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Summary: As a break from the FM website's usual fare of geopolitical realism, today film critic Locke Peterseim reviews "Interstellar", an example of what passes for a science fiction film in our time. He explores its shallow but exquisitely rendered plot, so deftly revealing the themes that excite us. Perhaps another day he'll explain why Hollywood ignores the hundreds of awesome sci-fi tales written during the past 50 years in favor of this kind of hackwork. Post your thoughts about the movie in the comments.
Interstellar's Quantum Love and Other Cosmic Horses#*t
By Locke Peterseim
Posted at the film blog of Open Letters Monthly.
21 November 2014
Reposted here with his generous permission.
Christopher Nolan loves his daughter very much. He would like you to know that his parental love for his daughter is super large. Larger than your love for anything you might love in your lesser, non-blockbuster-making ways.
Once a cold, calculating director, Christopher Nolan now believes in love, and his love for his daughter is so big that it transcends time and space. His love is so big that he had to make a film about it. But not just any film.
You see, Christopher Nolan's love for his child is so immeasurably powerful and life-changingly epic that he had to make a really huge film. No mamby-pamby quiet meditation on life and parenthood. No naturalistic, small-scale capturing of the reality of human interaction. Leave that stuff to the independent whiners and pikers with their out-of-focus grainy navel-gazing.
Chris Nolan don't play that game no more. Chris Nolan made The Dark Knight. Chris Nolan made Inception. So when he makes a movie that explores the power of the human heart by exploring the boundaries of human imagination, he does it on a grand scale.
The kind of awesome box-office-exploding film making that puts fat asses in extra-wide theater seats by the billions. The kind that cost $165 million dollars and is full of mind-blowing imagery and fist-pounding excitement and adventure. A film full of love. And exploration. And danger. And hope. And science stuff. That runs almost three hours and must be seen on the biggest screen possible.
To show us all how much he loves his daughter, Christopher Nolan had to make Interstellar. We will now take a moment of silence to thank Christopher Nolan for letting us pay for the privilege of experiencing (preferably on IMAX) his cinematic vision and its nearly-ungraspable humanistic scope and philosophical depth.
That done, we should probably also take a moment to point out that Christopher Nolan's ode to the power of both familial and romantic love; his visually stunning paean to the American pioneer spirit of exploration and adventure; his plea for a renewed belief in the importance of scientific invention and understanding; his mind-blowing journey to the unseen space-time shores beyond our comprehension and imagination; is, per production dollar spent and running time endured, one of the most insultingly stupid affronts to your sense and sensibilities you'll see this year. Cinematically, Interstellar is an impressive film. In every other respect — character, story, theme, ideas — it's dumb as a bag of zero-gee space hammers.
But hey, Nolan loves his daughter. Love! So shut up.
Interstellar is set in a near future where apparently bad stuff has happened that has returned America to its rural Eisenhower-era ways. Everything's dusty. Crops have failed, so farmers are the future, or something like that, but the future is dying. The federal government seems to have been rolled back to the local level.
Energy is apparently in short supply for everything except reading lamps and pick-up trucks. For reasons unclear — other than the folksy charm of baseball being returned to its idealized halcyon roots of Mom, Apple Pie and, Chevrolet — the New York Yankees are now a traveling exhibition team that plays in small-town sandlots. In other words, it's the sort of big-movie, pandering, easy-feel notion of America the way many social conservatives imagine it should be: rural, folksy, down-home, family-centric, and science-free.
Though he'll eventually take us literally across the galaxy, Nolan isn't interested in showing much of Earth other than a single small town, specifically the farm of an astronaut-turned-dirt-farmer-turned-back-to-astronaut with the very Right Stuffed name of Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, giving this great-looking cosmic cheese-platter payday exactly the amount of his attention and talent he knows it deserves).
Much to the chagrin of his loving, science-minded daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), Coop is enlisted by NASA (which operates in secret out of a hidden underground science bunker on a budget it apparently procured by taking back cans) to answer a mysterious call from presumably some higher alien intelligence, blast off with astronauts Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley), and Romilly (David Gyasi) and fly through a wormhole that's been set up near Saturn (again presumably by the aliens).
Their mission is to find out what happened to previous NASA expeditions sent through the wormhole and hopefully find a new suitable future home to which they can migrate the human race and save it from extinction on the dying Earth. (Apparently, despite the global economic and environmental collapse, NASA had a whole bunch of interstellar rockets just laying around, like that box of old cellphones you keep under your desk.)
Meanwhile, left back on Earth, Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain, Space Scientist, while resenting Cooper for having left her. (He literally runs out the door, jumps in his truck, and drives off to Secret Underground NASA, as if he suddenly decided to go to Vegas for a weekend rather than across the galaxy for decades. Secret NASA seems to only be an hour or two's drive from the Cooper Farm, but once he runs off, Coop can't be bothered to go back and visit his family before blasting off into space.)
(Also, Coop's wife died years earlier, as wives and moms so often do in these kinds of Spielbergian cinematic vision quests. Dead mom-wives make family members left behind seem so much more poignant and strong, so much deeper. And their absence also lets widowed Dad have a noble stirring in his spacesuit for a pretty, younger scientist-astronaut.)
Coop also has an older son, but Coop, the Nolans, and the film have very little use for him, other than as an embittered, narrow-minded, paranoid thematic prop to be deployed later for narrative effect. No wonder he grows up to be sullen, creepy Casey Affleck.
That's no knock on the younger Affleck, who is a fine actor, but the Cooper son is not unique in his shallow utilitarian nature. There are no real, human characters in Interstellar — everyone is there to act as an avatar of a larger idea or ideal.
Cooper is the loving, protective father with the can-do American spirit of exploration and adventure (multiple times his yee-haw pilot skills save the day when pre-programmed flight science falls short); Murph is the future hope of scientific curiosity and imagination; John Lithgow is on hand as Coop's baby-sitting father in law, so Coop's children aren't entirely abandoned; Michael Caine's Professor Brand, the head of Secret NASA, is The Wise Elder who recites the same Dylan Thomas poem over and over. Bill Irwin voices a cool robot that is on hand to represent cool robots.
And Hathaway's younger Brand is… well, her character is Love. That's it. That's her entire purpose in the film. Hathaway is Hollywood's current embodiment of romantic, sometimes tragic love, with those big sad eyes full of hope and pain, and so her character is included in Interstellar just so she can give a big speech in the middle about the Power of Love. About how love is not simply a chemically-created genetic survival instinct, but literally a scientifically measurable, quantum force that can transcend time and space.
No, really, she says that. For pure movie-magic stupidity, this is right up there with George Lucas trying to convince us that the Force really runs on Midicholrians in the blood stream. Nolan has always approached human behavior as something that, while complex, can still be categorized and explained, and Interstellar feels as if the director, flummoxed by his own love for real people in his life, sets out to find a cosmic spreadsheet he can fit the powerful emotion into, to make it part of the greater formula of life.
All of Interstellar's characters are laid out in that same spreadsheet, each of them carefully assigned traits and motivations that neatly fit into the film's larger panorama. Nolan is so in love with his concepts and constructions that his characters almost always feel like just another collection of components. They don't act, speak, or behave like real, people, but as simulacra; their feelings quantified, their arcs classified and cataloged.
There are only three types of characters in Interstellar: farmers, scientists, and astronauts (four if you count the highly symbolic baseball players in the background), and each type is painted with broad, easy, thin strokes. There's hardly a line of dialogue in the film that sounds like it was uttered by a human being in natural conversation with another. Instead, everyone converses in platitudes and pronouncements and fierce declarations of intent. And Dylan Thomas poetry. Lots of Dylan Thomas poetry.
Interstellar is also a film that purports to celebrate science, the quest for discovery, the curiosity of exploration, and the triumph of rational thought and knowledge over superstition and fear. At one point the film pointedly trots out a near-future school teacher who insists the Apollo moon landings were staged. The message is clear: See what happens to us as a society when we abandon scientific thought? We get giant crop-destroying dust storms that make everything really dusty and reduce the mighty New York Yankees to playing ball in Little League lots.
But as things progress and the plot manipulations demand it, the Nolan brothers start tossing around increasingly ridiculous science (much of it having to do with the poor, abused Theory of Relativity) purely for the sake of keeping the short-attention-span audience goosed with regular doses of oooh-aaaah action scenes and awwww tear-duct sucker-punches.
(Between the black holes, worm holes, tessaracts, and gravity boogeying across the fifth dimension, it's as if they let McConaughey re-color the Laws of Physics during a smoky lunch break.)
Worst of all, after having Cooper give science and rational thought plenty of that sweet, sweet McConaughey drawling lip service in the first half, in the film's second half one of the characters who represents "pure science and rational thought" turns out to be a bad guy. Not just a bad guy, but a full-blown mustache-twirling bwahahahaha movie villain — in part because he supports a scientific, rational solution. So yeah, suck it, science. The heart wins! Love wins! The head loses. Science loses. Again.
When pressed on fact that even the "science" they fudged for the sake of narrative expediency and entertainment value, the Brothers Nolan would probably fall back on that hoariest of Hollywood excuses: "Well, it's more of a fable than reality, and the most important thing is engaging the audience in the story."
Except that even as an edifying, heart-felt fable, Interstellar is still full of space poop. The Nolans love them a good puzzle-box as Inception proves, but they get way too much respect as "storytellers" when in fact their idea of story is just that cool (cold) puzzle box that, no matter how artificially complex, fits neatly together, with all questions answered, all endings plausibility-stretching happy and hopeful.
Interstellar's larger narrative is suitably impressive only for its size, reach, and scope as it roams across space, time, and other dimensions. It's a massive, stunning achievement in epic geek movie making — it's totally cosmic, man — but it still feels utterly contrived and, despite all the tears, soulless.
Once you've stumbled out of the theater and back into the harsh light of reality, none of it makes a bit of sense, nor is it really supposed to — Nolan's plot points and exposition exists simply to support the tale he wants to tell (about a father's love for his daughter, in case you hadn't hipped to that yet) and to cheat out the film's cheap, shallow emotional beats. Ooh, farmers are important! Oh, space exploration is good! Ooh, loving your children (at least one of them) is nice!
In practice, the film itself is plenty entertaining and gripping, and when critics and audiences flail over themselves to praise Interstellar, that's what they're praising: its strange planets (one all gray water and giant tidal waves, the other layers of gray frozen clouds) look amazing and mostly holds your attention for a long two hours and 45 minutes. We are a generation raised by Spielberg and now roaming through non-stop media entertainment 24/7, not just susceptible to this sort of wide-screen string-pulling, but craving it. We live to be constantly seduced by spectacle, steadfast in our collective cultural belief that the cinema must be a constant dream factory, pumping out illusion to keep our restless consciousness from tumbling into existential despair.
Like Inception, Interstellar is loudly jacked up on contrived threats and races against time, perpetuated by increasingly silly imaginary "rules." (Interstellar ends up being as accurate and believable in its notions of space-time as Inception is on the science of dreams.)
Of course it's a mainstream film and thus requires a certain amount of goosed-up drama, danger, and conflict, but Nolan is so clinical about it, so brazen and sterile, even when injecting into it his seemingly newfound appreciation for "selfless" love. (Fueled with the overwhelming arrogance of a true explorer — or film maker, Cooper's idea of love is purely selfish. He's willing to sacrifice the future of humanity to see his daughter one more time.)
Nolan's ideas are comic-book shallow, which would be fine if Interstellar just wanted to be a comic-book movie, but it wants to be so much more, mean so much more. There's lots of talk about exploration and the pioneer spirit, about the stars and wonder, but by the end you understand that Nolan's enthusiasm isn't really for real science, it's for that mythical American West idea of just going out and doing something big somewhere new. The only reason Nolan wants to build a bridge to the future is so people can bungee jump off it.
Despite the sledgehammer repetition of Thomas' verse, Interstellar has no internal grace or vision of its own — it's all borrowed pomp and parade, no poetry. For all its pretensions of being "about something important," Interstellar is yet another dazzling fun ride tricked out to feel like both a science lesson and a life sermon.
Those seeking even the pop-lite existential melancholy and inward yearning of "Rocket Man" or "Space Oddity" are instead treated to very expensive, very epic and exciting rollercoaster and log flume rides. It's EPCOT Center in space. In love.
(2) About the author
Locke Peterseim writes the Hammer and Thump film blog at Open Letters Monthly, an online arts and literature magazine. A film critic whose work has appeared on Redbox, WGN Radio, and in the Magill's Cinema Annual, he also serves on the board of the Chicago Film Critics Association.
These days he still enjoys films on their artistic and entertainment merits, but also finds himself as much if not more interested in them as cultural mirrors; artifacts of how we want to see ourselves–and how mainstream studios want to sell those desires back to us.
Some of his other reviews:
- "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" asks if you want a Revolution.
- Transformers 4: the Greatest Film Ever Made About 21st Century America.
- 300: Rise of an Empire – The Half-Truths and Bloody Fog of Cartoon War.
- Ender's Game: Playing at Shock and Awe.
- "Edge of Tomorrow": Cruise, Again and Again.
- Shut the Robo-whining: The Robocop Remake Has Something on its Mind.
- A new Man of Steel for 21st century America: a warrior superman.
- Elysium Shouts Big, Loud Messages About Health Care & Immigration Reform. Gun Control, Not so Much.
- "The Lone Ranger" shows Hollywood's new paradigm, since films were too deep for us.
- Hollywood transforms "The Hobbit" into The Desolation of Tolkien.
- Fury: the big screen display of America's love of war, & inability to understand it.
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(4) The Trailer


