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Zero stars (out of four)
A Chicago-native filmmaker with any loyalty to hometown crowds should never, ever claim a scene takes place in Detroit while blatantly displaying the exterior of Ukrainian Village's Rainbo Club and the Division Street sign.
In director/co-writer Bob Meyer's horribly written, shockingly amateur "Drunkboat," the embarrassment to our city doesn't end there. Following an introductory scene in which he wears a mop on his head, Vietnam vet Mort (John Malkovich) dazedly tries to stay off the sauce after returning to his sister's (Dana Delany) home in the Chicago area. There, Mort's nephew Abe (Jacob Zachar) pursues his dream of buying a boat, and luckily a shady boat salesman (John Goodman), who coincidentally just came into contact with Mort and his other estranged nephew, has plenty on hand.
Cheap-looking and ponderous beyond belief, "Drunkboat" features teenagers acting like 7-year-olds and a stunningly false scene in which neighborhood kids suddenly appear to help Abe push his boat. Contrived and exhausting don't begin to summarize this inert disaster, which I first saw in advance of the 2010 Chicago International Film Festival. I watched it again last weekend. Age has only intensified its stench.
Watch Matt on "You & Me This Morning," Friday at 7:30 a.m. on WCIU, the U
firstname.lastname@example.com. @mattpais


text:
|Data Dictionary:
|ACS 2014 (5-Year Estimates)
|Data Source:
|U.S. Census Bureau
|B11001D. Household Type (Including Living Alone) (Asian Alone) [9]
|Household Type (Including Living Alone) (Asian Alone)
|Universe: Universe: Households with a householder who Is Asian alone
|Excerpt from:
|Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2014 Summary File: Technical Documentation.
|ACS 2014-5yr Summary File: Technical Documentation -> Appendix A: Supplemental Documentation -> 2014 Subject Definitions -> Population Variables -> Household Type and Relationship

subset: commoncrawl


text: A collaboration of VCU's Schools of the Arts, Business, Engineering and College of Humanities and Sciences, the VCU da Vinci Center is a unique collegiate model that advances innovation and entrepreneurship through interdisciplinary collaboration. The academic and other program offerings of the da Vinci Center aim to create T-shaped individuals: individuals who are anchored in a discipline and have the capacity and openness to span across disciplines. Students participating in the da Vinci Center view innovation and entrepreneurship from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and thus, are prepared for the 21st Century workforce by more robustly approaching the innovation/entrepreneurship endeavor.


text:
No one could quite understand why Anthony Weiner needed another interlude on television to say what everyone already knew: He is resigning from his Congressional seat.
This time, he did not take questions, but he did subject himself to the circus of the press and the hecklers (or maybe one heckler, plausibly from the Howard Stern show) who shouted, "Will you maintain your hard-on?" and "Are you more than seven inches?" More shouting followed that man's shouts.
This could have been predicted; in fact, it was a repeat of his last outing. But the man who was unable to stay away from the cameras seemed to want a last measure of undivided attention. He used it to talk about his constituents and his district — overshadowed both by his national pontificating and his Twitter/Facebook/email scandal — and to position himself as a proud member of New York's middle class. "The middle class story of New York is my story and I'm very proud of that," he said.
He mentioned his wife, Huma Abedin, twice, and said that she "stood with me" throughout it all. She did not, however, appear with him. But here's the first call for her to run for his seat.


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Can long-term unemployed find work in improving US economy? There's hope.
The 3.6 million long-term unemployed account for 2.3 percent of the nation's workforce – still a historically high level in Year 5 of the recovery – posing potential problems for the economy.
| Washington
Todd Hamilton was out driving a delivery route for Hostess when a frightening message arrived: He would have to turn his truck around and exchange the keys for a pink slip.
His employer, long known as Interstate Bakeries, was going out of business.
Many Americans at the time fretted (needlessly, it turned out) about whether this meant the end of Twinkies and other Hostess snack cakes. But on that November day in 2012, Mr. Hamilton had a much more pressing concern: He was out of work in a tough economy, along with the other workers.
For months, he struck out in his efforts to find a similar job near his home in south central Michigan. He looked for both truck-driving jobs and any other options, but says the only ones available seemed to pay near minimum wage.
Helping him survive were unemployment benefits that Congress had extended beyond the typical 26 weeks to address the labor-market emergency. "Without that I wouldn't have been able to pay my bills," Hamilton says.
Across the nation at least 3.6 million Americans – and probably many more than that official count – are facing a similar challenge of long-term unemployment.
To grasp what that means for the health and future growth of the economy, consider this: The "long-term unemployed" alone account for 2.3 percent of the nation's workforce – a share that's almost as high as it's ever been during the depths of any prior recession since Labor Department tallies began in 1948. That's the case even though this is not a recession but roughly Year 5 of a recovery that began officially in June 2009.
America's high rate of long-term joblessness is important for a couple of big reasons, economists who study labor markets say. First is the toll it takes on affected individuals and their families, not just financially but in other ways, such as on their physical and mental health.
"The human concerns are quite serious," says Ann Huff Stevens, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis.
More broadly, the historic upward spike in long-term joblessness could potentially dent the pace of US economic growth for decades ahead, she and others say.
Growth, after all, hinges on things like an economy's overall supply of labor and the quality of "human capital" (education and skills). The US loses productive capacity when people drop out of the labor force, or when workers' skills and earning potential are held back by a long period on the sidelines.
President Obama summed up the issue this way at a recent event enlisting business executives in efforts to hire the longtime jobless: "We are stronger ... when America fields a full team."
Hamilton's story, meanwhile, embodies both the challenge and the hope for solutions.
Fast-forward to today, and his situation has turned around. He has a job he's enjoying, for good pay, and he didn't have to move. This happy conclusion arrived just weeks ago, after a year-long odyssey that included finding a new career path and going through intensive retraining.
His new employer is Hatch Stamping, which makes metal parts for the reviving US auto industry.
To those trying to find their way back from joblessness, Hamilton offers words of encouragement and advice:
"I'm 54 years old and chose a completely different profession and a completely different direction. Don't be afraid to do that," he says. "It's hard, but there's people out there that'll give you a chance."
His story is not unusual.
Many Americans are getting jobs, finally. Yet, even more than four years into an economic recovery, it's still taking some 37 weeks on average for the jobless to find new work – about twice as long as during past economic expansions.
The problem
What can be done to solve the problem? Economists say the biggest answer must be improvement in the overall job market – the ultimate salve whether people have been out of work for a short or lengthy stretch. Another important answer, though, may be targeted programs to help ensure that would-be workers don't get lost on what can be an arduous journey.
Hamilton, for example, followed a multistep course that was ultimately successful. Stages along the way included the following:
•Realizing he needed a new career.
•Learning he was eligible for counseling help under a government program for displaced workers.
•Selecting a new occupation (operating computer-controlled manufacturing equipment) that held the promise of job opportunities and good pay.
•Finding a local group (the Jackson Area Manufacturers Association) that would train him, and persisting in the intense, four-month effort.
Even after he was trained, Hamilton had several more months of looking and waiting before he landed the job he started in January. In December, Congress had let the extended federal unemployment benefits expire amid partisan battles over broader budget issues.
The still-high level of long-term unemployment explains why Congress is debating whether to renew those benefits, even though the nation's official unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent in 2009 to 6.6 percent today.
"We have huge numbers of people who have been out of work for more than a year," says Jerry Rubin, who heads the nonprofit group Jewish Vocational Service of Greater Boston, part of the nation's patchwork of public, private, and charitable support for the unemployed.
In Massachusetts alone, he says, "thousands and thousands ... lost their benefits" at the end of 2013.
For now, some big questions are unanswered on how harmful to the economy this sustained surge in long-term unemployment has been.
One is this: How many Americans have already stopped looking for work because they are discouraged – and thus are not counted as officially unemployed? The number could be 2.5 million or more, some researchers say, although the Labor Department officially counts just 800,000 in its "discouraged" category.
A follow-on question: How many people will return to the labor force when and if the job market gets stronger?
The so-called participation rate in the job market has been generally falling in recent years. Demographics explain a goodly chunk of the trend, since growing numbers of baby boomers are reaching retirement age.
Still, many economists expect some uptick in participation as the economy continues to improve.
What's promising is this: By many indicators the long-term unemployed don't look vastly different from the people who lose jobs and find them again more quickly. Both groups have similar profiles when it comes to things such as education and occupation.
Why is that a hopeful thing? It suggests that the long-term unemployment problem has more to do with a weak rate of job creation than with what economists call "structural" issues, such as when large groups of people have obsolete skills.
One sign of this promise: The official level of long-term joblessness has been declining fast. A big caveat is that, again, not all the long-term jobless show up in that chart.
Older workers can face particularly difficult hurdles in getting back to work.
Deborah Wetterich of Cincinnati lost her job at a medical lab last May, when her employer decided to consolidate its nationwide operations. Since then, she's looked for new work in her field but has had only two job interviews and no offers.
She has lost jobs and changed jobs before, and has never had much trouble finding work until this time.
"You get into health care and you think it's untouchable" as a growing segment of America's service economy, she says. "I've come to realize that nothing is secure."
Part of the challenge, she believes, is that when a lab job does open up, employers will choose younger applicants who are also trained in the field. Employers "can pay them probably $10 an hour less than they would pay me," says Ms. Wetterich, who is in her mid-50s.
Wetterich is not eager to retrain for a new occupation, but the difficulties in finding lab work have prompted her to start applying for other kinds of jobs as well.
With her unemployment benefits now expired, she and her husband now live solely off the income from his custodial job, plus some support from their children who live nearby.
The long-term unemployed aren't just people age 50 and older, however. Rather they're a cross section of the labor force.
Christopher Pafford, age 33, has a degree in chemistry and experience in both the private and public sectors. But he, too, has been out of a job more than half a year.
He and his family recently moved from Tennessee to the outskirts of Atlanta for a job his wife found. Mr. Pafford says his challenge is that, while there's more demand for people with expertise in organic chemistry or polymers, his background is in the environmental chemistry of drinking water or waste water.
"[What] everybody is wanting I don't have," he says.
Pafford took his most recent job, with the Tennessee Health Department, in part to broaden his skill range, but his section was forced into job-cut mode before he could get the desired training.
What steps could policymakers take to help people like Wetterich and Pafford get back to work?
Some targeted efforts might be able to help the long-term unemployed fare better. Here are some ideas:
•General job-search skills. The unemployed often need support or counseling on things such as how to look for job openings, fine-tune a résumé, and sharpen their presentation during job interviews, Mr. Rubin at Jewish Vocational Service says. "They still actually have very marketable skills" but often lack confidence, he says.
•Support for retraining. New skills are often the ticket to a job. The optimal model is a local one in which employers and local institutions such as community colleges work together to match training with demand, says Gregory Acs, a labor expert at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Even as this grass-roots model grows, federal dollars may have an important role to play. Unemployed workers often lack money to pay for courses, and federal funding has been falling far short of the national need, Rubin says.
•Skills certification. In some cases, workers have up-to-date skills, but the challenge is to prove that to a potential employer. Exams that verify skills could make these applicants stand out as employable, Mr. Acs says.
•Wage subsidies. Some economists have proposed temporary incentives that offer payroll-tax breaks or wage subsidies to employers who hire people who have been long out of work.
That's not a perfect solution. Some of the subsidized hiring would have occurred anyway, for example. And for each winner from the ranks of the long-term unemployed there might be a loser (another job seeker who missed out as a result). But Ms. Stevens of UC Davis says it's "probably worth trying" all the same, to help break the cycle whereby the long-jobless look steadily less employable.
To help the unemployed, the biggest need is simply for more new jobs to be created.
This means consumer demand and business investment from the private sector, but it also means government policies that support job formation rather than getting in the way. Some ideas being proposed by the Obama administration or Republicans include corporate tax reform, free-trade deals that can open export opportunities, and public spending on needed infrastructure.
Some economists say an important piece of the jobs puzzle is to encourage more new-business formation – which is currently running at a slower-than-normal pace.
It's not just that unemployed people might find jobs at new firms, it's also that they can help to create them. That was the story for David Wadler when he faced a long jobless period in the early 2000s. He had experience in the high-tech industry and, after his long bout of unemployment, battled head winds to launch Twistage, a company that helps businesses share video content online.
Eventually that wrote a ticket for 10 jobs, beyond just his own.
Mr. Wadler, in New York, knows what it feels like to run into dead end after dead end. "The fear of rejection might be paralyzing," he says, whether someone is submitting job applications or seeking financial backing for a start-up. But he urges people to stay focused on their goals and persist.
Hamilton, in Michigan, echoes that idea. His experience felt like being in a dark bedroom, and getting a job was like when "you open the curtain and the sunlight finally shines in."
His job came thanks to an improving economy that opened up more manufacturing jobs, but also because of his own strategizing, study, and persistence.


