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12 Nov 2012 07:24:10 AM
KJ Noons vs. Ryan Couture Added to 'Strikeforce: That's All, Folks' on Jan. 12
(Alternate titles for the event include "Strikeforce: All's Well That Enswell" and "Strikeforce: Operation Frequent Wind. / Photo via Showtime Sports.)
Strikeforce continues to blow its talent wad for what might be the last event of its existence. As MMAJunkie reported on Friday, a compelling lightweight battle between KJ Noons vs. Ryan Couture has been added to January 12th lineup, and will likely take place on the Showtime Extreme-televised preliminary card.
Since coming up short against Nick Diaz during their Strikeforce welterweight title fight in October 2010, Noons has gone 1-2 at lightweight, most recently dropping a unanimous decision to Josh Thomson at the Tate vs. Rousey card in March. Still, his sharp boxing and significant experience edge could make him a very tough match for Couture, who is riding a three-fight win streak. Couture won a split-decision over Joe Duarte in his last Strikeforce appearance at Rockhold vs. Kennedy, and was most recently spotted looking at a paint-clad Natasha Wicks with an expression that seemed to say, "You're hot and everything, but my dad's already manhandled you, so I don't know."Read More DIGG THIS


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A disgraced money manager has sued Martin Scorsese for $600,000 for what the jailed financier says are unpaid accounting bills.
Kenneth Starr, who shares his name with the former special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton, managed the acclaimed director's money from 2006 to 2010. Starr, who has been charged with defrauding high-profile clients including Uma Thurman and Al Pacino of nearly $60 million, says Scorsese never paid his fee of five percent of earned income. The suit was filed in New York State Supreme court.
Starr, 66, ran a company that managed more than $700 million for nearly 200 wealthy individuals.

subset: commoncrawl


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DIY Vertical Succulent Garden Panels by Flora Grubb
We've blogged before about Flora Grubb's amazing Woolly Pocket Living Walls and it seems that everything they touch shines of beautiful green style. They now have vertical garden succulent wall panels for sale so check them out, even if just for inspiration.
Flora Grubb's 20"x20" vertical wall panels provide slanted planting cells to support plants and soil to grow succulents, or whatever living wall you can dream up. The system is modular, allowing you to interconnect the square panels to make any size you desire. The setup requires free-drainage and can be irrigated using a regular garden hose or by adding a built-in irrigation line.
The succulents that Flora Grubb uses are 2" plants, first grown flat for a few months to allow roots to develop in the individual cells. They recommend finishing the installation with a wooden frame to create a picture frame look.
According to Flora Grubb, the panels in their San Francisco store front just require missing every now and then for watering. They keep the garden pruned and well groomed.


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BREAKING POINTE - (9:00-10:00p.m. ET)
"You Can Feel the Tension" (Content Rating TBD) (HDTV)
THE PRESSURE IS ON - With only one week left before the cast of "Cinderella" is announced, Silver plans a trip to the mountains so the dancers can let loose. While Ronnie struggles with the infection in his foot, Rex begins to see improvement with his torn tendon. The competition heats up between Ballet West II dancers Ian and Zach as they fight for the one-and-only spot in the main company. Meanwhile, Beckanne and Chase confront Zach about the rumors they believe he started (#202).


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|2008-08-31, 21:42
|Link #1021
Black Dragon
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: In the Netherrealm, thinking who to betray next...
Let's work with GIMP
My second tutorial of graphic works using GIMP, now I alredy posted many of the basics like opening files and saving in the last tutorial here
We will make a simple, textless signature, First of all, we must choose our render, I'll make a sig out of Taki from Soul Calibur
PD: Yes, I made the render and it's free to be used if you want
NOTE: Important, I'm only gona put EXAMPLES, you must play a bit and try your own ideas
1) Firs we are gona make the BG for our sig, first, we must create our sig Layer (I'm using a 400x120 one) Now, we are going to use our filling color tool and fill our Sig layer with a color of our preference
2) Now, we need a C4D, I'm using this one
We will place our C4D on the sig layer and then we will set the layer of the C4D as "Screen"
3) I know what are you thinking, it doesn't looks good right? Don't worry, we will fix that, in our sig layer we are going Image/ Apply image, then we will go to Colors/ Colorfull and set the options your preferences, yes, you need to play a bit here until you get what you want, have fun!
Looks beter, right?
4) Now that we have our BG ready, let's put our render on the sig layer, probably you'll have to rotate it and resise it to have it in the position you want, simply go to the GIMP window and there you'll find the Rotate tool and the Scale tool
5)Now, we need to adjust the colors of our "Taki" to fits them with the ones of the BG, to do this, selkect the Layer of our "Taki" And go Colors/ Balance Colors, you'll also have to play a bit here until get what you want
6) Now, we will ad a "Runing efect" to our Taki, I'll teach you a little trick, first, duplicate our "Taki" render, select the duplicated layer and go Filtres/ Blur/ Moving blur, set the optiuons to this ones
Now your sig should look like this
Just move the duplicated layer beneath the original and you'll have this
Nice trick, eh? You can play a lot with this to make variuos things, you just need to experimentate a bit
7) Next, we will add a "Light efect" to the Blade of Taki, to do this first, go Image/ Apply image, then go Filtres/ Lights and Shadows/ Supernove, select a white color in the section marked below and set the options to the marked ones
8) Next, we will add a border, now in the last tutorial I teached you how to add a simple border, for this sig, we will create something diferent
First, create a new transparent Layer, then clicl Ctrl+A and Go Edit/ Stroke, select 6 pixels, then in the GIMP window select another color and go again Edit/ Stroke and this time place it with 4 pixels, go to the GIMP window again, select the first color you used and go again Edit/ Stroke and this time, 2 pixels
Good Border, Uh?
Your final resule must be something similar to this:
The only thing that this Sig seems to need is a Text, but that will be another tutorial XP
Hope you found it usefull, remember, the most important is to practique
|2008-09-03, 01:24
|Link #1024
Kira_Naruto, the ecchi
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: http://www.exciting-tits.com/
>.> Not only you cant be bothered to read the thread before asking, you are not gonna bother to read thread AFTER we post the answer BUT expected to be replied like a king?
Nobody wished to be the butler.
And no one is to feed the lazy bastard. There's no use for lazyness in learning.
|2008-09-06, 18:01
|Link #1025
Bankai Master
I have a question. I don't know what the process is called (sweatdrop. Damn me being a n00b when it comes to this.) so I can't say if it's been posted before.
How do you remove unwanted text from images? As in:
If its been posted before, just point it out please. I think what I'm looking for is 'render' but the pics in that tut don't show up so I can't tell.
|2008-09-06, 18:35
|Link #1026
Kira_Naruto, the ecchi
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: http://www.exciting-tits.com/
We use the clone tool, and painstakingly reconstruct part of it if it got removed too much.
There's also greycstation plugin for gimp.. Well.. passable for a semi automated, but it still require a painstaking process of masking the required part
|2008-09-07, 08:58
|Link #1028
~Nanchatte Renai
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Australia
Age: 24
Also as a matter of fact I did a tut on what I call de-texting awhile ago here
I hope that helps you and I wish you the best with it \(^o^)/
|2008-09-07, 09:10
|Link #1029
commands you to...!
Join Date: Apr 2006
Just my 2 cents, but for a straight forward image like this (without gradients or textures) wouldn't it be easier to just use brush or pen tool? Clone tool seems like a unnecessary hassle, especially since clone tool really tends to limit your movements (every few pixels you need to reset your reference point if you're copying from some narrow area); unless you intend to copy the texture or noise, most of the time which i find it easier to just surface blur or some other method to make it flat.
|2008-09-07, 21:56
|Link #1031
Black Dragon
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: In the Netherrealm, thinking who to betray next...
Let's Work with GIMP
Now is time to you to learn how to add cool texts to your sigs using GIMP lol
Now, In photoshop is really easy adding efects to the text, simple going layesr/ Drop Shadow... Glow... Bebel and Emboss... etc... Now, in GIMP, we don't have those options, but don't worry, that doesn't means that we can create those tricks
First, know your text tool:
and, obviusly, the first thing we must do to create text efects... is to create our text! XP
Now, let's go with the efects
1)The most simple, first duplicate your text layer, in the copy, go filtres/ blur/ Gausian Blur
2) Now, just put the copy layer beneath the original and move it a bit to the angle you want
1)Very similar to the shadow (Probably you alredy figurated how) Duplicate your text layer and go Layer/ Selection Text/ Selection text, to surround your text with the files of ants, now ´paint the text with the color you want to be glowing
2) Go Filter/ Blur/ Gausian Blur, move the duplicated Layer beneath the original and it's done
Text with Border
1) Duplicate your text layer and go, Layer/ Selection Text/ Selection text to add the file of ants, now go Selection/ Grow, grow it 1 or 2 pixels
2) The text will not grow, the thing that is going to grow is the file of ants, now grab your brush tool, and paint the new selection with the color you want to have the border
3) Now just move the duplicated Layer beneath the original one and your border is ready
1) Duplicate your text layer and go Layer/ Selection Text/ Selection text, Grab the eraser tool, and erase a bit the superior part of the text
NOTE: I hided the text layer beneath just to show you how it should look, you must not hide it
2)Set the opacity of the layer to 50%
NOTE: I hided the text layer beneath just to show you how it should look, you must not hide it
3) With the rotate tool, put the duplicated layer below the original one, like this:
4) With the turn tool, rotate the duplicated layer in horisontal way so have each letter match with the one up (The "E" with the "E", the "R" with the "R", etc...) Like this:
Now it's done
Embossed text
1) Duplicate your Text layer and Go, Layer/ Selection Text/ Selection Text, now goSelection/ Shrink, shrink it 1 0r 2 pixels and paint it with white
2) Go Filter/ Blur/ Gausian Blur and it's done
Hope that this little tut has been usefull, now, I just teached you how to add Simple efects on texts, the Stylised Text is another tutorial
|2008-09-09, 16:26
|Link #1032
Junior Member
Join Date: May 2008
hi its me again hazelkenro
Hi there how can i make avatar using round image
like to Graphic designer KINA!or probably i ask KIna hehehe!