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The first trailer of Solo: A Star Wars Story has finally arrived, offering a glimpse of the much-anticipated spinoff plagued by production troubles.
After a 45-second ad for the latest Star Wars film played during Sunday's Super Bowl, a 90-second teaser trailer premiered Monday on Good Morning, America. The footage showcased a gritty prequel featuring the snazzy interior of a then-new Millennium Falcon, the familiar growl of Chewbacca and a plethora of handsome fur coats.
Though punctuated by the brashness of Alden Ehrenreich's young Han Solo, the vibe of the trailer is a little chiller than was once forecast for Solo. The initial directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street) are known for their irreverent sense of humor, something that first excited many Star Wars fans when the pair was enlisted for the stand-alone installment.
But Lord and Miller were removed from the film six months into production over what Lucasfilm said were "different creative visions" on the film. Ron Howard was brought in as a replacement in July, and shooting concluded in October.
The trailer for the film, to be released May 25, seemed intent on assuring fans that Solo will be a more typically somber chapter in the science-fiction franchise. Young Solo is shown as an ambitious flyboy who drops out of the fight academy and enlists with a rogue band led by Woody Harrelson's Tobias Beckett.
"I've been running scams on the street since I was 10," Solo says in voice-over. "I was kicked out of the fly academy for having a mind of my own. I'm going to be a pilot — best in the galaxy."
Concerns have also been focused on Ehrenreich, who has the unenviable position of following in Harrison Ford's footsteps in one of the most iconic roles in movies. Before booking the role, Ehrenreich starred in Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail, Caesar! and Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply, but The Hollywood Reporter earlier reported that an acting coach was brought in late in the production to aid the actor's performance.
Instead of focusing solely on Solo, Monday's trailer promoted the film's larger ensemble, including Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, Emilia Clarke and Thandie Newton.

subset: commoncrawl


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(visited by Danny Strickland)
23-May-2002 -- I departed 46°N 105°W around 1:00 PM and drove about 2 hours north to Miles City, Montana. I spent about an hour there at a high-pressure spray carwash knocking the mud out from under my truck and from behind the wheels. There was enough "gumbo" mud stuck underneath to fill a couple of wheelbarrows and once it was gone, my truck stopped shaking, thank goodness. I continued north from Miles City towards this confluence.
It had turned into a beautiful day and I was glad I had decided to continue on my confluence-visiting vacation. It was 47°F (8° C) and the sky was blue with scattered white clouds. I drove across the inevitable bumpy cow pastures, saw several antelopes and dodged cows. For a while a tiny yellow or golden bird (American Goldfinch?) flew along with me. I was going slowly and he would fly low to the ground, staying slightly ahead of me. He would stop and wait for me, then dart ahead some more and wait again.
The land here wasn't as desert-like as the confluences I had visited in the last week. There were rolling grass covered hills and plowed fields. It was very picturesque. I was able to drive to within 0.8 miles (1.3 km) of the point and had to hike across a ravine and a newly plowed field to reach it. I took the photos and hiked back. While hiking through the lush ravine, I saw a rabbit and was able to walk up very close to it and take a picture before he ran into his hole.
I departed and drove towards the next confluence, 47°W 107°N. I stopped about 17 miles from it and camped out in a pasture for the night.
Danny Stricklandwww.artgaga.com


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Gospel truth demonstrated, in a collection of doctrinal books, given forth by that faithful minister of Jesus Christ, George Fox: containing principles essential to Christianity and salvation, held among the people called Quakers
Marcus T.C. Gould, 1831
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Términos y frases comunes
according Acts apostles beast believe blind blood bring brought called cast Christ Jesus christians church comes command contrary covenant darkness death deny destroy devil doth earth enemies enlightened everlasting evil eyes faith false Father fear flesh gave Gentiles give given glory God's gone gospel guilty hand hate hath head hear heart heathen heaven holy honour idols images Israel Jesus Christ Jews John judge judgment keep killed king kingdom known land liberty light live Lord manifest mark mind ministers Moses nature offering peace persecute preach priests prison profess promise prophets Quakers receive religion righteousness rule saints saith scriptures seed shew soul speak spirit spoke stand teach teachers temple thee things thou tongues transgression true truth turned unto walk whore wisdom witness woman word worship written yourselves
Pasajes populares
Página 402 - Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?
Página 112 - Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him ; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily : and thy righteousness shall go before thee ; the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward.
Página 104 - Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
Página 407 - Ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship; for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
Página 293 - And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord ; for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
Página 90 - THAT which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life ; (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us...
Página 66 - And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.
Página 76 - For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, And the men of Judah his pleasant plant: And he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; For righteousness, but behold a cry.
Página 335 - But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made.
Página 56 - For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.


