text:
TNM's production of a Brecht classic leads the way in a politically charged winter-spring season, but there's plenty of escapist entertainment, too
It's politics not as usual in Montreal theatre's upcoming season
You might be aware that there's a HUGE event opening on the world stage next week (whether it's set to be farce, tragedy, clown show or heroic pageant depends on your viewpoint). Here in Montreal, there's plenty going on over the rest of winter and spring to offer some much needed distraction. But there's also a noticeable sharpening of political content, which will no doubt give us much food for thought during these interesting times.
Take Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (84 Ste-Catherine St. W.), which this week sees a rare sighting of that most political of theatrical beasts, Bertolt Brecht: so political, in fact, that he's often dismissed as an irrelevant Marxist troglodyte. Lorraine Pintal's production of his The Good Person of Szechwan (La bonne âme du Se-Tchuan in Normand Canac-Marquis's translation) should put paid to such dismissiveness. It's a playful parable about a big-hearted prostitute who, bidden to do good by three buffoonish gods, finds she can only do so in hard times by disguising herself as a ruthless, amoral businessman. Leading a 20-strong cast, Isabelle Blais plays Shen-Te and her alter ego Shui-Ta. If you're worried about "yellowface" casting, let's point out that Brecht's China is about as realistic as the cartoonish London he created in his Threepenny Opera. It previews Tuesday, continuing to Feb. 11.
Another francophone show opening this week is Jerk (Usine C, 1345 Lalonde Ave., Jan. 17 to 21), cult-writer Dennis Cooper's tale of a serial killer speaking through glove puppets. A taste of Cooper's enjoyably macabre style was seen in his The Ventriloquist's Convention that played last year's Festival Transamériques and, like Jerk, was directed by Gisèle Vienne.
Already underway is a remount of director Angela Konrad's deconstruction of Shakespeare's Richard III, Auditions ou Me, Myself and I (Théâtre de Quat'sous, 100 Pine Ave. E., to Jan 21). It stars Dominique Quesnel, with whom Konrad worked to such stunning effect in a Québécois Macbeth recently.
The big theatre story of 2017 so far is the departure of Roy Surette, whose tenure as artistic director of Centaur Theatre (453 St-François-Xavier St.) ends in June (watch this space for news of his successor). His very last show as director will be the aptly named You Will Remember Me (March 7 to April 2), the Quebec English language première of the darkly comic tragedy Tu te souviendras de moi by François Archambault (who also has a new play, Une morte accidentelle opening at La Licorne, 4559 Papineau St., on Tuesday). It's about an academic struggling with senility and weaves family drama in with the fading memories of the Lévesque years.
Before that, there's the Surette-directed production of Steven Sach's two-handed comedy, Bakersfield Mist (Jan. 31 to Feb. 26), which arrives at Centaur from Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre. It stars Nicola Cavendish as a trailer-park ex-bartender who might have bought a multi-million-dollar Jackson Pollock from a local thrift store. Jonathan Monro plays the pompous art expert who arrives to appraise whether it is indeed the work of Jack the Dripper.
Ellen David directed a terrific production of Archambault's The Leisure Society some years back, so there's confidence that she'll be more than capable of handling the high demands of Clybourne Park (April 4 to 30), Bruce Norris's Pulitzer Prize-winning play that ingeniously riffs on Lorraine Hansberry's '50s classic, A Raisin in the Sun. It brings the story up-to-date to a contemporary and perhaps even more racially charged Chicago. Centaur's season ends on an amiable note with Bed and Breakfast (April 25 to May 21). The heart-warming tale of two gay B&B proprietors in a tiny tourist town, it first played at the Thousand Island Playhouse in Gananoque, Ont.
The Segal Centre's (5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd.) year opens with a crash, a bang and hopefully waves of laughter as Michael Frayn's classic Noises Off takes the stage from Jan. 29 to Feb. 19. It's an ingenious slice of meta-theatre in which the staging of a raucous trouser-dropping farce is doubled by the chaotic backstage antics of the hapless cast. It's being directed by filmmaker Jacob (The Trotsky) Tierney, whose production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties played at the Segal in 2015.
It's followed by a visiting production from Toronto's theatrical jewel, Soulpepper, of Kim's Convenience (March 8 to 19), the hit comedy about a Korean store that went on to become a CBC sitcom last year.
Segal boss Lisa Rubin follows up her impressive directing debut of Bad Jews with Million Dollar Quartet (April 23 to May 14), the Tony-award winning show that recreates the too-good-to-be-true (but actually true) 1956 recording session, which included Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins.
Over in the Segal Studio, Black Theatre Workshop and Tableau D'Hôte première Lorena Gale's Angélique (March 15 to April 2), which tells the story behind the story of a slave who started a fire in 18th century Montreal. BTW will also be giving the public the opportunity to catch its school-touring production of Blue Nose, a playful look at prejudice on a pirate ship, at the Black Community Resource Centre, 6767 Côte-des-Neiges Rd., on Feb. 18. And don't forget the lavish BTW Gala this year, which will be honouring, among others, director and educator Winston Sutton on Jan. 28 at the EVO Hotel, 420 Sherbrooke St. W.
Segal Studio also sees award-winning lighting designer Itai Erdal reprising a show first seen at Usine C: How to Disappear Completely (April 30 to May 14) takes a tender look at mortality and the magic of light.
Geordie Productions are opening up their school-touring productions for the general public with Erin Shields's Instant, Marcus Youssef's Jabber and Jesse Strong's Water Weight playing at Le Monument-National (1182 St-Laurent Blvd.) March 21 to 26.
Meanwhile, over at Théâtre St-James (265 St-Jacques St.), Infinithéâtre continues its commitment to new writing with the première of Oren Safdie's Mr. Goldberg Goes to Tel Aviv (Feb. 2 to 19), a comedy about a Canadian writer controversially sticking his oar into the Israel-Palestine conflict. Infinithéâtre then return to their temporary Rialto Infinite Studio base (5723 Parc Ave.) for a remount of Michael Michel's sexy and thoughtful comedy-drama, Honesty Rents By the Hour (March 2 to 19).
Imago Theatre have a particularly hot-topic piece on their hands with Intractable Woman, Stefano Massini's play about murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, which guests at Centaur Theatre, Feb. 9 to 18.
Over at Mainline Theatre (3997 St-Laurent Blvd.), there's the chance to catch two Shakespeare productions: Snowglobe's Much Ado About Nothing, Jan. 26 to 29, and Théâtre Sans Argent's Troilus and Cressida, Feb. 23 to 26.
If you're desperately looking for big, brash escapist entertainment, head over to Place des Arts for the visiting production of the Abba extravaganza Mamma Mia (Feb. 17 to 19).
Meanwhile, back to the francophone side, TNM follow up their Brecht production with a real scoop, made possible by the cancellation, due to health reasons, of Novecento. Replacing it is Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's heart-warming one-hander Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (Feb. 22 to 28), performed by the author himself.
Other francophone highlights include three adaptations that were previously classic films: Vol au-dessus d'un nid de coucou at Théâtre Rideau Vert (4664 St-Denis St.), March 21 to April 22; Harold et Maude at Théâtre Duceppe (Place des Arts), April 5 to May 13; and Le décline de l'empire Américain at Espace Go (4890 St-Laurent Blvd.), Feb. 28 to April 1. Meanwhile, FTA hit Siri returns for a date at Théâtre Aujourd'hui (3900 St-Denis St.), Jan. 17 to Feb. 4.
Finally, the narrowing of the anglo-francophone divide continues at Théâtre Prospero (1371 Ontario St. E.) with a bilingual presentation of Jon Lachlan Stewart's Fringe classic Big Shot from April 11 to 29.


text:
Your shopping cart is empty!
AT24C256 24C256 Kbit Serial I2C Bus EEPROM..
Rs59.00 Ex Tax: Rs50.00
Low-voltage, high-performance CMOS 8-bit microcomputer with 2KB of flash programmable and erasable read-only memory. The device is manufactured using ..
Rs65.00 Ex Tax: Rs55.08
Rs91.00 Ex Tax: Rs77.12
Features - AT89S51Compatible with MCS-51 Products
4K Bytes of In-System Reprogrammable Flash Memory
Fully Static Operation: 0 Hz to 33 MHz
Rs92.00 Ex Tax: Rs77.97
Features - AT89S52:Compatible with MCS-51 Products
8K Bytes of In-System Reprogrammable Flash Memory
Fully Static Operation: 0 Hz to 33 MHz..
Rs89.00 Ex Tax: Rs75.42
Features:High performance, low power Atmel® AVR® 8-bit microcontroller
Advanced RISC architecture
131 powerful instructions – most sing..
Rs247.00 Ex Tax: Rs209.32
FEATURES:Operating Voltage: 1.8 to 5.5 V.
Flash memory: 16 Kb.
EEPROM: 512 Byte.
I/O pin: 32 pin.
USART protocol interface...
Rs165.00 Ex Tax: Rs139.83
The ATmega16A is a low-power CMOS 8-bit microcontroller based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture. It has 16K bytes of In-System Programmable Flash ..
