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The demise of The Exile began, as so many demises have in Russia, with an official letter. Faxed to the offices of the newspaper late on a Friday afternoon the spring before last from somewhere within the bowels of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and Cultural Heritage Protection, it announced the imminent "conducting of an unscheduled action to check the observance of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media." The Exile, a Moscow-based, English-language biweekly, stood accused of violating Article Four of that legislation by encouraging extremism, spreading pornography, or promoting drug use. The letter scheduled the unscheduled action to take place between May 13 and June 11. This being Russia, it wasn't faxed until May 22.
An Exile sales director, about to leave for the day, received the fax and phoned an editor, who called the real target of the letter, Exile founder and editor in chief Mark Ames, at that moment a world away in Los Gatos, California. Ames in turn promptly called a few lawyers in Moscow, who warned him he might be arrested if he returned. Someone, apparently, had it out for The Exile.
But who? Ames likes to indulge a grandiose paranoia whenever possible, and did. A functionary? An enraged oligarch? Someone on President Dmitry Medvedev's staff, or, more to the point, in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's circle of spooks? (*The Exile'*s first cover story on Putin, in 1999, grafted the man's head onto the body of a latex-clad dominatrix over the headline putin commands mother russia: kneel!) Egotism aside, the possibilities were in fact endless. Since its debut, in 1997, The Exile, which read like the bastard progeny of Spy magazine and an X-rated version of Poor Richard's Almanack, had pilloried, in the foulest terms possible, almost everyone of importance, and no importance, in Russia, and had made a point of violating not one but all of Article Four's provisions. But everyone knew that.
So why now?
No one seemed to know that.
The one thing that Ames did know: he was going back to Moscow. Putin's Russia is an infinitely more dangerous place for journalists than the crumbling country that had drawn Ames 15 years before from the same suburban town where he paced about now, but still it was Russia, and not America, that was his spiritual home. It was not for nothing he'd named his paper The Exile.
Several days after Ames returned to Moscow, the dour Federal Service officials, three men led by a woman, arrived at the paper's office. When they walked in, a staffer old enough to remember some of the worst parts of the Soviet era, crossed herself and simply ran from the office, Ames says. The officials questioned Ames for more than three hours, going through issue after issue of The Exile, by turns offended, disgusted, baffled. Ames suppressed his urge to start cursing at the officials in mat, Russian's profane slang, as he watched them thumb through his life's work, but his restraint meant little: news of the interrogation soon got out, and stories appeared in the Russian press, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters. Ames's investors broke off contact. The distributors stopped sending trucks. "They worried that everybody would be sent to Siberia," Exile sales director Zalina Abdusalamova says.
Just like that, *The Exile'*s era was over.
Ames is angry—he's often angry—about how it all ended. He'd always pictured some exultant, bloody end for The Exile. But he can't claim to be surprised. "I always assumed that every issue would be the last," he says. Indeed, it's a mystery to many why Mark Ames didn't end up in jail or a grave years ago. In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before. Columnist Edward Limonov, the 66-year-old political provocateur in whom the Federal Service officials were particularly interested, filed his copy from prison for two years after being convicted of possessing arms, which he admits he intended to smuggle into Kazakhstan in an effort to incite a coup there. Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he'd written—McElwee, *The Exile'*s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk. On another occasion, a deranged and slighted man sent a letter promising to kill the "frat boy" Ames. Ames in turn published an editorial urging the loon to instead off his co-editor, Matt Taibbi. True, the many death threats Ames received took less of a physical toll on him than loading up on Viagra and attempting to bed nine Moscow prostitutes in nine hours, which he wrote about to commemorate *The Exile'*s ninth anniversary, but that was only because Ames approached the assignment with a rigor befitting a Consumer Reports exposé—"There really was no other way to tell whether these drugs actually worked," he recalls with sincerity and audible exhaustion.
But far more dangerous in Putin's Russia was *The Exile'*s serious journalism. By the time it was shuttered, the paper had published damning views of Russian life through three administrations, two wars, and a stock-market crash, ever since the freezing February night in 1997 when, penniless and infuriatingly sober, Ames had put out the first issue in a torrent of outrage at the sharpies and frauds who insisted that post-Communist Russia was a new democratic paradise, at the liars in the Kremlin, the dreamers in Washington, the academic careerists, Wall Street, the World Bank, the idiots in the press who'd never hired him—at pretty much everyone save Ames himself. Never mind that he and Taibbi would prove the hardest-partying Moscow media celebrities of their time, never mind that they wouldn't just expose the place's hedonism but come to embody it—Ames was pissed off. He wasn't George Plimpton chasing Hemingway's Sad Young Men as part of some romantic lost generation. He was living in the unromantic rubble of a lost empire.
"Everything was about free markets and capitalism and democracy, and it was all leading us to some great new future, but all you had to do was look around in the streets and see there was something fucking wrong with it," Ames says. "We were in the middle of total devastation, one of the worst, most horrible fucking tragedies of modern times."
Ames was from the start vindictive, and carping, and paranoid, and, in the opinion of Exile devotees, a group that includes many of its victims, he also happened to be right.
"They were incredibly gutsy," former Moscow-bureau chief of The Economist Edward Lucas says. Ames once devoted a cover story to deriding Lucas's reporting, and The Exile panned his book, but nonetheless Lucas read the paper regularly. "There was kind of a suspension of disbelief in the 1990s—it may be corrupt, but it will work. The Exile spotted very perceptively that the most optimistic Western interpretation was wrong."
"They were very direct and visceral and often very scurrilous, but they caught a side of Moscow that no one else did," Owen Matthews, currently Moscow-bureau chief for Newsweek, says. "They didn't feel the need to hedge around with reportorial politesse," and Ames is "a great stylist. I don't compare him to Céline lightly. He has that quality of brutal honesty." This from a man whom Ames repeatedly savaged in print, once describing his teeth as leaning "randomly like Celtic temple ruins." Still, he's an admirer. "I haven't seen a newspaper that's so breathtakingly dark and cynical and brilliant," Matthews says. "They had something going that really couldn't be repeated anywhere. It would be out of business in three seconds if they tried to publish it in the U.S."
"They took me on for using journalistic clichés, and at the end of the day I was like, 'You know what? You're right,'" says Colin McMahon, a former Moscow-bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, adding, "I read it because it was good for story ideas, frankly. These guys were deeper into a subculture of Moscow than I could ever have allowed myself to be. I'd see something in The Exile and say, 'How can I get this into a story without mainlining cocaine?'"
Yet The Exile was too vitriolic to romanticize for long or to consult just its fans. And listening to the critics is too fun. They call Ames and Taibbi, singly or in combination, children, louts, misogynists, madmen, pigs, hypocrites, anarchists, fascists, racists, and fiends. According to Carol Williams, of the Los Angeles Times, "It seemed like a bunch of kids who'd somehow gotten funding for their own little newspaper." A former New York Times Moscow-bureau chief, Michael Wines, offered a no-comment comment. "I think I'll pass, thank you," he e-mailed, "except to repeat what I said at the time, and what Shaw said a lot earlier: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
Of course, a pig is probably not the farm animal that comes to Wines's mind first when he's reminded of The Exile. It was Wines, then the *Times'*s Moscow-bureau chief, who, having won *The Exile'*s coveted Worst Journalist in Russia March Madness contest in 2001, was typing in his office when Ames and Taibbi rushed in unannounced and, by way of congratulations, slammed a pie in his face. The pie was made with fresh vanilla cream, hand-puréed strawberry, and five ounces of horse semen.
'That's what he said?," Ames asks when I relay Wines's comment. "He said the same thing back then, the poor bastard."
It's a late-November afternoon and Ames is sitting unrepentantly at his kitchen table, next to a window looking out onto a cheerless backyard complex, in the second-floor Brooklyn sublet where he and his wife moved a month earlier after deciding to leave Russia for good. It's been 15 years since Ames first moved to Moscow. Now a contributor to The Nation and the Daily Beast and a guest commentator on MSNBC, Ames, who's just woken up—it's 2:30 p.m.—is typing a Nation column indifferently on a laptop. He's more interested in a documentary on TV about life in the Pleistocene era. "I feel bad for the Neanderthals," he says. "They ran into Cro-Magnon man and just got stomped." He takes a break to crush some Adderall pills in a bowl, the powder from which he then daubs onto his tongue, washing it back with his third cup of black coffee.
Ames looks younger than his 44 years, handsome in a prehistoric and only slightly demonic way, at six feet four inches with the thick neck and headstone torso of the all-league defensive end he was in Los Gatos, a San Jose suburb. He's wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, white socks with no shoes, and a black Oakland Raiders cap pulled low over his already shadowy eyes and vehement face, which seems to grow darker by the hour. Thanks to his coloring, the Moscow police often mistook him for a "black ass," slang for a migrant from the Caucuses, and delighted in shaking him down for bribes.
In the bedroom, his 27-year-old wife, Anastasia, is still asleep, and in the next room over, among half-emptied suitcases, sits an unopened hulking green Samsonite festooned with FedEx packing tape. It contains the complete and now sole paper archive of The Exile. Just before the interrogation, Ames had Exile editor Yasha Levine secretly pack up all 285 back issues and fly them to the States.
Ames opens the suitcase and removes the bundles of newsprint, gingerly laying them on the floor. Some have been professionally bound and jacketed, while others, in fitting samizdat fashion, have been thrown together and sewn up with string. Kneeling, he opens the most yellowed bundle to the inaugural issue, No. 0, dated February 6, 1997. The red X in The eXile, a graphic betrayal that in two strokes turns democracy into anarchy, is faded but still big and raw and eye-grabbing. He leafs through his first columns. I ask the last time he's looked at them.
