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Friday, November 05, 2010
V for Vendetta in Kinetic Typography
Rather appropriate for tonight.
Aside from politicians, I'd also chuck the loons who are still setting off fireworks at 11.30pm on the bonfire.
Posted by Div at 11:40 pm 8 comments
Labels: politics
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
They Don't Write Them Like This Anymore!
Proper sports reporting from the past.
Posted by Div at 7:23 pm 1 comments
Labels: football
Monday, May 31, 2010
What Is The Difference Between Israel and North Korea?
Not much so far as I can see. Though North Korea seems more efficient in the art of high seas terrorism.
Posted by Div at 7:41 pm 2 comments
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Election Time Again
Before the last election, I actually managed to put together a post I was quite proud of. Alas, nothing changed for the better in the last five years, and now I can't even motivate myself to put my thoughts in print.
Instead, I'll offer up some comedy genius from long ago, with a political slant. (Hint: Stick with it til the end!)
Posted by Div at 8:43 pm 1 comments
Labels: politics
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
The "Honest Mistake" Files from lovethesfa on Vimeo.
Match fixing, anyone?
Posted by Div at 3:00 pm 1 comments
Labels: corruption, football
Thursday, February 18, 2010
More On Poker and Luck
I've finally gotten round to dipping my toes in the world of Rush Poker. Initially, with some success, but latterly I seem to have ended up with scalded feet.
It all started so well. On my way back from a training course in England, I finally managed to get my wifi connection to the T-Mobile hot spot on the Virgin Train working.
Which meant that as I whizzed northwards at 125mph or so, I was able to fire up Full Tilt on my little Samsung netbook. Since the screen on this is tiny, and I'm generally used to playing six tables simultaneously, Rush Poker seemed the ideal compromise. One table, but many more hands per hour.
My initial impressions were that it's great fun, but I am not convinced that it will supersede multi-tabling regular games as my preferred mode of play.
This feeling should be qualified against yesterday's experiment, where I worked my way up to four-tabling Rush Poker, by which time I seemed to be averaging over 1200 hands per hour! Absolutely incredible.
I did play, by my standards, very tight (11%/8%) but the results were execrable. I finished the day, after three hours play, a whopping eight buy-ins down.
Which leads me to luck. Looking over the results, I was able to attribute one buy-in to bad play on my part (3-bet from the blinds with AK, c-bet a whiffed flop and got a bit carried away on a K turn versus oppo with KQ who flopped top pair and turned two pair).
However the overall loss was primarily a combination of cooler situations (set-under-set, QQ v AA on a low flop, flush vs top set who fills up on the river, bottom set vs top-two who fills up on turn, etc.), and some teeth grindingly neanderthal play (cold calling a 4-bet pre with 97s, floating the flop with nothing and back-dooring a straight on a flushing board, etc.)
Encouragingly, I didn't even stack-off in most of these situations. But taken together, they all added up to a hefty loss!
Which, to me, seems like a hellish run of luck. However, fortune WAS smiling on me in one way.
As I was experimenting, I was playing lower than normal. A mix of $25 and $50 buy-in, instead of $100 and $200.
So, whereas I could easily have been looking at a loss in excess of $1000, the actual damage was more like $300.
Not ideal, but well within the tolerance of my bankroll - and even $25 buy-in games generate some rakeback when you are getting through 1200 hands per hour!
Posted by Div at 12:28 pm 15 comments
Labels: poker
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Missives From A Pretend Professional Poker Player - Part 4. Luck
I've spend the last few weeks working in Belfast. Cosily ensconced in a nice hotel that was at the upper end of acceptable walking distance to the office.
This meant than on Mondays I took a taxi back to the hotel, as hefting a fairly sizeable suitcase was both impractical, and an open invitation to be mugged.
Belfast rush-hour traffic is much like any other city, with one rather complex junction in particular causing a backlog, as the lights rapidly cycled. Meaning that to my eyes only a few cars got through on each iteration.
Next morning I crossed the same junction on foot. As I waited patiently for the green man to appear, a lengthy stream of cars passed by along the same route I had taken the previous evening. 'ffs', I thought, 'Those lights let LOADS of cars through!'
This simple lesson in perspective took me back to a few hands I've recently played, in both of which, I got lucky. But in very different ways.
Hand A is a classic cooler. KK v AA Effective stacks 80BB deep. Having raised my KK then 4-bet when re-raised, I did get a sinking feeling when my opponent shoved, but his range was wider than just AA, so I had to call.
I needn't have worried, as a K on the board saw me right. Whereupon my opponent went off on an enormous 'how could you call that' type rant. Rather than explain how exploitable it would be to fold KK whenever someone 5-bet shoved pre-flop, I played dumb while gleefully enjoying the suck-out.
Hand B is the stuff of dreams. AA v KK Effective stacks 170BB. All-in pre. I deliberately played this one very fast, to give the impression of AK rather then AA, and it worked perfectly, as my opponent couldn't wait to get his chips in the middle.
No suck-out and a healthy pot to rake.
To me, both these hands are extremely lucky.
I doubt anyone would deny the outcome of Hand A merits that description. But I do think many people lack any sophistication in their appraisal of the entire situation, as opposed to the outcome alone.
To lose with AA v KK is clearly unlucky, but it's also pretty damn unlucky to run KK into AA in the first place. Especially against a fairly aggro opponent.
Having lost the hand, I could have pointed out to my opponent that since he hadn't topped up recently, he'd actually saved 20BB through tardiness.
Taking it to another level, I could have considered that he was still lucky to be playing against people such as myself, who are not good enough to put a stone-cold read on him and (correctly) fold KK pre-flop.
Hand B, conversely, isn't just lucky for being AA v KK that holds, it's doubly lucky because we were both fairly deep-stacked, so the successful outcome was highly rewarding.
How many times have we been dealt AA and got it all-in versus a shortie with 77? In that case one could argue we are actually unlucky when we win (because the profit is < 20BB) and lucky when we lose (because it's only 20BB).
There's a lot more to luck than the RNG running true. Something it pays to bear in mind when grinding a large number of hands, and working hard to manage tilt.
While it's good to understand the odds, a little rationality and perspective can go a long way towards an improved and profitable game.
Posted by Div at 1:22 pm 2 comments
Labels: poker


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New York University will host an open house at the newly refurbished Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal Street, on Sat., Dec. 11 from noon to 5 p.m. The public is invited to tour the historic theatre and enjoy light refreshments and live piano music, all free.
New York University will host an open house at the newly refurbished Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal Street, on Sat., Dec. 11 from noon to 5 p.m. The public is invited to tour the historic theatre and enjoy light refreshments and live piano music, all free.
A new exhibition, designed in conjunction with C&G Partners, LLC, will be unveiled at the event. The exhibition, on view in Playhouse's lobby, tells the story of the theatre using archival images of some of the most famous playwrights, actors, and productions that are part of the theatre's near 100-year history. The exhibition also includes a map of Greenwich Village, featuring images of the artistic scene around the neighborhood over the last century.
From playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell in the early 20th century, to Edward Albee and George Bernard Shaw at mid-century, and to Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Charles Busch in more recent years, the Provincetown Playhouse has been one of the most significant theatres in American theatre history.
"We're thrilled to re-open the doors of the Provincetown Playhouse to the Greenwich Village community and invite our neighbors inside to see the terrific improvements that have been made to this historic theatre," said Mary Brabeck, dean of NYU's Steinhardt School. "I'm proud of what we accomplished in preserving the original theatre's walls, in renovating and upgrading it, and improving its handicapped accessibility. We're grateful for the hard work and support of our partners, NYU School of Law and the Wilf family, in making this project a success. Current and future members of the community will benefit from the Playhouse's artistic productions for years to come."
In 1998, the Playhouse became a performance and educational venue for New York University's academic programs in educational theatre and vocal performance in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Renovations in 2010 preserved the Playhouse's only remaining original feature—its brick walls—and refurbished the mid-century seat end standards, restored the exterior to its 1940 facade, and updated the 88-seat theatre's seating, lighting and sound controls, and air handling. Productions in the Playhouse, all open to the public, are inspired by and honor the legacy of this cultural landmark.
Reporters interested in attending should call Tim Farrell, NYU Office of Public Affairs, by phone at 212.998.6797 or by email, firstname.lastname@example.com.