Rs330.00 Ex Tax: Rs279.66
Features:High-performance, Low-power AVR 8-bit Microcontroller
Advanced RISC Architecture
131 Powerful Instructions - Most Single Clock..
Rs212.00 Ex Tax: Rs179.66
Rs202.00 Ex Tax: Rs171.19
FEATURES:High Performance, Low Power AVR® 8-Bit Microcontroller
Advanced RISC Architecture
131 Powerful Instructions – Most Single Cloc..
Rs133.00 Ex Tax: Rs112.71
Features:28-pin AVR Microcontroller
Flash Program Memory: 8 kbytes
EEPROM Data Memory: 512 bytes
SRAM Data Memory: 1 kbytes
I/O Pins:..
Rs127.00 Ex Tax: Rs107.63
The AT89S52 is a low-power, high-performance CMOS 8-bit microcontroller with 8K bytes of in-system programmable Flash memory. The device is manufactur..
Rs100.00 Ex Tax: Rs84.75
DESCRIPTION:Atmel ATTINY45-20PU is tiny little 8pin DIP microcontroller, packed with high performance, low power 8 bit Advanced RISC Architectur..
Rs130.00 Ex Tax: Rs110.17
DESCRIPTION:The ILN2003A are monolithic high-voltage, high-current Darlington transistor arrays. Each consists of seven n-p-n Darlington pairs tha..
Rs35.00 Ex Tax: Rs29.66
Rs78.00 Ex Tax: Rs66.10
Model: PZEM-004TA. Function 1. electrical parameter measurement function (voltage, current, active power). 2. The power button clear functio..
Rs950.00 Ex Tax: Rs805.08
Usb (Full speed 12 Mbits/s interface to host PC) real-time execution mplab ide compatible (copy included) built-in over-voltage/short circuit monitor ..
Rs1,190.00 Ex Tax: Rs1,008.47
Ra-02 is based on SX1278 wireless transparent transmission module (transceiver one), socket it can connect external antenna. Using advanced LoRa sprea..
Rs680.00 Ex Tax: Rs576.27
DESCRIPTION:Freezer Temperature Controller Fast Using1.1 Please check the wiring according to the user manual, caution don't over voltage or o..
Rs1,250.00 Ex Tax: Rs1,059.32
Simultaneous display of voltage and current and mAh data for easy viewing mAh mobile power output can be detected Save multiple sets of test data, pow..
Rs390.00 Ex Tax: Rs330.51
Heart Rate click carries Maxim's MAX30100 integrated pulse oximetry and heart-rate sensor. It's an optical sensor that derives its readings from ..
Rs650.00 Ex Tax: Rs550.85

subset: commoncrawl


text:
De'Vondre Perry
After showing potential during his sophomore year, De'Vondre Perry has enjoyed a breakthrough season in leading Poly to its first Baltimore City Division I championship. Perry moved to Baltimore two summers ago because his mother needed treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Copyright © 2019, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad


text:
Love stories of 9/11 show resilience in the face of grief
When almost 3,000 people were killed in the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, each of them left behind loved ones. But for those who lost a spouse or significant other, many tried to turn their grief toward something positive.
SEE MORE 9/11 SPECIAL COVERAGE: Health problems linger 14 years after 9/11
Jennifer Gardner Trulson's husband, Doug Gardner, was killed in the attacks. She wrote down her memories of him so her two young children could remember their dad.
"After Doug died, my first panicked thought was, 'How am I going to give him to the kids? How are they going to know their father when they're old enough to ask?'" Gardner Trulson said.
But she soon realized the memories could come together in a book. "Where You Left Me" follows Gardner Trulson's journey from grief to being able to love again.
Some who lost loved ones became advocates for policy changes after the tragedy.
See photos of people rallying together during and after the attacks:
See Gallery
Beverly Eckert lost her husband, Sean Rooney, in the World Trade Center collapse. In a piece for StoryCorps, she remembered their last phone call.
"We stopped talking about escape routes, and then we just began talking about all of the happiness we shared during our lives together," Eckert said.
SEE MORE 9/11 SPECIAL COVERAGE: How the New York City skyline has changed
She went on to be a spokesperson for victims' families, lobbying for changes, including transparency in the investigations following the attacks and improvements to building codes. Eckert died in 2009 in a plane crash near Buffalo, New York. She was 57.
Although many lost loved ones, at least one connection was formed because of 9/11.
On the day of the attacks, flights were barred from entering the United States, and many were sent to Gander, Newfoundland. There, two passengers met and fell in love.
"Everybody showed us love, friendship, hospitality, compassion, giving, it was unbelievable," Diane Marson said.
"Meanwhile, you two are just walking around flirting," said actress Sharon Wheatley, who played Diane in a musical about the Marsons' story. Nick and Diane Marson were married almost exactly a year later and even returned to Gander for the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 in 2011.
See more special coverage of the 14th anniversary of 9/11:
Meet Bretagne: The last surviving 'Ground Zero' dog
Children of 9/11 want to focus on the future
14 iconic images of 9/11


text:
(Editor's note: Welcome to the 67th installment in The Rap Sheet's "Story Behind the Story" series. Our guest this time is Kalyan Lahiri, a resident of Kolkata, India, who—"well on his way to becoming a senior citizen"—has traded in a long career in the banking world for the life of a crime-fiction author. His first novel, The Kolkata Conundrum, was released earlier this year by Crime Wave Press. Below, Lahiri recounts his enthusiastic but oft-vexing entry into the fiction-writing field.)
When I stopped the daily 9-to-5 grind a couple of years ago, I happily started reading all of those thrillers and other novels that had been waiting in my to-be-read pile. Quite enjoyable as they were, still I found myself falling back again and again on works by Agatha Christie and Dick Francis, Ian Fleming and Lee Child. But there are no new Agatha Christies or Ian Flemings, and both for Dick Francis (now Felix Francis) and Lee Child one has to wait two years for a new two-day read.
So, one day it struck me: why not create my own stories? Make up the characters and let them take me wherever they want to. Construct a crime (or two) and let the characters get involved in it. Well, at times the characters I had recruited seemed to really take on a life of their own … but then they'd run away, doing whatever it was they wanted. I found myself suddenly saddled with a few thousand words of trash. After a while I realized that I had to be more severe, bend those fictional players to my will, and get them to do what I wanted them to. Following that,
the hardest part was fashioning a believable plot.
I made my detective, Orko Deb, a young fellow, the son of a mechanic, just out of college and possessing no quirky traits, no baggage, no love interest. Just a straightforward, educated, athletic young man from an Indian village, eager to discover a big city—the West Bengal capital of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta)—and looking forward to the business of life. He has to have some support system, which I've given him in the form of his uncle, an ex-army commando, who's trying to run a commercial enterprise that provides private security guards—a company for which Orko Deb soon goes to work. I have also given Orko a lawyer friend for some basic legal help.
The decision to leave Orko free of any distinctive quirks, or some kind of traumatic past, was quite deliberate on my part. In the best tradition of Bengali detective fiction—and this is a genre that has its roots in the 19th
century—the detective is a straight-laced, regular guy. Bengali detective fiction was really brought to the forefront by the great filmmaker Satyajit
Ray. His protagonist, Prodosh C. Mitter (aka Feluda), originally created in 1965 as a figure in children's literature, is the quintessential Bengali sleuth, although he has had to share the stage with another equally famous fictional crime solver, Byomkesh Bakshi, created in 1932 by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. Both of those authors have passed away, however; Saradindu in 1970 and Ray in 1992. And no new fictional detective in Bengali literature has caught the reading public's fancy in the same way they did.
Both Feluda and Byomkesh were based in Kolkata, though the former enjoyed adventures all over India and even in other countries. Byomkesh's adventures were mostly in Kolkata. My man Orko Deb, too, has started his career in Kolkata. The city supplies the backdrop to The Kolkata Conundrum, and readers familiar with this place will recognize some of the well-known places and landmarks I mention. But the suburb where the main action in my story occurs is a fictitious one. It is, though, a generic sort of Kolkata suburb—there's nothing at all remarkable about it. Similarly, the rural areas I describe are fairly classic-style Bengal villages, located close to railway stations, but with fictitious names.
Friends who have read my novel, or at least excerpts from it, often ask me whether the names I chose for the various cast members were based on real people. They were not. For the most part they are typical Bengali names that just popped into my head during the writing. As to the naming of my detective, though, I must confess there was some agonizing involved. I discarded a number of options before finally settling on Orko Deb. I had to be comfortable with my final choice. After all, if things go well, I'll be employing his name, as well as the names of his close associates, in my fiction for some time to come.
(Right) Author Kalyan Lahiri
The most difficult part for me was the plotting of this first novel. After starting off rather lightheartedly and all aglow at having successfully created a plausible detective and placed him in a promising setting, I was stopped short by having to think up a worthy crime for Orko Deb to solve. It had to be a murder, of course, and furious walks in pursuit of inspiration eventually produced a solution to that quandary. But rather deep
into my storytelling, it occurred to me that there should be another crime involved, a subplot. The central murder I had planned takes place rather late in my yarn—at the end of the third chapter, around page 20—so the subplot, which I decided would be a jewelry store robbery, had to be introduced earlier as a hook for the reader.