"It's been a long fucking time. I don't like looking back," he says.
"Why?," I ask.
"What's the point?" he says.
That Ames produced even a single issue of The Exile is a minor miracle. His entrance into the Moscow media world could hardly have been less auspicious. After stints working for a wine dealer and a Mauritian importer, he started the paper out of gall, having tried and failed to get work as a writer at The Wall Street Journal, the Moscow Times, the L.A. Times, and on. (Ames confirms only the Moscow Times.)
At first, "The Exile was about petty, personal vengeances as much as it was about anything political," he says. "Why have a newspaper if you can't have these arguments and win?"
By the time he got to Russia, Ames relished rejection, he says. At U.C. Berkeley, he'd rebelled against the "bland liberal consensus" by flirting with right-wing politics, getting into arguments with humorless lefties, and falling under the wing of John Dolan, a literature professor and campus cult figure who liked Ames's personal essays and macabre short stories, loathed though they were by his fellow students. Ames still remembers Dolan's first somber career advice: "He said, 'You're talented, but one thing you're going to have to get used to is that you'll never get published in The New Yorker.'" Dolan also introduced him to that urtext for masochistic littérateurs everywhere, Dostoyevsky's The Devils, the story of a doomed anarchic plot hatched by amateurs. Ames was hooked from the words "Stepan Trofimovich was, for example, greatly enamored of his position as a persecuted man and, so to speak, an exile," thereafter tapping at every chance he got the grotesque vein in Russian letters, idolizing Gogol and Bulgakov, shunning Tolstoy and Chekhov. After graduating, Ames bounced around between menial jobs and taught himself Russian, and when the Iron Curtain fell, in 1989, one place beckoned. "The only way to escape was to go somewhere that scared off all those frauds and idiots," Ames says. Russia "was perfect for me."
Ames's first attempt to stay in the country, in 1991, was thwarted when Communist generals tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, which led to the heroic rise of Boris Yeltsin and his dissolution of the U.S.S.R. Ames watched coverage of the coup from Berlin, enraptured. Two weeks after Ames finally moved to Moscow, in 1993, Yeltsin, no longer much of a hero, disbanded parliament. Then the rebels attacked the White House. Ames had just turned 28. He ran around the city, chasing tank fire, ducking behind soldiers until they kicked him away. "It was this different world where everything was more intense and consequential and full of surprises," he says. This was home.
By the mid-90s, a different species of expatriate was flocking to the Wild East, as it was known. The decade had all the indulgence of 1920s Paris and Weimar Berlin, without the bothersome art and poetry. There was too much money and sex to be had. Perestroika and glasnost were all very nice, but Russia was broke, and Yeltsin, committing to a raft of hasty privatization measures, ushered in Western bankers, consultants, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and opportunists of every other stripe, who joined the nascent capitalists and native raconteurs of Russia. According to *The Christian Science Monitor'*s Fred Weir, "It was, of course, the sexiest story in the world, because the great Soviet giant was transforming itself—we thought—into a Western country." In fact, he says, "the fuckers were just looting Russia." It was hard to keep your eye on the looting, though, when Moscow was overflowing with young Russian women coming in from every corner of the country to find work. "Every woman was hot," says Alexander Zaitchik, an Exile editor. "The policewomen were hot. The tram drivers were hot."
"Russians are always anarchic, but at that time they wanted to try everything—new drugs, new positions," the Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent Alan Cullison says. "The esteem of Americans was enormous. The men wanted to drink with you, the women wanted to sleep with you."
But if libertinism was regnant, propping it up were graft, poverty, and murder. Many Russians were living in worse squalor than they had under the Soviet Union. Horrific public violence was routine, and Westerners were not immune, a fact driven home early in the party when an Oklahoma-born bon vivant hotelier, Paul Tatum, was perforated with Kalashnikov rounds in a metro station one evening in 1996. Nor did reporters enjoy special protection. Carol Williams investigated the Tatum murder for the Los Angeles Times and after concluding it had likely been a contract killing, she got a call from someone in the government who told her it was "unhealthy to pursue certain avenues of inquiry," Williams says. The trickle-down venality began with Yeltsin's cadre of billionaires and bumptious economists and descended to the streets and storefronts of Moscow, controlled as they were by overlapping criminal syndicates and factions of the city police and the F.S.B. (the K.G.B.'s successor), which provided the requisite krisha, or roof—protection by way of extortion, in other words.
"When I opened a business in Moscow, the question wasn't if we'd be successful, but whether we'd be able to keep it," says one American financier and entrepreneur who works for a large Wall Street firm in Moscow. "Would I be in danger, get kidnapped? Would I get extorted by a criminal racket, or by the K.G.B.?" He adds, "All of us were scavengers on the carcass of the Soviet Union."
And the place where Moscow's new expatriate plutocracy ogled that carcass was in the pages of The Exile. By the week in early 1998 when it published a cover story on Yeltsin entitled "The Bribefather," complete with Mario Puzo puppet-master typeface and Yeltsin's vodka-bloated mug receding into blackness, the paper was required reading.
"It was the bible. You've never seen a paper read like that," Russianist and journalist Andrew Meier, author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, says. According to James Fenkner, a Moscow fund manager, "It was like Facebook. It kind of just hit."
Ames had spent the first issues maligning everyone in Moscow who'd never given him a job, but in the paper's second month, when he took on Matt Taibbi—stole him, actually, from a short-lived alternative weekly that Ames had briefly edited, where Taibbi had been hired to replace Ames—it really took off. The son of NBC reporter Mike Taibbi, Matt grew up in Boston, attended Bard College, and graduated in 1991 while at the University of Leningrad. He became infatuated with Gogol, and spent his 20s bouncing between continents, episodes of depression, and jobs that included a stint in the Mongolian Basketball League. Like Ames, Taibbi was tall and good-looking, but in a safer, corn-fed way, with bright eyes and a wide, boyish smile. Unlike Ames, he spoke Russian without constant profanity and was a born journalist, having reported from Uzbekistan for the Associated Press and then in Moscow for the Moscow Times. Owen Matthews called him "the best city and crime reporter the Moscow Times ever had."
"Before he came I just wanted to destroy journalism," says Ames. "I learned how to report from Matt."
What made The Exile so popular, and still makes it so readable, was its high-low mix of acute coverage and character assassination, sermonizing laced with smut—a balance that has also characterized Taibbi's work at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributing editor for the last five years. "One of the big complaints we heard for years—really violently angry complaints—was: You cannot mix, in one paper, satire and real investigative journalism," Ames says. "And we were like, Why?" Taibbi wrote on subjects ranging from Washington and I.M.F.'s policy in Russia to Moscow prisons, labor strikes, and religious cults. He hung out with crime bosses, cops, and rogue politicians and wrote a series in which he lived the lives of ordinary Russians for days and weeks, working as a bricklayer, a miner, and a vegetable hocker and attending a Moscow high school. He was among the first foreign journalists to speculate openly on the connection between a series of suspicious apartment-building bombings and Putin's ratcheting up of the Chechen War, now a mainstay of the anti-Putin canon.
Taibbi also served as *The Exile'*s good cop. When its prey had to beg for mercy, they'd turn to him. "There was always that slight fear that Ames would double-cross you," says Peter Lavelle, an investment banker and journalist in Moscow in the 1990s. "Taibbi was the straight guy. When I met him at an Exile party for the first time, he says, 'Oh, I lampooned you—I'm sorry. Let me get you a T-shirt.'"
Despite their contrasting personalities, or because of them, soon into their collaboration Ames and Taibbi were inseparable. Working to all hours in the Exile office or from Ames's apartment in a monstrous Stalinist high-rise, the pair would pore over Russian publications, write, talk with sources, and bullshit, and then stomp through the snowdrifts and ice into the Moscow night, where their confessional columns and towering American swagger had already rendered them luminaries.
Stepping out with the Exile crowd meant invitations to the newest restaurants and nightclubs—including, one surreal night, to the grand opening of the Chuck Norris Supper Club & Casino, where the star of Walker, Texas Ranger and Braddock: Missing in Action III was, apparently, asking why they didn't show—but Ames and Taibbi usually rejected those to throw their own debauched Exile parties or to get back to their regular hangout, the Hungry Duck, a place Ames, not given to squeamishness, describes as a "vile flesh pit." Ask Moscow veterans about the bar and the most common response is a long, regretful groan. "Everything you've heard about it is conservative," Peter Lavelle says, a hint of fear in his voice. "That place changed people."
According to Doug Steele, the bar's Canadian owner, "at the Duck you got laid even if you didn't want to." On Ladies' Night, the doors opened at seven p.m., but the only people let in were women, as long as they were at least 16 years old. They'd drink for free. At nine, the men were allowed in. It wasn't until the metro stations opened the next morning that it ended, and in the meantime, anything went. "Orgiastic" is an insufficient description. The only appropriate word seems to be Caligulan, and not just because the Duck was situated steps from Lubyanka, the former prison and Soviet torture chamber that now housed the F.S.B. The action was mostly elevated, according to Vlad Baseav, an early Exile general manager, with women and men alike dancing on the bar and on the tables, disrobing on the bar and on the tables, having sex on the bar and on the tables, fighting on the bar and on the tables, and then crashing in various states of undress onto the floor scrum. "They would get up and continue dancing, blood everywhere," Baseav says. Steele recalls a night when the deputy head of a Moscow police unit, drunk beyond all reckoning, emptied his pistol into the ceiling and made everybody lie on the floor for three hours. Lavelle claims he saw a man stabbed to death next to him one night. "No one thought it was unusual."
"Mark and Matt would go there and they'd be celebrities," Lavelle says. "Especially Ames. People would say, 'When are they coming, when are they coming?'"
Moving with the Exile guys also meant, if not mainlining cocaine, then at least having access to all the speed and heroin you could imbibe. Ames preferred the former, mixing powdered amphetamine into his drinks, while Taibbi, in a committed relationship for much of his time in Moscow, snorted bumps of white Asian smack.