I love this Forum I have learned So much!!!
Thank you .......
Last edited by hazelkenro; 2008-09-10 at 13:32. Reason: mistake for namesake
|2008-09-09, 17:21
|Link #1033
Kira_Naruto, the ecchi
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: http://www.exciting-tits.com/
Ms .. KiNA ..
O_O I'm a guy dammit!!!
Just group every layer you want, then use eclipse tool to draw a circular marching ant .. then use layer mask
There's a tutorial earlier too in first post
|2008-09-09, 18:14
|Link #1034
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: event horizon
But simple version as KiNAko-chan said above,
Rounded corners just means part of it is transparent, so you can use the same principle (diffrent shape tools or methods to obtain the selection for the shape) to get any other style of edges. Also, to add a border, simply save and subsequently load the selection before adding the layer mask.
|2008-09-09, 18:36
|Link #1035
Kira_Naruto, the ecchi
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: http://www.exciting-tits.com/
You dont actually have to save the selection.. Ctrl+click on the group thumbnail (the one that masked) should suffice to reselect it
Cats.. hidoiii >_< not only the -ko .. but the -chan as well :'(
|2008-09-10, 14:16
|Link #1037
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: event horizon
I think it was fixed with the last patches but I'm still too used to saving/loading it.
|2008-09-11, 06:49
|Link #1038
Butler mitai~
it's been one stressful day. I tried out Furuno's Night Scene tut and end up with this sig i'm using. It's a nice & easy tutorial except for the part where I have to 'fill' in the empty space and for some reason I ended up with an unusual style
I was thinking of adding an anime-ish grassy field as the terrain, sadly, couldn't find one.
@KiNA: nice water effect tut you have there
do you plan on writing a PS based tutorial in the near future for that? it'd be a great help if you could teach me how to animate a pouring sake
|2008-09-11, 19:29
|Link #1039
Kira_Naruto, the ecchi
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: http://www.exciting-tits.com/
You dont actually have to bump a stickied thread XD
And please do tell me, which water effect are you refering too? All my tutorials so far have been PS based. I'm capable to use GIMP as well (been retraining myself back- especially since GIMP-GAP are so wonderful) but I've never made other then PS tutorial
|2008-09-12, 13:02
|Link #1040
Butler mitai~
^I figured XD
btw, it's this one. By taking a good look at it for the second time it does use PS, I was misled by the plug-in you included and the fact that my head is worn out from playing CoD4 online
I guess what i'm asking for is the harder/advanced version of that tutorial that uses displacement filter as you have mentioned. I'll give this a try today and hopefully it fixes my problem.
P.S. that sig is awesome
|avatar, graphic, photoshop, signature, tutorial
|Thread Tools


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At any given moment, on any given morning, there are roughly 6,000 planes on their way to somewhere, from somewhere, over American airspace. Getting them safely down to the ground will depend upon the efforts of a small group of controllers who, nearly without fail, get the job done despite long hours, grim working conditions, and ancient technology. Jeanne Marie Laskas journeys to the tower at LaGuardia Airport in New York City to find out how it all happens.
To get to the air-traffic-control tower at New York's LaGuardia Airport, you have to walk through Concourse D in the Central Terminal, past the shiny shops and fat pretzels and premium brews, into and back out of streams of travelers yammering wirelessly at wives, lovers, brokers. You come to a thick steel battleship-gray door, shove it open with your hip. Step inside. You are now in…Leningrad? Bucharest? Cinder-block walls washed in dingy fluorescent light, a cramped elevator, slow and rickety, up to the tenth floor—Sorry it's so cold, but this thermostat hasn't worked for shit in years—through another gray door, up a knee-creaking set of concrete stairs: Welcome to the LaGuardia tower cab. Would you like a doughnut? Check out the view! The skyline demands all of you first, Manhattan spreading unobstructed like a mural written on the bottom of the sky. Airplanes everywhere, white, silver crawling. Rikers Island sits alone on the upwind leg of runway 31. Shea Stadium, on the opposite end, is mere skeleton and guts, just now on a crisp fall morning coming undone. You don't see a view like this every day. Never mind the furniture, the duct-taped Archie Bunker couches in the break room, the ragged fold-up tables and the ancient, empty vending machine advertising Mike and Ike for twenty-five cents. Never mind the missing ceiling tiles, the warped paneling, the chipped Formica, the spectacular curls of peeling paint. Taped to the handset of a red phone is a sign reading BLACK PHONE. Some of the computer equipment brings to mind the days of Tandy and Heathkit. Some sections of the control console bring to mind the golden age of telephone operators wearing pointy bras. For a long time the roof here leaked so badly they had giant diapers hanging, tarps tacked from here to there to catch the water; a garden hose took the water down a flight of stairs to a janitor's sink. Sometimes the bathroom plumbing goes, and when it goes it really goes; some controllers keep an extra shirt in their lockers in case of explosion. (Others have learned to flush with their foot and duck.) But check out the view! people here say with pride—intent or not intent on masking the obvious. Yeah, this place is a dump. This is the center of the universe, a tower serving 23 million passengers a year as they fly in and out of the most congested airspace in the world, and yeah, this tower, built in 1962, one of the oldest in America, is a dump.
The FAA promises a new tower next year. You can see it emerging next to the parking garage. It's right there. Some LaGuardia controllers remember hearing about a-new-tower-next-year as far back as 1984. "Next year." "Next year." "Why fix up the old tower when a new tower is coming next year?" A quarter of a century of no next-years is enough to make any worker with a spare shirt in his locker in case of toilet explosion feel…skeptical.
Cali loves it here; it sounds crazy at first, but he does love it. (In fact, most LaGuardia controllers kiss the mud-colored carpet tile they walk on. They could tell you about the alternatives. Stick around and they'll tell you about the alternatives.) At the moment, Cali is on Ground. It's 8:20 A.M. on a Friday, rush hour, every forty-five seconds another airplane landing, then another launching, then another landing, relentless as throbs of a throbbing headache. Twenty-six departures wait in line, all stoked up, backed up on Bravo clear down to Foxtrot. Twelve controllers maneuver the chaos. Brian is on Local, clearing for takeoff and clearing for landing, while Cali, on Ground, is managing the taxiways—a constantly moving puzzle of airplanes loaded with thousands and thousands of souls. Of all the positions, almost everyone here loves Ground most, because it's so fucking complicated. LaGuardia Airport is tiny compared to its sleek modern counterparts, like Atlanta or Denver with their endless parallel runways spread over thousands of acres. LaGuardia is jammed into just 680 urban acres; taxiways are tight; runways intersect; you can't launch a departure until the arrival on the other runway crosses the threshold or else the airplanes will…collide. There's also water on three sides to avoid falling into. There's also adjacent behemoths Newark and (especially) Kennedy airports, each launching and landing one plane every thirty-six seconds, constantly breathing down LaGuardia's neck. Kennedy, just twelve miles south, is obnoxious. If Kennedy goes into delays, it's LaGuardia that has to change its runway configuration to help Kennedy get out of delays. All in all, the complications make this place so much more awesome than a place like Atlanta or Denver. This, anyway, is the LaGuardia mystique. This dump rocks.
Cali sends a Dash 8 into the departure lineup, feels the thunder of a launching 757 soaring past the tower windows. He's keeping an eye on an Embraer jet and gate Charlie 9. He has a lot on his mind. His first name is Tom, but the guys call him Cali. He plays hockey. He used to be a short-order cook. He is proud of his gardens, especially his enormous orange canna lilies. His hair is buzzed, and his eyes are smart, and his nose is prominent, and his accent is Long Island. His movements are impatient gesticulation, yadda yadda yadda. His headset cord is long, enabling him to wander practically the full circle of the cramped tower cab. Like nearly everyone else here, he stands when he's on position. It's not a sit-down kind of job. "Swivelheads" is a nickname for tower controllers, because they're constantly scanning in all directions, like owls.
The 757 that just launched is headed to Chicago. That flight, like every commercial departure, has more to it than the commonly recognized components of pilot, flight plan, and fuel. Every flight has people watching over it, guardian-angel style, every step of the way. For example, shortly after Brian launched the 757, he handed it off, via radio, to a controller fifteen miles away at the Terminal Radio Approach Control (TRACON) in Westbury, Long Island, where it showed up as a blip on a radarscope. The 757 now becomes the charge of the TRACON controller, who guides it as high as 17,000 feet. At that point, it is handed off to yet another controller, this one at the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Islip, New York, where it shows up as a green blip on that controller's radarscope. Centers are spread out like a net across the United States, twenty-two in all, each filled with controllers watching, babysitting, passing off blips to one another. The New York Center controller, for example, will guide the 757 west and eventually pass it off to a controller at the Cleveland Center, who will guide it further west and pass it off to the Indianapolis Center, who will likewise guide it and pass it off to the Chicago Center. As it nears its destination, the 757 will descend, get handed to the Chicago TRACON and then to a controller at the Chicago O'Hare tower, who will clear it for landing and steer it to its gate.
Nearly 30,000 commercial flights thus zoom across America's skies each day and never bash into each other. The "modern" air-traffic-control system, and the FAA itself, was created in the aftermath of one of the most dramatic commercial midair bashes, way back in 1956. On a warm summer morning, United flight 718 from Los Angeles was headed to Chicago, and TWA flight 2 from Los Angeles was headed to Kansas City. Over the Grand Canyon they met, at 21,000 feet, inside a cumulus cloud. After impact, both planes plunged into the canyon, taking 128 people to a most violent death.
