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About the Club
Activities, E-cards, and More!
- Personalized e-card with a message from the Birthday Bird of Katroo just for you.
- Exclusive activities on your birthday from your Dr. Seuss birthday book of the month.
- Exciting content on DrSeussBirthdayClub.com!
What's Your Birthday Book of the Month? Click to Explore!
And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street
Dr. Seuss's very first book for children proves that a little imagination can go a long way! From a plain horse and wagon, young Marco imagines the colorful cast of characters who make Mulberry Street the most interesting location in town. January is the first month of the year—the perfect time to let your imagination run wild as you celebrate your birthday!Get activities Purchase
Yertle the Turtle
Dr. Seuss presents three modern fables in the beloved favorite Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. Featuring a greedy turtle, a vain bird, a boastful bear and a bragging rabbit, these stories will give young readers lots to talk about. February may be the shortest month of the year, but with this book, featuring three stories instead of just one, February birthdays feel a whole lot more fun!Get activities Purchase
The Cat in the Hat
It's a rainy day, and Dick and Sally can't find anything to do . . . until the Cat in the Hat shows up and turns their dreary afternoon into a madcap adventure! In March, the temperature can be up and down. . . . What better way to celebrate birthdays this month than with some unpredictable mischief and fun, care of Thing 2 and Thing 1!Get activities Purchase
The Lorax
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
In this whimsical yet powerful cautionary tale, Dr. Seuss's Lorax speaks for the trees and warns of the dangers of harming the environment. With Earth Day on April 22, The Lorax is the perfect way to celebrate this month's birthdays and all who share this planet!
Oh, the Places You'll Go!
From soaring to high heights and seeing great sights to being left in a Lurch on a prickle-ly perch, this book explains life's ups and downs in humorous verse while empowering readers to find the success that lies within. In May, with school ending and summer on its way, this story about endless possibilities celebrates all that is to come.Get activities Purchase
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
"Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one."
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish shows readers just how much fun imagination can be. Featuring creatures from the can-opening Zans to the boxing Gox to the winking Yink who drinks pink ink; this book will have readers giggling from morning to night. World Oceans Day is June 8 and there's no better way to celebrate June birthdays than with this funny fish tale.
Green Eggs and Ham
"Do you like green eggs and ham?"
In a house or with a mouse? In a boat or with a goat? On a train or in a tree? Follow Sam-I-am as he insists that this unusual treat is indeed a delectable snack to be savored everywhere and in every way! Summer is about exploration and trying new things. . . . What better book than Green Eggs and Ham to celebrate July and all the things you might try!
Fox in Socks
Fox in Socks is a dangerous book. It comes with the following warning: "This is a book you READ ALOUD to find out just how smart your tongue is. The first time you read it, don't go fast! This Fox is a tricky fox. He'll try to get your tongue in trouble." Summer is winding down, but there is still fun to be had. Celebrate August birthdays with a little tongue-twisting fun! You can blab blibber blubber if your tongue is made of rubber and have silly fun all month long!Get activities Purchase
Dr. Seuss's ABC
This amazing alphabet book features a fantastical cast of characters—among them a lazy lion licking a lollipop, an ostrich oiling an orange owl, and ten tired turtles on a tuttle-tuttle tree—paired with zany drawings that provide visual clues to help beginning readers understand new words. As you head back to school, September is the perfect time to celebrate while having fun brushing up on your ABCs.Get activities Purchase
The Sneetches and Other Stories
The Sneetches and Other Stories contains four wildly whimsical stories that touch on important moral issues. While they can be read for sheer pleasure, they are also perfect for sparking conversations about tolerance, the need for compromise, and fear of the unknown. Celebrate your special day in October by doing something you've never done before!Get activities Purchase
Horton Hears a Who!
Horton the elephant teaches the importance of kindness and perseverance in this beloved classic in which we discover "a person's a person, no matter how small." Whether at the kids' table or the big (kids') table, give thanks for this birthday and all birthdays to come!Get activities Purchase
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
"And what happened then?
Well, in Who-ville they say
That the Grinch's small heart
Grew three sizes that day!"
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a heartwarming story about the effects of the Christmas spirit on even the smallest and coldest of hearts—like the Grinch's! Now that the Grinch's heart has grown three sizes, he's ready to get into the birthday spirit and celebrate with you on your special day this December!


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VIDEO: Wilin Rosario works dilligently on blocking drills
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. — A ball ricocheted off his arm. Several hit his chest. It's all part of blocking drills for a catcher in spring training. But they have taken on added importance for Wilin Rosario, who's determined to improve his defense after a terrific rookie season offensively.
"I caught six games in winter ball to get ready. But I didn't want to do too much. All of my focus is improving here for my team," said Rosario, who hit 28 home runs last year and has impressed new manager Walt Weiss and hitting coach Dante Bichette with his power.
Rosario worked with catching coaches Jerry Weinstein and Mark Strittmatter in Tuesday's drills. Rosario has changed his stance to get lower, making it easier to stop pitches in the dirt. Veteran Yorvit Torrealba, seen in the video wearing No. 8, provided instruction for Rosario in Spanish. Torrealba said it's important that Rosario learn to relax, which benefits him in multiple ways. It helps prevent the stabbing of the glove and can help absorb the pitches off his chest protector.
"He's working hard," Torrealba said.

subset: commoncrawl


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Moderator: administrator
Jamezb09 wrote:Thanks for the replies I didn't realize the way lines are kept varied else I would have been a little bit more specific on the original post, our lines are wrapped tightly in a gause dressing and taped up, we have both asked the nurses if there is anything they can give us (I still have my line for the time being) but we never seem to get any decent answer, they just say 'some patients wrap it up with a bag' or something along those lines, teggaderm sounds like a good idea but I think it would stick to the gause and be difficult to take off so I'm not sure if that would be a viable option
Dotty wrote:Hi again,
My tesio lines also have gauze wrapped around them, I just replace it after my shower. I find the tagederm keeps the wound dry.
Your unit should be able to prove gauze and tape if not try speaking to your gp.
jbell wrote:I have asked a few times in my unit and they wont give me tagaderm, in fact they say there is nothing but to be careful. I use a seat in shower now when washing hair with a plastic glove wrapped around line ! I just have to lean forward so the water doesnt touch ,ine and if I am washing I just keep the shower head low enough it again doesnt touch my line, its a real pain doing it this way but it does work. Is there anywhere else I could get tagaderm from ? ....Jan
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Incomplete Bowel Movements
Hemorrhoids Symptoms
Do you know what some of the symptoms for hemorrhoids are? Just how common are they? You might be surprised to learn that some very prominent figures throughout history have suffered from hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids are what unhorsed Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, sent President Jimmy Carter to the operating room, and benched Kansas City Royals slugger George Brett during the 1980 World Series. Hemorrhoids are really common and hemorrhoids symptoms are often unrecognized by people.
A recent study from Consumer Reports shows that out of every 200 healthy people reporting for physical exams, 82% had hemorrhoids in a mild or extreme form. This tells me that if you have not experienced hemorrhoids symptoms at some point in your life already, you probably will.
I've compiled a short list of typical hemorrhoids symptoms that many sufferers experience:
* Mild burning
* Rectal bleeding
* Anal swelling and itching
* Bloody stool or anal bleeding that may streak the bowel movement or toilet paper
* Tenderness or pain during or after bowel movements
* Painful lumps varying in size from a pea to a walnut around the anus from a blood clot (in severe cases of external hemorrhoids)
* Incomplete bowel movements
* Excessive straining or constipation
Hemorrhoids are the main cause of rectal bleeding and are not always dangerous, but can be. Hemorrhoids can be an indication of colorectal cancer. If no hemorrhoid treatments are used, hemorrhoids usually only get worse and serious complications can result. Occasionally, hemorrhoids symptoms will disappear for a few days. They almost always return, usually worse than the first time. It's best to prevent them from forming, or treat them in the early stages. Hemroid Harry's Herbal Remedy will treat and heal the most serious cases of hemorrhoids, strengthening vascular walls and preventing future recurrences.
Hemroid Harry's Herbal Remedy is a natural hemorrhoid remedy made up of only herbs. These herbs have traditionally been used to assist the body in the complete healing of the causes of hemorrhoids (which is inflammation and strangulation of veins in and around your anus). Getting rid of the cause of hemorrhoids will naturally get rid of the irritation and symptoms of your hemorrhoids. Get relief from your hemorrhoids today with Hemroid Harry's Herbal Remedy.
Click here to find out more about Hemroid Harry's Herbal Remedy.
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Today's post is a Memorandum from the Association for Feminist Anthropology's Executive Board of Elected and Appointed Members.
The Association for Feminist Anthropology Executive Board consisting of elected and appointed members (the AFA Board) voices its concern for what appears to be a censure of breastfeeding and a lack of recognition of parental needs on academic campuses and in the wider society. Such problems have a long history, but recently were highlighted in the situation of an assistant professor of anthropology at American University who breastfed her baby during a class meeting.
As feminist anthropologists, we contend that: 1) breastfeeding should not be stigmatized or hidden from view, and indeed should be considered a basic human right; 2) breastfeeding is not inherently unprofessional or distracting, and increased recognition of how the demands of infant care, and of breastfeeding in particular, shape the challenges parents face in the workplace is crucial for improving conditions for all families; 3) childcare needs on campuses tend to marginalize and create obstacles to parents of all genders seeking educational and career mobility as students, faculty, and staff; 4) campus needs for childcare, including services to care for sick children, deserve more consideration by institutions, unions, and policymakers.
We urge others to join us in using this incident as a 'teachable moment' that fosters critical analysis and education by feminist anthropologists and others, and promotes political mobilization.
– The AFA Board (Jane Henrici, Ellen Lewin, Lynn Kwiatkowski, Sandra Faiman-Silva, Nia Parson, Margot Weiss, Holly Dygert, Susan B. Hyatt, Sophie Bjork-James, Susan Harper-Bisso, Jennifer Patico, Jamie Sherman. Amy Harper, Jessica Smith Rolston, Damla Isik, and Rebecca Boucher)