By most accounts, Ames slept with as many women as any Moscow expatriate of the period. "Russian women liked the kind of sternness and scariness he had that didn't work in California," Dolan says.
One of Ames's first regular columns was "Death Porn," which rehashed stories of grisly murders and suicides from police reports and Russian media, printing them alongside crime-scene and autopsy photographs. He was most renowned and reviled for his regular "Whore-R Stories," for which he hired prostitutes and then wrote about them. Like corruption and casual death, prostitution was a reality of Russian life that every reporter saw, often more than saw, but refused to discuss in straight terms.
"Everyone in Moscow at the time—and I mean everyone—used prostitutes. That's what Moscow was in the 1990s. But no one would talk about it," Dolan says. Ames seems to have had no need to pay women, and the column appears self-serving only until you read it. Some of the pieces' poignancy and attention to detail call to mind Studs Terkel's Working. But Terkel only listened; Ames partook. One memorable Dostoyevskian journey took him into the St. Petersburg night to a ramshackle apartment block whose residents let bedrooms by the hour with a former ballet student. Ames described the blunt safety razor Ira carried in her purse to spruce up for johns.
"I dreaded it, but I knew that it needed to be done," Ames says of "Whore-R Stories." "They were migrant workers with shitty jobs. The only way to tell that story was in first person, otherwise you'd end up moralizing somehow."
"The most refreshing thing about Mark was that he was absolutely truthful, even about the most shameful things in his life," *The Wall Street Journal'*s Alan Cullison says.
The honor of being *The Exile'*s most imperiled writer, however, belonged to neither Ames nor Taibbi, but to Edward Limonov, who embodied The Exile before it existed, from the day Ames first picked up his 1990 novel, Memoir of a Russian Punk, while working in a San Francisco bookshop. By the time Ames moved to Russia, Limonov was his literary idol. At that point Limonov, the son of a Stalinist secret-police man, had already lived several lives, as a thief, an exiled dissident writer, a punk icon, a louche sensation in Paris, a fighter with paramilitaries in Serbia (his memoir about that experience is titled Anatomy of a Hero), and, in his most recent incarnation, an anti-Putin activist and chief of the National Bolshevik Party. Limonov was the first writer Ames recruited, and he agreed to join The Exile on the condition that his spotty grammar and diction not be corrected. His broken English appeared in the paper through its final issue.
Much of the rest of the Exile staff arrived like religious pilgrims. "They represented everything that I wanted to be. They were like me. They escaped from America to escape a graveyard existence," Yasha Levine says.
"My mother said, 'Nobody will take you for a job after that,'" Zalina Abdusalamova says. "It was the best time of my life."
And not just hers. Ames and Taibbi had soon landed an agent at William Morris and a book deal at Grove Press. The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia came out in 2000. Taibbi told The New York Observer he'd written much of it while addicted to heroin. The movie rights were sold to the film-production company Good Machine, now part of Focus Features, before the manuscript was finished.
The Exile offices were furnished with cast-off desks, a few unreliable computers, and boxes of Exile T-shirts, leftover from the last party or awaiting the next one. Ames and Taibbi may have written most of the paper, but it lived or died with Ilya Shangrin, its usually drunk designer, who was at his drunkest around the time they filed, seldom before two a.m. "Ilya would drink a bottle of beer per page that he laid out," Jake Rudnitsky, an Exile editor, says. "There were 24 pages. By the time we got to the end Ilya was wasted. He'd pass out on his computer."
Kostantin Bukaryov, the paper's main backer, was a publisher of Moscow nightlife guides, with sidelines in gentlemen's clubs. He paid Ames and Taibbi $1,200 a month, and what laughable revenue The Exile generated with its circulation, which never topped 30,000, came from advertisements for nightclubs, restaurants, and, most lucratively, call-girl services. After producing its first issues out of a spare room in, of all places, a defense-ministry building, The Exile landed above a strip club on the ring road, Rasputin's, where it was situated above the dancers' changing room. The office next door was outfitted with reinforced steel doors that the Moscow police attempted to batter in every so often.
What The Exile lacked in resources it made up for in ritualistic public humiliation. For one stunt, Ames and Taibbi, armed with forged stationery purporting to be from the St. Petersburg mayor's office, hired the American public-relations giant Burson-Marsteller to help put a nice spin on the city's police-brutality problem. Burson-Marsteller, at the time doing a lot of work in Russia on behalf of American companies, happily took the job, and The Exile published the correspondence and phone transcripts. Taibbi masqueraded as an executive from the New York Jets and tried to recruit Mikhail Gorbachev to move to New Jersey to become a motivational coach for the team. Later, reporting from Manhattan, he exposed Wall Street's complicity in 1998's disastrous ruble devaluation, bought a gorilla suit, walked to Goldman Sachs's headquarters on Water Street, and sat down on the lobby floor for lunch, announcing to the security guards, "If Goldman Sachs can make a $50 million commission selling worthless Russian debt, then I can come into their offices in a gorilla suit and eat a sandwich on their floor." The Exile took overt moral stands, too, vigorously opposing most American military actions, including the bombing of Serbia in 1999, when it published a Moscow city map showing the offices of American defense contractors contributing to the war, with the hope of inciting protests. Ames and Taibbi even staged their own protest near the U.S. Embassy. Taibbi held up a "free mike tyson" sign.
"One thing I couldn't stand was Westerners who thought they had higher moral values than Russians, these people who came preaching Western civilization and then become connived," *The Economist'*s Edward Lucas says. "The Exile exposed them."
The Exile also ignored or glossed over a lot of important stories, most notably the horrific Moscow Theater siege, the Beslan massacre, and the killings of journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya, and went after people—too often harmless people or friends like Owen Matthews—with an ugly sadism. Taibbi's press reviews can read like poison-pen letters. He falsely claimed in print that he'd slept with the wife of Russia scholar Michael McFaul, now a special adviser to President Obama on Russia, with whom he'd been carrying on a war of words. There was the cover depicting Condoleezza Rice in minstrel garb, and, during the U.S. presidential primaries, an Ames editorial on Barack Obama saying that his "perfectly bland, business-friendly swagger makes him exactly the sort of African-American who'd earn Trump's approval," an admissible argument made less so by the image of Obama's head on the body of rapper 50 Cent. Ames insisted his real target in both cases was Russian racism.
Nothing won The Exile so many enemies, however, as the attack on the *Times'*s Michael Wines, a stunt even its allies were repelled by, though the recounting of it was another narrative gem. It launched from the horse's point of view ("His name was Porobnik. He had never read The New York Times"), described Ames's bribing of the breeder and Taibbi's storage of the semen in a special thermos in his refrigerator, where his poor girlfriend had to see it every morning, and then unfurled into a dense indictment of Wines's career, going back to his tutelage under former Times executive editor Max Frankel and his early dispatches from Indonesia and endorsement of the Kosovo war, and extending up through a recent softball profile of Putin. Taibbi called Wines a "grasping careerist who cheers the bombing of thousands of civilians from the comfort of his Ikea-furnished bedroom many time-zones away." This ran with photos of a stunned, pie-covered Wines, wiping himself off with an Exile T-shirt. The results were foul but the argument was formidable.
Ames claims he's not the least contrite about the episode. "We knew we went too far. That was the point, going too far. Everybody errs on some side and almost everybody errs on the side of caution. It was *The Exile'*s mission to err on the side of incaution."
In Brooklyn, Ames is still kneeling over the archives. It's close to five p.m. Anastasia, whom Ames met when she was a 17-year-old Exile administrative assistant, wakes up and emerges from the bedroom and quietly introduces herself. They speak in Russian for a minute. Draped over the Samsonite is the last issue of The Exile, No. 285. The cover depicts Ames, receding into a black background, above the headline good night, and bad luck: in a nation terrorized by its own government, one paper dared to fart in its face.
Puerile to the last.
"It's kind of terrifying being back here. I find the rules here suffocating," Ames says when I ask how it feels returning to the States after a decade and a half in Moscow. "I miss the extreme melodrama" of Russia, he says. "Here there are so many horrifying layers of décor and piety. Everything is at stake in this country—in theory it's Rome, and yet it operates like small-town Nebraska. There's so little real drama here."
Yet Ames still sees corruption around every corner. "Maybe it's from living in Moscow, but he really has a great bullshit detector," Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel says of Ames. "He has a sense of the absurd and right and wrong and tells it like it is." This could also be said of Taibbi, whose Rolling Stone coverage and frequent TV appearances (notably on The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher) earned him a reputation as the premier bullshit detector and absurdist on the campaign trail in the last two U.S. presidential elections. He famously followed John Kerry around during the 2004 campaign in a gorilla suit. In 2009, Taibbi made a bigger name for himself with widely read and talked-about columns going after what he saw as Washington's and Barack Obama's complicity with Wall Street, particularly his old whipping boy, Goldman Sachs. Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner says of Taibbi that he is "absolutely the first person to come along since Hunter [Thompson] who could be called Hunter's peer." Taibbi's Rolling Stone editor, Will Dana, is more specific. Also comparing him to Thompson, Dana says, "What they share in common is that they hate politicians."
"When you meet Taibbi and talk to him, he's this very cheerful, friendly neighborhood kid," Ajay Goyal, who published Taibbi at the Russia Journal, says. "But he's unique in that he doesn't see anything that is good. He just notices the flaws in people."