This meant some of my first few thousand words had to be scrapped and the rest rewritten. Then came the matter of distributing the clues—who, what, when, where, how. All of the pertinent mysteries in both plot lines had to be raised and explored, and eventually, solved. This entailed a bit of back-and-forthing to get the whole thing just right. At one point I toyed with the idea of introducing a first-person narrator, like Hercule Poirot's Captain Hastings or Sherlock Holmes' Doctor Watson. Even my protagonist's role models, the Bengali detectives, had
other people narrating their adventures—Byomkesh his Ajit and Feluda his Topshe. In the end, though, I re-read a few Miss Marple and Jack Reacher stories, and decided to stick with my original third-person narrative and the sleuth's
straightforward point of view.
Finally, I conceived of no fewer than three different conclusions to The Kolkata Conundrum, discarding them all before settling on a fourth and then tying up loose ends.
The plot elements I've used did not come from any real-life experiences; they are completely imaginary. I have never met any mysterious glamorous woman in my life, such as the homicide victim in The Kolkata Conundrum. Nor do I have any first-hand knowledge of the workings of a private security agency or a police department. But the various banking details to be found in this book are obviously drawn from my own work experience. And the city of Kolkata has been my home all my life.
Once I had written "The End" on the last page, I was both eager to have the novel read and mightily apprehensive as to what the reaction might be. A couple of friends, who are avid readers, gave the work an initial
critique. Their reactions were rather mixed. They were generally encouraging, yet thought I still needed to do some more work. They thought the plot was fine, the characters were well drawn, the situations plausible, and the narrative smoothly executed—but … So I sweated a bit and then combed through all of my pages with "an editor's eye" (without really knowing what that entailed). The new draft I came up with was, I thought, not only tighter, but more consistent and polished.
Thereafter began the heart-breaking and soul-destroying process of sending my novel away to agents and publishers, only to collect rejection slips in return. One fine day, though, Tom Vater, a fellow author and the co-owner of Hong Kong-based Crime Wave Press, simply sent me a publishing contract. He wound up renaming my story The Kolkata Conundrum, gave it a beautifully evocative and mysterious cover, and launched it first into cyberspace and then print. Seeing my story out in the world at last gave me a new high, and encouraged me to begin the second Orko Deb adventure.
READ MORE: "Short, Sharp Interview: Kalyan Lahiri," by Paul D. Brazill.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
The Story Behind the Story:
"The Kolkata Conundrum," by Kalyan Lahiri
Posted by J. Kingston Pierce at 5:54 PM
Labels: Story Behind the Story
1 comment:
- Heidi Schussman said...
Well said Kaylan. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your process, especially about reeling in your characters. I've had the exact same experience... nice to hear someone else had the same problem, hehe.
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Fresh Lemon Ice Cream is like no other ice cream you've ever had, homemade or store bought ~ the zippy, tart, citrus flavor is unique and so refreshing because it's made with lots of fresh lemon juice. It's ready in under 30 minutes!
This ice cream qualifies for Minimal Monday status because it takes less than 30 minutes to make from start to finish (if you use an ice cream maker) and it has the simple, clean flavor of tangy fresh lemon. The secret is lots of fresh lemon juice and a tiny bit of pure lemon extract to really bring that flavor out.
Reader Rave ~
"My son and I just made this and we love it. I am not a lemon person but this turns out surprisingly not too lemony. We put vanilla bean extract instead of lemon extract. I asked my son to give the recipe a rating and he chose 5 stars. Kids don't lie lol. We will be keeping this recipe for future use. Thank you" ~ Has
I added 2 tiny drops of yellow food coloring, mostly for the sake of the photos. I hardly ever use food coloring, and when I do I use it very sparingly. In this case it just takes the 'edge' off the stark whiteness of the ice cream, which enhances my appreciation of its lemony-ness.
I love this partly because I'm a lemon addict, but also because it's such an unusual flavor, at least for ice cream. There are plenty of lemon sherberts and sorbets out there, but not too many actual ice creams. I almost added dark chocolate chunks to it, but held back in favor of the pure lemon. I think I made the right decision.
So far anyway I've been focusing on the simplest ice cream recipes, ones that involve no egg yolks, and no cooking. For this one I just whisk sugar into cold milk and cream, and then I poured the lemon juice in right before I added it to the machine. It curdled a bit but I figured it would work itself out as it churned, and I was right.
The best part of making your own ice cream is dipping the spoon in while it's churning. One taste and I knew I had a winner. The large amount of lemon juice gives it a kick that you don't expect from ice cream.
You can sprinkle on a little zest as a garnish, but again, I did that mostly for photographic purposes. I do think this lemon ice cream would be pretty spectacular with some homemade dark chocolate magic shell, or homemade bittersweet hot fudge sauce, though. Lemon and dark chocolate is a killer combination.
Which ice cream machine do I recommend?
I get asked all the time about what machine I use. I use and recommend Cuisinart. I've had my machine for years without any issues, I think because there are no fussy electronic parts to break down ~ it's a simple motor that turns the freezer bowl for churning the ice cream and it works quickly and perfectly every time.
- The machine I use, and it's the base model. It works great for ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sorbets, and makes all of them in about 2o minutes. Click Here or click on the image for more info.Fresh Lemon Ice Cream
Fresh Lemon Ice Cream is like no other ice cream you've ever had, homemade or store bought ~ the zippy, tart, citrus flavor is unique and so refreshing because it's made with lots of fresh lemon juice.
- 1 1/2 cups cold heavy cream
- 1/2 cup cold milk
- 1/2 cup sugar (I used superfine baking sugar, but you don't have to)
- 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (about 4 or 5 lemons)
- 1 tsp lemon extract
- 2 or 3 drops yellow food coloring (optional)
5.0.14*Recipe from [The View from Great Island|http://theviewfromgreatisland.com] All images and content are copyright protected. If you want to use this recipe, please link back to this page.
- Mix the cream, milk, and sugar together and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved.
- Add the food coloring if you are going to use it.
- Make sure your mixture and your lemon juice are cold, and when you are just about to add the cream to your ice cream maker, add the lemon juice and extract. Pour into the machine and process according to the instructions. On the basic Cuisinart machine it takes about 20 minutes.
- You can eat it soft right from the machine, or freeze it longer for a firmer scoop.
- After this ice cream has been in the freezer for several hours it will be quite hard. Bring it out and let it sit for a while to soften up before scooping.
- Recently I bought some quart sized cardboard ice cream containers, just like commercial ice cream comes in, and I love them. They're great if you want to share your ice cream, or use it as a host/hostess gift. And if you have anyone in your house who likes to eat ice cream right out of the carton while they watch tv, letting it get all drippy and disgusting, and then put it back in the freezer, you might want to consider reserving a carton just for yourself.


text:
Speaking of the IGI, the Illustrators Ireland website has had a very nice makeover courtesy of our web officer Stephen Synnott.
Great job Stephen.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Illustrators Ireland's Website Makeover
Labels: IGI, illustration, Irish Illustration
1 comment:
- robert said...
Great Post.. thanks for posting.Web design Orlando
- April 17, 2012 at 12:18 AM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Monday, September 9, 2013, was the first day of school for the children of Fort Lee, New Jersey, as it was for many throughout "the Garden State." The day dawned clear and bright in this tired little city of 35,000, across the Hudson River from the northern reaches of Manhattan, as the roughly 30 tollbooths that span the western entrances to the George Washington Bridge awaited the morning rush hour. Of the two levels for the toll plaza for the world's busiest bridge, which channels an average of 37,000 cars and trucks from New Jersey to New York every morning, the upper one has nine tollbooths for cars coming in from the clogged New Jersey Turnpike. But at the plaza's southern end, the last three booths have long been cordoned off with traffic cones so that local drivers can, in essence, cut to the front of the line.
But that morning, as the world now knows, something strange happened at the Fort Lee tolls. Sometime before six o'clock, the beginning of rush hour, a uniformed officer picked up the orange traffic cones protecting the Fort Lee booths and lined them up along a single lane, reducing the booths available to local drivers from three to one. The Fort Lee cars were forced into a single-lane bottleneck, causing traffic to back up into the city's downtown streets. The road leading into the plaza, Park Avenue, became a sea of idling cars, and the snarl soon spread to Bruce Reynolds Boulevard, the street behind. The furious blare of car horns could be heard for blocks.
For two hours the traffic steadily built, until dozens of downtown blocks in this middle-class city of high-rises and modest older houses were jammed with honking cars and their angry drivers. By 8:30 much of downtown Fort Lee was gridlocked, its streets impassable not only for vehicles seeking to cross the bridge but for just about anyone who needed to drive anywhere. School buses couldn't move, nor could ambulances; an emergency crew was forced to leap from its vehicle and run to its destination.