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When political analyst Zerlina Maxwell appeared on Fox's Hannity this week, she suggested that preventing rape in America might have to do less with informing women to get guns/learn self-defense/dress different/drink less/what have you than it does with... teaching men, from a young age, not to rape. Jesus Christmas, how would you ever come to that conclusion?! She's obviously
totally sane UTTERLY MAD, I TELL YOU.
The quote:
"The reality is that we need to be changing how we train and teach young men. We need to teach them to see women as human beings and respect their bodily autonomy. We need to teach them about consent and to hold themselves accountable."
Even outside the patriarchal, rigid confines of our beloved Fox network, it's pretty clear why this line of thinking is significantly underrepresented. It's so much easier instead, so much less daunting, to lecture women on why they should have brought their Glock to the bar or worn a rape-deflecting smelly Hefty bag covered in T.G.I.F. swag whenever they leave the house or whatever the fuck stupid shit they're saying now that women "should" be doing to protect themselves from being raped.
Maxwell, a rape survivor herself, illuminates the right wing tendency to want women to arm themselves because they assume that true "rape" is only perpetrated by a stranger in a ski mask with a gun who jumps out of the bushes. In fact, obviously, many rapes are committed by people the victim knows and trusts, even loves, says Maxwell: "Telling every woman to get a gun is not rape prevention. [...] We need a reality check. We're talking about the wrong things. We're asking the wrong questions."
Canada provides a model example of Maxwell's idea: after launching their "Don't be that guy" consent awareness campaign, the national sexual assault rate dropped (for the first time in years, at all) by 10%.
Naturally, the audacity of Maxwell to suggest that perhaps men should be more involved in the conversation about rape prevention earned her criticism from various news outlets (one called her argument "bizarre," and another interpreted it as an argument against women arming themselves). Not to mention the myriad Twitter trolls and Facebook assholes posting messages to Maxwell saying that they hope she gets raped. God. America, ladies and gentlemen.
'Can Men Be Taught Not to Rape?' [Salon]