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Detect and treat cataracts at a San Diego eye care specialist near you.
Cataracts cloud your vision. Tiny proteins accumulate in the eye lens and interfere with vision.
They grow slowly. Over time cataracts will reduce the ability to read, drive, and perform day-to-day tasks. There are short term solutions to help make the most of remaining vision. However surgery is often used to correct this problem.
Learn more below and contact a trusted eye care provider to find the right treatment for you. Find an office near you in the San Diego area.
How Cataracts Affect Vision
Cataracts form in the lens of the eye. As the eyes age, lenses become thicker and less flexible and the tissue begins to break down and clump together.
The normally clear lens becomes clouded and diminishes vision. Cataracts can occur in one or both eyes.
As cataracts grow, vision may change in several ways. Typical symptoms may include:
Cloudy, blurry, or dim vision
More difficulty seeing at night
More sensitivity to light and glare
"Halos" around light sources
Need for frequent changes in eye prescriptions
Perception of fading or yellowing of colors
Double vision in a single eye
Cataracts can occur in different parts of the eye lens. Depending upon their location, the symptoms may vary. The most common types include:
Nuclear cataracts, which cloud the center of the lens, are the most common form. Vision may become more nearsighted or even temporarily improved for reading. Both clear vision and colors will be distorted.
Cortical cataracts begin as streaks on the outer edge of the lens. Glare is a common issue.
Posterior subcapsular cataracts, which usually form near the back of the lens, are associated with underlying illness or injury. This kind causes difficulty with reading or glare.
Treating Cataracts
The symptoms of early cataracts can be managed and improved in many ways including new eyeglasses, brighter lighting, anti-glare sunglasses, or magnifying lenses. When cataracts grow large enough to interfere with sharp vision and day-to-day tasks, it may be time to consider surgery.


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Measure your wrist size
What do you need?• A piece of twine or a slip of paper (not too wide)• A ruler or measuring tapeMeasure• Wrap the piece of twine or slip of paper not too tight and not too loose around your wrist (just above the wrist bone, seen from the fingers.)• Draw a line on the piece of twine or slip of paper at the place where both ends meet.• Measure with a ruler or measuring tape the length up until the line.• Use your wrist size below to see our advice for a bracelet size.
Our advice for your wrist
Everyone has a personal preference for how tight or loose a bracelet should fit your wrist. The combination of wrist size and bracelet size above should therefore be taken as an advice.
TI SENTO rings are available in 8 different sizes. The sizing starts at size 48 and goes up to size 62. If you are not sure which size is right for you, use the following guide.
You can use different approaches to determine your size. Take a ring that you are currently wearing, place this on a ruler and measure its inside diameter in millimeters. If you do not have a ring, use a measuring tape to measure the circumference of your finger in millimeters. You can also use our printable ring sizer (download our sizing guide).The inside diameter is given in the sizing table as EU and you can also see the perimeter in millimeter. The size on the top on the chart is how we classify our ring sizes.
Use the button to download the printable version of the complete sizing table.
Download sizing guide
All sizes of the TI SENTO necklaces are featured behind the reference number. The sizes are in centimeters.
This image shows how the different lengths fall.
The TI SENTO - Milano Ring 12011TG is crafted with Silver rhodium plated. The colour of this ring is Grey. All TI SENTO - Milano jewels are gift-wrapped with infinite love and care. The magic is in our Silver.
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It is hard not to notice that two of the regulators who stand out for doing the right thing in this incredible financial mess are women. Brooksley Born, as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Clinton, wanted to regulate credit default swaps and other derivative instruments back in the late 90s. Her effort was torpedoed by Clinton's economic heavyweights: Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.
More recently, Sheila Bair, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Cooperation (FDIC), has been a pesky voice, arguing that the purpose of the financial bailouts is not to ensure that the Robert Rubins of the world get to keep their day jobs at the Wall Street banks. She has been arguing that the banks that received public money should be required to rewrite mortgage terms so that more homeowners are able to stay in their homes.
The role of these two women is surprising because finance, and its regulation, continues to be an area that is heavily dominated by men. Therefore, it is striking that just about the only regulators who stand out for trying to do the right thing in this tsunami of garbage finance are women.
While some of the luminaries of the economics profession might seek to explain the unusual role of women regulators by biological differences between the sexes, there is a more obvious explanation. Basically, the women who enter the financial world have not been fully integrated into the club. They are still outsiders. Therefore, they are more likely to blow the whistle on the sweet deals that can make hundreds of millions for the boys, while leaving the rest of us out in the cold.
This point was made explicitly in a surreptitious campaign to undermine Bair's standing in the Obama administration. According to one of the anonymous complainants, Bair is not a team player.
This statement was intended as an indictment of her conduct as FDIC chair, but it actually looks like the highest possible form of praise. After all, this team of financial regulators makes the 1962 Mets look like world champions. If Bair doesn't fit in, then this is all for the good.
If we needed any further evidence that the financial industry suffered from too much deference to insiders, Bernard Madoff filled the gap. He apparently ran a simple-minded Ponzi scheme for 30 years, stealing tens of billions of dollars from wealthy individuals, private charities and even large banks.
When some investors and reporters raised suspicions about Mr. Madoff, no one bothered to seriously investigate because he was such a good guy. After all, he belonged to all the right clubs, generously supported charities and was even a founder of the Nasdaq.
The regulators don't investigate respectable people like Madoff, and this is precisely the problem. The regulators are not supposed to be friends of the financial industry. They are the cops, who keep the industry from running off with our money. Remember, the big actors in the industry all benefit from a government insurance policy called "too big to fail."
As any good believer in the free market knows, the finance boys will do everything they can to maximize the value of this government insurance policy. This means taking the biggest possible risks since, at the end of the day, the taxpayers, not the firm's creditors or executives, will pick up the tab. The financial regulators are the ones who are supposed to keep the banks from taking advantage of their government provided insurance, in addition to keeping them from ripping off pension funds, small city school districts, private charities, and any other suckers they find.
It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will be prepared to seriously regulate the financial industry. President Obama did pick a woman, Mary Schapiro, to be head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but her past associations with the financial industry make her look like one of the boys.
In the holiday spirit, perhaps we should give Schapiro and Obama the benefit of the doubt. But the reality is that the US financial industry is a cesspool. Cleaning it up must be a top priority for the Obama administration. The public must insist on a much smaller, cleaner industry and long jail sentences for the folks who brought us this economic disaster.
Courtesy Truthout [http://www.truthout.org/122208R]
2008-2013©copyright, All Rights Reserved. Vijayvaani Publishers.
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The early bird rates for this year's AllFacebook Marketing Conference end tomorrow, May 9. Sign up now and save over $200 on passes that give you access to two full days of panels, discussions, presentations, and networking.
The conference features over 40 social media and digital marketing experts who will teach you proven solutions for building your brand and engaging prospective customers on Facebook. This year's program will focus on Facebook's latest tools, apps, research, and marketing opportunities, and will take an in depth look at Facebook ads, pages, credits, pages, social video, search history, social data, ROI, and F-Commerce.
Check out the full program here.
Tickets are only $579 when you register by tomorrow ($799 at the door). Sign up now!


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Katrina Benefit
The pastors of the United Methodist Cooperative Ministry will sponsor a fund-raiser today, Friday, Jan. 18 to help support volunteers who will travel to Slidell, La., to help with post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction.
The event, which will feature home-made waffles, is scheduled from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Christ United Methodist Church, Church street, Vineyard Haven. More information is available by calling 508-645-3100.


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VIA KT600 Motherboard Roundup
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective's website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.VIA's natural progression of the motherboard chipsets has at least, been impressive in its diligence. The KT400 and KT400A releases were not the most successful we have seen from VIA, but the newer KT600 chipset is a competitor to the nForce2 chipset from NVIDIA and thus a more viable option for enthusiasts.
We reviewed a reference KT600 board in our look at the Athlon XP 3200+ processor in May of this year. Since then, we have slowly been getting in board sample after board sample from the manufacturers based around the KT600 chipset – it sure seemed that the manufacturers were much more ready to integrate VIA's latest AMD solution than the previous ones.
The KT600 Chipset
The KT600 chipset is not a drastic turn from the KT400 and KT400A chipsets. The only substantial difference is in the north bridge: it has the ability to accept processors running at a 400 MHz front-side bus (which only the Athon XP 3200+ is capable of). This was a feature that was left out of the KT400A chipset that allowed the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset to be the lone competitor for a short time.
Another very strong advantage that you will see in the KT600 motherboards is the inclusion of the VIA 8237 south bridge chip. This new addition to the VIA line of chipsets allows motherboard manufacturers to implement two channels of SATA and a RAID setup at a very low cost, as it is integrated into the south bridge. All of our KT600 motherboards that we looked at today took advantage of that feature, and I imagine that nearly all of the retail boards (not just the ones I review here) will have it.
NVIDIA has been slow to react to this attack from VIA technology-wise. While NVIDIA's road maps have shown an MCP with RAID and SATA built into it, nothing has yet been released in the form of an nForce2 product. Even on the Athlon 64 front, with their nForce3, NVIDIA doesn't have an integrated SATA solution ready quite yet. VIA is aware of this is advantage and has been delivering it to manufacturers (and thus to end-users) to reclaim some of the lost market share in the enthusiast market.
Now, let's take a look at the layouts and features of the 9 KT600 motherboards that I am going to be rounding up today…