subset: commoncrawl


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Bridezilla Furious After Her Crazy Weight-Based Wedding Dress Code Leaks
By Dave Basner
December 6, 2018
So far this year we've heard about bridezillas sending out an absurdly strict list of rules to guests, demanding guests pay thousands of dollars to attend the wedding, and secretly fattening up bridesmaids, but this latest one tops them all. There is a bride out there who sent a message to her guests that mentioned the dress code for her upcoming wedding - no problem there, except that she lays out what people must wear based on their weight.
A screenshot of her message was posted to Reddit and in it she explains, "The dress code is very specific because it will be used to create an incredible visual effect. If done right, it will make our synchronized dancing along the beach really pop."
To ensure the dance routine really pops, women between 100-160 pounds are required to wear a green velvet sweater, orange suede pants and a Burberry scarf - not the most comfortable outfit considering the wedding is set to take place in Hawaii. They also must don a pair of red Louboutin heels so "when we spin and lift our feet, the effect will amaze you."
Meanwhile, men under 200 pounds are to show up in a purple fuzzy jacket, a soda hat and white trainers. They should also have glow sticks.
Guests who are female and over 160 pounds have to wear a sweater and pants with heels, all in black, while men over 200 pounds are expected to sport all camouflage along with black sneakers. As for kids, they need to be in all red since they'll be forming the shape of a heart. The bride makes sure to note the color needs to be "true red not blood orange or some bulls**t."
Someone on the internet was kind enough to illustrate what's expected of guests:
The good news is, once the dance is over, the guests can change out of those clothes, but the bad news is whatever they change into should be worth at least $1000 Australian dollars, or $722 American dollars. The bridezilla explained, "Remember, the venue is extremely upscale and we want to be looking our BEST ladies and gents… If you look like trash, so will we. This wedding is 24K themed for a reason."
Not surprisingly, such a ridiculous post quickly spread, and eventually the bridezilla caught wind of it leaking. She was very unhappy and made her thoughts known in a new, even crazier post that announces a "polygraph party" to find the "rat" who leaked the dress code.
The bridezilla says she "could not be more crushed, betrayed, or saddened," before inviting everyone to the polygraph party where she "will be hunting out the snitch who put me on blast." She reveals she bought a polygraph for $99 on Amazon and unless guests have a valid excuse, they will be "presumed guilty."
She also gives the culprit a chance to just come clean, explaining, "I won't retaliate, I will simply cut all ties and communication with you (and talk s**t about you for a long, long time)." The bride even offers $100 to any information about who the leak is.
The bride then explains the strange history of her relationship and the even more bizarre meaning behind the dress code, comparing it to Indian culture. She goes on to tell guests that they don't need to take part in the dance routine, noting that instead they can "help the crew clean up after dinner."
It seems like the wedding is still on, although some people find the whole thing hard to believe, but plenty of others are certain there is truth to the story.
Photo: Getty Images, Imgur


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Home construction activity picking up in Eagle County
EAGLE COUNTY — Joe Bazja could probably use more help at his business, but he's being cautious.
Bazja is the owner of Joe's Wallboard, which supplies drywall and supplies to the construction business. When the construction industry nose-dived in about 2008, it took any number of other businesses down with it. Bazja held on, but laid off more than 20 employees and sold two of his trucks. As the boss, Bazja went back to working as he did during his startup days, doing whatever needed to be done, in, or out, of the office.
This year, Bazja has added a truck to his fleet, and has bid for jobs as far away as Steamboat Springs, Breckenridge and Aspen. But there's also a good bit of business close to home.
For the first time since the valley's construction industry fell apart, there seems to be a good bit of building up and down the valley.
Early indications are that most of those new homes are being built in Gypsum, with most being built by the Pauls Corp. That company will this year build 10 new homes at Sky Legend, the neighborhood above and to the west of the Cotton Ranch area. The company will also build at least 16 new homes this year at Stratton Flats, just off U.S. Highway 6 on the east end of town. In Eagle, town building official Bob Kohrman said it's been at least three years since there's been this much activity in that town, with projects from remodeling jobs to townhomes and single-family homes coming through his office.
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William Gray in Avon told the same story, with a couple of twists — expensive projects in the Mountain Star neighborhood and a handful of "spec homes" — homes built and marketed without a buyer lined up in advance — being sold after the houses were built.
The "spec" home market was one of the first arms of the industry to pull back a few years ago, due to both a drop in demand and banks' unwillingness to finance homes without a buyer waiting.
As the local economic slump deepened, home financing became more difficult to find. That's starting to ease, too.
Kohrman said a four-unit townhome building in Brush Creek Village, near the town's pool and ice rink, had been started, then allowed to languish. But, with a couple of buyers lined up, financing was found for the four-plex project.
Stephanie Roybal of the Gypsum building department said several projects have either started, or re-started in town thanks to a combination of low interest rates and lower prices on lots.
But no one would start a construction project without buyer demand and that seems to be coming back, too.
Local real estate brokers have been talking for the past few months about lack of housing inventory in the valley. That provides the spark to add more housing to the existing stock. Bill Holm, a Realtor who represents Pauls Corporation projects in Gypsum, said the issue goes beyond inventory to "good" inventory. That drives demand for homes with that new-place smell. Besides, Holm said, he's seeing potential customers who are more confident in their own financial situations than he did just a couple of years ago.
"I haven't seen anything like in the last seven or eight years, really," Holm said.
But the demand for housing doesn't necessarily mean construction and similar companies will start hiring in droves any time soon. While Bazja said he's always on the lookout for good employees, he plans to be careful in how he builds his workforce.
"When we do hire, I want it to be for the long term," Bazja said. "Other companies I've talked to are the same way.
"No one knows the future," Bazja added. "You don't want to hire people now and have to lay them off again in six months."


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New York City didn't have to flood quite this badly, or, at least, it doesn't have to again. There's no shortage of ideas out there for how the city could adapt to rising sea levels (or, we'll just say it: climate change). A lot of them haven't been deployed or more seriously studied because they seem too expensive or daunting. But an event like Sandy quickly changes that calculus. Suddenly, some of these solutions don't look quite as expensive as cleaning up after a hurricane:
1. Sea Gates and Surge Barriers. We'll start with the biggie, a multi-billion dollar idea to keep storm surge out of New York by blocking it with some kind of moveable sea wall. Such infrastructure actually exists in England and the Netherlands, and a Dutch design and engineering firm was among several that presented ideas for such a barrier at a conference in New York City in 2009. Any surge barrier would have to be able to open for passing ships, while also doing the least to disturb the natural ecosystem. Arcadis, the Dutch firm, proposed putting this 4,800-foot-long barrier in the Verrazano Narrows. One large sliding piece of it, 860 feet long, would enable ships to pass and could be closed in advance of a storm.
Arcadis estimated at the time that the cost of constructing such a project would be about $6.5 billion. This sounds ridiculous. Until, of course, you see the estimated price tag on this week's damages.
2. Elevated infrastructure. There are very few buildings in the entire state of New York built at grade at elevations below sea level. But New York City has constructed one massive piece of infrastructure below that threshold: the subway system. As we saw this week, flooding can devastate an underground network of tunnels, train platforms and corridors. So how do you keep more of that water out? For one thing, elevating subway entrances would help. Bangkok, another low-lying city susceptible to rising tides, has built precisely these kinds of subway entrances. They're raised a meter off the ground and include built-in floodgates. A subway rider in Bangkok must first walk up a stairway from the sidewalk before heading down into the metro:
The New York MTA has also experimented in the past with elevating the grates that ventilate the subway system, another piece of transit infrastructure susceptible to flooding. Several years ago, the MTA commissioned architecture firm Rogers Marvel to design prototype elevated subway vents that would double as street furniture:
3. Wave Attenuators. One of New York's biggest problems is that the city and the sea meet along such a hard edge. Development butts right up to the water, with little natural barrier separating the two or serving as a kind of buffer during floods. If New York could re-imagine its coastlines to include new wetlands or barrier islands along, for instance, the southern tip of Manhattan, that natural landscape extending out into the water could help mitigate the impact of a storm rolling in. Several of the architecture firms involved in the 2010 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Rising Currents" (which we mentioned earlier this week) deployed this tactic in their plans for a new New York coastline.
Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio set out to rethink the "ecology and infrastructure in a sustainable partnership, thus changing the direction of the last 400 years of development." Along their graduated edge of Manhattan, they envisioned adding 80 acres of new park network, freshwater wetlands and tidal salt marshes extending into the upper bay.
4. Oysters and Sand. Two ideas for enhancing the natural protection of the city's beaches and harbors. "Beach nourishment" is an old one, in fact an idea that was apparently first tried in the U.S. at Coney Island in the 1920s. We already buffer communities from rising tides by adding to their beaches… literally trucking in sand. The state of New York currently does this with about 1 million cubic yards of sand each year. But according to a state climate change studypublished last year, New York will need to boost that amount by 2.3 to 11.5 percent by the 2020s to keep pace with expected sea level rise. By the 2050s, that sand volume will need to increase by 18 to 26 percent.
Or there's this: New York could truck in new oyster colonies to repopulate the ones we killed off over the years. Paul Greenberg wrote lovingly in defense of this idea in the New York Times earlier this week:
I'm not talking about oysters to eat — although a dozen would be nice to go with that leftover bottle of Champagne that I really should drink if the fridge goes off. I'm talking about the oysters that once protected New Yorkers from storm surges, a bivalve population that numbered in the trillions and that played a critical role in stabilizing the shoreline from Washington to Boston.
5. Different development patterns, duh. The previous two ideas would build out the coastline with added sand, marshes or man-made wetlands. But of course, it only makes sense to extend the New York coastline if we don't then insist on building on top of it. Grist posted some great historical maps earlier this week showing that the most flood-prone evacuation zones on the southern tip of Manhattan today sit atop landfill we created there in the past. We have a terrible track record of trying to build man-made land where water once was (who would have thought there would be such consequences!).
And so we should keep that in mind as we talk today about other interventions in nature at the coastline. Developers love waterfront property, and many of our best solutions involve creating new waterfront that will be no one's property (or reclaiming waterfronts for posterity). The most straight-forward solution would be to scale back existing development on New York's waterfront. But as the New York Times reported in an eerily prescient article in September:
The city's plan for waterfront development dismisses any notion of retreat from the shoreline. Curbing development or buying up property in flood plains, as some smaller cities have done, is too impractical here, city officials say, especially because the city anticipates another million residents over the next two decades.
This originally appeared on The Atlantic Cities. Also on our sister site:
The creepiest Sandy debris: a 200-year-old skeleton
This London traffic light has 75 signals