And it was not just their intolerance for cant that made Ames and Taibbi work so well together; the pair also shared a raging animus. Where it came from is unclear and probably irrelevant. Asked, Ames allows only that it "starts at home." Rumors abounded in Moscow then, and continue to circulate in the New York media world now, about Taibbi's relationship with his Emmy Award–winning father, though no one seems decided whether he's out to anger Mike Taibbi or please him. Whatever the wellspring of the bile, Ames and Taibbi, at their worst and best alike, evoke Akaky Akakievitch, the civil servant in their beloved Gogol short story "The Overcoat," bristling with the privileged awareness of "how much inhumanity there was in man, how much savage brutality there lurked beneath the most refined, cultured manners." It can be too much to bear. One can come away from The Exile depleted from hating. Hating everything. In its eyes, fraudulence is a given. Nothing is pure enough, nothing cool enough. Everyone's a sellout. As *The Wall Street Journal'*s Alan Cullison puts it, "I don't know what their alternative worldview was."
Chronic contempt may have been a sane take on turn-of-the-millennium Moscow, but in life, generally, it's an unsustainable one, and eventually, inevitably, Ames and Taibbi came to hate each other. Oddly, the Wines incident seemed to mark the apex of their volatile collaboration and the beginning of its decline. By that point the partying and penury were catching up with them—Taibbi was for a time a full-on heroin addict—and the paper was faltering. "You can't live like that for that long in a place as intense as Russia and not burn out," Jake Rudnitsky says. The notoriety made it worse. "I'm sure both of them heard stuff like 'You're really good, the other guy sucks.' Stupid coked-up Aerosmith Steven Tyler–Joe Perry rivalry stuff," Kevin McElwee says. According to Exile staffers, Ames and Taibbi would get into screaming matches in the office. "Matt and Mark would argue bitterly. Matt would ask him, 'Why are you so angry?'" one writer recalls. In 2001, Ames escaped to the U.S. for almost a year to do research for a book (Going Postal—Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond) and to come down off a four-year speed binge. Taibbi stayed on, reluctantly.
Shortly after Ames returned to Moscow, in early 2002, Taibbi left for Buffalo, New York, to start a new paper, The Buffalo Beast. Ames says Taibbi made it clear he didn't want Ames's help. According to some, it was Taibbi's plan all along to parlay the Exile buzz into Stateside success. "[The Exile] gave him the Western platform he always wanted," says Andrew Meier. Ames agrees. "I never thought I'd get anything of mine read. Matt never suffered from that worry. It was his birthright to be read," he says. "He wasn't ever comfortable with his own anger. Matt's fate all along was to end up in a privileged space. He knew that and realized that if he could take an unconventional route there it would make him much more interesting once he arrived." Ames claims that while he was gone Taibbi mismanaged The Exile, running it into debt and embroiling it in a libel lawsuit with Russian hockey star Pavel Bure after Taibbi ran a prank story claiming Bure's then girlfriend, tennis player Anna Kournikova, had two vaginas. Ames says Taibbi pushed him to take on Bure, a hero among some of Moscow's less humor-inclined underworld figures, knowing that it might endanger The Exile and Ames's safety, even his life. "He wanted out of The Exile and he wanted out of my shadow. He was pretty clear that he wanted The Exile to go down," Ames says.
Taibbi left the Beast after only 18 issues and wrote a political column for the New York Press (where he became best known for writing the uproar-causing "52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope") and then moved full time to Rolling Stone in 2005. He tried to get back in touch with Ames many times, but Ames refused, because Taibbi "betrayed The Exile. The Exile was incredibly unique and fragile, and it was the only thing fighting the right fight, and when you turn on that, that's it," Ames says. "I don't believe in giving people second chances."
"I think he knows he became a mainstream caricature," Ames says when I ask what he thinks of Taibbi's Rolling Stone work. Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for it in 2008. Ames and Taibbi have not spoken since 2002.
After Taibbi left, Ames became *The Exile'*s sole editor in chief and its lead reporter, writing investigative pieces on covert U.S. involvement in Georgia and on oil disputes in the Caspian Sea and, in a painful Socratic episode, covering the trial and incarceration of Edward Limonov, in what may be the best work of his career. Jake Rudnitsky filed excellent dispatches from Siberia and the Urals. John Dolan moved to Moscow and started a first-rate literary column in which he was an early outer of faux memoirist James Frey. But The Exile was never much of a business, and Moscow was changing. It had become expensive and clean and was taking on an ominous neo-Soviet flush. The expats had gone home, and journalists, including Americans, were being killed. Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov, whom Ames knew, was gunned down in 2004. "Even the snow seemed archaic and doomed," says Dolan, who left in 2006. The Exile nearly collapsed in 2007, before a group of private investors bailed it out.
Certain people close to The Exile, including some of those investors, claim Rossvyazokhrankultura did not cause it to fold. They say that Ames was tired of publishing it and that he used the government as a scapegoat. Alex Shifrin, *The Exile'*s lead investor, whom Ames accuses of abandoning him, would say only, "There are a lot of half-truths as to what happened." Another investor claims the officials were simply looking for a bribe. "There was no government plot. I think everybody had it out for The Exile to some extent," he says. But the investors didn't "want to get involved with a media fight [Ames was] having with the feds."
Ames flatly denies this.
Nina Ognianova, a program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, who worked on *The Exile'*s case, says the fact that the Federal Service officials asked repeatedly about Limonov shows "the audit was politicized." She says, "Now that the mainstream space is cleared, the state has been methodically moving towards auditing and harassing smaller papers and Internet publications." The irony is that The Exile was always far harder on America than Russia and, by the end, was probably more widely read by Russians than Americans. Finally, politics and finances may have conspired. "The Exile could never be profitable in [Russia]," Zalina Abdusalamova says. "If you want to be profitable, you have to be nice. The Exile was not nice. It was honest, but it was not nice."
In June, Ames threw one last Exile party. At a strip club. "It was the most depressing party I've ever been to," Yasha Levine says. "It dawned on a lot of people that they were never going to work on something this cool again. The dream had died and we'd be moving on to lamer and more boring jobs."
They could at least take solace in the fact that The Exile won't soon be forgotten. "It infuriated an awful lot of people in this town," The Christian Science Monitor contributor Fred Weir says, "but they did a lot to keep us honest." Speaking of reporting from Moscow, he then adds, "As a journalist now it's pretty fucking bad and getting worse. Once again a foreign journalist is regarded as a spy."
After a series of attempts at adaptation, the Exile movie, a rocky endeavor from the start, was abandoned. Producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey say that while at a meeting at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles, "we had one writer tell us we were morally repellent for trying to adapt this book, particularly Ames's part of the story." Eventually a number of drafts were written, and some big names, including Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, considered the project, but "by the time we got ready to move forward with it, Matt said he'd chosen not to talk about that part of his life anymore," Carey says. In 2005, Taibbi declined to renew the option.
The treatment that Good Machine wanted to film may have had something to do with this. Depicting Ames and Taibbi as crusading reporters who uncover Russian war atrocities in Chechnya and are killed for their heroism, it bore, aside from the sex and drugs, little relation to reality.
When I first contacted Taibbi for this story, he replied unenthusiastically. "Ugh. No way I can talk you out of this, huh?" he e-mailed. "In the end nobody really wants to read about a couple of overgrown suburban teenagers writing about anal sex and the clap and then calling themselves revolutionaries when some third-world dictator gets bored of letting them stay published."
He then fell out of touch, re-emerged a month later, and agreed to meet me for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. I arrived late, and he was visibly annoyed. There was no boyish smile. "I just don't see why you're doing this story," he said. When I told him that Ames was now living in New York he grew more agitated. I mentioned some of the Exile pieces of his I planned to write about, and he said, "That was covered in the book." I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn't think it was very good.
"The book wasn't good?" he said.
"No, I didn't think so," I said.
"My book?" he said.
"Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did," I said.
At this, Taibbi's mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.
"Fuck you," he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.
The restaurant was packed with customers, and they all turned to watch as I sat there, stunned, coffee dripping from my face. The waiter arrived with the milkshake Taibbi had ordered. After wiping myself off a bit, I went outside, where Taibbi was putting on his coat, and asked him to calm down and come back into the restaurant. He walked up to me, glaring, beside himself with rage.
"Fuck you!" he yelled. "Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!"
I tried to talk to him, but gave up when he walked away. I went back inside, paid the bill, left, and began walking up Sixth Avenue. Halfway up the block, I turned around, and Taibbi was behind me.
"Are you following me?," I asked. He walked toward me, raising his arms as though preparing to throttle me or take a swing.
"I still haven't decided what I'm going to do with you!" he said.
"Are you kidding?," I asked.
And at that moment I thought he might be kidding. There was part of me that thought it must have been a prank. I half expected some old Exile accomplice, maybe even Ames, to jump out from behind a tree with a camera. Maybe they'd been setting me up all along. Maybe there was horse sperm in the coffee. But the anger in Taibbi's eyes was genuine, and, after some more glaring, he fumed off. That was the last I saw of him.
Eventually, Taibbi sent lengthy responses to e-mailed lists of questions. "I once considered Mark my best friend," he wrote. "When I left I never thought I was burning my bridges to The Exile permanently, and being shut out as I have been from all contact with the paper I helped build during these seven years, not even having my letters answered at any time by Mark or anyone else on the paper during that period, this is one of the truly unhappy things that has ever happened in my life. Both The Exile and Mark's friendship were very important to me, as were the memories of both of those things, and I've lost all of that now. That I'm now being accused of not only wanting to harm the paper, but desiring Mark's maiming or even his death, only deepens my sadness about all of this." He went on to say that "most people by the time they get old are full of regrets about the things they never got around to doing when they were young, but thanks to the paper I won't ever have that problem." But, he concluded, "if you romanticize any of that ugliness, I'm pretty sure you're missing the point."


