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31 December 2009
Introduction to Film Textbooks
I previously wrote (and wrote and wrote...) about what I was thinking when designing an intro to film class that I'll be teaching next term, and particularly when choosing the fourteen films to show during the 150-minute screening time outside of class. That post wasn't complete, though, because an important other factor in the shape of the course is the textbook.
When I got the assignment to teach intro to film, I'd never looked at a film textbook. I'd be tempted to say, "When I was in school, we didn't need none of them overpriced, overstuffed, overacademic behemoths!" And though it is true that the profileration of such textbooks is a relatively recent event, a handful of them are over thirty years old. I just tended to get teachers who didn't want us to read much in film classes.
I'm a fan of reading, though. And I'm especially a fan of reading in an intro class, where a textbook gives interested students more information than they'll get from the inevitably incomplete survey an intro class provides. With a good textbook, or even a mediocre textbook, a student who becomes particularly curious about a topic will have a tool that shows the way toward deeper exploration.
I began by borrowing books from colleagues, then contacting publisher's representatives to see what they could send me. I soon had over a dozen books to choose from.
After skimming the books in my pile, I was able to eliminate half of them as in one way or another obviously inappropriate. For instance, I loved Routledge's Introduction to Film Studies, and particularly appreciated that it was thirty dollars less expensive than most of the other textbooks. But that book's idea of introduction and mine are very different -- for students in their first or second year of college, it would be dauntingly complex, its vocabulary and concepts challenging even for intrepid students. As a textbook for graduate students or for undergraduates in a serious and comprehensive Film Studies program, it would be an excellent resource.
Once I had skimmed and whittled, I encountered this post by Chris Cagle about film textbooks and found it helpful and reassuring. Most of the books Cagle writes about have been updated or are out of print, but the post confirmed a number of ideas that had been floating around in my mind. With one exception (and that likely because of a difference in editions), the descriptions of the books seem accurate and fair to me.
It only took me a few days to get down to three finalists: Bordwell & Thompson's Film Art, Barsam & Monahan's Looking at Movies, and Corrigan & White's The Film Experience.
Each is a wonderful textbook and would serve the class well. Looking at Movies is the most straightforward and clearly written of the three, absolutely perfect for a basic intro class. It also has the only useful accompanying DVD that I've seen with a textbook. Film Art is a pure joy to read and look at; it has, hands down, the best use of images from films in any textbook I looked at. Appropriately, given its title, it feels like an art book. David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson are among the best writers in the English language on film -- this is a book I sat with and read as much for pleasure as for work. The Film Experience is the book I thought must have improved between the first edition, which Chris Cagle wrote about, and the second, which I have. The layout and design is not bad at all, with full color throughout, though the book doesn't even come close to Film Art in its use of the imagery -- too many of the stills seem to be in the book to provide a break from the text rather than to illustrate a concept, whereas Film Art brilliantly demonstrates how to make stills an essential part of the book's argument and information. Cagle also notes that The Film Experience is advanced and likely difficult, but I didn't find this to be particularly true for the second edition, though certain advanced terms are included (syntagma is still there, as it should be!).
The first book I eliminated was Looking at Movies, though I wished there were some way I could have the students have access to the DVD, since a number of film ideas are explained far more efficiently and clearly via a DVD than a book. Alas, it seems the only way to assign the DVD is to assign the book, and in the end Looking at Movies was just too simple and too formalist in its approach for my needs.
Film Art is also mostly formalist, but it's also by Bordwell & Thompson, and if you're going to get formalist, you might as well get Bordwell & Thompson. As they said of James Bond, nobody does it better. I'm not sure why textbook writers and publishers even try to compete. Film Art is the most frequently adopted film textbook, and so publishers and writers feel compelled to try to nip at its market, but though a genius might be able to improve on Bordwell & Thompson, most textbook writers are not geniuses. The key to competing with Bordwell & Thompson is to offer a textbook for the teachers who want something other than what Film Art, for all its wonders, offers.
The only book I've found that does that is The Film Experience. Its chapters on the formal elements of film are adequate, though the materials trying to convince you to adopt the book say it has "the best coverage of film's formal elements," which is a lie. Film Art has the best coverage of film's formal elements, and White and Corrigan recognize the need for a book that has a perfectly good but not "the best" section on film form and style while also offering something else. The example films in The Film Experience are broader and more diverse than the examples in Film Art, there's coverage of theoretical and political approaches to analyzing film, and throughout the book there's an emphasis on the social construction of our responses to and expectations of the movies we see.
The Film Experience arrived after all of the other textbooks, and before I saw it, I was certain I would use Film Art and that it was pointless to look at any other textbook. I had never read a textbook of any sort with the pleasure I had read Film Art. It's that good.
But when I started trying to fit the lists I had made of films I wanted to screen to the content of Film Art, I saw there was a bit of a problem. I would need to supplement the book with something to cover the territory Film Art ignored or skimmed over. I had planned a whole unit on how engaged filmmakers have used the medium to explore ideas of representation (thus, Do the Right Thing, The Living End, and Orlando, plus the various clips I planned for the six classes in that unit). Film Art would not help me much during that unit (though it has a great 4-page analysis of Do the Right Thing).
When The Film Experience arrived, I paged through it and, without looking at the captions, recognized still after still after still. One film after another on my lists was included. There was a chapter on global and local cinemas, with two paragraphs on Ousmene Sembene (one of those paragraphs devoted to Black Girl), which may not seem like a lot, given Sembene's importance, but is astounding for an intro textbook. In a section on "The Lost and Found of American Film History", significant discussion is given to the pioneering women of early cinema and the awful facts of Hollywood sexism -- a subsection titled "Women Who Made the Movies" begins, "The movie industry remains male dominated, with women directing only 7 percent of the 250 top-grossing films in the United States, according to a 2006 study." It goes on to discuss women in independent film (still not even remotely equal) and the overlooked, significant contributions of women to the history of the medium. It does the same with African-American film and with gay and lesbian film, and it discusses in a pretty accessible way the power of ideology to shape expectations and actions. These sections aren't tokenist, either -- the text of the entire book supports them, making these sections feel like elaborations on ideas that have been prepared earlier.
I hated to let Film Art go, but it was obvious once I saw The Film Experience that this would be the textbook for my class. I wish I could assign them both, because they make fine companions, but I try not to go beyond a retail price of $100 for all of the books I assign to a course. (This has gotten harder to do over the last decade, so I sometimes have to raise the limit to $125, but never beyond that.)
Just before book orders were due at the bookstore, I decided to add one more text. I'd been toying with the idea of adding Amy Villarejo's Film Studies: The Basics, at least as a recommended text, because it's a good one-stop reference guide and priced like a trade book, not a textbook. It didn't offer sufficiently different content from The Film Experience, though, to justify the order.
What I did decide to add, though, was The Village Voice Film Guide, which is a great collection of short reviews of many wonderful movies, including some we'll be watching in class. One of the virtues of the book is that it often gives multiple reviews of films, so, for example, there's the original Andrew Sarris review of Psycho along with a later review from a re-release. These reviews can sometimes be entirely at odds with each other, and that serves my purposes well. The Voice has employed a good range of reviewers, so the book shows a variety of writing styles, from the informal to the almost-academic. It's important for the students to have good examples of a range of short writings on film, because most of the writing they will be doing will be short responses. Ultimately, the book will, I hope, help guide students toward films we don't watch in class and further stoke their curiosity about all that remains to be seen.
In addition to the textbooks, I'll constantly be pointing them toward various film blogs and websites, because today much of the conversation about cinema has moved to the web. Indeed, I can slightly alleviate my sadness at having to let Film Art go by sending students to David Bordwell's website, one of the best film sites out there.
Update 1 (2011) here.
Update 2 (2013) here.
29 December 2009
An Introduction to Film Class
And so I've spent more time preparing for this class than I have for any class since I decided to add an African lit section to one of the high school AP English classes I taught nearly ten years ago. I've done this only partially out of fear of not knowing what the heck to do once I'm standing in front of the class -- that fear, I've learned, never goes away, no matter how well prepared I am; it's the same fear I have before setting foot on stage as an actor, and it's essential to being able to perform well. (Indeed, the few times I've lacked the fear have been disastrous.) The primary reason I've spent so much time preparing is that the material is engrossing and the possibilities for the class are about as close to limitless as it's possible to get and still provide a general course description. One of the two regular teachers of the class told me he loves teaching it because it allows him to show some movies he likes and talk about them with students, and who wouldn't like that? (His syllabus reveals there's a bit more to it than that!)
21 December 2009
Go Underland for the Holidays!
Here's what you do: Go to the Underland website, order lots of books, and type in the code xmas09. This should get you 15% off your order. The more you spend, the more you save! I would recommend getting at least 5 copies each of Finch, Best American Fantasy, Pilo Family Circus -- well, heck, all of their books. You need at least one for yourself, two or three for various friends and family, one to donate to the local library or school, etc...
Robin Wood: 1931-2009
Hitchcock's Films Revisited is fascinating, too, because it is multiple books in one, and various parts think about, contradict, and, indeed, criticize other parts of the book. After the original Hitchcock's Films was published, Wood's life changed considerably -- he had been a married man living in England, politically uncommitted, with little knowledge of or respect for certain trends in film theory. In the 1970s, he divorced, came out as gay, re-evaluated some of his stances on film theory, developed strong leftist political convictions, and moved to Canada. These seismic shifts in his life inevitably affected his view of Hitchcock's films, and he chronicles those changes in the autobiographical sections of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, which includes the entire text of the original book and adds hundreds of pages of later material. Even if I were not as interested in Hitchcock's work as I am, I would find Hitchcock's Films Revisited valuable as a model for the intersections of autobiography and criticism. It forces readers to assess their own ways of evaluating and interpreting films by showing the ways Wood himself had done so over the years and, as importantly, the experiences that led him to choose particular techniques of evaluation and interpretation when he did.