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Quanah Parker, c. 1890
Quanah Parker on horseback wearing eagle feather headdress and holding a lance bottom-up.
Cavalrymen remember such moments: dust swirling behind the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders' tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song rising on the wind: "Come home, John! Don't stay long. Come home soon to your own chick-a-biddy!" The date was October 3, 1871. Six hundred soldiers and twenty Tonkawa scouts had bivouacked on a lovely bend of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, in a rolling, scarred prairie of grama grass, scrub oak, sage, and chaparral, about one hundred fifty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. Now they were breaking camp, moving out in a long, snaking line through the high cutbanks and quicksand streams. Though they did not know it at the time—the idea would have seemed preposterous—the sounding of "boots and saddle" that morning marked the beginning of the end of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred fifty years of bloody combat that had begun almost with the first landing of the first ship on the first fatal shore in Virginia. The final destruction of the last of the hostile tribes would not take place for a few more years. Time would be yet required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources of food, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or kill them outright. For the moment the question was one of hard, unalloyed will. There had been brief spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. M. Chivington's and George Armstrong Custer's savage massacres of Cheyennes in 1864 and 1868 were examples. But in those days there was no real attempt to destroy the tribes on a larger scale, no stomach for it. That had changed, and on October 3, the change assumed the form of an order, barked out through the lines of command to the men of the Fourth Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to go forth and kill Comanches. It was the end of anything like tolerance, the beginning of the final solution.
The white men were grunts, bluecoats, cavalry, and dragoons; mostly veterans of the War Between the States who now found themselves at the edge of the known universe, ascending to the turreted rock towers that gated the fabled Llano Estacado—Coronado's term for it, meaning "palisaded plains" of West Texas, a country populated exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the continent, where few U.S. soldiers had ever gone before. The llano was a place of extreme desolation, a vast, trackless, and featureless ocean of grass where white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst; a place where the imperial Spanish had once marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to find that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered. In 1864, Kit Carson had led a large force of federal troops from Santa Fe and attacked a Comanche band at a trading post called Adobe Walls, north of modern-day Amarillo. He had survived it, but had come within a whisker of watching his three companies of cavalry and infantry destroyed.
The troops were now going back, because enough was enough, because President Grant's vaunted "Peace Policy" toward the remaining Indians, run by his gentle Quaker appointees, had failed utterly to bring peace, and finally because the exasperated general in chief of the army, William Tecumseh Sherman, had ordered it so. Sherman's chosen agent of destruction was a civil war hero named Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a difficult, moody, and implacable young man who had graduated first in his class from West Point in 1862 and had finished the Civil War, remarkably, as a brevet brigadier general. Because his hand was gruesomely disfigured from war wounds, the Indians called him No-Finger Chief, or Bad Hand. A complex destiny awaited him. Within four years he would prove himself the most brutally effective Indian fighter in American history. In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them.
For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.
Just how bad things were in 1871 along this razor edge of civilization could be seen in the numbers of settlers who had abandoned their lands. The frontier, carried westward with so much sweat and blood and toil, was now rolling backward, retreating. Colonel Randolph Marcy, who accompanied Sherman on a western tour in the spring, and who had known the country intimately for decades, had been shocked to find that in many places there were fewer people than eighteen years before. "If the Indian marauders are not punished," he wrote, "the whole country seems in a fair way of becoming totally depopulated." This phenomenon was not entirely unknown in the history of the New World. The Comanches had also stopped cold the northward advance of the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century—an empire that had, up to that point, easily subdued and killed millions of Indians in Mexico and moved at will through the continent. Now, after more than a century of relentless westward movement, they were rolling back civilization's advance again, only on a much larger scale. Whole areas of the borderlands were simply emptying out, melting back eastward toward the safety of the forests. One county—Wise—had seen its population drop from 3,160 in the year 1860 to 1,450 in 1870. In some places the line of settlements had been driven back a hundred miles.4 If General Sherman wondered about the cause—as he once did—his tour with Marcy relieved him of his doubts. That spring they had narrowly missed being killed themselves by a party of raiding Indians. The Indians, mostly Kiowas, passed them over because of a shaman's superstitions and had instead attacked a nearby wagon train. What happened was typical of the savage, revenge-driven attacks by Comanches and Kiowas in Texas in the postwar years. What was not typical was Sherman's proximity and his own very personal and mortal sense that he might have been a victim, too. Because of that the raid became famous, known to history as the Salt Creek Massacre.
Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does not begin to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie's subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. "Their fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths," wrote Carter, "and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines." They had clearly been tortured, too. "Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death—'burnt to a crisp.' "
Thus the settlers' headlong flight eastward, especially on the Texas frontier, where such raiding was at its worst. After so many long and successful wars of conquest and dominion, it seemed implausible that the westward rush of Anglo-European civilization would stall in the prairies of central Texas. No tribe had ever managed to resist for very long the surge of nascent American civilization with its harquebuses and blunderbusses and muskets and eventually lethal repeating weapons and its endless stocks of eager, land-greedy settlers, its elegant moral double standards and its complete disregard for native interests. Beginning with the subjection of the Atlantic coastal tribes (Pequots, Penobscots, Pamunkeys, Wampanoags, et al), hundreds of tribes and bands had either perished from the earth, been driven west into territories, or forcibly assimilated. This included the Iroquois and their enormous, warlike confederation that ruled the area of present-day New York; the once powerful Delawares, driven west into the lands of their enemies; the Iroquois, then yet farther west into even more murderous foes on the plains. The Shawnees of the Ohio Country had fought a desperate rearguard action starting in the 1750s. The great nations of the south—Chicasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Choctaw—saw their reservation lands expropriated in spite of a string of treaties; they were coerced westward into lands given them in yet more treaties that were violated before they were even signed; hounded along a trail of tears until they, too, landed in "Indian Territory" (present-day Oklahoma), a land controlled by Comanches, Kiowas, Araphoes, and Cheyennes.
Even stranger was that the Comanches' stunning success was happening amid phenomenal technological and social changes in the west. In 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, linking the industrializing east with the developing west and rendering the old trails—Oregon, Santa Fe, and tributaries—instantly obsolete. With the rails came cattle, herded northward in epic drives to railheads by Texans who could make fast fortunes getting them to Chicago markets. With the rails, too, came buffalo hunters carrying deadly accurate .50-caliber Sharps rifles that could kill effectively at extreme range—grim, violent, opportunistic men blessed now by both a market in the east for buffalo leather and the means of getting it there. In 1871 the buffalo still roamed the plains: Earlier that year a herd of four million had been spotted near the Arkansas River in present-day southern Kansas. The main body was fifty miles deep and twenty-five miles wide. But the slaughter had already begun. It would soon become the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in human history. In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881. All of these profound changes were under way as Mackenzie's Raiders departed their camps on the Clear Fork. The nation was booming; a railroad had finally stitched it together. There was only this one obstacle left: the warlike and unreconstructed Indian tribes who inhabited the physical wastes of the Great Plains.
Of those, the most remote, primitive, and irredeemably hostile were a band of Comanches known as the Quahadis. Like all Plains Indians, they were nomadic. They hunted primarily the southernmost part of the high plains, a place known to the Spanish, who had been abjectly driven from it, as Comancheria. The Llano Estacado, located within Comancheria, was a dead-flat tableland larger than New England and rising, in its highest elevations, to more than five thousand feet. For Europeans, the land was like a bad hallucination. "Although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues," wrote Coronado in a letter to the king of Spain on October 20, 1541, "[there were] no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea . . . there was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by." The Canadian River formed its northern boundary. In the east was the precipitous Caprock Escarpment, a cliff rising somewhere between two hundred and one thousand feet that demarcates the high plains from the lower Permian Plains below, giving the Quahadis something that approximated a gigantic, nearly impregnable fortress. Unlike almost all of the other tribal bands on the plains, the Quahadis had always shunned contact with Anglos. They would not even trade with them, as a general principle, preferring the Mexican traders from Santa Fe, known as Comancheros. So aloof were they that in the numerous Indian ethnographies compiled from 1758 onward chronicling the various Comanche bands (there were as many as thirteen), they do not even show up until 1872. For this reason they had largely avoided the cholera plagues of 1816 and 1849 that had ravaged western tribes and had destroyed fully half of all Comanches. Virtually alone among all bands of all tribes in North America, they never signed a treaty. Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse's stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not do. Even other Comanches feared them. They were the richest of all plains bands in the currency by which Indians measured wealth—horses—and in the years after the Civil War managed a herd of some fifteen thousand. They also owned "Texas cattle without number."
On that clear autumn day in 1871, Mackenzie's troops were hunting Quahadis. Because they were nomadic, it was not possible to fix their location. One could know only their general ranges, their hunting grounds, perhaps old camp locations. They were known to hunt the Llano Estacado; they liked to camp in the depths of Palo Duro Canyon, the second-largest canyon in North America after the Grand Canyon; they often stayed near the headwaters of the Pease River and McClellan's Creek; and in Blanco Canyon, all within a roughly hundred-mile ambit of present-day Amarillo in the upper Texas Panhandle. If you were pursuing them, as Mackenzie was, you had your Tonkawa scouts fan out far in advance of the column. The Tonks, as they were called, members of an occasionally cannibalistic Indian tribe that had nearly been exterminated by Comanches and whose remaining members lusted for vengeance, would look for signs, try to cut trails, then follow the trails to the lodges. Without them the army would never have had the shadow of a chance against these or any Indians on the open plains.
By the afternoon of the second day, the Tonks had found a trail. They reported to Mackenzie that they were tracking a Quahadi band under the leadership of a brilliant young war chief named Quanah—a Comanche word that meant "odor" or "fragrance." The idea was to find and destroy Quanah's village. Mackenzie had a certain advantage in that no white man had ever dared try such a thing before; not in the panhandle plains, not against the Quahadis.
Mackenzie and his men did not know much about Quanah. No one did. Though there is an intimacy of information on the frontier—opposing sides often had a surprisingly detailed understanding of one another, in spite of the enormous physical distances between them and the fact that they were trying to kill one another—Quanah was simply too young for anyone to know much about him yet, where he had been, or what he had done. Though no one would be able to even estimate the date of his birth until many years later, it was mostly likely in 1848, making him twenty-three that year and eight years younger than Mackenzie, who was also so young that few people in Texas, Indian or white, knew much about him at the time. Both men achieved their fame only in the final, brutal Indian wars of the mid-1870s. Quanah was exceptionally young to be a chief. He was reputed to be ruthless, clever, and fearless in battle.
But there was something else about Quanah, too. He was a half-breed, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman. People on the Texas frontier would soon learn this about him, partly because the fact was so exceptional. Comanche warriors had for centuries taken female captives—Indian, French, English, Spanish, Mexican, and American—and fathered children by them who were raised as Comanches. But there is no record of any prominent half-white Comanche war chief. By the time Mackenzie was hunting him in 1871, Quanah's mother had long been famous. She was the best known of all Indian captives of the era, discussed in drawing rooms in New York and London as "the white squaw" because she had refused on repeated occasions to return to her people, thus challenging one of the most fundamental of the Eurocentric assumptions about Indian ways: that given the choice between the sophisticated, industrialized, Christian culture of Europe and the savage, bloody, and morally backward ways of the Indians, no sane person would ever choose the latter. Few, other than Quanah's mother, did. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was the daughter of one of early Texas's most prominent families, one that included Texas Ranger captains, politicians, and prominent Baptists who founded the state's first Protestant church. In 1836, at the age of nine, she had been kidnapped in a Comanche raid at Parker's Fort, ninety miles south of present Dallas. She soon forgot her mother tongue, learned Indian ways, and became a full member of the tribe. She married Peta Nocona, a prominent war chief, and had three children by him, of whom Quanah was the eldest. In 1860, when Quanah was twelve, Cynthia Ann was recaptured during an attack by Texas Rangers on her village, during which everyone but her and her infant daughter, Prairie Flower, were killed. Mackenzie and his soldiers most likely knew the story of Cynthia Ann Parker—most everyone on the frontier did—but they had no idea that her blood ran in Quanah's veins. They would not learn this until 1875. For now they knew only that he was the target of the largest anti-Indian expedition mounted since 1865, one of the largest ever undertaken.
Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry, which he would soon build into a grimly efficient mobile assault force, for the moment consisted largely of timeservers who were unprepared to encounter the likes of Quanah and his hardened plains warriors. The soldiers were operating well beyond the ranges of civilization, beyond anything like a trail they could follow or any landmarks they could possibly have recognized. They were dismayed to learn that their principal water sources were buffalo wallow holes that, according to Carter, were "stagnant, warm, nauseating, odorous with smells, and covered with green slime that had to be pushed aside." Their inexperience was evident during their first night on the trail. Sometime around midnight, above the din of a West Texas windstorm, the men heard "a tremendous tramping and an unmistakable snorting and bellowing." That sound, as they soon discovered, was made by stampeding buffalo. The soldiers had made the horrendous mistake of making camp between a large herd of buffalo and its water source. Panicked, the men emerged from their tents in darkness, screaming and waving blankets and trying desperately to turn the stampeding animals. They succeeded, but by the smallest of margins. "The immense herds of brown monsters were caromed off and they stampeded to our left at breakneck speed," wrote Carter, "rushing and jostling but flushing only the edge of one of our horse herds. . . . one could hardly repress a shudder of what might have been the result of this nocturnal visit, for although the horses were strongly 'lariated out,' 'staked,' or 'picketed,' nothing could have saved them from the terror which this headlong charge would have inevitably created, had we not heard them just in time to turn the leading herds."
Miraculously spared the consequences of their own ignorance, the bluecoats rounded up the stray horses, broke camp at dawn, and spent the day riding westward over a rolling mesquite prairie pocked with prairie-dog towns. The latter were common in the Texas Panhandle and extremely dangerous to horses and mules. Think of enormous anthills populated by oversized rodents, stretching for miles. The troopers passed more herds of buffalo, vast and odorous, and rivers whose gypsum-infused water was impossible to drink. They passed curious-looking trading stations, abandoned now, consisting of caves built into the sides of cliffs and reinforced with poles that looked like prison bars.
On the second day they ran into more trouble. Mackenzie ordered a night march, hoping to surprise the enemy in its camps. His men struggled through steep terrain, dense brush, ravines, and arroyos. After hours of what Carter described as "trials and tribulations and much hard talk verging on profanity" and "many rather comical scenes," they fetched up bruised and battered in the dead end of a small canyon and had to wait until daybreak to find their way out. A few hours later they reached the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos, deep in Indian territory, in a broad, shallow thirty-mile-long valley that averaged fifteen hundred feet in width and was cut by smaller side canyons. The place was known as Blanco Canyon and was located just to the east of present-day Lubbock, one of the Quahadis' favorite campgrounds.
Whatever surprise Mackenzie had hoped for was gone. On the third day the Tonkawa scouts realized they were being shadowed by a group of four Comanche warriors, who had been watching their every move, presumably including what must have seemed to them the comical blunders of the night march. The Tonks gave chase, but "the hostiles being better mounted soon distanced their pursuers and vanished into the hills." This was not surprising: In two hundred years of enmity, the Tonkawas had never been close to matching the horsemanship of the Comanches. They always lost. The result was that, while the cavalrymen and dragoons had no idea where the Comanches were camped, Quanah knew precisely what Mackenzie was doing and where he was. The next night Mackenzie compounded the error by allowing the men the indulgence of campfires, tantamount to painting a large arrow in the canyon pointing to their camp. Some of the companies blundered yet again by failing to place "sleeping parties" among the horses.
At around midnight, the regiment was awakened by a succession of unearthly, high-pitched yells. Those were followed by shots, and more yells, and suddenly the camp was alive with Comanches riding at full gallop. Exactly what the Indians were doing was soon apparent: Mingled with the screams and gunshots and general mayhem of the camp was another sound, only barely audible at first, then rising quickly to something like rolling thunder. The men quickly realized, to their horror, that it was the sound of stampeding horses. Their horses. Amid shouts of "Every man to his lariat!" six hundred panicked horses tore loose through the camp, rearing, jumping, and plunging at full speed. Lariats snapped with the sound of pistol shots; iron picket pins that a few minutes before had been used to secure the horses now whirled and snapped about their necks like airborne sabres. Men tried to grab them and were thrown to the ground and dragged among the horses, their hands lacerated and bleeding.
When it was all over, the soldiers discovered that Quanah and his warriors had made off with seventy of their best horses and mules, including Colonel Mackenzie's magnificent gray pacer. In west Texas in 1871, stealing someone's horse was often equivalent to a death sentence. It was an old Indian tactic, especially on the high plains, to simply steal white men's horses and leave them to die of thirst or starvation. Comanches had used it to lethal effect against the Spanish in the early eighteenth century. In any case, an unmounted army regular stood little chance against a mounted Comanche.
This midnight raid was Quanah's calling card, a clear message that hunting him and his Comanche warriors in their homeland was going to be a difficult and treacherous business. Thus began what would become known to history as the Battle of Blanco Canyon, which was in turn the opening salvo in a bloody Indian war in the highlands of west Texas that would last four years and culminate in the final destruction of the Comanche nation. Blanco Canyon would also provide the U.S. Army with its first look at Quanah. Captain Carter, who would win the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in Blanco Canyon, offered this description of the young war chief in battle on the day after the midnight stampede:
A large and powerfully built chief led the bunch, on a coal black racing pony. Leaning forward upon his mane, his heels nervously working in the animal's side, with six-shooter poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage, brutal joy. His face was smeared with black warpaint, which gave his features a satanic look. . . . A full-length headdress or war bonnet of eagle's feathers, spreading out as he rode, and descending from his forehead, over head and back, to his pony's tail, almost swept the ground. Large brass hoops were in his ears; he was naked to the waist, wearing simply leggings, moccasins and a breechclout. A necklace of beare's claws hung about his neck. . . . Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip him in the race. It was Quanah, principal warchief of the Qua-ha-das.
Moments later, Quanah wheeled his horse in the direction of an unfortunate private named Seander Gregg and, as Carter and his men watched, blew Gregg's brains out.