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Hack 49. Install Windows on a CompactFlash Card
Microsoft's XP Embedded OS can help you do what XP normally can'tboot off a CompactFlash card.
The car PC community is constantly searching for hardware and software solutions to improve the system's boot speed and reliability and reduce the physical size of the computer. One of these solutions is to build a system that boots off a CompactFlash (CF) drive. Flash storage is used in many commercial devices because it's small, has no moving parts, uses less power than a hard drive, and holds up much better than a hard drive when exposed to vibration and extreme temperatures.
Using only a CF-to-IDE adapter (Google "CF to IDE") and any off-the-shelf CF card (Figure 4-16), flash-based systems can be built relatively easily and affordably. One of the disadvantages of using flash, however, is that due to its construction it can withstand only a limited number of writes. This is fine for digital cameras, but since operating systems like to constantly thrash around on the hard drive with temporary files and virtual memory, flash requires special support by the operating system to filter out or completely disable these writes. Many users have turned to custom versions of Linux, while Windows users have had no viable option other than Windows CE or XP Embedded.
Figure 4-16. A CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter
For those willing to try, Microsoft provides a free trial of XP Embedded (XPe) from its web site that allows developers to build a fully functional boot image that will work for 90120 days. It takes a few tries to get it working right, but it's a very powerful tool. After spending a good amount of time playing with it and reading as much as I could about it on Microsoft's MSDN site, I decided to investigate how XPe was able to work on flash disks. Since XPe is just a componentized version of XP, I figured there was no reason why a regular XP install couldn't be made to use some of the XPe components in order to boot from a CF disk.
Microsoft provides a component called the Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) for developers planning to deploy their systems to a CF disk. EWF is simply a storage filter driver that can be configured to protect one or more volumes from any unwanted writes. All changes to a protected volume are filtered by EWF, which then stores them in RAM rather than writing them to the disk. Upon system shutdown or reboot, changes can be either committed to the volume or discarded. Since the volume is not written to during normal operation, the system is also more resistant to data corruption in case of a sudden power loss.
MinLogon is a component Microsoft added to XPe for devices that need quick boot times and as little overhead as possible. Normally, when an XP system is booted, an executable called WinLogon is started that performs the user login, sets the security policy settings, and runs the logon scripts. This can be a lengthy process and seriously hurt boot times. Car PC developers don't typically need this level of functionality in our systemswe just want the system to boot up as quickly as possible and start playing music like a normal radio would. MinLogon was created for just these types of devices, and coupled with EWF, you can use it to turn a regular XP install into an OS capable of quickly booting off a CF disk.
The first step in preparing a CF install is downloading the XPe trial from http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/windowsxpembedded/default.aspx. The install will create a network share on your system called Repositories. This is where all the XPe components are stored, and all the files I use in this hack come from this directory. The best way to experiment with this hack without corrupting your desktop system is to use machine virtualization software, such as VirtualPC (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx) or VM-Ware (http://www.vmware.com). Set up your XP install and make sure you've got a way to transfer files between the virtual machine (VM) and the desktop. After I set up my system in VirtualPC, I created a second VM using a differencing drive of the first VM. This was so that if I screwed up I wouldn't have to go through the lengthy reinstall process all over again. (See the VirtualPC documentation for directions on how to set up a differencing drive.)
If you have any disk-cloning software, such as Symantec's Ghost (http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/), you can use that too. Clone the drive you want to experiment with onto some old 1-GB drive you have lying around, and try changing that version so that you can re-clone it if you mess it up.
4.10.1. Setting Up MinLogon
First we'll set up MinLogon. This is an optional componentit is not necessary for running XP from a CF card, but it does improve boot time. Search the Repositories directory on your main hard disk for the latest version of minlogon.exe and transfer it to the test virtual machine or hard drive:
As long as you entered everything properly, the VM will boot into XP using the System account. The first time you boot up it will prepare the user settings for the System account, so it'll take a bit longer than usual. Once that is done, go ahead and reboot again to make sure everything is working properly. MinLogon may cause problems for some applications, so if you find that it doesn't fit your needs, just restore the original winlogon.exe.
4.10.2. Setting Up Enhanced Write Filter (EWF)
Now that MinLogon is working properly, you can go ahead and set up EWF. Before you do so, make sure you disable the paging file by right-clicking on My Computer, clicking the Advanced tab, clicking the Performance button, clicking the Change button in the Virtual Memory section, and selecting "No paging file." You'll also want to disable system restores, by right-clicking on My Computer, selecting the System Restore tab, and checking "Turn off System Restore." (These features interfere with EWF.) One bug I've found is that when booting with EWF, XP always brings up the recovery options at bootup. You can disable this by deleting the file named bootstat.dat in the Windows directory. You'll need to search the Repositories directory again for three files: ewf.sys, ewfntldr, and ewfmgr.exe. Since the directories may change with each release, make sure you search for the latest versions and place them on the VM system.
Pay special attention to the last entry, ArcName. That points to the volume you want protected. This script will default to the first partition of the master drive on the primary IDE controller, so as long as you have your CF card set as the master drive on the primary IDE controller you'll be fine.
The first few entries are optimizations for EWF-enabled systems. To minimize disk writes, we've disabled automatic defragmentation and prefetch. I also included a tweak to disable the NTFS last-access file timestamp. If you use NTFS on your system, you don't want the OS constantly updating timestamps for files you access and creating unnecessary disk writes.
Once the system boots, pull up a command line and run ewfmgr n:, where n: is the letter of the protected drive (typically "c"). The output should be similar to this:
Protected Volume Configuration Type RAM (REG) State ENABLED Boot Command NO_CMD Param1 0 Param2 0 Volume ID 87 0B 88 0B 00 7E 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Device Name "\Device\HarddiskVolume1" [C:] Max Levels 1 Clump Size 512 Current Level 1 Memory used for data 1294336 bytes Memory used for mapping 4096 bytes
If instead you get an error stating that no EWF volume could be found, pull up the Registry Editor and recheck your settings, make sure that ewf.sys is in the System32\drivers directory, unplug any other hard drives, and restart.
ewfmgr gives you some important information about your protected volume and tells you how much RAM your overlay is taking up. That's an important factor to keep in mind: the more changes you make to your protected volume, the more RAM it'll take up, until you finally run out of memory. So be careful what you do to your system with EWF running.
Here are two important commands to remember:
C:\ ewfmgr c: -commitanddisable live
This will immediately disable EWF and commit all changes to the volume.And this command will enable EWF on the next bootup:
C:\ ewfmgr c: -enable
The typical process for making persistent changes to your volume is to run the commitanddisable command, make your changes, run the enable command, and restart.
Another useful feature for car PC systems is what Microsoft calls "Hibernate Once, Resume Many" (HORM). If you have hibernation support enabled in your system, this basically allows you to hibernate your system once, and then always resume from that same hibernation state every time you boot up. This minimizes writes to the CF card and improves boot and shutdown times. All it takes is a simple file called resmany.dat on the root of your drive. Just create an empty text file and name it resmany.dat. When this file is present on the root drive, the EWF NTLDR knows not to reset the hibernation file as it normally would; thus, you never have to re-hibernate, unless you specifically request it. If you decide you don't want to resume from hibernation, just hit F8 while the system is booting to delete the restoration data and boot up normally.
The hibernation process bypasses EWF, so there's no need to disable EWF before you hibernate. However, make sure to disable EWF when you create the resmany.dat file, or it won't be written to the flash drive. (You'll then need to re-enable EWF and reboot before hibernating.) Most likely, you'll have an external drive containing your MP3s. Microsoft recommends setting the hibernation point without any other hard drives plugged into the system, because if the write cache still has data in it when you hibernate, every time you resume that data will be in the write cache and could potentially corrupt the partition. XP will automatically detect any new drives that are attached to the system, so once you set the hibernation point you can leave your drives plugged in.
4.10.3. Setting Up Your XP Installation
Now that you have successfully created an EWF system in a VM, you can start planning your final system. My recommendation is to first make a customized XP install, using a program such as nLite (http://nuhi.msfn.org/nlite.html) to remove any excess features you don't need. You want to get your XP installation as small as possible so that it can fit onto a CF card. You'll probably have to choose between a 512-MB or 1-GB card. Do some research, and try to find the fastest CF card you can afford. Keep in mind that if you plan on using hibernation, your space requirements will increase by the amount of RAM you install in the system. In other words, if your XP installation takes up 320 MB and you have a 256-MB stick of RAM, you'll use up about 576 MB of space and will need to get a 1-GB card. However, if you don't need hibernation, you can make do with a 512-MB card and save yourself some money. You'll also need to buy a CF-to-IDE adapter. Do a search on Google, and you'll find quite a few different adapters out there. Some can even plug directly into the IDE port rather than using cables, which saves space.
The best way to go about putting your XP installation on a CF card is to first set up your system on a regular hard drive. Load up all your drivers and third-party tools, make the necessary configuration changes, and of course install EWF and MinLogon. Once you're happy with the system, you need to initialize your CF card. Microsoft recommends using a FAT filesystem to improve the performance of EWF and minimize writes to the drive. Also, many retail CF cards come configured as removable drives, and as Windows XP will not allow you to partition and format a removable drive with NTFS, you must use FAT for these cards (although you can sometimes get a utility from the manufacturer to configure the CF card to appear as a fixed, or non-removable, drive).
XPe includes a special tool called Bootprep.exe that is used to enable FAT-formatted disks to boot into Windows XP. To configure a FAT-formatted CF disk to boot XP, you'll need a DOS boot disk with fdisk.exe, format.com, and bootprep.exe. Here's what to do:
If you are using NTFS, simply use Windows Disk Management to partition the drive and format it.
Now you are ready to copy over your XP install. Since Windows won't allow copying of files from the currently running OS instance, you need to boot into another OS, or attach both the hard drive and the CF card to another machine. Use whatever method you prefer, whether it's booting into Knoppix, DOS, or another XP installation. Just make sure that whichever method you use, it copies all hidden and system files and keeps the file attributes (hidden, read-only, archived, and so on) intact.
Once the transfer is done, connect your CF card to your system, remove all other hard drives, and boot up. As long as all the files were copied over properly, the system will start booting into your XP install, just as it did from the hard drive. Once the system boots up, take a look around and make sure everything is working right. Bring up a console by running cmd from the Start menu, and check that EWF is running.
With your system now running on a CF card, you have a small, fast, and reliable installation of XP to use for your car PC or any other small, embedded device you plan to use. I suggest you experiment a little by using the standby power function, as well as taking a look through Microsoft's MSDN site for embedded technologies (http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/) to see what tips they may have.
If you're going to be making significant changes to the system, you may want to consider doing it on the hard drive first and then redeploying to the CF disk. That way, you can clean out log files, temp directories, and any other leftover junk that'll take up precious space on your CF disk.
Silvio Fiorito


