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Up through September 27, 1999 Tiger Stadium hosted crowds for major league baseball games, serving as home field for the Detroit Tigers. Located at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, this classic ballpark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has long stood as a symbol of stability in a city that felt so keenly the major social, political, and economic upheavals of twentieth century life. The future of the stadium is uncertain following the decision by the Tigers to abandon their traditional address. This decision came despite a determined 10-year effort by fans, architects, preservationists, and social activists to demonstrate that renovations could enhance its viability as both a profitable venue for a professional baseball franchise and an attractively identifiable landmark for a constantly rehabilitating city neighborhood.
Such uncertainty about the existence of Tiger Stadium would have struck most writers as inconceivable. In its cameo appearances in fiction by Loren D. Estleman and Harold Livingston, the ballpark often receives the fleeting attention appropriate to an indelible feature of the cityscape, something taken for granted as so fundamentally part of Detroit that the mere mention of it locks the setting in place. Tiger Stadium is viewed as such a given of life in Detroit that an arson conspiracy to destroy it comes to represent all that is evil in the fictional world of Duffy House, hard-boiled narrator of Crabbe Evers's Tigers Burning.
As Philip Levine describes Tiger Stadium in "A Walk with Tom Jefferson" (277-92), the "gray conning towers / of the ballpark" evoke the same strength and durability his speaker remembers seeing during World War II
at a railroad crossing
near Joy Road
as the Sherman tanks passed
two to a flat-bed car,
on their way to a war
in Europe or the Pacific, shipped from a city that mass-produced tanks, if not submarines, as part of an American arsenal for democracy. Forty years later, presumably in 1984, the last of the Tigers' full-fledged pennant seasons, urban survivors like Tom Jefferson, with a tenuous hold on the precarious streets of the city, seem to anchor a portion of their lives fast to the stadium. After all,
During baseball season
the neighborhood's a thriving
business for anyone
who can make change
and a cardboard sign
that reads "Parking $3."
This was especially true in 1984 when more than 2 million fans attended games and the speaker muses about watching "the light rise / from the great bowl / of the stadium" with "50,000 / pulling at the night / air for one last scream."
In "Like Colavito" Jan Mordenski writes of the stability an eight-year-old girl instinctively felt while with her father at Tiger Stadium in the early 1960s, when so many city neighborhoods underwent unusually rapid racial changeovers. All too often the first influx of black residents coincided with the aggressive block-busting tactics of unscrupulous realty companies trying to scare white homeowners into putting their properties up for sale at reduced asking prices. During the spring after home run champ Rocky Colavito was acquired from the Cleveland Indians in a less pernicious blockbuster of a trade for batting champ Harvey Kuenn, "change was in the air in a city that / negotiated its way into and through the Sixties. / 'Tiger' Stadium just made sense" then, for many reasons. Chalk lines marking foul territory from fair were permanent and non-negotiable, overseen by umpires. Ballplayers like Colavito digging in at home plate seemed to put down roots, even when transplanted from a place like Cleveland, all the more important when
things were changing, and nobody knew that better
that year than an eight-year-old poised on the
right-field line, bundled up against the winds
in an Am. League jacket who, dusting the salt
from the wounds of her hands, waited, crouched forward,
stretching her glove to catch whatever time
was going to toss her.
Perhaps for no writer does the ballpark more fully inhabit and inform the poetry than for Jim Daniels. And while Tiger Stadium remains for him every bit as stolid-and solid-a fixture in Detroit life as the one fan in "The Fat Man at the Ballgame" (Long Ball 18) who always "stands behind the last row of general admission"-"Every game . . . back there / keeping score"-its abundant reasonably-priced seating also affords common ground of sorts. People of all ages, sizes, and sexes-all colors, incomes, and persuasions-rub up against each other in democratic proximity, even intimacy. Where else, Daniels seems to ask in the same poem (even if his speaker never takes up his wife's suggestion to "just talk to him sometime"), can the so-called "fattest man in the world" inspire another "general admission man" like the speaker to claim him as "my pal" and to remind himself that
What takes him here each night
is what takes me here—we've all got
a little weight to lose.
I haven't been keeping score,
But I know I should.