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C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kerry Thornley, Mary Ruwart, Karl Hess Jr.'s "Market Anarchy, Ecological Order: Three Libertarian Views on Environmental Protection" that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kerry Thornley, Mary Ruwart, Karl Hess Jr.'s "Market Anarchy, Ecological Order: Three Libertarian Views on Environmental Protection".
$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.
This booklet brings together three essays from the left-libertarian tradition on emerging ecological orders and environmental protection in a freed-market society. The first, "A Libertarian Technology of Ecology" was originally published in the Summer 1969 issue of The Innovator: Applications, Experiments, and Developments in Liberty, a radical libertarian newsletter that ran from 1964-1969. The article was signed by "Ho Chi Zen," a pen name commonly used by Kerry Thornley (1938-1998), a market anarchist author, counterculture publisher, and Nonprophet of Discordianism. The second, "Environmental Destruction" is excerpted and abridged from "Destroying the Environment," Chapter 8 of Mary Ruwart's book, Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression (1993). The third, "Deeper Ecology and Deeper Markets" was originally published as "Closing the Green Gap of Market Liberalism," in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty (December 1994), by Karl Hess, Jr. (Karl Hess IV), a left-market anarchist, a noted libertarian ecologist and champion of appropriate technology (and son of the ground-breaking left-libertarian radical and political theorist Karl Hess, Sr.).
"Conservation is often considered a statist bugaboo but, in fact, the problem of ecological upset is a real one — made all the more pressing by the fact that statist solutions of increased legal restriction do not work. Those who do the most polluting and destroying also have the most political influence in a society where government and business are interdependent partners. What is needed, instead of more laws cranked out by conditioned reflex, is the same kind of rational, scientific and cybernetic epistemology that is now used in DISCOVERING ecological problems, but not in solving them! Doubtlessly, such spiraling cycles of thought, experimentation, and data collection on the subject would transcend the legalistic, regulatory solutions in short order. . . ." —Kerry Thornley
"While the market of global process and exchange is essential to the wellbeing of society, it is not sufficient for most people's happiness. The market that matters most to people lies closest to home, the marketplace where people gather to exchange in voluntary fashion everything from cash to good ideas to friendship to mutual aid and cooperation. It is the deep market of community, the cooperative flip side to the market of competition and impersonal economic forces. Therein lies the challenge to both greens and market liberals—how to save the marketplace from both the state and the impersonal market. Free marketeers must look beyond market gimmicks to solve festering environmental problems in a manner still consistent with liberty. The new environmental commons of ecological processes and unbounded communities of plants and animals demand solutions that encompass and yet go beyond ordinary markets and property rights. The environmental commons is a challenge to community—or, in the absence of community, a challenge that will be eagerly taken up by a centralized state in search of an equivalent to militarism. . . ." —Karl Hess, Jr.