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Historic Lodging – Memorable Dining – Southern Hospitality
Experience "Victorian Southern Comfort" at our historic Natchez bed and breakfast. We offer exceptional Natchez lodging options; the luxurious Main House and the pet friendly Aunt Clara's Cottage only a few doors away. Both of our homes are child friendly and feature wonderful gardens and porches. Enjoy…
- A fabulous full Southern breakfast each morning
- Spacious rooms & suites with beautiful furnishings
- Modern luxury amenities including private baths
- Afternoon beverage & cheese welcome receptions
- Ideal location in the heart of historic Natchez
- Guest-acclaimed wonderful B&B experience with unmatched Southern hospitality
- Choose lodging in our 1893 Main House (2-room King Suites) or our 1873 Cottage (Queen or King Rooms) and our newly opened (Oct 2019) 1893 Bost House (2-room King Suite and two Queen Rooms)
We are in the perfect location for romantic getaways in Mississippi, Natchez Pilgrimage and intimate celebrations or elopements.


text: Left Navigation How Cars Measure Up The property and casualty insurance industry gathers and analyzes statistics on the number and cost of collision, comprehensive, direct compensation property damage (DCPD) and accident benefit claims for the most popular Canadian models of cars, passenger vans, SUVs and pickup trucks. Insurers track theft claims for these vehicles. This information includes the cost of these claims as well as how often these cars are stolen. The results give an accurate picture of how theft, collision and other claims affect the cost of car insurance for particular makes and models of cars.This year's edition of "How Cars Measure Up" presents the results for 2003 through 2015 models where at least 1,500 of each of the models were insured between 2011 and 2015. The information comes entirely from actual insurance claims data, collected from most of the car insurance companies in Canada.Low Claims Can Add Up to Premium Savings Columns highlighted in green indicate positive rankings – in comparison with others – in the current marketplace. Multiple green highlights can potentially add up to less expensive insurance premiums.YearModel YearsDocument Type20132000 - 2012PDF / Excel20142001 - 2013PDF / Excel20152002 - 2014Excel20162003 - 2015Excel20172004 - 2016Excel20181999 - 2017Excel What Insurers Want to Know To determine the price of your car insurance, insurers want to know the following information... Related ServicesCanadian Loss Experience Automobile Rating (CLEAR)Collision, specified perils, comprehensive and all perils are among the additional coverages available for your vehicle. In general, these coverages are very similar across the country.TelematicsInsurance telematics – also known as usage-based insurance (UBI) or pay-as-you-drive – represents a shift in how insurance is administered and how premiums are calculated. Telematics has the potential to reduce your premium costs and generate significant benefits to society. Useful LinksTop 10 Stolen VehiclesEach year, IBC produces a list of the top 10 stolen vehicles in Canada. IBC also reports on the top 10 stolen vehicles and trends in organized auto theft for specific regions in Canada. Cost ControlThere are many ways you can control insurance costs and lower your premium. Shop around and ask your insurance representative for more information about the options below and other savings opportunities.Buying Auto InsuranceKnow how insurance premiums are calculated, where to turn for insurance if you are a higher-risk driver and what additional auto insurance coverage is available.


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22 hours ago
Happy Thanksgiving!
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Leave a comment here or on the Washington Wine Report Facebook page and let us know what you'll be opening up to celebrate today. Enjoy the day!
1 Responses to Happy Thanksgiving!
Anonymous Says:
I broke open a 2009 Figgins I'd been waiting to enjoy with family, along side some non-traditional Ribeye steak followed by some smoked turkey leg.