You don't hear of accidents like that anymore. The FAA employs 15,000 controllers who make sure that midair collisions and a host of other horrible things don't happen. Controllers are choreographers, deciders, big-picture people with a knack for making split-second decisions based on physics, geometry, aerodynamics, and God-given guts. They're perched above runways in little glass rooms and hidden in radar rooms, physically cut off from us and yet completely connected, or so we hope. We'd know them better if they did a bad job. The better they are, the more invisible they become.
Hidden, too, is the cloud of anguish under which they work. There is bitterness and resentment, feuding and infighting. Here is a workforce in a festering standoff with management, again and again, and now again. The story of air traffic in America today is one of growing pockets of exhausted controllers working with ancient equipment in understaffed facilities. The stakes go well beyond the inconvenience of airport delays, which are getting famously worse. The stakes are millions of passengers going from here to there: the safe handling of an utterly vulnerable public.
At the moment, Cali is "plugged-in." He's on his tiptoes, getting a better view. Plugged-in is what a controller calls it when he's on position. Plugging in means plugging out of the rest of your problems, or those of your union or a bunch of blabbermouth politicians in Washington, D.C. Plugged-in is its own dimension, hypertime and hyperthought and hyperawareness of airplanes loaded with people and all their problems. Cali glances down Zulu taxiway. Is it clear? He's probably going to need it. He's seeing four or five or twelve steps ahead.
What happens out on the tarmac is everybody wants to be first. Everybody wants to be next. Everybody wants to go. A 737 has just landed, touching down on runway 31. Destination! Destination means I'm done. Get-off-the-plane. Shake the wrinkles off your overcoat and march on bloated feet into the next fragment of your day. Mentally, all the passengers on the 737 play out the scenario even as they sit with their seat belts still obediently buckled, tapping their tappy fingers while the plane taxis toward its assigned gate, Charlie 9.
But Charlie 9 is occupied, an Airbus taking forever to board. A whole different horde of passengers who want to be first, next, go. Shifting, settling in, folding overcoats, claiming elbow room, all the passengers on the Airbus play out a scenario of getting somewhere on time, or late.
"Move!" thinks the pilot of the 737.
"Hurry!" thinks the pilot of the Airbus.
"Get me out of here!" thinks everybody all at once.
Cali knows the story, over and over again the same me-first story no matter whose head he gets inside. Me first! There is only so much a controller working Ground can do. Cali shoots the 737 down toward Zulu. "Bravoshordazulu" he says, machine-gun fast, into his headset. Not "Taxi by Bravo and hold short of Zulu" but "Bravoshordazulu." The pilot hears Cali's command, thinks Fuck. Zulu is nowhere near Charlie 9. Is this dipshit going to hold us all the way down there by Shea Stadium until our gate is cleared? No, Cali's just moving the 737 out of the way. He's got a departing Dash 8 he's rolling up Alpha (me first!), and he's got another arrival, an MD-80 to roll Bravoshordamike (me first!), and he needs to do what he can to help Brian, next to him on Local, launch a twofer (two departures for one arrival) if LaGuardia has any hope of getting out of delays. Cali is seeing all of this at once, a matrix of decisions hurling without apology toward the threshold of another matrix of decisions and another and in an instant another. It's overdrive for even the most practiced brain, all those variables, all those planes, all those souls, all that responsibility, no chance of saying "Fuck it!" and walking away, no ghost of a chance at all of that until, finally, after about an hour, a replacement controller steps in and you plug out, go downstairs for about thirty minutes to the break room for some crackers or an egg sandwich from the concourse, give the brain a chance to empty, exhale, recharge.
Cali is the sort of person to constantly ask himself, "Well, how would I feel?" It guides him through his decisions. The last thing a passenger wants to feel after landing in an airplane, he knows, is the feeling of sitting on the tarmac. But I have arrived at my destination. Why am I not moving on with my day? So Cali won't just park the 737 down at Zulu while it waits for its gate. If at all possible, he'll keep the plane moving on the tarmac. He will pause it at Juliet, inch along, then hold for a moment at Lima. "Give the passengers the illusion of progress." That's his motto. It gives the people hope.
He turns the 737 up Alpha, tries to swing it so it arrives at Charlie 9 the second the gate becomes available. He nails it, thinks yessss.
Another controller might not have bothered with all that. Another controller might have just dumped the 737 down at Zulu, just left all those passengers stranded down there, hopeless and forlorn. To do it better doesn't matter in the scheme of things, doesn't get anyone anywhere any faster, does nothing to help LaGuardia's reputation as one of the world's most delayed airports. It's not heroic. It's not avoiding a midair collision. It's certainly not landing an Airbus A320 on the Hudson. It's just 120 passengers feeling slightly less awful about being stuck in an airplane. A little bit of humanity. A little bit of love. What of it?
Early last summer, when I first visited the people at the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) union offices in Washington, D.C., to inquire about meeting some controllers, they assumed I was there to talk about misery. Did I want to understand why controllers were so miserable? In fact, my driving curiosity was about the work and not the mood of controllers. They said it would be difficult to separate the two.
They whispered a strategy for dealing with the FAA, which they spoke of as if it were shrouded in Kremlin-style inscrutability. Say this and don't say that. I would have to go through the FAA if I wanted to get access to a facility, and I would have to be very careful about how I asked. The FAA had a reputation for granting precious few such requests, and it probably wouldn't grant this one. Try this and don't try that.
When I went down 14th Street and talked to the people at the FAA about meeting some controllers, they assumed I was there to talk about misery. Had I spoken to anyone at NATCA? What did they say? They wanted to squelch rumors. They spoke of the union as if it were a bunch of bratty little girls throwing fits for a candy fix. They handed me a handsome four-color glossy report proving that controllers were happy, or if they weren't, they should be. Everything is fine. Don't panic. Everything is under control.
When moving between the union and the FAA, it is easy to feel like the only grown-up in the neighborhood.
At issue is a labor shortage. Air-traffic controllers are retiring at a rate of nearly 1,000 a year. A shriveling workforce, ever-increasing air traffic—somebody has to guide all those airplanes. You guys have to suck it up, the FAA says to the controllers. Work more hours, take fewer breaks—work six-day weeks if you have to. Yeah, you have to. Six-day workweeks are now the norm at the nation's busiest radar facilities, which are notoriously hard to staff. The fact that everyone saw this crunch coming long ago, and had been warning about it for years, makes the union nuts. Do the math. Controllers have to retire at 56. Most experienced controllers were hired in the early 1980s after the then union went on strike and President Reagan famously fired their asses. Most of the people brought aboard back then are now in their fifties and being booted out the door. And so there's been a surge in controller retirements—nearly half the workforce will become eligible for retirement in the next three years. We need more controllers! The union has been saying it for years. Our guys are falling apart here! They're gonna start making mistakes if you don't give them a break! Why won't you hire more controllers? It's not a simple task. Training takes years. We need more controllers in the pipeline!
The FAA acted, finally, in 2006. This was in the wake of failed contract negotiations. Forget it, they said. Here's your new contract. Take it or leave it. The union took it, sort of. The union refuses to use the word contract when referring to the "imposed work rules" controllers now work under. Among the 2006 changes: a salary freeze and a two-band pay scale. All new controllers would be brought in at as much as 30 percent less than those hired before the imposed work rules. A certified controller just starting out at LaGuardia tower now, for example, makes about $63,000; under the old rules, he would have started at around $93,000.
And so it was at bargain prices that the FAA finally started hiring like gangbusters in 2006. The plan is to bring aboard nearly 17,000 controllers in the next decade. Finding all those warm bodies is an issue. Gone are the days when controllers were expected to have college degrees. Now people can walk in off the street—McDonald's or Piercing Pagoda or carnival washouts. Once hired, a recruit attends the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City for three months and then gets stationed at a tower or a TRACON or a Center, where one of the already overworked controllers trains him on each position. Gone are the days when training to become fully certified at the nations' toughest facilities can take up to five years; new recruits are now fast-tracked in as little as two.
The union fears the worst. Is anyone listening? The union says America's skies are not safe if its controllers are exhausted, miserable, overworked, resentful, or inadequately schooled. The union says, Please, everybody, please remember what's at stake. The union says it's only a matter of time.
Oh, relax! says the FAA, citing stellar safety records and accusing the union of trying to whip the flying public into a fear frenzy to get them to support the union's whiny demands for a real contract.
Say this and don't say that. Try this and don't try that. Who did you talk to and what did he say?
After months of deliberation, the FAA said okay, I could come into one of their facilities; they would pick one for me. The union was pleased—finally, maybe the real story of controllers would get some attention—but said the FAA would probably offer some little Podunk place with little traffic and little misery. A place that would show off some jazzy simulator or something that would make the FAA look good.
Finally, the FAA offered LaGuardia tower. The union said, "Really?" and "That's a good one." Then they told me that controllers could get fired if they dared to speak the truth about how miserable they were, so I'd better take that into consideration. By the time I got to LaGuardia, I was imagining scared rats hunkering in corners of a cage.
But of course, that isn't what I have found. I have found Cali and Brian, Lars and Eric, Tim, Andy, Joe, Franklin, Camille, and the rest of the C team, one of three groups of twelve controllers who man the tower twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. There is little time here for pouting. Brian is my assigned guide. He is a compact man with ruddy skin and sharp blue eyes and a fatherly earnestness. Each day he brings a different coffee mug to work, on each mug a different photo of his four kids. "To remind myself why I'm doing this," he says. He does not appear even a tiny bit miserable, and neither, for the most part, does the rest of the C team. Joe, the (nonunion) supervisor, is distinguished from the rest of the (union) group only in that he wears a tie. He also wears a lanyard covered with pins: Snoopy, the logo from the '70s band Yes, a shamrock, a pink ribbon for breast-cancer awareness he has been wearing ever since one of the guys' wives was diagnosed.