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The contract assures the ratings-leader cable news network that it will retain one of its most popular commentators, and someone whose views continually make news, especially in the heat of a campaign.
( PHOTOS: The best stories of 2012)
Rove appears on a variety of Fox programs including "Hannity," where he and Sean Hannity talked Wednesday night about President Barack Obama's gun control plan, and the assault weapons ban.
On Wednesday, Bill Shine, Fox's executive vice president of programming, announced that the network had added former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a former presidential candidate, to its roster of contributors.
Roger Ailes, Fox News chairman and CEO, FOX News, said in a statement that Kucinich's "willingness to take a stand from his point of view makes him a valuable voice in our country's debate." Kucinich is to make his debut as a contributor on Thursday night on "The O'Reilly Factor."
( PHOTOS: Best attacks on the media in 2012)
So the pair of announcements bookend the political spectrum.
Rove joined Fox as a contributor in February 2008, and has become famous for the handheld whiteboard that he uses when discussing electoral math during presidential races. He has a home in Texas, and often appears from Austin.
From Rove's official biography: "Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy-making process. … Before Karl became known as 'The Architect' of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, non-partisan causes, and non-profit groups.
"His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional, and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden. … Karl writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and is the author of the … New York Times Bestseller, 'Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.' … A Colorado native, he attended the University of Utah, the University of Maryland-College Park, George Mason University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Karl has taught graduate students at [the University of Texas] Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and undergraduates in a joint appointment from the Journalism and Government departments."


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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — July 10, 2012. Cellular change thought to happen only in late-stage cancers to help tumors spread also occurs in early-stage lung cancer as a way to bypass growth controls, say researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida. The finding, reported in the July 11 issue of Science Translational Medicine, represents a new understanding of the extent of transformation that lung cancer — and likely many other tumor types — undergo early in disease development, the scientists say. They add that the discovery also points to a potential strategy to halt this process, known as epithelial-mesenchymal transition, or EMT.
"Our study points to EMT as a key step in lung cancer progression during the earliest stages of cancer development," says lead investigator and cancer biologist Derek Radisky, Ph.D.
"Normal cells recognize when they are dividing too rapidly, and turn on programs that block inappropriate cell division. Here we found that early-stage lung cancer cells switch on EMT in order to bypass these controls," he says.
The discovery could offer a new way to prevent progression to late-stage lung cancer, possibly by inhibiting a particular molecule from functioning, Dr. Radisky says.
Because EMT is a well-recognized late-stage transition that occurs in all sorts of solid tumors, the researchers say they believe that the same early-stage use of EMT they found in lung cancer is likely occurring in other cancers.
EMT is a biological process used in embryonic development to allow body development, which requires the ability of cells and tissues to morph from one type to another, and develop in an orchestrated fashion.
Late-stage cancer uses EMT to change tumor cells into a form that can migrate through blood.
"The gaps in our knowledge of lung cancer have not allowed us to develop more effective targeted therapies," Dr. Radisky says. "This study offers us great new clues for a new approach to treating lung and possibly other cancers as early as possible."
Co-authors include researchers from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.; University Hospital Giessen and Marburg in Germany; Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto; and the University of Colorado in Denver.
The study was funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute and the State of Florida's James & Esther King Biomedical Research Program.
As a leading institution funded by the National Cancer Institute, Mayo Clinic Cancer Center conducts basic, clinical and population science research, translating discoveries into improved methods for prevention, diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. For information on cancer clinical trials call 507-538-7623.
About Mayo Clinic:
Recognizing 150 years of serving humanity in 2014, Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit worldwide leader in medical care, research and education for people from all walks of life. For more information, visit 150years.mayoclinic.org, www.mayoclinic.org and newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org.
Media Contact: Paul Scotti, 904-953-2299 (days), firstname.lastname@example.com
According to a recent study by the American Cancer Society, cancer is a leading cause of death among those of Hispanic heritage living in the U.S. Hispanic ...
Kathleen Stewart was used to waiting for test results. She'd been called back for additional mammogram images many times and had already undergone two biopsies ...
September is Thyroid Cancer Awareness Month, which makes this a good time to learn about treating thyroid cancer. Nearly 44,000 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed ...


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SAN FRANCISCO — Frustrated parents in San Francisco have coined a new phrase for their latest classroom reality: "Zoom in a Room." In Los Angeles, students can start going back to school in person, but more than half say they will stick with distance learning.
Kira Gaber said she's been told to send her kindergartner back to his San Francisco classroom with a laptop and headphones — aka Zoom in a Room. His teacher will be working online from home, while an adult monitor watches the kids in class.
"How is this OK? This is completely not in-person learning," said Gaber, who doesn't plan to send her son to class with a computer. "I'm going to send him with worksheets and a coloring book."
Reopening schools varies city to city because of California's decentralized education system, where 1,200 school districts must negotiate new contracts with workers. While educators were among the first groups eligible for vaccines, some districts have let them keep working from home if they or someone they live with is at increased risk from COVID-19.
Across the U.S., what it means to be back in school looks very different from one state to the next. New York City, the nation's largest school district, allowed students to return last fall, but the Department of Education expects just one-third of its 960,000 K-12 students in classrooms by month's end.
As of March 29, more than 40% of districts nationwide had offered all students the option to return to full-time in-person instruction, according to the Return to Learn Tracker, developed in part by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
California ranks last in the country, according to Burbio, a company that monitors some 1,200 school districts, including the largest 200 in the country.
An analysis by the Los Angeles Times found that just 3 million of California's 6.2 million K-12 students now have the option to learn in a classroom, and most are younger children. Even in schools offering an in-person return, some kids will receive only a few hours a week of classroom instruction.
Several states have ordered schools to offer in-person instruction, including Iowa, Florida, Washington and Oregon.
But not California. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pushed to reopen schools by setting aside vaccines for educators and dangling financial incentives, but he's made it clear he will not order classrooms to open.
Teachers unions have outsized political power in the Democratic-led state, and Newsom is expected to face a recall election partly over his handling of the pandemic. Last week, the Democratic governor said California plans to lift nearly all pandemic restrictions by June 15.
"There will be no barrier to having our kids back in in-person instruction," he said. "That is our expectation."
But most students will be on summer vacation by then.
Advocates of reopening argue that online learning exacerbates the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their white and Asian peers. Many private schools and some smaller California school districts have been open for months.
But the students at risk of falling behind are not necessarily the ones clamoring to return.
In Los Angeles, where about 80% of the 600,000 K-12 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and one in five is an English learner, Superintendent Austin Beutner said a survey indicated that parents in communities hardest hit by the pandemic were more reluctant to send their children to school.
"Our challenge is convincing families that schools are safe," Beutner said recently.
Nearly three-quarters of families surveyed in San Diego said they preferred a mix of in-person and remote learning, rather than online. Parents of white students expressed the most enthusiasm for in-person instruction, and those of Asian students the least.
In the Elk Grove Unified School District, the state's fifth largest, schools expanded in-person teaching to four days a week from two because of relaxed social distancing requirements and fewer students opting to return — only 39% of elementary school students and 24% of secondary students so far, said Scott Scidmohr, lead director with the Elk Grove Educators Association.
Unlike San Diego, LA and other larger districts, San Francisco has no timetable for middle and high school students to return this academic year. The city, which has had some of the lowest infection and death rates in the country, took the remarkable step in February of suing its own school district to reopen classrooms.
While districts in other states have had to hire classroom monitors to oversee children as educators teach from home, the prospect of "Zoom in a Room" sent many of San Francisco's already frustrated parents over the edge. Officials said almost 300 staffers have permission to work remotely.
"I'm sending my kid because she misses her friends. If not, I wouldn't even bother because this is a joke," said Robin Herman, whose daughter's fourth-grade teacher will be dialing in.
One of the challenges in planning, educators say, is that California keeps changing the rules.
Until recently, schools were told to space students 6 feet (2 meters) apart, then it changed to 3 feet (1 meter), allowing more students to squeeze into a classroom but requiring new negotiations with teachers unions. Educators wonder what might change with Newsom's June 15 reopening push.
Santa Ana Unified, a district with about 45,000 students in Orange County, has decided to finish the school year online.
Parents like Lucinda Solórzano, a mother of three students in the district, are pleading for classrooms to reopen. She says parents weren't given a choice, despite falling infection rates and increasing vaccinations.
"They don't know what it is to have a child who's given up," Solórzano said.
Taxin reported from Orange County. Associated Press journalist Karen Matthews contributed to this story from New York.