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Tuesday, November 27, 2007
An Improbable Home
I was brought up to believe that a home can be two types: the family you build and pull together to be with you in good times and bad; and the house where that family lives. Growing up in upstate New York, I never had any doubts that Mom would succeed in building the first type of home - even though times were tough in the early 1970s for a newly-divorced mother with two young boys, no credit and no real job experience. It was the second type of home - the physical one - that Mom bought as our first home that was never really meant to exist. Not only was Mom determined to make it exist, she made certain it thrived, even to this day.
After many years of apartment living and scrimping and saving, Mom decided it was time to buy a house. She really didn't have a choice: the 3-bedroom apartment over a warehouse that cost $80 a month was being converted into a larger warehouse so we had to move. We looked at a few houses but they either were rife with problems or the price was way beyond our means. Then in early 1976, we got word that someone was selling a house on the outskirts of the village with 2 acres of land for an unbelievable price of $18,000. Still, that seemed like a lot of money to us back then.
On our first visit it became clear why the price was so low: the house was a Lustron Home. Lustron Homes were pre-fabricated houses manufactured between 1948 and 1950 to help solve the housing crisis confronting returning GIs right after WW II. The homes were made of "porcelain enameled steel" as they advertised - the concept was to sell a house that took 350 man hours to install and had no maintenance or redecorating issues: you could simply wipe down the panels with soap and water. There were lots of "new concepts" such as radiant panel heat from the ceiling, lots of "built-ins", even a Thor washing machine that converted into a dishwasher! No bugs, no rot, no worries, no fuss, no muss. What more could an atomic age 1950s family want?
We knew the place needed work and thought most of it was cosmetic. But what we didn't realize is what more could a 1970s family need? Upstate New York was no place for a Lustron Home - that we soon found out. The houses were intended more for the Sun-belt states with their mild climates and easy lifestyles. To us, Florida was warm winters, palm trees, ocean waves and relatives who only spent October thru April there, arriving like snow birds in their late model Cadillacs.
So, with a mortgage and a second mortgage that the seller was willing to provide, Mom signed on the dotted line and we moved in around the time of the Bicentennial celebration. Mom now had her security and her freedom and it was all wrapped up in a new home.
Our home was smack on the side of a small mountain, with 50 mph winter winds making sure that pipes would freeze, and hot steamy humid summers that would begin to corrode the areas of steel that weren't so "porcelain enameled." Summer appropriate windows that might as well be wire screens in the winter. And didn't someone once say that "heat rises"? So how does radiant heat from ceiling panels work without some forced air system to make sure the lower extremities don't freeze? No wonder that the previous owner only used it as a summer home when he came up from - guess where? Florida. I always thought it would be funny if he lived in a classic Northeast home like a New England salt box or a New York Dutch stone house down there and not a more suitable type, like a Lustron Home.
If anything, Mom was always resourceful: within five years and help from relatives along with learning how to use a hammer and how to cut wood, she was able to convert this "improbable home" into a great 1,000 sq ft living space. Before I left for college in 1980 she had insulated the entire house - walls and roof, paneled the outside with wood, replaced the roof, changed the rusty metal doors with bi-fold ones, and made so many other improvements that you couldn't even recognize the place!
Mom was a genius to me in that she could take a house that just didn't fit into its surroundings and seemed unlivable, at least on a year-round basis, and convert it into a home where all the relatives gathered at every holiday, where there were crazy graduation parties and summer cookouts, and where she would raise two boys before sending them off into the world. What better lessons could a son have than to know that anything was possible and to not allow anyone to tell you that you wouldn't be able to accomplish something?
And Mom would spend the remainder of her days there, working many jobs, socializing with friends, entertaining her grandchildren - all before 2000 when Alzheimer's Disease would come at the age of 58 and gradually remove all those memories - memories of making something out of almost nothing.
One way that I continue to honor all Mom's efforts is to keep the house going even though I am over 800 miles away in Chicago. Now I have tenants who do as good a job at taking care of the house as my mother did and help with improvements such as a wood stove, new gutters, patches and repairs. And I see Mom every few weeks at the nursing home when I fly in. She doesn't ask about the house any more and probably doesn't remember what she accomplished with that crazy house and those two boys.
3 comments:
- Tristan said...
What a great blog, Thomas! I haven't come across one devoted to family and family history like yours. Very interesting stuff! As someone who's had two grandparents and a great-grandparent-in-law pass away within the past year, I've realized the importance of documenting family history and memories. I wished I'd recorded conversations with my family members who've passed on about their lives and experiences; I guess hindsight's 20/20. At least I have the memories.
Anyway, I actually came across your site because I work at Angie's List and am host/producer of List-en up!, the authorized Angie's List podcast. I've interviewed several people from the home history contest that you reference, and I thought you and your readers might be interested in hearing audio interviews from some of the winners in our third episode, out Friday. Due to time constraints, I was unable to interview the family mentioned above, but you might find the other stories interesting... One of the winners even wrote a song about their home, which some folks here at the List recorded. The Homestead History song, podcast and pictures will be available at www.angieslistpodcasts.com.
Also, I'm considering doing an episode about documenting family memories, and you seem like a great Angie's List member to interview. If this is indeed a future episode topic, would you be interested in sharing your knowledge with us and our listeners? Thanks! - Tristan Schmid
- November 28, 2007 at 10:31 AM
- Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...
A great story and tribute to your Mom!
I grew up in a post WWII tiny ranch but I'd never heard of the Lustron's and so I looked into them a little more. After your description I was surprised that there were so many on the map. There is one for sale in N Syr. right now that is going for not much more than I paid to live out in the middle of nowhere. There is even on for rent at the Chautauqua Institution which is someplace I've always wanted to visit.
- November 28, 2007 at 12:12 PM
- Nancy said...
What a great post about your mom and the little Lustron house. What a great mom you had to teach you so many lessons by her good example. I'm sorry she has Alzheimer's - what a heart-breaking disease - and at such a young age. Thanks for sharing.
- November 3, 2009 at 6:55 PM


text:
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Don't Be Fooled By These 3 Real Estate Myths
As the real estate market significantly rebounds, some buyers and sellers are dipping their toes in the waters for the first time. Inevitably, they come into the market with assumptions about how it works.
Their assumptions may come from TV reality shows or watching their parents' house-hunting experiences. Maybe they've learned about real estate from a co-worker's recent home buying or selling experience. The trouble is, the new buyer or seller's assumptions are sometimes based on outdated or generalized "real estate myths." Here are three such myths that many less-seasoned home buyers and sellers assume are true.
Myth No. 1: Spring is the best time to sell a home
Historically, real estate seasons were tied to summer and the end of the school year. Families were the typical buyers or sellers, and they wanted to move during the summer so their kids could start anew in September. That's how spring became the prime selling season. It's true there are still more homes for sale in the spring, which means there's a lot of activity and buzz. But spring isn't necessarily the best time to sell a home anymore.
The reality: The best time to sell is during the holidays and right after
Today, more than half of buyers aren't married, and their decisions aren't based upon school schedules. So spring isn't as relevant as it used to be. Instead, the best time to sell a home is in November, December and January.
It's a supply-and-demand issue. Most sellers assume buyers aren't seriously looking during this prolonged holiday season. And yet, many buyers are looking at properties in person and online right up until Christmas Eve. If the right home goes on the market in mid-December, a serious buyer — and there will be a lot of them — will take note.
After New Year's Eve, most buyers jump back into their routine with a resolve to get into the real estate market, even though many sellers wouldn't even consider listing in January. The net effect: Savvy sellers will face less competition for a still-strong pool of buyers during this period. And that makes November-January a great time to sell.
Myth No. 2: Always start with your lowest offer
There's no generalized strategy for making an offer on a home anywhere, ever. A seller could have overpriced or underpriced the home on purpose. Some markets may be more competitive than others. But, somehow, in the back of the buyer's head is good old Uncle Bob saying "never offer the full asking price." That strategy might work if you're trying to buy a used computer on eBay. And it worked in some real estate markets years ago. But times have changed.
The reality: A low offer may get you nowhere fast
A buyer in a strong, tight inventory market today would be wasting their time making low offers right from the start. It's likely a home that's priced right and shows well can receive multiple offers, sometimes even over the asking price. In this environment, constantly throwing in low offers because that's what your Uncle Bob advised you to do will likely lead to disappointment. Instead, work with a good local real estate agent to understand the market. You'll quickly learn after a few weeks on the open house circuit (and maybe a disappointment or two) that starting low may not get you anywhere.
Myth No. 3: A cash offer trumps all
There's an assumption that a seller, considering two different offers, will always go with the cash offer because there's less risk. As a result, many buyers who hear they're competing with a cash offer assume they won't get the home. They may not even make a formal offer. At the same time, many cash buyers assume that because they're paying cash, they can make an offer below the asking price, and it will likely be accepted.
The reality: A savvy seller may be more tempted by a solid financed offer
Consider a seller with a home priced at $399,000. The seller receives two offers: One is a cash offer of $375,000. The other is an offer for the full asking price, with 25 percent down, a bank pre-approval letter and swift contingency periods.
A good buyer's agent, upon learning their client is competing with a cash offer, will arm the seller with lots of data supporting their client's finances, such as a credit report and verification of income or assets. The agent might even arrange a call between the seller and the buyer's lender.
Learn your market
When you become a buyer or seller, especially for the first time, the most important thing you can do is learn your market. Talk to a savvy local agent, and don't make assumptions based on what you think you know. Real estate is local. Every market is different, with its own customs. If you believe there are general rules for real estate strategy that apply everywhere, anytime, you'll likely be fooled — not only in April, but every other month of the year.


