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- In a project following agile programming model what is the main job of a team leader?
- What are the job differences between team leader and project manager?
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closed as too broad by GlenH7, Giorgio, MichaelT, gnat, ozz Oct 15 '13 at 11:19
There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
In a project following agile programming model what is the main job of a team leader?
With the position that agile teams are "self managing", I would say that the main job of the team lead is to moderate the agile process for both the team and the customer. I'd say that in just about any process, the lead is a bridge between disparate groups, the person most responsible for keeping the big picture in order, and the person filling in the cracks between team members. In an agile methodology, where the whole team is working out priorities and figuring out how best to get the job done, and collaborating closely with the customer/users - I see the team lead as being the speaker for the team to the rest of the company and to the various entities that aren't major stakeholders.
What are the job differences between team leader and project manager?
Generally, I see the team leader as being people focused and the project manager being project focused. In practice this means the team lead is getting the technical team on track to do the job, while the project manager is worrying about the bigger case of finance, long term strategy, corporate resources, product positioning, legal, etc. I'd believe that in a small enough company, the two jobs could be filled by the same person, but in a big project or company, there will be many more team leads than project managers. Also, in general, the team lead ought to have both technical skills and soft skills, the project manager needs business skills and soft skills. If the project manager has applicable technical skills, then it's a bonus.
Management is climbing the ladder, Leadership is deciding which wall the ladder should be leaning against.
This is from my experience in large enterprises. A project manager is much larger role. In a medium to large enterprise project there may be a software application development stream (with even subtreams like web frontend, core systems backend etc), infrastructure changes (desktops, servers and networks), business process changes, staff training etc. It is impossible for a project manager to manage each stream of work in details. This is where a team lead kicks in. He will help the PM in sizing, estimation, work break down and resourcing. He should be responsible for tracking project progress and report to the PM regularly identifying risks and issues early. He should coordinate with other teams and steams in a project. He should be also taking technical design decisions and create solution design for the project. If necessary do design review with other projects and architects to fit in overall solution or enterprise architecture as necessary. This is for both software and other technical and business streams.
The PM is responsible for overall project delivery, schedules, budgeting, reporting to steering committee. Sometimes there is a business PM who is overall lead of the business change and an IT PM focusing on the IT changes only.
There are a couple of different types of team leader, IMO:
Technical lead:
Administrative lead:
The project manager is someone that is usually that single point of contact to keep an eye on the project as a whole. This is the person to report to the steering committee, handle change requests, and other administrative things related to the project. A team lead, at least in terms of a technical lead, may not be that involved in communicating to the other teams in contrast to the project manager that will likely want to know where is each team which can include those outside of development.
In agile way development goes in iterations, I can think few responsibilities of a Team Lead as :
In an agile environment, there is no "team leader", per se. Teams should be self-organizing. In Scrum, there is the concept for a "ScrumMaster", but that is very different from a "team leader" or "project manager".


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I'm looking for a travel guide (i.e. book) to Kaliningrad. Are there any particularly useful English-language references for visitors to Kaliningrad? I am particularly interested in any remnants of the old Königsberg.
Well there are lots of sites online that cover this.
For example you could look at Wikitravel's page on Kaliningrad.
It looks like the top site from the old capital Königsberg is the cathedral, built in 1333. There is an English-language page on their official site.
Königsberg was destroyed during WWII, and then reconstructed. So there are some old houses, but not as many as you can hope to find.
As Mark said, you should start with Cathedral, and Kant's Tomb.
You can find much more information in this answer.
And about guidebooks - you can buy many of them inside the city - in bookstores or in travel agencies. A virtual excursions on city are available at Friedland gate site
There are also good online guide.
Although I still consult the default guides (e.g. lonely planet, rough guide), I find my self more and more to rely on online resources, specifically build around satnav devices.
My three favorites are 1. Geocaching.com, 2. routeyou.com, and 3. Everytrail.com. Geocaching is nice, specifically if locals engage in this fun activity. Then again, you need to speak russian to appreciate the caches to the fullest.
So although these three online resources don't provide an extensive source on written descriptions, all provide interesting focal points in any destination, at least in my experience.
Routeyou has a very interesting route in Kaliningrad. In never realized that the in mathematical circles well known Travelling sailes man problem is actually based on Kaliningrad Source: Wikipedia.org
You can find a guide in the local tourist information center: http://www.visit-kaliningrad.ru/
And there are several books in Amazon about Kaliningrad in English: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/276-9024839-7416712?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=kaliningrad+guide

subset: commoncrawl


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Recently,I am reading kolodziej's acta paper,there are some ditails that i do not know clearly.
In the top line of page 99,"it's no restriction to assume that for each s we have $\nu(\cup_{I\in{B_s}}\partial I)=0$",i do not know why.Here $\nu=(dd^{c}v)^n$ and $v\in PSH(\Omega)\cap L^{\infty}$,$\partial I$ is the boundary of some cube.
From Kolodziej's view,a poriori $\nu(\cup_{I\in{B_s}}\partial I)$ may not be zero.However,i think $\partial I$ can be seen as a part of a pluripolar set,then according to Bedford and Taylor's reasult,we know the above monge-ampere measure concentrates no mass on $\partial I$.So we get $\nu(\cup_{I\in{B_s}}\partial I)=0$,and it should not be a assumption!
I hope some expert in this field can help me.Thanks.