We're both fans of the game
This grass diamond open to the skies both day and night has occasionally provided everybody with a green and welcome respite from the city's summertime heat and its sometimes hotter streets. In "Time, Temperature" (M-80 29-43) another Daniels speaker can find shared relief in an "open fire hydrant in hot August / after an afternoon game at Tiger Stadium" with a "young black kid, maybe six, . . . dancing / in his underwear in the cool spray." Such relief, he knows, must sound "naïve," coming as it does after the roar of white voices, raw and racist and rage-filled, that he has remembered hearing in the searing decades of antagonism following the 1967 riots. Still, the common grounds of the stadium and its immediate surrounding streetscape do emphasize for this Daniels speaker that "we dance under the same sun / and there is room enough for both of us / in the spray on Rosa Parks Boulevard." After all, the "one big sun" will take us all, not out to but out of the (ball)game, to die, "take us all / in its own good time," so why not bridge barriers while there's still a chance?
Tiger Stadium itself has even done its own share to help close the gap between black and white, an ironic twist of history in light of the Tigers' own long refusal to sign black ballplayers after Jackie Robinson first broke the major-league color barrier in 1947. Not until 1958, when Ozzie Virgil joined the club, did any African American take the field wearing the old English D and have a chance at hearing the cheers of the crowds. For many white Detroit fans in the late 1950s and early 1960s the ballpark might have been the only place where they actively pulled for the success of a black man like Willie Horton, a graduate of Northwestern High School and soon a mainstay in left field. The speaker in "Willie the Wonder" (Long Ball 14) still marvels at the moment in 1968 "after the Tigers won the Series": he "stood with Willie Horton . . . / shaking his hand" and posed for a picture. What Horton had done on the field at Tiger Stadium that championship year, "his best"-"36 homers, 85 RBIs, .285 average"-led the speaker to try matching Willie's powerful grip when he "tried to squeeze as hard / as I could, twelve years old." Years later the memory persists just as "Willie's muscles still stand out": "I remember him as calm, passive, / my hand in his, just another sweaty palm, / another white kid in the long line." For how many of those white kids in 1968 was Willie Horton's the first black hand they shook, the hand of a man so strong "They say he once broke a bat / just by checking his swing." Such gestures should not be downplayed so soon after the 1967 riots that left much of the city burned-out and left two races wary of Detroit's future as their mutual hometown.
To be sure not all encounters have necessarily been pleasant in this place with more than 10,000 cheap seats in the double-decked bleachers. In "Stormin' Norman" (Long Ball 6-7) the older voice speaking recalls how as a youngster he "never sat in the bleachers / with my father again" after one particularly raucous "Sunday doubleheader against the Yanks." He remembers "a man who called himself Old Red" who "wore / his shirt on his head like a swami" and grew more foul-mouthed with every two beers "(limit two to a customer)" guzzled under a sun that "blazed away." Even though Old Red had to be escorted from the bleachers by a security guard and "disappeared in the darkness / under the stands," the speaker who eventually grew "old enough to venture alone / to the bleachers" has also acquired with the passing of years enough perspective and wisdom to perhaps understand Old Red. At least he can now interpret the drunkard's vulgar tirade against future Hall of Famer Al Kaline as the bellow of a lifetime "singles hitter himself, / . . . who'd trade it all / for one over the roof," aspiring to follow the popular example of his hero, long-time first baseman Norm Cash. The common grounds of the stadium have yielded an experience commensurate with the speaker's eventual capacity for sensitivity and insight.
Of course Tiger Stadium can always reprise its century-old role as the queen of diamonds in any baseball-grounded fiction, as it does for Patrick Creevy and Troy Soos. But for Daniels the games played at Tiger Stadium and the players starring in those games provide the bases for enduring emotional connections. These connections often embrace friends and family across generations. In "Baseball Cards #1" (Long Ball 4) Jake Wood seems to be calling to the speaker "across hundreds of miles" from a 1964 Series 2 baseball card, one among the "10,342 . . . in my parents' attic." Only someone attached to the games played at the stadium, to the family members who took him there, could be so affected years later by one of the cards he collected as a boy. Charley "Paw Paw" Maxwell's pinch-hit home run in "Nightmare" (Long Ball 5) resounds in the memory of another Daniels speaker every bit as clearly as it did that one late August night he spent outdoors in his sleeping bag, when the original play-by-play "voice of Ernie Harwell" from the stadium came through "on my father's old transistor / . . . close to my ear." That same Harwell voice is what a grandmother in "Play by Play" (Long Ball 22) holds onto like "gospel . . . . / Even at the ballpark, she squeezes her transistor." The games of summer still shape the old woman's days: "Instant runs, she says / in the middle of making tea, / wiping the table." Though she once stayed home on a cold and rainy September afternoon and did not make one of the "small crowd on Ernie Harwell Day," she still "applauded her radio." According to her dutiful grandson, whenever she cannot pick up the broadcast signal "she laughs nervously," as if losing touch with life itself-life being now like "the red glow of a burner she's left on" but forgotten. Certainly the golden moments and passions of youth can get revisited with every trip down "the Lodge Freeway / toward the stadium," as happens in "31-6" (Long Ball 10-11), dedicated to Denny McLain, baseball's last thirty-game winner. The grown-up speaker has no desire to let go of his personal highlight from the season of 1968, "the year after the riots." It occurred at "Tiger Stadium: . . . / Grass so green it seemed like a mirage / in the raging heat of an angry city." He recounts his twelve-year-old's gut-level identification with McLain who "grooved one to Mantle, / put him third on the all-time list / his last year, your 31st win, best moment." Even years later this speaker insists on his kinship with Dennis Dale McLain, since
I was twelve, sitting in the bleachers,
saying goddamn and shit, spitting,
fighting dirty for home run balls.