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Samsung Galaxy S3: Top 6 Deals From Wireless Operators
The Samsung Galaxy S3 was unveiled at a press event in London May 3 and the new smartphone has been praised for its enhanced battery and processor capabilities.
Galaxy S3 has come with some inventive S software features, which are based on a concept of human interaction.
Detailing on the availability of the handset and the expected price, the smartphone will be available in black and white colors and will go on sale in Europe from May 30. The preorder for the phone has already started on various UK mobile operators' websites.
Ahead of the S3 launch, Vodafone and O2 have confirmed that they will sell the handset. Later, other wireless network operators all join the bandwagon.
Here are the details of the data plans available from various carriers for the new Galaxy smartphone.
Vodafone would be the only network which would stack up the with the exclusive 32 GB version of Galaxy S3 (limited to one month) along with the 16 GB variant of the handset. Both the variants are currently offered free with 32 GB on a £46, 24-month contract, with 1,200 minutes, unlimited texts, and the same data plan as offered with the 16GB model.
The 16GB version of the Galaxy S3 is also available free on a £41, 24-month price plan. This plan offers 900 minutes, unlimited texts and an introductory deal of 2GB of mobile data and 2GB of BT Openzone access.
Moreover, both the 16GB and 32GB versions will be available on Vodafone's Data Test Drive which allows unlimited data usage for the first three months and a user will be able to find out if the data plan matches his or her requirement.
The cheapest Vodafone price plan will offer the phone for free with 1200 minutes, 3000 texts, and 500MB of data for £36 a month for 24 months. If you like texting and surfing the web, you can opt for just 600 minutes of calls with unlimited texts and 1GB of data a month.
On selected price plans, Vodafone is providing 100 free music tracks to download from Vodafone Music, 25 tracks for each of the first four months.
Phones 4u
Phones 4u is offering a deal which says that all preorder customers will receive an exclusive premium accessory bundle worth more than £50. Phones 4u has not revealed what that bundle consists of, but reports suggest that it will consist of cases and accessories for the shiny new Galaxy S3.
Phones4u is offering the new Galaxy at a 2-year contract costing £36 per month for which the user will receive 1200 minutes, 3000 texts and 500MB of data.
The user will be getting the handset on The One Plan at £34 per month with no upfront cost. In addition, everyone who preorders Galaxy S3 with Three before May 30 will be automatically entered into a daily draw to win one of 26 brand new Samsung Smart TVs.
The users can also get their brand new Samsung Galaxy S3 from the O2 network, but they will have to spend £41 a month and sign a 24-month contract for thaT. And in return, the operator would offer the buyers 600 minutes, unlimited text messages and 1GB of data a month. The users would also get access to O2's wireless hotspots that would include places like Costa coffee.
If the user doesn't wish to buy Galaxy S3 through a contract, there is a SIM-free edition of the 16 GB phone which will be available at Amazon UK for £500.
Orange UK will be ranging Galaxy S3 as free on Orange Panther or Dolphin plans for £36 a month for 24 months. Dolphin users will get 900 minutes, 3000 texts, and 250MB of data a month while Panther users will get 600 minutes, 3000 texts and 1GB of data.
Take a look at the impressive features of the smartphone:
Samsung Galaxy S3 Specs
Galaxy S3 features a huge 4.8-inch Super AMOLED Plus 720p HD display (720 x 1,280 pixels) with a 306ppi pixel density and the phone has the protection of Corning's Gorilla Glass 2 and includes the latest Eye Tracking technology.
Samsung has brought some really smart features on Galaxy S3, including Smart Voice, Direct Call etc., which might prove the device to be a winner in the market. In terms of dimensions, the device boasts a curvy and ultra-slim body (136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm) and weighs around 133 grams.
Processor and RAM
The smartphone is powered by a 1.4GHz Coretex-A9 quad-core CPU and Exynos 4212 quad chipset and is accompanied by 1GB RAM. Further, as a USP, Galaxy S3 includes Mali 400 MP GPU which offers complete graphics acceleration and adds to the battery life.
Operating System
Galaxy S3 runs on the latest Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, topped with TouchWiz UI 4.0, a commendable and better performance than its predecessor.
The device has an 8 megapixel sensor camera accompanied with autofocus and LED Flash. It will also be capable of capturing 1080p video at 30fps and will let the consumer capture still images while recording a video. The S3 would also support geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection and image stabilization. The handset will come backed by a 1.9 megapixel front-facing HD camera for video chatting and 720p video capture.
In this latest uprising category, Galaxy S3 4G LTE support includes LTE 700 network band, alongside 3G bands HSDPA 850/900/1900 and 2100 MHz bands, depending on the regional availability. The handset will also support Wi-Fi capabilities alongside Bluetooth connectivity.
The phone will feature 16GB, 32GB and 64GB internal memory and also a microSD card slot which supports 64GB card. So the highest variant will have 128 GB memory.
Galaxy S3 is loaded with a 2100 mAh battery to support its stronger processor and plus. The battery is also replaceable.
Wireless Charging
The new Galaxy supports the technology of wireless charging. The inductive wireless charging technology will juice up the battery of the handset, without the use of cables or plugs. While getting charged, the phone will also be able to share, sync and take backup of the data.
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text:
Oil utility
The Oil utility is a special package command can be used in several ways to facilitate quick development, help with testing your application and for running Tasks.
Oil is an optional command line utility designed to help speed up development by providing several functions:
- Generate - Build MVC components, migrations and entire scaffolding.
- Refine - Run tasks such as migrate and your own custom ones.
- Package - Install, update and remove packages.
- Console - Test your code in real time using an interactive shell.
- Test - Run PHPUnit tests.
- Server - Run FuelPHP using the PHP 5.4+ built-in webserver.
Each of these commands works in a different way to achieve different things, but before getting into them it's best to make sure you are in the correct folder and oil is available and running.
$ cd Sites/fuel
$ php oil -v
Fuel: 1.2
Oil won't use any instructions you've made for HTTP requests, such as defining the server environment using .htaccess. Oil will use whichever environment is the default unless you instruct it.
$ FUEL_ENV=production php oil refine migrate
In place of
production you can use any of the defined environments.
In-line help
Oil contains its own basic documentation which can be found by typing the command:
$ php oil help
php oil [cell|console|generate|package|refine|help|server|test]
Runtime options:
-f, [--force] # Overwrite files that already exist
-s, [--skip] # Skip files that already exist
-q, [--quiet] # Supress status output
-t, [--speak] # Speak errors in a robot voice
The 'oil' command can be used in several ways to facilitate quick development, help with
testing your application and for running Tasks.
If you want to specify a specific environment oil has to run in, overload the environment
variable on the commandline: FUEL_ENV=staging php oil <commands>
More information:
You can pass the parameter "help" to each of the defined command to get information
about that specific command: php oil package help
Each of these commands has its own help section which can be found by typing:
$ php oil generate help


text:
Second-Tier Law School Dean Desperately Assures You That Law School Is Still a Great Buy
Lawrence Mitchell is the dean of Case Western Reserve University's law school, ranked #67 by US News, not that a doctor of jurisprudence like Lawrence Mitchell would concern himself with pedestrian matters such as his law school's low, low ranking. No—Lawrence Mitchell is concerned with more elevated matters, such as the wanton meanness of mean people who say mean things about law school. Have persons no respect?
Lawrence Mitchell, whose income and professional success is wholly dependent on hordes of young people continuing to pay huge sums to attend his second-tier law school, is tired of the "relentless attacks on law schools," by "the popular press, bloggers," and others. First of all who is he even talking about because that issue just has not shown up on our radar. Second of all, it's strange that a law school dean would write what might be colloquially referred to as a "butthurt" op-ed, because it is completely out of character for lawyers to be self-righteous, defensive little crybabies. Third of all, what is the problem here, really?
The overwrought atmosphere has created irrationalities that prevent talented students from realizing their ambitions. Last spring we accepted an excellent student with a generous financial-aid package that left her with the need to borrow only $5,000 a year. She told us that she thought it would be "irresponsible" to borrow the money. She didn't attend any law school. I think that was extremely shortsighted, but this prevailing attitude discourages bright students from attending law school.
One less lawyer in the world, one less smart person wasting their life as a lawyer, one less indebted law school grad, one less person competing with all those other recent law school grads for work, one more bright young person who might put their talents to work helping mankind rather than helping corporations pay the lowest possible taxes. Everything seems to be in order here.
But since Lawrence Mitchell appears to be having a tough time, please remember to consider Case Western Reserve University law school. It's in Cleveland.


text:
Bradley tweaks calf; leaves practice
Linebacker Stewart Bradley limped off the practice field at the NovaCare Complex today, favoring his left leg.
The Eagles said he tweaked his calf. Bradley declined to be interviewed.
Bradley pulled up lame during a 7-on-7 drill and was briefly examined by the team's trainers before they decided to head inside. He walked off the field under his own power, but needed a little assistance before he walked through the doors that lead into the complex.
Bradley, of course, missed all of last season after he tore the ACL in his right knee. He tore the ACL in his left knee during his junior season at Nebraska.
Bradley has looked healthy since returning during minicamp a month ago. On Tuesday, he made a nice play when he ran with Brent Celek and broke up a pass intended for the tight end.
"Stew looks real good," Celek said. "He looks like his old self. I was telling him the other day that it doesn't look like he was ever injured at all."
His injury comes a day after the Eagles lost safety Marlin Jackson, who ruptured his right Achilles tendon during practice.
Guard Todd Herremans, meanwhile, missed his second straight day of practice with a unspecified left foot injury. Max Jean-Gilles filled in for Herremans at left guard.