There have been numerous eulogies for Wood written in the past few days. The Auteur's Notebook has a roundup. David Bordwell's blog post is typically thoughtful and well-written. Film Studies for Free links to eulogies as well as works by or about Wood. All worth reading.
18 December 2009
Charlie Darwin, Bewildered
December 18 1832
After passing through the straight of Le Maire at Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle anchored at Good Success Bay. Here Darwin had his first encounter with savages [sic]. He was shocked by the primitive way of life they led but was also fascinated by them. A group of four male Fuegians met the landing party. After an attempt to communicate with the Feugians the party presented them with some bright red cloth and the Feugians immediately became friendly with them. The natives initiated a dialogue by patting the crewmen on their chests. Apparently they had the most amazing ability to mimic the crew's gestures and even the words they spoke, often repeating whole English sentences back to them. Darwin was bewildered by all this.
17 December 2009
Directors of the Decade
Here's how Seitz defines the group:
The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping. They're interested in sensations and emotions, occurrences and memories of occurrences. If their films could be said to have a literary voice, it would fall somewhere between third person and first -- perhaps as close to first person as the film can get without having the camera directly represent what a character sees.Bingo -- if I could sum up the mix of aesthetics and worldview that most appeals to me, that reflects and extends my own take on how it feels to live, I doubt I could come up with a better description than Seitz has. Indeed, it reveals succinctly what I most favor in art. That's not, of course, to say that all other approaches are wrong or don't work or whatever, but that the fastest, surest way I've found toward the pleasures of recognition (of life, of living, of being and time) and the evocation of emotion (without what feels to me to be sentimentality) is via exactly what Seitz describes.
Yet at the same time sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character's and the scene's). But they'd rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he's thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies -- not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer.
You can tell by watching the sensualists' films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight -- as markers that don't seem like markers when they happen.
(If my preoccupations of late seem mostly to be with the world of cinema, you're right. A profound sense of having burned out on prose fiction has been replaced by a deeper fascination for film and film criticism than I've felt for years. [The timing is appropriate, since I'm teaching an intro to film course next term, about which more later.] I always return to prose fiction -- it is, in so many ways, the foundation of what I know -- but sometimes need to take a little break.)
14 December 2009
Manohla Dargis on Women in Hollywood
In a recent issue of the Times, Dargis wrote an essay about women in Hollywood. The commercial American film industry remains an astoundingly sexist enterprise, and the sexism is systemic, as Dargis shows. Even if you think you know how bad the situation is, the statistics are breathtaking:
Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of the six major Hollywood studios and their remaining divisions this year: 20th Century Fox had "Jennifer's Body" (Karyn Kusama) and "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" (Betty Thomas), while Fox Searchlight had "Amelia" (Mira Nair), "Post Grad" (Vicky Jenson) and "Whip It" (Drew Barrymore). Anne Fletcher directed "The Proposal" for Disney, while the studio's once-lustrous division, Miramax Films, continued on its death march without any help from female directors. Ms. Ephron's "Julie & Julia" was released by Sony Pictures while the art-house division Sony Pictures Classics released "An Education" (Ms. Scherfig), "Coco Before Chanel" (Anne Fontaine) and "Sugar" (Anna Boden, directing with Ryan Fleck). Universal Pictures has Nancy Meyers's "It's Complicated"; its specialty unit Focus Features has no female directors.The Jezebel website has now published an interesting interview with Dargis about the essay and about the relationship between women and Hollywood. Her replies to the questions are sharp, succinct, and peppered with the wonderful vernacular vocabulary the Times never lets her use...
Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, meanwhile, did not release a single film directed by a woman. Not one.
The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That's why they'll be interested in something like [Kathryn Bigelow's] The Hurt Locker. She's done so well critically that she can't be ignored.
Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.
Rain Taxi Auction
The new print issue of RT includes an essay I wrote about the work of Wallace Shawn, a playwright and essayist whose face and voice many people know from some of his iconic roles in movies and TV shows, but whose writing is vastly less known -- he's one of those writers who is more popular outside of his native country than in it.
Aside from a couple short stories that are currently wending their way through the submission process, my major writings since this summer have been the Shawn essay for RT and the essay on Coetzee for The Quarterly Conversation. The effect of spending so much time reading and re-reading the writings of both men is obvious in my latest Strange Horizons column, "On the Eating of Corpses".
13 December 2009
00 Movies
Everybody's making lists of the best of everything from 2000-2009 right now. I like reading such things when they're the personal preferences of individuals -- Richard Brody's film list is the most idiosyncratic I've encountered, filled with films I haven't seen and in many cases have never heard of, and of the ones I have seen, they aren't really films I'd put toward the top of my own best-of-the-decade list, were I even able to come up with such a list. And yet I loved reading Brody's list because his explanations worked together to create a sense of how he thinks about his encounters with art.
Similarly, John Patterson's passionate essay on Terrence Malick's The New World as the single best film of the decade is a joy to read because of Patterson's ability to share his deep engagement with Malick's creation. It helps that I'm sympathetic to Patterson's view -- I would certainly include The New World among my favorite ten or even five movies of the decade, though I don't think I could choose just one as "the best".
The committee lists are less interesting to me (even when they are ones I am surprised to find myself frequently agreeing with), because I use them primarily to remind myself of films I wanted to see but forget to get around to sticking on the Netflix queue. By melding various aesthetics in a quest for objectivity that ends up being more procrustean than coherent, the editors produce lists that feel, to me at least, almost random.
Whereas looking at the individual ballots is fascinating -- at Time Out London, for instance, I love that the dance editor put Man on Wire as #1. And when I looked at the ballots for the Time Out New York reviewers, I realized why I had liked the overall list more than any other committee list I've seen: though I preferred the individual lists to the combined one, none of the lists made me say, "Egads! I will never trust a review you write!" The film section at TONY is one I read closely because they have managed to put together a group of writers who do not have exactly the same tastes (how dull that would be!) but who share an approach to analyzing and evaluating movies -- an approach that often fits well with my own tastes. They also show a talent for writing very short reviews that are usually richer than many reviews twice their length.
As for me, I would need to go back and take a closer look at what came out between 2000 and this year before I could really make such a list. I'd also need to take another look at at least a few films (The Fall, Grizzly Man, Mysterious Skin, There Will Be Blood, 3-Iron, others) before I could sort out anything resembling a list I was happy with, but I know I would be inclined to include Across the Universe, Children of Men, Code Unknown, The Edge of Heaven, I'm Not There, Memories of Murder, Miami Vice, Mulholland Drive, The New World, No Country for Old Men, Nobody Knows, Public Enemies, Reprise, Spirited Away, Synecdoche, NY, The White Diamond, Yi Yi, Zodiac...
Oh, lists are such fun -- especially when I should be writing a final exam and/or doing housework!
11 December 2009
School of Rogue
The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.
Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?
Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.
Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil's "Georgics", read Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo "True History of the Conquest of New Spain"
- Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.
The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lockpicking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream.
07 December 2009
Summertime and Coetzee's Countervoices
Here's a taste:
In its form and subject matter, Summertime has more in common with Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year than Boyhood and Youth, but some of its central concerns are the same, and it is possible to see the John Coetzee who is the topic of Summertime as an adult version of the John Coetzee who is the protagonist of Boyhood and Youth (if we assume the protagonists of those books are the same John Coetzee . . .). In many ways, Summertime unites the strategies of the recent books with the earlier ones—not only Boyhood and Youth, but Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Foe, The Master of Petersburg, and Doubling the Point.As usual, this is a rich and diverse issue of TQC -- deserving particular attention is "Translate This Book!", in which dozens of translators, writers, editors, publishers, agents, journalists, etc. offer one title not available in English that they wish were.
03 December 2009
Under the Dome by Stephen King
(It is here, dear reader, that you should depart if you have not read the novel and do not want to learn important details of plot and situation, for I shall soon be writing about some of the primary mysteries of the tale........)
One of the ideas propelling the narrative of Under the Dome is that it is a rare person who will not, under the right circumstances, behave in a cruel and brutal way. There's nothing particularly profound about this -- we all know about the Milgram experiments, after all -- but it's one of those ideas that proves particularly fruitful for storytellers. In Lord of the Flies, Golding found a powerful template for such an idea, and King has extended it to the world of adults, although the adults who are self-reflective and try for decency often think back to the shames and cruelties of childhood. Shame for the decent people usually comes as much from complicity as from the commission of crimes: Dale "Barbie" Barbara, the primary protagonist-hero of Under the Dome carries tremendous guilt for having stood by while soldiers under his command tortured and killed a man in Iraq. Barbie's shame mixes at the end with the very different shame of the other protagonist-hero, Julia, who helps evoke a sort of pity from the alien child controlling the Dome by projecting her memories of abasement at the hands of the children who had attacked her in elementary school along with Barbie's memories of Fallujah, and the effect is to cause the alien child to lift the Dome: "She took pity," Julia says, "but she wasn't sorry." The shame wasn't enough to bridge the gap of species and create empathy, but it is enough to evoke pity and a sort of mercy.