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Lillian Daniel nails the "spiritual but not religious" crowd
United Church of Christ* pastor Lillian Daniel, author of a new book, When Spiritual But Not Religious Is Not Enough," is profiled by Bob Abernethy of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. She rocks the house:
ABERNETHY: At Howard University in Washington, DC recently, Daniel railed at writers and others who, she says, have blamed the church for many of the worlds biggest problems.REV LILLIAN DANIEL: What church community are you describing? Because it is not mine. And how dare you presume to paint me with that broad and offensive brush? So why is it that when the spiritual but not religious complain about Christianity, why dont we get mad? Why dont we tell them a different story, of a progressive church where your questions are welcomed, where we worship a God who invented us and not the other way around.ABERNETHY: Daniels audience included the dean of the Howard chapel and Howards president and his wife. She referred to them when she acknowledged her own part in what she calls Americas culture of narcissism.DANIEL: in which it is so easy to think, Its all about me. So much so that when the dean told me quietly that the president and first lady were here today you know where my mind went. Im from Chicago. I said, Barack and Michelle? Here?ABERNETHY: But Daniels humor is not always so gentle. She ridicules people she says try to make up their own God and their own forms of worship.DANIEL: Often some shallow combination of exercise and caffeine, coffee shops as spiritual community, hikes as pilgrimages, The New York Times as sacred text, and sunsetsdont ever forget the sunsets. These people are always informing you that they find God in the sunsets. Well, excuse me, as if people who go to church didnt see God in a sunset. You know, my take is that any idiot can find God in the sunset. What is remarkable is finding God in the context of flawed human community, and a tradition bigger than you are with people who may not reflect God back to you in your own image.Part of the nature of religion, so much beat up on in our society, part of the nature of religion is that it delivers a message that is like sandpaper against the culture of narcissism. It is not all about you and, no, you cannot make it up. The beauty of a long tradition is that it is bigger than anything we can do by ourselves.
Amen. And there's more. Read it all here...
* The original version of this post erroneously referred to Daniel as a Methodist pastor.
About the Author
David Gibson is a national reporter for Religion News Service and author of The Coming Catholic Church (HarperOne) and The Rule of Benedict (HarperOne). He blogs at dotCommonweal.
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The up to date and spiritual but not religious character in the Evelyn Waugh novel about Constantine's mother, Helena: We "have to move with the times. It's no use trying to puncture the horologium. . . what they were taught may have been all very well in the catacombs, but now we have to deal with a much more sophisticated type of mind altogether."
The courageous and right thing to do is to stay with the family and build it up. Countless women stayed with abusive husbands until death did them part, because priests told them the same thing.For an individual to stay in a family or a club or a church or any "community" where she is not valued is sick. You know, my take is that any idiot can find God in the sunset. What is remarkable is finding God in the context of flawed human community, and a tradition bigger than you are with people who may not reflect God back to you in your own image.Gibberish.
Im with you on the richness of tradition, David. But Ive never understood the impulse to ridicule people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Cant we just be happy for people searching out their path to God? Why the need to get so ticked off about it?
Yuck, David.Those who avoid organized religion have compelling reasons for doing so. If anyone is using a "broad and offensive brush," it's Lillian Daniel. Her denunciation of "coffee shops as spiritual community" is fatuous. What does that mean? Is she unaware of the importance of coffee houses in our nation's history? The patriots who plotted the Revolution met in coffee houses, not in churches. http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring01/coffeehouses.cfm
Thank you, Kevin. I too am somewhat surprised that you (David Gibson) seem to think that Lillian Daniel's judgment of the "SBNR" is something to hold up as a "good" thing when it is neither accurate nor fair. It comes across as a rant. I have been astonished at the fury so many in the clergy show to those who are SBNR. These excessively angry attacks seem to arise among those in the clergy who feel threatened by those who don't see the world, nor God, nor spirituality exactly as they do. This minister is angry about attacks by atheists on christianity that are one-sided, but she has she missed all the polls that show that most SBNR are NOT atheists? Nor even agnostic? Perhaps the professional religionists should spend some time reflecting on what "institutional" religion is doing that is driving so many away. Angry defensiveness and strident judgments are not likely to attract many back into the pews.
David's not alone in his admiration. Lillian's book at Amazon:#1 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Religion#4 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > West#6 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Sociology
I think that the point that Lillian makes that should have the most traction concerns the critical value of (most?) religion's corporate orientation (e.g., the Church is the body of Christ, and all that jazz). I agree that her message seems dispersed in that she's making fun of SBNRs on the basis of her reaction against atheists activists. Moreover, I suspect that she makes a crucial error in discounting the harm religious organizations can work in people's lives. When she said, "Or they have been a part of organized religion where theyve been damaged and hurt in profound ways. All you can do is respond compassionately and just be so sad that that happened," I cringed. It seems that a compassionate response has to include accepting that people have legitimate reasons for abandoning religions. The thing is, the basic subtext of her message seemed to boil down to :"Yes, a lot of religious groups blow, but some of them are progressive. Go join one of them." I don't think that that is illegitimate, but it doesn't really address some of the more profound issues that may be driving disaffection with religion.
Kevin: Yes, it's a rant, but a fairly genial one, I thought, and much needed. My biases: I tend to cringe at the holier-than-thou crowd. I also greatly favor the both/and approach instead of the either/or approach. And I do think the religious-and-spiritual approach has much to recommend it -- building up a community, a culture, the common good. There is communal worship, and responsibility. There is a connection across time, forwards and backwards, as well as in the present. There is much that just spiritual (like "just religious") does not have. So yes, I like her rant, and think it is a justified self-defense against those who mock those among us who are religious as well. And I would indulge in the observation, surely belied my many anecdotes, that spiritual-but-not-religious folks are generally not terribly deep in their spirituality. In my experience it is usually a shrug of the shoulders rather than an expression of a serious commitment and practice. Sort of like when someone calls themselves agnostic. They say, Well, you just can't know. Generally, they just haven't tried to know. I tend to see a central crisis in faith and culture today as one of a lack of seriousness -- I completely respect serious atheists, or anyone who explores and commits to something is a real way. I don't think very many of us do.Okay, so there's my rant...
I don't see the "seriousness" in Lillian's book. Maybe the sample available at Amazon leaves out the deep bits. Reading about her adventures standing in line for the bathroom, etc., makes me think Burpo's book may not be so bad, after all.
Personally, I just keep a picture of a bull in my cabinet that I give some water to every morning. I consider myself to be cultic, but not religious (CBNR).
CBNR -- now that's a keeper. To be fair and balanced, as they say, here is evidence against my argument -- the spiritual-but-not-religiosity of the sublime RuPaul, today's Meister Eckhart:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/rupaul-divine-mystical-wi...
If you read the whole interview you will see that she is balanced. Despite the corruption in religious communities and the "leaven of the Pharisees" a community is important as striving sinful people. As Dorothy Day says :"The church is a whore but she is my mother." If you just stay away then you are definitely missing the physical community. There is no church without community and that community is definitely physical. The definition of church is "a gathering."Jesus still dealt with the religious leaders despite their corruption. The courageous and right thing to do is to stay with the family and build it up. Even so called purely "spiritual" people have their faults. We are a sinful people who welcome redemption through Jesus Christ. We should stay together.
"You know, my take is that any idiot can find God in the sunset. What is remarkable is finding God in the context of flawed human community, and a tradition bigger than you are with people who may not reflect God back to you in your own image."Amen to that.
Bill, "There is no church without community and that community is definitely physical". That may be true in a literal sense of "church". But it does not rule out the reality that people can be both religious and spiritual without belonging to a formal religious community. If those people are Christian and strive to follow Christ's teachings, are they not also members of Christ's "body"? And if so, are they not also part of Christ's "church" - even though they are not in specific type of building with a particular group of people each Sunday? And why is it more "courageous" to stay within what many see as a dysfunctional church than to refuse to continue to enable it?
I agree vigorously with your observation about community, Bill.Maybe your observation that we are sinful people is one motive for looking elsewhere for community. Im not a sinful person, and neither are most of the people I encounter every day. Most of us try to lead decent, generous lives. Its knowing that about ourselves which makes us so gregarious.Hearing the priest say every Sunday morning let us now call to mind our sins has me looking around church and checking for the fire exits. After Mass I miss no opportunity to remind my children that this view of humanity is simply wrong. It is a contradiction of why God delights in uslacking in rigor, to Davids point.
I think some people in organized religion - especially those whose jobs are in organized religion - are actually afraid of the SBNR people .... God forbid someone might find God in their own and obviate the organization - eek! And there's a certain arrogance in the dismissal of SBNR people's spiritual depth - a lot of those people were once in organized religion and they have kept the spiritual practices they learned there.The opposite caricature by the Onion - "Father Clancy Donahue of St. Michael Catholic Church told reporters Wednesday that while he believed in blindly adhering to the dogma and ceremonies of his faith, he tried not to get too bogged down by actual spirituality." ... http://www.theonion.com/articles/priest-religious-but-not-really-spiritu...
PS ...Here's a video interview with Diana Butler Bass about SBNR people and her book Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening ....http://youtu.be/L5DoQMGyjC0
Ann, we should stay with it without "enabling" it. Kevin, Perhaps you are referring to the depressed syndrome which languishes in guilt. Are you saying you are without sin. The reality is that we tend to be selfish and not altruistic. Saying we are a sinful people does not mean we do not strive to do well. We have to distinguish between those who believe they are relieved of virtue by faith alone. Gerelyn, the fact that we stay does not mean that we should accept abuse. Now more than ever, we are confronting the leaders who are not good examples and do not build up the community. I accept those small communities that meet in the Eucharist. But the church is a big tent and we should stay but not passively as we make the church better. On the other hand are you content without a community? Crystal, that many in organized religion are self serving and lack charity does not free us from the family. Peter and the Apostles had many faults. Yet they worked through things to build the church, the community. Look at how Paul worked with different factions.The fourth century brought much damage to the church and the fact is that the Fathers of the church presided over it. Yet today we have the opportunity to build the church, with Francis, more than at any other time since the bishops cannot use soldiers anymore to punish those who correct them. Othewise, where do we go? Going from Guru to Guru?
I don't know when the spiritual-not-religious dichotomy began, but it has gained a lot of traction in the last seventy-five years or so from Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. Many alcoholics come to AA after trying, or trying to try, everything else, including church. But structure, ordered community, and a system of beliefslet alone condemnations and anathemas, or uncomprehending appeals to exert will powerare as helpful as expecting a cat to do algebra. So AA hit on the idea of making no demands. "The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking." And even that can be tenuous and faltering. Recovery is about following suggestions, not obeying commandments, and the suggestions are rooted in the actual experience of what other men and women have done to achieve sobriety, and not in revelations from on high. In the end, reliance upon God is a big part of it, but that is left up to the understanding of each member. It is a path for people who are desperate and yet still rebellious, a modern sort of sensibility."Spiritual" also contrasts very sharply with "material," of course, where it will mean a belief in an order of being not rooted in anything corporeal or verifiable by the senses. All major religions hold that belief in some form, I think, as the traditional explanation of natural mysteries, and some of them may feel threatened as those mysteries yield to natural explanations.
On the one hand, I was raised a Unitarian Universalist. By the types of people Daniel describes. My mother seems to be some sort of spiritist (I was the only person in elementary school who could have told you who Bridey Murphy was), but the idea of God struck Mother as looney. My dad believed that all organized religion was a scam, not unlike fire insurance, but really smarter because churches had figured out how to make their money tax free. He said that God may have created the world but He was clearly no longer interested in it, and the proof was right there in the newspaper every night.I confess I felt a kind of despair in their ideas from the time I was fairly young, it wasn't until I was 24 that I could admit that I felt pulled to more traditional Christianity (me and T. S. Eliot, both Unitarian converts to Anglicanism, and there any other parallels end, except for liking cats).On the other hand, my parents had some ugly, even traumatic, encounters with organized religion. They wanted to live rational and ethical lives, though they imposed reason and ethics somewhat selectively on themselves. But I know traditionally religious people who do that, too. Their journeys may have been side-tracks, but they knew bad religion when they saw it. And they were heart-sick when I was baptized because, as far as they were concerned, it meant embracing close-mindedness, empty ritual, and the smug pew sitters.And having been, for the past 20 years, a denizen of both Anglican and Catholic communities, I can't say that I don't see some truth in their characterizations.So while I understand what Daniel is ranting about (however good naturedly) and agree with it, I also suspect she has no idea what her views look like to people who were damaged in some way by religion. She might want to check her charity-meter.
For the past 20 years? Yikes make that more like 35!
Bill, how do we stay in without enabling? How do we "work with" the hierarchy? We have no voice EXCEPT our money and our feet. We cannot "work with" those who don't want to work with us AND who also hold all the power. They take our money and refuse transparency or accountability nor do they ask those who are funding them what they think church is and should be. As Gerelyn noted, hanging around to be abused by the one in power doesn't help build anything good. Sometimes you have to tear down the collapsing structure before you can begin to rebuild.Crystal has pointed out what seems to be a factor in the shrillness of those like Lillian Daniel - they do seem to feel threatened by those who have active and deep religious and spiritual lives outside church doors. Some "need" community. Nothing wrong with that, but why are they so angry at those who don't need a formal religious community in their religious and spiritual life?
Bill, i'm not saying there's no value in community. But every post I've seen at a Catholic site about SBNR people has been derogatory. Why not respect them as different but ok?
Crystal, Right. We should recognize good will wherever it is. Ann, while there are many legitimate objectors, there is a tendency for some to rebel for rebellion sake. As I read Daniel that may be to whom she is referring. She does not deny the shortcomings of religious leaders. As critics of SPNR people go, wouldn't you say that Daniel is rather mild compared to the monarchists in the church. People like that are angry at immigrants and other minorities. The challenge is always to rebuild the church. The mediocre will always be there.
R. R. Reno over on First Things is also denouncing the spiritual but not religious today, and doing it by trashing Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama:
And so our age applauds the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and other adepts of negation and critique. God without priests. Churches without authority. Faiths that are optional. Its wonderfully liberating. The divine cant get his hands on us anymore! Now we can be spiritual without being religious. Its the luxury good human beings have always wanted: bespoke worship, idols made to spec.
Lillian Daniel and R. R. Reno make me want to be spiritual but not religious. Or maybe neither spiritual nor religious.
Get yourself a bull.
I am not aware of any "spiritual" tradition that does not have a corresponding "religious" body to bind it together. The etymology of religious means "to bind" or "place and obligation on".All spirituality, in my view, needs to be embodied in some fashion. Berdyaev has a wonderful quote to that effect: "Bread for me is a material question; bread for my neighbour is a spiritual one." That does not mean that we are going to be feeding our neighbours "spiritual" bread, it means actual bread. However, what animates us are impulses that bring us beyond our own egoistic natures. Those impulses are, or at least can be, referred to as spiritual impulses but the binding nature of the obligation comes from religious traditions.In a similar fashion, I do not see how spirituality itself cannot be embodied in a community which in turn builds and nurtures it.Even Kaballah Jewish mystics, as far as I understand it, rely heavily on the group.Simone Weil was a mystic that I admire. She was never formally baptized in the Church but she saw the importance of it both as an institution and a body. The American (although not exclusive to America, USA has mythologized it heavily) experience of individualism has had a profound impact on religious sensibilities. The myth of the individual is a strong one in American culture.Religion has a lot to teach us about community, about living together in a big tent and what that obligation means as Bill has been saying.Flannery O'Connor, Simone Weil, and Bonhoeffer all, I think, struggled with the question of Christian ecclesiology in a postmodern world.But I think it is a mistake to cast aside religion as it is, in fact, the vessel through which spiritual traditions have a binding effect on us. We are not always on the side of the angels!!
@ Crystal Watson"God forbid someone might find God in their own". Can one "find" God in any meaningful way without being in communion with other women and men?
Anthony,I don't know for sure, but I would think that a relationship between an individual and God is always possible, whether that person is all alone or in a community. In that video talk I linked to above, Diana Bass said that in 2009 a study found that about 50% of Americans said they believed they had had a religious experience. I think that's what's important to many people - a personal relationship/experience of God - and though you may arrive at that through some religious practice like prayer or meditation or the Spiritual Exercises, I'm not sure that you would need to be part of a community to achieve it. For one thing, it isn't really a human accomplishment alone - God is part of the equation. Don't know if that makes sense (except to me ;)
The etymology of religious means to bindYes, the "lig" part means to bind (as in ligature), but the "re" part means re (again). Religion means to re-tie, to re-bind, as if the original bond between the Creator and Her child had been sundered. Who is capable of doing the re-binding? People like Lillian, of course, priests, shamans, ministers. Naturally she opposes the notion that go-betweens are not needed, that re-ligion itself is not needed, that our spirits can commune with Creator Spirita without help.
Can one find God in any meaningful way without being in communion with other women and men?The desert Ammas and Abbas, the stylites, the anchorites, the hermits, etc. manage.(As do those who follow Jesus' injunction: when you pray, go into the closet and shut the door.)
Gerelyn:Yet we have a historical record of what occurred with that movement to the desert. St. Benedict discusses the varieties of monasticism and the disparate practices that did not always lead to an ethical and upright life.The "rule" was devised precisely to address this tendency.Jesus, for his part, was not irreligious but was deeply involved in the religious controversies of his day as the book "A Marginal Jew" demonstrates.
oh, an example ...I've been listening to a video series from Georgetown University on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The first one is here, for those interested ... http://youtu.be/5gMTEYHB130At the start of the second one ... http://youtu.be/Vk0F7CVtKFI ...the speaker emphasizes that the Spiritual Exercises isn't about doing good acts but instead the retreat is about allowing God to reveal himself to the person making the retreat. By the end of the retreat the person will probably come to a decision about how to make the world a better place with what he's experienced, but it's the experience that comes first and that can only be individual ..."[S]o often the Spiritual Exercises ... have been interpreted as moral uplift, giving new motivations for good activity, giving you a sense of moral strength, stamina, to go about living the Christian life the way you should. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but it eviscerates the whole idea of experience and of new revelation, of the introduction of new designs that God might have for an individual ... how you should perform instead of how God is revealing God's self to you.""
PSI am a bit ambivalent about this question as I found Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" compelling. Still, I am uneasy about a kind of free roaming spirituality unhitched from any tradition.
Yet we have a historical record of what occurred with that movement to the desert. St. Benedict discusses the varieties of monasticism and the disparate practices that did not always lead to an ethical and upright life.Benedict praises the "Anchorites, or Hermits, that is, of those who, no longer in the first fervor of their conversion, but taught by long monastic practice and the help of many brethren, have already learned to fight against the devil; and going forth from the rank of their brethren well trained for single combat in the desert, they are able, with the help of God, to cope single-handed without the help of others, against the vices of the flesh and evil thoughts."(Your claim about Simone Weil is off, too.)