The tower conditions, to be sure, are laughable. The plumbing, the leaks, the tired equipment. Most people, if they saw this, would not feel encouraged.
Controllers here, as in a lot of towers, still use "strips." Strips are pieces of pale green paper with flight data written on them—one strip for each departing and each arriving flight. Franklin, a happy old man, sits Geppetto-style in the corner, printing out the strips. At his side is a big white plastic bucket, the kind you salvage after home-remodeling projects, filled with plastic strip holders. Strip holders look like the trays you put Scrabble tiles on. Franklin carefully threads each strip into its own little holder, hands them down to the guys working traffic. The guys slide the strips around in the holders to indicate things: A third out (or so) means you've contacted a pilot, half out (or so) means a plane is ready to launch, strips balanced over the console like diving boards mean something else. When they clear for takeoff, they slide the strip all the way out, stamp it with an old-timer time stamper—bonk!—then pitch the empty strip holder—clunk!—into another white bucket. Bonk. Clunk! Bonk. Clunk! The rhythm gets hypnotic after a while. You can close your eyes and tell how busy LaGuardia Airport is just by the bonk and the clunk. It is a sound that makes you question what century you are, in fact, in.
"I don't quite know how to tell you this," I say to Brian one day. "They have computers that can do this sort of job for you." He looks at me. His eyes are all trust and innocence. I say even the local library long ago figured out how to ditch the card catalog. He nods. "We like the strips," he says. Short-term memory is almost always mad out. If you can't remember what you told this pilot six commands ago or that pilot three commands ago, you can glance at the strips and know the story in an instant.
As for the rest of the equipment, Brian refers me to Lars, a controller with a computer-geek bent who can't help himself from desperately trying to keep the tower from suffering a complete analog collapse.
"Don't even get me started," says Lars, when I ask him about the odd assortment of computer equipment, the whole Commodore 64 vibe. He's a lanky man with a long, rubbery face topped with a shock of sandy blond hair. After many sighs and shakes of his head, he finally finds words. "It's-such-a-mess." He says the problem with the computers in the tower is that nothing matches, nothing is integrated, every piece of software comes with a dedicated monitor, it's a fucking monitor farm in here. "A Unix thing here, Windows-based stuff here, stand-alone stuff here. Some contractor talked somebody in the government into buying it, you know. You can smell the backroom deals going around. It's just…no big picture. No big picture. It drives me absolutely nuts."
I ask about the red phone labeled black phone.
"Standard operating procedure," Lars says. "The book says use the black phone, but—"
"Oh, that phone doesn't work," a controller says to him.
"It doesn't?"
"It's been broken since I started training."
"The black phone?"
"Not the black red phone."
"No, the _black _phone."
"Not the red phone that's black?"
"There used to be a black phone that didn't work."
I stand and look at them, blinking confusion and worry.
"Look," Joe says to me, "the red black phone calls the police garage, like for a medical emergency, someone needs paramedics at the gate, whereas the other red phone is, okay, the airplane is coming in with minimum fuel, can crash or whatever—the real red phone. Then the tan phone is the Queens fire department."
"That's the one that doesn't work. The tan phone."
"It doesn't?"
"Jesus Christ."
For the sake of adventure, Brian has asked the crew if they'd like to go out after work for some beer and good times. So after work we go. Brian has arranged for Phil to be the designated driver, and seven of us ride in Brian's silver minivan to a Holiday Inn in Queens.
"So this is how air-traffic controllers party?" I say in the van, all of us sitting up good and straight with our seat belts on.
"We are so fucking responsible," says Cali.
I tell him it's actually very encouraging to learn that the people in charge of keeping all those airplanes from bashing into each other are dependable geeks in reasonably good moods. "Word down at headquarters is that you folks are miserable," I say.
"Oh, so you've been talking to NATCA," Lars says. The van erupts with laughter. They themselves are union members, but not "that kind." Not, that is, the hard-core kind that shoots itself in the foot by whining all the time. They tell stories blasting management and the union, blaming both for keeping this war going—especially at the TRACON. They tell of a union guy having a beer with a manager in a bar; another union guy walks in, sees this, you can't drink with a manager; they almost come to blows. A union guy gets promoted to management—crosses over!—and the other union guys key his car in the parking lot. Management plans to do a Thanksgiving turkey at the TRACON until the union hears about it: You can't do that! Nobody eats turkey with management.
"A Thanksgiving turkey at the New York TRACON, are you shitting me?"
"That's what I heard."
"Like the Pilgrims and the Indians are going to sit down and eat together, are you shitting me?"
"That's what I heard."
If there are hot spots of controller misery in America, the New York TRACON is, they say, among the hottest. They know this because many of them used to work there.
"It's two and a half years of my life I'll never get back."
"I got out. I escaped. I survived."
"You sell your soul to work there."
"They offered bonus money, like $75,000, to get people to work there, and still they can't staff the place."
"A black hole."
"A snake pit."
"You can't get out."
"A shithole."
No sign announces the New York TRACON, a two-story ash white warehouse beneath a tower with antennae and satellite dishes sticking out like whiskers. The building is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and is policed twenty-four hours a day by at least one remarkably gloomy security cop in a guard shack. Tall stacks spew dark stuff from a recycling plant on the other side of the parking lot. It is not a place that welcomes journalists—not for a long time now. I get in because Brian makes some calls. I feel an uncomfortable duty to be polite, like he's taking me to his creepy, crazy uncle's house and neither of us knows each other well enough to say, "Whew. Creepy."
Upstairs is where the action is: a windowless gymnasium-sized room, dark as night, sectioned off into sectors, each with lanes of glowing radarscopes. Supervisors (nonunion) sit perched on a raised throne in the middle, looking down upon rows of about fifty controllers (union) flopped in chairs like doughy bread in bread pans, hunched over, mumbling into headsets. The supervisors are the ones taking me on the tour.
"We handle about 6,500 flights a day," one of them proudly tells me, "into and out of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark, as well as forty-six smaller airports."
"It's an awesome responsibility," he says. "You get, I don't want to call it a God complex, because that's more for heart surgeons. But the ego starts. If you work here, you gotta start understanding where your ego's at."
The job of a TRACON controller is to organize the flow of traffic leaving and approaching the airports. Think of a highway. The TRACON controller handles the merge and the highway itself. There are dozens of other highways at dozens of altitudes he likewise manages. Now, say, at any given moment, ten of those planes zooming at those altitudes all want to use the same exit: LaGuardia Airport. The TRACON controller manages that confusion, gets everyone lined up to exit, one at a time, then hands the organized traffic off to the tower controller. Time is everything, space is everything, keep each airplane at least three miles apart, don't waste airspace, don't allow gaps. Quick: Turn ten random jets into a necklace of jets making a descent toward LaGuardia, each plane zooming one mile every eleven seconds. It is not a job for thinkers. You can't sit back and say, "Hmmm." Success as a radar controller is about intuition and guts, repetition and feeling.
"It's such a good job. It's a lot of fun. But the FAA takes every hope of enjoyment out of it. They ruined the industry."
"You gotta be able to dance," the supervisor with the ego tells me. "You gotta be able to inject imagination in a moment's notice. You can't say, 'Oh, this isn't working—what do I do now?' You gotta say, 'This isn't working—do this!' Know the plan and know when to change it. Always have an out. What if that guy loses an engine? You gotta know. You gotta have ideas. You gotta dance. I go home and my wife says, 'Don't boss me around like an airplane.' It's true! Here, you say something and it happens. It happens. It's not like that at home. You know, 'You can't talk to me like that! Shut up.' I always had that problem. You get used to it. I'm not going to call it a God complex, but…free spirits, a lot of us are. You gotta be able to dance."
At one point, but only after I ask, one of the supervisors agrees to walk me down among the controllers working traffic. I want to talk to them, meet them, maybe pull one aside and hang out in the cafeteria for a soda and ask if there is anything at all to the TRACON's reputation as a shithole, as the place where teams of disgruntled controllers sit and fume about their jobs—jobs that are about keeping thousands and thousands of otherwise helpless people safe as they're flung through the sky. The controllers I pass are, of course, busy. But even those plugging out for a break, or just plugging in after a break, avoid my eyes. I feel like I'm being escorted on a tour to see the villagers by Castro or something.
"You're kidding, right?" explains an unplugged TRACON controller I meet later at a bar. "No one talks, no one looks up, if management is around. That's, like, not done."
The former and current TRACON controllers I talk to do so in whispers, saying please, please don't use their names. They don't want the FAA to know they're bad-mouthing them, nor do they want the union to know they are (less so, but not insignificantly) bad-mouthing them. They feel trapped in the cross fire, little kids scrambling to dodge the rocks the big boys hurl at each other. None of them complain about the job itself. They feel proud of the work they do. (They mention God and heart surgeons: "But we have _thousands _of lives in our hands every minute, and the heart surgeon has, what, two a day?") They hate everything else. They hate being treated like shit by the FAA, mandatory overtime, six days a week, no questions asked. They hate being exhausted. They hate spending so much time training young recruits, some of whom they feel to be lost causes. The dregs. "We're getting people now who might not have any other options. When you think about the number of lives you have in your hands every day and the people they're sending us to put through training, it's scary." They hate the mold or whatever the hell the black stuff was that used to pour out of the ceiling vents. They wonder if the black stuff is the reason so many of them have asthma. They have inhalers. They hate not being able to leave the building for lunch. "I just want to drive down the street to McDonald's. They're afraid I won't be back in time. I'm like, I have hundreds of lives in my hands every second, and I get them where they need to be safely. You're telling me I can't get myself back from McDonald's?" They hate getting so little respect. They hate the chickenshit cowardice of their managers. "My manager won't come out to the control floor, won't show his face. I barely know what he looks like." They hate the paper that went around, like, three times that they had to keep signing: You will not strike. It's against the law. You'll lose your job. It's against the law. They hate plenty of the ways the union is handling the situation, expecting them to _not _impress management, to not go above and beyond the call of duty. "I was raised that you go to work and be the best possible that you can be. But it's not really like that. We're not supposed to impress our managers. We're only supposed to impress each other." Imagine being on a baseball team and you purposely stand there and take strikes just to piss off the coach while your teammates cheer.