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So, I'm cheating. I really wasn't planning on cooking just yet. You see, I spent a whole lot of the last few weeks of pregnancy honing in on cookbooks that focus on simpler, but uncompromised cooking (and I will absolutely do a post on these, soon), bookmarking the kind of recipes I could imagine assembling with one hand tied behind my back (or you know, holding a squawking newborn) and even banking a decent amount of recipes, such as that date spice loaf and the stuffed eggplant, and a few other things I have even told you about yet. And I don't need to cook either: Our fridge is filled with homemade matzo ball soup, spaghetti and meatballs, endless bagel fixings, pickles galore, fruit, sandwich bread, lunch meats, milk for cereal and you name it (did I tell you our families were awesome or what?). Do you hear me? There is no reason on earth that I need to be pulling down the pots and pans right now. And yet I did. Because there was something — one tiny thing, perhaps — that I had not anticipated when I mapped these early weeks out in my head.
I am so freaking hungry.
Here's the thing: When I was pregnant, I never had a huge appetite. I don't know why, I just didn't. Trying to figure out what to eat was an exacting process, to say the least. I'd eat perhaps half of whatever I had in front of me, and listlessly push the rest around the plate. I tried to woo my tastebuds with beef empanadas, migas and pasta but I have to confess: none of it did anything for me. It kinda blew.
So, to suddenly be consumed with the desire to eat, well, everything is like waking up from a 10-month slumber. I see squash and eggplants and cauliflower and onions and you name it at the markets and no, I cannot wait out some self-imposed no-cooking period, I must cook right now. And so I did. And I didn't even ease myself back with one of those pared-down recipes; I made a crust and I caramelized onions and ended up with exactly the quiche I'd been craving.
I did have a little help, though, in the form of a swing (I call it Mother's Little Helper, if you must know) that my sister bought Jacob which sits right outside the kitchen. He loves it. He snorgles into the lamb-eared pillow and stays napping and content for hours in there. Mama gets her hands free for a while, Jacob gets mezmerized by the flying lambs, and we all get quiche — everyone wins.
Quiche, previously: Spinach Quiche, Leek and Mushroom Quiche and Leek and Swiss Chard Tart and wow, it looks like I might need a leek intervention soon, eh?
One year ago: Twice-Baked Shortbread, Acorn Squash Quesadillas
Two years ago: Arroz Con Pollo and Gazpacho Salad
Quiche Lorraine
Adapted from Le Pain Quotidien
So, curiously enough, one of the few places I could reliably find something I wanted to eat during my 9-plus months of no appetite this year was a chain restaurant (Quelle horreur! Except it is not.), Le Pain Quotidien. I loved their barely sweet granola bars, their hefty miche and countless simple lunches like this. (I believe they had a cookbook at some point, but it is either AWOL or out of print or maybe I'm just making this up?) Nevertheless, I found this recipe online and was chomping at the bit to make it, stat. No seriously, like the minute I got home from the hospital.
What sets this apart from other versions of this quiche is the piles of caramelized leeks and the richer-than-rich sour and heavy cream custard, two things I implore you not to miss out on. I hadn't made this tart crust before, but was very impressed by how easy it came together and how crisp it remained as a shell without requiring a par-baking. I will definitely use it again.
1 3/4 cups diced leeks, white and light green only (from about 2 large leeks, although I think you can get away with one super-big leek)
3/4 cup diced onion
2 1/2 teaspoons olive oil (I needed a tad more)
1 1/4 cups flour
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons cornstarch
6 tablespoons butter, diced
4 eggs, divided
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon heavy cream
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sour cream
Pinch nutmeg
Pinch pepper
1 1/2 cups diced ham (1/4 -inch dice; I used about 1/2 pound)
3/4 cup grated Swiss cheese
1. Heat a large sauté pan over low heat. Sauté the leeks and onions in the olive oil 30 to 40 minutes until caramelized, occasionally stirring. Remove from heat and cool.
2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine the flour, cornstarch and one-fourth teaspoon salt. Cut the butter in with a pastry blender, fork or two knives until it is in very tiny bits. Add one egg (a fork works great for this) and mix it until a dough forms. (Dough can also be made in a food processor, or in theory, and as the original recipe suggests, in a stand mixer.)
3. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to a 12-inch circle. Place the dough in a 9-inch pie plate (I used an 8-inch deep tart pan, though ended up with extra filling) and press to remove any air bubbles. Crimp the edges, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
4. While the quiche shell chills, mix the heavy cream and sour cream in a medium bowl. Whisk in the remaining three eggs. Add a pinch each nutmeg, salt and pepper and combine to form a batter. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
5. Remove the quiche shell from the refrigerator and spread the leek and onion mixture evenly over the base. Sprinkle the ham and then the cheese over the leeks and onions. Pour in the batter and place the quiche in the oven.
6. Bake until puffed and golden, about 25 to 30 minutes (a deeper pan, such as the one I used, will require extra baking time). Remove from the oven and cool slightly on a rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.


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Press Release
WASHINGTON A former U.S. Army Sergeant pleaded guilty today to bribery in connection with a fuel theft scheme to solicit more than $400,000 in bribes from a government contractor in Afghanistan, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride of the Eastern District of Virginia.
Michael Dugger, 27, of Jonesboro, Ga., pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Court Judge T. S. Ellis, III in the Eastern District of Virginia to a one-count criminal information charging him with bribery as a public official. Dugger was originally charged in a criminal complaint filed on June 24, 2010. The complaint charged him and Stevan Nathan Ringo, a former U.S. Army staff sergeant in Afghanistan, with one count of conspiracy to commit theft of government property. The charge against Ringo remains pending. The charge in the complaint is merely an allegation, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
According to court documents, Ringo and Dugger were stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Shank, a U.S. Army installation in the Logar Province of Eastern Afghanistan. FOB Shank supports U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in various ways, including through fuel receipt and redistribution. More specifically, the Army stores large quantities of fuel at FOB Shank and redistributes that fuel to installations in the surrounding area through government contractors. Dugger's responsibilities included supervision of FOB Shank's fuel redistribution process.
In his guilty plea, Dugger admitted that between January and February 2010 he aided and abetted a co-conspirator's solicitation and acceptance of more than $400,000 in bribes from a government contractor, all in exchange for his co-conspirator's creation and submission of fraudulent paperwork permitting that contractor to steal fuel from FOB Shank. Dugger also admitted that he helped his co-conspirator conceal the money in various locations in and around FOB Shank. The total value of the fuel stolen during the course of the scheme was at least $1.39 million.
At sentencing, Dugger faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and a fine of $250,000; twice the gross gain or loss from the scheme; or three times the value of the payments solicited or received. Dugger's sentencing is currently scheduled for Nov. 5, 2010, at 9:00 a.m.
The case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Ryan S. Faulconer of the Criminal Division's Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Edmund P. Power for the Eastern District of Virginia. Substantial assistance was provided by Trial Attorney Dan E. Stigall of the Criminal Division's Office of International Affairs. The case is being investigated by the FBI, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Division, other military law enforcement at FOB Shank, and members of the National Procurement Fraud Task Force (NPFTF) and the International Contract Corruption Task Force (ICCTF).
The NPFTF, created in October 2006 by the Department of Justice, was designed to promote the early detection, identification, prevention and prosecution of procurement fraud associated with the increase in government contracting activity for national security and other government programs. The ICCTF is a joint law enforcement agency task force that seeks to detect, investigate, and dismantle corruption and contract fraud resulting from U.S. Overseas Contingency Operations worldwide, including in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.