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Just a year ago, I gave up sweets. I was in a restaurant in San Francisco, and, for the first time that I can recall, when the waiter said, "Dessert?," in that conspiratorial, perky way waiters have, I said . . . nothing. And then the next night, at another place, I did it again.
The usual reasons that move men and women as they age moved me: I was self-conscious about gaining weight, crossing into the world where you slowly become doughier and wake up as a middle-aged man with a paunch. So I decided to stop eating desserts, to see if that would help. Like all diets, both the reducing kind and the religious kind, mine had an element of logic (lose those calories neatly, and at once!) and an element of magic, too (give up the thing you like best and you will appease the gods of aging). I love desserts. I think of my mother and I taste desserts. My mother, though a scientist with an academic career, made a different dessert every night of my childhood: lemon tart and chocolate cake, wonderful coffee custard with bittersweet chocolate hardened like a winter lake on top, and hot apple pie with light custard sauce.
I am aware that pies and cakes and cupcakes are the more usual thing to love from Mom's Kitchen. But she was a Francophile, and made soufflés, and those I loved best of all. Yet they were the one dessert of hers that I couldn't make for my own children. When I left home, she gave me a self-published recipe book that included her formula for apricot and grand-marnier soufflés. I had followed it dutifully over the years, and never got it quite right. There was a moment when you were supposed to know that the egg whites were beaten—a zone of beaten egg whites, with danger and failure on either side. "DO NOT OVERBEAT/ DO NOT UNDERBEAT!" she had written, and although I had seen the proper moment, the true loft, countless times, the presence of the words somehow froze the operation, made the right state of beaten egg whites an unobtainable condition. I could never find the zone.
The curious thing was that, while it was hard to do without sweets at home, it wasn't nearly as hard when we went out to eat, and especially not when we went out to eat fancy food. It was as if the dessert chefs had given up on dessert, too, and produced something else in its place. At even a moderately upscale establishment, you would invariably get what I had come to think of as the Portman Plaza plate, since it so closely resembled the model that a developer would have proposed for the center of a crime-wracked mid-sized city in the seventies: three upright cylinders—small towers of something wrapped in something—with the tops sliced at an angle; a crumbly landscape of some kind; and a reflecting pool running around the edge. The plate would be advertised as, let's say, a chocolate-peanut-butter mousse cake with walnut-balsamic crumble and a sesame sorbet with Concord-grape foam. But the effect was always the same: not enough of a cakey cylindrical thing, too much of a crumbly thing, far too much of a gelatinous thing, and an irrelevance of an off-key runny thing. Without surrendering sugar, dessert had surrendered all its familiar forms—the cake, the soufflé, the pudding—as the avant-garde novel had surrendered narrative, character, and moral. Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing our faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be.
Leafing through books at the neighborhood cookbook store, I slowly became aware that our dessert modernism sprang from somewhere else, and had a more revolutionary purpose than I knew—that the Portman plates were to a European movement what the Portman towers had been to the Bauhaus, the American domestication of something austere and rigorous. Here in New York, the true, uncompromised revolution was limited to a handful of places, and I went to one of them, Wylie Dufresne's WD-50. I broke my sweet fast, and had a full roster of the pastry chef's delicious devisings: cheesecake with dried pineapple, pineapple purée, and pineapple tuiles; lemongrass mousse with lemongrass foam. The chef, Alex Stupak, turned out to be an intense intellectual, clear and dry in his judgments.
"I happen not to like sweets," he said as we sat down after dinner and he began to explain his work. "It's an idiosyncrasy of mine. I decided to become a pastry chef because it gave me autonomy. Whether you think your desserts are manipulated or not, they are! When you're conceptualizing an entrée, a protein, you generally expect to get a piece of that thing intact. In pastry, it doesn't occur. Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it's less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food." He looked at me sternly. "Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth."
When I asked him who had influenced him, his eyes, which had been narrow slits of purpose, suddenly shone bright. "I admire Albert Adrià more than any other cook in the world," he said, referring to the younger brother of Ferran Adrià, of the legendary (and soon to close) restaurant elBulli, in Catalonia.
Everywhere I went, I heard similar talk of him and other Catalan dessert wizards. Dan Barber, of the restaurant Blue Hill, spoke reverently of Jordi Roca, whose restaurant, run with his two brothers and situated not far from elBulli, had recently been voted one of the five best in the world; on a visit to New York, Rene Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen, had in the same poll been named the best restaurant in the world, spoke of both Adrià and Roca with the same quiet awe.
In search of the truth about the new sweets, I even went to the White House, whose pastry chef, Bill Yosses, I had been made to understand, was the Great Still Center of the American dessert. Yosses turned out to be a smiling, vaguely seraphic presence—at one point, he neatly, calmly distinguished caramel, mere burnt sugar, from butterscotch, brown sugar mixed with butter, for the benefit of his sous-chefs. (Though, as we walked through the White House, it did occur to me that, from the point of view of a caterer, the White House might seem less like the nerve center of the free world than like a medium-sized, slightly shabby charming resort hotel in Virginia, the kind where your best friend from college puts everyone up when he marries that horsy girl you all have doubts about.)
"Dessert is aspirational," Yosses said, laying out his philosophy. "It's the one part of the meal you don't have to eat. It's the purest part of the meal: the art part. But it's also the greediest part, the eat-it-in-a-closet part. We don't have to have it, and we do. When I was a kid, I would stuff my face with éclairs. I still would, I guess . . ." His voice trailed off. "The real question is this," he said. "How did this thing, this spice, sugar, become a staple? How did something that ought to be like saffron, a rare thing to add, become the thing we build on? How did a whole way of cooking creep up from sweetness? Why do we use it to end the meal? Those are the big questions." I asked if I should go to Spain. He gave a Yoda-ish smile, and said, "Oh, yes. That's a trip you ought to take." When I consulted Dan Barber again, he was still more emphatic. "Go there!" he said. "That's where it's all happening. Go!" And so I went.
On the plane over, I felt like Paul Newman or Michael Caine in a Cold War spy movie of the sombre, le Carré or Len Deighton kind: a black-and-white film, with a jazz score and a grimly ambiguous ending. I was crossing the salt-caramel curtain, and no turning back.
When I got to Barcelona, there was, just as there ought to be in such a movie, a cool, efficient beauty, in a black frock and a sports car, waiting for me. This was Lisa Abend, an American writer who lives in Spain, and who was to be my companion in Barcelona. She had spent the past season observing the innards at elBulli, while writing a book about the Oompa Loompas of the operation.
It was twilight, and we sped through the dark, narrow streets of the Old City on the way to our first stop, the EspaiSucre. This "Sweet Space" was, Lisa explained, a working research laboratory and school, where new desserts are regularly conceived and experiments made, with the results exhibited, and eaten, at a nearby restaurant. As we drove, the almost kinetic energy of the Catalan capital was evident, as it had been the last time I was there, twenty years before. At the time, the only dessert seemed to be flan, with a distinct salty taste that I associated with the local café con leche. I asked what had happened in the twenty years since.
"I've been doing a lot of research, and it really seems to be the case that the legend is the truth," Lisa said. "Twenty years ago, the Adrià brothers took over a struggling French restaurant up in Roses, and in the nineties they began to collaborate with a chemist here at the university. And, being isolated and inexperienced, they began to do new things. It really did come from two intense brothers who didn't care what the rules were supposed to be."
We pulled up in the darkness to a modern glass storefront amid the medieval buildings and parked on the sidewalk. Inside, Jordi Butrón, the chief scientist-cook of the research center, greeted us solemnly and led us into his classroom. On the blackboard behind his head was a series of abstruse-looking diagrams. With a close-shaved beard and mustache, he had more the look of a severe French sociologist than of a happy Spanish cook. I explained that I was on a quest to find out what desserts really were and where they were going. He held up a hand and began to speak, in rapid, accented French.
"In retrospect, they're disgusting, many of the things we used to do—too much fat and too much sugar, and a series of clichés taught while being rationalized," he said. "The key thing now for a cook is to develop a library of flavors that you can recall. If I say to you, 'Apple and cinnamon,' you would click in immediately. 'Yes, apple! Yes, cinnamon!' The library of your mind contains that. But what if I say 'Apple, asafetida'? Nothing! You have nothing stored there." He added slyly, "Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don't like it you think there's something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don't like it there's something wrong with you." He laughed briefly, professionally. "The development of a pastry chef is not the development of techniques. It is the slow, careful development of a catalogue of savors and flavors, which you can develop the way you develop muscles. There is a logic in every dessert worth eating. Consider the logic of white peach and rich cheese. We must be conditioned not by sight but only by flavor, the tongue, the nose, and the feel in the mouth." He went on placidly, "It is to avoid these errors that we do so much of our teaching and learning blindfolded."
"Blindfolded!" I said, wondering if I had misunderstood.
"Yes, blindfolded," he repeated. He went to a drawer and took out a handful of silken eye masks, which he threw on the desk. "It is important to be able to work with the sensations of the nose and mouth alone, so we spend hours in the dark, tasting. Of course, appearance matters, but it is the last part of the equation. Taste, taste, taste—that is what matters. So I keep people blindfolded for much of the work, which is devoted to the marriages of taste."
Then he opened the door to an immense, pristine kitchen, dominated by a great length of polished black stone. Here, he said, "as many as fourteen young chefs can work, blindfolded, to discover the taste and enlarge their flavor libraries."
I noticed various pieces of space-age-looking machinery littering the beautiful, dark kitchen, and I asked how the new technology contributed to his work.
"It is useful as tools," he said crisply. "If I want to capture the flavor of a raspberry meringue, I use a powdered egg white, and then I have a true raspberry in the form of a meringue, instead of a super-sweet meringue overwhelming raspberries." He shrugged. "Nothing we do with new equipment does more than allow us to reinsert flavors."
We sat down for dinner in the nearby restaurant, and had a meal of five courses, all sweet, or at least sweetish, yet all beginning with a savory theme. First, there was cucumber-ginger-pineapple-tarragon sherbet, then olive-oil cake with San Simón cheese and a perfect white-peach sorbet. "The combination is a classic conception of the savory kitchen: cheese and olive oil," Jordi observed. Then came an Idiazábal-stout-beet-cherry cake, too various to make much sense. Then a green-apple granita with bay leaf, as fresh and acid as a winter morning, and, finally, truffle-hazelnut-toast cream pudding. The genius showed in the details: a curry-and-salt cookie, thrown in as an extra but a study in itself. There was something perfectly modulated in the transition from savory herbs (tarragon and bay) and savory tastes (salt and curry, particularly) into sweet dishes.
"This is kind of amazing," I said to Lisa, as I scraped the plate of truffle-toast pudding and grabbed another curry-and-salt biscuit. Lisa gave me a seraphic, you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet smile, and said, "You'll meet Albert tomorrow."
I sat in my little hotel room in Barcelona, jet-lagged and sugar-satiated, and read about the history of sugar. Primates, I learned, love sweets for reasons that are simple enough to explain: sweetness is the natural sign of ripeness, and the best assurance, especially when balanced with just enough acids, that the thing you're eating is good to eat. Yet the picture is more complex. The primate instinct for sugar is particular, adjustable, and sometimes seasonal. The lesser mouse lemur of Madagascar, a gourmand among monkeys, raises its threshold during the rainy season so that, when sugars are less abundant, it requires less sweetness. Yet this may be why the lesser mouse lemur has always remained so deeply lesser. Our nearest relations among the primates, particularly chimps, have a "supra threshold": they love sweets and will practically die to get them—and this, the theory goes, is one of the things that make them forage over extremely large territories, outside the forest. They strolled on all fours, then walked, then ran, just to have dessert.
As both the anthropologist Sidney Mintz and the historian Jean-Louis Flandrin have documented, it was only recently that the instinct for devouring sweets met the availability of abundant sugar. In pre-Crusades medieval European diets, only honey and fruit and other "natural" sweeteners were available, and they were mostly used in savory dishes. For centuries, sugar was a spice as rare as myrrh and as precious as saffron: an expensive extra used to give food taste and color. Only in the Renaissance did sugar slowly, through the New World, become widely current. ("Sweet" became one of Shakespeare's favorite adjectives: it appears seventy-two times in the sonnets alone, and the first writer who mentions them refers to his "sugar'd sonnets.")
Then, in the late seventeenth century, the price of sugar plummeted, never to recover, largely as a consequence of that hideous invention the West Indies sugar plantation. The cheap-sugar revolution took different paths in different places. In England, sugar combined with tea became the staple drink of the masses. In France, a full-blown dessert cuisine emerged, with the pastry chef as its hero. Soufflés rose; egg whites lifted up; aerated egg yolks combined; cheaper chocolate was blended with butter to make buttercream; and egg yolks were kept from cooking while allowed to thicken.
Reading the primatologists and the anthropologists, I got the sense that the double life of sweets ever since the sugar revolution—as a thing we universally crave, and as a highly specific, French-derived cooking culture—has led to a strange fight between disciplines. The primatologists insist that we eat sugar because our genes scream for it, while their humanist colleagues insist that sugar is above all a cultural symbol—we eat as many sweets as we can in order to emulate the rich, who usually get to eat more. Yet surely an artifact and an appetite are not opposites to be reconciled but the same thing seen at different moments in its history. The lesser mouse lemur would doubtless devour a crème caramel and a butterscotch pudding indifferently; it takes a pastry chef trained in France to state the difference. The artifact gives the appetite shape; the appetite makes the artifact shine.
The next morning, I met Albert Adrià at the workshop that the Adrià brothers keep in the old quarter of Barcelona. In jeans and a work shirt, Albert had the stocky, proletarian look of a young Braque or Léger. He is a classic younger brother—earnest, hardworking, self-critical—and he explained the rise of the Barcelona dessert as a series of accidents disciplined by labor.
"Postres?" he asked. "Why me for postres? First, because the pastry chef left. I had just finished moving through all the other stations, and I was due to be at the dessert. And I also have a severe allergy to shellfish, which limits my movement. But the real reason was that pastry seemed much more interesting—a world without limits. Meat cook? Fish cook? What are you going to do with it? And also there was a lot more to learn in pastry—just the techniques! My question was, Why can't you serve main dishes that are sweet, and why can't you have savory tastes during the dessert time period?"