Perhaps most of all, they hate being stuck. They can't leave this mess without quitting altogether. Any FAA controller can put in a bid for a job at another FAA facility, but your existing manager has to release you to take the new job. Woefully understaffed, the managers at the New York TRACON can't afford to release anybody. "You're stuck here. And they'll flat-out tell you that. You're not leaving. I got told the other day that maybe, maybe, I'll get out in five years."
Oh, they could have gone on and on with the complaints, so they did.
They hate the shame of it all. "It's such a good job. It's a lot of fun. But the FAA takes every hope of enjoyment out of it. They ruined the industry. When I first got in, everybody was all about doing everything possible to get as many planes in line, in the shortest amount of time. And over the years, the FAA has just pushed us and pushed us and pushed us, and now people are like, 'I don't care.' They can hold the aircraft for hours, the aircraft will divert, and we don't care anymore. Now we just work until we think we have enough in, and we hold the rest. It's not the same mentality as it was. I'm sure you could look at the delays from five years ago to now and you'll see much bigger delays now. People have stopped caring."
Factors influencing flight delays are, of course, numerous: airline problems, such as pilot shortages and mechanical breakdowns, and weather issues that cause ripple effects across the country. FAA critics have long pointed the finger at antiquated technology, to which the FAA has responded with the promise of a new, $22 billion satellite-based system. (Current projection: 2025.)
It's hard to quantify the human factor that goes into airport delays: teams of overworked, pissed-off, unmotivated controllers in radar centers that feel to them like prisons. It's hard to know if the human factor translates to real safety concerns, although the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Transportation has been warning about that one for a while. Testifying before Congress last summer, the OIG reminded everyone that in 2003 it had reported that "almost 90 percent of controller operational errors (when a controller allows two aircraft to get too close…) were due to human factors" such as fatigue and "situational awareness." In May 2007, the OIG reported that the FAA had "made little progress in this area." Progress, according to the testimony last summer, had come slightly in the form of NATPRO, a program designed to sharpen controllers' "mental skills most closely associated with visual attention and scanning."
Visual attention and scanning are important, but so, you would think, is the other human factor: These people are miserable.
Does it matter? America has enough to worry about. So some radar controllers are cranky. So some of them have stopped caring. What of it?
Brian, my guide, invites me home for dinner. Home is Blue Point, Long Island, over an hour away, a commute he does not mind. In the minivan, he tells me his Little League coach was a controller. He would look at him and think, Wow. In the 1980s, when Top Gun came out, he imagined himself a fighter pilot instead. He took flying lessons, anticipated glory. But reality won out over imagination, as it does for responsible men, and he found himself at the FAA Academy. A lot of the other controllers I talk to fell into the career, as if from outer space, a Plan B for dreamers. Joe studied to be a history teacher, Lars studied geology and chemistry, Andy was a graphic-arts major, Cali, too, wanted to be an artist. He grew up on Long Island, remembers passing LaGuardia tower often; from the road, it looks like a vase, gently narrowing in the middle. As far back as Cali can remember, he wanted to work in that tower, because the shape was so beautiful.
At home Brian's wife, Kathy, makes spaghetti. Brian loosens the tie he is still getting used to, rolls his head around and around. "It feels like a leash." A few days ago, he got promoted to supervisor of LaGuardia's C team. The guys made fun of the tie, of course. What this means, though, is that Brian has left the ranks of the union and crossed over to management. Crossed over. This fact has hardly raised an eyebrow with Cali and Lars and Tim and the rest. Just a nice thing for Brian. Brian is washing out the mug he took to work today. This one says we love you, dad. His own dad died when he was 5. He's being the dad his dad never got to be. A breadwinner. A responsible man. And now a supervisor.
Kathy makes whopping quantities of extra pasta, having recently learned you can freeze it. She makes homemade sauce even though Brian consistently sings the praises of Ragú. She makes a homemade apple pie. The kids say please and thank you and admit they're showing off because their dad asked them to be superpolite. We sit down to eat, and my phone rings. I ignore the call, but then it rings two more times. I excuse myself to check the voice mail to find a message from an upset union rep who works at the TRACON. He and I had plans to meet later. He was going to talk to me on the record about conditions there. On my voice mail he says, "Forget it." He says he's learned that I am "speaking to management," and therefore he will not speak to me.
"Nothing against the fine people of Phoenix, but there's history here. They showcased this tower at the 1964 world's fair, okay? And Amelia Earhart, she flew into this airport..."
Management? Does he mean Brian? Brian? And how does this union guy know I am with Brian? Does he? Are my tires getting slashed somewhere? I close my phone and go back to the table. I don't tell Brian. I don't want to ruin anyone's appetite.
The next morning, just before dawn, I meet Lars, Cali, Tim, and Eric at the Family Dollar in East Northport and ride in the carpool lane with them to LaGuardia. Eric can't hear because of the Papa Roach concert he went to last night. Tim is mad at his busted ox. Cali is thinking about how much he enjoyed the book Kitchen Confidential. Lars is driving. I tell them about the voice mail.
"Get out! That is beautiful! Oh, that-is-beautiful!"
"I can't stand it!"
"That's the TRACON, baby! You didn't properly genuflect to the union!"
"They're so warm and cuddly I just love 'em. I just love 'em."
"That's why we still have no contract. That. That!"
"That's bullshit. NATCA used to be king of the jungle, and now they're not, so they're pissed."
"Even when they were kings, they were pissed-off kings."
"Aw, man, that is beautiful."
It's not so much that these guys are sympathetic to management as they are unsympathetic to management and the union both. Just so sick of the whole stupid war.
We sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Whitestone Expressway and wonder why morale at the LaGuardia tower is so completely different than it is at the TRACON.
Lars goes out on a limb and says maybe the reason LaGuardia isn't a shithole like the TRACON has something to do with Leo, the LaGuardia tower manager on the ninth floor. "For all his bravado, Leo is still his own guy, you know?" You can talk to Leo. You can ask for a day off to go to your kid's soccer championship and not be laughed out of Leo's office. Leo isn't another FAA talking head. Leo, with his monthly pep talks downstairs in the stuffy conference room with the cardboard jammed into the windows to keep out the glare; Leo drinking his power, and spewing it out in a fountain of sharing-the-love. _"I trust you with everything I have. I do that every day. It's what I have. Trust. Because you gotta have the important parts of 'What-am-I-really-doing-here?' When you go to sleep at night and you wake up in the morning, are you confident that you've done it right? I can't help you with that. It's not my burden. It's yours. It's about safe transportation for the public. Pay attention! Are you paying attention? When bad things happen, that's what I look at. In this split second of time, what were you looking at, what were you thinking about, and why did it take you x, y, z seconds to respond? You can explain it to me, or I'll give you the chance to walk down on the concourse to a full waiting lounge of passengers, and you can raise your hand and tell them, 'Oh, I'm the air-traffic controller that's going to work your flight, and oh, by the way, I have a problem with paying attention.' Look, if you think the distance is that far between your actions and their lives, you're kidding yourself. You are kidding yourself. That's what you are. Kidding yourself." _
It would be complete cornball stuff were it not so frighteningly true.
The pep talks are usually only once a month on training days, required refresher courses. Then you watch movies of runway incursions at other towers and wonder what you would have done differently. Then you watch movies of all the ways the FAA is going to get-this-technology-thing-down and move away from _Smokey and the Bandit _CB radios and into, like, GPS or something awesome like that. It used to be you could go home after the movies were over, but now the FAA says you are not allowed to leave until you have put in every last second of your eight hours of training, so whatever; you read the paper or eat some crackers and bullshit about the chicken wings you had for dinner last night. Whatever. It's not _that _bad. It's no reason to alert your union representative.
The point is: the team. Whose team are you on, anyway?
"The carpool" is what everyone calls Cali and Lars and Eric and Tim, who move as a unit each day in one car or the other and hopefully not Eric's stupid little truck. They've rejoined the rest of the C team up in the tower, everyone again battling rush hour, again and again and again, the morning moves jackhammer fast. Bonk, clunk, bonk, clunk, bonk, clunk. Cali's craning his neck, watching an MD-80 he just launched on runway 4. Is this asshole going to go, or what? This is an American Airlines MD-80, which in controller language means: geriatrics. You soaking your bunions there, buddy? Nobody understands what the American pilots in those MD-80s _do _that takes them so long to roll. Cali watches, hopes. Up in the air, he's got an RJ on approach for runway 31, tells that pilot to square the base, which means don't cut corners, make a nice wide, square turn in the sky. _You're gonna need the extra time, dude. I'm launching an American MD-80 down here. Square the fucking base. _
"I don't think you're going to make it," Camille says. She's back here on cab-coordinator position, overseeing. It's kind of like the outfield. The cab coordinator watches the backs of the guys on Local and Ground, a second set of eyes.