There are more implications in the novel's exploration of such emotions as pity, empathy, and remorse, but the one I found most striking was how the reader becomes implicated by the narrative. The people who get their news of the Dome from CNN are observers, just as the aliens are observers, just as we are observers. We take pity and are not sorry, because this is our entertainment. There's a Hitchcockian element to it all -- reading the book, we share some qualities with the aliens who have set the Dome down on the town of Chester's Mill. The Dome is there in the narrative for our entertainment. The characters suffer and die because we read the words that equal their suffering and death: we create that suffering and death in our minds, and we take some sort of pleasure from the imagining. Julia hears the alien child say, "You aren't real," and "How can you have lives if you aren't real?" Julia tries to convince the alien otherwise, screaming out that she is, indeed, real:
--Prove it [the alien child says.]The moment can't help but be metafictional. The words we have read are tools that let us imagine a character named Julia, and that imagined character, like all the other characters in the book, has, indeed, taken our mind. If we have read this far, we want her to live. We have developed more feelings for her than the alien child has, though, because we are capable of more than pity -- our minds have turned the words into characters and situations, and those characters and situations have evoked emotions. We have reached the point in the narrative where we want the tension to be released, where we are ready for an end, and so the Dome lifts ... and a few pages later, the book runs out of words.
--Give me your hand.
--I have no hand. I have no body. Bodies aren't real. Bodies are dreams.
--Then give me your mind!
The child does not. Will not.
So Julia takes it.
Thus, King has made us complicit. We are the alien children. Storytelling is an experiment in cruelty. We could have stopped reading at any point. We did not need to imagine the suffering and horrible destruction -- we could have stopped it. But we wanted to see what happened. We wanted to be entertained, amused, to pass some time with this toy of a tale. Fiction is a safe way to enjoy all sorts of things we'd rather not enjoy in life, because it's all make-believe. How can the characters have lives if they aren't real? It's just a story.
The narrative voice supports the metafiction -- it is not invisible. From the earliest pages, the narrator tells us of things that will happen in the future. By page 37 (of the U.S. hardcover) we can't ignore the narrator, who suddenly steps forward:
We have toured the sock-shape that is Chester's Mill and arrived back at Route 119. And, thanks to the magic of narration, not an instant has passed since the sixtyish fellow from the Toyota slammed face-first into something invisible but very hard and broke his nose.If the narration has been transparent, it has now revealed itself to be, like the Dome, very hard indeed.
The narrator, being a good storyteller, encourages our fun, popping in now and then to let us know that everything is going to get much worse. If we keep reading and are horrified at the carnage, we cannot say we were not warned.
The citizens of Chester's Mill aren't like ants being tortured and killed by sadistic children, as the survivors think. They're like characters in a novel: their misery is the stuff of someone else's entertainment.
Maybe Aristotle was right, and great tragedy produces some sort of purging of pity and fear. If so, Under the Dome is a great tragedy about great tragedy. Scholars have argued for centuries over who benefits from Aristotle's purgation -- the creator, the characters, the audience? We could argue the same for Under the Dome. For centuries, too, people have debated the uses of art and imagination, the morality of imagining suffering and horror, the complicity of narrative voyeurism.
And yet few of us desire stories where the characters do not face obstacles, do not struggle and suffer, because, alien children that we are, we can't help but want to set down Domes and see what happens.


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The Walrus Says
Beginning Saturday, July 30, and every weekend until the 22nd annual Talent Show on Aug. 18, members of the Jamestown Community Chorus and volunteers will be selling raffle tickets at East Ferry and McQuade's. The tickets will also be available at the talent show. All proceeds benefit the chorus. Tickets are $1 each or six for $5, and winners will be awarded gift cards with the first prize of $200 and three others with a value of $150, $100, and $50.
Auditions for the show entitled "Summer Nights" will take place on Monday, Aug. 15, and Tuesday, Aug. 16, beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the recreation center. There is no charge to audition and performers of all ages and from all cities and towns are invited to try out. Past shows have featured a wide range of entertainment including singers, instrumentalists, storytellers, dancers, duets, trios and ensembles.
Questions about the auditions, talent show or the chorus? Call 423- 1574 or visit www.jamestownri.com/ chorus.
Can you imagine a dog being introduced into a new home with three cats and remaining "very sweet?" That's what happened to 8-year-old Bishop, a white-and-brown bull terrier mix adopted from the Potter League of Animals by islander Betsy Lee, who is a volunteer at the Middletown shelter.
The felines in residence that greeted Bishop are Porter, 3, and Abby Gail, 4, a three-legged stray that had to have a leg amputated following an accident. Both are from the Potter League. The third is Pearl, a 12-yearold stray. Betsy said that Bishop had lost weight but is now putting some pounds back on. "He's very friendly and loves people," Betsy said. He's even getting along with the cats except Porter, the youngest, that revels in giving him a slap once in awhile.
Ellen Sanchez has adopted two guinea pigs, Skittles and Snikers, a mother and daughter duo, from the Potter league. Ellen's daughter, Reagan, 10, and son, Jonathan, 8, are in charge of the newcomers.
On July 15, I brought home a 6-year-old female beagle and basset mix from the Potter League. Iris has adjusted quickly to her new home and happily spends her days on our enclosed deck keeping the squirrels away from the bird feeders. She is very friendly and gives me back the love and companionship I lost when Joshua died on May 2. I'm sure that Joshua would approve of our taking in another dog that needs a home.
After last week's searing temperatures, and more in store during August, Dr. Joshua Hatch of the Jamestown Animal Clinic says that hot and humid weather can be dangerous for our pets.
"They cannot read the weather reports so it is our job to keep them safe," he said. "Make sure your pets always have access to cool water and shade and don't let them run or play for too long outside." Dr. Hatch added that it's a good idea to change the timing of your dog's walks so they are in the early mornings or later in the evenings when it's cooler. "Even if they don't seem affected by the heat, make them stop and come inside to cool off frequently."
He advises that if your pet has heart or breathing issues, make sure they have a cool and quiet place to stay during the heat of the day. "Symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke can range from lethargy and breathing trouble to vomiting, diarrhea, or even collapse and seizures. If you feel that your pet may have gotten too much heat, seek veterinary care immediately."
On that note, Linda Biddle suggests a piece of rain gutter as a water trough for pets at the "Got Dog?" sign in front of the Cathryn Jamison Salon. Can anyone out there make that happen?
Islander Will Deffley is keeping in shape this summer working for Largess Forestry. The 6-foot, 210-pounder is a linebacker at Springfield College and is due back on the practice field Aug. 20.
The vegetable stand at Hodgkiss Farm on North Road now has native corn that is the best on the island
There was valet dumping at the transfer station Sunday morning. It seems the crusher machinery was kaput and town worker Ramon Ibarlucea was greeting arrivals and helping toss their rubbish into an open truck container.
Jamestown Boy Scout Troop 1 will be at Camp Yawgoog Aug. 7 to14.
With last week's stifling heat and no rain forecast in the near future, it's up to islanders conserve as much town water as possible. I remember not too many years ago when the National Guard was trucking it across the bridge and dumping it into the reservoir.
Ron Hickman, a former Shoreby Hill resident, dropped a line bringing us up to date on the Jamestown contingent in Hattiesburg, Miss. He wrote that his son, Ron, also a former islander, is a PGA master golf professional and Senior vice co-chairman of the PGA rules committee and officiated the Masters again this past spring. He also was involved in another major event, the 22nd annual American Century Championships earlier this month in South Lake Tahoe, Nev.
When he's not traveling to tournaments, Ron and his wife, Pipper, oversee the activities of the Timberton Golf Club, which they own in Hattiesburg. The club is now observing its 20th anniversary and has been ranked by Golfweek as one of the top 10 golf courses in Mississippi.
Another former Jamestowner, Richard Walsh, son of islanders Bud and Norma Walsh, is a golf professional at Timberton.
RIP Bruce Sundlun, a fellow islander.
A summer class building threedimensional shelters, objects and portraits using found and recycled materials, clay, wood and paper mache will be held next week, Aug. 1 through 5, at the Jamestown Arts Center. Open to students 9 to 12 years old, the class will study artists like Claus Oldenberg and Tom Deininger for inspiration. Instructors are Hadley Johnstone and Haley Barber. The fee is $150. Questions? Email email@example.com or call 662-3839.
A Snapple cap moment: Every hour, more than one billion cells in the body must be replaced.
I wondered what all the activity was.
Stay out of the hot sun and be true!
Call in your stuff to 829-2760 or 423-0383, or email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. Thank you.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The Lincoln Inaugural Train of 1861andThe Lincoln Funeral Train of 1865
The story of the two most important trains in United States Presidential History.
1861 - President-elect Abraham Lincoln departed from his home in Springfield, Illinois on February 11, 1961 with a destination of Washington City, to be sworn in as President of the United States of America. His suite who planned to accompany him suggested he not travel as a passenger en route, but by special train making many appearances along the way. The trip took thirteen days over a lengthy route. No national security was offered. Lincoln was confronted with three assassination attempts, the train was detoured once due to flooding, a blizzard across New York State, tow mis-fired salute canons and at least one missed lunch. His 52nd birthday was celebrated on the train between Indianapolis and Cincinnati.Lincoln raised the flag over Independence Hall on Washingtons Birthday, February 22, then went to Harrisburg to address a joint session of the Pennsylvania Legislature before executing a plan to sneak him into Washington on a regular scheduled passenger train over two railroads. His journey was successful and the next morning, February 23, 1861, he was walking on the streets of Washington.
1865 - President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, expiring on the morning of April 15, 1865. His widow wanted him embalmed and shipped straight to Chicago for burial. While the Illinois Committee worked to get her to change her mind about a private funeral, plans were unfolding to have several national funerals en route. Major cities acrss the north wanted the train to come there. Such town included Boston and CincinnatiOn the morning of April 21, 1865, the Lincoln Funeral Train departed from Washington City with two bodies on-board. One was that of the late President Abraham Lincoln and the other was that of his son William Willie who had died in 1862. Mary, his widow, had very reluctantly agreed to a route that partially followed portions of the Inaugural Train route of 1861. There were ten planned funerals en route. The destination at Springfield, Illinois was reached on May 2, 1865. At least 42 locomotives were used en route, the train was ferried across the Hudson River twice. Sleeping cars were added at Albany, New York, but they belonged to Webster Wagner, and not George Pullman as popular lore suggested.The train consisted of two trains, both under the control of the Federal Government. A pilot train operated ahead of the actual funeral train by from 10 to 15 minutes. As the train entered Illinois, it expanded to three trains, and on the final leg of the journey it consisted of five trains. Lincoln was the first United States President assassinated while holding office.