I asked when the new style had first appeared. He furrowed his brow, trying to recollect something that had clearly not been the result of a deliberate plan. "It was an accident of the kitchen, really. I suppose we first made an ice cream with saffron in 1985. My first step is, I have to draw it. I have to sketch it, get it down on paper, and then do the explanatory texts." He began to draw on paper. "This one I wanted to take up, this dirt—one of my most famous desserts involved dirt. A sweetened illusion. The idea came when it was winter at elBulli and I was going up the hill to get my car, and stuff was falling down, and I thought, Shit, that's good! I can use that! It's a dirt road, and, in the course of the fall, I noticed not only how the leaves changed color but also how they changed the color of the ground." The dessert, as it was eventually plated, included cherry sorbet, salted honey yogurt, frozen chocolate powder, and spice bread, all evoking one fall moment: a dessert of frozen time.
Struggling to find words for his inventions, he began to speak about his most recent work: two desserts for the upcoming "Cook It Raw" conference, in Lapland, which would emphasize low-energy techniques, uncooked food. "Elemental, elemental," he said. "That's what I want. The really new idea I have for Lapland is—you see, I was thinking, if you were thirsty there you would eat the snow or the ice, and if you're hungry you're going to kill the reindeer. So: blood! The most basic thing is to drink the reindeer's blood and eat the snow. So we made sweet snow and sweet blood. The key for the blood is your belief that it is. It looks like real blood only at forty degrees—it's a beet-and-orange reduction, and the texture, I promise, is exactly the same as blood. So we're not telling people that it's not real blood. It's meant to be provocative. But it's very delicious."
"Is there anything that didn't work out?" I asked. "Something that you tried and failed at?"
"A lot," he said. "One of the first things that Ferran asked me to do is create hot ice cream."
Hot ice cream! He nodded gloomily. "You would look at it—ice cream—and then you would taste it, and it would be hot. Every year I thought I had it! But I never had it. What we discovered was to use an ice-cream machine but invert it, so that it was pumping in hot air, and to use gelatin to get the form. That was as close as we could get. It's still this idea that we have." He shook his head. "A sort of dream. I have a lot of them."
By now, the story of elBulli has become part of modern cooking lore: how the combination of science and culinary curiosity created a real revolution in cooking, with high-tech equipment borrowed from the mass-produced-food industry for the purpose of wild, semi-surrealist picture-making. And how, at the height of this fame, Ferran announced that he would close the restaurant in 2011 and devote himself to "a foundation for pure research in cooking." (What admirers of elBulli often forget to tell you is that it is a very hard place to get to. You weave your way there on narrow, winding cliff roads along the Spanish coast. The terror of the ascent surely adds to the delight of the arrival.)
If Albert is a Braque—a stolid man with a poetic imagination—Ferran is very much a Picasso, a grand maître who knows it. Like every first-rate artist, he has the kind of immense egomania that is oddly impersonal: his greatness is so uncontroversial to him that it is an act of generosity to try to limit it in words and dates. There is a certain kind of artistic egotism that is enveloping rather than narrowing: less "All I care about is my work" than "If you only cared about my work as much as I do, you would be as routinely elated as I am."
I asked dutiful questions about the history, and the future, of desserts, and Ferran responded instantly, in Spanish, not with the guarded caution of his younger brother or the academic certainty of Jordi Butrón but with eager, nodding, flowing eloquence. His guttural, consonant-driven Catalan accent made everything he said sound as though he were murmuring a list of Jewish holidays. "Let us go all the way back to Carême and then come forward to us! Hmm. The problem! The problem! The phrase 'molecular gastronomy' I don't like. 'Techno-emotional'?—I'm not crazy about it, but let's use it. Now let's look at the history of desserts."
He called for paper and pen from one of the countless earnest, eager apprentices, and began to draw floridly and actively, making swooping charts of the history of cuisine, filled with Venn-diagram-like circles enclosing famous names and long arcs and arrows connecting one significant moment with the next. He drew as he talked—I realized that he was the inventor of the Barcelona diagram—and soon turned to sketching boxes and vectors on a large sheet of white paper.
"Carême, you see, was a pastry chef," he said. "Everybody thinks of him as a cook, but he was actually a pastry chef. Sugar?" He took two for his coffee. "He was the best pastry chef in France. Now, come to our own time, who's the great innovator?" Dramatic pause. "Michel Guérard!" He trumped with the name of the chef best known as a father of nouvelle cuisine, in the nineteen-seventies. "And he was a pastry chef, too. Very interesting that two revolutionaries have been pastry chefs. Whatever they've tried to do, they've tried this symbiosis of the savory world and the sweet. Escoffier more than being a cook was a codifier. I don't know why it played out this way, but it did. Since then, Gaston Lenôtre and Pierre Hermé. And, after that, nothing, really. It's been consolidated, but nothing very new came out of it in France. Why did Michel Guérard begin this revolution? Because he was a pastry chef, and the pastry chef was the second-class citizen of the kitchen. He did it to show 'I am a cook.' It's the thinking of a pastry chef that initiated the revolution of nouvelle cuisine!" He looked at me keenly, to see if I was following.
He was, in truth, speaking so quickly, and mentioning so many names and concepts, that I was a bit confused by the argument—until I looked down at the paper where he had been drawing the complex flowchart of French dessert-making. The point it conveyed was simple: there had really been just two hinge points in French cooking—Carême's early-nineteenth-century revolution, and Michel Guérard's twentieth-century one—and both had come from pastry cooks escaping the limits of pastry. Pastry-makers were natural magicians, and magic in cooking would always come from them.
"So, now, here's elBulli!" He drew some more. Then he called for one of the many illustrated books that document the ascension of elBulli, and flipped through its pages for examples. "We started taking things from the sweet world and moving them to the savory: a sorbet, or a savory ice cream," he said. "One early savory ice cream was a Parmesan ice cream, in 1994. It extends an incredible dialogue between me and Albert. One of the important themes for us was about construction: how do you construct a dessert? This opened us up to the whole question of tiramisù—opened an incredible world to us. Deconstruction began here. Black Forest cake. This is mythical."
Turning the pages of the book while drawing rapid diagrams and speaking in even more rapid Spanish, Ferran went on to explain that the true point of the deconstructed dessert was to create a kind of analytic Cubism of the pastry plate. It wasn't that Black Forest cake was broken down into bits but that, if you're possessed by the urge to break things down into bits, it's more obvious that you're doing it when you do it to a Black Forest cake. The Cubists used guitars and tables, ordinary still-life objects, for the same reason: you knew what a guitar or a table looked like, and so could see when it didn't look that way. Once the fracture was achieved and accepted, you could move on to your own mythology. "If we make a curry ice cream, and you put mushrooms there, and eel—strange!" he said. "But if you put chicken stock, and coconut, then it's curry."
Were we, I asked, on the verge of entirely breaking down the line between sweet and savory?
He looked at me with delighted triumph. "It can't be that an American is asking me that!" he said. "A hamburger with ketchup and Coca-Cola? That's the most intense symbiosis of sweet and savory imaginable. It's your cultural theme."
As Lisa and I approached the door, Ferran grabbed the pages of diagrams and handed them to me for further study. He continued brooding on the subject of dessert, explaining that for him the big question was not that of sweet and savory but that of sequence. "What matters is how we end the meal. With a surprise? A flourish? Reassurance? That's the big question about dessert: how do we close out dinner? How do we finish the meal?"
He had a pensive look, and I couldn't help asking him about Albert's unmade dream. His face came alive again. "You mean hot ice cream? Yes. Yes! But . . . it's hard! Ice cream is ice cream because it's cold. But gelatin is the same way: gelatin used to be both gelatin and cold. There must be some way. We'll solve it. We will." Then he signed the historical diagrams "FERRAN ADRIÀ."
A meal at elBulli—sweet-and-spicy flash-fried shrimp tortilla, wild strawberries in wild-hare bouillon—showed that the French line setting off savory from sweet could be entirely bypassed, like other French defensive lines in history, by mechanical ingenuity, speed, and superior strategic thinking. But I was still interested in desserts as such, pure desserts, desserts that always ended sweetly. And so the next morning Lisa and I travelled to meet with the young Mozart of pastry, Jordi Roca, at the restaurant he runs with his brothers, in Girona, in northeast Catalonia, about an hour from elBulli.
Where elBulli is old-fashioned and even a little run-down, as though to frame the hyper-modernity of its plates all the more sharply, El Celler de Can Roca, to give the full name of the Roca brothers' three-star place, is of exquisitely contemporary design, with small groves of poplar trees contained within the zigzagged green-glass walls of the restaurant proper. A long, low-lying wine cellar sits just across an allée of trees from the restaurant, and in it Josep Roca, the second, sommelier brother—the oldest brother, Joan, is in the kitchen—keeps his wines in tenderly nourishing musical environments, playing recorded melodies in the caves: Bach for the champagne, romantic cello music for the Burgundys, and local guitar music for the Spanish wines.
Jordi, the baby brother, is still young-looking—startlingly so, at thirty-two. Dreamy of visage and gentle of voice, he came out of the kitchen before lunch, tentative and eager and even a little wide-eyed in his chef whites, to talk about his dessert work. He had inherited the pastry station, he admitted, because it was the younger brother's station, but he thought that there was room to grow there. "Desserts in Catalonia don't have the weight of the past," he explained, in the French he had learned during several stages. "We had Crema Catalana. A cake or two or three. So we felt free to invent and compete."
After an apprenticeship at elBulli, he realized that his preoccupation was with scent. "That was something that hadn't really been realized enough in desserts, I thought: the power of aromas. We had this new machine that could extract essential oils, and I began to play with it. I began making perfumed desserts." He laughed. "I went to Sephora and found the most wonderful aromas in all the women's perfumes. And I started making desserts built around their smells. Calvin Klein-like aromas. I wanted to make something as wonderful to taste as Chanel perfume was to smell. For me, that's where all that new chemistry and equipment help. We have the machine to extract essential oils. Another just for smokes. Working with smokes and smells, this has a—fragile aspect? Sense memory extends to the heart of who we are. I think that there's a freedom there, for a certain delicacy." He shrugged. "You'll see," he said.
Did he have a dream dessert that he had tried and failed to perfect? He nodded. "Yes, there's one I'm working on. I haven't really . . . perfected it yet. You see, I'm a big fan of F.C. Barcelona"—the soccer team—"and I wanted to make a dessert that would re-create the emotions Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal." Messi is the great Argentine striker who stars for Barcelona. "I feel I'm close. Could I try it out on you at the end of lunch?"
The desserts came around. And here was the real thing, here were true desserts: not dancing nimbly on the edge between sweet and salty, like Albert Adrià's, but plain old-fashioned sweets touched by the invention and audacity of a liberated imagination. There was watermelon rind with bitter almonds and tarragon; a hot lemon-mint eucalyptus liquid that, as it was poured, solidified into a small, sweet iceberg. Then lemon custard and granita, with the floral scents in a small cup alongside: you eat and smell by turns. Lemon zest, pure distilled mint flowers. And then an apricot ice-cream bombe with a spun-sugar shell and apricot foam inside and an apricot sabayon inside that.
Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the "grass" is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter—like a French curve—with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.
Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.
An announcer's voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. "Messi turns and spins!" the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.
"Messi is alone on goal!" the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. "Messi shoots!" A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white-candy netting.
"MESSI! GOOOOOAL!" The announcer's voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.
You feel . . . something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he's a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.
In those le Carré and Deighton thrillers, the things the antihero learns on the other side of the curtain tend to be brooded on stoically rather than applied with spirit. What you saw on the other side of the curtain stays there. What I learned in Barcelona was that genius can produce what it chooses—but not much of it was really applicable to the table I sit at or the kitchen I cook in. It wasn't just that you can't do this at home; it's that home is the last place you were ever meant to do this. The earlier great changes in cooking were a kind of baroque template, suitable for simplification—you made haute cuisine with cream and butter, nouvelle cuisine by leaving them out—but "techno-emotional" cooking was created only for the three-star stage. It was pure performance, cabaret cooking, the table as stadium show. As often happens with the avant-gardists, by advancing the form they had only deepened the crisis. There was nothing that you could do with what I had learned, other than serve cake and ice cream while the soccer game was on, which we knew how to do already.
And yet something, at least, came out of the quest. I invited Bill Yosses, the White House chef, over for dessert, and laid a small trap for him: I was going to make the apricot soufflé, and see if I could achieve the zone. Over dinner, we talked desserts some more: the mysteries of plating, the needs of family life.
Then I led him into the kitchen, showed him the apricot-purée base, the transparent egg whites in the unlined copper bowl, the five soufflé dishes waiting to be buttered. He murmured instruction. "Butter around the outer edge, too," he urged. "All the way around the outer rim like this. Make a small space—climb up to grow up. And then put the dishes in water: not a bain-marie or anything deep, just a shallow tray of water. You don't want to lower the temperature too much."
He watched as I beat the egg whites and they thickened and turned opaque. "Do you know why you use unlined copper?" he asked. "It's for the static electricity. A small electrical storm going off in the bowl." An act of God, making clouds of white.
We approached the zone, the perfect moment of stiff-but-not-too-stiff peaks. ("DO NOT UNDERBEAT/ DO NOT OVERBEAT!") I beat. He waited. I beat some more. He nodded—go on. I went on, far longer than I usually would, and then he tapped my shoulder. There! That was it. The zone was there: not the gauzy, moist shiny area where I used to stop but a step above.
"I remember how there was one kid at Le Cirque back when who just did this," Yosses said. "Starting around five-thirty, he had the bouilli or the soufflé base, and he beat egg whites all night."
As we put the soufflés in the oven, he said, "Fifteen minutes," and when fifteen minutes had passed he held his hand above them, to measure the heat rising, as much as the texture firming, and nodded one last time.
They were perfect. The apricot intensity shone; the egg whites' neutrality and airiness softened and lifted it; the hotness gave an edge of taste delight that is always allied to danger, even tiny danger. A thousand small adjustments turn rules into skills, and then three smaller ones turn real skills into art. With Yosses's help, I had taken something elaborate and made it something that seemed elemental. The primate instinct—get sweets at any price—had been turned into this polished performance. The virginal egg whites, the electric storm that whitened them and made them stiff: the perfect zone was drier and older than I had imagined. You could beat them more and they would be better.
Ferran's question still counts: How do we finish the meal? But then how do we finish anything? At least I know now that if we beat hard enough, and long enough, and do both more than we ever thought we would have to, we might yet arrive at a lighter end. ♦