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Welcome to the CRG Discussion Forum!Forum registration problems: Make sure you enter your email correctly and you check your spam box first. *Then* email KurtS2@gmail for help.Classified ads are not allowed on the forum.
Like many have reported on this site, I continue to be disappointed with many reproduction parts. Why can't these suppliers get this stuff right?Anyway, can anyone recommend a good source for reproduction door hinges? Mine are pretty worn.Thanks in advance,John

subset: commoncrawl


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The set begins with the two-hour Greatest Moments program, hosted by Peter Funt. There's a bonus disc containing Candid Camera's debut on NBC in 1949. Then, full programs are selected from Candid Camera's library to represent the Best of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and Today. Other bonus features include Peter's look behind-the-scenes at each decade.
In all, the remarkable set contains over 23 hours of smiles from TV's original reality program!
For more details and to purchase your set, click here to visit our Merchandise Section.


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Over the weekend Red Bull put on its first Curb Kings contest at Belmont Park down in San Diego. We saw Anthony Schultz, Peter Smolik, Truman Hooker, and a bunch of ams showing what they got running against the big boys. We even had a little Sk8Mafia appearance with Jamie Palmore, Wes Kremer, and Jimmy Cao rolling through! It was a gnarly seven-heat contest that lead down to the semi finals and then the finals. With Tyson Bowerbank taking first, Micky Papa with second, and Anthony Schultz with third, it was a tough decision with how hard everyone was skating.
Words & Photos by Mikey Gould


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His first NFL coach laments unrealized potential. His current ones question his drive. On his last football legs at 34, Michael Vick appears content watching from the Jets' sideline and taking what he calls 'a step back away from the game'
Jets coach Rex Ryan has a favorite Michael Vick story, though telling it makes him cringe. His 2006 Baltimore Ravens defense was perhaps his best ever, but the coordinator barely slept during the week leading up to a November game against the Falcons. Vick was 26 and in the midst of becoming the first NFL quarterback to rush for 1,000 yards in a season. He was in the sweet spot of his prime, still a year away from having his career interrupted by felony charges for his connection to the Bad Newz Kennels dogfighting ring.
Searching for a solution late one night, Ryan designed a blitz to beat Atlanta's pass protection, but the execution hinged on one defender being wide enough to turn Vick back inside if he took off running. Ryan harped on the player all week: Not wide enough! Run to the numbers! That's the only way to be sure! Get wider! The Ravens actually did a good job of containing Vick, except for when that specific blitz was called. The crucial defender didn't run to the numbers—didn't think he needed to—and Vick blew past him and around the corner for 17 yards, all the way to Baltimore's 5-yard line.
"Man," the defender told Ryan on the sideline, "that dude is way faster than I thought."
"Really," Ryan replied in his habitual deadpan. "Imagine that."
I had some great years and played in some great games and went through a lot," says Vick, the Jets' backup QB. "Now it's an opportunity for me to refresh myself and take a step back away from the game.
When Vick signed with the Jets this March, adding another chapter to his comeback story following a 23-month prison sentence and five seasons in Philadelphia, Ryan made sure to relay that story. It was the coach's way of expressing to his new quarterback why he wanted him on his team. When asked about it recently, Vick flashed a knowing grin and said, "I think that guy ended up getting cut, too."
But Vick is no longer the transcendent athlete who once drove a generation of defensive coaches to insomnia, nor is he simply a humbled ex-con who sought reclamation in the City of Brotherly Love. With the Jets, he is in his third and perhaps final act, a 34-year-old injury-prone quarterback backing up a 23-year-old who threw nearly twice as many interceptions (21) as touchdowns (12) last season. And even though the 12-year veteran says, "I would be sick if I had to retire tomorrow," he seems resigned to the fate of no longer being a franchise quarterback.
JETS PREVIEW: It's Geno Smith's job to lose
"The last five years I spent in Philly, I had some great years and played in some great games and went through a lot," Vick says. "Now it's an opportunity for me to refresh myself and take a step back away from the game."
He pauses, letting those words sink in.
"I don't want that. It's just—I'm kind of relishing the moment that I'm in right now," he says. "I am not required to have to do a lot. Preserving my body right now is very important to me, and making sure I can make a strong push late in my career in case I am needed."
No one, of course, really expects that he is the Jets' quarterback of the long-term future. But if he can't beat out Geno Smith for a starting job, then what has become of Michael Vick?
* * *
From top to bottom, people within the Jets organization use the same word to describe Vick: quiet. That can be a good trait for a backup quarterback, a role Vick knew he was inheriting when he made the trip north on the Jersey Turnpike to join his new team. Smith, the Jets' second-round pick in 2013 and their answer to Mark Sanchez, is the starter in every way except for an official announcement having been made by Ryan.
Vick has seemed simultaneously amused and annoyed by all the quarterback competition rhetoric since he arrived at team headquarters in Florham Park, N.J. The worst-kept secret in the NFL has been driven by general manager John Idzik's beliefs that competition is good and transparency is bad. But the depth chart was plain to see during a July practice in which Vick got zero 11-on-11 reps with the first team. Afterward, a beat reporter asked Vick if a decision had been made already. "Decision about what?" Vick said, chuckling and patting the reporter on the backside as he left the interview tent.
Some Jets coaches have privately expressed disappointment that Vick didn't show up more hell-bent on winning the starting job.
He might be an injury or an early losing record away from seeing the field, but Vick's primary 2014 mission is clear. "He's here to push Geno, to compete with Geno, to make Geno the best quarterback he can be," offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg has said.
Entering free agency, Vick thought he would be a Week 1 starter this season, somewhere. But he ultimately accepted the Jets' one-year, $4 million offer that came with non-financial terms, too. Reps with the first-team offense during most training camp practices were divided about 4:1 between Smith and Vick, and sometimes none at all for Vick. He's almost like a one-on-one teacher's aide for Smith, who is still learning the offense that Mornhinweg ran in Philadelphia for four seasons with Vick. The Jets also want Smith to use his legs more, and Vick has always been the maestro of that skill.
MORE JETS: Rex Ryan's last stand
No one is intimating that Vick is washed up, which is why some Jets coaches have privately expressed disappointment that Vick didn't show up more hell-bent on winning the starting job, or at least a little more vested in making Ryan lose sleep again as he agonized over a difficult decision. His physical gifts—firing a mid-range out-route with the mere flick of his left wrist, and bursting with what he claims is still 4.4 speed in the 40—have always looked so effortless that onlookers have trouble discerning any sense of urgency in Vick's play. Nor does there seem to be any in what Ryan has called Vick's "cool customer" persona, either.
"I'm at a very good place," Vick says. "Very relaxed. Things are more laid back right now as far as football, and off the field. No stress, no pressure. Even though, when you play football, there is always some sort of pressure. But at this stage of my career, I'm just trying to refresh and regroup and see where it takes me."
* * *
Dan Reeves, the Falcons' head coach when Vick was drafted No. 1 overall in 2001, understands the career arcs of mobile quarterbacks perhaps better than most. He played with Don Meredith, played with and then coached Roger Staubach, and later coached John Elway. None had Vick's speed, but they all learned how to run and pass smarter over time.
It's an education Vick never received.
"He has been in so many different systems now," says Reeves, who had hoped to make changes to Vick's game but was fired during the quarterback's third pro season. By the time Vick was suspended in '07, he had already been playing for his fourth head coach in Atlanta. "He's still relying a great deal more on his legs than he needs to," Reeves says. "He should be at that stage where he feels comfortable and knows when to get rid of the football and not take some of the hits he has to take."
The sad thing to me is I don't think he's ever been able to reach his potential," Reeves says of Vick. "I think he had that ability, to be one of the best who ever played the position.
That's always been the knock on Vick, who has played all 16 games in a season only once, in 2006, and who has had only one season in which he completed more than 60% of his passes, in 2010, under Mornhinweg.
"When I look at Mike's career, the sad thing to me is I don't think he's ever been able to reach his potential," Reeves says. "Whether it was me, or just one coach and one system, he would have had a heck of a career. He's had a good career, but I think it could have been one of the best. I think he had that ability, to be one of the best who ever played the position."
It makes you wonder about the up-and-coming generation of franchise quarterbacks, many of them mobile. If they don't develop true pocket-passing skills, are they destined to become big-name, overpaid backups? Vick missed two seasons during his 548-day imprisonment at a federal penitentiary in Kansas, and he never mastered "old player skills"—the idea, for example, that a young baseball player can break into the majors hitting solely for power but won't stick around as long as his peers who also learn to hit for average.
No doubt about it, Vick was still an electric player when he returned to the NFL for the second act of his career. In 2010, his second year back, he battled Tom Brady for player of the year, throwing a career-high 21 touchdowns (in just 12 games) and earning his fourth and final Pro Bowl nod. Vick by nature is a people-pleaser, a guy who can get easily distracted by friends, hangers-on and the demands of stardom. He was at his best, one Eagles source says, early in his comeback when all of that had been stripped away, when all Vick had was a tenuous second chance and few people penetrating his inner circle.
"He proved that year," then-Eagles coach Andy Reid now says, "that this game is such a microcosm of life."
When the Eagles took a chance on Vick, team owner Jeffrey Lurie tried to set a new standard by which his quarterback would be measured. "Frankly, the legend of Michael Vick will be determined as we go forward," Lurie said at press conference announcing the signing in August 2009. "It won't be determined on the field of football."
Vick began speaking to thousands of at-risk kids on behalf of the Humane Society, sharing his cautionary tale, and he appeared on Capitol Hill in 2010 to support legislation creating tougher penalties for those who brought children to watch dogfighting. Last summer he helped establish Team Vick Field in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Hunting Park, his $200,000 donation going a long way toward providing a youth football team its first home field in nearly two decades. "He's done some things that no quarterback really ever did," says Lurie, whom the Jets spoke with before signing Vick, "and turned out to be a quality person after having gone through everything that he went through. That's a good combination."
The quarterback's foundation, Team Vick, vows to give "second chances" to those who need it most. Strictly in a football sense, Vick is now on his third.
* * *
Before the Eagles' playoff loss to the Saints in January, LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson were among the players who lingered near Vick's locker during what turned out to be his last week of practice in Philadelphia. Vick is now a veteran cornerstone in the Jets' locker room, and he commands respect despite not being in a position to directly help the team win.
Jets rookie Tajh Boyd, a quarterback taken in the sixth round this year, attended Vick's football camp as a kid growing up in coastal Virginia, where Vick is from, and he sought out Vick's advice when deciding whether to return for his senior year at Clemson or to declare for the draft. Young players go out of their way to tell Vick that they were always him when they played Madden growing up, and wore his Nike cleats before the shoe line was dropped. The Jets QBs voted Vick as their representative on the team's 14-man veterans steering committee, which Ryan uses as a sounding board (one decision the committee made was not having joint practices with the Bengals before last week's preseason game).
Young players go out of their way to tell Vick that they were always him when they played Madden growing up, and wore his Nike cleats before the shoe line was dropped.
Despite his gift of speed, however, Vick still hasn't been able to fully outrun his past. This spring, a change.org petition collected thousands of signatures in the hopes of barring Vick from SUNY-Cortland, the college campus in central New York where the Jets hold training camp, because of his past connection to dogfighting. But you wouldn't have known it by watching him interact with fans. "We want Vick!" chanted a small crowd after one practice. He signed autographs for at least 20 minutes, lingering until there were no more to sign.
It's been five years since he left prison, and Vick wouldn't be human if he didn't occasionally consider, Is it over? Will the scrutiny disappear? Will people always be skeptical about the authenticity of my efforts to make amends? Not long ago these questions defined his life.
But now there is just one: Can Michael Vick still play quarterback in the NFL?
It's a strange sight, watching Geno Smith lead the Jets' offense in jersey No. 7, the number Vick wore in both Atlanta and Philadelphia. Stranger still, Vick seems genuinely happy to be backing up an unpolished, unproven quarterback whom ESPN analyst Ron Jaworski ranked No. 30 in the league.
"It's kind of hard sitting on the sideline and watching your team play," Vick says. "But at the same time, when I look around—I look at the stadium, I look at the crowd, I look at myself and see where I'm at—everything becomes irrelevant. I just appreciate the position that I am in."