The MD-80 gathers oomph like an old lady getting out of a chair down runway 4. The RJ appears first as a glimmer just past Shea Stadium, bigger and bigger until it fully reveals itself. These airplanes are headed toward each other on intersecting runways. Too fast. Too soon. Here it comes. The MD-80 is not over the threshold.… Fuck. "Go around!" Cali says into his headset, instructing the RJ to abort its landing. It's too close to the MD-80. It's too close… The plane swoops down, then up abruptly, like a gull with a fresh kill.
"Go-around!" says Camille, putting everyone on alert. "We got a go-around!"
Cali asks Eric, who's monitoring all the little choppers and private planes zooming around, if he's got anything at 2,000 feet that might get in the way of the go-around. Eric says he's got nothing. Cali takes the RJ up to 2,000 feet over Rikers Island; Camille radios the TRACON, says we got a go-around you're going to have to resequence.
"Yeah, I knew it was a tight shot," Cali says to the team, apologizing. LaGuardia has thousands of go-arounds a year. At an airport like this, everything is a close call, everything is dependent on split-second decisions, snap judgments, jets constantly barreling toward each other. It's people, just people, with nerves of steel and uncommon courage, keeping the planes from bashing into each other. Just people.
"I knew it was tight," Cali says again.
"Nobody's gonna shed a tear over that shit," says Lars.
"If those guys would have played nice, it would have worked," says Joe. If the American would have rolled faster, it would have worked. If the RJ would have squared the base, it would have worked. If the TRACON would just give more fucking separation between arrivals, it would have worked. If Kennedy with its whiny-ass delays hadn't… Well, Kennedy hasn't really bothered LaGuardia at all yet today, but it will. It will.
Us versus them. It depends on what team you're on, and this is the team. This is the C team. This is the family. This is what is so awesome.
Joe stands at a computer monitor, poking it as if trying to revive a dead cat. "Yo, Tim," he says. "I can't make my touchy thingie work. Can you insert that Cactus RJ in front of Flagship?" He summons Lars. "Our touchy-screen thingie is not touching again," he tells Lars.
One day Leo invites me out a little gray door on the tenth floor to see the tower observation deck and to have a smoke. He's tan, square, a little bit short, a little bit rascal. "Back in the day," he says, "people paid money to come out here on this observation deck and watch aviation. Okay? There was a time when this was interesting. It was important. It was a place to be."
It's windy, hard to get a lighter to light. The sky is crisp blue crested white. Manhattan looks manageable from here, neatly laid out as if you could weed it.
"We're not Phoenix, you know?" Leo says, shouting over the harsh growl of a launching 757. He's a big cheese. He's in charge of twenty-four towers in the region, including Newark and Kennedy, but the LaGuardia tower, such as it is, is his baby darling. "Nothing against the fine people of Phoenix," he says, "but there's history here. They showcased this tower at the 1964 world's fair, okay? And Amelia Earhart, she flew into this airport.… So did all the early airplane builders, people that not only conceptualized aviation but built it themselves with their own hands. This same piece of ground is where they flew into." He pauses dramatically. He squints toward a world beneath that is his, all his. "I make these new controllers understand the history of where they're at, okay?" he says. "Because this is a place that has a heart and soul. It's all about the great people who were here before and their stories. And the stories can be a burden on people's souls forever. I try to make my people understand that this place is unforgiving, and a mistake here will be a burden on your soul forever."
I suppose it makes a difference having a guy at the top who is all romance and conscience and chivalry, the sort of fellow who makes you want to purse your lips, wag your brow, and give him an attaboy punch on the chin. I tell him he's awesome. I never say "awesome." It's a word that invades my vocabulary only here, at the LaGuardia control tower. We turn toward the south, speculate about the choppers hovering over what's left of a crumbled Shea Stadium. We marvel at LaGuardia's new-tower-next-year; the actual empty promise has been standing right here for almost a year now. It is massive, of course phallic, a 233-foot concrete stalk. Lately, it's been draped in scaffolding, a very encouraging sign. A gigantic red crane hangs over the top, frozen in place, as if painted there.
"You're looking at $63 million," Leo says. "It's our new tower. We're moving in next year. No, they really mean it this time."
Jeanne Marie Laskas is a GQ correspondent.
*This story was originally published in the April 2009 issue


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Forums : MFLS Central Forum Thread : Letter to Sunil
[thread started by Phoenix TS on Thu 10/22 18:15 ET]
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from Phoenix TS
on Thu 10/22 18:15 ET
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Dear Mr. Gulati
Dear Mr. Gulati. I�ve seen on the internet that you have come under a lot of scrutiny over the last few weeks. I wanted to take time to thank you for your contributions to core American values. As a proud Alabama native (ROLL TIDE) I have long been worried about the influence that soccer has had in holding back American football and would like to thank you for the steps you have taken to rectify the situation. I feel I am in a unique position to understand the issues as my pansy brother-in-law is a soccer coach and prattles on constantly about the importance of US Soccer and though he does not agree with anything you are doing, I want to thank you for your vision. Your moves and decisions in recent years have done a great job in maintaining the status quo in our county and helping to ensure a future where interest in soccer in the United States will dwindle for the first time in three decades.
As with anything you need to start at the top. You have done a great job by hiring a coach who not only is unable to connect with the fan base and his constituency, but is willing to go the extra step and publicly insult them at every given opportunity. I have a story of your success I would like to share. My brother-in-law recently received his �A Coaching License� and was so proud of having that piece of paper with this Klinsmann�s name on it, until the next day when Klinsmann came out and explained how poor all coaching was in the United States. As I said I watch A LOT of college football (ROLL TIDE) and am always scared to play a team whose coach can rally the boosters, students and alumni through tough seasons. I�m glad to see that wasn�t the case in this regard.
I also love his strategy of bringing in Germans to compete for the US team. We both know Americans should not be playing soccer anyway. We need to be watching and playing real football. I know that you helped out in my household when my kids wanted to come home and play soccer and I was able to explain to them that they wouldn�t really be considered for the National Team since we don�t speak German in Alabama. I�m happy to report that I have them in the kitchen eating their second steak dinner of the night. Alabama class off 2024 (Roll Tide). I also want to thank you for changing the youth structure of soccer in this country. For years and years all these kids have enjoyed going out onto the field and playing with their friends that they go to school with in their same grade. You made it downright easy for God fearing true Americans like me to talk their kids out of playing the sport since they didn�t want to be playing the with the kids from the other grades. For far too many years I have been worried by the growing number of soccer goals I have seen popping up around the country and would like to thank you for addressing this problem. Maybe with you soccer numbers down parents will forget about this concussion problem we have and get back to real football. (ROLL TIDE)
Lastly I�d like to thank the US coach for his continued accurate bashing of this �Major League Soccer.� This Klinsmann guy and I are 100% in agreement on this issue. (It�s ironic that it took the sport of soccer to make me agree with a German) If our kids want to play professional soccer they shouldn�t do it here. They can just go to Europe and play. I come home after a hard day�s work in June and turn on Sports Center and I do not want to see soccer. I want to see how the Tide�s summer break is going and see coverage of the SEC�s pre-pre-pre- season coverage. This cannot happen with all these soccer highlights on TV. We hired a German as our coach. We do not know what we are doing with this sport. By having a successful professional league we are just giving our kids the wrong idea about what their future could be. Every kid that dreams of playing in Major League Soccer is another potential Alabama recruit/fan down the drain. Thank you for taking steps to dismantle this league. I too was worried when they hit their 10 and 15 year mark. We cannot let this continue. I�m glad to see that US Soccer is taking drastic steps to stop the continued existence of the league from the top down. It�s a dirty business but we have to have the right priorities.
Thank you for all you�re doing. I could continue on but I drone on. Those are some of the big issues but it is in the unnamed details that you subtly promote our agenda of traditional American sports. My pansy brother-in-law made me watch the game against Mexico last weekend and I was heartened to recognize so many names from the last national team game he made me watch 8 years ago. This shows that you are doing your job by ensuring we don�t produce more players and this whole soccer experiment doesn�t work. My brother-in-law tells me that you gave the women�s coach who barely won this world cup thing with the most talented players in the world another 4 years. I do not think this is a bad idea. In truth I don�t mind those pretty ladies running around in short shorts every 4 years. I don�t think they�d make proper Cheerleaders anyway. For all these little details and the big picture that you are taking care of I thank you.
from Seattle SC
on Thu 10/22 18:32 ET
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Excellent. from Arrows SC
on Thu 10/22 21:29 ET
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Wow from Shaolin Mystigods
on Thu 10/22 22:58 ET
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sumbitch from FC Byrd Turgler
on Fri 10/23 11:23 ET
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Please tell me you actually mailed this to Dr. Gulati. Please. from Dynamo Salem
on Fri 10/23 13:51 ET
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Well done. from The Laws of Lalas
on Sat 10/24 8:40 ET
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your kids only have two steak dinners a night? here in
Birmingham they are required to have three.
from Phoenix TS
on Mon 10/26 15:28 ET
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Thank for the comments guys. Let me make it clear that my intention wasn't to tweak any noses outside of the USSF. I spent a lovely summer years ago traveling Alabama and coaching soccer and found the people to be nothing but receptive. I simply chose the biggest baddest football program around and had fun with it. Enjoy your off-season


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LOS ANGELES, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- David West scored 19 points and Lance Stephenson had 15 points and 14 rebounds Tuesday in Indiana's 104-92 win over the Los Angeles Lakers.
West and Stephenson were among six Indiana players in double figures in the win, which got the Pacers back on track after losing two of their previous three games.
Indiana dominated the paint, outscoring the Lakers 52-32 under the basket and winning the rebounding contest 63-50.
Pau Gasol and Jodie Meeks both scored 21 points for the Lakers. Kendall Marshall tallied 11 points and 13 rebounds, but Los Angeles lost its fifth consecutive game.