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TrustCo to Release Third Quarter 2019 Results on October 21, 2019; Conference Call on October 22, 2019
GLENVILLE, N.Y., Oct. 11, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TrustCo Bank Corp NY (TrustCo, Nasdaq: TRST) today announced that it will release third quarter 2019 results after the market close on October 21, 2019. Results are released on the 21st of the reporting months (January, April, July and October), or on the next day that equity markets are open if the 21st falls on a Friday, weekend or holiday. A conference call to discuss the results will be held at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time on October 22, 2019. Those wishing to participate in the call may dial toll-free 1-888-339-0764. International callers must dial 1-412-902-4195. Please ask to be joined into the TrustCo Bank Corp NY / TRST call. A replay of the call will be available for thirty days by dialing 1-877-344-7529 (1-412-317-0088 for international callers), Conference Number 10135926.
The call will also be audio webcast at https://services.choruscall.com/links/trst191022.html, and will be available for one year. The earnings press release will be posted on the Company's Investor Relations website at: http://www.snl.com/irweblinkx/corporateprofile.aspx?iid=100465. Other information, including the Company's most recent annual report, proxy statement and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission can also be found at this website.
TrustCo Bank Corp NY is a $5.2 billion savings and loan holding company and through its subsidiary, Trustco Bank, operates 148 offices in New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Florida. For more information, visit www.trustcobank.com.
In addition, the Bank's Financial Services Department offers a full range of investment services, retirement planning and trust and estate administration services.
The common shares of TrustCo are traded on The NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol TRST.
Safe Harbor Statement
All statements in this news release that are not historical are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "goal," "seek," "believe," "project," "estimate," "expect," "strategy," "future," "likely," "may," "should," "will" and similar references to future periods. Examples of forward-looking statements include, among others, statements we make regarding our expectations for our performance during current and future periods and for the growth of loans and deposits throughout our branch network, our ability to capitalize on economic changes in the areas in which we operate and the extent to which higher expenses to fulfill operating and regulatory requirements recur or diminish over time. Such forward-looking statements are subject to factors that could cause actual results to differ materially for TrustCo from those discussed. TrustCo wishes to caution readers not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The following important factors, among others, in some cases have affected and in the future could affect TrustCo's actual results and could cause TrustCo's actual financial performance to differ materially from that expressed in any forward-looking statement: our ability to continue to originate a significant volume of one-to-four family mortgage loans in our market areas; our ability to continue to maintain noninterest expense and other overhead costs at reasonable levels relative to income; our ability to comply with the supervisory agreement entered into with Trustco Bank's regulator and potential regulatory actions if we fail to comply; restrictions or conditions imposed by our regulators on our operations that may make it more difficult for us to achieve our goals; the future earnings and capital levels of Trustco Bank and the continued ability of Trustco Bank under regulatory rules and the supervisory agreement to distribute capital to TrustCo, which could affect our ability to pay dividends; results of examinations of Trustco Bank and TrustCo by our respective regulators; our ability to make accurate assumptions and judgments regarding the credit risks associated with lending and investing activities; the effect of changes in financial services laws and regulations and the impact of other governmental initiatives affecting the financial services industry; the effects of, and changes in, trade, monetary and fiscal policies and laws, including interest rate policies of the Federal Reserve Board, inflation, interest rates, market and monetary fluctuations; the perceived overall value of our products and services by users, including in comparison to competitors' products and services and the willingness of current and prospective customers to substitute competitors' products and services for our products and services; real estate and collateral values; changes in accounting policies and practices, as may be adopted by the bank regulatory agencies, the FASB or PCAOB; changes in local market areas and general business and economic trends, as well as changes in consumer spending and saving habits; our success at managing the risks involved in the foregoing and managing our business; and other risks and uncertainties under the heading "Risk Factors" in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and in our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q or other securities filings.
Subsidiary: Trustco Bank
Robert Leonard
Executive Vice President and
Chief Risk Officer
(518) 381-3693


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stock option
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
stock option, contractual agreement enabling the holder to buy or sell a security at a designated price for a specified period of time, unaffected by movements in its market price during the period. Put and call options, purchased both for speculative and hedging reasons, are made by persons anticipating changes in stock prices. A put gives its holder an option to sell, or put, shares to the other party at a fixed put price even though the market price declines; a call, on the other hand, gives the holder an option to buy, or call for, shares at a fixed call price notwithstanding a market rise.
Another form of option, a stock purchase warrant, entitles its owner to buy shares of a common stock at a specified price (the exercise price of the warrant). Warrants are often issued with senior securities (preferred stocks and bonds) as "sweeteners" to increase their salability. They may also be issued directly as part of the compensation for underwriters of new issues and other promoters in the establishment of a new business.
The stock rights option gives a stockholder the choice of (1) buying additional stock at a price below the current market price for a specified period of time, usually briefer than the life span of stock purchase warrants, or (2) selling the rights on the market. They are the customary way of implementing the stockholder's preemptive right to subscribe to whatever additional stock is issued in order to maintain his proportionate equity in the corporation and its control.
American corporations frequently issue employee stock options as a form of incentive compensation for their executives. The underlying theory is that an option constitutes an incentive to do what will improve the company's fortunes and thus raise the value of its stock. The employee stock option was widely used as a means of supplementing the compensation of high-salaried employees after 1950, when federal income-tax provisions permitted the "spread" between high market price and the lower option price to be treated, upon sale of the stock, as capital gain, taxable at a 25 percent ceiling rather than the higher personal income-tax rates. In 1976, however, such profit was designated as ordinary income.


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Gusev Crater
March 13, 2003
This mosaic of daytime infrared images of Gusev Crater, taken by the camera system on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, has been draped over topography data obtained by Mars Global Surveyor. The daytime temperatures range from approximately minus 45 degrees C (black) to minus 5 degrees C (white). The temperature differences in these daytime images are due primarily to lighting effects, where sunlit slopes are warm (bright) and shadowed slopes are cool (dark). Gusev crater is a potential landing site for the Mars Exploration Rovers. The large ancient river channel of Ma'Adim that once flowed into Gusev can be seen at the top of the mosaic. This image mosaic covers an area approximately 180 kilometers (110 miles) on each side centered near 14 degrees S, 175 degrees E, looking toward the south in this simulated view.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The thermal emission imaging system was provided by Arizona State University, Tempe. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, Colo., is the prime contractor for the project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.


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Clean Eating
Clean Eating Is A Way Of Life
Clean eating is a style of eating that emphasizes on the quality of the foods you eat.
Clean eating is not a new concept.
Long before the days of processed foods, pesticides, hormones and GMOs, people ate food directly from the source with minimal processing—that is outside of cooking. Some say, eat as your (great) grandparents ate.
Clean eating allows you to take back control of what you put into your body. High-quality, whole and ideally organic foods replace those covered in pesticides, engineered or produced in massive factories.
The highly-processed foods that line the shelves of your local grocery store are loaded with calories, added sugars and ingredients that only scientists can pronounce, yet lack many beneficial nutrients. These foods are linked to obesity, low-energy levels and an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and in some cases, cancer. Many of these low-quality foods are also treated with pesticides or contain genetically modified ingredients, both of which carry potential health risks—not to mention a significant environmental toll.
Nourish your body with healthy and nutrient-dense foods.
Such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, extra virgin olive oil, grass-fed meats and hormone-free dairy. Consistently eating clean foods fills your body with plentiful vitamins and minerals, high-quality protein and healthy fats, which improve heart and brain health, assist with weight management, build a stronger immune system and increase energy levels, among other benefits.
This is not a strategy for losing weight. Plenty of foods that are considered clean are high in calories and won't help you shed extra fat. So if you're attempting to lose weight, don't let the "clean" label give you a false sense of security when deciding what to put on your plate.
How Do You Eat Clean?
Three Steps To Eating Clean
Shop The Perimeter Of The Grocery Store Clean foods are typically found along the perimeter of grocery stores. Spend most of your time in
the produce section, stocking up on a wide variety of colorful and healthy fruits and vegetables. Opt for organic foods—especially meat, dairy and produce on the dirty dozen list—when possible.
Read Labels
If you venture down your grocery store aisles, make sure to read food labels. Check the ingredient list and avoid any product with ingredients that you're not familiar with or can't pronounce. The fewer the ingredients, the better. Also, check for added sugars listed under carbohydrates. An item as basic as a pasta sauce can have as much as 100 grams of sugar in a single jar.
The easiest way to eat clean? Cook your own food. That way you have total control over your ingredients and can be certain that your meals are indeed clean. Cooking also helps you avoid items that masquerade as health foods but are far from it. For example, many alleged healthy juices found at grocery stores come loaded with sugar and cheap ingredients. It's far better to buy your own ingredients and use your Vitamix to blend delicious, clean juices that are full of healthy nutrients.


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Sensible BC Office , 207 W Hastings St , 311 , Vancouver, BC V6B 1H7 , Canada
The municipal elections are an excellent opportunity to push for change at the local level. We are setting up a central phone bank at main office so that we can contact as many voters as possible between now and election day on November 15th.
Contact Nick at


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This is the third supplement for In Her Majesty's Name, the Steampunk skirmish game published by Osprey games
Within these pages, you shall find new weapons and equipment, talents and powers, and creatures both normal and supernatural. As well as a host of new companies to fight or, bring on, the darkness that threatens to engulf the Old World.
You will meet old enemies such as Vlad Tepes, Prince of Wallachia, and his nemesis Abraham van Helsing. Play the brave men of the Imperial Nightwatch as they test their modern might against the terrifying vampire minions of the immortal Countess Bathory. Rouse the Village mob to drive out Baron Viktor von Frankenstein and his abominations. Tread the corridors of power as a member of the Illuminati or, join the Gypsies to hunt Werewolves under the full moon. Witness Sampson Caine and the Nuns of the Order of the Bringer of Salvation defend the innocent from the predations of the Dread Monks of Sucevita. Unleash the Unborn upon the terrible White Slavers. You can also upgrade and test your existing IHMN companies against these many terrors.
New scenarios and landscapes will take your companies into dark forests, mist shrouded castles, ancient ruins, pagan altars and grim, fortified villages the length and breadth of Transylvania, Wallachia and the ever-forbidding Carpathian Mountains.
This is classic Victorian Gothic Horror at its grisly, horripilating best. It is not recommended for ladies and gentlemen of a nervous disposition, for the darkness will feed upon their terror.