Traffic jams are not uncommon in Fort Lee, so it took a while for city officials to realize this one was exponentially worse than usual. Police chief Keith Bendul was among the first to figure out its cause: the two walled-off tollbooth lanes. Around nine Bendul began calling staffers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that oversees the bridge's operations, demanding to know why the lanes had been closed with no warning. No one seemed to know. Bendul was told to have Fort Lee's mayor, Mark Sokolich, call the Port Authority's number-two man, Bill Baroni. Sokolich called and left a message. Baroni apparently didn't call back.
By 11:30, after more than five hours of gridlock, the streets of Fort Lee were finally passable. But angry commuters and city officials pelted the Port Authority with calls and e-mails all that day. The only explanation anyone received was a vague one: The bridge, some were told, was the subject of an ongoing "traffic study." How long it would last, no one could say. And, sure enough, the next morning two of the Fort Lee lanes were again closed off, and once again traffic inundated the city.
Again Mayor Sokolich appealed for help.
"Presently we have four [sic] very busy traffic lanes merging into only one toll booth," Sokolich texted a Port Authority executive. "The bigger problem is getting kids to school. Help please. It's maddening."
For the moment, neither Sokolich nor any of the hundreds of drivers stranded in Fort Lee that morning were giving much thought to New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie's re-election campaign against Democrat Barbara Buono, much less to the fact that Sokolich, a Democrat, had declined the governor's efforts to gain his endorsement. To the commuters, this was simply the Traffic Jam from Hell. They would have felt far differently had they been able to follow the trail of Mayor Sokolich's text to the Port Authority, which was forwarded to an executive there, 52-year-old David Wildstein. Wildstein, a political appointee of Christie's, who has known the governor since boyhood, had ordered the lane closings over the warnings of the bridge's supervisors. Wildstein, in turn, forwarded Sokolich's concerns about Fort Lee schoolchildren to Bridget Anne Kelly, deputy chief of staff in Governor Christie's office in Trenton, the state capital. Kelly's office was directly across from the governor's, about 50 feet away.
"Is it wrong that I am smiling?" Kelly texted in response.
"No," Wildstein replied.
"I feel badly about the kids," she texted. "I guess."
"They are the children of Buono voters," Wildstein texted.
Thus began one of the strangest political scandals in memory, one that, should proof be found of Governor Christie's direct involvement in the lane closings, may go down as the only traffic jam in American history to derail a leading contender for the White House. Even if Christie is eventually cleared, his presidential prospects have sustained considerable damage. Until the scandal broke, in January, he had been a front-runner for the Republican nomination, a loud, pushy political puncher who had shown an ability to draw Democratic and independent voters, even as he did battle with entrenched special interests such as the powerful public-sector unions. Now, however, a scandal that began with a single set of orange parking cones has sapped much of the momentum from his presidential ambitions, prompting many big-ticket Republican donors to have serious doubts.
"The accepted wisdom is he's cooked," says Gerald Krovatin, a prominent Newark defense attorney and Christie critic, who is married to the writer Anna Quindlen. "I don't agree with that. There's enough of a window between now and the point of critical mass for the 2016 campaign that he can certainly try to come back, and I think he's pedaling his bicycle as fast as he can now, and he's got a great platform [as chairman of] the Republican Governors Association to do it. Me, I wonder if this whole thing resonates nationally as much as it does in New Jersey. But if there are indictments returned, and I'm feeling there will be, that's going to prolong the whole story and the agony for Christie. And that's going to create an interesting scenario. When his people get that bull's-eye on their back, how deep will their loyalty go? That's the whole aspect that's yet to play out."
The story of the bridge scandal is far from over. The U.S. attorney in Newark, Paul Fishman, is investigating, as are various other jurisdictions and state legislative committees. Just about everyone involved has lawyered up, meaning that only the odd trickle of new information has eddied into public view in recent months. By far the most thorough review to date is tainted, because it was led by a law firm hired by Christie. This report, sometimes called "the Mastro Report" after its lead author, Randy Mastro, has been widely derided as a whitewash—because, without interviewing Kelly or Wildstein, among others, it absolved Christie, to no one's surprise. It nevertheless provides the viewpoints of several participants who have not spoken publicly elsewhere. Still more information can be found in the thousands of e-mails, texts, and phone logs that have been provided by officials from the governor's office, the Port Authority, the city of Fort Lee, and others roped into the scandal.
The burning question is what Christie knew and when he knew it. He has vehemently denied organizing the stunt or even knowing about it until four months after it occurred. "What I've seen today for the first time is unacceptable," he said then in a statement.
But the real head-scratcher is why anyone would have staged such a moronic, morally reprehensible scheme—one that put an entire city at risk—in the first place.
Bully Pulpit
In American politics, mud tends to stick to an elected official when it underscores something we already sense. "I am not a bully," Christie proclaimed at a press conference in January, when the bridge scandal broke in the press. But the scandal has clung to him precisely because it reinforces his reputation as a bully, an image he has struggled with throughout his political career, from the sharp-elbowed deals he has struck as governor all the way back to his beginnings 20 years ago as a county commissioner in suburban Morris County, 20 miles west of Manhattan. Christie is Jersey to his bones, glib, aggressive, and combative, seemingly always on the lookout for someone to body-slam. Even former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, whom Christie claims as his political mentor, told The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza in April, "He doesn't always try to persuade you with reason. He makes you feel that your life's going to be very unhappy if you don't do what he says."
It isn't all that clear that Christie would have been unhappy with this reputation before the scandal. In fact, he virtually cultivated it, especially with his YouTube appearances. One popular video from last year (more than 150,000 views to date) shows Christie scolding a teacher, goading him to come onstage. "You want to come up here? Come up here." Then, after a dressing-down in which the teacher does not have a microphone, Christie kicks him out of the town-hall meeting, to hoots and cheers. In another video he gets into a shouting match with a former navy SEAL and calls him an "idiot."
Plenty of people in New Jersey delight in such aggressive behavior. It's part of the culture—think Frank Sinatra, Tony Soprano, and the cast of Jersey Shore. But it can get scary when the governor is that way, because he really can make your life very unhappy, as Kean so aptly put it. The New Jersey governorship is one of the most powerful in the nation. It is the only state office (besides lieutenant governor) on which the whole state votes; the governor appoints just about everyone else, such as the state treasurer and attorney general.
Stories abound about those who have displeased the governor. In 2011, Christie took issue with state senator Richard Codey, who Christie claimed had been difficult about a nominee for state education commissioner. Codey, a former governor, was told he would no longer receive his state-trooper escort, a courtesy granted to all former governors; that same day, Codey's cousin was fired from the Port Authority.
Later that year, a Rutgers professor who was selected to decide how the state's legislative districts would be re-drawn ran afoul of Christie when he chose the plan backed by Democrats. Christie promptly cut $169,000 for two programs at the professor's institute.
In 2010, Hoboken mayor Dawn Zimmer was reviewing a $1.1 billion redevelopment proposed by the Rockefeller Group, which was represented by the law firm of David Samson, soon-to-be chairman of the Port Authority. Zimmer eventually concluded, after a study funded by the Port Authority, that the project could not move forward. As this unfolded, Christie was doling out Hurricane Sandy aid, of which Zimmer had requested $100 million for flood prevention. Zimmer says that two Christie officials, including Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno, told her that if she did not approve and fast-track the Rockefeller Group's proposal Hoboken wouldn't receive all of the flood-protection money requested. (Christie and Guadagno have denied the allegations.)
To understand the bridge scandal, it helps to understand the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the byzantine bi-state agency where much of it played out. The Port Authority operates not only the George Washington Bridge but many key transportation assets in the New York area, from the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels to La Guardia, John F. Kennedy, and Newark Liberty airports to One World Trade Center, which it has rebuilt. That's not to mention the largest containerport on the Eastern Seaboard, bus terminals, the PATH trains that run beneath the Hudson River, and a 1,600-person police force to patrol it all.
Though headquartered on Park Avenue South, in Manhattan, the Port Authority is in fact jointly controlled by the states of New York and New Jersey, though the Garden State has long been treated as the junior partner. For 75 years, from its founding, in 1921, until the mid-1990s, that was rarely a problem; run by a 12-member commission, with 6 commissioners selected by each state, the agency was long a model of urban-planning professionalism, completing massive projects such as the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge while fending off periodic attempts at political meddling by various New York and New Jersey governors. That was undone in 1995, when New York's governor, George Pataki, nominated one of his backers, an investment banker from Queens with virtually no managerial experience, as the Port Authority's executive director, its top management position. Christie Whitman, the New Jersey governor at the time, allowed this but insisted she get to select the number-two person; this power-sharing arrangement, with New York choosing the executive director and New Jersey his number two, became permanent.
By opening the door to patronage appointments the 1995 deal forever changed the Port Authority's culture. Political appointees, once a rarity in the agency's hallways, became commonplace. New York appointees owe their loyalty to New York politicians, New Jersey appointees to theirs, which has created a bureaucracy divided down the middle and more or less constantly at war.