The game was tied 49-49 at halftime, but the Pacers outscored the Lakers 30-20 in the third quarter and led 104-88 in the final minute of the contest when Roy Hibbert slammed home the last of the 11 points he scored in the game.


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Also this weekend, a friend (I'd call him a dear friend too, but can I really use the expression twice in one post) who moved to Seattle a while back was here to visit.
I wanted a cupcake that would show my moving friend that we would miss her and my visiting friend that we were glad he was here.
The visiting friend has a passion for carrot cakes, so I really felt obligated to go that route. I knew at some point I would want to try a carrot cupcake and it would feel all kinds of wrong trying it while he wasn't around.
As for the moving friend, I'd figured I focus the accoutrements on her. First, I thought about spelling her name out in carrot strips and putting them on top of the cupcakes. While that would be cute, maybe, not everyone loves raw carrots. I gathered this after looking at many many pictures of carrot cakes each adorned with a fake icing carrot on top of it. If people liked real carrots that much, why would so many people bother creating fake ones out of icing.
I then saw a picture of cupcakes for someone's birthday where each cupcake had a little candle sticking out of it, and inspiration hit me. I decided to make cookies which spelled "Good Bye Naomi" put them on little sticks and stick one in each cupcake.
What frosting? What cookies? I opted for both maple frosting and maple cookies. That part was for me. There has to be a me component. I love maple. I think maple syrup could go on anything and be yummy. I've even had it on pasta.
Overall, I was really pleased with the creation and particularly pleased with the comment of one friend who said, " These look like they are straight out of party magazine." I know I said at the beginning of the project that I was only going to care about taste, not looks. Well, call me shallow, but appearances are starting to matter to me.
The details
The cake
For the cake I used a carrot cupcake recipe from Diana's Desserts.
These didn't really taste like carrot cake. Oh well. Orange was definitely the predominant flavor. Guess I should have realized that with all the orange zest and orange juice. However, they were the perfect level of moistness and bursting with flavor. If you think of them as orange carrot cakes vs just carrot cakes you'll be in for a treat.
The Frosting
For the frosting, I returned to All Recipes.
The only thing I changed was to follow the advice of one of the commenters on that site and use 1/2 t vanilla and 1 1/4 t maple. This was to give it a stronger maple flavor. The consistency of the frosting was spot on. It had a perfect smooth texture and was really easy to pipe. As you can see in the pic, I piped on far more icing than I have in any past cupcakes.
Everyone keeps requesting that I use more icing, so I finally listened. It is clear that I like much less icing on my cupcakes than the average person so I guess I'm just going to have to cave a bit on that on to please the masses. I can always wipe some of it off directly into my husband's mouth with no complaints.
I would definitely use this as a cream cheese base for future creations.
As for the maple flavor, it turned out this was a true test of just how much love of maple you have. Some said it was maple overload, but others and most importantly the bride and groom to be really liked it just as it was. If you aren't such a maple fan, just don't up the maple in the recipe as much as I did.
WARNING: The maple extract seems to some how get into your pores. For days after baking these, despite multiple showers and many other meals, I could smell maple on my skin. Good thing I like the smell of maple.
The Cookies
I knew I wanted a flat cookie that would hold its shape when made into a letter.
I opted for a Canadian Maple Leaf cookie found on Recipezaar minus the frosting. Figured I already had frosting.
Never having made cookies on sticks before, I was a bit skeptical of how they would stick on the sticks. I cut out my little letters and just pressed them lightly into wood skewers. When they came out of the oven, they were stuck. It's just that easy.
I was reminded though of what a pain cookies are, mainly because you can't make that many at a time. Cutting out all those suckers and doing all those batches can get old fast. My solution, just stop when you get bored. As it turns out, I still have 3 times as much dough as I used sitting in my freezer for future use. You may see more maple creations coming so I can have an excuse to use some of it.
For those reading and viewing closely you may note that I said the letters would spell "Goodbye Naomi". Somehow I lost my D cookie cutter, good thing her name didn't have a D in it.


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Milsim Leadership and preparation structures: from beginning to end
As we all should agree, Milsim is about simulating the real thing, good, bad and ugly. In any real military conflicts, battle are won with a strong logistics and leadership structure. Any lack of the two and you exponentially increase the risk of mission failure. Milsim is no different. This topic is an open discussion about how to effectively create an effective leadership structure.
To begin, the leadership structure in airsoft/milsim is generally composed of Commander(CO), Executive officer (XO) and Squad Leader (SL). These are the most common roles in play across the community. Depending on the event size, you can then add VIP/Advisors, Lieutenant(LT), Fireteam leader (FTL), etc.
One thing that I personally have a difficult time with, is being able to select competent leaders. In an open play, a team captain can goof off and nothing major will happen. In milsim, if the team captain is not taken seriously or worse, HE doesn't take the leading roll seriously, he should, simply said, NOT BE the leader for that event. An an example, I am the owner/captain of Team Strikers but many, many times, I let my other guys lead for an event because they were more capable than me. No shame to step aside when you know it is for the better good of all.
So to go back to the original issue here, the community must find a way to support, nominate and elect the leaders, like the commander and XO, more efficiently. I don't know, a voting system perhaps? when a CO decide to attend an event, maybe we should have a public poll system just to get more feedback?!
When the leadership chart is fulfilled, you can start preparing for the major "known" tasks and planning tasks. For example;
- Getting in contact with all leadership elements(players).
- Setting up the squads and roles.
- Setting up the comm net.
- Make sure players have the proper equipment
- Etc.
It is a misconception to think that knowing the missions ahead of time will make things better for the simple reason that missions are very adaptive. Whatever is planned ahead of time can changed within minutes of starting time. Another example would be when players lose radio contact and then wonder what to do next? that is the kind of things that SHALL be planned WAY ahead of time, regardless if there is a player pack or not. So while the missions can change, the way your squad shall react, communicate and adapt should not change, regardless of the event you are going.
So in your opinion now, what should be implemented to:
1. Guaranty better/competent leaders.?
2. Create a solid preparation structure. ?
It's so hard to say what is a good commander anymore. The commander really depends on the people around him. That being said, if the commander isn't organized then things will fall apart right from the start. You need to have squads, leadership, comms, briefs, etc. planned well in advance of an op. Too many guys come in with zero plan and fly by the seat of their pants. That leads to breakdown in CoC.
I know there are some LTs and whatnot out there willing to teach some ready leadership how to motivate, lead, and form tactics that will ensure a good fight. I think we need a few leadership courses through the year. Gives you a chance to meet your command elements and those command elements a chance to prove they can do it.
I don't think there's much you can do about choosing competent leaders. The reason being that unless you're know they're competent and ask them to volunteer for the part and they do so willingly knowing the effort it will take, then it's a crapshoot. Most veteran players want to get out there and fight, not issue commands. The people that do volunteer are often optimistic and motivated, but there's no telling the experience they have. This could be their first leadership position ever. They may lack the foresight to do proper planning and organization.
I think that leaders should receive some guidance on what to prepare for because it is entirely possible that those who volunteer simply wait until the day of the event to get their information. Some may say "well they need to be proactive" but if they've never led, how do they know to be proactive? It may just take telling the person that they need to establish their chain of command, unit structure, comm net, etc. to get them to do it. Maybe the leader doesn't know exactly how to go about doing that. Franc, I think as far as things you can do, maybe just shooting the volunteer leadership a message to make sure they're on track. There's no need to do it for them when they can do it themselves.
As far as a preparation schedule, maybe there needs to be a short list of responsibilities for leadership made so that COs, XOs, PLs, PSGs, SLs, and TLs know what they're all supposed to do at their levels. There is no definitive guide to leadership, and I know the next thing that will be posted is "well then research it" but again this goes back to the problem of new leaders maybe not knowing what to know. If our answer to these kinds of questions is "look it up, don't ask me" then we're dooming ourselves. Leaders are forged through the leadership of others.
I'd love to play as leadership for an event, but the issue of scheduling airsoft with ROTC and college classes is a pain in the ***. I've been pretty lazy with event attendance since Assault on Volgograd though, so we'll see what I can work out.
Kind of like real military, work your way up through the ranks. Or have people prove themselves by being leaders in your smaller events and you could have a pool of people that are known to you. This way you would also be able to ensure that they are used to your style of event and they can make decisions in the spirit of the rules you put down.
I don't know if it would work, just brainstorming =)
Without intending to get off topic, my feedback is in general to the original question on FB of how to keep milsim events going in our current environment.
While an effective command structure will win or lose the game, I think game design is more important if the goal is to keep people going on objectives and not being concerned will how much trigger time they had.
For example, this spring my guys and I hit up a Third Coast Airsoft event in south Chicago. We hadn't been really happy with LC events as of late, we felt they were largely turning into open plays at really great venues.
Third Coast used a simple yet really effective model that I feel would work well with Blind Fury given how many people BF can bring in. They simply used 6+ objective locations that had a pelican box with a point counter inside. The whole goal was take control of the objectives, switch the toggle on the box to your team, and watch the point s for your team start accumulating. At the end, staff simply collected the boxes and totaled up the points.
The benefit of this was even if you had a total commo breakdown, everyone still knew the large/overall goals - capture and hold the points. The winners would of course be determined by who had good commo and knew where to allocate human resources, but everyone was still able to stay on the overall mission regardless of command breakdown.
Now, a setup like this can of course be enhanced by having supplemental FRAGOS/DAMs, side missions, whatever. I just think when you're trying to keep an event of this size, age groups, and varying experience levels; simplicity/clarity on a large portion of the objectives is a great thing.
To speak more to Franc's original post. Here is what I think works:
-Whitelisting COs/XOs. EOs can share who has done an effective job leading smaller events so that when it comes time to recruit for large events, you actually have a pool of vetted people to contact.