Methinks Susie Starbucks ain't Evagrius Ponticus.
I give her credit for reaching out to people that are spiritual but not religious. Catholics should certainly be doing the same.It just seems to me that Paul of Tarsus' entire ministry consisted of planting Christian communities, and then trying to help them to cope and thrive. If living communally isn't the normative way of living a Christian life, then we can save a lot of trees by cutting about half of the New Testament out of the Bible.I don't know how one can be a Christian without being part of a community of disciples. It seems to me to be a constitutive element. If we care about people, I believe we should be initiating them into our community.
Yes, there are reasons for hermits. But most of us do better in groups, and groups maintain traditions, including understandings of all sorts of things that individuals cannot reach on our own. One life simply isn't long enough to learn what a whole long series of people have learned. And then there are the Sacraments. . .I think that part of the problem with the Catholic Church these days is that too many people were brought up to "believe in" the Pope and bishops, rather than believing in the Church. Yes, the popes and bishops have authority to speak as best they can for the whole, and when they do so we're really dumb when we dismiss what they say out of hand. There is more wisdom in a group than an individual. Sure, groups make mistakes, but individuals make even more.
Has anyone ever wondered how these anchorites, stylites and hermits ate a balanced diet and otherwise took care of their physical needs? Especially how did those "athletes for God," the Stylites, who lived on platforms on top of pillars and did hundreds of push ups while waiting for the imminent return of Christ, get enough nutrition and sanitation to keep going without getting sick? Did they not have helpers who might be called a community? Two Byzantine Emperors visited Daniel the Stylite. Was the visit for advice or was it like the visits of present day politicians to religious leaders such as a prominent Bishop or the Rev. Billy Graham? What kind of advice could these people give? Or did the visitors just come to look at them for a Sunday afternoon entertainment?
I'm a little bit dismissive of the SBNR people myself (perhaps unfairly so); the ones I run into actually don't seem very spiritual.
Over the last sixty years Ive noticed a change in the referent of the word religion. In two of the most famous definitions of religion offered in the modern era, the accent falls upon the individual. William James:
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.
Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged a definition of religion on its doctrinal side, as a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended. but his emphasis, too, will fall on the individual:
In the long run your character and your conduct of life depend upon your intimate convictions. Life is an internal fact for its own sake, before it is an external fact relating itself to others. The conduct of external life is conditioned by environment, but it receives its final quality, on which its worth depends, from the internal life which is the self-realisation of existence. Religion is the art and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things.This doctrine is the direct negation of the theory that religion is primarily a social fact. Social facts are of great importance to religion, because there is no such thing as absolutely independent existence. You cannot abstract society from man; most psychology is herd- psychology. But all collective emotions leave untouched the awful ultimate fact, which is the human being, consciously alone with itself, for its own sake.Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness....Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behaviour, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms.They may be useful, or harmful; they may be authoritatively ordained, or merely temporary expedients. But the end of religion is beyond all this.
Its interesting that now, among the SPNR, religion is taken to mean all the externalities, whereas all the internal dimensions are assigned to spirituality. The latter term used to refer to reflection on the spiritual life, as in the great classics or in works presenting the wisdom of the Christian spiritual tradition. Now spirituality is commonly individualized so that someone may speak of my spirituality where when I was young we might have spoken of my spiritual life. At Catholic University where there is a graduate program in spirituality, some students were surprised to learn that its most important courses explored the classics of Christian spirituality.
"I think that part of the problem with the Catholic Church these days is that too many people were brought up to believe in the Pope and bishops, rather than believing in the Church. "Hi, Ann, there may be something to that. There is also the phenomenon, reported in surveys, whereby many people feel connected to their local parish community, but not so much to the universal church.
I suspect that the "SBNR" category isn't monolithic. Understandably, there has been some commentary above that takes into account the subset of folks who formerly were connected to a denomination but for whatever reasons(s) have become alienated. But surely there is another cohort out there, possibly a bigger cohort than the unchurched, who never were really "churched" in the first place. A typical scenario that I see around me would be the children of a 'mixed marriage', in which, say, a Catholic married an Evangelical, and they had children. Both parents have a religious patrimony, but to keep harmony within the family and possibly because of a lack of fervor, the family doesn't really practice either Catholicism or Evangelicalism. They don't worship regularly (or at all), they don't pray regularly as a family, sacramental milestones are missed, and so on. And yet throughout the children's lives, there are reminders of the religious patrimony: baptisms, weddings and funerals in the extended family; or they spend the weekend with the grandparents and are taken to the grandparents' church; they see that some of their friends do have an active religious life, and perhaps some of their friends have even witnessed to their faith. These households aren't actively atheistic, and I can see that the products of such families may have inherited a sort of spirituality.
Jim Pauwels, I'm not convinced that Rev. Daniel's angry tone in "reaching out" to SBNR would attract many who are turned off by organized religion. She is angry, patronizing, dismissive, sarcastic, and judgmental. Who would be attracted to someone's church who insults you and your intelligence AND your spirituality and then says - BTW, services on Sunday are at 8 am and 10 am with Fellowship at 9.I suspect the reason a lot of Catholics were brought up to "believe in the pope and the bishops" is because this is what the Catholic church teaches officially - the pope and the bishops claim to be "channeling" God's voice and thoughts and wishes on earth - the vicar of Christ. The church claims magisterial and on occasion papal infallibility. The church itself raises its young to substitute the institution for God. How do you propose to change these church teachings?Bill, how does one stay in the church (thus supporting the current structure) without enabling? How do the people in the pews who are voiceless in the church "work with" the hierarchy? Or sometimes even with one of the new young arrogant pastors who believe that they, as priests, are ontologically superior to the people in the pews?
Anne ==As I understand it, the Church teaches that the popes and bishops have to teach what the Church believes. They have to consult with the Faithful to find out what that is. Unfortunately, this bunch doesn't seem to have gotten that message.
"Im not convinced that Rev. Daniels angry tone in reaching out to SBNR would attract many who are turned off by organized religion. She is angry, patronizing, dismissive, sarcastic, and judgmental. Who would be attracted to someones church who insults you and your intelligence AND your spirituality and then says BTW, services on Sunday are at 8 am and 10 am with Fellowship at 9."My take on her message is that she is appealing to those who don't find fulfillment from pilates, Starbucks and the NY Times - those who are left with that nagging feeling, "There must be more to life than this." And as I read her, she has a two part message for them,"1. You're right, there is more to life, and the way to find it is to situate yourself in the great Christian tradition by joining a denominational church like mine; and 2. you should check our our progressive church, which is not homophobic and judgmental and sexist."
And so our age applauds the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and other adepts of negation and critique. God without priests. Churches without authority. Faiths that are optional.The whole SBNR idea is so I'll defined, how can anyone comment on it. What about the Dalai Lama or the Anglican bishop has anything to do with "Churches without authority"? Anyone even know the Dalai Lama's name? We refer to him by title only. Maybe we can include the Pope among those who are not religious?There are real issues to be discussed about spirituality and religion, but there is a lot of silliness out there that has little to do with it. Rev Daniels at least is grappling with a part of it, religion as community.
" She is angry, patronizing, dismissive, sarcastic, and judgmental."Jim P. ==Yes, she is. And some of the SBNRs are angry at her for it. And some judge her, even as they accuse her of being "judgmental". So there's a lot of irony in the situation -- people being judgmental about others who they see as as being judgmental. At least she admits that she judges, and does so because she thinks that, yes, there are some sure moral matters. I think that a lot of this problem == or, better to say 'these problems' -- are concerned with just what the sure moral matters are. I think there aren't many people truly think there are no sure moral matters, but in the American intellectual climate right now there are many who make that claim. This is, I think, one of the reasons that the Catholic faithful now includes so many super-conservatives -- the intellectual times are so very threatening that they go for what they think is the most solid of teachings, i.e., the notion that the Church NEVER changes. They simply cannot emotionally tolerate the idea that some day they actually might not know what to do about a moral matter. It's better, they think, to be able to ask Father for answers for everything.At the other end of the spiritual/psychological extreme are people who do not accept themselves as inclined to sin. Their problem, they say, is Original Sin. Some of them find it extremely difficult to admit that they are sinners, and their solution is to believe that nothing is sure, all morality is subjective, we must do our own thing, as if others have nothing to teach us. Sometimes such people were brought up in a super-conservative background where accusations of sin never stopped, and their reaction against that is quite understandable. But I think that there are others who are are looking for an easy way out of real personal responsibility. No existential angst for them.
Hi, Ann, regarding, She is angry, patronizing, dismissive, sarcastic, and judgmental. - I just want to make sure that it's clear that this wasn't my characterization - it was Anne Chapman's, which I quoted in a subsequent comment. FWIW, I also think you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
"There is also the phenomenon, reported in surveys, whereby many people feel connected to their local parish community, but not so much to the universal church."Amen to that!
I know many people who claim to be spiritual but not religious. Many of these good folks admit that they were only superficially attached to an organized religion, or that they heard that this or that group was hypocritical. This seems to be like a person who insists multi-vitamins dont work, having taken only one or two tablets. Lillian Daniel rightfully suggests that these folks might try a church community like hers - progressive, and where all questions are welcome. This would likely exclude our Catholic church, where those who ask certain questions or propose certain ideas are inviting a world of grief.
"FWIW, I also think you catch more flies with honey than vinegar."I guess that's true if your goal is to "catch" people. I'm not entirely comfortable with that kind of faintly predatory terminology. The unchurched-but-spiritual who have bad experiences with organized religion and have rejected it for do-it-yourself spirituality generally stay in the tall grass specifically because they don't want to be "caught."Certainly, I've heard evangelicals talk about the "souls we've brought to Christ." I'm sure those folks are sincerely interested in those souls, but it does smack of trophy hunting to someone looking in on the outside.
Gerlyn:I do not have Weil's book "Waiting for God" handy at the moment but it is one of my favourites and I have read it and profited from it a lot. BTW, as chance (or providence?) would have it I lent it to a SBNR friend of mine although I suspect that she is SBNR simply because she was never raised in an explicitly religious home in the sense that we are describing it.However, in that book, Weil clearly states that a magisterium or church as keeper of dogma is indispensable. However, she felt that the Church was guilty of an abuse of power when she forced love and intelligence to model their language upon her own. This abuse of power, she believed, is not of God. But that is besides the point, maybe we disagree on the necessity of a community for the individual believer. I can only say that based on my experience, it is fairly important in order to assist in disciplining my own wayward mind not to mention, occasionally, wayward impulses....:(
Yes, Simone Weil said the function of the Church as the keeper of dogma is indispensable. Also:"But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word, apart from its relation to ail these things that I do love. I am capable of sympathizing with those who have this love, but I do not feel it."
I wonder who they were for whom Simone Weil said that she had not the slightest love. Who constituted "the Church in the strict sense of the word"?
"I love the saints through their writings and what is told of their lives - apart from some whom it is impossible for me to love fully or to consider as saints. I love the six or seven Catholics of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies. But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word, apart from its relation to all these things that I do love "
I have some Jewish friends who like to follow their traditions - gatherings of family and friends, food, singing, rituals - but who do not believe in God: are they RBNS?
I wonder who they were for whom Simone Weil said that she had not the slightest love. Who constituted the Church in the strict sense of the word?Hi, Joseph:Imho, Simone Weil was deeply disturbed. In many many ways and for many many reasons.I think there are people who read into her writings what they need to find. There are people who use her as Dorothy Day is used. I guess I wish people would leave her alone. Since that's unlikely to happen, I wish people would read about her life, her family history, her illnesses, etc., etc., before attaching too much meaning to her writings.
Lillian's book this evening: #1 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Religion#4 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Sociology#4 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > Westhttp://www.amazon.com/When-Spiritual-but-Religious-Enough/dp/1455523089/...
Ann: "And some judge her, even as they accuse her of being judgmental. So theres a lot of irony in the situation people being judgmental about others who they see as as being judgmental".That statement may be true, but I have never read any articles by SBNR about these condescending scoldings. Perhaps you can guide me to some? I have even done a google search, and while I find plenty of scolds out there like Daniel (James Martin is another who is very hot and bothered by the idea that people might not need priests and ministers and formal churches) I don't find too many who are scolding people like Lillian Daniel.This blog article is "vinegar" from start to finish - the title signals that what is to come will be haughty and demeaning - [she] "nails" the SBNR CROWD." I have seen these kinds of dismissive and insulting attacks on the SBNR on Catholic websites many times now - all take the same tone. If these articles are seen by SBNR as representative of the type of people in the church "community", why would anyone choose to join a community of people like this?And why do those who seem unable to have a spiritual life outside a formal community find it so difficult to understand that others may not share that need? I suspect most SBNR are perfectly willing to accept that those on this board and many other Christians and non-christians "need" a community for whatever reason. They find it helps them in the spiritual journey. But others don't.People are different - that is no surprise. So why expect everyone to live their spiritual lives in precisely the same way? And why be so nasty to those who have made a different choice than your own?Perhaps another perspective is needed - for example, this article called "Celebrating the SBNR" - the language is much more respectful and, frankly, more "christian" than is the title "Nailing...the SBNR". This blog is written by the Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California.He begins with "Every day, I ENJOY conversations with students who fit into the category of SBNR - "spiritual but not religious."....http://tpcmagazine.org/blog/celebrating-sbnanother example of a more positive take is by Amy Thomsom Sevimli who is ordained in the ELCA and currently serves as Assistant to the Bishop in the Metropolitan Washington D.C. Synod."I know about the discomfort of getting on an airplane and telling the person sitting next to me about what I do.....So when I read about Lillian Daniels similar experience, I was sympathetic to her situation. What I was surprised by, and not terribly sympathetic to, was her reaction to the person sitting next to her on the airplane. She seemed especially put-off by those who identify themselves as spiritual but not religious.......But honestly, why would someone who can read our condescending views of their sense of spirituality want to come to church at all?I firmly believe that the best way we can connect people with God in Christ -- and with the way we worship that God in church -- is by first listening to their spiritual story and only then telling our own. ....Spiritual but not religious is not an impediment to that conversation but an invitation if we are willing to accept it."
Anne --I don't think anyone here has said that all SBNRs are dismissive, angry, judgmental, etc. of their critics. I certainly didn't. But your own posts do seem quite "vinegary" to me. And I'm not saying you have no right to be. But your reaction to Rev. Daniel does seem to answer her in kind.
Ann, definitely - I AM answering "in kind". Because it seems that too many conventionally religious are saying "right-on" and avoiding real reflection on the rise of SBNR, apparently preferring to take the far easier route of blaming the SBNR for the failures of their own religious communities to keep or attract 20% of the overall population and 33% of the younger adults. It seems almost to be a variation of "blame the victim". It is far too easy to call them "shallow", "undisciplined", "self-centered", "too individualistic" etc, etc etc. than do a serious examen. I am quite deliberately being "vinegary" - using the same negative tone to try to encourage those who applaud Lillian Daniels for her snooty put-downs of people whose spirituality isn't taking exactly the same path as their own to really think about what they are saying and doing, to look in a mirror and see how they might come across to the SBNR who have chosen another path - and perhaps come to understand a bit better at least one reason why some have chosen another path. I will get off my soapbox now. I've said all that I can say about it.
Ann --It seems to me that the problem is that there are many, many stories and hence many, many sides to the issues. You're right to insist that your side be told fairly too.I don't really identify with talk of either the presence of community or the lack of community in the Church. Community is not something I looked for in the Church, and in my case that's a good thing. The Church offers precious little in the way of community to single people like myself. Tradition, yes, that it offers. Tradition is the wisdom of the ages, it's what allows me not to have to relive all the mistakes of the past, or at least some of them. And it brings me the positive insights of the saints and theologians. This isn't, of course, a matter of the virtue of the teachers, though the courage of some of them can inspire. But I believe that the Church is Christ's Church, and however imperfectly it treasures the sacraments and the teachings of Christ, and encourages the Faithful to share our blessings with others. The failures of us members is not what defines it for me, and I'm old enough to know that there is moral failure everywhere.
Ann - "It seems to me that the problem is that there are many, many stories"Exactly - so why put down others because their story is not "traditional"?
I agree with all your comments, Anne Chapman. (Including the one about "nails" in the headline.)I hadn't realized how resentful some religionists are of non-religionists. The success of Lillian's book, marketed as Humor & Entertainment, is a vivid illustration of the contempt the "community" has for those she regards as idiots, stupid, superficial, sloppy, etc., etc., etc.
Anne --ISTM that, as in many groups including religious ones, among the SBNRs there are some who are holier-than-thous or whatever, and Rev. Daniel particularly dislikes them because she thinks they misrepresent her. She too has a right to defend herself. If she said that all SBNRs are X, Y or Z it would be a different matter.
Lillian's resentment of children is particularly offensive, imho. Her ham-handed mockery (aka "Humor & Entertainment) reveals a lot more about her than about those who fail to bring their children to Sunday school.See pages 5 through 8 from the Amazon sample: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455523089/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
Wow, she really is obnoxious. Is the whole book like that?
And I say that as someone who likes obnoxiousness when done right. That just reads like the kind of blog-posting you'd see on the Patheos Catholic channel.** That ain't a compliment.
Lillian is expressing the sentiments of many Christians, obviously. How thrilling it must be for her to see her book in the #1 slot day after day.
I mean, it's an obnoxious religion book--nothing new there. Not sure if it's worth that much agonizing.
Daniel's book (thanks to Gerelyn for the refer on SBNR children) seems to be more about galvanizing her own community of believers around a satiric picture of SBNRs rather than trying to attract any new converts. Which is good because she surely won't.She is smug and uncharitable, and will remind many SBNRs why they left churches in the first place.
-- Ive heard evangelicals talk about the souls weve brought to Christ. --And every year Catholics trumpet the number of people brought into the church via RCIA.But neither group is open and honest about the KNOWN number of people who were "in" but now are "out." And I'm sure that the known number pales beside the unknown number that has simply walked away quietly.Body counting smacks of militarism.And which is worse: being SBNR or "piously agnostic" as are so many habitues of church buildings for an hour on Sunday (or Saturday evening)?
No doubt, Lillian Daniel seems to feel about SBNR the same way I feel when I am confronted by someone from a rural state who sneers about his rugged individualism compared to my effete urban existence, without acknowledging that he is utterly dependent on tax revenue that is collected in the aggregate from people like me. I don't know whether that analogy is a fair one, however, given that the "quest for spirituality" seems to be a part of the human experience. Perhaps Ms. Daniel should focus on seeking common ground or trying to enlarge their vision of spirituality. Otherwise, I tend to agree with Anne Chapman's comments. There is a lot of room for self-examination before anybody leaps to conclusions about whole groups of people.