To read the full story, purchase the books -- available on this web site. Just click on the tab.
[Home] [Train Routes] [Inaugural Train] [Funeral Train] [Buy The Books] [Building the Funeral Car] [Marker Project] [Funeral train recounted] [Speaker] [Links]


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March 21, 2011
Sounds of spring: April showers music across campus
Guest artists, faculty, students and more put April in tune at Kansas State University with a month of solos, recitals, concerts and more.
The K-State department of music sponsors the performances. All events, except where noted, are free and open to the public. They include:
* "Sticks and Things," 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, All Faiths Chapel. The annual percussion chamber music concert features K-State students performing works by various composers, including Aurel Hollo, Mayuzumi, Slater, Debussy and Ford. K-State's Kurt Gartner, professor of percussion, is the director.
* Percussion studio student recital, 5:45 p.m. Wednesday, April 6, All Faiths Chapel Auditorium. Students will play solo and small ensemble works for multiple percussion instruments.
* Students of Jacqueline Fassler-Kerstetter, associate professor of French horn, will present a recital at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 10, in All Faiths Chapel.
* Recital by guest organist Karen Black, 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 11, All Faiths Chapel. Black conducts the Chapel Choir at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. She also teaches organ, church music and music theory, and serves as organist for weekday chapel and Sunday worship services.
* Tubaists Kevin Sanders and Dennis Nulty will present a guest artist recital at 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, April 12, in All Faiths Chapel. A Juilliard graduate, Sanders is a faculty member at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis. Nulty, a graduate of the New England Conservatory and Eastman School of Music, is the principal tubaist with the Detroit Symphony.
* Bassoon students of Susan Maxwell, instructor of bassoon, will perform a recital at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 13, in All Faiths Chapel.
* K-State Faculty Brass Quintet recital, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 14, All Faiths Chapel. Music faculty members in the group include Craig Parker, associate professor, trumpet; Katherine Klinefelter, graduate assistant and master's student in music, Whitehall, Mich., trumpet; Jacqueline Fassler-Kerstetter, associate professor, French horn; Paul Hunt, professor, trombone; and Steven Maxwell, assistant professor, tuba.
* Flute Studio recital, 1:30 p.m. Sunday, April 17, All Faiths Chapel. The group is instructed and directed by K-State's Mary Lee Cochran, associate professor of flute.
* Collegium Musicum, 3 p.m. Sunday, April 17, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Sixth Street and Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan. K-State's early music ensemble, Collegium Musicum, is directed by Thomas Bell, graduate services librarian at Hale Library.
* K-State's Reginald Pittman, tenor and associate professor of voice, will present a solo recital at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 19, in All Faiths Chapel.
* Guest artist Ruben Alvarez, Chicago-based Latin percussionist, drum set artist and composer, will be in residence at K-State from April 17-19. The K-State Percussion Ensemble will perform a collaborative concert with Alvarez at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 19, in McCain Auditorium. In addition to the ensemble and Alvarez, the concert will include Victor Alexander Ramirez, a guest choreographer; the K-State Dance Studio; and the K-State Latin Jazz Ensemble. For more information, contact Kurt Gartner at 785-532-3808.
* The K-State Orchestra's final performance of the season is 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 20, in McCain Auditorium. The event features Concerto Contest winners John Allred, senior in applied music, Manhattan, performing Gordon Jacob's "Horn Concerto," and Jana Krajciova, master's student in music, Slovakia, performing Schumann's "Piano Concerto." Blair Williams, graduate assistant and master's student in music, Peabody, will conduct the performance. The orchestra will conclude the program with "Symphony No. 1" by Shostakovich, written when he was an 18-year-old student as his graduation piece for the Leningrad Conservatory. The orchestra is directed by K-State's David Littrell, university distinguished professor of music.
* General Student Recital, 11:30 a.m. Thursday, April 21, All Faiths Chapel. The recital will feature student solos from string, wind, percussion, voice and piano divisions.
* The K-State Singers' Spring Show, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 21, McCain Auditorium. A small admission fee will be charged.
* Men's and Women's Glee Clubs performance, 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 25, All Faiths Chapel. The glee clubs are co-directed by Joshua Oppenheim and Julie Yu-Oppenheim, both assistant professors of music at K-State. The groups are assisted by graduate assistants in music: Janie Brokenicky and Joshua Taylor, both from Manhattan, and Ryan Bogner, Leavenworth.
* Collegiate Chorale and University Choir concert, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 26, All Faiths Chapel. The choirs are co-directed by Oppenheim and Yu-Oppenheim.
* K-State Jazz Band concert, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, Forum Hall, K-State Student Union. The band is directed by K-State's Wayne Goins, professor of music, and assisted by Gordon Lewis, instructor of music.
* Recital by guest violinist Jennie Lee Vaughn, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, All Faiths Chapel. A graduate of Florida State University and the Eastman School of Music, Vaughn is the daughter of K-State's Alfred Cochran, professor of music, and Mary Lee Cochran, associate professor of music.
* K-State Jazz Combos performance, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 28, Union Station, K-State Student Union. The group is directed by K-State's Goins and assisted by Lewis.
In addition to the faculty, student and guest performances listed above, several student solo recitals are taking place in April. More information about them and any of the other department of music performance events is available by calling 785-532-5740 or by checking the calendar outside the music office at 109 McCain.


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STOCKTON - The cost to taxpayers for running the Stockton Arena, Bob Hope Theatre and two more sports venues is up slightly despite an increase in the number of concerts last year.
STOCKTON - The cost to taxpayers for running the Stockton Arena, Bob Hope Theatre and two more sports venues is up slightly despite an increase in the number of concerts last year.
SMG, the firm that also manages the Stockton Ballpark and Oak Park Ice Arena, is expected tonight to ask the City Council for a subsidy of nearly $2.4 million for the next fiscal year.
That's up from last year's by $26,000. The city factored in spending an additional $259,252 for overhead salaries and a tax payment it's making for the Stockton Ports.
Combined, the city will subsidize the four venues by nearly $2.7 million. Yet city officials say that figure comes in well below the $3.2 million under former management by IFG.
The increase is partly due to unexpected repair costs at each of the four city-owned facilities and a drop in attendance felt at concert and entertainment venues across the country.
"We saw a fall-off on attendance," said Mike Cera, SMG's general manager of the Stockton venues. "We just think people stopped spending some of their income on shows."
Cera tonight will present his business plan and budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1. This marks the third of a five-year contract SMG has with Stockton.
Next year, SMG plans to hold 160 events at the Bob Hope Theatre and Arena, up from 151 events in the previous year and 123 before that. That will draw an estimated 340,000 people to downtown Stockton.
Cera said the Arena and Bob Hope Theatre stimulate $17 million in spending annually from people staying in hotels, dining out and gassing up their cars while visiting the events in Stockton.
People come from Sacramento and Modesto for Stockton events, the report says.
In the past 12 months, the Arena featured shows such as: Alan Jackson, Cirque du Soleil, the Harlem Globetrotters and events such as the San Joaquin Delta College graduation and a PG&E corporate meeting.
The Bob Hope Theatre featured B.B. King, Bill Cosby, the Brubeck Festival featuring Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Live Orchestra, Ron White and George Lopez.
The SMG report says that cities such as Miami, Louisville and Bakersfield also subsidize their entertainment venues. Without a public contribution, there would be nothing, city leaders contend.
In a jam-packed agenda, the City Council at tonight's meeting is also expected to adopt a $521 million budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1. It includes a $160 million general fund and suspends $22 million in debt under bankruptcy protection.
The council will also be asked to vote on holding a public hearing July 9 to consider putting a 3/4-cent sales tax measure on the Nov. 5 ballot. The $28 million it is estimated to raise annually will pay Stockton's way out of bankruptcy and hire police officers, officials said.
Contact reporter Scott Smith at (209) 546-8296 or firstname.lastname@example.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/smithblog.


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Giving: The Elkhart County Miracle
A reclusive entrepreneur wills his entire $150 million fortune to his hometown. Now the town wonders what to do with it
WHEN DAVID GUNDLACH RETURNED HOME several years ago, it was inconceivable to those who knew him as a boy that he would soon be a local legend, almost a myth. In fact, he'd largely been forgotten.
It was spring of 2007 when Gundlach bought a house in Elkhart, Ind., where he went to high school and his mother still lived. Shortly after, he called longtime area resident Robert Kloska to say he wanted to reconnect. "I had to call my dad and say, 'Refresh my memory: Who is David Gundlach?'" recalls Kloska, now 46. The answer, recalled his father, was a boy who sometimes joined them during rounds of golf at the local country club. Gundlach was a good player—he was known to hit balls on the practice range until his hands bled—but a loner and somewhat socially awkward.
The Kloskas agreed to go for a ride on Gundlach's pontoon boat and see what sort of man he had become. In his early 50s at the time, Gundlach spoke with a slight English accent and his hair was more salt than pepper but he was in many ways the same guy Kloska remembered from childhood: gregarious, with a hearty laugh, but also prone to pontificating and needling people to the point it became uncomfortable. "He was just sort of an eccentric guy."