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Court Rules Against Angola 3's Albert Woodfox: No End in Sight to 38 Years in Solitary Confinement
Albert Woodfox has spent nearly all of the last 38 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. His case has brought protests from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who argue that Woodfox's decades in lockdown constitute torture, and from a growing band of supporters, who believe that he was denied a fair trial. For more than ten years, he has been fighting for his release in the courts. But yesterday, a ruling by a federal appeals court ensured that for the forseeable future, Albert Woodfox will remain right where he has been for nearly four decades: in a 6 x 9 cell in the heart of America's largest and most notorious prison.
It's been nearly two years since a federal district court judge in Baton Rouge overturned Woodfox's conviction for the 1972 murder of a guard at Louisiana's Angola prison. Judge James Brady's 2008 ruling, which ordered the state to retry Woodfox or release him, brought new hope to the 63-year-old Woodfox, who has been in Angola–originally for armed robbery–since he was 24. A member of the group known as the Angola 3, Woodfox has always contended that he was effectively framed for the guard's murder–and then thrown into permanent lockdown–because of his involvement with the Black Panther Party, which was organizing against conditions in what was then known as the "bloodiest prison in the South."
Without drawing any conclusions about Woodfox's guilt or innocence, Judge Brady of the Federal District Court, Middle District of Louisiana, concluded that Woodfox had not received a fair trial in 1998 (at what was itself a replacement for a faulty 1973 trial). The main grounds for overturning Woodfox's conviction were ineffective assistance of counsel, which allowed questionable evidence and irregular practices to stand without challenge. Woodfox had argued that better lawyers could have shown that his conviction was quite literally bought by the state, which based its case on jailhouse informants who were rewarded for their testimony. (Woodfox's case was described in full in this 2009 article for Mother Jones.)
Judge Brady agreed, and in July 2008 he granted Woodfox's Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, ordering that his conviction and life sentence be "reversed and vacated." But some of the most powerful figures in the Louisiana justice system were committed to keeping Woodfox in prison and in lockdown. After his conviction was overturned, Attorney General James "Buddy" Caldwell declared, "We will appeal this decision to the 5th Circuit [Court of Appeals]. If the ruling is upheld there I will not stop and we will take this case as high as we have to. I will retry this case myself…I oppose letting him out with every fiber of my being because this is a very dangerous man."
Caldwell put his case before the federal Fifth Circuit in March 2009–and in yesterday's decision, he prevailed. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of three federal appellate judges ruled that Judge Brady had erred in overturning Wallace's conviction. Their decision is not only a crushing blow for Woodfox, but also a manifestation of how far the rights of the accused have fallen in recent decades.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals once had a reputation as one of the finest appellate courts in the land. In the 1960s, a small group of Fifth Circuit judges—mostly Southern-bred moderate Republicans—was known for advancing civil rights and especially school desegregation. But today the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, is seen as among the most ideologically conservative of the federal appeals courts. It is notable for its overburdened docket and for its hostility to appeals from defendants in capital cases, including claims based on faulty prosecution and suppressed evidence. The court has even been reprimanded by the U.S. Supreme Court, itself is no friend to death row inmates: In June 2004, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the Fifth Circuit was "paying lip service to principles" of appellate law in handing down death penalty rulings.
In addition, the decision in Woodfox's case shows the crippling effect on prisoners' rights of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) which was passed under Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. That legislation has become the bane of anti-death penalty lawyers and activists, and of thousands of other prisoners seeking to challenge their convictions–a pursuit which AEDPA now renders nearly impossible.
As the Fifth Circuit noted in its ruling, "The AEDPA requires that federal courts 'defer to a state court's adjudication of a claim'" unless the state court decision ran "'contrary to…clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court,'" or was "'based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.'" And as the judges pointed out, "An unreasonable application of federal law is different from an incorrect or erroneous application of the law."
In other words, the state courts could be wrong, they just couldn't be so far out as to be undeniably "unreasonable." And in the end, the Fifth Circuit judges agreed with the State's argument that in the case at hand, "the district court failed to apply the AEDPA's heightened deferential standard of review to Woodfox's ineffective assistance claims." Woodfox's conviction may have been wrong, but it was not, in the eyes of the Fifth Circuit, "unreasonable"–so there will be no new trial for him. This is how justice works in post-AEDPA America.
For Woodfox, this means that his time in prison stretches before him with no obvious end in sight. His lawyers have promised to return to his case with new evidence, but that could take years, and the outcome might still be the same. In the meantime, Woodfox and fellow Angola 3 members Herman Wallace and Robert King have mounted a constitutional challenge to their solitary confinement, which may come to trial before the end of this year. (Wallace was Woodfox's co-defendent in the guard's murder, and has also been in solitary for 38 years. King, sentenced to life for another prison killing, had his murder conviction overturned and was released from Angola in February 2001 after 29 years in lockdown; he remains a plaintiff in this suit, which covers time he was in solitary.) That case, too, will eventually go before the Fifth Circuit–and even a win would mean only a release from permanent lockdown, not from Angola.
Woodfox's release from solitary, as well as his criminal appeal, is vehemently opposed by Angola's warden, Burl Cain, who has likened the Black Panthers to the KKK, and is adamant that the aging Woodfox is and always will be a menace to society by virtue of his political beliefs. He has said that Woodfox is "locked in time with that Black Panther revolutionary actions they were doing way back when…And from that, there's been no rehabilitation."
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Native Plants
Search for native plants by scientific name, common name or family. If you are not sure what you are looking for, try the Combination Search or our Recommended Species lists.
Eustoma exaltatum
Eustoma exaltatum (L.) Salisb. ex G. Don
Catchfly Prairie Gentian, Bluebell Gentian, Western Blue Gentian, Blue Marsh Lily, Small Bluebell, Catchfly Gentian, Seaside Gentian
Gentianaceae (Gentian Family)
USDA Symbol: EUEX5
USDA Native Status: L48 (N)
Eustoma means "open mouth," referring to the large throat of the flower. It prefers damp areas and seems to reach peak condition on moist prairies, where it sometimes grows in profusion. The large, bell-shaped flowers, 2-3 inches across, have 5-7 bluish-purple petals, less than 1 inch long, which are constricted into a small tube at the base and have prominent purple markings in the throat. The plants are 1-3 feet high with smooth, erect stems and branches. The leaves are long and oval with pointed tips, 1-2 1/2 inches long.
Although it is often referred to as the Seaside Gentian, this plant is not restricted to coastal habitats; it also grows in the Great Plains from Montana to New Mexico. The interior subspecies, E. exaltum ssp. russellianum, is called the Showy Prairie Gentian. The genus name, from the Greek eu ("good") and stoma ("mouth"), refers to the wide opening of the corolla tube.
From the Image Gallery
Plant CharacteristicsDuration: Annual
Habit: Herb
Fruit Type: Capsule
Size Notes: Up to about 3 feet tall.
Bloom InformationBloom Color: White , Blue , Purple
Bloom Time: Mar , Apr , May , Jun , Jul , Aug , Sep , Oct , Nov
Bloom Notes: The large, bell-shaped flowers, 2-3 inches across, have 5-7 bluish-purple petals, less than 1 inch long, which are constricted into a small tube at the base and have prominent purple markings in the throat below a white band.
DistributionUSA: AL , AR , AZ , CA , CO , FL , KS , LA , MS , MT , NE , NM , OK , SD , TX , WY
Native Distribution: Southern United States from Florida west to California and north in the interior to Montana and South Dakota.
Native Habitat: Sandy coastal areas, moist places in prairies and fields, and saline to freshwater marshes.
Growing ConditionsLight Requirement: Sun , Part Shade
Soil Moisture: Moist
BenefitConspicuous Flowers: yes
Mr. Smarty Plants says
Native plants for seasonal poor drainage
May 16, 2006
I have an area in my front yard that has a drainage ditch running through it. When it rains, that area stays very wet. What kind of plants available for sale will work in this situation?
view the full question and answer
National Wetland Indicator Status
From the National Organizations DirectoryAccording to the species list provided by Affiliate Organizations, this plant is on display at the following locations:
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center - Austin, TX
Nueces River Authority - Uvalde, TX
BibliographyBibref 946 - Gardening with Prairie Plants: How to Create Beautiful Native Landscapes (2002) Wasowski, Sally
Bibref 318 - Native Texas Plants: Landscaping Region by Region (2002) Wasowski, S. & A. Wasowski
Bibref 248 - Texas Wildflowers: A Field Guide (1984) Loughmiller, C. & L. Loughmiller
Search More Titles in Bibliography
Web ReferenceWebref 23 - Southwest Environmental Information Network (2009) SEINet - Arizona Chapter
Additional resourcesUSDA: Find Eustoma exaltatum in USDA Plants
FNA: Find Eustoma exaltatum in the Flora of North America (if available)
Google: Search Google for Eustoma exaltatum
MetadataRecord Modified: 2023-02-10
Research By: TWC Staff