I cheered you because you were bad—
dumping water on reporters . . .
gambling, mouthing off.
No matter that McLain later landed in prison after "another bankrupt deal." His less-than-heroic setbacks mirror the speaker's own measured fall from grace and the graceless pranks of youth:
I'm in general admission now—my back
can't take the bleachers
and I can't afford the boxes.
I'm not such a bad boy
myself anymore.
The ballpark hosting the Tigers has seen more than its share of disappointments, built as it was for a game where hitters consider themselves successful if they don't fail more than 7 times every 10 at-bats, where a plaque at Cooperstown awaits if 4 hits result from every 10 trips to the plate. Those sporting disappointments hurt at the time, but they're manageable pains, nothing compared to what life will dish out later; the stadium is a place to practice coping. So, in "New Words" (Long Ball 9), a man is reminded of how, as a boy on the cusp of adolescence, he lost his temper after "the Tigers lose another game. / Don Wert let a ball roll through / his legs and down the line in left."
This young man then cried, "You pimp, . . . as the winning run scored" and promptly received from his mother a stern lecture on the more brutal life awaiting him in a world where "men sell women's bodies. / Don Wert was not a good third baseman. / Don Wert was not a pimp." Even when the heartache of a twelve-year-old was intense, as it must have been in "World Series, 1968" (Long Ball 13), watching the hometown Tigers lose 10-1 from "left field box seats, upper deck," the grown-up speaker can still recollect his refusal to leave early: "I wouldn't budge. I kept whispering The World Series, The World Series . . . / but I was still cold." If hurts need bearing up under, they're more bearable at Tiger Stadium. In "Polish-American Night, Tiger Stadium" (Long Ball 15), a boys' night out with "girlfriends / in general admission" at first made the speaker and his buddies feel "like old guys / taking our wives to the ballgame." But then everything went wrong, on the field and in the relationships. Relief pitcher John Hiller's bum knee and, later on, his heart attack, stand in for missteps in love-betrayals and infidelities and changes of heart. If Hiller himself came to realize "There's a risk any time you pitch," it's also true that the speaker and his friends "were just beginning to learn that night, / that it can all come on so suddenly / just by bending your leg the wrong way."
Whatever the disappointments of life, Tiger Stadium seems to work to heal the wounds or at least to tender space for such healing to occur. In "The Bookkeepers Talk Baseball" (Long Ball 20), a CPA sits trapped at a desk, bombarded from all sides by co-workers who put down the sport itself as "boring" and "can hardly stand one game / much less two." As casual fans question, "Why go to the ballpark, / . . . and deal with the traffic / and the crowds?" the speaker clearly feels bruised by the number-crunching office environment, pelted by audit-level abuse as he's "flipping through accounts, pulling overdrafts. / My ass squirms in padded comfort / longing for the bleacher's hard bench." To one of his colleagues' claims to like baseball "better / on tv" the would-be fan hears the echoes of Tiger Stadium vendors in his mind's ear and revives for his own sanity the sights and sounds, the taste and feel, of being at the ballpark. He feels utterly transported: "I bang my seat / to start a rally" right in the middle of the workplace, just to survive the tedium of the day's grinding labor, the numbing routine. "Extra Innings, Tiger Stadium, 1982" (Long Ball 16-17) suggests how an extended time at the ballpark might constitute, however temporarily, soothing balm for the scars of a failed marriage. This speaker remembers going to Tiger Stadium with a divorcee friend after he and his own wife "had split-the first time / we were both free in the ten years / we'd known each other." Their date unfolds on a "clear spring night / when we're flush with possibility, / the fresh upper-deck breeze blowing out." After all their respective heartache, and after a game filled with two "bench-clearing fights" which saw even the venerable manager Sparky Anderson "out there wrestling around," life starts to feel good again when Kirk Gibson
wins it with an upper-deck blast in the twelfth
and everybody's so happy no one wants to leave
and we're hugging each other, a little hoarse,
a little drunk, a little in love.