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WACO (August 16, 2012)—U.S. Marshals and Waco police tracked down a wanted suspect Thursday afternoon in a south Waco neighborhood.
Marshals noticed Robert Mondragon, 30, driving on Monte Vista Street Thursday afternoon and attempted to stop him.
When Mondragon stopped in front of a house at 1618 Monte Vista, he jumped from his car and led marshals on a short foot chase through back yards and over fences.
Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said the chase finally reached a fence that was too high for the suspect to climb over and marshals caught up with him.
Swanton said Mondragon fought with marshals, who finally used a stun gun to try to bring him under control but the suspect continued to resist.
One of the marshals struck Mondragon in the back of the head when the suspect reached into his pants pocket.
Mondragon, Swanton said, continued to resist and was stunned again and finally brought under control.
EMS was called to the scene and treated Mondragon there.
He then was taken to the McLennan County Jail where he was being booked Thursday afternoon.
Swanton said Mondragon was wanted on a Waco police robbery warrant, a bond forfeiture, a previous evading charge and likely he would face a new charge of evading arrest and resisting arrest.


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Call of Duty: Black Ops II for $49.99 + free shipping
Price is for Xbox, PS3, and Wii U versions.
Free shipping
6 Comments add a comment
No love for the PC :(
Was going to pick this up for my little brother for Christmas, he likes to play MW online, anyone have any feedback on this game?
@davidschronic: its like any call of duty game, lags for the first 9 months, then its fixed, then a new one comes out :D enjoy
nice find. Thanks.
@davidschronic. Any games will have lag not just COD.
This game actually better than the first BO. Very stable and less glitches. Fun game online and offline. Will not dissapoint.
@davidschronic: I've found it all depends on the connection you get; some games I can wreck face and it's enormous fun, other games I struggle to get a single frag (and it's not much fun at all).
I do like the new Pick 10 create a class system, I think I like how Prestiging works, and the weapons feel different and unique from one another.
I'm not really fond of the weapon unlocking system, but that's a fairly minor issue once you find guns you like (and all the guns are available to use in certain play modes if you want to try different builds).
Just posted same deal for the PC