text:
Here's a Father's Day treat from the late, great Paul Hemphill. From The Good Old Boys, published in 1974.
ICC is a-checkin on down the line,
Well, I'm a little overweight
And my log book's way behind;
Nothin' bothers me tonight,
I can dodge all the scales all right;
Six days on the road
And I'm a-gonna make it home tonight ...
During the week, when he would be on the road somewhere, the days at home began with the muffled slapping of screen doors and the dull starting of cars and I could look through the living-room window and see the same thing happening up and down the block: the other men, wearing drab blue factory uniforms or plain gray suits, carrying lunch pails or briefcases, going off to shuffle somebody's papers or stand in somebody's production line, a stolid army of beaten men moving out under the orders of fate to absorb whatever the world had to dump on them today. And when I saw them return in the late afternoon, their lunch pails empty and their chalky faces more pinched than ever now, my throat would tighten and I would think, in the manner of a 12-year-old boy: My old man is better. Because I could not imagine then, nor can I imagine now, how a kid could get excited about a father like one of those; a father who wasn't visible, a father who merely functioned. And because I knew that during the same day, in that nine hours between the going out and the coming back of the other men of the neighborhood, my old man had been Out There—Ohio, Kansas, California? Outwitting the Interstate Commerce Commission? Saving a life on the highway? Overtaking a Greyhound?—a mechanized Don Quixote challenging the world, spitting into its face the juice of a Dutch Masters Belvedere cigar, giving it a choice of weapons and then beating it at its own game. And, too, because I was faintly aware that a snarling four-ton Dodge pulling a sleek aluminum trailer was, unlike the portfolio of the insurance agent or the samples of the salesman, something a kid could sink his teeth into.
Then, on a Friday afternoon, my mother would be standing at the kitchen sink and suddenly say, with a slight inward smile I did not yet know, "Your daddy ought to be home soon." And I would go out into the front yard, and shortly a mud-spattered red behemoth would top the long hill above the house, a clattering silver warehouse dragging behind, air brakes sneezing and air horns blasting at the wide-eyed kids gamboling on the sidewalks and the stunned old ladies swinging on their porches, the excitement swelling in my bony young chest until finally there was one final burp on the horns—for me—before the belching engine gasped and the whole rig shuddered to rest at the curb beside the house. "How-dee, I'm just so proud to be hyar," he would yelp, Minnie Pearl at the Opry, swinging down from the cab like a Tom Mix dismounting—sunburned face, grimy hands, squinty piercing pale blue eyes, greasy overalls and pirate boots, a half-chewed cigar jammed in the corner of the mouth—the leathery adventurer, King of the Road, home from the wars. Neighborhood kids crowding around, daring to touch the simmering tires, while my old man digs through dirty socks and Cleveland newspapers and kitchen matches to produce a novelty-shop key to the City of Akron for me. A kiss for Mama and a hug for Sis, cowering, at the age of eight, in his presence. An hour in the vacant lot across the street, hitting mile-high pop flies until dusk over complaints from his wife ("Thirty-seven years old, acting like a boy"). Over supper, the stories of bad wrecks and truck stops and icy roads and outrunning the law and pulling the Appalachians at night, a born liar refining his art: "That fog was so bad I had to get out and feel that sign," and "They got watermelons in Texas grow so fast the bottoms wear off before they can pick 'em," and "She had a face so ugly it wore out two bodies." And afterward, a session at the old black upright piano in the living room, a self-taught Hoagy Carmichael: "I'd o' learned to play with the left hand, too, but before they could mail me my second lesson the Injuns shot the Pony Express." And finally to bed. Five days on the road, Birmingham to Akron and back, and he had made it home again tonight. He was my first hero and, the way things have been going lately, quite possibly the last.
So why, I am asking myself now, of all the good times we had together, why should I remember a bad one? The details are fuzzy. I must have been 18 or so. He came in off the road, but something was wrong. There was shouting. He talked about taking off again right after supper. My mother found a pint of booze in his overnight bag and, with hell-fire finality, flushed the contents down the toilet. He left. She and my sister were hysterical. It's the son's place to go find him and talk to him. Bewildered, I got into the car and raced into town, to the lot cluttered with tires and rusty engines and oil pans. I could see him sitting all alone in a dark corner of the cab, swigging from a pint, and when I pulled up and parked in the gravel beside the truck we tried not to look at each other. Blue lights laid a scary blanket over the lot. There was the desperate choking putt-putt-putt of a refrigerated trailer somewhere, broken by the occasional wail of a far-off train whistle, and after an interminable pause I heard myself say, "They're crying."
A gurgle, a cough. "Thought I'd get started early."
"How come you did it?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Made 'em cry."
"What'd you come down here for?"
"Mama said. I don't know."
"She shouldn't o' done that."
"Well, she told me."
He tilted back his head and began draining the bottle, his Adam's apple quivering and some of the whiskey dribbling off to the side of his face, and his eyes looked like deep swollen ponds. I looked down and toed the gravel with my shoe while he finished. He sniffed and cleared his throat and then spoke in a frightened, vulnerable voice, a voice I had never heard come out of him before. I'm not running anywhere, son. There's a lot a boy don't know. I don't mean to make your mother cry, but sometimes a man's, a man's—" His voice had broken and when I dared look up at his face, bleached white by the pale lights on the lot, I saw that my old man, too, was crying.
Growing up is, of course, in line with the prevailing notion, a terrifying experience. But contrary to that notion, it is not accomplished in one giant symbolic leap, to the accompaniment of a dozen violins turning up full volume and the sudden brilliant dawning of a new and better day. Boys are not miraculously transformed into men through the first brutal sweaty defloration of a writhing rose in the back seat of a car, nor through the quaffing of eight beers without throwing up, nor by the stunning conquest of the neighborhood bully in defense of thy mother's good name—although all of those events play a part in the transformation, however exaggerated their importance later becomes. No, growing up isn't that simple. It may begin with a single pivotal moment, yes, but that moment is more likely to be one of defeat than of victory. In short, we must first discover that we do not know a goddamned thing and then take it from there. This has been known to take years.
Philosophically, theoretically, there is no good reason why it should take so long. Maybe one day we will become so sophisticated that we will modernize the whole system of maturing, organize it into an orderly program whereby young boys are weaned away from their childhood fantasies and patiently taught the mechanics of coping and therefore gently delivered into manhood as the grooming of young baseball players for the major leagues is done these days; you know, daily classes on Growing Up, regular weekly seminars with the old man where he speaks with candor about the times he screwed up and how it could have been avoided, and, finally, that ceremonial day of graduation into manhood just like the African tribes in television documentaries.
Maybe there are some fathers already doing that, but I doubt it. Because it is the nature of fathers to protect the old image, to set themselves up as infallible, and the nature of sons to swallow every bit of it. So growing up must begin with the shattering discovery that one's father is not perfect, a knowledge not easily extracted or believed; and then you have to learn why he is not perfect; and, finally, you are getting somewhere when you determine how he has managed to compensate for this pitiable shortcoming.
That night in the lot haunted me for a long time. It isn't easy to look on and see your father brought to his knees by mysterious devils. There was, indeed, "a lot a boy don't know." To this day—since it was a moment that embarrassed us both, we have never discussed it—I don't know who the devils were. That would have been around 1954, when he was 43: about the time the Teamsters were beginning to make it difficult for independent, free-wheeling "lease operators" of his breed to make it; about the time more money was needed for us than ever before, my having attained college age; about the time a woman's natural instincts for "respectability" were causing my mother to hack away at such issues as church and example-setting and a nicer house in a subdivision and a more secure job like driving a bus.
But the larger point is that I had seen him running scared, and it brought me to the first vague stirrings that life was not going to be easy or even fun; that life could be a bitch not above kicking you in the groin if you so much as winked at her; that there would be some terrible scars before it was done; that one day there would be a young boy looking up at me, wanting answers, and about all I might be able to give him in the way of solid advice would be to suggest he go into a clinch when they started working on the head. Here we had been working on the theory that he was unbeaten and untied, the last of the indomitable heroes, and now I knew differently and he knew I knew differently. From there, we began.
He has always seemed to treat everything that happened before he went into trucking as a prologue, which could explain why I have never been able to get much more than fragments about his growing up. I do know that he was born in 1911 at a tiny community in upper East Tennessee called Robbins, a then-prosperous but isolated mining and lumbering town that sat on a branch of the Southern Railroad between the birthplace of Sgt. Alvin York and the inaugural dam on the Tennessee Valley Authority system. Left fatherless at the age of eight, he got on a tram seven years later with his ailing mother and a sister and they went to live with relatives in Birmingham, never to return to the hills. He lacked a semester of English to graduate from high school, but instead of returning to finish—he has said he was a good student and could have gone to college if the money had been there, borne out every time I see him arrogantly complete the Sunday crossword of The New York Times with a ballpoint pen—he cut out for the Midwest to work at hard labor on the Rock Island Line. After a year or two he went back to Birmingham and married Velma Nelson, one of a husky coal miner's six children, whom he had met one night while hanging around the steps of a Baptist church.
The Depression had hit rock bottom by then, and it was a scramble to stay alive. For a while he and a Greek named Mike Manos set up a news-butch operation on the daily excursion train running between Birmingham and Chattanooga—splitting $50 a week from the proceeds of newspapers, soft drinks and snacks at a time when most men felt lucky to earn $15—and later on he established a back-breaking one-man coal-mining business. I have heard some of the stories: how he and my mother won a drawing that gave them a free wedding on the stage of the Ritz Theater and a night in the honeymoon suite of the Thomas Jefferson Hotel, how she would get up well before dawn to make sandwiches to be sold on the train, how he painted the doctor's house to pay for my birthing in 1936. I am sure that much of what he is today was shaped by those times, which is true with the great bulk of Americans who went through the Depression, but he is served well by a faulty memory of the whole thing.
Then, on a March morning in 1941, I awoke to the sounds of fierce sawing and hammering in the backyard. He was building wooden sideboards for a borrowed trailer and converting his dump truck to pull it, and with a war coming on he was announcing plans to go into trucking. "There's gonna be a lot of stuff needs haulin'," he said, "and I'm gonna help 'em."
It was the beginning, in a true sense, of his real life. He was born to drive a truck on the open road—a hard worker, a gambler, a fast talker, an adventurer with the eagle eyes and razor instincts and idiotic courage of a moonshine runner—and over the next 20 years he was to become something of a legend in that grim outback underworld of truck stops and loading docks and ICC checkpoints and cut-rate gas stations. Having a mountaineer's inbred distrust of big companies and organized labor, preferring to make or break on his own merits, he set himself up as a "lease operator." This meant he was a hired gun, a freelance trucker not on salary but on commission. The company, thus free of responsibility, couldn't care less if he was overloaded or otherwise illegal in the eyes of the ICC; if he got caught, that was his problem. Just deliver the stuff by Tuesday morning.
You can see, then, how quickly my old man learned the location of every weight station on the continent, not to mention the sleeping habits and personal financial conditions of the men who ran them. He would stand there at the dock and tell them to fill 'er up until she was bulging—with steel, tires, explosives, helmets, uniforms, whatever—and take off in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness, like a bootlegger off on another run, twice as heavy as some states allowed but also twice as hungry. He knew every road in America by heart, and where to find the good coffee and the cheap gas, and how to make a gentleman's arrangement at a truck stop in regard to somewhat clandestine cargo; and it seemed to be about all a man had to know. By the time the war had blown over, he had paid cash for a three-bedroom house and a '46 Dodge automobile ("The 78th Dodge bought in Birmingham after the war"), started taking us on summer vacations to Florida and hired a driver to run a second rig. Those were the days of unblinking idolatry: that glorious time of puberty when I tried to wear my cap like his, and affected his hillbilly twang, and wondered what it took to be able to smoke and chew a cigar at the same time, and marveled at his ability to back a heaving trailer into the tightest hole. On summer evenings, at dusk, there was the great excitement of stuffing fresh socks and underwear into a bag and waiting impatiently for him to announce it was time to be going. "Now, Paul, I don't want him growing up to be a truck driver," my mother would say. "It's good enough for me," he would snap, "and I notice you ain't starving."
And a large part of growing up would begin to take place as we hit the open road, father and son, discovering the world and discovering each other together. Sleeping all day in the simmering Southern heat and riding all night to the songs of the whistling tires and the all-night country radio stations ("Ol' Ernest Tubb sings like a bulldog, don't he?"). Seeing the big tankers parked at the Mobile docks, the traffic in Atlanta, the tarpaper shacks in Mississippi, the cattle in Texas and the mist along the Blue Ridge. The truck stops at 3 o'clock in the morning, with bug-eyed truckers so high on bennies they couldn't feed the pinball machines fast enough. "Your boy there looks just like you, Paul," and, in response, "Well, the kid can't help it." Donora, Pennsylvania, where Stan Musial was raised. Nashville, where the Opry was. Pittsburgh, where the Pirates played. Blowing past a Greyhound on a straightaway, walking around a curve to see if the scales were open, standing on the running board to relieve ourselves while crawling up the Smokies, the jouncing of the cab and the pinup overhead bringing a curious new sensation to the groin. The mysterious hand signals exchanged with passing truckers, the wrecks and near-wrecks, the Cardinals game from St. Louis broadcast by Harry Caray, the black laborers begging to help unload at the docks at New Orleans. "Naw, ain't got but a partial load o' tires on," to the ICC inspector and, a quarter-mile down the road, grabbing another gear, "Them boys just don't take their work serious enough." We had that to hold us together, and baseball—more than once we stood through Sunday doubleheaders to watch the Birmingham Barons play, then rushed home to work on my fielding until dark—and it seemed like a dream that would never end.
The breaking away began, of course, with that confusing night when I found him with his defenses down. We didn'thave the trips together or the baseball any more—l had been jolted awake to the fact that I would never make it to the major leagues when I lasted only five days in spring training with a pathetic Class D club—and now I was cutting the umbilical, going off to college. In the college atmosphere, lost in a crowd of people whose fathers were doctors and architects and owners of legitimate businesses, I began to develop the notion that my old man was somebody to be ashamed of. It struck me for the first time that there had never been a book around our house, that my old man's English was atrocious and that his business associates tended to be unlettered itinerants spending their dim lives driving other people's trucks from one warehouse to another. I painfully learned that he, being a man of instinct rather than intellect, had been incapable of instructing me in any of the social graces now facing me, including sex. It occurred to me that while my friends were being staked to automobiles and off-campus apartments and fraternity initiation fees, I was having to serve up chow in a series of dining halls and work at summer jobs simply to stay in school. This was, remember, the 1950s, when we of the Silent Generation were in college for girls, football, parties and secure positions with big companies. Now my old man was no longer a character or a folk hero or even a champion to me; he was, as we say, tacky.