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Prospective Analysis of Hypersensitivity Reactions to Oxaliplatin
|The safety and scientific validity of this study is the responsibility of the study sponsor and investigators. Listing a study does not mean it has been evaluated by the U.S. Federal Government. Read our disclaimer for details.
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00831571
Recruitment Status : Active, not recruiting
First Posted : January 29, 2009
Last Update Posted : November 2, 2018
- Study Details
- Tabular View
- No Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
This research study will examine how often hypersensitivity, or allergic reactions, occur in patients receiving the chemotherapy medication oxaliplatin. Hypersensitivity reactions can vary from a transient skin rash and fever to more severe symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest tightness, and a more severe allergic reaction that can affect blood pressure called anaphylaxis. We will be examining how often hypersensitivity reactions occur and how severe the reactions are when they occur. We will also examine whether there are factors that place people at risk for developing hypersensitivity reactions to oxaliplatin. In an optional portion to this study, we will examine whether allergy skin testing can predict whether someone will develop a hypersensitivity reaction.
Participants who develop a moderate to severe allergic reaction to oxaliplatin will be invited to participate in an additional portion of the study examining a desensitization process. This part of the study will examine whether a desensitization process can prevent future hypersensitivity reactions to oxaliplatin in patients who previously developed moderate to severe hypersensitivity reactions and allow therapy with oxaliplatin to continue.
|Condition or disease
|Colorectal Cancer Esophageal Cancer Gastric Cancer Small Bowel Cancer Pancreatic Cancer
- Participants will come in for chemotherapy treatment as scheduled by their oncologist. The frequency of the visits will depend upon the chemotherapy regimen the participant is receiving.
- With each visit, the participants will have a physical exam and will be asked questions about their general health and specific questions about any problems that they might be having and any medications they may be taking. At each of these visits, routine blood work will be taken to monitor the participant's health.
- While the participants are receiving oxaliplatin, the infusion nurse will monitor them for any evidence of hypersensitivity reaction. Participants will also leave with a diary to record any symptoms that may occur for 24 hours after they have completed the infusion of oxaliplatin.
- In the optional portion of the study, participants will undergo allergy skin testing in the Allergy Service at Brigham and Women's Hospital The skin testing will be done at three time points: before the first dose of oxaliplatin, before the 5th dose of oxaliplatin, and before the 10th dose of oxaliplatin.
- Desensitization is a method used to help a person with an allergy tolerate exposure to a specific allergic agent. Desensitization to a medication such as oxaliplatin involves giving the medication in slowly increasing amounts, starting with tiny doses, and ending with the full dose prescribed by the physician. Patients participating in this part of the study will have the desensitization at Brigham and Women's Hospital in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU or MICU) to ensure close supervision. Desensitization to oxaliplatin involves a multi-step procedure where the oxaliplatin dose is started at very small doses and the rate of infusion is increased every 15 minutes until the "target rate" is achieved. This rate is then maintained until the full dose of medication has been infused. This usually takes approximately 6 hours if no adverse reactions are experienced.
|Study Type :
|Estimated Enrollment :
|200 participants
|Observational Model:
|Time Perspective:
|Official Title:
|Prospective Analysis of Hypersensitivity Reactions to Oxaliplatin
|Study Start Date :
|February 2009
|Actual Primary Completion Date :
|October 2012
|Estimated Study Completion Date :
|December 2019
All Participants
Patients receiving Oxaliplatin
Patients that have experienced a moderate to severe hypersensitivity reaction to oxaliplatin
- To determine prospectively the incidence and severity of hypersensitivity reactions to oxaliplatin among patients beginning treatment with oxaliplatin during a two-year observation period. [ Time Frame: 2 years ]
- To determine the relationship between cumulative dose of oxaliplatin and duration of therapy and development of hypersensitivity reactions. [ Time Frame: 2 years ]
- To determine the ability of oxaliplatin skin testing to identify patients at risk for developing hypersensitivity reactions. [ Time Frame: 2 years ]
- To determine the safety and efficacy of a rapid desensitization protocol to allow responding patients with moderate to severe hypersensitivity reactions to oxaliplatin to continue therapy with the drug. [ Time Frame: 2 years ]
Choosing to participate in a study is an important personal decision. Talk with your doctor and family members or friends about deciding to join a study. To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contacts provided below. For general information, Learn About Clinical Studies.
|Ages Eligible for Study:
|18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult)
|Sexes Eligible for Study:
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers:
|Sampling Method:
|Non-Probability Sample
Inclusion Criteria:
- 18 years of age or older
- Histologically or cytologically confirmed colorectal cancer, esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, small bowel cancer, hepatobiliary cancer and pancreatic cancer
- Patients must be eligible for treatment with oxaliplatin
- ECOG Performance Status of 2 or less
- Adequate bone marrow, renal and hepatic function as outlined in the protocol
- Patients must have recovered from both the acute and late effects of any prior surgery, radiotherapy or other antineoplastic therapy
- Patients may participate in monitoring for hypersensitivity and skin testing if they are receiving oxaliplatin as part of another clinical trial and allowed by that trial. Patients cannot receive oxaliplatin through the desensitization protocol if they are part of another clinical trial.
Exclusion Criteria:
- Prior treatment with oxaliplatin
- Active infection or with a fever of 101.3 or higher within 3 days of the first scheduled days of protocol treatment
- Patients with active CNS metastases. Patients with stable CNS disease, who have undergone radiotherapy at least 4 weeks prior to the planned first protocol treatment and who have been on a stable dose of corticosteroids for greater than 3 weeks are eligible.
- Patients with known hypersensitivity to any of the components of oxaliplatin or chemotherapeutic agent used in combination with oxaliplatin
- Patients who have received radiotherapy to more than 25% of their bone marrow; or patients who received any radiotherapy within 4 weeks of study entry
- Peripheral neuropathy of grade 2 or higher
- Patients who are pregnant or lactating
- Any other medical condition, including mental illness or substance abuse, deemed by the Investigator to be likely to interfere with the patient's ability to sign informed consent, cooperate and participate in teh study, or interfere with the interpretation of the results.
To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contact information provided by the sponsor.
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier (NCT number): NCT00831571
|United States, Massachusetts
|Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
|Boston, Massachusetts, United States, 02115
|Principal Investigator:
|Jennifer A. Chan, MD, MPH
|Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
|Responsible Party:
|Jennifer Chan, MD, MPH, Principal Investigator, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|NCT00831571 History of Changes
|Other Study ID Numbers:
|First Posted:
|January 29, 2009 Key Record Dates
|Last Update Posted:
|November 2, 2018
|Last Verified:
|October 2018
Immune System Diseases
Antineoplastic Agents