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From what the Buds have witnessed, Wheeling has a new 'top dog'.
After the closing of long-time area favorite Louis' Hot Dog late last year, the Friendly City has a new weiner vendor: the Weiner Hut.
Occupying the location of the former Sesame Cafe, the eatery opened its doors to hungry patrons last week. Owner Trudy Gratz, a longtime restauranteur of the Washington, Pa. area, has been a resident of Wheeling for two years. Gratz always wanted to open a hot dog stand at the beach, but since she hasn't made it there she decided to open one here. And the Buds couldn't be happier.
Article Photos
Regular chili dog
Italian hoagie
The small eatery, which sports a new color scheme and adorable thatched roof, was literally packed full of people when the Buds paid a visit on Friday. Apparently, we weren't the only folks after those weiners!
Once seated, the Buds had a chance to peruse the menu, which offers much more than just hot dogs, which - by the way - come in original (with the casing), regular and footlong and can be topped with ketchup, mustard, relish, onion, chili, sauerkraut and cheese.
The Weiner Hut also offers Italian, meatball, ham and veggie hoagies, a variety of pizza pies, a burger, and even B.L.T., grilled cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Certainly something for everyone! Side items include baked beans, side salad, cole slaw, potato salad and cottage cheese.
Bud Shaunna decided on a regular hot dog topped with chili and a side order of cole slaw. The dog had a great flavor, and the chili was a nice flavor boost - not too spicy and not too sweet. The cole slaw was delish, as it was full of fresh cabbage and a thick sauce, but it wasn't too saucy - it was just right! The Buds don't like overly saucy slaw! With a can of pop, this tasty lunch rang in at only $5.50.
Bud Em, who as you probably are aware is not a huge hot dog fan, opted to try the Italian hoagie. The 9" sub was loaded with deli ham and salami, cheese, lettuce and tomato and topped with a zip of what Em thought was extremely good Italian dressing all on a delicious toasted hoagie bun. Ummmm .... it was a $7.99 piece of Heaven. With an order of chips on the side and a soda it was one of the tastiest lunches she'd had lately. Well done Weiner Hut!
Both Buds agreed that the Weiner Hut is a fabulous addition to the streets of downtown Wheeling and will no doubt serve their casual fare to hungry crowds for years to come. Great place, great food, great people - we can sum it up in one word: weinerific!!
The Buds can be reached at tastebuds@timesleader online.com