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Creating Files through BlobBuilder
As Web sites transition more and more into Web applications, working with files in meaningful ways is becoming increasingly important. Starting with Platform Preview 2, IE10 includes support for the File API, enabling developers to read and slice files on the client. Platform Preview 4 adds support for BlobBuilder, a way for developers to create new files. IE10 also has two new methods that allow the user to save blobs to their computer, enabling great end-to-end experiences when working with client-resident data.
Over on the IE Test Drive, we have a fun piano demo showing off BlobBuilder and File API capabilities. When you press notes on the piano, the site constructs two files: an mp3 music file and an SVG file of the musical score. You can see how the size of both files change each time you press a note. Press the play button to listen to your song, or download either the music file or the SVG score file by pressing the links just above the piano keys. In the rest of this blog post I'll go through how the demo works, focusing on the capabilities of BlobBuilder and File API.
BlobBuilder Capabilities
BlobBuilder, like the name implies, is a way to build blobs on the client. The main method to do this is
append. The
append function accepts three data types:
- Blob objects
- Plain text
- Array Buffers
The piano demo creates the mp3 file by appending blobs together, using one blob for each note. The demo creates the SVG file of the musical score by appending text that contains the SVG source.
getBlob is another method available on the BlobBuilder object which returns a blob object containing all the items previously appended. Here is a very simple example that uses BlobBuilder to create a text file:
// The BlobBuilder constructor is prefixed in all browsers.
// Use MSBlobBuilder in IE, MozBlobBuilder in Firefox, and WebKitBlobBuilder in WebKit-based browsers.
var bb = new MSBlobBuilder();
bb.append("Hello World!");
var blob1 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");
One thing to note about the
getBlob method is that when you call
getBlob in IE10 and Firefox, it will clear out the contents of the BlobBuilder object, so the next time you call append it will be as if you were appending into a new BlobBuilder object. WebKit does not currently clear out the contents of the BlobBuilder after calling
getBlob. Consider this example:
var bb = new MSBlobBuilder();
bb.append("Hello World!");
var blob1 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");
bb.append("BlobBuilder is great");
var blob2 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");
In all browsers, blob1 will contain the text "
Hello World!". However, blob2 will be different. In IE10 and Firefox, blob2 will contain the text "
BlobBuilder is great" while in WebKit-based browsers it will contain the text "
Hello World!BlobBuilder is great". This discrepancy is still under discussion in the Web Applications working group.
Getting Blobs via XHR
The File API makes it easy to access files selected by the user, something I demonstrated in the Magnetic Poetry demo. This is great when you want to incorporate the users own data into your site. However, in the piano demo, I needed the note files to be built into the demo. When you want to work with blobs but you want to supply the data, you can use XHR.
New to IE10 is the XHR
responseType property. The
responseType property supports four values:
array buffer,
text, and
document. In the piano demo's initialization method -
getBlobs() - you'll see the following:
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
var url = 'PianoNotes/AllNotes2.mp3';
req.open('GET', url, false);
req.responseType = "blob";
req.onload = function () { /* ... */ };
One thing you may notice is that the demo only makes a single XHR request. It only downloads one file which contains all the notes used in the demo. However, when you press a key in the demo, only a single note plays and the site appends only a single note to the mp3 file. To make that work, after downloading the file containing all the notes, the site slices the file using the File API
slice method and extracts 24 individual notes. This is a great performance savings versus having to download 24 individual files.
Creating the Music File
Once I have a blob for each note in the demo, creating the mp3 file is easy. Each time you press a key I call:
In order to update the file size, I get the blob and then get the file size.
var musicBlob = musicBlobBuilder.getBlob("audio/mp3");
// display musicBlob.size
Lastly because I know that the BlobBuilder object was cleared out when I called
getBlob I just append the blob back in:
Creating the SVG File
Each time you press a key in the demo, you see a note added to the musical score. The musical score is drawn by a single SVG element contained within a div with an id of "scoreContainer." Each time you press a key, script runs which adds a note to the SVG element and then the SVG file is created by appending the source:
var svgBlob = svgBlobBuilder.getBlob("image/svg+xml");
// display svgBlob.size
In this case, I don't refill the svgBlobBuilder because I want to start with a clean slate the next time the user presses a key.
Saving Files to Disk
The last part of the demo is saving the files to disk. When you press the "Music File" and "Musical Score File" links on top of the piano keys you will be able to save the file though an experience that feels just like downloading a file:
Note that the notification bar is not available in the Platform Previews. Instead, a save dialog is presented.
Each link calls either
saveSong() or
saveSheetMusic(). Looking into each of these methods will reveal that they use the
msSaveOrOpenBlob function:
window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(svgBlob, "MusicScore.svg");
msSaveOrOpenBlob and
msSaveBlob are two methods available in IE10 which let sites ask the user to save a blob to their computer.
msSaveOrOpenBlob will provide an option on the notification bar to open the file in addition to saving or canceling. Calling
msSaveBlob only provides the option to save the file or cancel. Though these functions are not yet included in any standard, we believe they are extremely useful for writing end to end scenarios with blob data and hope that they might become a standard at some point.
Creating the Piano demo was a fun experience and I'm excited to see how you will use BlobBuilder. Let us know what you think!
—Sharon Newman, Program Manager, Internet Explorer


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Blind Items Revealed
Apparently even this expressionless A list celebrity/editor is not beyond fawning over someone they think is good looking. There was a lot of thigh touching yesterday of this B list very good looking foreign born mostly television actor who is having a big year. At one point the A lister was even seen giggling. I didn't even know she could do that.
Anna Wintour/Benedict Cumberbatch


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How adorable is this?
The upcoming issue of People magazine features a chat with disgraced New York ex-congressman Anthony Weiner—driven from office last summer over his naughty habit of texting pics of his package to strange women—as well as Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, the drop-dead gorgeous deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton.
The piece is sweetness and light: Weiner talking about their 6-month-old son, Jordan's, first steps; Abedin gushing about how Anthony does all the laundry and "has spent every day since [the scandal] trying to be the best dad and husband he can be." The spread could be dismissed as little more than an excuse to run a heart-warming photo of the happy family. Except…
For the past week or so, the New York media have been floating reports that Weiner is itching for a return to politics, possibly even a run for mayor next year. Friends and staffers say he misses the game. And it has been noticed that, after months of media silence, the former congressman has been popping up (and piping up) in a smattering of outlets. For his part, Weiner told People that he currently is "not doing anything to plan a campaign," but the magazine noted that he remained "noncommittal" about rejoining the fray in the future.
Welcome to the early stages of the Anthony Weiner Political Rehabilitation Tour.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, "There are no second acts in American lives." This, of course, is total bunk—even within the supposedly unforgiving field of politics.
Oh, sure, plenty of pols behave so appallingly (ex-Rep. Mark Foley's pursuit of young House pages) or ridiculously (ex-Sen. Larry Craig's "wide-stance" defense) that they are driven from the business altogether. Others suffer a nasty twist of fate that balloons their garden-variety misbehavior into a superscandal. (Think ex-Rep. Gary Condit, whose romp with young Chandra Levy landed him in the eye of a murder probe when the Hill intern went missing.)
In many cases, however, a savvy lawmaker can rise from the ashes of even a seemingly fatal scandal. Not in a pathetic Eliot Spitzer, persuade-desperate-network-execs-to-give-you-a-talk-show way, but in a triumphant restoration of political prowess. If Weiner is indeed hoping for a rebirth, he would do well to study how some of his noteworthy predecessors managed such a feat.
Without a doubt, shamelessness is requirement No. 1. How else could these guys face their friends and family ever again, much less ask the American people to let them keep running things? Almost exactly five years ago, Sen. David Vitter showed up in a brothel owner's little black book. What did he do? Held a press conference at which he and, better still, his wife informed America that this was a private matter and scolded the media for their nosiness. Vitter then shuffled on back to the Senate as if nothing had ever happened. And there he sits still today.
Indeed, when the going gets tough, having a tough spouse standing up for you (as opposed to standing weepy-eyed and red-nosed behind you) can be a major asset. Arguably, Hillary Clinton remains the reigning champion in this department. How many times did she bail out Bill's sorry butt? Hillary was so effective that not only did she save Bill's political career, she went on to become the most respected woman on the planet, cheered by Democrats and Republicans alike. (Though, apparently, not so beloved among certain segments of the Egyptian populace.) So what if she didn't wind up president? It's a thankless gig, and at this point Hillary is bigger than politics. To paraphrase John Lennon, she's damn near bigger than Jesus.
Having a constituency that accepts you for who you are, warts and all, is invaluable. In the late 1980s, Rep. Barney Frank found himself in a tough spot when it was discovered that his housemate—a male prostitute Frank originally had met through a sex ad—had been running an escort service out of the congressman's apartment. Frank pled ignorance of his companion's illegal activity, copped to the embarrassing roots of their relationship, and refused to resign.
Frank did more than survive; he thrived. But it took literally decades for him to achieve full redemption, requiring patience and determination on his part. Smart as a whip and mean as a honey badger, the fallen congressman gradually worked his way back up the House ladder. By 2007, he was chairman of the financial services committee, where he presided over Congress's efforts to deal with the subprime mortgage disaster.
In the resurrection of Newt Gingrich, endurance and shamelessness played equally important roles. After a political ascent that installed him as the first Republican House speaker in four decades, Gingrich crashed back to earth thanks to a toxic combo of arrogance (that government shutdown did not help his party's Republican brand), an ethics reprimand (using a tax-exempt college course for political purposes turned out to be a no-no), and a long-term affair with then–Hill staffer Callista Bisek (now the third Mrs. Gingrich). Leaving office after the 1998 midterms, Gingrich spent the next decade-plus writing books, consulting, and speaking. A few years back, he started making noises about a presidential run. This year, with much of the GOP longing for someone to stop Mitt Romney, he went for it. Did he ultimately topple Romney? No. But his fiery, in-your-face debate performances made him a political star once more.
Among the most impressive comebacks of modern politics was that of Marion Barry, D.C.'s infamous "mayor for life." In early 1990, the then second-term mayor was caught on video by the FBI smoking crack in a cheap motel with an ex-girlfriend turned informant. (Thus was born the immortal phrase: "The bitch set me up.") But within a year of wrapping up his six-month prison stint, Barry won a seat on the capital's city council, followed by a third term as mayor, followed by a return to the council. Despite new scandals of varying shapes and sizes periodically surfacing, Barry has kept the loyalty of his Ward 8 constituents, who love in him in part because of his glaring imperfections.
Of course, Barry's super-buoyancy has long been fueled by his masterful manipulation of racial grievances in the hyper-racialized climate of Washington. Which points, more broadly, to the restorative value of painting yourself as a victim of overzealous political enemies, a strategy that proved useful time and again both for Barry and for Bill Clinton.
Does Weiner have what it takes to join the pantheon of serious comeback kids? Hard to say. He's not as charming as Clinton, as smart as Frank, as narcissistic as Gingrich, as … well, let's just agree that there is only one Marion Barry.
Then again, the behavior that derailed Weiner was, while weird, tame by the standards of political sexcapades. He wasn't stalking minors or soliciting hookers or trolling for action in public restrooms. He didn't knock anybody up or hook up with a staffer. Hell, the poor guy didn't even get laid, so far as we know. He simply couldn't resist sharing his magnificently photogenic penis with a few special lady friends.
Unfortunately for Weiner, this means there is visual documentation of his perviness floating around the Internet—documentation likely to resurface whenever Weiner himself attempts to. This doesn't preclude a comeback, but it does complicate one.
Interesting to see whether he can rise to the challenge.