Gundlach explained that he'd been living and working overseas for more than a decade, and though he never married and had no children, he talked of his houses in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Las Vegas. He mentioned poker games in Hollywood with A-list celebrities, and hopes of getting into the movie business. Kloska's initial reaction: "I thought he had to be making some of this stuff up."
He wasn't. A semi-regular visitor to Elkhart for the next few years, Gundlach eventually caught the town's attention when he co-produced a film called "Get Low," starring Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Robert Duvall. In the movie, which had a modest $7 million budget, Duvall plays a hermit who is the subject of rumors and mystery in the Tennessee town near where he lives and throws himself an elaborate funeral so he can "get low" and die in peace. The film got mostly positive reviews, but to Gundlach the real prize came at home. He told Kloska that a front-page story in the local newspaper, the Elkhart Truth, about his role in the project was one of the highlights of his life.
Residents were still getting to know their quirky neighbor when a year later, in 2011, Gundlach died of a heart attack at age 56. In Elkhart, the funeral drew an intimate crowd of about 50 people, including only a handful of people from out of town and overseas. "There weren't a lot of people anywhere who knew David," says Liz Naquin Borger, who grew up with Gundlach and was named executor of his estate.
In the weeks after his death, word trickled out around town that Gundlach had met with officials at the Elkhart County Community Foundation shortly before he died. There were rumors of a sizable gift, but few people knew how much money was at stake. His mother, Marge Swift, told friends that she didn't have any idea how much money her son had. The irony was inescapable: As in Gundlach's movie, a town was transfixed by a man who few knew anything about. And this story, too, had a happy ending.
When the estate was mostly settled, in mid-2012, Pete McCown, president of the foundation, went to visit Marge, who was 93 at the time. McCown told her that her son's gift was going to have a "transformative" effect on life in the community.
"How much was it?" she asked.
"Well," McCown recalls saying, "there is a Swiss bank account with $113 million sitting in it."
THE UNITED STATES IS IN the midst of what's being called the largest transfer of wealth in history, with trillions of dollars being passed down to future generations, says the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College. While most of that money will go to heirs, a big chunk—about 12 percent—will be allocated to charities like hospitals and universities, which then have to make sure they make the best use of it. It's often a tricky business, and the Gundlach bequest generated more than its share of hand-wringing and debate.
'While the size of the gift is significant, there's an extraordinary element:the foundation can use it however it likes.'
With a population of about 50,000, Elkhart sits in far north Indiana, not far from the Michigan border and only 20 miles from the University of Notre Dame in nearby South Bend. A manufacturing hub for recreational vehicles, Elkhart has produced a steady stream of blue-collar millionaires over the years. But until Gundlach died, McCown didn't have an original Salvador Dalí sculpture on his desk, and there was no Marc Chagall painting above the filing cabinet in the office next door. Those works are among the noncash components of the estate, along with 11 homes and 15 cars, including a Rolls Royce, two Bentleys and a Ferrari. All in, the estate's value is estimated at $150 million, almost quadrupling the assets for the Elkhart County Community Foundation. Despite the pockets of wealth, Elkhart was hit hard by the recession. When President Obama visited in 2009, the city's unemployment rate was the highest in the country, at more than 15 percent. McCown says it's hard to overstate the impact the gift could have, calling it "one of the historic moments in time for this county."
While the size of the gift is significant, there's another element that potentially makes it extraordinary: The foundation can use it however it likes. Typically, big donors prefer to specify how their donations are used. But Gundlach declined to put conditions on his money. McCown, a 44-year-old former college professor, had just taken the job at the foundation when he met with Gundlach, who explained that he was putting the foundation in his will. After chatting for about an hour, McCown recalls, Gundlach tapped him on the knee and said, "Kiddo, it seems to me you are better qualified to handle this money than I am."
Like all foundations, Elkhart's must spend at least 5 percent of its endowment each year—now at least $7.5 million annually, 10 times more than its previous commitment. After the gift was announced, McCown says he received around 500 emails daily from residents with ideas on where the money should go, including pleas to fix schools, transform the animal shelter and even improve outreach to the local Amish community. At local charities and community groups, long-shelved proposals got dusted off as civic leaders angled to get a piece of the pie. McCown started a "listening tour" of the community to hear what residents think should be done. The first gifts will be made next year.
There is another, equally vexing decision to be made: how to honor the man behind the town's newfound largesse? The foundation's board recently voted to endow a scholarship fund in Gundlach's name, and there have been discussions about creating a library or gallery to display some of his art and furniture and perhaps tell the story of the town's benefactor.
That story, however, is incomplete in places. Even those who were closest to him say that because Gundlach traveled so much, no one had a complete picture of his life. "We had to piece together what was out there," says Borger. They describe a brilliant but complicated figure who was still trying to sort through how he wanted to use his vast fortune, and create a positive final chapter in a life marked by sadness and disappointments. With his gift to Elkhart, they say, he did just that. He was, McCown says, "a somewhat lost soul who did something incredibly noble at the end of his life."
THE HEARTBREAK STARTED early for Gundlach. He was born in Downey, Calif., and his father, an insurance man, died when he was 8 years old. His mother later moved the family back to Elkhart to live with her parents. David's older brother, a California highway patrolman, was killed several years later in a motorcycle accident. His mother says she and David were always "great buddies," and friends say he doted on her when he got older. But Gundlach never collected friends or thrived socially, which in combination with his tendency to fixate on topics or interests led some to believe he had a mild form of Asperger's syndrome—though Gundlach recoiled at the notion when it was suggested to him as an adult. He returned west for college to the University of Southern California but dropped out before getting a bachelor's degree at Chapman University.
I Leave My Fortune To...
A Chinese restaurant? Some large and unusual bequests:
1. Roman Blum, U.S.
Worth about $40 million | Died: 2012
When the real-estate developer died childless and without a will, he left behind the largest unclaimed estate in New York state's history. Experts say that in most of these cases, the money ends up in the state coffers.
2. Wellington Burt, U.S.
Worth about $100 million | Died: 1919
The lumber baron and former Michigan state senator took his own sweet time with his bequest. He wanted his fortune handed out 21 years after the death of the last grandchild, who was born while he was still alive. The money was finally distributed to 12 heirs in 2011.
3. Golda Bechal, U.K.
Worth more than $15 million | Died: 2004
The property magnate left her fortune to a couple running her favorite Chinese restaurant. The unusual friendship, which began over a dish of Chinese pickled leeks and bean sprouts, extended to shared Christmases and other holidays.
4. Nina Wang, Hong Kong
Worth about $10.7 billion | Died: 2007
A long-drawn battle over Wang's will unfolded when it revealed she had left her money to her personal feng shui guru. The Hong Kong court later ruled the bequest to be a forgery by the geomancer, who recently appealed a prison sentence for fraud. The money has gone to charity.
He worked at several large companies but ultimately followed his father into the insurance business and in 1995 started his own car-insurance firm in the U.K. that used demographic data to assess driver risk. It was an idea ahead of its time, says Andrew Bowen, a computer programmer who was the first person Gundlach hired. "He was very intelligent and very direct," recalls Bowen. Gundlach also made some brilliant marketing decisions, naming his company Hastings Direct in large part so he could use the digits 1066—the year of the Battle of Hastings—in the company's telephone number. The firm's jingle also became ubiquitous on British television.
Gundlach was also a workaholic and "a difficult person to know on a social level," Bowen says. With the habits of a committed bachelor, Gundlach began each week buying a half-dozen new dress shirts—then throwing them away after wearing them so he wouldn't have to do laundry. The two men, who were neighbors, ate dinner together almost every night for 10 years.
As the company grew rapidly, Gundlach made clear that he saw success—and the money that came with it—as a means to an end. One was charity. Gundlach always said he wanted to give his money away, Bowen says, and talked frequently of getting involved with groups that helped children. The other was "access"—meaning a wider spectrum of business and social activities he felt would be open to him through wealth.
In 2006, Gundlach got his payday. He sold Hastings Direct to Insurance Australia Group for 140 million pounds, or about $260 million at the time. With his new fortune, Gundlach returned to the U.S. and bought a $20 million glass-and-stainless-steel Malibu mansion, originally built by fashion designer Perry Ellis, and a Beverly Hills home neighboring Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. He even plunked down millions on a 20,000- square-foot home at Reynolds Plantation in Georgia, telling friends that it was less than an hour's drive from Augusta National, home of the Masters, and that he dreamed of meeting someone who might invite him to join the exclusive club.
'Word quickly spread in hollywood that Gundlach was sitting on a pile of money and willing to spend it. '
Gundlach, whose favorite movie was "Gladiator," which starred Russell Crowe, also tried to break into Hollywood. Dean Zanuck, scion of the storied producing family, was introduced to Gundlach in 2008, after trying to make "Get Low" for years. At first, he was skeptical that this newcomer could help. "He told me, 'Get me a signed contract from Robert Duvall and a signed contract from Bill Murray and I'll write you a check for $5.5 million.'" Once the stars signed on, Gundlach stayed true to his word: Zanuck woke one morning to find $5.5 million in his production account.
Word quickly spread in Hollywood that Gundlach was sitting on a pile of money and willing to spend it. "Guys like David come around once in a lifetime," says Joey Rappa, a producer who met Gundlach soon after he arrived in L.A. "People come at you in droves." Stars like James Franco and Keanu Reeves came to barbecues at Gundlach's Malibu mansion. Gundlach told friends that he played poker with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Gundlach was also prized because he didn't demand to participate in the creative process: His only nonfinancial contribution to "Get Low" was insisting a swear word get cut out, Zanuck says.