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Bill E. Snyder, 84, of Amarillo died Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012.
Private memorial services were held on Saturday in the Angel Funeral Home Chapel of Angels with family and friends officiating. Arrangements were by Angel Funeral Home, 2209 S. Arthur St.
Mr. Snyder was born Nov. 6, 1927, in Avard, Okla., to Alva and Eva Snyder. He served in the Navy during World War II. He married Ina Riggs on June 26, 1947, in Kiowa, Kan. Mr. Snyder worked for the Santa Fe Railroad for 41 years and retired in 1988.
He was preceded in death by a great-grandson.
He is survived by his wife of more than 65 years; a daughter, Dolores Evers of Canyon; two sons, Dennis F. Snyder and John E. Snyder, both of Amarillo; four grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
Sign the online guest book at www.schoolerfuneralhome.com.
Amarillo Globe-News, Feb. 26, 2012


text: Injured Heat forward Chris Bosh spent last night's Eastern Conference Finals Game One on the bench, though he certainly didn't seem to be missing much about playing the game. Indeed, most opportunities viewers were given to look in on Bosh showed a man at ease with the lofty predictions for his team's success. Perhaps, even, Bosh felt uplifted by his teammates' performance in his absence. His spirits, I dare say, are positively altitudinous.


text: Chocolate milk is well supported by research as ticking all the boxes for an effective exercise recovery drink. tracy benjamin/Flickr August 17, 2015 Health Check: here's what you need to know about protein supplements Tim Crowe, Deakin University The decision to use protein supplements is based more on marketing claims than anything else. They offer few real performance benefits that an athlete's normal diet isn't already delivering.


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The head coach saved his job with a playoff win.
But the roster has important changes coming. Some important positions will need to be filled. In particular, these big names may not be around in September.
Tight end. Tony Gonzalez will almost definitely retire. That is a huge --- I say again, huge -- hole in the offense. Gonzalez had a great year and was vital on 3rd downs. He had a great understanding with Matt Ryan. Frankly, they can't replace him. This means the offense will almost certainly not be as effective next season.
Running back. Michael Turner is about done. They rested him a lot this season and it helped late in the year. But they need a full-time running back. If they can get a real contributor it will be a step up.
Defensive end. This may be the end for John Abraham. Here's another aging, injury-prone player. He's been a part-timer for years. I think it's safe to say that if the Falcons had a legitimate pass rusher, they would have beaten San Francisco. This is a huge position of need.
It may be that the Falcons will want to address linebacker/secondary, given how badly Seattle and SF gouged them in the 15-20 yard area. But the areas above would take precedence, I believe.


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On Hill, VA Chief Shinseki Faces Hospital Death Allegations
From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
And I'm Melissa Block. Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki faced tough questions from senators today. They wanted to know about allegations that VA clinics are cooking the books claiming they see patients within 14 days, when in reality veterans can wait months for an appointment. And there was something else senators raised with the secretary: Whether he should take responsibility for the troubles and resign. Here's NPR's Quil Lawrence.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: The VA's inspector general is investigating whether veterans may have died while waiting for care at the VA hospital in Phoenix. Allegations followed from around the country - Colorado, Texas and Wyoming - that hospitals were keeping fake statistics about wait times - for now just allegations.
SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: We need to get the facts and not rush to judgment.
LAWRENCE: Senator Bernie Sanders opened the hearing with some statistics of his own suggesting that despite problems the VA is doing a good job.
SANDERS: We are talking about the largest integrated health care system in the United States of America. Every single day VA serves more than 200,000 veterans.
LAWRENCE: The problem isn't new. Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina said wait times have been an issue for years, and that Secretary Shinseki now owns the problem after nearly six years in office.
SENATOR RICHARD BURR: VA senior leadership including the secretary should have been aware that VA was facing a national scheduling crisis. VA's leadership has either failed to connect the dots, or failed to address this on going crisis which has resulted in patient harm and in patient death.
LAWRENCE: Shinseki, a former army general sat poker-faced through 48 minutes of the senators' statements before he had a chance to speak. When he finally did it was personal.
SECRETARY ERIC SHINSEKI: I have this great privilege of being able to care for people I went to war with years ago and people I have sent to war. Any adverse incident like this makes me mad as hell.
LAWRENCE: Senators from both parties pushed Shinseki on whether the VA has fired staff for reporting fake statistics. Shinseki didn't' answer directly, but he said 3000 employees were removed from their posts last year. It wasn't clear if some had retired or been reassigned. Democrat Patty Murray of Washington said the VA needs a cultural change.
SENATOR PATTY MURRAY: The standard practice at the VA seems to be to hide the truth in order to look good. That has got to change once and for all and I want to know how your going to get your medical directors to tell you when they have a problem rather than pursuing these secret lists and playing games with these wait times.
LAWRENCE: Senators asked Shinseki if VA officials might have committed crime falsifying records. Shinseki deferred to his inspector general's report, which is being conducted independently of his office and may take months. Nevada Republican Dean Heller ran down a list of problems at the VA and then asked the question on everyone's mind.
SENATOR DEAN HELLER: Would you explain to me after knowing all this information why you should not resign?
SHINSEKI: Well, I would tell you, Senator, that I came here to make things better for veterans. This is not a job. I'm here to accomplish a mission that I think they critical deserve and need. And I can tell you over the past five years we've done a lot to make things better. We're not done yet.
LAWRENCE: Shinseki said he'd stay on until the work is done, or the president asks him to step down. At his request the White House has dispatched a senior aid to assist the VA's audit, but so far the president wants Shinseki to stay in his post. Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.


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Bern are a brand that constantly evolve their products. Reacting to demand from their female audience, they created the Lenox, the beautiful twin-sister to the men's ever popular Bern Watts.
Designed to be both flattering and functional, the Lenox has a smaller shell than its twin brother - and a lower profile so it sits neatly against your head. Newly added is a fit system within the helmet that allows you to adjust the size for a perfect fit.
As well as adding a certain je ne sais quoi, the moulded peak protects you from the sun's glare and keeps the rain out of your eyes. This is a chic and supremely comfortable helmet in subtle grey with a dazzling flash of pink that becomes even more attractive when you see the price tag.
Ideal for:
- All season riding.
- Cycling, snowboarding, skiing & many other sports.
- Safety on the bike.
*Check out the video above to find out so much more!
Size Guide
To measure which size will work for you, simply wrap a measuring tape comfortably around your head at the level that a helmet rim would sit:
Small: 52-55cm.
Medium: 56-59cm.
Each size incorporates a neat sizing dial to fine tune sizing for your head.
Tech Spec
- PVC 'Zip Mold' microshell outer casing.
- 'Zip Mold' liquid injected PU hard foam inner lining.
- Combination of inner and outer 'Zip Mold' layers creates a thinner, tapered helmet shape, with a higher strength to weight ratio than standard EPS helmets.
- Passes all relevant safety standards for bike and skate, including CPSC and EN 1078.
- Passes all relevant safety standards for snow and ski, including ASTM F 2040 and EN1077B.
- Stylish integrated visor.
- New colour range - Graphite Grey.
- Weight 400-450g.
- Separate Winter liner can be purchased to convert to either cold weather bike riding, or for skiing/snowboarding.
Ideal for:
- All season riding.
- Cycling, snowboarding, skiing & many other sports.
- Safety on the bike.
*Check out the video above to find out so much more!
Who's Behind It?
Bern was founded in 2004 by Dennis Leedom - a passionate cyclist, snowboarder and skier who was acutely aware of the need to protect his head. As a multi-sport fanatic, he launched Bern to create helmets that would not only provide more safety but also serve more than one discipline.
Since then, Bern has grown to become one of the most popular makers of cycling helmets in the world. Working with a specialist design team, the results have become iconic. Bern believe they've 'driven the evolution of head protection' and we're inclined to agree. We love the lightweight results that meet rigorous safety standards whilst always exuding cycling style and sophistication.
Since 2014, Bern's colourful helmets have come with a fully adjustable sizing mechanism, and their design team have created increasing numbers of products shaped specifically for women that incorporate their flip visor system. Go forth and protect your head stylishly with one of these lids!
Complete the Look
1 customer reviews
Exactly what I wantedReview by Ash
Super comfortable and the nice grey colour shown in photo, not the weird tone shown on Google. Excellent service from VeloVixen too, they're so friendly!
Write Your Own Review
Unit 28, Wheatley Business Park, Old London Road, Wheatley, Oxford OX33 1XW // email@example.com // +44 (0) 1302 249 323


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kybun has its headquarters in Roggwil in the canton of Thurgau, Switzerland. kybun Tower introduced a modern architectural style to the idyllic village in 2006.
The kybun tower, overlooking the roofs of Roggwil, gives you a chance to experience the walk-on-air feeling yourself. The tower has a unique atmosphere and offers the kybun experience with a panoramic view of Lake Constance.
The kybun AG headquarters is on the third floor of the tower. All work spaces are set up in line with the kybun philosophy: soft, springy mats and standing desks instead of seats, treadmills under standing desks and a standing meeting room instead of a regular meeting room.
You can take part in a varied training programme on the softest treadmill in the world and the soft, springy kyBounder mat at the kybun Training Center.


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New Paper: Why Sustainability Standards for Biofuel Production Make Little Economic Sense
The U.S. sustainability standard currently requires ethanol production to emit at least 20% less CO2 than the gasoline it is assumed to replace. In a new study, authors Harry de Gorter and David R. Just argue that sustainability standards for ethanol are, by definition, illogical and ineffective. Moreover, say de Gorter and Just, those standards divert attention from the contradictions and inefficiencies of ethanol import tariffs, tax credits, mandates, and subsidies, all of which exist whether ethanol is sustainable or not.