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7 Classic Disney Movies Based On R-Rated Stories
As happy as they were to give us the occasional nightmare, Disney's favorite way to misshape our world view was to coat classic stories in a suffocating saccharine wrapper, damning us all to a lifetime of naivety.
But all you have to do is look at these (very real) original endings to tales Disney sanitized to be thankful for their protection, and baffled that they chose to adapt such horrifying stories to begin with ...
#7. The Jungle Book: Everybody Dies
The Disney Happy Ending:
The film follows Mowgli, a baby who winds up in the jungle and is befriended by talking predators. After avoiding the human world for years and spending most of his childhood being awesome in the jungle, Mowgli stumbles upon a village and is instantly smitten with some doe-eyed floozy. The girl bats an eyelash and Mowgli disappears into the village forever, living happily ever after with his own people and leaving Baloo the Bear and Bagheera the Panther in the dust. Roll credits!
"Y'know, in hindsight we probably should've just eaten him."
The Original Ending:
The original "Jungle Book" was a short-story by Rudyard Kipling, a man with surprisingly little tolerance for anything resembling Disney bullshit.
His mustache would not allow it.
In Kipling's version, when Mowgli decides to return to polite society, polite society isn't so certain it wants him back. The village Mowgli tries to return to in the short story re-banishes him to the wilderness, and the family that was kind enough to take him in gets tortured as sorcerers.
In response, Mowgli recruits Hathi the Elephant for help. But the thing is, the book's Hathi isn't the cuddly, forgetful old Major of the film.
No, he's a bloodthirsty, scarred old elephant who likes nothing more than seeking revenge on humans for an old wound he received in a spike pit. The "help" Mowgli gets from his old friend is in destroying the entire goddamned village. That's right. The lovable kid protagonist whose goofy antics you grew up laughing at recruits his elephant friend to, along with Bagheera and a bunch of wolves, storm in and raze the freaking village to the ground.
All the houses get stomped into dust, supplies are destroyed, the wolves chase away the cattle and good old Bagheera kills the horses. Damn, we're thinking this franchise is due for a gritty reboot.
#6. The Little Mermaid: Blood, Heartbreak, Death
The Disney Happy Ending:
After an entire movie of trying to turn from a mermaid into a human girl so she can marry a prince, things aren't looking good for Ariel. Due to cunning contractual stipulations, the evil witch Ursula winds up with Ariel and Triton's magical crown and trident.
Really, she has all the ingredients for a prog-metal album cover.
Springing into action for the first time in the entire movie, Prince Eric drives a ship's broken bow right into her stomach, like that time we attempted to use chopsticks at a sushi bar. The day is saved, the crown is restored and Ariel gets to marry her prince as the unicorn of happiness explodes into gooey rainbows.
The Original Ending:
After having her tail split in two by the evil sea witch's potion, the mermaid goes upon land and proceeds to bleed absolutely everywhere.
The prince, finding this delightfully amusing, commands her to dance for him while she grins and bears the excruciating pain.
"And maybe later I can choke you while we have sex!"
Afterward, the mermaid finds out that the Prince is to marry another woman, and that if he does so she will dissolve into sea foam, but all can be saved if she can somehow persuade the Prince that she was the one who saved him from drowning. But she doesn't, and he gets married anyway. The sea witch tells the mermaid that in order for her to survive, she must kill him.
Instead of descending upon his sleeping body with an X-Acto knife, she instead chooses to believe in the power of love.
Unfortunately, this does the complete opposite of "work," and the mermaid dissolves. And since mermaids don't have souls (at least according to Hans Christian Andersen), she has to do 300 years of good deeds in order to earn one, only every time a child cries, she has to do an extra day for each teardrop.
Damn, Old Yeller probably tacked on about 500,000 years alone
#5. Pinocchio: Chewed Up by Dozens of Ravenous Fish
The Disney Happy Ending:
Pinocchio is a tale about the humanity of a little wooden puppet as he is led through the trials and pitfalls of growing up. He learns many important moral lessons along the way.
Such as how to deal with assholes like Lampwick.
After experiencing wage slavery, peer pressure, gambling, alcohol and donkey transformation, he gets swallowed by a whale, presumably representing teenage pregnancy. He rescues his father from the whale but dies in the process, prompting the Blue Fairy to resurrect him as a real boy before she moves on to Haley Joel Osment in Spielberg's A.I.
Along with some aliens. Because in case you forgot, A.I. was stupid.
The Original Ending:
After Pinocchio is turned into a donkey, he gets bought by a musician who wants a new drum head made out of donkey skin and tosses Pinocchio into the sea to drown him, presumably because there were no knives or heavy rocks available at the time. Fortunately, Pinocchio is saved by a school of fish that proceed to devour his flesh, reducing him to wooden bones.
In five seconds this is going to get bloodier than a GWAR concert.
Not only that, but in the Disney film, Gepetto is rescued from the whale in a relatively snappy time frame. In the original story, Gepetto is eaten by a shark and lives there for two years before Pinocchio finally gets off his splintery ass and does something about it.
On second thought, we're with Pinocchio on this one.
#4. The Fox and the Hound: Everybody Dies (Again)
The Disney Happy Ending:
Despite it being a story of unlikely friendships and insurmountable obstacles, Disney nevertheless finds room in The Fox and the Hound for a happy ending and a kickass bear fighting sequence.
The scene ends with Copper the Hound protecting his childhood friend Todd the Fox from his master, achieving a mutual respect and understanding between species. Todd settles down with a vixen and Copper goes on with his life as a working dog, presumably ripping apart foxes he didn't grow up with.
And eating cat poop from the litter box.
The Original Ending:
Daniel P. Mannix, the author of the original story, probably hadn't met a child before writing The Fox and the Hound. In his version, the Hound is a bloodthirsty killer out for revenge against the Fox for the accidental death of another hound on a previous hunt. Once he discovers the Fox's lair, his master proceeds to gas the hell out of it, killing both the vixen and her cubs. At this point, the author obviously didn't think the book was depressing enough, so he threw some rabies into the mix, and then a child dies from an infected bite.
Not the obvious choice for a children's film.
The story reaches its climax with a chase longer than the one in The Matrix Reloaded in which Todd the Fox collapses and dies of exhaustion. The Hound and the Master go home to celebrate, a term which here means "the master shoots the hound in the face and then gets sent to a rest home."
And they all lived happily ever after.