"These political appointees, they've changed the culture of the place," says Dave Gallagher, a 33-year Port Authority veteran who is president of the Port Authority Retirees Association. "It's become a culture of fear, a fear of retribution—they're afraid to do anything other than what the political appointees direct them to do, because that's where the power is. All that dysfunction seems generated by the New York versus New Jersey power struggle. That defines the place."
Christie took patronage appointments to a new level. Critics count upwards of 50 of his people now in place. This little army of loyalists has helped the governor deepen his influence at the Port Authority during a period in which, in a pair of hotly debated moves, he has managed to pry nearly $2 billion out of the agency—money that otherwise would have come from New Jersey taxpayers—for use in upgrading his state's battered highways. First, Christie canceled a long-planned rail tunnel beneath the Hudson, something most experts say the state badly needs. That saved about $1.8 billion. But then, in what has been portrayed alternately as a crass theft and a bravura bit of political maneuvering, he somehow persuaded the agency's commissioners to issue $1 billion in bonds to refurbish a highway for which they historically have had no responsibility: the Pulaski Skyway, the rickety 82-year-old span linking Newark to the Holland Tunnel.
It's in this political context that David Wildstein can best be understood. Wildstein has been described as Christie's enforcer at the Port Authority, watchful, secretive, and intensely loyal, a onetime political blogger who forever pelted the governor's aides with out-of-left-field ideas. "If you look at coverage of David, he is passed off as some sort of shady character, but to understand David you really have to look at him more fully," says Alex Isenstadt, a reporter at Politico who got his start working for Wildstein. "He is really a brilliant guy, the ultimate political insider. David lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps New Jersey politics, he really does. He knows where all the bodies are buried, all the history, in a state that is brutally political, probably more than any other state. The irony, I guess, is that he now finds himself at the middle of exactly the kind of tabloid political scandal he would have loved to cover himself."
A year ahead of Christie at Livingston High, Wildstein was the statistician on Christie's baseball team, though it seems he and Christie were in those days acquaintances at best. Until 2010, when he was named to fill the new and vaguely defined position of director of interstate capital projects, at the Port Authority, Wildstein was largely known only as an executive at his family's company, Apache Mills, one of the country's largest makers of floor mats. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, he became the Port Authority's second-ranking New Jersey appointee. His hiring announcement disclosed a secret that had been debated in New Jersey political circles for years: Wildstein turned out to be "Wally Edge," a political blogger whose gossipy scoops—such as one that revealed married governor Jim McGreevey's involvement with an Israeli male aide—were widely read.
Wildstein began moonlighting as "Wally Edge" in 2000, at PoliticsNJ.com (now PolitickerNJ.com), a Web site he founded and later sold to a young New Jersey real-estate heir named Jared Kushner (best known today for his marriage to Ivanka Trump and his ownership of The New York Observer). Wildstein is "a big guy," Alex Isenstadt recalls, "always lumbering around, brilliant but extremely disorganized, one of those people you call and you get his voice mail and it's full. David was pretty intense—he definitely comes across as someone you don't want to cross."
Wildstein's appointment at the Port Authority went largely unnoticed until a much-discussed 2012 article appeared in the Bergen Record. In it, reporter Shawn Boburg portrayed Wildstein as Christie's "eyes and ears" at the agency, a quiet, doughy number cruncher ever on the lookout for Christie's interests. "He became the watcher of the entire agency," one source told Boburg. "What he was watching for was strict adherence to the Christie agenda." It's a measure of the fear and secrecy surrounding Wildstein's role that, in all the dozens and dozens of articles written about him in the last six months, I didn't find a single on-the-record quote from anyone who worked with him. The closest anyone came was one in The New Yorker, which quoted an unnamed Port Authority official calling Wildstein "a cancer."
Whatever his precise duties at the agency, there is one task Wildstein undertook for the governor that is now clearly understood: pitching in on the effort to gather endorsements for Christie's 2013 re-election campaign. Wildstein's role involved Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich, a man whom he would come to term the "little Serbian."
On November 26, 2012, Christie announced he would seek a second term as governor. The election was a full year away, in November 2013, and such was his popularity at the time that few observers believed he would be seriously challenged, as in fact he wasn't. His opponent, Barbara Buono, was a little-known state legislator who was widely viewed as a sacrificial lamb. From the beginning the Christie campaign focused on how big his win would be, knowing that a landslide would buoy the governor's chances for the White House in 2016. Crucial to these efforts was building an image of "crossover appeal," that is, the perception that Christie could draw Democratic voters as well as the Republican base. For this effort, the campaign compiled a list of Democratic legislators and mayors it felt could be persuaded to endorse him. Fifty-year-old attorney Mark Sokolich—he is actually Croatian, not Serbian—was on the list.
Born and raised in Fort Lee, Sokolich is an easygoing type with little obvious political ambition; the managing partner of a law firm he founded in 1998, he once told a local newspaper he was interested mainly in building Little League fields. The Christie campaign's efforts to woo him are detailed in testimony before a state investigating committee, and in an interview Sokolich, who has avoided the press in recent months, gave the Bergen Record. He traces Christie's charm offensive to October 2012, when two cousins, visiting from Croatia, asked to visit the 9/11 Memorial. Christie's top man at the Port Authority, Wildstein's boss, Bill Baroni, had urged Sokolich to call if he ever needed a favor, so he did, and soon after the mayor and his cousins were given a tour—by none other than David Wildstein. "I've been told to be nice to you," Wildstein kept saying during the 20-minute tour, Sokolich recalled. "If he said it once, he said it 25 times." Sokolich found Wildstein's comment to be a little odd at the time.
The courtship was then taken up by a 22-year-old campaign aide named Matt Mowers. In the months after the mayor's Ground Zero tour, Mowers met with Sokolich at least three times to chat. It was a soft sell by New Jersey standards. Mowers would mention the names of other Democratic figures who were openly considering endorsing the governor. "He would say, 'What are your thoughts?' " Sokolich recalled. "He would say, 'What do you think?' Or he would say, 'Is this something you would consider?' "
Sokolich was in a delicate position. The Christie administration had been good to Fort Lee, the governor himself instructing the Port Authority to give the city a $162,000 grant for shuttle buses in early 2012. And Sokolich needed more, chiefly state approval for new traffic patterns around a massive, $1 billion luxury housing and retail complex under construction on several lots beside the George Washington Bridge. And so, not wanting to alienate the governor's office, Sokolich stalled. Mowers kept at him, however. Finally, after a dinner on March 26, Sokolich said he just couldn't do it. His law firm counted several neighboring Democratic towns among its municipal clients. Endorsing Christie, he said, would endanger that business. Mowers said he understood. Afterward, he texted another Christie staffer that Sokolich "is going to be a no. It's a shame too—I really like the guy."
Wheel Estate
Perhaps, among the 50 states, only California is as preoccupied with traffic as New Jersey is. Even with the help of online traffic analysis and updates, the routes to and from Manhattan and points east are unpredictable; one bad decision can easily lead to an hour or more mired in traffic. As a longtime New Jersey resident, I can claim a personal worst of four hours and 20 minutes to make it from Wall Street through the Holland Tunnel to my home, barely 20 miles west. I have endured dinner parties where traffic debates lasted half the evening. As comedian Joe Piscopo tells it, when you introduce yourself to a fellow New Jerseyan he'll ask, "Which exit?"
David Wildstein, it appears, was even more interested in traffic than the average New Jerseyan, especially where it concerned the George Washington Bridge. He had long taken an interest in the decision to wall off three of its tollbooths for Fort Lee drivers. Two bridge supervisors later testified before a state investigating committee that Wildstein had inquired about its genesis shortly after joining the Port Authority; told it was the result of a dimly remembered agreement with a Fort Lee mayor some 30 years ago, Wildstein remarked he "wasn't crazy about the favoritism" shown Fort Lee drivers, especially since it meant fewer lanes available to drivers from the rest of the state. Wildstein made a similar comment to one of Governor Christie's staffers, terming the Fort Lee lanes "a political deal."
At some point, apparently last spring—exactly when no one has yet pinpointed—Wildstein hatched the idea to re-align the Fort Lee tollbooths, supposedly to strike back at Mayor Sokolich. Upon doing so, he sought approval for the scheme from people in the Christie administration: how many and who these people were remain in question. So far only two have been identified: Bill Stepien, the 36-year-old wunderkind who ran both of Christie's gubernatorial campaigns, and the woman whom many consider Stepien's protégée, 41-year-old Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie's deputy chief of staff.
Of the two, Stepien was by far the better known and the more important to Christie. Lean, handsome, and intense, Stepien was an up-and-comer in national political circles, a key member of John McCain's presidential campaign team in 2008, an architect of Christie's election victories in 2009 and 2013, and the man who came up with the idea of the feisty town meetings where Christie became a YouTube sensation. "The establishment of Christie as a national figure, a lot of that has to do with Bill Stepien and the tremendous job he did there," says Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist who came to know Stepien during McCain's campaign. "Bill is one of the top Republican campaign operatives out there, certainly in his age bracket. He was someone who obviously was on a track to manage his first presidential campaign."