Later on, a bit of love-making behind them, these two new fans of each other even "joke about getting married, / how anything's possible in extra innings." The speaker does not really need to point out how "Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing' comes on the radio," since the healing had clearly started already at Tiger Stadium. No intervening years can erase the speaker's sensation of feeling once more his patched-up "heart full / with the swell of that huge crowd / as the ball rose."
That Tiger Stadium has curative properties is not a notion restricted to baseball faithful like Jim Daniels. In "Stadia," a short story by Alyson Carol Hagy, a bookstore clerk named Laura buys for herself and Dan, her boyfriend of six months, several pairs of tickets to Tiger ballgames in the hope of helping him cope with the impending anniversary of his father's sudden death, a trauma she thinks he has yet to recover from. That Dan's father had never taken his son to a game at Tiger Stadium is beside the point. Dan himself had gone with his friends many times and Laura surmises that time there will bring a deeper solace than any other activity she might devise. Unfortunately she could not foresee how Dan's juvenile act of delinquency-trying to sneak a pint bottle of whiskey past the turnstiles in his boot-would sabotage her efforts at getting him to face life as his father might have wished him to. As Dan is forcibly escorted to the street outside by the stadium security guards, Laura catches a last glimpse of him "trapped as the cold metal fence that cut her sight of him into colorless pieces." If only he had been able to make it inside to his seat next to her, perhaps he could have been made whole again.
No matter who the writer, Tiger Stadium conjures up special moments. In "Getting Al Kaline's Autograph," by Richard Behm, the prized signature may be won by requesting it "'for my Dad' / . . . the lie like a hard earned double," but it would never be worth the trouble if somewhere in the past the speaker hadn't seen Al Kaline in action at the stadium "delicately plucking a screamer from the wall / in deep right center field." The speaker has screening on a continuous loop in his mind the slow-motion sequence of how Kaline . . .
. . . loped toward the dugout,
saw me in the stands, flipped
that pure, sweet sphere into my lap
and the crowd roared.
Only such a cherished instant at the ballpark can explain the speaker's avid pursuit years later of an autograph stretched "across the page / like a smoker down the left field line."
Nothing ever has or ever will come close to Tiger Stadium as the diamond jewel of the city. Like a pendant it lies close to the very heart of Detroit.
As a board member of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club, Michael P. Gruber wrote the nomination that eventually secured the stadium's listing on the National Register of Historic Places. He grew up in Detroit and attended the University of Detroit High School and the University of Detroit. He received his M.A. in English at Duke University. He lives in Detroit and teaches at Mercy High School in Farmington Hills.
Photo credits: Top and bottom photos by Anna Fedor. Middle photo: © Lowell Boileau, DetroitYes.com
Behm, Richard. "Getting Al Kaline's Autograph." Michigan Quarterly Review 25.2 (1986): 350.
Creevy, Patrick. Tyrus: An American Legend. New York: Forge, 2002.
Daniels, Jim. The Long Ball. Pig-in-a-Poke Press, 1988.
---. M-80. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993.
Estleman, Loren D. Jitterbug. New York: Forge, 1998.
---. King of the Corner. New York: Bantam, 1992.
Evers, Crabbe. Tigers Burning: A Duffy House Mystery. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
Hagy, Alyson Carol. "Stadia." Michigan Quarterly Review 25.2 (1986): 351-62.
Levine, Philip. New Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Livingston, Harold. The Detroiters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
Mordenski, Jan. "Like Colavito." Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001. Ed. Melba Joyce Boyd and M.L. Liebler. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001.
Soos, Troy. Hunting a Detroit Tiger. New York: Kensington, 1997.