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I was very excited to learn that a fellow Godwin researcher might have found a relative to submit DNA to test against other conflicting or proposed lines. She is descended from a family that often gets mixed up with my own family, or at least the family I am trying to prove relation to.
Our two Nathan Godwins were born in the mid to late 1700s and resided in Sampson Co., NC prior to the turn of the century. My colleague's Nathan Godwin is reported to be the son of Jonathan and Rachel (Bullard) Godwin, also of Sampson Co., NC. He wrote a will in 1821 and died in Sampson Co., NC in 1823. He was the older Nathan. I believe, however that it is actually MY Nathan Godwin who was the son of Rachel and Jonathan and I have a deed to back it up. My Nathan Godwin removed to Randolph Co., NC about 1800, following the death of Jonathan in 1791 and the sale of his lands by his widow Rachel, and Nathan and Dred Godwin in 1795.
DNA analysis would help us to determine which of the two Nathan Godwins was the real son of Jonathan and Rachel Godwin. First we would need to find a definite descendant of Jonathan and Rachel who has a paper trail, to compare our DNA to. Then we would need two additional samples – one from my colleague's line and one from my own line. My family's DNA has already been submitted and has matched up with 6 other NC Godwin lines. How exactly they are related is yet to be determined. I got my colleague to agree to submit her family's DNA.
However, then I remembered something: Her ancestor was reported to be descended from the older Nathan Godwin who left a will in 1821. In the will, he mentioned her ancestor's name – Handy Godwin – a grandson, son of Nathan's daughter, Tressie Godwin. I found court documents against this Tressie Godwin for 4 children she had out of wedlock. In 3 of the 4 cases, the fathers were named, however, the children were not named. One of those men named did happen to be a Godwin, but we are not sure if he sired my colleague's ancestor or not.
When finding family members to participate in DNA studies you must make sure that they are a true descendant of that surname. In this case, meaning their father must have been a Godwin. It is not enough that my colleague's ancestor, Handy was a Godwin. He had been given his mother's surname. We don't know who his father was. Of course, if my colleague were interested in finding out who Handy's father was, she could go ahead and get the DNA submitted and compare it against possible surnames (perhaps against the two other men mentioned in the court cases).
So now I need to locate another heir of the older Nathan Godwin's line to compare my family's DNA against in order to prove or disprove relation to him and/or to Jonathan and Rachel Bullard Godwin.
Filed under: Godwin, North Carolina | Tagged: Bullard, DNA, Godwin, North Carolina, RandolphCoNC, SampsonCoNC | Leave a comment »


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Hire a Software Developer
Rozpočet $3000-5000 USD
I am looking for a freelancer to help me with my project. The skill required is Software Development. I am happy to pay a fixed priced and my budget is $250 - $750 USD. I have not provided a detailed description and have not uploaded any files.
13 freelanceů na tento projekt zveřejnilo nabídku v průměrné hodnotě $4144
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The Best Films of 2011
Last year was a terrific year for movies. It had some truly memorable films that still coarse through my brain on a regular basis. Black Swan, Toy Story 3 and The Social Network were all worthy of attention. 2011, on the other hand, not so much. Aside from perhaps my number one movie of the year, if the rest of these films had been released last year, they would have been much closer to the ten spot than the one, if they even appeared on the list at all. That's not to say these movies aren't great—they certainly are—they just lack the specialness last year's crop of films possessed. Nevertheless, there were 10 films that stood out above the rest and without further ado, here they are.
Note: Click the title to read my full review.
10. In Time—Certainly the biggest wild card on this list, In Time is, dare I say it, brilliant. Here's a sci-fi movie with a truly unique and interesting idea, that the currency of the world is time, not money, and the rich can live forever while the poor live day by day, watching as the time on their arm slowly ticks down to zero, killing them. Despite its sci-fi coat, this is a movie about modern times. It's about the recession and the anger the American people have felt over the corrupt Wall Street business practices that got us in this mess. It's a political message about spreading the wealth. It's an allegorical exploration into social Darwinism that asks why, when there is more than enough resources on the planet for all to live comfortably, do we let greed take over while others suffer? It's a timely film with purpose, not just mindless action and explosions. It might not look like much on the surface, but if you give it a chance, you'll be surprised at just how intelligent In Time is.
9. We Bought a Zoo—There were a handful of movies this year that had memorable endings. A couple of upcoming movies on this list notwithstanding, We Bought a Zoo had the best. It's an emotional hit that comes out of nowhere and deviates from the simple story of a widower and his family as they buy a zoo and renovate it for opening with an odd flashback, but it nonetheless works. All but the most hardened of souls will be wiping a tear from their eyes when the credits roll around, and for good reason. But We Bought a Zoo is more than an ending. It's about moving on and coping with the loss of a loved one. It's about maintaining memories of that person while creating new ones with those still around. It's about taking what life throws at you and making the most out of it (making lemonade out of lemons, as the old adage goes). When the film begins, the wife of the central character, played sympathetically by Matt Damon, is already dead, meaning almost no time is spent with her, so the fact that so much emotion seeps through anyway is something impressive. Some may find We Bought a Zoo cloying and overemotional, but I found it achingly heartbreaking, but ultimately uplifting and lovely.
8. Senna—Largely forgotten by critics circles and unseen by the public, Senna is hands down and by far the best documentary to be released this year. It's about the life of Ayrton Senna, a Formula One Racecar Driver who is largely considered to be the best to ever sit behind the wheel, and the events that led to his tragic and untimely death. The entire movie, perhaps save for the opening credits sequence, is told completely through archival footage, an effect that is both highly impressive and narratively interesting. It's like watching any type of drama, except that what you're seeing is completely real. You'll become so invested in it that you'll be praying for a hopeful outcome even though you know it's an impossibility. Like an upcoming movie on this list, you don't need to be a fan of the sport to enjoy the movie. You just have to be a fan of a good story. Senna is about corruption, greed, guilt, redemption, sabotage, life, death and more. It packs more in its short runtime than any other movie this year, but it's not due to over-ambition like many of Hollywood's fictional efforts. Those themes and story points are there because, well, that's how the true story unfolded. With all that and more action than any other movie to be released this year, Senna is a documentary for those who refuse to watch documentaries. If you don't see it, you'll be missing out.
7. The Muppets—I love the Muppets. The show may have gone on and off the air before I was even born, but I nonetheless grew up on The Muppet Show. Reruns aired all the time when I was little and I don't think I missed a single one. Their films were all around terrific too, aside from an exception or two (the less said about their desecration of The Wizard of Oz the better), but it was the TV show that captured my imagination. Though certainly accessible to children, their newest theatrical endeavor, simply titled The Muppets, is for people like me who grew up sitting in front of the television watching them. In the film, the old Muppets studio is in danger of being bought and destroyed by an evil oil baron and to save it, the Muppets must raise 10 million dollars. The only way to do that is to throw a fundraiser and put on one final Muppet Show. It's truly a joy watching the Muppets perform the classic show opening onscreen, a sense of warmness and nostalgia washing over you. To top that off, you have some memorable new songs and a recurrence of some wonderful old ones, including the fan favorite, "Rainbow Connection." Not to take anything away from the human stars, including Amy Adams at her most radiant since Enchanted, but the Muppets steal the show in this one. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2—For whatever reason, the Harry Potter series and Twilight series are compared all the time. They're both based on a series of books, they're both hugely popular and they both draw in many of the same audience members, but there's one key difference between them. The Harry Potter series is, you know, good. And there might not be a better entry in the series than its slam bang finish, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Emotional, action packed and exciting are only a few of the adjectives that can be used to describe the finale of a story that has captivated us onscreen since 2001. Even for those who haven't read the books and only partly invested themselves in the story (like myself), this movie will hit you hard. The final confrontation between Harry and his nemesis Voldemort is underwhelming from an action perspective, but it's the underlying emotions involved in the battle that give it its weight. After eight movies, the story of Harry Potter has finally ended and it couldn't have ended in a better way.
5. Kung Fu Panda 2—Every year, Pixar has been able to do something incredible. There's a reason they're the go-to animation studio for moviegoers and critics. With Up, Wall-E, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, the Toy Story franchise and more under their belt, they're a force to be reckoned with. Even their most lackluster films, Cars and A Bug's Life, are only lackluster in comparison and feature plenty of imagination and wit. But this year, they released Cars 2, which is by far their worst (and only bad) film. That's why I thank the movie gods for giving us Kung Fu Panda 2, which easily made up for the rest of the year where the best animated movies were only legitimately labeled "good" and nothing more. Although the first movie was a fine adventure in its own right, Kung Fu Panda 2 expands on the story of Po with a journey of self discovery. The whimsical nature of the original is still intact, but this movie finds profundity and heart to add on top of it. But for those not interested in those aspects in an animated movie about a fighting panda, Kung Fu Panda 2 offers lots of exciting action scenes and a plethora of hilarious jokes that spoof traditional kung fu and action movies. I wouldn't say it ranks among the best animated movies ever like some of Pixar's best, but it's certainly the best animated movie of the year.
4. Drive—One of the things many of the movies on this list have in common is how surprising they were. Who would have thought a science fiction thriller starring Justin Timberlake would be as profound and provocative as it was? Who expected The Muppets to be a nostalgic trip down memory lane with a story revolving around the old Muppet Show? Would anybody have expected Kung Fu Panda 2 to finally bring a stop to Pixar's streak of animated domination? But even after considering what those films had to offer, none were more surprising than Drive, a film that had no buzz leading up to it, a leading character with no name and a story with numerous tonal shifts. It blended so many genres together, it was likely to not find a distinct voice, but it worked just the opposite. It stood out from the crowd thanks to its refusal to stick to one genre or tone. That refusal didn't translate to a lack of focus like it would in other movies, however. On the contrary, Drive may have been the most focused, contemplative movie of the year. On top of that, it's masterfully directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, with a visual style that can't be compared to any other movie, and Ryan Gosling once again knocks it out of the park with his brilliant portrayal of the nameless protagonist. It's not for everybody due to its sudden explosion into violence halfway through, but if you can stomach it, Drive is all kinds of amazing.
3. Midnight in Paris—Woody Allen has been the subject of a lot of criticism in recent years. Most people prefer to think back to his earlier works like Annie Hall when discussing him, as his most recent endeavors have been too mediocre to remember. But that was before Midnight in Paris, which is easily his best film in at least 10 years and, in my opinion at least, may be his single greatest achievement. In the film, Owen Wilson, who is spending some time in Paris with his fiancée Rachel McAdams, is transported back in time where he meets famous people like Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, and Luis Bunuel, the man responsible for the terrific Spanish film, The Exterminating Angel, and his trip is pure delight. For those with knowledge of classic film, art, and literature, Midnight in Paris will be captivating. For those without that knowledge, no worries. The film is just as wonderful thanks to steady direction, a whimsical script and a number of terrific performances. It's the only movie on this list I didn't review and I tried not to include movies on here I didn't review, but Midnight in Paris is too great to ignore.
2. Warrior—It's criminal how overlooked Warrior is. It's not as underrated as In Time—it did, after all, get glowing reviews—but it's not getting the awards nominations it deserves. Multiple critics organizations who have released their end of the year awards, including my own, the Washington Area Film Critics Association, neglected to give this film even one award nomination, despite a trio of brilliant performances, a deep, gripping, emotional story and a unique ending that strayed from your typical sports drama. It may have been recently usurped by my next pick for best picture of the year, but that in no way diminishes its greatness. It's emotional without resorting to overwrought histrionics, it's powerful without cheating and it gets to its bittersweet ending without relying on contrivances. It reinvigorates the sports drama genre after so many "based on a true story" films that all followed the same trajectory to their predictable conclusions. And the beauty of it is that you don't have to be a fan of mixed martial arts to enjoy it. I hate MMA. Despise it actually. I just don't understand the fascination of watching two men beat the living daylights out of each other. To me, it's barbaric, unnecessary and a sad statement on humanity, but Warrior makes MMA something more than encouraged cruelty. This movie is about the characters and their emotional struggles, the MMA merely a tool for dealing with them. And if you can make me like a movie revolving around the sport, then you've really accomplished something.
1. The Artist—By far and away the best film of the year, The Artist is magical. It can be argued that it hasn't been a great year for movies, but any faith that was lost in such a lackluster year will immediately spring back to life after watching this movie. In fact, it's the rest of the year's poor performance that makes The Artist so grand. It reminds you why you love movies, even when they're not so good. It reminds you of their grace, their beauty, their pleasures and their free spiritedness. Aside from one or two moments of crassness that wouldn't be present in silent films past, watching The Artist is like being transported to the 20's, when the world was just learning about the power of film and what it could do. Yes, it's black and white and (mostly) silent, but it's more entertaining than the biggest, loudest, most expensive CGI spectacle to be released this year. It has a wonderful story about love and fame and the score is absolutely brilliant, simultaneously evoking the musical stylings of classic silent films while never falling into repetition like so many of them did. If you don't like The Artist, you're either too young to appreciate it, too stubborn to acknowledge it or too cynical to care because it's truly wonderful and is the single best movie of the year.