Stepien was a hot property almost from the moment he graduated from Rutgers University, in 2000. His first real political job, working for Congressman Bob Franks's 2000 Senate campaign, against Jon Corzine, was pivotal to his rise. Franks narrowly lost, but in the process Stepien attracted the notice of a young Hamilton Township attorney named William E. "Bill" Baroni—the same Bill Baroni who, as Christie's top appointee at the Port Authority, has now been caught up in the bridge scandal. Stepien would serve as manager of Baroni's successful 2003 long-shot campaign for the state legislature, where Baroni worked until Christie appointed him to the Port Authority.
In running Christie's first campaign for the governorship, Stepien met Bridget Kelly, a hardworking volunteer manning the phones in Bergen County. Then a pert 37-year-old who wore her blond hair in a pageboy, Kelly had majored in political science at Mount St. Mary's University, in Maryland, before returning home to Bergen County, where she married a local golf pro, Joseph Kelly. (He's now the pro at the tony Mendham Golf & Tennis Club, where the Christies are members.) A mother of four—the New Jersey papers inevitably call her a "soccer mom"—Kelly sat near the bottom of the political food chain, but she worked long hours for a string of Republican candidates, including Christie. Co-workers recall her lugging her kids to campaign meetings.
By all accounts, Kelly impressed Stepien, who, after Christie's election, sponsored her to join him as one of the governor's aides, handling relations with any number of legislators in Trenton. Three years later, in April 2013, Stepien resigned his position as deputy chief of staff for legislative and governmental affairs in order to run Christie's re-election campaign, and Kelly took his place. Her responsibilities, which included coordinating relations with elected officials around the state, placed her at Christie's side in scores of news photographs. Her job performance has since drawn sharply differing reviews. One of her top staffers, Christina Genovese Renna, painted a critical portrait of her boss in testimony before a legislative committee in May. Renna described Kelly as erratic and unstable, saying she was "enormously overwhelmed and enormously stressed with day-to-day life."
But that wasn't the Bridget Kelly many in Trenton say they knew. When the scandal broke, in January, the word most often used to describe her was "professional." What many remember most clearly about her was her ever present string of pearls, the two or three smartphones she was forever juggling, and, most of all, her close relationship with Stepien. The two are invariably described as being "joined at the hip," an observation that took on new meaning in March when the Mastro Report alleged they had engaged in a "personal" relationship.
According to press reports, Kelly abruptly left her husband in late 2010, not long after joining the Christie administration, and the couple later divorced. Without any hint of its sourcing, the Mastro Report says Kelly and Stepien became "personally involved" three years later. The report adds that the relationship ended, supposedly at Stepien's behest, around the time Kelly began speaking to David Wildstein about the bridge-realignment scheme. Renna claimed that Kelly had told her at the time that she and Stepien were no longer speaking. The Mastro Report's subtle implication is that Kelly had been emotionally overwrought.
Kelly's attorney, Michael Critchley Sr., declined to comment for this article, but in May he issued a blistering statement criticizing Christina Renna's characterization. "Ms. Renna's attempt to pile on and portray Ms. Kelly as insecure, erratic, and paranoid is completely at odds with Ms. Kelly's twenty-year record serving in state government," Critchley said. "Anyone who thinks they are going to rewrite history and make Ms. Kelly a scapegoat is gravely mistaken."
Whatever the status of Stepien and Kelly's relationship last summer, it was then that both were approached by David Wildstein, who had a strange idea. About the George Washington Bridge.
Wildstein met with several supervisors in August and asked whether walling off the three Fort Lee lanes was causing delays for the majority of drivers approaching the bridge from the New Jersey Turnpike. He proposed they run a test to find out, by reducing the lanes available to Fort Lee drivers. The bridge's general manager, Robert Durando, later testified that he warned Wildstein of "severe traffic consequences" in Fort Lee if they did so. According to Durando, Wildstein replied, "That's why you run a test."
By that point, Wildstein had begun an effort to get approval from Governor Christie's people for the scheme. The first person Wildstein approached appears to have been Stepien. According to the Mastro Report, Stepien later told the governor that Wildstein had brought the idea to him and he had dismissed it, terming it one of the "fifty crazy ideas a week" Wildstein might mention. The report says Stepien suggested to Wildstein that he take the idea to "Trenton," meaning to someone in the governor's office, because Stepien himself no longer worked there. While Stepien would later be c.c.'d on a number of Wildstein's e-mails during the traffic jams, the Mastro Report concludes that he wasn't a party to the scheme.
That's certainly what Stepien's friends believe. "Part of being a campaign manager for an A-list American politician is it's your job to clear the plates. I mean, there's all manner of stupidity you're dealing with on an hourly basis," says Steve Schmidt.
The second person Wildstein is known to have approached was Bridget Kelly. Their conversations about the matter date at least to August 12, 2013, four weeks before the traffic jams began. That afternoon, after an e-mail exchange on another topic, Kelly asked Wildstein to call her. Whether they discussed Fort Lee isn't known. But 90 minutes later Kelly telephoned Matt Mowers, the campaign aide who had wooed Mayor Sokolich, reaching him at a diner in Jersey City. Kelly asked whether Sokolich would endorse the governor. Mowers said he wouldn't. According to the Mastro Report, Kelly said that was all she needed to know.
It was early the next morning, at 7:34, that Kelly sent Wildstein the notorious e-mail that is widely believed to be the go-ahead for Wildstein to put his idea into practice:
"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."
Wildstein replied, "Got it."
On Friday, September 6, Wildstein told bridge supervisors that the "traffic study" would begin Monday morning, September 9. E-mails and text traffic among the supervisors suggest that none had any clue about the "study" 's political motivation. One supervisor wondered "what is driving" this, adding, "A single toll lane operation invites potential disaster. . . . Very confused." When another supervisor asked Wildstein whether they should alert the New York side of the Port Authority to their plans, Wildstein replied, "Don't worry about that. We will take care of that."
Their e-mails and texts suggest that Wildstein and Kelly seemed all but intoxicated by the power they were poised to wield. At one point, Wildstein e-mailed Kelly the photo of a Port Authority chaplain named Mendy Carlebach—actually a rabbi—posing with the U.S. Speaker of the House, John Boehner. For reasons that remain unclear, Wildstein told Kelly the rabbi "has officially pissed me off."
"We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?" Kelly replied.
"Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed," Wildstein responded.
"Perfect," Kelly responded.
Bridge over Troubled Waters
On Monday morning, as traffic piled up in downtown Fort Lee, Wildstein toured the area with a Port Authority police lieutenant named Thomas "Chip" Michaels. By that afternoon, Port Authority staffers were inundated with complaints from commuters and Fort Lee officials, especially from police chief Bendul, who expressed "grave concerns" about the ability of ambulances and police cars to respond to emergencies if the "traffic study" continued further into the week. An ambulance crew had been late to respond to a call involving a 91-year-old woman, who subsequently died. (Her daughter later told reporters the delay hadn't caused or hastened the woman's death.) Police were also challenged in responding to a call involving a missing four-year-old, who was later found unharmed.
Monday afternoon Wildstein informed the bridge supervisors that the "traffic study" would continue on Tuesday. Bridget Kelly, meanwhile, checked with two campaign aides to see if they had heard anything from Sokolich; they hadn't. The mayor and his people continued to bombard the Port Authority with plaintive calls, to no avail.
Tuesday morning Fort Lee was again gridlocked; Wednesday brought more of the same—more traffic, more complaints, and a yawning silence from the Port Authority.
That evening, September 11, was the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Wildstein joined Governor Christie and others for a ceremony at the site of the fallen towers. Much later, Wildstein would tell the governor's press secretary, Michael Drewniak, that he had told Christie about the bridge realignment that night; Christie says he doesn't recall anything other than chitchat.
Thursday morning, Fort Lee was once again a parking lot of honking, angry commuters. For Wildstein and Kelly, everything was going swimmingly: Mayor Sokolich was under siege, and, best of all, no one outside Fort Lee had noticed. Then somebody noticed. That afternoon John Cichowski, a reporter from the Bergen Record, the newspaper that covers much of northern New Jersey, e-mailed a Port Authority spokesman. Cichowski, who writes a regular column on New Jersey traffic conditions, had been pelted with reader complaints about the bridge backups most of the week. He had gotten through to Mayor Sokolich, who had wondered openly whether this was somehow politically motivated.
When Scott Rechler, a New York appointee who served as one of the Port Authority's vice-chairmen, read a summary of press reports that included Cichowski's inquiry, he was startled. While junior staffers on the New York side knew of the jams, this was by all accounts the first that senior officials had heard of them. Rechler, who suspected Christie's people were behind the lane closings, quickly forwarded it to his boss, executive director Patrick J. Foye, adding, "We need to get to the bottom of this." A Cuomo appointee, previously a Wall Street takeover attorney, Foye too smelled a rat. "Agreed," he responded three minutes later. "Very troubling."
At 6:01 the next morning Foye e-mailed the bridge's general manager, Robert Dorando, asking to talk; Dorando relayed the e-mail to Wildstein. Dorando then gave Foye a rundown of the week's happenings on the New Jersey side. Foye asked if Dorando had been instructed not to tell him of the closures; Dorando admitted he had. Foye fired off a note to Scott Rechler saying he found the talk "very troubling."