text: Scroll down Hours We're open today until 5 pm PUBLIC HOURS Wednesday–Saturday 10 am–5 pm Sunday 1 pm–5 pm Get directions Welcome to the GCMA Considered the premier American art museum in the South, the GCMA is home to the world's largest public collection of watercolors by iconic American artist Andrew Wyeth. The GCMA also has an impressive collection of paintings and prints by contemporary artist Jasper Johns. Ranging from Federal portraits to contemporary abstractions, the GCMA's acclaimed Southern Collection invites viewers to survey American art history through works with ties to the South. The GCMA is the only museum in the Upstate to be fully accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Learn more Plan your visit Calendar Sundays at 2: Gallery Tour | Sculpture of Grainger McKoy Oct 1, 2023 learn more Sundays at 2: Family Art Adventure Oct 8, 2023 learn more Museum closed in preparation for Antiques, Fine Art & Design Weekend October 9, 10, and 11 learn more Gala Preview for the 37th Antiques Fine Art & Design Weekend October 12 learn more 2023 Antiques, Fine Art & Design Weekend October 13, 14, and 15 learn more Connect Twitter Facebook Instagram Appraisals & Donations View more events play video learn more learn more GCMA member?Create a user account Sign upto receive email updates


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(CNN) -- Britney Spears, Paris Hilton ... Sen. Barack Obama?
The latest ad from John McCain implies Barack Obama is a megacelebrity -- like Britney Spears.
A new campaign ad from Sen. John McCain -- which flashes shots of the two aforementioned megacelebrities -- calls Obama a megacelebrity, too, and questions his leadership ability.
"He's the biggest celebrity in the world. But is he ready to lead? With gas prices soaring, Barack Obama says no to offshore drilling and says he'll raise taxes on electricity. Higher taxes, more foreign oil -- that's the real Obama," the ad's narrator says while crowds screaming, "Obama!" are shown.
Responding to the ad, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said, "On a day when major news organizations across the country are taking Sen. McCain to task for a steady stream of false, negative attacks, his campaign has launched yet another. Or, as some might say, 'Oops! He did it again.' "
The ad is the latest in a string of hard-hitting television commercials from the McCain campaign. Earlier spots suggest Obama is playing politics with the Iraq war, is against funding American troops and bears some of the responsibility for high gas prices.
The campaign says the ad will run in 11 battleground states: Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Watch the ad »
In a conference call with reporters announcing the ad, McCain adviser Rick Davis said of Obama's campaign coverage: "The focus on media, on events and activities, is much more something you'd expect from someone releasing a new movie."
"What we decided to do was find the top three international celebrities in the world," he said. "And I would say that from our estimation, Britney and Paris came in second and third. So from our perspective, we have the biggest three celebrities in the world."
Davis also brushed aside suggestions the ad will be viewed by the American public as going negative.
"Will people think of this as negative advertising? Look, it's the most entertaining thing I've seen on TV in a while. I wouldn't anticipate anything about this being negative," he said.
Steve Schmidt, another top McCain adviser, also said it was accurate to compare Obama to the two celebrities who, as one reporter said on the call, are often portrayed as "frivolous and irresponsible."
"I don't poll Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, but I know they're international celebrities, so apples to apples," he said.
A McCain adviser also told CNN's Dana Bash the ad targets Obama's "outrageous, narcissistic statements."
"It has not gone unnoticed by this campaign that Obama makes outrageous, narcissistic statements suggesting that his candidacy is what the world has been waiting for. Excuse me?" the adviser said. "What's going to happen when he parts the sea? What about all the fish in the middle?" the adviser said.
While Obama was overseas last week on his tour through the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign sarcastically addressed the Illinois senator's media coverage.
In an e-mail to supporters last week, the McCain campaign said, "It's pretty obvious that the media has a bizarre fascination with Barack Obama. Some may even say it's a love affair."
The campaign compiled clips of reporters praising Obama and made two videos set to music -- one with "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" and the other to "My Eyes Adored You."
The campaign also gave reporters covering McCain in Pennsylvania a fake European press pass.
The pass featured a shot of the Statue of Liberty in front of an American flag, and the words: "McCain Press Corps/JV Squad/Left Behind To Report in America."
The back had a picture of a man sporting a beret and a neck scarf, standing in front of a silhouette of the Eiffel Tower and pouring a glass of wine.
All About U.S. Presidential Election • Barack Obama • John McCain


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All you need to know:
New Festivizer Weapons: The kritzkrieg
Minorly important details after this:
Casual Match Improvements
At the end of a Casual match, players will now be automatically formed into a new match with the same players and teams. You'll also get to vote on which map the new match will take place on.
New Autobalancing System
We're introducing a new autobalance system for Casual Matches AND COMMUNITY SERVERS that asks for volunteers to switch sides. Casual matches will reward you for switching teams by giving you the chance to earn bonus XP!
Not that anyone on csn plays casual cuz we all play on csn, yea


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The Family Cooks
Pre-order Now: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-a-Million
A call to action for parents, kids, and anyone who eats to start cooking their own meals again.
For families, eating right has become a monumental challenge. Cultural messages convince us that we no longer have time to cook, and food marketers spend billions persuading us that packaged, processed food is convenient, satisfying…and the key to happiness. Half of all our meals are now eaten outside the home. The result? Skyrocketing rates of heart disease and diabetes and unprecedented levels of childhood obesity. This crisis is movingly portrayed in author and activist Laurie David's new documentary (co-executive produced with Katie Couric), Fed Up!
Luckily, we have a solution: Studies have clearly shown that eating home-cooked meals reduces obesity and develops lifelong healthy eating habits. There is an exciting movement afoot that involves a skillet, a few good knives, and some fresh ingredients: Home cooking is making a comeback.
In The Family Cooks: 100+ Recipes to Get Your Family Craving Food That's Simple, Tasty, and Incredibly Good for You, David inspires parents and kids to take control of what they eat by making it themselves. With her long-time collaborator, Kirstin Uhrenholdt, David worked up more than 100 recipes that are simple, fast, "low in the bad stuff and high in the good stuff," and designed to bring kids into the cooking process. The authors also demystify cooking terms and break down basic prep techniques, creating stress-free meals that foster health, togetherness, and happy palates. The Family Cooks is the ideal companion for unseasoned chefs of all stripes, whether they're parenting or being parented.
The Family Cooks: 100+ Recipes to Get Your Family Craving Food That's Simple, Tasty, and Incredibly Good for You by Laurie David; Recipes by Kirstin Uhrenholdt; Foreword by Katie Couric. Available April 2014.
Pre-order Now: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-a-Million