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Ellis de Vries was born on October 15, 1944, in the Theresienstadt ghetto. It was a miracle that both mother and daughter survived. Most members of the Jewish de Vries family were deported via the Westerbork transit camp directly to Auschwitz or Sobibor, where they were murdered. Helena de Vries, who was pregnant, was...learn more
In the summer of 2018, Jean-Pierre Lopez was able to wind up his father's watch again, a square timepiece with a silver link band and a white face. "It's extraordinary," he wrote to the ITS, "it seems to still work perfectly after 74 years."learn more
Max Wernicke was committed to the Neuengamme concentration camp as a so-called police inmate. After the bombing attacks on Hamburg in the summer of 1943 and new waves of arrests, there was no longer enough space in the city prisons.learn more
August 2 is the International Day of Remembrance of the National Socialist Genocide of the Sinti and Roma, to which some 500,000 persons persecuted as "Zigeuner" ("gypsies") fell victim. On this day in 1944, 2,900 Sinti and Roma were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on orders from the Chief Office...learn more
Six columns and five lines—that was all the Nazis needed to divide the people in the concentration camps into categories. One of the few surviving panels illustrating the cloth ID badges made its way to Arolsen after the war from the liberated Dachau concentration camp and is kept in the ITS archive.learn more
A delicate pair of earrings with red stones symbolize the great injustice Helena Poterska suffered. That's why it was so hard for her daughter Christina Siegl to open the envelope containing them, sent to her by the International Tracing Service (ITS) in June 2018. "It moved me so deeply. It just never seemed to be the...learn more
"A lot of emotions come up when I hold these documents in my hands," Lucien Bohler's daughter wrote in a letter of thanks to us after she received his belongings in July 2018.learn more
"I can't tell you how much it means to me to have this pen." Yaron Roksa is emotional as Floriane Azoulay, Director of the International Tracing Service (ITS), hands him the ink pen belonging to his father, István Rokza. The pen had been taken from István Rokza when he arrived at the Neuengamme concentration camp in...learn more
For three days at the end of June, twenty members of local history, education and commemoration initiatives took part in a special research seminar at the International Tracing Service (ITS).learn more
On October 28 and 29, 1938, the National Socialists arrested more than 1,500 Jewish residents of Berlin within the framework of the "Poland Operation" and deported them to the German-Polish border. An exhibition at the New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum tells the story of this first mass deportation as illustrated...learn more


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I can assure you all that the only way I can afford our boats is by keeping to the one stick at a time method of finance. The culvert runs under Egan Drive, a four lane divided highway that was built in the 70's. Part of the project was maintaining water access for us because grandpa had established and improved tideland rights.
This was grandpa's last boat.
I helped run the boat through the tube twice a year for twenty years.
The new boat measures six feet to the top of the transom, as it sit on the hard right now and the aft cabin is a about four feet taller than that. About the only concession I'm willing to make to get it the fit would be to make the mast collapsible. If it fits that would be ideal, but I'm not going to change the basic fabric of the boat to accommodate that. It's a great old boat and I'd like to see it put to rights and going strong into the future.


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This thread is a resource to use to date your guitar.
You can post your serial number and we will get back to your shortly with the "date of birth" (DOB) for your instrument.
If you have any other questions regarding your instrument, please email Music Man Customer Service at:
This thread is also a good place to have your serial number on record in the case that it is needed in the future for insurance purposes, etc.
Please note: We do not have any serial numbers for the Pre-Ernie Ball Music Man instruments in our data base. You can check this site for more info on the early Music Man instruments (This site is not run by the Ernie Ball company):


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DANA POINT – When Todd Mansur saw a massive black and white flipper rise out of the sea about two miles off the Headlands on Tuesday morning, he knew it was a humpback whale breaching.
He immediately steered the whale-watching boat toward it and couldn't believe what he saw next. Two humpbacks were rolling, throwing their flippers and rubbing up against each other. One was about 55 feet long; the other was a little larger. Mansur, who's been a captain with Dana Wharf Sport Fishing and Whale Watching for more than 30 years, said likely the pair were courting.
The sighting of humpback whales is rare in Southern California and is one of less than a dozen Mansur remembers seeing off the coast of Orange County. Humpbacks, which travel from Hawaii to Alaska and from Mexico to Alaska and back, don't generally navigate along Southern California. They are more commonly seen off the waters of Santa Barbara and Monterey, Mansur said.
"This is extremely unusual," Mansur said. "But seeing them in the dead of winter is extremely rare."
Mansur said the whales looked healthy. They likely broke off from the normal migratory route possibly in the pursuit of a large bio mass of krill that has recently drawn blue whales, fin whales and even squid to the Orange County coastline.
Mansur, his crew and more than 70 whale-watching enthusiasts on two boats took advantage of the display. The whales were traveling slow enough that that Mansur unloaded one boatload of whale-watchers at the docks and returned with another set of sightseers.
"I always tell people who come out to whale-watch that it's like a box of chocolates," Mansur said. "You never know what you get. Some people were so excited they came up and hugged me."
Right outside the harbor, Mansur made another discovery when a playful fin whale frolicked in front of the boat. But that wouldn't be the last event. The trifecta was complete when Mansur spotted another rarity. A mother gray whale was shepherding her month-old calf through seaweed. The calf was likely born prematurely in open waters off either Oregon or Northern California, Mansur said.
"The mother was prompting the calf to keep swimming south," Mansur said. The 45-foot mom was likely headed to the birthing lagoons in Mexico just about 200 miles south of San Diego.
"The mother is lucky the calf is alive," Mansur said. "When they're born in open waters, they have to manage the conditions and watch out for rough seas and predators."
The whale mother likely may have had to transport the new baby on her back for part of the way south so the calf could rest, he said. The calf will stay with its mother for a year. Then it will begin traveling with other juveniles along the shallower waters near shore during its migration to and from Alaska.
And just before the boat trip was over, Mansur spotted the elusive Humboldt squid on his sonar about 200 feet below the surface just offshore the Ritz Carlton. The squid had been fished out by the hundreds for days earlier this month. And just as suddenly as they appeared they disappeared two weeks ago.
Contact the writer: 949-492-5152 or email@example.com or twitter.com/lagunaini