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How can I calculate my chance of success given my ability + skill vs a difficulty? How is this complicated when the difficulty is rolled as well?
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I would recommend using anydice.com. The creator of anydice.com has written a program on that site to calculate success probabilities for NWoD, but the dice mechanics are very similar and shouldn't need much tweaking. Here is the post. It should give you a rough idea.
I tweeted the creater of Anydice.com and he suggested this:
Which gives this sort of graph:
This is a question that many WoD players have faced and tackled. Here is a good start.
Difficulty shouldn't be rolled, but set at a number (such as 6) and opposing rolls compare successes to determine victor.
Using the AnyDice roller as in PureFerret's answer I've come up with these rules of thumb. You can estimate that in order to get one success it takes, on average,:
For multiple successes it's not linear:
Note that deviation is approximately +/- 1 success up to 6d and +/- 2 successes for more dice
A fast and dirty (and not terribly precise) method I recommend for my players of both Shadowrun and V20 is as follows:
Take what percentage of the dice is less than the target number (I.e. 4 on a six-sided die would have a 50% success chance, 6 on a 10-sided die has 50% chance).
For every die past that add half of the chance of the previous die; 1 d6 versus 4 is 50%, 2 is 75%, 3 is 87.5%, so on and so forth, and the same progress applies to d10 on oWoD dice. I'm not familiar with nWoD's system, so I can't help, but I'm assuming if you're playing Masquerade you're using the old system. This doesn't apply so much to V20 since I play with fumbles, so there needs to be a calculation (10% for each die past the first reduced similarly to the normal success chance seems a good rule). This allows them to quickly guess more complex chances, like if the target number were increased (40%; 50%; 55%). It breaks down rather quickly as you throw more dice, however, but usually isn't such a big deal, though it does work a lot better for Shadowrun than it does for V20.
Here is what I came up with. Chance of 1 success on X dice:
Someone can check my work in this spreadsheet:


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Weirton signs off on fiscal budget
March 6, 2013
WEIRTON — City officials aren't taking chances in their proposed budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year....
Here's a thought--stop paying overtime to the firefighters for a 48 hour work week and follow the federal wage laws which allows for a longer work week, thus saving taxpayers money and allowing for more personnel per crew. You keep hiring new people which creates higher legacy costs (pension, insurance, etc.) when you don't have to be doing this. You're just wasting taxpayer money.
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there's the pot calling the kettle black...when you were chief you could have changed the 48hr pay week but you didn't. now that you are no longer a city employee, one can only imagine why you still have to comment on how things are done. Isn't it time that you just moved on to bigger and better things??
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You are obviously misinformed because I have never been affiliated with the city of Weirton. I, like others who like to be kept informed, learned the facts and base my opinions on factual information. I guess the firefighters can always sell more t-shirts if they need a new truck--it worked when they wanted new flat screen tvs for their stations.
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Creating Campaigns
Campaigns belong to individual advertisers, and you should create an advertiser before defining a campaign. A campaign contains a number of Ads or Banners that can share delivery settings, or alternatively, different delivery settings can be assigned to each banner.
Creating New Campaign
Once the Advertiser is created, from the Advertisers screen click Add new campaign. This will take you to the Add new campaign screen:
The next step is to define what type of campaign is needed for this advertiser. The three campaign types are:
- .Contract: The Ads for a contract campaign are delivered a pre-arranged number of times per day for a specific number of days.
- .Contract (Exclusive): An exclusive contract campaign's Ads will take up all impressions, and is prioritized above all other campaigns.
- .Remnant: A standard campaign type that can be limited according to an end date or other specific limit.
Once the campaign type is selected for the advertiser, then the other details are needed to be filled for the campaign as shown in the below snap shot.
Enter the campaign's start and end dates as the Advertiser Requires.
Allow you to set the campaign's pricing model (cost per Impression/click/action, etc.).
Priority in relation to other campaigns:
The default priority level is 5. Set your priority level between 1 and 10 (10 being the highest priority). The limitation for the impressions/clicks or conversions can be set as required if advertiser desires, to a certain number per day.
Delivery capping per visitor:
Here we can limit campaign views to a certain number either in total or per session. This avoids the spam views.
If desired the advertiser and websites associated with this campaign can be hidden.
Also the companion positioning can be assigned. When the companion positioning option is enabled, OpenX will attempt to deliver all ads from this campaign together on the same page while displaying to the end user.
Once you have made your selections, hit Save Changes to go to the Campaigns screen.
eCPM Prioritization
eCPM prioritization is a feature that automatically prioritizes all of your non-contract campaigns according to each campaign's performance. It computes the effective CPM for each of your CPC, CPA and CPM-based remnant campaigns and then determines the optimum weight to assign to each campaign so as to maximize your overall revenue. This feature is set at the account-level by the Administrator.
Admin Settings:
To enable the eCPM prioritization,
- .Go to My Account > Preferences
- .Click on the Campaign Preferences option in the left hand navigation menu.
- .Click on Use eCPM optimized priorities instead of remnant-weighted priorities
- .Save Changes.
Then you should see a list of remnant campaigns that you will need to update in order to enable or update the eCPM calculation. This list will include all remnant campaigns that do not have a price associated with them.
Go to that campaign edit page. Enter the price corresponding to the value of that campaign's impression/click/action, etc.
Below these fields, you can see the eCPM Prioritization section. The eCPM value will automatically update with a calculation based on your entered price and the observed statistics for the given campaign. This value is read-only and cannot be manually updated by you.
You can also specify the minimum daily impressions you want to give this campaign to ensure that its statistics (and eCPM calculation) remain up to date.
Once you have set prices for all of the remnant campaigns, eCPM prioritization will keep on a running calculation of each campaign's eCPM and automatically weight the campaigns by their measured performance.


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Support your favorite MAC school with a FatheadSaturday, September 19th, 2009
By now you have probably heard of Fatheads, those wall cling graphics that stick to the wall and can be moved without hurting the paint. The durable vinyl sports posters are now available for four MAC schools as Fathead has recent added Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Ohio and Western Michigan logos to their available inventory. Typically overlooked, the addition of four MAC schools to the Fathead inventory is a nice win for the Mid-American Conference and is an even bigger win for MAC sports fans.
Want to get your hands on one of these great MAC Fatheads? Check out VanDelay Sports for CMU Fatheads, EMU Fatheads, Ohio Bobcats Fatheads and WMU Fatheads today or click the link below to check out the entire Fathead inventory of college team logos & helmets.