There were signs, though, that Gundlach was slightly adrift through this time. Because of a persistent bad back, he was taking painkillers, and there were many days when he didn't leave the house. His friends say he battled depression. On one occasion, Kloska says, Gundlach became convinced while watching the financial news that he could be a successful day trader. It was a poor impulse: He lost $6 million in less than 24 hours, he told Kloska. Gundlach also made fitful attempts at philanthropy. He bought an apartment building in Las Vegas with plans to convert it to a sort of halfway house for teens leaving foster care, but the project never got off the ground. His lawyer in Elkhart, Mike Pianowski, says Gundlach felt taken advantage of by the charities that he tried to work with and "had some bad experiences trusting people."
Around this time, Gundlach started spending more time in Elkhart, and the Kloskas, who have five children, became a sort of second family. On several occasions Gundlach told Kloska that he wished he had a family of his own and complained that many people only used him for his money. Yet Gundlach insisted on picking up the check at fancy dinners and implored friends to vacation at his houses around the country. When the Kloskas agreed to visit the Georgia house, Gundlach bought two extra jet skis so the kids could be out on the lake together. Gundlach also flew Robert and his wife, Margy, out to Hollywood for the "Get Low" premiere.
Kloska knew his friend was struggling, but saw glimmers that Gundlach was recognizing the good his money could do. Just before he died, Gundlach agreed to host an event for Holy Cross College, where Kloska works. Gundlach was subdued on the day of the event, and it took some convincing to get him to come upstairs and mingle. As it happened, the brother of a former Holy Cross student had been killed in combat in Afghanistan days before, and the event started with a prayer for the soldier and his family. Out of the blue, Gundlach announced that he was endowing a permanent scholarship in the fallen soldier's name. Gundlach "just came alive," Kloska says. "At the end of the day, he really wanted to help people."
There are conflicting views about Gundlach's plans for his estate. Some say he complained of heart problems and knew he needed to settle his affairs sooner rather than later. Others contend the gift to the foundation was more of a placeholder until he opted for a detailed philanthropic plan that he would be involved in personally.
But all of those who knew Gundlach say he would be thrilled at the excitement his gift has generated around Elkhart, and the expectation that its impact will be felt for generations to come.
The effects are already showing up in surprising ways. In June, a local businessman announced plans to bring a professional baseball team to Elkhart. In deciding on a name for the team, one of the factors he considered was Gundlach's sizable gift to the community. The name he chose: the Elkhart County Miracle.
Write to Brad Reagan at firstname.lastname@example.com


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LITTLETON, New Hampshire (Reuters) - A New Hampshire man who took several members of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign staff hostage in 2007 was taken into custody on Monday on suspicion of leaving a halfway house overnight without permission.
Leeland Eisenberg, 52, faces a charge of escape punishable by up to seven years in prison after he was re-arrested in the lobby of a community center in Manchester, New Hampshire, the state's Department of Corrections said in a statement.
He had walked away from the minimum security Calumet Transitional Housing Unit in Manchester on Sunday, the statement said. Eisenberg had been eligible for parole in August, a department spokesman said.
In 2007, Eisenberg entered a Clinton campaign office in Rochester, New Hampshire, with what appeared to be a bomb hidden under his clothes and took five people hostage, holding them for nearly six hours before surrendering. It was later discovered he had strapped road flares to his body.
In an interview with CNN in 2007, Eisenberg said he took the hostages to raise awareness about mental health issues, the network reported on its website.
The New Hampshire Department of Corrections Investigations Bureau and the New Hampshire State Police were investigating the cause and circumstances that led to the inmate's disappearance.
(Reporting by Jason McLure; Editing by Daniel Trotta, Eric Beech and Phil Berlowitz)


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Snake Galaxy HD iPad Review
It doesn't happen often, but every now and then a new bar will be set for a genre by an indie gem, and Snake Galaxy HD fits the bill. We can't remember any other version of Snake that has left our jaws dropped like this game has.
Instead of slithering around a grid-based 2D level, each level of Snake Galaxy has you wrapping the snake around stylized 3D worlds. In order to rack up high scores, you'll want to eat the floating crystals as quickly as possible to keep your combo meter rising.
Each planet has a distinct theme, such as a paper mache city, an ocean mine, a cheeseburger, and even a replica of landmarks across Paris. The visuals are stunning and lag-free, allowing you to become fully immersed in the spinning environments. Each planet is backed by its own original tunes, which range from fast-paced techno to offbeat percussion.
Includes a sesame-seed counting minigame.
The speed, turning radius, and size of the snake are tuned to each planet. This can make it easier to maneuver around and through tight spaces. Excellent drag controls help you wiggle out of any dangerous situation. After eating a diamond, you can double-tap the screen for a short speed boost, or touch the screen with two fingers simultaneously to slow the snake down.
In order to unlock new levels, you'll need to beat the top preset local high score. This is pretty easy to do, but the real fun is in the online leaderboards for each individual planet. You'll have 13 unique environments to score big on, offering a lot of lasting value.
If we had to pick out a downside, it would be that you aren't getting any new content exclusive to the iPad version of the game, even though it costs a good bit more than the iPhone version. However, the game does play even smoother on the iPad, so we aren't complaining.
Not a fan of Snake or simply tired of the onslaught of similar clones? Put those thoughts aside and go download Snake Galaxy HD. We'd be hard-pressed to find a more unique, enjoyable Snake game.


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Ok, so it's not security, but since I got my Treo 650 I've been pretty heavy into WAP applications and web content via my phone/pda/thingamabobber. This is REALLY welcome news:
Google Launches Mobile Search Engine
Google has launched a new mobile version of its popular search engine to complement the Google Mobile service introduced in the US and Canada earlier this year. Google Mobile search supports WAP, XHTML and iMode handsets, and offers web and images searches. The service searches for pages written in extensible HTML, which are pages optimized for mobile internet users with pages designed to be viewed on a phone-sized screen.
Users will access the Google home page, and when they type in their query, they will select 'Mobile Web (Beta)' as the search option. The results are presented in a clean interface with a top 10 list for web searches, and a top 3 list for image searches.
Once a user clicks the link from Google, they are taken to a Google-formatted version of the content that has been reformatted for viewing on a mobile-phone sized screen.
"Try it the next time you visit Google on your mobile phone - you'll see a new option to search the Mobile Web. How different is it than standard web search? There are sites out there that have already been designed for your mobile phone, which makes them more navigable on the small screen. So we've created an index specifically for these sites. And so your phone can now be that much more useful," said software engineer Steven Schirripa in the Google blog headline.


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UCC Filings - General Information
The Secretary of States Office, under Revised Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, effective July 1, 2001, serves as the central filing office for financing statements regarding security interests. A financing statement indicates a commercial agreement between a debtor and a secured party. Searches provide information on collateral. When a debtor pledges collateral on a loan, UCC search results tell lenders if others have filed a claim against the same collateral.
General Filing Instructions
- Type or legibly print in dark ink the applicable UCC form in its entirety. All forms are fillable, therefore you may type directly onto the pdf form or you may download and print the form. All of the Secretary of States Forms may be found on the Forms and Fees page.
- Submit the proper form with the required fee. A separate form should be submitted for each UCC transaction.
- Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
To read the statutes governing the UCC Article 9 Secured Transactions, please follow the links in the guide below:
Uniform Commercial Code Division


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HCL Technologies - iCFO Revenue and Expense
HCL has envisioned a overarching framework built on the cutting-edge Microsoft BI platform to meet the CFO requirements from strategic and operational planning to risk and regulatory compliance. Our iCFO solution also provides better transparency through data centralization, increases business insight with predictive analysis and accelerates performance resulting in faster closing and easy accessibility of reports.Contacter le partenaire Voir la vidéo
- Gold Cloud Platform
- Gold Cloud Productivity
- Gold Collaboration and Content
- Gold Data Analytics
- Silver Data Platform
It is rightly said that Finance is the Business of Data. The CFO's office is often the source of most qualified data for your enterprise and mine – reliable, timely and accurate. Whether it be shareholder, regulatory or external reporting and maintaining the performance of the enterprise to the outside world or the stakeholder, management or internal information, the Finance details with the entire value chain of information management, delivery, analytics and insights for one and all.
While the criticality is well understood and enabling technologies are available at hand and increasing, it still remains a pipe-dream for Finance Reporting folks to move efforts from 70% data production and 30% analytics to turn it the other way around.
HCL has been leveraging the power of BI and analytics to help clients navigate this world to bring the power of data and insights at their finger-tips and function as a true partner to business. We attempt to frame the critical needs from the information delivery perspective and explain how through right technology solutions and understanding of the domain, we can bring accelerated solutions to this prevalent problem.
HCL has envisioned a overarching framework built on the cutting-edge Microsoft BI platform to meet the CFO requirements from strategic and operational planning to risk and regulatory compliance. Our iCFO solution also provides better transparency through data centralization, increases business insight with predictive analysis and accelerates performance resulting in faster closing and easy accessibility of reports.
The critical needs can be framed from both the production side of data and the consumption side or information delivery to varied needs.
-For reliability, (both timeliness and accuracy) of data, the data sources need to be ring-fenced to be structured and governed. The question therefore is how can one create enterprise information hubs that have well curated contents that can address a predictable set of users?
-For agility i.e., providing information-on-demand, the data discovery and role-based access to select pools of data needs to be made available with minimal production over-heads. The question would be how can we have a self-service BI solution that will balance both reporting needs and discovery needs suited to different levels of granularity driven by users?
-For insight-driven data, it is key that multi-dimensional and layered information can be modelled quickly and over-laid with business insights that can be readily consumed. The question then would be, how can the any-time, any-'ware' data be married with both advanced visualization capabilities and also captured business insights that can lead to action?