Which is not to say I had not been reminded of this before. He had always been the maverick in that great sprawling body on my mother's side referred to as The Family. One uncle sold insurance. Another was a career man with Internal Revenue. Another was a mechanic. The other uncle was, the best I could determine, a freelance inventor; but then, his wife hadn't let him out in years. It was a huge family, one that had in the early years knelt at the feet of my maternal grandfather—an imposing white-haired patriarch who reminded me of John L. Lewis and was respectfully called "Daddy Nelson"—and my old man had set the ground rules very soon after his marriage into The Family by refusing to cater to "the old man," as he doggedly called him. His irreverence on that score, and on dozens of others, had made him an outcast, a role he seemed to relish. He drank. He didn't believe in church. He talked loud and told blue jokes. He stated that the inventor had more brains than anybody in the bunch, he implied that being a deacon in the church was as good a way as any to sell insurance policies, and he was unable to fulfill his duties as a pallbearer at one relative's funeral when he warmed up to the task with a few snorts of bourbon on an empty stomach. He worked with his hands, often outside the law, and to a group bent on attaining respectability—garden clubs, Sunday school, college, newer cars and bigger houses—he was, more often than not, a pain in the ass.
Meantime, I had finished school, gotten married, begun to write sports and to understand that I hadn't seen much of the world at all. I had hitchhiked around a lot in pursuit of baseball clubs needing second basemen and I had covered a lot of miles in a truck with my old man, but it had been like running in place. After spending a year in France with an Air National Guard unit during John Kennedy's "Berlin Crisis," a year of enforced leisure in which I introduced myself to literature and found that a lot had happened in the world in 1946 besides the Cardinals' winning of the World Series, I returned knowing that I had to do two things: quit writing about games, and get the hell out of Birmingham. By 1965 I found myself a daily columnist on The Atlanta Journal, featured prominently on the second page and free to write about anything—politics, Vietnam, sports, strippers—a sort of Jimmy Breslin, Dixie branch. But the real issue then was, of course, civil rights, and I found I was poorly equipped to handle it. I didn't have the education or experience or, most important of all, the personal association with black people.
I had been raised by a Negro maid named Louvenia, never thinking to ask why she took her lunch on the back porch, and had grown up throwing rocks and jeering at a lanky fellow known as Nigger Charles as he ran from school to the shantytown that sat on a pile of scarred red dirt beyond our shaded neighborhood in Birmingham. My old man had always said they were shiftless and smelled bad and were not to be associated with, but the only opportunity I had to investigate that was when I played semipro baseball in Kansas with a dusky little local outfielder named Hank Scott; he turned out to be energetic, bright, deodorized and, to my astonishment, more of a soul brother to me than some of the white teammates from places like Chicago and St. Louis.
No, Louvenia and Nigger Charles and Hank Scott represented the only connections I had in what they were beginning to call the black community, unless you want to throw in the swarthy laborers who had always met my old man at the docks to help unload, and I had some homework to do. Not that I was alone in the South. Maybe the kids who grew up on a farm where there was nobody else to play ball with except the sharecroppers sons had prior relationships with the Negro, but most of my friends had never faced anything like that. We had blindly accepted the proposition that Negroes were inferior and should therefore be kept in their place—the back of the bus, the balcony of the theater, the "nigger bleachers" at the ballpark, and in their own churches and schools and restaurants—and now we had to make a decision: fight desegregation or work for it.
I must say that my old man made it easy for me. During the time I was living under his roof he had seldom felt it necessary to comment on the balance of the races, but the sight of those uppity folks actually demanding service in white Southern restaurants during the early 1960s drove him into a frenzy. This wasn't my old man. It was somebody else. An autographed 8 x 10 of George Wallace showed up on the family piano. He quit hiring blacks to help him unload—at his age rolling into his trailer tires that sometimes weighed 500 pounds. He applauded the Birmingham Barons' decision to drop out of the Southern Association rather than play integrated baseball. He talked about reactivating his father's old squirrel rifle, which hadn't been fired in at least 40 years. He discussed moving out of the old neighborhood. Once, on a visit with me when I was temporarily separated from my wife, he raved on and on about Communists and niggers and Catholics and Jews without addressing himself to my anguish. A trip to visit the folks in Birmingham invariably developed into an incredible one-way conversation: "This old boy out in Texas was telling me all about Jackie and those Secret Service agents. ... That's all right, I know old Rastus McGill won't let y'all say anything when you get out of Atlanta, but everybody knows he's getting paid by Moscow ... You talkin' 'bout Martin Luther Coon? ... Now that Strom Thurmond, that's a man for you ..." Ralph McGill paid from Moscow? Jackie Kennedy pleasuring the Secret Service? I mean, there are times when it doesn't take an expert to sort out the truth. I became a liberal, through the back door.
During the last of the 1960s, then, our relationship, what there was left of it, caved in from what should have been peripheral pressures. He became just as convinced I was a freaky Communist as I was certain he was the last of the great racists, and one thing I did that I regret was to say it in my column. Not because I consider it an especially cheap shot to talk about your father like that in print or because it might have disturbed him, but because it made him polarize even further. Funny things were happening in The Family. After being bombarded by Freedom Riders and Martin Luther King and church bombers and police dogs, it seemed as though everybody in Birmingham was preparing to give the world 24 hours to get out of town. There had been a time when my old man's audacious verbosity made him tacky, but now The Family was rallying around him as though he were some kind of proletarian prophet. "Well, now, Paul was telling me he heard over in Louisiana the other day how the nigras are being paid, yes paid, to, ah, go looking for young white girls and, ah ... ," said with some authority because my old man was, after all, as everybody knew, the one in The Family who traveled a lot and talked to different people.
Birmingham became a nice place for me to stay away from, what with one cousin being promoted to an executive position with the John Birch Society and my sister's husband building a house on an elevated cul-de-sac and actually saying, if I remember correctly, that he would be better able to "get a bead on 'em when they start coming." Jesus. How the hell do you talk with them, reason with them, when their nostrils are flaring and their mouths are clucking while we all sit around the color television watching Daley's cops riot in Chicago at the convention? Communists, everyone of 'em. Enraged: Hell, they're just kids. Calmly, smugly: Prove they ain't Communists, then maybe I'll believe it. Somebody, help.
"... never even a book in our house when I was growing up, and Auburn was better known then for its football players and engineers than for its writers and thinkers. So I feel, in a sense, the Nieman program was made for somebody like me. I feel I can come to a better understanding of the South and people like my father by spending a year away from it all, in the academic atmosphere of Harvard ..."
Each year a dozen newspapermen from all over the country are selected as Nieman Fellows, to spend a school year doing whatever they want to do at Harvard: reading, attending lectures, sleeping, drinking. The year is intended to put a spit-shine on promising young journalists, and it can be a good year if you handle it right. I mean, you don't have to lift a finger for a whole year. At the suggestion of Dan Wakefield, the writer, who had been a Nieman once, I started filling out applications in the spring of 1968. I had the vague notion that maybe a year away from the South and The Family would help me put some things into perspective—"Give 'em some of that poor-Southern-boy stuff and you're in," I was advised—but mainly I was running from the writing of six 1,000-word columns a week. I mentioned the possibility of a year at Harvard to my old man once, and all I got was a knowing smile. Then a wire came, saying I had been one of those picked, and I called Birmingham with the great news. "Mama, I won that fellowship," I yelled over the phone. 'What school did you say that was?" she replied. "Harvard, Mama." In the background I could hear my old man's response, and it didn't take much imagination to guess what he might be saying. Went ahead and joined the damned Party, didn't he? As far as he knew, the Nieman Fellows was an organization of Communist fags.
The joke was, as it turned out, on both of us. The atmosphere at Harvard was so academic it was overwhelming, eventually sending me into a shell I was unable to come out of. Among my fellow Niemans were two Moscow correspondents, a former Pulitzer reporter and a fellow who had once run errands for Scotty Reston at The New York Times. While many of the others had been fighting in the trenches of the civil rights push five years earlier, I had been picking up ten bucks a game as official scorer for the Augusta Yankees of the Class AA Sally League. Talk about your cultural shock. I was pretty good at drinking beer at Cronin's, but when they broke out the sherry at the Faculty Club and Galbraith started in on the industrial state I began getting a headache.
But there was more. It dawned on me, after too many boring cocktail parties with too many terribly proper New Englanders, that what I was really missing at Harvard was the sweaty passion for life I had always taken for granted while growing up in the South. There was a superficiality, a sterility, in Cambridge—even among most of the Southern kids I met, who were, after all, from a different South than I—which was neatly packaged for me by a lady at one of those parties who told me, straining to be sympathetic, that she had been to the South and found it to be not nearly as bad as everybody thought: she and her husband had spent the night in Atlanta on the way to Miami Beach, and found the South to be altogether delightful. So I was able to develop a handy catch-all theory about life: that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who live life and those who ponder it. And I learned that a good way to break the routine at the parties was to get off in a corner and regale them with highly embellished stories about my old man and Junior Johnson and Roy Acuff—How quaint. Tell us about Johnny Cash's years in prison—and the time to go back home didn't come soon enough. The year at Harvard was the most profitable year I ever spent, for the wrong reasons.
Going back, then, I had a new frame of reference within which to view my old man. I had taken some 15 years to finally accept him for what he was—to discover why he wasn't perfect and then to determine how he made up for not being perfect. I knew, now, that I had to overlook his racial hangups—we would just have to ride that one out, it being too late for him to be changed—and search for the larger truths he had left me: an involvement with and a passion for life, a willingness to take on the world if necessary, the courage to endure. That's the word—endure—a word not so fashionable as it once was. Instead of bending or running when the blows came pouring down on his head—his wife harping on security and respectability, his children acting ashamed of him, the unions killing his way of life—he stood and fought and, if forced to retreat, was still standing there, bloody, throwing rocks and cussing, when they found him. About all a man should be asked to do, when it comes to raising sons, is somehow to see that there is a slight improvement in the species. It's a hell of a burden.
He is 62 now, and those riotous days and nights of scrambling on the open road are faint memories. In the mid-1950s he chose to make it on his own rather than join a union or go with a big company, and by 1961 the unions were so strong that it was all over for the independent. Today he does some driving and bidding and odd jobs—"nigger work," he calls it—for a Syrian in Birmingham who owns a surplus tire company, lives in an $80,000 house and can't begin to understand what makes my old man tick. He and, my mother live serenely in a comfortable brick house where there is an expensive organ for him to play, as well as a piano; they have plenty of friends their age, and they go to Florida several times a year to inspect the converted swampland they plan to retire to in two or three years. Not everything is right with him—his job is dull, and his wife makes more money working at the Social Security office than he ever made trucking—but he manages to keep up a facade.
Two weeks before the 30th anniversary of his entry into trucking, we took a trip together. A fellow in Louisville was selling out his tire business and my old man was going up to take the rest of the tires off his hands. On a Saturday afternoon we left in a pitiful faded red truck—no fuel gauge, leaky heater, bad brakes, no radio, dusty lopsided trailer behind—and for a while, chugging up the trough into Middle Tennessee, both of us were trying to pretend it was the same. "Call that Jew Overdrive," he cracked, cutting the engine to coast down a hill. We stopped off to watch the Opry from backstage—"Sure wish that pretty Jean Shepard ['A Dear John Letter'] was here"—before plugging on toward Louisville. From eight in the morning until two. Sunday afternoon he loaded huge surplus aircraft tires into the trailer, in the rain, with the help of a couple of white boys and an aging Negro named Clem Miller ("Yessuh, yo' Daddy can go almost as hard as I can"), and after some sleep at a cheap motel across the river in Indiana we got up around two o'clock in the morning and headed back.
It wasn't really the same anymore. All I had to do was look at the truck he was driving, to observe the meaningless work he was doing, to see that. I noticed, when we stopped for breakfast at an obscure roadside diner, that he had trouble reading the menu. But we tried, passing a bottle of Scotch back and forth, laughing at the stories, creaking through Nashville as the streets jammed with Monday morning traffic: "Yeah, that time there was this fellow just handed me $150 cash up in Delaware and told me where to deliver these aircraft parts in Atlanta. Saved him some money, made me some. ... At least two and a half million miles without an accident chargeable to me. ... Hell, if you're driving a Greyhound they can fire you just because some little old lady didn't like your looks. ... I was representing all 82 of the drivers at Alabama Highway, see, and when I told this union organizer we didn't want to join up, he just looked at me real cold and said, 'Well, we can't be responsible,' and I said, 'For what?' and he said, 'If you get a brick through your windshield somewhere.'" And about the time the ICC almost nailed him in California, where he had some unpaid fines hanging: "Didn't want 'em to know my name, so I told 'em I didn't even have a license, was just helping out my buddy there who had passed out in the truck after drinking all night. 'Yeah, I'm from Tennessee, just came along to see California, can't get back home fast enough,' I told 'em. Never bothered to look in the truck. Think he just got tired of hearin' me talk." And disgust for the new breed of trucker: "Some of 'em been to college. Got credit cards now, company rigs, and if they break down they just call collect and have 'em send somebody out to fix it."
We got back into Birmingham in the afternoon, dropped off the load of old tires and went by the house. While we waited for my mother to come home from work, we sat alone in the cool, darkened living room that I have never known and he sipped a beer and entertained me at the organ. Mama's taking lessons," he said, "and I just watch and do what she does. Teacher says he's gonna start chargin' double. Then I said something about how it sure wasn't like it used to be, his work and his life, not knowing how he would take it, and he quit playing and slowly turned around on the bench ... "If something was to happen to your mother, I'd be back out on the road in a minute," he said. "There's days I'll be sitting on the yard downtown, nothing to do but drink bourbon and chase it with a six-pack, and out on the expressway I'll hear some old boy in a rig whistle and get another gear, and it gets to me. Hell, yes, I miss it. It's the only thing I ever wanted to do. Tell your boy, David, he better hurry if he wants to ride with me."
The late Paul Hemphill was often called the Jimmy Breslin of the South, but that doesn't do him justice. He wasn't just a brilliant columnist. His first book, The Nashville Sound, remains one of the great books ever written about country music. And his baseball novel, Long Gone, later made into a fun and now overlooked movie (it was shown on HBO the year before Bull Durham came out), is a treat. Do yourself a favor and read Hemphill's classic piece, "Quitting the Paper," and then pick up one of his collections. This story comes from The Good Old Boys and is reprinted here with permission from Hemphill's wife, Susan Percy.
The Stacks is Deadspin's living archive of great journalism, curated by Bronx Banter's Alex Belth. Read his introduction here.