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Designated Library Status for Central Library
The Library of Birmingham is unique amongst UK public libraries for the depth and range of its collections. This unique status has now been recognised by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) who have awarded six of its collections ' designated' status.
This means that they are recognised as having national and international significance as library and archive collections. The latest round of designation applications was open to libraries and archives for the first time. Previously the process had been for museums only.
Nationally, 38 collections were designated in 28 institutions and included only 2 other public libraries, Bristol and Westminster who were designated for one collection each. The panel stated that 'The quality, range and depth of Birmingham's collections reflect its status as Britain's second city' and that the designation application 'clearly demonstrates [the collections'] broader significance in terms of the social, industrial, commercial and cultural history of the city, the region, and the nation'.
The six designated collections are:
Photography Collection - The Library has over 2 million photographic items and uniquely, holds the only national collection of photography in a public library. There are outstanding collections including those of pioneers like Sir Benjamin Stone and Francis Bedford as well as modern collections such as Paul Hill / Photographer's Place and Vanley Burke.
The Archives, Heritage and Photography service holds over 6000 archive collections including numerous major collections of national and international importance such as the archives of industrial innovators James Watt and Matthew Boulton, Birmingham Repertory Theatre including Bernard Shaw correspondence, and broadcasting pioneer Charles Parker.
Early and Fine Printing Collections a collection of outstanding quality and significance incorporating over 8,200 books printed before 1701 including splendid examples of early atlases, bookbinding from 15th century, 4,500 examples of fine printing, outstanding hand-coloured illustrated books and two 17th century parish libraries.
The Literature Collections Central Library holds the most significant and extensive collection of literature in a public library. It includes the Birmingham Shakespeare Library, one of the world most comprehensive Shakespeare collections, a superb collection of war poetry, and a significant collection of Children books and games.
The Birmingham Collection is unrivalled in depth and detail amongst historic collections about a single city. It charts every aspect of Britain second city, bringing together material available nowhere else. Its appeal is both national and international in scope.
The Music Collection - contains material of national and international significance unavailable elsewhere including records of the Triennial Music Festival, featuring correspondence with Elgar and other composers, the Manuscript score of Mendelssohn Elijah, unique Handel Libretti, and a vast collection of performance sets.
Please note - The Library of Birmingham holds the copyright for all images on this webpage.


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Hello, I have posed myself the following problem: suppose that two affine algebraic with no common components curves be given. To fix ideas, suppose that we have a cubic $C$ and a quartic $D$. More precisely, let $C=\{(u,v)\in C^2\colon P(u,v)=0\}$ and $D=\{(u,v)\in C^2\colon Q(u,v)=0\}$, with $P$ and $Q$ polynomials and $deg(P)=3$, $deg(Q)=4$. Could we say that $C\cap D\cap \mathbb{C}^2$ has at least 9 points?
I have also worked out an answer, (which should be: yes). All points are to be counted with multiplicity. Let $\tilde C$ and $\tilde D$ be the projective extensions of $C$ and $D$: $\tilde C$ has three points at infinity and $\tilde D$ has four, so $\tilde C \cap \tilde D$ has at most three points at infinity. Now we can apply Bézout's theorem: we have that $\tilde C$ and $\tilde D$ intersect in exactly twelve points. This implies that $C\cap D\cap \mathbb{C}^2$ has at least $12-3=9$ points, QED. It seems correct to me, but still something sounds wrong. Many thanks for any answers or comments.


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Adam Clymer
Adam Clymer now writes occasionally for The New York Times, after 26 years of writing or editing day in and day out. He retired as the Washington Correspondent in 2003, but since then has contributed Op-Ed articles, obituaries and about once a year, an Outdoors Column about fly-fishing.
He joined the Times in 1977 to cover Congress and moved on to become the national political correspondent in 1979. In 1983 he came to New York as polling editor, occasionally writing about polls. In 1988 he was also the paper's first political editor, and in 1990 he served as senior editor for weekends, managing the newsroom on Saturdays and Sundays. He returned to Washington in 1991 as chief Congressional Correspondent, and won the 1993 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Congressional Coverage.
From 1997 to 1999 he was the newspaper's Washington Editor, and became Washington Correspondent in 1999. He covered a variety of subjects in that role, including Congress, politics, secrecy and privacy. The American Political Science Association honored him in 2003 with its Carey McWilliams Awards for "major journalistic contributions to an understanding of politics."
Before joining the Times, Mr. Clymer worked for The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the New York Daily News and, for 14 years, The Baltimore Sun, for whom he covered the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow and Richard Nixon in Washington. He recalled that his favorite lead paragraph of all time reported that Nixon said "I am not a crook," but the dateline was Disney World, Fla.
He is the author of two books, "Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right" (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and "Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography" (William Morrow, 1999). He is a co-author of "The Swing Voter in American Politics" (Brookings Institution Press, 2008) and "Reagan: The Man, The President" (Macmillan, 1981). He edited "The New York Times Year in Review 1986" (Times Books, 1987).
Mr. Clymer has served as president of the Washington Press Club Foundation, an organization that promotes and preserves the history of women in journalism, and as chairman of the Harvard Crimson Graduate Council. As a Harvard undergraduate, he had been president of The Crimson.
Mr. Clymer was born in New York on April 27, 1937, and graduated with an A.B. from Harvard in 1958. He later studied at the University of Cape Town and at Georgetown University. In 2005 the University of Vermont awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Human Letters. He lives with his wife, the former Ann Wood Fessenden, in a Washington apartment occupied in the 1930's by Maj. and Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Their only child, Jane emily Clymer, was killed by a drunk driver in 1985.
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Nineteen interviews with Edward M. Kennedy, along with 170 more with colleagues, aides and others about his 46-year career, were released on Wednesday.
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With Fishing, Suspense Trumps a Sure Thing
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I am not Jewish, but sort of try to emulate some parts of it to see if it does me any good. Well, not doing anything for 1 day is too boring. Actually what else can we do anyway during sabbath beside sleeping? The game is diablo 3. Basically we "work" on gaining level trading items, etc. But hey it's a game. It's not like I am programming. What would a Jew in my position do?
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Unfortunately video games are out on Shabbos, as we are not permitted to manipulate electricity. "Working" on Shabbos is not defined by what we achieve, but rather what is defined in the Shulchan Aruch (Jewish Code of Law) as "work". (For example, the Talmud states that one can carry heavy loads around the house all day and not desecrate Shabbos, but carrying a small object to a different domain is forbidden.) An overview of the basic laws of Shabbos can be found here. Jews typically spend Shabbos in synagogue praying, spending time with the family and learning Torah.
the talmud says that Shabbat is given for the study of torah.if one does not learn torah, then indeed there is very little to do. furthermore, a nonjew is NOT allowed to keep shabbat by refraining from work. I think it's best to focus on doing your mitzvot properly, i.e. the 7 laws of bnei noach


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Scheduled Maintenance from 12:00am Thu Dec 5, 2013 to 3:00am Thu Dec 5, 2013
Each week our Blackboard learning management system Ole.sandiego.edu has a scheduled maintenance window. During this time, ITS may install critical patches or perform updates on the system. You might be unable to access Ole or experience slow speeds during this window.
Contact ITS Help Desk for more information.
Alert last edited 5:22pm Wed Oct 2, 2013


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Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah supports re-examining peace process
March 24, 2013
Vice Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz has called for a re-examination of the Mideast peace process in light of growing international support for the creation of a Palestinian state. Speaking at a preparatory meeting for the 24th session of the Arab League Council in Doha today, Prince Abdulaziz said, "This summit comes after the recognition of the State of Palestine as a non-member observer state at the United Nations. This international recognition of Palestine necessitates that the Summit shall take decisions to enhance the status of the Palestinian state, and strive to push the United Nations Security Council to quickly take necessary recommendations to accept Palestine as a full member of the United Nations."
He continued, "The last ministerial session of the Arab League issued a resolution that mandates the Arab Peace Initiative Committee re-evaluate the Arab position about the peace process in all its aspects, and to reconsider the feasibility of the Quartet and the international approach in dealing with the Palestinian issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to change this approach to terminate Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories."
Prince Abdulaziz claimed that Israel is stalling the peace process, while attempting to change the facts on the ground. "We're categorically rejecting Israeli settlement activity, which we believe is an attempt to undermine the two-state solution by isolating Palestinian towns from each other and encircling Al-Quds [Jerusalem] with settlements," he said. "We are also rejecting plans that seek to Judaize the city of Al-Quds, especially Al-Aqsa Mosque. We call on the international community to stop those practices that undermine any action towards reaching a just and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian cause."
Prince Abdulaziz also called upon the international community to pressure Israel to turn over the money owed to the Palestinian National Authority.