-For data interrogation, it is key that the industrialized data packs should lend themselves for intelligent data interrogation and advanced analytics. The final question then, would be on how does one leverage standard reports/dashboards to search for specific data patterns/insights and also build advanced analytical models on top of them?
Based on our deep and wide expertise in working across the spectrum of Business Intelligence, Advanced Analytics and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) closely with Finance IT departments, HCL has created and implemented a suite of solutions under its iCFO (integrated CFO) framework.
iCFO combines the best of Finance packaged/be-spoke solutions (from integrated GL, FP &A, reporting and reference data management systems) with that of technology solutions (from warehouses, reporting and visualization solutions, analytics solutions) and enable both the modernization and implementation of integrated transformation solutions.
Partnering with Power – Technology and Domain
HCL has architected and developed next-gen CFO dashboards for all enterprise classes – from transnational corporations to SME 'all-in-a-box' solutions with role-centric perspectives.
Power of Domain:
-The iCFO dashboards are aligned to industry-standard KPI's from across Finance functions and also key KPI's for corporate performance management with customized KPI metrics for various industries ( BFSI, Life Sciences, Hitech/Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Telcos etc.,)
-The solution is underpinned by standardized data modelsfor Finance areas covering all key subject areas (from overall planning, budgeting to spend analytics)
-Role-based perspectives and drill-downs is built in from CFO/CXO to Controller/LOB views to manager-level detail views ) – with hierarchy definitions, key fact areas and dimensions and standardized reporting catalogues
Power of Tech
iCFO is realized on Power BI which brings in quadrant leading features on many counts
Powered by PowerBI, iCFO Dashboards have very intuitive visualization capabilities driven by user segments
-Intuitive, trends-driven, zero foot-print and customized visualization widgets for CXO, decision-making users (including mobile devices)
-Multi-dimensional, custom KPI's driven with advanced visualization capabilities and integration with analytical models for LOB/middle-management users and leveraging features for creating reporting content packs
-Multi-grain, slice-and-dice capabilities for self-service reports and curated content for large data sets for operational users with integration with key MS Productivity solutions with Q & A capabilities at all levels
HCL has identified the most influential use cases for this solution that will result in tangible cost reduction for customers. These include:
-Faster Decision making process
-Enable the customer to implement faster using the KPI Repository
-Provides Strategic Theme to KPI Drill Downs
-What if Models – In force base
-Critical to Business KPIs – Central Dashboard
-For Strategic Execution &Transformation - Scorecards & Dimensions
-Detailed reports on Line of Business, Revenue, Regional, Quality – Maps, Sparkline, Dateline, Drill Downs, Graphs
-Mobile Alerts
-Predictive Analytics using Azure Machine Learning
-SQL Server 2012
-Power BI
-Cortana Stack (Azure Machine Learning, Azure SQL Data warehouse, Data Lake, Stream Analytics, Azure Data Factory)
-R Integration
HCL's Business Analytics Services brings you some of the solutions at your enterprise door-step through its
-iCFO Dashboard solutions (with KPI libraries, process and data models, domain and industry contents)
-Visualization solutions (for advanced and custom visual intelligence solutions)
-HCLs ETL Framework
-Data Catalog Framework
-EoMC Utility for Monitoring and Performance Analysis
-Web based utility Trends Analysis for corrective action
Vous souhaitez devenir un partenaire Power BI ?
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Peer Advisors are experienced student leaders who have demonstrated academic and community success. Their main focus is to develop relationships with new students and to assist them with transitioning to university life.
Peer Advisors connect with new students through the Cornerstones course, which is part of the First Year Experience. Cornerstones introduces students to the LeTourneau University community and encourages a holistic approach to life-long learning.
Peer Advisors with majors within the School of Engineering and Engineering Technology also have the opportunity to work with FIGS (First-Year Interest Groups). FIGs will be a little smaller than the typical Cornerstones course section and will be comprised solely of engineering and engineering technology majors. Read more about LeTourneau University's First Year Experience.
Join the Achievement Center Staff! Peer Advisors are selected through the IMPACT program.
Elizabeth Menges
Assistant Director for
Student Retention
(903) 233-4472


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The time I was struck by lightning
Just about everyone who has spent time in the high country has a lightning story to tell — when lightning cracked open a nearby tree, or how their hair stood on end and they got out of there.
I'd been in Colorado a short time and was ignorant about everything Western when I decided to climb a mountain outside of Denver in July. It was a walk-up kind of "thirteener," and I was dressed in my usual mountain climbing outfit of shorts, sneakers, shirt tied to my waist, and a fanny pack. I lollygagged getting up that morning and didn't start up the mountain until 10 a.m. or so. Anyone who knows the mountains knows this is a stupid thing to do, and no, I had no compass, map, rain gear or even water bottle. Even stupider.
As I started up the trail, clouds began building over the Continental Divide. I ignored them.
I am a butterfly collector, and I was collecting butterflies in the rocks above tree line. I paid no attention to the weather because the sun was shining and it felt warm. By mid-afternoon, though, it was suddenly overcast, and that's when I stupidly decided to bag the peak as fast as I could. I got on the top and was sweating and breathing hard, when I noticed a humming in the air as if the mountain were singing. "Oh, wow, far out!" I thought. (This was the early 1970s, and we talked that way.) "The hair on my arms is standing up. And, man, I got an Afro. Whoa!"
The next thing I remember is a guy standing over me asking me if I was dead. From below, he said, he'd seen a lightning bolt hit me on the top of my head. Thinking back, lightning felt like the "thumpers" — what we called a "schmiddock" in Pennsylvania — that my older brother used to give me on my head.
I looked down; I'd turned a purple-pink color and there were snakelike tracks on my skin. My feet were burned, my T-shirt was gone, my shorts were in tatters, and my shoes were charred and nearly blown off. Somehow I staggered down the mountain with the help of the Good Samaritan and drove home. I assume I did that, but I don't remember anything about it. I hurt for weeks from the burns and the muscles that seized when I was hit. When asked what happened, I told everyone I had a lot in common now with Frankenstein's electrified monster.
I was a lucky innocent that day. I must have had my mouth open because my eardrums didn't burst, and because I was sweaty, electricity ran down my skin and not through my body. I was also high up and the clouds were low, and though the charge was somewhere between 200 million to 2 billion volts, the amperage or current was not. This "flashover" effect travels on the outside of the body, so it doesn't usually disrupt the electrical functions of the brain and heart.
Deaths from lightning are rare and so are direct strikes. "Splash" — where lightning hits somewhere else and the electricity runs along wet rocks or grass — is what kills most people. People stand with their legs apart, and the current runs up one leg, through their body and down the other leg. This summer a golfer in Granby, Colo., was struck exactly the way I was, surviving with similar burns and pain. Personally, I would not carry a metal stick under threatening skies in the mountains during summer. Perhaps he should have been holding a one-iron — even God can't hit one of them.
What I learned from this experience is to get on and off the mountain early, before the clouds build up. Keep your feet together. Try to hold your mouth open. Don't carry a metal stick. Count "1001,1002" when you see the lightning flash; if the count gets up to 1005, you know the storm is about a mile away and get the hell out of there. Unless, of course, like me, you want to get your battery charged.
Rob Pudim is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes and draws cartoons in Boulder, Colorado.
Note: the opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of High Country News, its board or staff. If you'd like to share an opinion piece of your own, please write Betsy Marston at [email protected].


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|Volvo PV544 Stainless Steel Bumper - US Style
|PTT BUMPERS where you can choice the best bumper for your car with a reasonable price and high quality!
With over ten years in manufacturing and exporting bumper for classic car, we proud of our best service to all customers over the world with great pleasure.
Also, using our bumper, you do not worry about the rust because it made of solid stainless steel SAE 304, 1.5 – 2mm thickness and polished surface. The gloss of bumper is shiny like mirror polish and the backside of bumper are cover by 3 painted layers to protect the bumper from the bad weather and chemicals elements.
Specially, we can duplicate all kinds of bumpers from original sample for fitting, shape and dimension, etc...(100% resemblance compared with original)
Why do you hesitate to contact us to get the best bumper for you car! We will give the very competitive price for who place a bulk order.
For any question or inquiry, please feel free to email Ms. Joni. Email: email@example.com. Tel: (84) 8 22452841
"Make your cars more luxury – safety – beauty. That's our pride"
|Part For Sale
|Sep 27, 2011
|bumper, bumperscar, ptt, auto, part, sgbumper, volvo, anazon, 122s, kombi, pv44, pv445, duett, p210, pv544, p1800se
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What to CookWeeknight Cooking
Pasta with Sweet Potato, Goat Cheese and Sage
- Jenny
My internal life is almost entirely animated by the things I would like to buy and eat, cook and eat, or purchase the ingredients for and fantasize about eating. My nightstand hosts an array of cookbooks and recipes. My kitchen is piled high with manila folders filled with clippings, some of them recipes I have made 100 times, some I am still mulling. I spend a lot of time trolling cooking blogs, usually this one, looking for inspiration.
But once in a while, I am just not feeling it. The thought of chicken appalls me. I can't face another slab of salmon. Pork chops, pea soup, turkey chili, sautéed whatever: blech, blech, blech and so what.
Whenever that happens, I go see my extremely cute herb guys, Kenter Canyon Farms, who have a stand at all the farmer's markets I visit. I examine everything carefully, pick what looks best, and build my next meal around the herb. This week, the sage was bunny-ear soft and smelling like a meditation festival. I had to have it. So I popped it in the bag, got home, and looked here for a suitable recipe, and happened upon Sweet Potato, Goat Cheese and Sage Pasta Pileup.