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Cherie Currie is many things to rock music fans: The 50-year-old blond bombshell who made out with Joan Jett, the front woman for the rock 'n' roll band that changed the way women were perceived in music, and now the author of a book that brings us The Runaways, a biopic that opens March 19 and is based on her just-published memoir Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway. The accomplished chain saw carver (Currie was rated number 7 in the world in chain saw competition in 2008) was inspired by her son, Jake (his father is Robert Hays of Airplane! fame) to revisit and expand on her 1989 book, Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story, only this time including the dark events that occurred behind the scenes of The Runaways -- the band's rise to fame and demise, Currie's struggles with drugs and being raped, and how she overcame everything. Currie to discuss her triumphant return to the studio with Jett, working with Dakota Fanning (who plays her in the film), and that kiss between Fanning and Runaways costar Kristen Stewart.The Advocate: Why were you forced to omit so much from 1989's Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story?Cherie Currie: First of all the 1989 book was for young adults. It was the publisher's first young adult book. The first book had so much in it for that audience that they felt, hey, this is good enough. And around 2000, with my son being a teenager at that time, I decided I wanted to rewrite the book; I read the book again -- I hadn't read it in a few years -- and I just wanted to tell the stories I couldn't tell in the young adult books. What are the primary differences between this memoir and the 1989 book?It's completely different; it comes from a different point of view. It comes from a 50-year-old woman instead of a girl in her 20s. I have no fear in this book. I really have had all this time to think and revisit what really happened. I don't care what people think; I think that just comes with age.How much influence did you have during production of The Runaways?Not a whole lot. They were receptive to some things that I felt could be changed, but again in the end they had the final say, as always. I was so blessed to have worked closely with Dakota, and I was always there for her -- I was there with her in the studio, she came to my home. We worked really hard on the songs and on her stage performances. We were under quite a time constraint as well. We gave it our all. Joan was there every day as much as she could be.
What was it like working with Joan again?We've been able to rekindle a friendship that was lost when I left the Runaways, so there's a lot of unfinished issues that neither one of us were aware of. When I left the group, I really thought that she wanted me out, that all the girls wanted me out. It turns out that that wasn't the truth and that Joan was really pissed, that she didn't want me to leave. It was a complete lack of communication by that time. We were all so tired. We never had a break. What was it like returning to the studio -- as the Runaways -- with Joan after more than 30 years to record the film's soundtrack?It was like time stood still. We never missed a beat. We went right in and cut the songs like we did 35 years ago and it was fantastic. Our voices still blend so well together. Literally it was just a take or two and we were done. [Laughs] Would you ever record with her again?Of course! Absolutely! Working with Joan is just incredible. She's a fantastic artist. There was always this magic there with the Runaways and it's still there.What was it like being at the Sundance Film Festival in January for the big premiere party for the film? It was great to sit there watching Joan, one of the greatest female performers of all time, with Kristen and Dakota. It was absolutely fantastic. I'm living my dream. I'm living the dream that I gave up on 35 years ago, and it's just remarkable that the Runaways are getting the notoriety now that we deserved back then. Would you ever consider reuniting the Runaways?Well, without [drummer] Sandy West it's kind of impossible. Sandy was ... there's just no one like her. When Sandy passed away, that whole idea kind of went with her. But you never know in life. We never thought this film was going to happen. I never thought I was going to have the opportunity to write a book twice and get a second chance. I don't ever say no, something could never happen, because this movie and what Kenny Laguna did with my book, it just shows me that anything is possible. But we kind of knew that when we were in the Runaways. We kind of knew that anything was possible. We just didn't think it would take 35 years! [Laughs]
The Internet has been ablaze with news of the Dakota Fanning-Kristen Stewart kiss from the movie. How much of what's in the film is accurate?Oh, it's all accurate. Joan and I were best friends back in the '70s. Back in the '70s, David Bowie and Elton John had come out -- even Mick Jagger was talking about it. It's what was happening back then. There wasn't any stigma. There wasn't any kind of prejudice like there is now about that. It was great, and Joan being my best friend at the time, we just had a lot of fun.How did you get into chain saw carving?It was just a fluke. I was working in wood at the time, doing relief carving, and was driving over to Malibu beach and saw a couple of guys chain-saw carving on the side of the road and I couldn't get it out of my head. It just kept irking me. The next weekend I went over there. I talked to the owner, and he looked at some of my artwork, and I went to work there the next day. And he taught me how to not kill myself with the saw, and for that I'll be forever grateful! [Laughs] What new projects are you working on?I've been working on the book, and there are a couple of other irons in the fire. I'm still carving, which keeps me very sane in this wonderful craziness. And I'm going to go in the studio and I'm going to do some shows this summer. It'll be fun. I've got my kid up there in the band with me, which is a blast. He was giving Lita [Ford] a run for her money when he was 15.Will you be touring?I'm going to be doing some shows, but I don't know to what extent. But I am going to be doing some shows.
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Crayons started a Math Mammoth worksheet about months and years. Her homework is to calculate how many days old she is.
We read a little bit of Evangeline. Evangeline is still waiting for it to be tomorrow so that she can go hunt down Gabriel. But these are my favourite lines from this section:
Then from his station aloft, at the head of the table, the herdsman...spake to his guests, who listened, and smiled as they listened:--Aw, c'mon, we do get summer here too, you know.
"Welcome once more, my friends, who long have been friendless and homeless,
Welcome once more to a home, that is better perchance than the old one!
Here no hungry winter congeals our blood like the rivers;
Here no stony ground provokes the wrath of the farmer.
Smoothly the ploughshare runs through the soil, as a keel through the water.
All the year round the orange-groves are in blossom; and grass grows
More in a single night than a whole Canadian summer..."
Royalty and Empire exhibit created in 1982. This led into a discussion about Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee, and the Queen's family, and what happened to Princess Margaret Rose (Crayons remembered her from an American Girl movie), and the hats that the princesses wore to The Wedding (which was a year ago yesterday).
We also read about how Alexander treated the female relatives of Darius after the battle of Issus (kindly), and about the reluctant king Abdalonymus of Sidon. (It's a good story, even if it seems like kind of a historical urban myth.) Crayons recreated both stories with her dolls afterward.


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The girls played with them for days!
That same day (this past Saturday) we were completely surprised with our first snowfall of the season.
And for this month's grand finale: Halloween! I've never been a big fan of this particular holiday, but for some reason I have been very gung-ho about making sure my girls have a great time each year.


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These in-ear headphones are perfect for dynamic sound on the go. Take calls with ease using the inline microphone, and jump right back into your music when you're done, with the inline remote.
- Driver Unit
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- 5Hz-24,000Hz
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- Approx. 1.2 m, Litz cable,Y-type
What's in the Box
Hybrid earpiece SS/S/M/L Cable adjuster


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Herradura Hacienda del Cristero Tequila
A pure blanco tequila. Its lack of barrel contact allows it to retain a perfect clear color, and its exceptionally long distillation process makes this one of the smoothest tequilas in the world. It is a true thoroughbred among tequilas.
Founded by Ambrosio Rosales and Aurelio Lopez in 1870, Tequila Herradura represents one of the world's most revered and storied tequila brands of all time. In 1963 the company introduced the first Reposado tequila to the commercial market and several years presented the first Extra Añejo, Seleccion Suprema.. The 100%, all natural, estate grown and estate bottled agave is the primary reason Tequila Herradura reflects an authentic taste and proud tradition of Mexico Today, Tequila Herradura is the largest holder of barrels in Mexico and one of the leading 100% Blue Agave tequilas in the world.
Located and produced in the tiny town of Amatitan, Jalisco just outside of Guadalajara, Tequila Herradura is 100 percent blue agave, all-natural, estate grown and estate bottled. Renowned for being the tequila industry's foremost innovator since 1870, Tequila Herradura is made from the finest blue agave, with an unrivaled patience and meticulous care. The result: a deeply complex flavor of uncompromising quality. At Casa Herradura, tequila production is truly an art form – a process that is never complete until perfection is achieved.


text: It's a bit of a mixed bag. You have to fiddle with a slider bar to read the pages, then when you turn to read the next page, there's this really strange zoom out then zoom in behavior before it will turn the page! What's up with that? Whatever happened to just flipping to the next page WITHOUT the zoom in, zoom out special effects. The one dark-comical moment: In the December 2009 edition, on page 19, a BMW Motorsports advertisement about the Rahal-Letterman racing program, BMW bragging about their racing and motorsports involvement, one issue after announcing they were pulling out of factory-sponsored racing altogether. What was that all about? The most ironic thing about it was the title: Commitment. M-Power. Commitment? BMW quit their racing program, so how can they advertise about commitment? Is that the same as the "lifetime fill" fluid they've been telling people their transmissions use?