-Emailing Info. While I think it's good and necessary that a site/FB page/forum thread has documents and roster info, I think top down email communication starting from the CO/XO is the most effective way to make sure the command structure is in the loop ahead of time. Require a personal email address for each player. It just always seems that when private forums and/or private FB groups are used that only a small % of folks get registered.
-Forced small briefings. Make the final ticket/patch/whatever needed to gain entrance to the field only obtainable after viewing/listening to a small group on-site briefing. Roll these briefings every 10-15 minutes while chronos are open.
I think there's a lot of good ideas here. I like the idea of a whitelist for leaders, as well as a system where you can't be a platoon leader until you have played as a squad leader, can't be an XO until you've succeeded as a platoon leader, etc. I don't know if there is enough consistency in people to make that work; you guys would know better if there is a large enough pool of prospective leaders to make that kind of thing work.
First let me say even the worst BF event is still a really good time! I was on the tan team this year and I will have to say our CO/XO failed to even communicate with me through FB posting or emails even worse I came out friday to touch base with the CO and just here what plans I may have missed and the CO had no clue what was going on. I feel the best approach for future events is for Blade to actually get COs that are not part of the paid participants and he is 100% percent confident they will command and control there team, the XO should be from the paid players.
One thing a CO needs to understand is he/she is no longer a fighter they need to focus on giving assignments to squad leaders and monitoring progress to meet the objective. A CO can not do this if they are part of the battle. A idea for solving this issues is to place each team CO in a permanent Command Post that can not be captured. All scenario objectives from the EO would be given face to face to each teams Command post not over the radio, this would eliminate confusion that can happen over unclear radios. Once each CO gets the objective its up to them to assign squads either by radio or the old fashion way of assigning a runner to send the message to a squad.
Just and idea but it seems that three teams just creates way to much chaos and frustration, scale back to 2 teams with clear objectives.
Just and Idea, how about assigning each team a Base at each end of the field and start the game from there with one main objective, NOT loss your base while completing objectives assigned from the EO.
Another issue I have noticed at every BF and other games is medic rules and how to properly enforce them. In real life you get shot your either dead or you go to hospital, at milsim you get shot, dragged to a place out of fire and get revived right where you lay and then you are right back into the fight from right where you died makes it difficult to determine if a team has lost the battle and the real estate. Maybe change it up that you have to go to a field hospital away from the fight, establish the field hospitals within 200 yards of each location on the map, medics get to you put your tourniquet on then you can be escorted by the medic or one player to the field hospital. You could even place event staff there to track how many kills for each team and incorporate that into a scoring system for the event.
I know how much work it must take to plan this event and even more how hard it is to get staff to help run the event. It may surprise you how many of us in the Airsoft Community would be willing to volunteer to help run the event with no more than a cool t-shirt and a thank you.
I know as an EO this year frustrated you, but honestly it was still fun. I do agree that it is time for a format change and asking for input like this a positive direction. I look forward to more BF, just like several others out there and I am willing to help out even if that means not playing but volunteering to help.
I know first hand that leadership can be tough both before and during an event. I think that Jonah as CO for Civi's did a fantastic job in both aspects. That being said, I have also been at events where the COC either was not good and/or broke down. A prime example was 2 years ago at Blind Fury where Jonah had a death in the family and could not attend. Friday night I stepped up and got civi's organized until Greg could arrive and take over as CO. On Sunday, Greg had gotten zero trigger time with his brand new stoner and I again stepped up to get that man on the field. I use this as an example not to boast but to show that on the field when COC breaks down or coms are crappy, someone needs to step up and take charge. I saw veteran players on green and tan this year. If you are having those issues, take charge get in touch with Blade or your event EO, advise them of the situation, and get those objectives and set your men in motion.
I think the registration and cut of dates need to be finalized a little sooner. I know this limits the amount of players you'll end up with, but this gives command (a quality CO) sufficient time to set a CoC, with players who actually want to be there.
Typically, I agree with the concept of the CO for large milsim games as a game staff/admin -- This would help make sure the CO is on task, and creates an easy line of communication between the EO and the COs, who should be working closely in any case.
Another idea I think would help is having a check in table for each team when players arrive on site -- COs (or their staff) check people against a roster, make sure they know what squad they're playing with, direct people to their chain of command, and can answer questions before the game. Since most players can't be bothered to to plan ahead of time (Or just never communicate), you're generally organizing half your squads on the day of game anyway, so it gives you an opportunity to fill out the TOE instead of trying to organize people at the last minute during briefing.
All ideas are great here, gotta remember them myself in case I'm ever in command/hosting....
This seems very similar to a topic I just replied to. So I'll copy & paste my response and add to it based on other comments.
Although at bigger sized games: Crucible IAC IV and V, Blind Fury XII, these games have had some of the best command structure I've seen in the last two years (as far as games I've attended) and it is EASY to see the difference.
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Merck & Co. (MRK – Free Merck Stock Report), a New Jersey-based drugmaker and Dow-30 component, has posted third-quarter results that exceeded our expectations. Reported earnings of $0.95 a share came in ahead of our $0.92 estimate, as significant reductions to overhead costs helped offset lower sales stemming from new generic competition for its blockbuster drug, SINGULAIR. Following the modest quarterly outperformance, management narrowed its full-year earnings guidance range from $3.75-$3.85 a share to $3.78-$3.82. As a result, we have reduced our 2012 share-net target by a nickel, to $3.80, largely reflecting a lower revenue outlook for the balance of the year. Investors seemed relatively unfazed by the earnings announcement, as shares of Merck were up less than 1% in early morning trading.
For the period, worldwide revenues declined 4%, to $11.5 billion, primarily reflecting the loss of exclusivity on its top-selling product, SINGULAIR, which went off patent in August. While some top-line deterioration was expected because of this, the fallout was slightly greater than we had anticipated, as sales of the drug plummeted 55%, to $602 million. Even still, Merck posted some impressive growth in other core products, including double-digit sales gains for JANUVIA (15%), JANUMET (16%), GARDASIL (31%), and ISENTRESS (16%). We are optimistic that heightened contributions from these products, coupled with promising upcoming launches, will help to lighten the SINGULAIR impact over the longer term.
Despite lower top-line results, management did a solid job of executing cost-cutting initiatives during the period to help offset the impact on earnings. Reduced spending on production, marketing, and research, coupled with lower taxes, largely helped to keep profits intact. In the coming quarters, we expect Merck to maintain a prudent cost strategy, allotting time for the further development of its existing core product line and the emergence of upcoming launches. The company's top pipeline candidates, ODANACITIB and SUVOREXANT, have shown promise in recent trials and should be key contributors down the road.
Looking out to 2015-2017, our investment thesis for Merck & Co. remains largely unchanged. While sales will likely be materially lower in the near term due to patent expirations, we believe new product contributions and continued growth of the existing products base should be enough to reinforce stability over the long term. At present, Merck stock holds a superior Safety rank (1), and the company's Financial Strength (at A++) garners our highest grade. An above-average dividend yield offers a nice income-component, as well.
About The Company: Merck & Co. is a leading manufacturer of human and animal healthcare and specialty chemical products. Important product names include SINGULAIR (asthma); VYTORIN, ZOCOR (cholesterol-lowering agents); FOSAMAX (osteoporosis); CRIXIVAN (HIV/AIDS); VASOTEC, PRINIVIL (angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors for high blood pressure and angina); and PRILOSEC (gastro.). The company acquired Medco in November of 1993 and spun it off again in August of 2003. It acquired Schering-Plough in 2009.
At the time of this article's writing, the author did not have positions in any of the companies mentioned.


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Officer Bubbles Sues To Find Out Identity Of Anonymous YouTubers
from the double-bubble-toil-and-trouble dept
As you read through the lawsuit, some of the YouTube comments Josephs is suing over are pretty silly, and it's difficult to see how they're worth a lawsuit. I mean, here's one of the comments:
"true -- probably wears the sunglasses while looking at himself in the mirror!!!"Now, that may be a false statement (though, can he really say he never looked at himself in the mirror with sunglasses?), but does it really qualify to the level of defamatory? Similarly, another of the comments he's suing over reads:
"officer bubbles probably looks at himself in the mirror a lot."Again, is that really defamatory?
Other comments certainly appear to be mostly opinion, rather than any sort of statement of fact:
"It's a shame that the police are becoming uniformed bullies. It's bad when the local people tell them to leave their community."Even in cases where the comments were a bit more stringent, it's hard to see how they could be seen as anything more than angry venting. The Toronto Star spoke to one of the (still anonymous) commenters who said he doesn't even remember what he wrote, but he was just angry about what he had seen. According to the lawsuit, his comment was:
"Nice going Officer Josephs, you are a real hero and a true testament to the sorry state of law enforcemtn here in Canada, and a fine example of the kind of policing peaceful people had to endure during the G20 farce."
"If this steroid addicted Nazi has children, they must be sooooo embarrassed."In other words, your typical YouTube-style comment. Sure, you could argue that claiming he was "steroid-addicted" and a "Nazi" might qualify as defamation, but taken in context, would anyone reading that comment really believe that the commenter knew Officers Josephs and was actually alleging he was addicted to steroids and a Nazi, or would they assume that it was just someone upset by the way Officer Josephs acted.
In the meantime, by filing this lawsuit, about the only thing that Office Bubbles has done is call a lot more attention to his initial actions and reinforce the idea that he seems to totally overreact to rather benign situations. But, I guess, if you're going to arrest a girl for blowing bubbles in your direction, suing YouTube (for being a 3rd party platform) and suing people for mocking comments that no one actually believes probably seems to be equally intelligent.


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