An hour later, at 7:44, Foye ordered the Jersey-side lanes reopened.
His e-mail doing so, c.c.'d to a dozen Port Authority officials, was the work of a lawyer fully aware that the week's events would soon be investigated. It was also a shot directly across Wildstein's and Kelly's bows. "I am appalled," Foye wrote, "by the lack of process, failure to inform our customers and Fort Lee, and most of all by the dangers created to the public interest, so I am reversing this decision now effective as soon as (I am told) it is safe to do so today." Calling the decision to shut down the lanes not only "hasty and ill-advised" but a clear violation of "federal laws and the laws of both states," Foye promised to "get to the bottom of this abusive decision which violates everything this agency stands for," adding that he intended "to learn how [our] process was wrongfully subverted and the public interest damaged to say nothing of the credibility of this agency."
At 8:04, 20 minutes after Foye's e-mail, the two walled-off Fort Lee approaches were reopened. The traffic, already snarled for miles, began to ease. Foye then fired off an e-mail to Bill Baroni, asking how he proposed to notify the public that order was being restored. Baroni swiftly went into damage-control mode. "Pat," he e-mailed Foye, "we need to discuss [this] prior to any communications."
"Bill," Foye responded, "we are going to fix this fiasco."
"I am on my way to office to discuss," Baroni wrote back. "There can be no public discourse."
"Bill that's precisely the problem," Foye replied. "There has been no public discourse on this."
Wildstein relayed the news to Bridget Kelly just before noon. "The New York side gave Fort Lee back all three lanes this morning," he wrote. "We are appropriately going nuts." He then made a passing reference to the Port Authority's chairman, a New Jersey appointee named David Samson, saying, "Samson helping us to retaliate," though what if any retaliation ensued is unclear. Kelly asked, "What??"
"Yes," Wildstein replied. "Unreal."
The Port Authority issued a statement that afternoon saying the traffic snarl had been the product of a study. Monday, however, brought the first signs that the story wasn't going away. Out of the blue, Ted Mann, a reporter from The Wall Street Journal, called a Port Authority spokesman, saying he was considering a story on the closings. The next day, Tuesday, September 17, another Journal reporter, Heather Haddon, called Christie's press secretary, seeking comment. It was clear from the tone of both calls that the story would explore whether the closings had been politically motivated. In the Christie camp there was suspicion Pat Foye had alerted the Journal. "I am told [Foye] leaked to the W.S.J. his story about Fort Lee issues," Samson e-mailed Rechler. (Rechler responded that neither he nor Baroni thought so.)
When the Journal article ran, on Wednesday morning, there were sighs of relief among Christie's people. The piece didn't link the governor's office to the traffic jams, nor did any of the other articles that trickled out in the following days. It all might have ended there, except for a 79-year-old grandmother named Loretta Weinberg.
The press has gleefully portrayed state senator Loretta Weinberg, of Teaneck, northwest of Fort Lee, as the elderly grandmother she is, but Weinberg is also a seasoned politician, having served as Jon Corzine's running mate when Christie defeated him, in 2009. During a previous tangle with her Christie had asked reporters, "Can you guys please take the bat out on her for once?"
After reading the Bergen Record's first article, Weinberg sensed something political afoot. The next week she spoke to a Port Authority commissioner she knew, who promised to look into things; when she heard nothing back, she began to get irked. Determined to get answers, Weinberg appeared at an October 6 public meeting of the Port Authority's governance-and-ethics subcommittee. At one point, she rose and asked about the traffic jams and why no one at the agency appeared to be investigating. Among those who dismissed her concerns that evening was Bill Baroni.
"I've attributed my investigative experience to the fact that I raised adolescents," Weinberg says, only half-jokingly. "The moment one of my kids isn't telling the truth, I know. If I come home late and I ask the kids, 'Did you have a party here?,' and they say, 'No, what party?,' I know when they are lying. The moment I heard Bill Baroni, my antenna immediately came out. I knew immediately he was hiding something. I knew immediately something wasn't right. Just his body language, the look on his face when I asked about it. . . . I knew that there was a cover-up going on the minute I heard him open his mouth."
Weinberg began attending the Port Authority commissioners' monthly meetings, each time asking about the traffic jams. At the November meeting, she took along Assemblyman John Wisniewski of Sayreville, chairman of the state assembly transportation committee. Wisniewski too smelled a rat, and he, unlike Weinberg, had subpoena power. He summoned Bill Baroni before his committee later that month. Baroni belligerently defended the "traffic study."
"Every one of you on this committee has people in your communities who sit in longer traffic every day because of the special lanes for Fort Lee," Baroni said. At one point he turned to Wisniewski. "Forty-two of your neighbors in Sayreville, they're waiting in longer lines," Baroni said. "Maybe that's O.K. When I was in the senate, I wouldn't have gone back to my constituents and said that was fair."
It was a display of breathtaking arrogance, and a turning point in the scandal. Afterward, Wisniewski angrily issued subpoenas to almost everyone involved, even as Christie began waving away questions about the jams, saying Weinberg and Wisniewski were "obsessed."
The cover stories began to unravel in December. Pat Foye went before Wisniewski's committee and said he hadn't been aware of any traffic study. Wildstein resigned, urged on by Christie's press secretary. The final straw came at Christmas, when Wisniewski took delivery of thousands of pages of subpoened e-mails and texts, including Bridget Kelly's now infamous e-mail: "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee." Kelly's assistant, Christina Renna, later testified that Kelly had asked her to delete a particularly incriminating e-mail.
In January the scandal broke wide, washing onto front pages across the country. Baroni and Kelly resigned. Bill Stepien, who was poised to be named chairman of the New Jersey Republican Party, withdrew his name from consideration. Christie, forced onto the defensive, gave an exhaustive press conference, repeatedly proclaiming, "I'm sorry," blaming everything on Wildstein and Kelly and saying he was "heartbroken" they had lied to him about their involvement. But Wildstein, who has reportedly met with federal investigators, claims he has a smoking-gun e-mail that shows the lane closures were ordered by the Christie administration and that Christie knew of the situation while they were closed. And Kelly's lawyer is said to be meeting with federal investigators.
"My initial reaction to this whole thing, very early on, was that it was just a bunch of frat boys gone crazy, you know, sitting in their office one night, one beer too many, saying, 'Let's get even with this mayor guy,' " Loretta Weinberg says today. She, like many in New Jersey, has struggled to understand the motivations behind the scandal. "Here's what I believe," she tells me. "Why would anyone think that creating gridlock in Fort Lee is going to punish a mayor, unless it's just to show we are so powerful we can interfere with your life anytime we want? That's why they did it, just to show their power. That's incredible. What's going to happen next? They're gonna disagree with the mayor of Newark and close down a runway at Newark Airport? That's the atmosphere this governor has created. That's what I believe, and I have seen nothing to dissuade me from that belief."
In the meantime, handicapping the scandal's outcome has become a staple of dinner parties and political gatherings across New Jersey. "It certainly sounds right that this was Wildstein's idea," says Gerald Krovatin, the Newark attorney. "On the other hand, given what we've learned about Wildstein's personality, it's inconceivable that he did this without making sure he was getting brownie points and credit for this directly from the governor. I'm not ready to say it didn't go further than that. This is a governor who micro-manages events and people, particularly on the political side. He can say all he wants about this being just another traffic jam. That's bullshit, especially in the heat of a political campaign. Any sort of event where there's a huge public-safety issue that's starting to get people hot under the collar, that's exactly the sort of thing any political campaign jumps on, especially this governor. So I don't believe the disclaimers. I don't believe Christie couldn't have known. That's nonsense."
"I just can't believe Governor Christie would have been involved in precipitating this," says Dave Gallagher, of the Port Authority Retirees Association. "But I find it even harder to believe that he didn't find out about it at some point. That's his management style. He wants to know everything all the time. I can't believe his people, either Kelly or Stepien or someone else—these offices are only 50 feet apart—I can't believe they wouldn't have let him know what was going on."
What did Christie know and when did he know it? It's a question that has dogged political and business leaders in scores of American scandals. Unfortunately for Christie, final answers aren't likely to emerge for months, once all the investigations wind down. Which all but ensures that as the country begins to turn its attention to the 2016 presidential campaign he will still have some explaining to do.
Follow to get the latest news and analysis about the players in your inbox.See All Players


text:
The Evolution of Residential Solar Leasing
Inside this Article
The introduction of the solar lease financing model and third-party system ownership has rapidly and fundamentally transformed the residential solar market in the US. One could argue that the advent of high-voltage string inverters in the US market in 2001 was the last transformative event of this magnitude. The solar lease is a once-ina- decade industry-changing product that has created vast opportunities for some integration firms, and competitive challenges and disadvantages for others. Examining the evolution of the residential solar lease, its current status, and likely future developments can assist integrators in navigating these often complex and quickly evolving system-financing mechanisms.