Some of you – you know who you are – will argue that this recipe is less cooking than compiling. Really all you are doing is boiling (sweet potatoes and pasta), spreading (goat cheese), and dabbing (sage sautéed in some butter). And yet this dish forced me to use more pans than others far more complex. But I digress.
The thing is that sometimes what one needs is less a set of instructions to be used with multiple ingredients, but rather a new concept, easily executed, with things you already have or know well. Think of it as food you thought you just wanted to be friends with, but sort of decided you would really like to date.
I cooked everything here while attending to other forms of domestic slavery, stopping only to peel a little of this, drain a little of that. Tossing lasagna noodles with sweet potatoes, goat cheese and loads of butter and sage would not, as a unit, have come to me, but what I realized as I chowed it down is that it was really deconstructed ravioli. Yes the lasagna can be a but cumbersome, but just chop it up a lot.
The incipient vegetarian proclaimed it "great." I do not agree with her assessment of "Glee," but her view of Amreen's attempt to get us through a Monday night is spot on.
Sweet Potato, Goat Cheese and Sage Pasta Pileup
By Amreen
Serves 8
- 2 sweet potatoes
- 8 ounces goat cheese
- 1/2 pound lasagna noodles
- 1 bunch sage
- 1/4 cup butter
- salt and pepper to taste
1. Bring two pots of water to boil, meanwhile scrub the potatoes and stab them with a knife. Once the water is boiling toss in the potatoes and cook until easily impaled. This should take around 20 minutes.
2. Once the potatoes are done remove them from the heat; for a quick cool down, run cold water over them. Put the lasagna noodles in the other pot of boiling water and set the timer for about 10 minutes.
3. Once the potatoes are cooled, pinch off their skin. Cut them into small pieces and mash them up with the goat cheese. (Note: if you want them creamy heat them up a little while you are doing this). Salt to taste.
4. In a saucepan heat the butter on medium-low. Add the sage and cook until browned, about 4-5 minutes.
5. Drain the lasagna noodles. Place a few noodles on a plate and scoop some of the sweet potato mixture around them. Repeat this until all the noodles and mix are used up.
6. Crack some pepper on top and devour!
By day, Jennifer Steinhauer, aka Jenny, is the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for The New York Times. By night, she is an obsessive cook.


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- Browse bikes
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KTM 300 EXC Six days 2013
2013 KTM 300 EXC Six days specifications, pictures, reviews and rating
Picture credits - KTM. Click to submit more pictures.
|KTM's profilation of this bike
|The 300 EXC is ´READY TO RACE ´ for the world´s largest enduro competition, the ´International Six Days Enduro´. Six days in succession, over a thousand offroad kilometres, 40 hours in the saddle - a gruelling test, not only for the rider.
|General information
|KTM 300 EXC Six days
|Enduro / offroad
|70.3 out of 100. Show full rating and compare with other bikes
|Engine and transmission
|293.00 ccm (17.88 cubic inches)
|Engine type:
|Single cylinder, two-stroke
|Engine details:
|Reed intake.
|Bore x stroke:
|72.0 x 72.0 mm (2.8 x 2.8 inches)
|Contactless, controlled, fully electronic ignition system with digital ignition timing adjustment, type Kokusan
|Lubrication system:
|Forced oil lubrication with 2 Eaton pumps
|Cooling system:
|Transmission type,
final drive:
|Wet multi-disc clutch / hydraulically operated
|14:50 (13:50). Primary drive: 26:72.
|Chassis, suspension, brakes and wheels
|Frame type:
|Central tube frame made of chrome molybdenum steel tubing
|Rake (fork angle):
|Front suspension:
|WP Suspension Up Side Down 4860 4CS
|Front wheel travel:
|300 mm (11.8 inches)
|Rear suspension:
|WP Suspension PDS 5018 DCC
|Rear wheel travel:
|335 mm (13.2 inches)
|Front brakes:
|Single disc
|Front brakes diameter:
|260 mm (10.2 inches)
|Rear brakes:
|Single disc
|Rear brakes diameter:
|220 mm (8.7 inches)
|Physical measures and capacities
|Dry weight:
|104.0 kg (229.3 pounds)
|Seat height:
|960 mm (37.8 inches) If adjustable, lowest setting.
|Ground clearance:
|355 mm (14.0 inches)
|1,482 mm (58.3 inches)
|Fuel capacity:
|9.50 litres (2.51 gallons)
|Other specifications
|Color options:
|Electric & kick
|Further information
|Insurance costs
|Get estimated US insurance cost with a quote from Allstate Motorcycle Insurance.
|Parts finder
|Chaparral provides online schematics & OEM parts for the US. Motorcycle Superstore provides an easy-to-use parts finder. Ships to the US, Canada, UK and Australia. MotoSport.com ships motorcycle parts and accessories to most countries. Sixity.com has low prices and free shipping on ATV and motorcycle parts to the US. Also check out our overview of motorcycle webshops at Bikez.info.
|Dirt-bike parts
|Dirt-bike parts and gear available from MotoSport.com. Ships to the US, Canada, the UK, most EU countries, Australia, India, etc.
|Also adventure and dirt-bike parts at CruiserCustomizing.com.
|Ask questions
|Join the 13 KTM 300 EXC Six days discussion group or the general KTM discussion group.
|Loans, tests, etc
|Search the web for dealers, loan costs, tests, customizing, etc.
|Related bikes
|List related bikes for comparison of specs.
Rate motorcycles you knowRate motorcycles you know and help your fellow riders to find the bike that is right for them. Bikez has the most users and the most extensive motorcycle rating on the net. It includes reliability, design, engine performance, accident risk, repair cost, offroad capabilities, racing track capabilities and touring capabilities. The ratings are also used to rank the 100 most popular MC models each year since 1990. The lists are adjusted weekly as new ratings are added. You can check out the rating of the 2013 KTM 300 EXC Six days and compare it to other bikes here.
|Rating sample for this KTM bike
Design and look for the 2013 KTM 300 EXC Six days:
(75.8 out of 100)
Click here for complete rating. You can also compare bikes.
Pictures, trademarks and logos of third parties are the exclusive property of the respective owners. Technical specifications are subject to change without notice. Bikez.com has been developed by low-cost software development company ObjectLabs.
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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski has announced the FCC's new five-step plan to revamp its 911 system to keep pace with data communications.
According to the FCC, these Next Generation 911 (NG911) services will allow emergency dispatchers to receive text messages, photos and even video.
If the FCC manages to pull this off, dispatchers would have even more information at their disposal, and quickly. This would no doubt end up saving more lives, which is definitely a good thing.
But one thing Genachowski did not go into is when the commission might be able to accomplish this marvelous feat, nor did he give any details how it might be done. Building a nationwide network that allows hundreds of millions users to share text, images and video is no doubt difficult, but it has been done before. So, FCC, my suggestion to you is one word: Facebook.
Why not? Our good Mr. Zuckerberg has already created a network that does most of what you want NG911 to do. Maybe you should ask for his help on this.
The one major complaint people have expressed with Facebook is invasion of privacy, but that isn't really a concern here. I mean, when are you less concerned about your privacy being infringed than when your house is on fire? You WANT people to know your personal information when fire's involved.
Of course, given the purpose of NG911 to facilitate the delivery of disaster information, we'd still have the dilemma as to whether it's good form to 'like' an announcement of bad news as a show of support for the victim.
"There's a fire at my house!" is not something that we generally want to like, though on Facebook, "Like" means something different. I don't think we as a society will ever figure that one out.
So think about it, Mr. Chairman. Heck, maybe even the Napster guy will jump at this project too. He's usually good for a laugh.
About the Author
Greg Crowe is a former GCN staff writer who covered mobile technology.
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Printable Format
Although having more information and live data feeds sounds like things we should automatically embrace, further discussion and research must be undertaken to determine how such information will be utilized. Live feeds of fires or critical incidents (in progress assaults, person in distress, etc) can be very useful to responding personnel but would likely be extremely damaging to the personnel who take calls regularly in dispatch centers. They are trained, and used to, dealing with non-visual information and providing the necessary resources and responses. The field could benefit tactically with live feeds but forcing it upon dispatch personnel is destructive to their long-term well being.
FB is NOT a network- it is a giant BBS that happens to reside on the internet. If their server farms crash, or if the local segment of IP world crashes, it is useless. Emergency comms need redundancy. Local-loop copper and RF still beat any virtual networks for reliability and availability.
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US court upholds judgment against ex-NHL player
Jun. 07, 2014
GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan (AP) — A federal judge in Michigan upheld a $1.6 million judgment against former Detroit Red Wings forward Kevin Miller for a hit from behind during a 2000 Swiss league game that ended another player's career.
U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist in Grand Rapids ruled in favor of a Swiss insurance company. The insurer asked the court to recognize a Swiss court's $1.1 million judgment, which increased to $1.6 million with interest and costs.
Quist said in Thursday's ruling that his court was following the Uniform Foreign-Country Judgments Recognition Act.
Miller's hit on Canadian national Andrew McKim caused McKim to fall forward and strike his head on the ice. He was hospitalized for weeks with a concussion and other injuries.
Miller previously refused to pay the Swiss court's judgment.


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You are here
The Art of Metaphor with Ellen Bass
Date and Time:
April 5, 2014 - 11:00AM to 3:00PM
April 6, 2014 - 11:00AM to 3:00PM
Event Location:
Conference Room
Saturday, April 5, 11:00am-3:00pm
Sunday, April 6, 12:00-4:00pm
Application Deadline: Friday, March 21
Ellen Bass's poetry includes Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. She coedited No More Masks!, the first major anthology of poetry by women and has coauthored non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal. Her poetry has frequently been published in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, as well as many other journals. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University.
Event Sponsored By:
Poets House
Event Type:
Workshops, Master Classes and Residencies