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Avon Grove slips past sluggish Kennett, 51-4601/15/2014 08:05AM ● By Acl
Avon Grove's Quinlin Parsons sinks one of his 10 free throws in the Red Devils' 51-46 win over Kennett.
By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer
Avon Grove varsity basketball coach Jesse Drelick knew prior to last Friday's game against Kennett that the key to beating the Blue Demons, his club would need to remove Jackson Hyland, Yohsuke Kobayashi and Vaughn Jenkins from the offensive equation. As Drelick said moments after Avon Grove defeated Kennett 51-46, two out of three ain't bad.
Although they surrendered 21 points to Hyland, who has been averaging close to that figure this season, Avon Grove's pressing zone defense held Kennett to six points each in the second and third quarters, while limiting Kobayashi (8 ppg) to 4 points and Jenkins (9.5 ppg) to a mere free throw.
"We did it with our defense tonight," Drelick said. "Anything we got offensively came from us playing good defense. The zone hurt us early on, but our defense was making opportunities for us on the offensive end."
If it was Avon Grove's decision to live or die by the zone, early indications read that the Red Devils were headed for a quick death, as Kennett scored 20 points in the first quarter, led by two 3-pointers by Hyland and a last-second driving layup by Kobayashi at the buzzer. Meanwhile, Avon Grove managed to stay in the game early on the outside shooting of Eric Ligda and Andrew Colagreco, whose 3-pointer with two minutes left in the first brought Avon Grove to within one.
By the second period, however, the effects of Kennett's 56-48 overtime victory over a stubborn Unionville team the night before began to show in the quality of their play. Implementing a stall offense, a 3-pointer by Matt Kelly extended Kennett's lead to 23-16 with 5:20 left in the second, but the shooting ended there. Kennett went 1-12 in shooting during the second quarter, while Avon Grove pecked away at the slim lead by penetrating Kennett's zone and forcing fouls.
A 3-pointer by Mike Boulden accounted for Kennett's only points in the first five minutes of the third quarter, while Quinlin Parsons' hook shot in the lane with 3:00 left in the quarter – and subsequent free throw after being fouled – gave the Red Devils a 31-30 lead. A minute later, Colagreco's steal led to foul and another free throw to extend the Avon Grove lead to 32-30, but the game was tied at the end of the quarter on a drive by Hyland.
Well into the fourth quarter, both teams juggled ownership of the lead. With 6:28 left, a break-away layup by Ligda gave Avon Grove a brief 34-33 lead, but on Kennett's next possession, Jenkins fed Connor McGlone in the paint to give the Blue Demons a short-lived 35-34 lead. Colagreco's 3-pointer and two jumpers by Ligda gave Avon Grove a 43-35 lead with less than four minutes remaining in the game. At this point, Avon Grove's defense went into overdrive, holding Kennett to one-shot possessions while extending the lead on one-and-one free throws by Parsons, whose in-bounds basket with 1:20 left put the game out of reach.
Parsons led Avon Grove scorers with 20 points, with 10 coming from the free-throw line, while teammates Ligda and Colagreco scored 13 and 12 points, respectively. With the victory, Avon Grove improved its overall record to 4-7 and its Ches-Mont American record to 2-3 on the young season. The Red Devils faced Downingtown West on Jan. 14, and travels to East on Jan. 16. Kennett, meanwhile, dropped to 7-5 overall and 3-2 in the Ches-Mont American division. The Blue Demons visited Octorara on Jan. 14, and will play at Bishop Shanahan on Jan. 17.