Solar Lease History
Many people contend that the residential solar lease was born in 2007 when Sunrun, a start-up finance company led by two Stanford business graduates, introduced its residential lease product. Lynn Jurich and Ed Fenster believed that the number one, two and three obstacles to the propagation of residential solar were—no surprise—money, money and money. Sunrun's financial model was simple: Leverage investor resources and tax equity to purchase PV systems on behalf of residential homeowners, providing a financed solution with no or low up-front costs. The solar lease effectively simplifies a homeowner's path to investing in solar. Under this model, the lease provider—not the residential homeowner— receives all rebates, tax credits and depreciation. The lease provider in turn offers a warranty on all aspects of the system and provides some degree of system monitoring and O&M over the typical 20-year lease term. At the end of the term, homeowners have three options: renew the lease, purchase the system at fair market value or have the system removed at no cost.
Residential solar lease providers typically offer two plan options.
Monthly payment plan. A monthly payment plan allows for zero money down or a low up-front investment, usually in the $1,000–$4,000 range. The homeowner agrees to purchase all the electricity produced by the PV system for the next 20 years at a rate lower than or equal to the local rate of conventional power per kilowatt hour. Depending on the specifics of the financing, the new rate may include an escalator that can be more beneficial to the lease provider than to the customer. The general lease approach provides the homeowner an opportunity to switch to solar power without having to come up with the system's total cost out of pocket. It also streamlines the homeowner's transaction by eliminating the need to claim the 30% federal tax credit.
Prepaid plan. Under this plan, the homeowner makes a large payment (typically about 65% of the total system cost) at the initiation of the lease term, but does not need to make another payment over the lease's 20-year term. This approach enables the customer to have a PV system installed without shouldering the tax liability necessary to take full advantage of available tax credits. A prepaid plan may be ideal for a homeowner such as a retiree living on a fixed income, who is prepared to make a large investment in solar but does not have the tax appetite required to take advantage of the 30% federal tax credit. The system owner also typically benefits from an extended warranty, O&M services and system monitoring provided over the 20-year term.
Both of these options have proven to be very appealing to a large number of consumers who want to make the switch to solar. According the 2012 U.S. Solar Market Insight report published by GTM Research and SEIA, as of Q2 2012 solar leases finance approximately 70% of residential installations in the major markets of California and Colorado, 80% of the installations in Arizona and more than 45% in Massachusetts. The increase in third-party–owned residential systems is expected to continue across all mature solar markets.
Early on, solar lease providers faced challenges from a regulatory standpoint. Existing rebate and interconnection processes were based on the concept of sole ownership. However, Sunrun and other solar finance companies have worked diligently to resolve these issues. Residential solar lease financing is now available in at least 12 states. The primary limiter on these products is generally not regulatory issues, but regional financial viability based on available financial incentives, electricity costs and the region's solar resources. Currently only a few states explicitly prohibit third-party residential financing.
Current Lease Models
As residential lease products continue to evolve, providers are developing and refining a range of business models. There are currently three solar leasing models.


text:
Open Positions
Fabio Gramazio
Matthias Kohler
Petrus Aejmelaeus-Lindström
Aleksandra Anna Apolinarska
Inés Ariza
Joris Jan Burger
Gonzalo Casas
Tanja de Almeida Pereira
Kathrin Dörfler
Selen Ercan
Jonas Furrer
Augusto Gandia
Aurèle Lieven Gheyselinck
Rahul Girish
Jonas Haldemann
Matthias Helmreich
James Horkulak
Pavle Ivanov
David Jenny
Ryan Luke Johns
Adam Kiryk
Mattis Koh
Eleftherios Kotsonis
Pok Yin Victor Leung
Ena Lloret-Fritschi
Esther Lombardini
Zhao Ma
Hannes Mayer
Jesús Medina Ibáñez
Coralie Ming
Ammar Mirjan
Daniela Mitterberger
Stanislaw Modrzyk
Matteo Pacher
Rafael Pastrana
Gergana Rusenova
Romana Rust
Foteini Salveridou
Sarah Schneider
Fabio Scotto
Petra Steinegger
Victor Stolbovoy
Anna Szabo
Nizar Taha
Andreas Thoma
Alexander Nikolas Walzer
Achilleas Xydis
Chenfan Zhu
Viviane Serafina Zibung
Jonas is a roboticist and mechatronics engineer. He has a Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering and a Master of Science in Engineering (Mechatronics) from UAS Zurich. During and after his studies, he worked as an engineer and research assistant at The University of Tokyo and ETH Zurich. From 2012, he spent 3 years in Japan working as a research engineer at Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto. Among other projects, there he developed an open-source middleware for cloud-based robotic services and a new mobile robot platform for research in 3D and audio mapping. Before 2015, Jonas contributed to R&D projects for Varian Medical Systems, Projectina, Mesa Imaging, Honda and Panasonic. His professional interests include mechatronic design of autonomous systems, mobile manipulation and robotic automation in architecture and construction.
Copyright 2016, Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
[Press Download]
Gramazio Kohler Research
Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication
ETH Zürich HIB E 43
Stefano-Franscini Platz 1 / CH-8093 Zurich
+41 44 633 49 06
Follow us on:


text:
Hey guys,
as is tradition, the upcoming Phoenix Con which will also feature Crimson Skies!
Date: Thursday 26th (4 p.m.) till Sunday 29th (around noon) in October 2017
Location: Hohegeiß, Germany (Harz mountains)
What to expect?
- lots of Battletech: chapter fights, construction tournament, FFA4drinks, fun tournaments.
- Crimson Skies: I'll be offering to play tutorials, dogfights and scenarios on demand.
- lots of other card- and boardgames for all ages.
- a friendly, familiar atmosphere that's welcoming to new gamers.
Here's the link for the (German) homepage:
Check out the facebook-page (also German):
Most important infos:
- 35€ Thur-Sun / 30€ Fri-Sun / 20€ Sat-Sun, this includes free tea, coffee & accommodation for the whole weekend! Save 5€ on the Thur-Sun fee when paying in advance!
- accommodation in a separate building in 2- to 3-bed rooms
- several large rooms for playing
- family friendly, lots of games for spouses and kids who are not into Battletech
- parking space across the road
- local train station "Walkenried" 12 car-minutes away
- bus stop "Hohegeiß Hindenburgstraße" across the road
- fair prices for food and drink
Advance reservation recommended as capacity is limited!
(PM me for this and advance payment info, there's no such option on the website atm)
Feel free to ask me anything about the event


text:
- Home
- About Us
- Products
- ORIX Locations
- Investor Information
- Management
- Careers
- News & Events
- Contact Us
- Rental Queries
- Complaint
- Share Registrar
Certificate of Deposit
Astute savers invest in ORIX Certificate of Deposit. It is a case of excellent returns and great security for your total peace of mind.
Astute savers invest in ORIX Certificates of Deposit (CODs). Service, Security and Stability are the hallmarks of ORIX CODs. Competitive returns, reliable service and firm commitment provide the investors peace of mind throughout their tenure of deposits with us.
ORIX's AA+ long term entity rating and A1+ short term entity rating from (updated in August 16, 2018 ) is an endorsement of our financial stability.
ORIX CODs offer flexible investment options with maturity terms ranging from 3 months to five years and profit payments can be periodic or accumulated till maturity.
Innovation and value addition are regularly made to our deposit schemes to provide our investors best value for their money.
Another value added service provided to our investors, is complementary accidental hospitalization and accidental life insurance cover for the investors.
Salient Features of ORIX COD schemes:
- Personalised service at its best
- Doorstep convenience of profit payments
- Lease / Loan facility against pledge of certificates
- No maximum limit for deposit
Who can invest? Pretty well everyone:
Individuals, associations of persons, companies, financial institutions, trusts, funds…..the list goes on.
Our following bouquet of products has been designed to suit the varied requirements of investors.
Please select the product that suits you best or call at our tollfree number 0800- 07070 during our office timing (9:00 am to 5:30 pm) from Monday to Friday, and our winning team will be pleased to provide you any further information or assistance if required.
Download Form(s) in PDF
Application Form for Individuals
Application Form for Institutions / Entities
Click Here For Details
Click Here For Details
Click Here For Details
Click Here For Details
Click Here For Details
Click Here For Details
Specimen of Deposit Taking Instrument:
The Certificates of Deposit are subject to various risks including credit risk and liquidity risk. The prospective customers are advised to conduct their own due diligence prior to investing in Certificates of Deposit.
What's next?
OLP's traditional business is equipment and vehicle...More Info
Certificate of Deposit
Astute savers invest in ORIX Certificate of...More Info
Corporate Lease
The cornerstone of ORIX business activities, the...More Info
Commercial Vehicle Leasing
As part of ORIX Corporation Japan, we...More Info
Consumer Auto Lease
ORIX Consumer Auto Division offers flexible product...More Info
Islamic Finance
ORIX leasing Pakistan Limited (OLP) has established...More Info
Micro Finance
ORIX provides reliable short to medium term...More Info
Agri Finance
It is time to cultivate your potentials...More Info
Lifting another burden off your shouldersMore Info