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Building a pharmacy fit for the 21st century.
How Walgreens Boots Alliance turned a century of service into a next-gen digital experience.
Increase in mobile app usage
Increase in digital traffic
Basis points of sales increases
Walgreens Boots Alliance uses these solutions:
"We needed Adobe to help us serve our customers better than ever at the peak of the pandemic. Adobe was a critical part of our technology solution when our customers needed us the most."
Vineet Mehra
Global Chief Marketing Officer, Walgreens Boots Alliance
Chief Customer Officer, Walgreens
A healthy dose of collaboration
You might not expect a typical CMO and CIO to be on the same page. Or even in the same room. Anyone who's worked with a CMO or CIO knows that they think a certain way, and even speak their own specialist language. So you might suppose that the CMO and CIO would stay in their respective lanes, only pausing to connect when absolutely necessary.
But Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) isn't most companies. And their CMO and CIO are anything but typical.
As leaders of one of the world's largest retail and wholesale pharmacy corporations, Global Chief Marketing and Customer Officer Vineet Mehra and Global CIO Francesco Tinto are working through a unique time in history. The global coronavirus pandemic of 2020 added urgency to a challenge that had already been looming in the healthcare industry for years — delivering customer experiences that are on par with other industries. Faced with rapidly growing customer expectations, WBA needed to reevaluate how they connected with consumers digitally. With over 120 million customers and 10,000 brick-and-mortar locations across the US and UK, it was clear that digital technology would have to play a huge part in the company's continued success.
Because customers' health and wellbeing were on the line, WBA needed to manage the sudden increase in digital experiences with extreme care. Built on the legacy of two iconic pharmacies, Walgreens and Boots, WBA has long been a staple of local communities. Charles Walgreen would personally greet every customer who walked through the door of his first Chicago location in 1901. Boots, founded by John Boot in 1849, began as a single herbalist store in Nottingham, England. But today, most WBA customers across the US and UK have a storefront within five miles of their homes. Pharmacies have evolved since Walgreen and Boot opened their doors over a century ago, but the imperative for a personal touch has remained.
It was up to Mehra and Tinto to lead WBA into a new era where high-quality, hyper-personal customer experiences were available to every customer on every channel — at a global scale.
Separated by specialization, united by passion
"I like to joke that Francesco, our CIO, is basically my digital soulmate," said Mehra.
Though Mehra and Tinto faced a huge task, they had an unstoppable tool at their disposal — collaboration. Unlike the typical CMO-CIO relationship, the pair worked closely together to overhaul their company's digital presence. As the symbiosis between customer experience and technology continues to grow, the two leaders are a prime example of the narrowing divide between the CMO and CIO roles. In business today, forming a personal connection with customers is everything — and it takes both marketing and IT to make that happen.
"The modern CMO needs to be dangerous enough on things like data architecture and technology to truly be cutting edge and build experiences. And on the flip side, the modern CIO needs to be able to talk the language of customer experience," said Mehra.
Their respective fields may differ, but Mehra and Tinto share plenty of common ground. They are both experts at the top of their fields. Both come from a consumer packaged goods (CPG) background. And both have a passion for the other's focus area, whether it's Mehra "geeking out" over technology or Tinto maintaining an in-depth knowledge of customer experience. As Tinto says, "The skill set that we have in common is that we are driven and collaborative. We really want to drive transformation." The leaders actively work on building even more common ground and keeping their collaboration productive, whether it's through frequent walks around the WBA campus, shared family dinners, or these days, virtual coffee breaks with espressos from their matching Nespresso machines.
"What has been at the core of the partnership, frankly, is having one single goal. The single goal is how we reinvent experiences for our customers. We don't separate what we do into IT and marketing. Instead, we work as a team, focusing on the customer journey and the experience we want to provide," said Tinto.
"What has been at the core of the partnership, frankly, is having one single goal. The single goal is how we reinvent experiences for our customers. We don't separate what we do into IT and marketing. Instead, we work as a team, focusing on the customer journey and the experience we want to provide."
Francesco Tinto
Global CIO, Walgreens Boots Alliance
Reimagining the pharmacy experience
"Pharmacies are healthcare's front lines in local communities. We need to bring them up to speed,"
said Mehra.
Pharmacies — and the pharmacy experience — haven't changed much in the past few decades. For a process so familiar to so many people, picking up a prescription can still be rather mysterious and frustrating. If you are lucky enough to have your prescription sent to the right pharmacy on the first try, chances are it won't be ready to pick up at a convenient time. Or if you, like many people who work nine-to-five, drop off your prescription after work, you're likely to face long lines and an uncertain wait time.
In the world of the 2020 pandemic, where customers can order groceries online and stream new-release films on their living room televisions, the old way just doesn't cut it anymore. Especially in pharmacies, which are especially critical when health is on the general public's mind.
Fortunately, WBA has a history of finding ways to improve the pharmacy experience. The company famously pioneered the "drive-thru pharmacy" at a national level. And their wildly popular Walgreens app, released in 2017, has five-star status with nearly three million ratings. In 2019, WBA was already en route to a full-scale digital transformation to make their services even more personal and convenient. But with the pandemic pushing all businesses more fully into the digital realm — plus social-distancing protocols — the company needed to do even more for their customers, fast.
As Matt Harker, WBA's VP of global marketing strategy and transformation, put it, "I think healthcare is waking up to the conveniences that we've seen in so many other industries."
This is where Mehra and Tinto came in.
Together, the leaders aimed to create a more personalized omnichannel pharmacy experience than the world has ever seen. This meant making everything digital. Touchless. Frictionless. Adding delivery options. And achieving all of this and more with an unprecedented level of personalization — at global scale. For example, customers could receive personalized recommendations based on past purchases, right when they're about to run out of a product they've taken regularly for years. If the customer chooses, she can pick up her purchase via drive-thru — a capability that, until now, has only been available for prescriptions. And when she arrives at the drive-thru window, the staff will already have any filled prescriptions on hand for her to pick up. They'll also remind her that she's due for her annual flu shot.
If WBA's mission to help patients lead happier, healthier lives — and if the way to get there is through hyper-personalized customer experiences — this is what it looks like in the 21st century. As Mehra said, "Health is the most personal thing in the world. And if there's one category that needs to be personalized, human, and customized to each and every one of our customers and patients, it's got to be healthcare."
The better the partnership, the better the personalization
"Look, when you've got 120 million customers and the amount of data and transactions around the world that a company like us has, you have to immediately seek partners that have the industrial strength to handle the level of customer data, orchestration, and personalization that we need in a category that's as sensitive, from a privacy standpoint, as healthcare. We can't band aid and duct tape our way to sustainable digital transformation at a scale like this," said Mehra.
Mehra and Tinto agree that when you start with the customer, everything else falls into place. With this in mind, WBA chose Adobe, in partnership with Microsoft, to lead the company on the path to personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale. "The pipes between Microsoft and Adobe just work, and that's what's allowed us to make this seamless and quick," said Mehra. Microsoft's cloud computing infrastructure, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform, formed a stable foundation on which WBA could, with help from Adobe Experience Cloud, build towards the level of personalization they envisioned. With Adobe and Microsoft as partners, the WBA team knew they had a long-term partner that could evolve alongside them — and help them reach customers with "surgical precision."
"When you think about what matters to individuals, whether it's a product, service, content, or messaging, you soon realize that personalization — at our scale of hundreds of millions — is going to quickly overwhelm you. You need help from technology to orchestrate content and messaging to land with individuals in exactly the right moment and context," said Harker.
"You need help from technology to orchestrate content and messaging to land with individuals in exactly the right moment and context."
Matt Harker
VP of Global Marketing Strategy and Transformation, Walgreens Boots Alliance
With Adobe Analytics, WBA started off on the right foot by gaining a deeper understanding of their customer base. The company had the good fortune of already possessing a rich source of customer data thanks to their 100 million customer loyalty program members. This made it easy for WBA to use Adobe Audience Manager to create intelligent customer segments for their retail operations and start delivering the most relevant messages to every customer via Adobe Campaign. With Adobe Target, WBA could personalize their new omnichannel retail experiences at scale — and perform all the necessary testing to ensure that each experience was optimal. And with Adobe Experience Manager, Mehra and Tinto could gain visibility into their new customer experience, making sure that customers received seamless, consistent, relevant experiences across every channel for both pharmacy and retail transactions.
The result is just what Mehra and Tinto were aiming for. Now, WBA can meet customers wherever they are. Literally. From mobile to laptops to drive-thru or in-store experiences, WBA shows up for customers when and where they need it — a claim that even the most dedicated pharmacist can't make.
Healthier communities for a healthier world
"I think personalized healthcare has a real opportunity to transform society in ways that we're just beginning to understand," said Mehra.
Technology, especially in the healthcare industry, has made a huge impact on individual wellbeing — be it innovations in medicine, equipment, or the delivery of care. Mehra and Tinto, along with their entire teams at WBA, have used technology to make healthcare more personal and accessible at an immense scale. Whether it's a 24/7 pharmacist live chat, spot-on wellness recommendations, or even simply adding ease and speed to filling prescriptions, every small step forward adds up. As Mehra speculates, the sum total of these advancements will doubtless lead to wide-scale positive change.
This is particularly important in the face of COVID-19, which has created waves across the entire globe — but also increased many businesses' drive and passion to build healthier communities. It's called on people to recognize their shared humanity. And it's asked every member of the healthcare industry to collaborate and cooperate in new and exciting ways. As leaders, Mehra and Tinto have set an important example across WBA and the industry for how experts — even those with different specializations and different points of view — can come together to build something more powerful and lasting than they could on their own.
As Mehra said, "In important moments, great companies can rise to the occasion if employees believe in their company's purpose. The way our people have emotionally responded to COVID and met our customers exactly where they are — it's unlike anything I've ever seen."
More customer success


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Pfeiffer sorry for 'N-word' gaffe
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer mistakenly tweeted out the "N-word" on Tuesday, quickly deleting the offending tweet and apologizing for the typo.
"Obviously a horrendous typo in my previous tweet. My apologies," Pfeiffer tweeted Tuesday morning.
Pfeiffer was replying to a tweet from New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin about an NBC News post discussing how a changing media has contributed to an increase in political polarization.
( PHOTOS: Dan Pfeiffer's career)
Pfeiffer responded that it was a "very smart point and massive factor in political polarization," then sent a second tweet that appeared to misplace an "n" where he intended a "b."
"@jmartNYT also a much nigger factor on the right," Pfeiffer wrote.
The two keys are next to each other on a standard QWERTY keyboard.
The tweet was quickly deleted and Pfeiffer followed up with his apology.


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Plugging you into the Bajie Charging electric customization news
March 18, 2023
Plugging you into the Bajie Charging electric customization news
Focusing on user needs, the shared power bank market is gaining momentum
BaJie charging 2 generation POS smart charging station.
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Shared power bank is very suitable for the choice of current investors
Bajie Charging has a global payment gateway
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Better implement its localization strategy to capture the local market in South East Asia
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