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Publishers of technology books, eBooks, and videos for creative people
Register your product to gain access to bonus material or receive a coupon.
• Coverage on the new, hot business model for Free2Play games, such as FarmVille, Bejeweled Blitz, Words with Friends, and others.
• Provides details on virtual economies, gameplay, monetization, analytics, and marketing.
• Clear, to-the-point style makes this an easy-to-digest and informative read.
• Gives the framework for designing and developing games that are profitable and fun in this hot, fast-growing area of gaming.
" Will's knowledge of F2P comes from years of building games, as well as writing about and consulting with developers on the model. All the topics covered in this book—economics, gameplay, monetization, analytics and marketing—are important to consider when you're building an F2P game, and Will covers each with an easy-to-digest style." —Ian Marsh, co-founder, NimbleBit
Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away is an accessible and complete guide to the business model that has revolutionized the videogames industry, creating huge hits, multi-billion-dollar startups and a new deal for players: Play for free, spend on what you like.
Written by respected game designer and consultant Will Luton, Free-to-Play gives you the in-the-trenches insight you need to build, run and make money from games you give away. In it you'll find:
A Conversation with Will Luton on Free-to-Play Games
Making Money From Games You Give Away: Understanding and Serving Your Players through Analytics
Download Chapter 4 Analytics: Understanding and Serving Your Players
How F2P Changed Games XV
Chapter 1: Economics
How the Money Works 1
Physical vs. Digital (Why Bits Aren't Atoms) 2
The Internet Is an Open Market; Your Game Isn't 6
We Don't Buy Things; We Buy Emotions 7
Not All Players Spend Equally 9
The Math 11
The Acronyms: A Primer 14
The Money Formulas 15
Winning at F2P: Increasing Profits with KPIs 17
Users and Engagement 20
Retention and Churn 20
Spend and Conversion 21
Cost Per Acquisition 24
Overheads 24
Improving KPIs Holistically 24
Chapter 2: Gameplay
Keeping Players Coming Back 27
F2P: The Good Games Revolution 28
Core Loops: The Beating Heart of Games 32
Structure of the Loop 32
Upgrades in the Loop 33
Waits in the Loop 34
Grinding in the Loops 38
Sessioning: Showing Your Players the Door 39
Finite Loops: How Sessions Work 40
Return Triggers: Enticing Your Players to
Come Back 44
Appointment Triggers 45
Competitive Triggers 46
Social Commitment Triggers 47
Location Triggers 48
Sales and Events Triggers 48
Nudge Triggers 49
Player Motivations: Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds
and Spades 52
Hearts (or Socializers) 52
Clubs (or Killers) 53
Diamonds (or Achievers) 53
Spades (or Explorers) 53
It's an Understanding 53
Goal Systems: Retaining Players for Years 56
Rats in Boxes: The Secrets of Variable
Reinforcement 57
Increasing the Rewards 59
Choosing a Schedule 62
Examples of Goal Systems 63
Don't Tick Boxes 68
Chapter 3: Monetization
Play ers Reward You with $$$ 71
What to Sell: The Four Cs of IAPs 76
Content 76
Convenience 77
Competitive Advantage 80
Customization 81
Mixed Cs 84
Creating Demand: Supply and Pinch Points 84
Virtual Currencies 86
Energy 87
Virtual Goods 88
Making Money from Demand 88
Creating Value: Comparison, Quality and
Experience 89
Comparison 90
Quality and Experience 92
Breaking the Barrier: Getting Players to Spend 93
User Experience 96
First Purchase Deal 96
Social Proof 97
Beyond IAPs 97
Advertising 97
Product Placement 104
Merchandise 104
Store Cards 105
Observe, Improve, Repeat 105
Chapter 4: Analytics
Understanding and Serving 107
Your Play ers
The Eternal Beta 108
Don't Listen to What People Say, Look at
What They Do 109
Collecting Data 111
The Metrics You Need 114
AB Testing 121
Data Quality 123
Statistics: The Analyst's Toolbox 124
Averages: Mean, Mode and Median 125
Causation and Variables 128
Regression Analysis 128
The Art of Interpretation 130
Gather Data, Test, Analyze 130
Chapter 5: Marketing
Reaching Players 133
Eyes on Your Game 135
Buying Players 135
Press 136
Organic Traffic 137
Viral Marketing 141
Players in the Funnel 143
No Two Players Are Alike 148
Catching Leaks: Sharing Players and
Building Communities 149
Strategic Positioning 151
The High-level Proposition 153
The Best Marketing of All 156
Appendix A
The F2P Spreadsheet 159
Appendix B
Additional Resources on 163
Free-to-Play Games
Appendix C
Interview with Zynga Co-founder 179
and CEO Mark Pincus
Index 188


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Friends Season 9 Episode 20 : The One with the Soap Opera Party
While Rachel is in the same position as Joey was a year ago, Joey holds a Days of our Lives party for the cast, but doesn't want any of his friends to come. Ross gets a crush on another professor, Charlie (Aisha Tyler), who has only ever dated "Nobel Prize" winners. He and Rachel catch her and Joey kissing at the party.
Episode Guide
Season 01
Season 02
Season 03
Season 04
Season 05
Season 06
Season 07
Season 08
Season 09
Season 10


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Man Commits Suicide in Mall After Girlfriend Refuses to Stop Shopping
A man who was fed up with his girlfriend's incessant Christmas shopping responded to her request for one more look around a mall shoe store by leaping seven floors to his death.
The 38-year-old, identified as Tao Hsiao, had been shopping with his girlfriend at the Golden Eagle International Shopping Center in Xuzhou, China, when she asked to check out one last shoe store.
Having been inside the mall for five hours, Tao had reached his limit, and reportedly insisted that they leave immediately.
"He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes that she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying any more," an eyewitness was quoted as saying. "She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument."
Surveillance footage shows Tao angrily hurling the shopping bags and jumping over the railing onto the cosmetics section below.
A spokesman for the shopping center says no one below was injured in December 7 incident, and that the man died instantly upon impact.
"This is a tragic incident, but this time of year can be very stressful for many people," the spokesman said.


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Anis Oueslati graduated from the IHEC (Institut Supérieur des Hautes Etudes Commerciales) Business School in Tunis, and the ENA – National School of Administration in Tunis. He is the Comptroller General of the Public Accounts and served as Chairman of the High Commission of the Control and Audit of Public Contracts from 2014 to 2016, then Secretary General of the Ministry of Environment and Local Affairs since January 2017 before being appointed President Director General of Tunisian National Railways (SNCFT) on 17 October 2017, succeeding Mrs Sarra Rejeb, who has been appointed Secretary of State to the Minister of Transport.
In his capacity as President Director General of the SNCFT, Mr Anis Oueslati will chair the Union of African Railways (UAC), a specialised agency of the African Union (AU).
(Source: SNCFT)


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Firefall, The Last of Us, Comic-Con Recap - The Lobby
Join us on The Lobby as we Take a look at the launch of Firefall, The Last of Us PS4 Remaster and go over some of the awesome things that ...
Join us on The Lobby as we Take a look at the launch of Firefall, The Last of Us PS4 Remaster and go over some of the awesome things that ...
Watch extended gameplay footage from Firefall featuring the Giant Bomb crew.
This week we get the Last of Us Remastered, Rogue Legacy, Titanfall gets the Frontier's Edge DLC, and Firefall is officially releasing after three years of betas!
Here's your first look the gigantic lava worm Kanaloa in this video of upcoming shooter Firefall's Titan Battles. Titan Battles are 20-player instances intended for max-level characters, and players can ...
Firefall launches on July 29th, 2014.
With Firefall finally making its way out of Beta, Kevin walks you through what you can expect from the MMO shooter.
Hop on this mount and ride into the sunset in this Firefall gameplay clip.
Discover the mysterious Blackwater Anomaly.
Aaron and Ryan explore the Open World MMO Shooter, FireFall.
Here's Firefall's latest trailer, which premiered at PAX East 2013.
Check out a Firefall gameplay trailer featuring jetpacks, gliders, and vertical exploration.
Check out a sampling of the features found in Firefall.
Maxwell finds out about the latest development updates to Firefall shown at PAX Prime 2012.
Tom & Kelly interview Red 5 Studios CEO Mark Kern at the Firfall booth at PAX Prime 2012
Shoutcasters rejoice as you will receive several esports tools to use while casting Firefall.
Wondering how far free-to-play games have come? Check out this demo for Firefall to find out!
On the Spot brings you demos of Infinity Blade: Dungeons, Bellator MMA Onslaught, Mercenary Ops, and Firefall. We'll also have The Vocabularium, Trivia, and more!
GameSpot Asia's Jonathan Toyad takes you on a massively multiplayer online space shooting spree with Firefall!
This video from Extra Credits help convey the idea of Firefall's staged content approach to game publishing and game development.
This developer diary takes a look at Firefall's open world and how it is being created.
Here's the February 2012 developer diary video for Firefall.
Meet Mourningstar in the first part of the Firefall Cosplay Program video series.
In this video, Red 5 Studios brings to life Firefall's hardened war hero, Typhon, as well as Mourningstar.
Firefall lead class designer Dave Williams talks about keeping the classes balanced in PVP and PVE.
GameSpot Asia's Jonathan Toyad speaks to vice president of Red 5 Studios Tony Park about the online team-based FPS Firefall, its classes, art style, and what sets it apart from ...
Check out a trailer featuring Firefall's fifth battle frame, Dreadnought.
Check out this developer commentary video for Firefall at PAX 2010.
Check out this trailer of Firefall at ChinaJoy 2011.
Check out this trailer showcasing intense PVP action on Sunken Harbor for Firefall.
Check out this gameplay video from PAX 2010 for Firefall.
Check out this gameplay trailer of Firefall shown at the DigiChina event in Beijing.
Check out this cinematic trailer for upcoming free-to-play PC game Firefall.
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How Did Groupon Nearly Ruin a Bakery Business?
Groupon deals can be great for helping small businesses build a following, but for one bakery in the UK, offering a cut-rate deal on cupcakes nearly bankrupted the shop.
Rachel Brown's Need a Cake bakery offered a 75 percent discount on a dozen cupcakes, bringing the $40 price down to $10. What she didn't expect was for 8,500 people to take her up on the deal, which meant a shop that normally produces about 1,200 cupcakes per month was suddenly expected to make ten times that amount.
As a result of the massive demand, she had to bring in temporary workers at a cost of $19,500 — which resulted in a loss of between $2.90 and $4.70 on each batch of cupcakes she sold, wiping out all her profits for the year. What's worse, the temps weren't as skilled as Brown's normal employees and thus didn't produce the same high-quality product.
"Without doubt, it was my worst ever business decision," she said. "We had thousands of orders pouring in that really we hadn't expected to have… My poor staff were having to slog away at all hours — one of them even came in at 3 a.m. because she couldn't sleep for worry. We are still working to make up the lost money and will not be doing this again."
Heather Dickinson, international communications director for Groupon, said that while companies can state in their contracts that only a certain number of vouchers can be sold, Brown didn't request the limit in hers, adding, "Need a Cake wanted to run a national deal with us, but we advised them to feature in a few cities so they wouldn't overextend themselves."
Guess she should have turned to Seize the Deal, huh?