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Philadelphia Information Locator Service
Agency Information
Philadelphia House of Detention Study Advisory Committee[Record group 60-114-1]
Agency Function
- This committee has ceased to function.
- Agency History
- Mayor Richardson Dilworth assembled a Study Advisory Committee in March 1957, consisting of prominent persons deeply interested in the field of criminal justice and corrections, in order to study the possibilities of establishing a House of Detention for Untried Adults. The final report of the Committee was submitted on 22 July 1958.
- Archival Records
- 60-114-1.1 Reports (1958)
Links to related information...
PhILS Home
-->City Agencies
---->Current Agency Information Sheet. (Graphical version of this page)
Send your comments to firstname.lastname@example.com
Last updated on July 9, 1999


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New Car Review
2014 Jaguar XK: New Car Review
It would be nice if everything aged like fine wine, but the 2014 Jaguar XK is aging like, well, an automobile. That's not surprising. After all, the XK is in its eighth year of production, and it's hard for a car to stay relevant after all that time. Truth be told, Jag's 2-door model was technology-deprived even when it debuted back in 2007, and that gap has only widened in this fast-moving luxury segment. The XK's interior also lacks the unbridled opulence that comes to mind when we think of British luxury.
But if you're someone who's all about style and performance, the XK may still appeal. We felt the XK had too much Ford Taurus in its snout at the outset, but Jag has made subtle revisions over the years, and the 2014 XK is easily the sexiest model yet. It looks like an Aston Martin red-tag special, and we mean that as a compliment. As for performance, the XK is a much faster car now than it used to be, from the 385-horsepower base model to the nuclear 550-hp XKR-S and race-ready XKR-S GT. It's not bad through the corners, either.
Overall, we'd say the XK is still worth a gander. Just don't expect it to have cheated Father Time as successfully as some of Jaguar's Hollywood clientele.
What's New for 2014?
The XK stands pat except for the addition of the limited-production XKR-S GT, which is basically a street-legal race car. Just 25 examples will be sold in the U.S.
What We Like
Distinctive and timeless styling; glorious V8 engines; surprisingly nimble handling
What We Don't
Dated cabin technology; transmission needs an upgrade
How Much?
Fuel Economy
The rear-wheel-drive Jaguar XK starts with a naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V8 rated at 385 hp and 380 lb-ft of torque. The coupe returns 16 miles per gallon city/24 mpg hwy, while the convertible gets 16 mpg city/22 mpg hwy.
The XKR steps up to a supercharged 5.0-liter V8 rated at 510 hp and 461 lb-ft of torque, while the XKR-S and XKR-S GT go bonkers with a 550-hp, 502-lb-ft version of this engine. All supercharged models are rated at 15 mpg city/22 mpg hwy.
Standard Features & Options
The 2014 Jaguar XK is offered in five trim levels -- XK Touring, XK, XKR, XKR-S and XKR-S GT. All except the coupe-only XKR-S GT are offered either as a coupe or a fabric-roofed convertible.
Standard features on the base XK Touring ($79,000) include 19-inch alloy wheels, a mechanical limited-slip differential, electronically adjustable adaptive dampers, xenon headlights with LED accents, push-button start, rosewood interior trim, a power tilt-telescopic steering wheel, heated 10-way power front seats, leather upholstery, driver memory functions, Bluetooth, a hard-drive-based navigation system with a 7-in touchscreen interface and 525-watt Jaguar premium audio system with iPod/USB connectivity and satellite radio. Note that XK Touring models are mono-spec, which means that no options are available other than interior and exterior color choices.
The standard XK ($84,500) comes with 20-in wheels, softer leather upholstery, heated/cooled 16-way front seats, a heated steering wheel and a 525-watt Bowers and Wilkins stereo with 14 speakers.
The XKR ($97,500) adds a supercharged engine, 20-in alloy wheels, adaptive xenon headlights, an electronic limited-slip differential, performance brakes with larger discs and aluminum calipers and HD radio.
The XKR-S coupe ($132,000) comes with 20-in wheels, quad exhaust tips, a lowered sport-tuned suspension (optional on XKR), a rear spoiler, unique exterior and interior trim and special sport seats that gain bolstering but lack the cooling function (also optional on XKR).
The exclusive XKR-S GT ($174,000) is a race-prepared version of the XKR-S with carbon-ceramic brakes, an exclusive track suspension, adaptive dampers with adjustable ride height, unique carbon-fiber accents and suede upholstery.
All convertible models cost $6,000 more than their coupe counterparts and feature a fabric roof that can be ordered in seven colors to either match or contrast with the body to your liking. When not needed, the top disappears into the body in 18 seconds, and can be operated at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour.
Trunk capacity is 11.7 cu ft in the XK coupe and 11.1 cu ft in the convertible, though the latter figure drops to about 7 cu ft with the soft-top folded down.
The Jaguar XK comes with standard stability control, 4-wheel anti-lock disc brakes and four airbags (front and front side). The convertible also features two roll hoops that pop up automatically if a rollover is imminent.
Like every car in this low-volume segment, the XK has not been crash tested in the U.S.
Behind the Wheel
The XK is the oldest car in Jaguar's stable, and it shows when you're sitting inside. Some of its buttons and switchgears have a downmarket vibe. What's more, the quality of the interior materials is merely adequate compared to some of its competition, detracting from that special feel it had from behind the wheel when it was a new design. At least it has Jaguar's distinctive rotary-shift knob, which dramatically rises out of the center console upon ignition. Cool.
All versions of the XK model's V8 are simply brilliant, with seemingly endless thrust and a NASCAR-grade wail when floored. The R and R-S versions add an endearingly audible supercharger whine as they pin your ears to your head. The standard XK is said to hit 60 mph in just 5.2 seconds from a standstill, with the XKR hitting mile-a-minute speeds in 4.6 seconds and the XKR-S in an even quicker 4.2 seconds. Only you can decide if the XKR-S model's modest acceleration edge and slightly louder noises are worth additional tens of thousands -- if you can even find one -- but we wouldn't dissuade you from spending the dough if you have it.
Whichever version you select, a 6-speed automatic transmission will handle the shifting duties, and it's unfortunately a poor match for the sensational V8 engines. Kick-downs are sometimes delayed and then abrupt when passing, while downshifts in manual mode can feel rough. To be fair, it's seamless in relaxed driving. But kick things up a notch and it sometimes feels a step behind.
Other Cars to Consider
BMW 650i -- Boasting a beastly twin-turbo V8, the 650i is a very fast car (not to mention the even beastlier M6), and its interior is vastly superior to the Jaguar's. But if attractive styling is a priority, we think the Jag wins without a fight.
Mercedes-Benz SL-Class -- The latest SL's styling hasn't grown on us yet, but its retractable hardtop, delectable engine choices and Mercedes-Benz prestige make for one tough rival.
Porsche 911 -- The iconic 911 is more of a luxurious grand-tourer than a pure sports car these days, which means it's more of a threat to the XK. But if you're looking for a comfortable cruise, the XK still takes the cake.
AutoTrader's Advice
The XKR seems to occupy the sweet spot in the XK lineup. In addition to the customization that the Touring doesn't offer, the XKR offers supercharged power that's too alluring to resist. And we just couldn't see spending another $30,000 or so to get an XKR-S.


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Reviewed by Michelle W. (age 6) and Chloe L. (age 6)
We like this book because we like what it is about. It made us feel happy and sad at the same time. The pictures are very colorful. The characters have very big hands. The illustrations have lots of details. Our favorite character is Grandpa. Grandfathers are special people. Chloe doesn?t have any grandfathers that are alive. Michelle has one. The special part of the book is that Sophie and Grandpa love each other and they always will.
We recommend this book to people who have babies and children 1 - 11. We recommend this book to people who loved someone in their lives and that person died.


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Wanna build your schema online and share?
Wanna test your SQL query online and share?
This might come in handy for you, if you are struggling with a SQL query:
If you don't fully understand JOINs:
Wanna hot-backup your InnoDB database?
Percona XtraBackup (open source)
Need to recover a corrupt InnoDB table?
Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB (open source)
Need to generate massive test data?
Want to Validate your SQL?
Mimer SQL Validator
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- if you want decent full-text search, choose PostgreSQL over MySQL, as MySQL doesn't support free-text search at the same time as foreign keys and transactions.
- Set your database to use the UTC timezone


text: Hi, let's assume a multiserver setup with 3 webhosting server, 2 databases and 2 mail servers and 1 ispconfig panel. I would like to create a standard hosting account (composed by 1 email, 1 webspace, 1 database) through API. I'll execute the API command with ispconfig panel's soap endpoint. In this case, how services will be distributed across cluster? On which database will the DB be created?


text:
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