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capotondi wrote:I would like to suggest to add the possibility to choose on which devices the selected plugin must be used.
This can be particularly useful in the case of kolor menu. for example it would be great to assign different plugins to different devices
mediavets wrote:
krpano supports such a concept via the devices tag.
HansKeesom wrote:mediavets wrote:
krpano supports such a concept via the devices tag.
Great that it is possible in krpano and sure if kolor can easily pass this on into panotour 2.0, then sure that is fine. I just think it does not fit into the general concept of panotour which is to be a tool that allows you to quickly and easily create a standard tour that works on any platform.
Adding all these advanced settings might clog up the simplicity panotour has now.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest


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Tom Hiddleston, dork crush
We're so fickle around these parts. How fickle? It was just over a month ago that many of us ran mad with Tom Hiddleston crushes, and it took only a few weeks to pretty much end it for the majority. Check out Lainey's timeline—she started crushing here and it ended here, a mere fourteen days apart. Two weeks was all it took. My crush took a beating as well. I accidentally wrecked it for Lainey by bringing up Hiddles' Twitter, and my friends delighted in sending me frontrum-heavy videos of him, which can never be unseen. And then one day, it just clicked into place and my crush rebounded in full.
Tom Hiddleston is talented, smart and gorgeous, and he is a HUGE dork.
I love dorks. They're my flavor. Hiddleston's dorkiness is kind of endearing. I'm sure the guy has some ego tucked away somewhere, but his defining characteristic has rapidly become "enormous dork", which when you consider his background includes a double-first at Cambridge and that he's RADA trained, means the power of his dorkitude is overcoming his natural right to parade around as a SERIOUS AC-TOR, as many of his (lesser-qualified) peers do. Looking over the current crop of under-forty Brits making their way across the pond, what sets Hiddleston apart is a very down-to-earth accessibility that belies all the training and accomplishments. Like, I love Benedict Cumberbatch but I can't imagine any real-life scenario that ends in any way other than him looking down his nose at me and saying, "Please. No." But Hiddles is the one you could get a beer with and discuss who would win in a fight, a bear or a ninja (ninja-bear?).
Also, there's that story about the cute kid from The Avengers set. The photo made its way around the internet last year, and I think most people, like me, assumed the kid belonged to someone involved with the movie, but no, it was just some kid that happened across the Central Park set. You can read the whole story here (Chris Evans comes off really well, too). I'm not into bugging actors, especially when they're on set and working, but even my acid-and-rebar heart melts a little for a kid that gets to meet "real" superheroes, and I always appreciate actors who make time for the kidlets. It's part of taking on that kind of role—you will always and forever be that character to little kids, and there's a kind of responsibility in that. Don't ruin their childhoods, you know? (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, ELLIOT FROM ET.)
And then there's my kryptonite: Shakespeare. Hiddleston is doing Shakespeare. And not just any Shakespeare, but the Henry cycle (Henry IV parts 1 & 2 and Henry V). Show me Hiddlywinks in Shakespeare and I'm done. And that it's high-level Shakespeare and not standard high school lit stuff is basically—me melting into the pavement. The BBC filmed the Henrys as part of the London 2012 festival and they'll air later this summer (please don't make us wait six months to see them in North America).
Hiddleston is Prince Hal, Henry IV's bum of a son who gets his act together to be king in Henry V. Which means one of Shakespeare's greatest lines is going to come out of his mouth (and have you ever noticed that thing he does with his mouth? Watch Hiddles talking some time and tell me it's not outrageously sexy): Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close up the wall with our English dead. Favorite part of The Avengers. Shakespeare. Total dork. Tom Hiddleston might be my perfect man.
(Lainey: get him to quit Twitter then.)


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Spatterware and spongeware are terms that have changed in meaning in recent years, causing much confusion for collectors. Some say that spatterware is the term used by Americans, sponged ware or spongeware by the English. The earliest pieces were made in the late eighteenth century, but most of the spatterware found today was made from about 1800 to 1850. Early spatterware was made in the Staffordshire district of England for sale in America. Collectors also use the word spatterware to refer to kitchen crockery with added spatter made in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spongeware is very similar to spatterware in appearance. Designs were applied to ceramics by daubing the color on with a sponge or cloth. Many collectors do not differentiate between spongeware and spatterware and use the names interchangeably. Modern pottery is being made to resemble old spatterware and spongeware, but careful examination will show it is new. Many spatterware pieces are painted by hand and often picture flower, bird, and house motifs.
Enter your email below to receive Kovels Komments for the latest antiques & collectibles news, answers to readers questions, marks and tips. In your inbox every Wednesday.
Current & Past Issues
Buyer's Price Guide
Words of Wisdom (Letter to Lee)


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You are here
Next Technologies for Learning
Next Technologies for Learning (NTL) is a plan for the next innovative technologies that will impact learning. The goal of NTL is to personalize learning for students to support their pathway to career and college readiness. The first phase of this work has largely focused on building a foundation of digital content, tools, literacy, wireless infrastructure and the capacity in staff and students to leverage these tools and resources. These stepping stones allow Bloomington to continue to grow and systematize the best practices we are already using.
Click here for stories about what NTL looks like in our classrooms.
Timeline: Introduction of Personal Learning Devices
2013-14: 6th grade
2014-15: 6th-8th grade
2015-16: 6th-12th grade
2016-17: 3rd-12th grade + PK-2nd grade at a 1:3 ratio
PlanNTL includes three main areas of focus to comprehensively move our students into learning environments that help prepare them to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
Click here for a list of frequently asked questions about Next Technologies for Learning.


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The debate over whether or not Moose is too slow rumbles on. On one side, are the folks using it in production (and presumably happpy with it). On the other, are folks saying it adds multiple seconds to the start-up time.
Following on from my benchmarking Moose startup overhead post, Sue D. Nymme provided code that actually created an object. Thanks Sue!
I took a look and Sue's code uses MooseX::Declare that I haven't installed. One magic CPAN invocation and, oh my gosh, more than 20 minutes later, MooseX::Declare is finally installed. Now I'm thinking that the benchmark time is actually measuring the time for perl to load in and parse MooseX::Declare and tens of thousands of lines of prerequisites rather than how slow Moose itself is.
I'll compare just loading the modules Moose vs MooseX::Declare.
Then I'll add the rest of Sue's code.
And finally I'll actually create a Moose object.
use Modern::Perl; use Moose; use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints; use DateTime; 1;
use Modern::Perl; use MooseX::Declare; use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints; use DateTime; 1;
And moose.pl (taken from Sue D. Nymme's comment here.
use Benchmark qw(:hireswallclock); use strict; use warnings; my $perl = 'c:/strawberry/perl/bin/perl'; Benchmark::timethese(200, { '1just-moose' => sub { system(qq{$perl -e "require 'just-moose.pl';"}) }, '2all-includes' => sub { system(qq{$perl -e "require 'all-includes.pl';"}) }, '3nocreate' => sub { system(qq{$perl -e "require 'moose.pl';"}) }, '4create' => sub { system(qq/$perl -e "require 'moose.pl'; MooseObject->new({ name => 'Bob' })"/) }, });
The Results
I've elided the too few iterations warnings.
Benchmark: timing 200 iterations of 1just-moose, 2all-includes, 3nocreate, 4create... 1just-moose: 100.196 wallclock secs ( 0.05 usr + 0.25 sys = 0.30 CPU) @ 673.40/s (n=200) 2all-includes: 279.252 wallclock secs ( 0.08 usr + 0.34 sys = 0.42 CPU) @ 475.06/s (n=200) 3nocreate: 318.256 wallclock secs ( 0.06 usr + 0.28 sys = 0.34 CPU) @ 581.40/s (n=200) 4create: 320.979 wallclock secs ( 0.06 usr + 0.27 sys = 0.33 CPU) @ 611.62/s (n=200)
The bulk of the time is in loading the MooseX::Declare library. But on the other hand, declaring a single object did take a significant amount of time (approximately 40 seconds over 200 runs). I can now believe that declaring a lot of objects would be prohibitively expensive.
But that is using MooseX::Declare. I'm sure it is nowhere near as bad if we used Plain Ole Moose.


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Use the search criteria below to find your facility and change the reservation length.
Picnic Reservations will default to 2 hours. The max reservation length is 4 hours online. For reservations over 4 hours please contact us at 702-267-5707, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Friday.


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Co-Founder & Moderator
About Me
- About Aaron
- Biography
- Aaron is a passionate entrepreneur, inventor, researcher and developer of paradigm shattering technologies. His quest into physics and spirituality has brought him to a conclusion that they are not able to be separated in true science. He has a Bachelors of Science in Natural Health and multiple certifications from network administration to energy healing. Aaron's goal is to communicate difficult subjects in a way that is easy to understand.
- Location
- Washington State
- Interests
- paths, energy, physics, free energy, consciousness, subconscious mind, environment, energetic science ministries, esm
- Your Mission or Life Purpose
- Shining Light!
- Gender: Male of Female?
- Male
- Greatest influence
- Parents, Rodger Q. Estes, John Bedini, Tom Bearden, Peter Lindemann, Kevin Pirolo, Charles T. McGee MD, Linda Nadia Hole MD, Thomas Kobara MD
- Person(s) you would most like to meet
- Nikola Tesla,Thomas Jefferson
- Favorite Author &/or Book
- Tom Bearden - Energy From the Vacuum, Ingo Swann - Secrets of Power I & II, too many to list
- Favorite Movie(s)
- The Matrix Trilogy, X-Men Trilogy, Powder, Phenomenon, other human potential movies
- Favorite Song, Musician, Group or Albulm
- Mozart, etc...
- Favorite Links
- http://emediapress.com
Contact Info
- Home Page
- http://www.emediapress.com
- This Page
- http://www.energeticforum.com/members/2-aaron/