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*Initial science results on comet released from University of Maryland, much more to come UMD scientists say.*
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – One of the biggest comet findings coming out of the amazing images and data taken by the University of Maryland-ledEPOXI mission as it zipped past comet Hartley 2 last week is that dry ice is the 'jet' fuel for this comet and perhaps many others.
Images from the flyby show spectacular jets of gas and particles bursting from many distinct spots on the surface of the comet. This is the first time images of a comet have been sharp enough to allow scientists to link jets of dust and gas with specific surface features. Analysis of the spectral signatures of the materials coming from the jets shows primarily CO2 gas (carbon dioxide) and particles of dust and ice.
"Previously it was thought that water vapor from water ice was the propulsive force behind jets of material coming off of the body, or nucleus, of the comet," said University of Maryland Astronomy Professor Jessica Sunshine, who is deputy principal investigator for the EPOXI mission. "We now have unambiguous evidence that solar heating of subsurface frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice), directly to a gas, a process known as sublimation, is powering the many jets of material coming from the comet. This is a finding that only could have been made by traveling to a comet, because ground based telescopes can't detect CO2 and current space telescopes aren't tuned to look for this gas," Sunshine said.
Sunshine and other members of the EPOXI science team are meeting all this week at the University of Maryland to analyze the very large amount of data from the closest approach, and new data continues to come down at a rate of some 2000 images a day.
The Deep Impact spacecraft that flew past comet Hartley 2 has three instruments — two telescopes with digital color cameras and an infrared spectrometer. The spectrometer measures the absorption, emission and reflection of light (spectroscopic signature) that is unique to each molecular compound. This allows Maryland scientists to determine the composition of the material on the comet's surface, in the jets, and in the coma, or cloud of particles around it. They have found that water and carbon dioxide dominate the infrared spectrum of comet Hartley 2's environment and that organics, including methanol, are present at lower levels.
This is no surprise to scientists. But what is surprising is that there is a lot more carbon dioxide escaping this comet than expected. "The distribution of carbon dioxide and dust around the nucleus is much different than the water distribution, and that tells us that the carbon dioxide rather than water takes dust grains with it into the coma as it leaves the nucleus, said Assistant Research Scientist Lori Feaga. "The dry ice that is producing the CO2 jets on this comet has probably been frozen inside it since the formation of the solar system."
From Deep Impact to Hartley 2
According to University of Maryland Research Scientist Tony Farnham, findings from the team's 2005 Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1, though less conclusive, nonetheless indicate that the Hartley 2 findings that super-volatiles (CO2) and not water drive the activity, probably are a common characteristic of comets. "Tempel 1 was most active before perihelion when its southern hemisphere, the hemisphere that appeared to be enhanced in CO2, was exposed to sunlight," said Farnham, a member of both the Deep Impact and EPOXI science teams. "Unlike our Hartley encounter, during the flyby with Tempel 1, we were unable to directly trace the CO2 to the surface, because the pole was in darkness during encounter."
The Maryland scientists devised the plan to reuse the Deep Impact spacecraft and travel to a second comet in order to learn more about the diversity of comets and the processes that govern them. This became the EPOXI mission on which the spacecraft has flown to comet Hartley 2.
The spacecraft's images show that Hartley 2 has an elongated nucleus, 2 kilometers in length and 0.4 kilometers wide at the narrow neck. Hartley 2 is only the 5th cometary nucleus ever seen and exhibits similarities and differences to the bodies or nuclei of other comets. Mission Principal Investigator and science team leader Michael A'Hearn, a University of Maryland professor of astronomy, said the mission has provided, and continues to provide, a tremendous wealth of data about Hartley 2 and the team expects to announce more science findings in the coming weeks.
*Source: University of Maryland


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Welcome, bloggers! Wow! We had a wicked awesome turnout with 286 entries for our last challenge!
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