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A STUDY OF PENSION PLANS A gap in the existing literature on pensions has been filled by publication in January of the Firm's study, The Pension System in the United States. Principals Robert L. Potter (Cincinnati) and John C. Tillotson (Executive Office) did the research and the original writing on which the study is based. Executive Office partners Paul W. Pinkerton and Everett J. Shifflett, respectively, edited and directed the work. Private pension plans have had a tremendous growth in the past two decades. Together with Social Security contributions, costs of private pension plans have become a significant item of business costs and liabilities. This new The year 1958 marked the start of the Firm's intensive investigation, development, and testing of statistical sampling as a new audit tool. Kenneth W. Stringer, Executive Office, the partner who had most to do with the project, was helped in the later stages by a committee of five partners and by many other people from the practice offices. The result is the Sampling Plan, published in October 1962 as Technical Procedure Manual Bulletin 301. New Mathematical Concepts During those four years H & S developed some entirely new mathematical concepts, in cooperation with Professor Frederick F. Stephan of Princeton, and devised a method of relating statistical sampling to internal control. Now, six years after this work began, we have encouraging reports on the Plan's application. Comparing the Firm's use of statistical sampling during the busy season 1961-62 (while the Plan was in its testing stage) and 1962- 63, we can see a marked increase. booklet is not intended to make the reader an expert on pension plans; what it does is to bring basic information together in one place in a form that is readily usable by our people who meet with pension plans in their day-to-day work. Copies have been provided to all professional personnel of the Firm. Study Contents The booklet begins with a look at governmental systems — mainly Social Security, which now covers some 85 million people. It then describes private plans, both insured and trusteed, the types of benefits and the ways they are provided, and various methods of fi- There are indications, too, that it will be used much more in the future. Reports from the offices comparing these two periods show that the number of engagements in which the Sampling Plan was used more than doubled, from 150 to 358. The total number of applications of the Plan increased from 389 to 886. Statistical sampling affords more objective choices of how much information to test and better means for evaluating errors uncovered by the tests. The Sampling Plan measures and controls the risks inherent in testing practices. There is reason to believe it results in a more uniform application of auditing judgment throughout the Firm. Experience with the Plan shows that it does not change total audit time greatly. In 96 per cent of recent cases in which it was used, total audit time did not change by more than 5 per cent. The Plan is being used effectively for client engagements of all sizes. When Bulletin 301 was written, it nancing them. One chapter assumes an employee group with stated benefits and then compares costs and fund balances under several funding methods. Another chapter outlines federal income tax aspects of pension plans. A bibliography is provided. Besides our own people, others who may find the study helpful are clients, bankers, and lawyers who have felt the need for a general understanding of pension plans. Smaller companies that do not yet have pension plans will find it useful as an introduction to the subject; and companies that already have plans may note alternative methods of financing them. was thought that three stratums were a practical maximum in sample design. Our experience now shows that multi-stratum design (often four or more stratums, and sometimes up to twelve and even twenty) is feasible and results in substantial reduction in sample size. The great majority of applications to tests of transactions have covered a full year. This reflects recognition of the fact that while a sample selected from the transactions of one month gives assurance only with respect to that month, in most cases only moderately greater samples give assurance as to the transactions of an entire year. These encouraging results can be attributed also to increased familiarity with the Plan and more efficient selection techniques, including increased use of clients' data processing equipment in the Plan's application.The Firm is now considering the practicability of a standard EDP program for sample design which our auditors would be able to apply in all cases on clients' equipment. USE OF STATISTICAL SAMPLING RISES 7
Object Description
Study of pension plans
Use of statistical sampling rises
Pensions -- Accounting
Auditing -- Statistical Methods
H&S Reports, Vol. 01, (1964 spring), p. 07
|Originally published by: Haskins & Sells
|Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte;
|PDF page image with corrected OCR scanned at 400 dpi
|Deloitte Digital Collection
|Digital Publisher
|University of Mississippi Library. Accounting Collection
|Date-Digitally Created

subset: commoncrawl


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Much as we love Kimi for dressing like a gorilla and falling over things, he is sometimes required to keep from drinking and do real work. This includes winning the Formula One World Championship and being in the army, apparently.
Räikkönen took his twelve months of mandatory Finnish conscription at a sports school, eventually becoming a non-commissioned officer.
Not being from Finland, it's hard to know if Finns take the world champion's military service seriously, or if this demonstration video is just something that they all laugh at.
(Hat tip to Matej!)


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Photography retouching
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|Orangevale, Calif.
|High School:
|Bella Vista
|Mid Free/Breast/Fly/IM
2013-14: Recorded her season-best times at the America East Championships, placing second in the 100 fly (56.11), third in the 100 breast (1:03.24) and second in the 100 free (51.13)…At the Patriot Invite, she placed second in the 50 free (23.75) with a season-best time… In a dual meet against Howard on Senior Day at the UMBC Aquatic Complex, she won the 200 IM (2:13.20)… Holds the second-fastest time in the 100 free, 100 breast and 100 fly in the UMBC history book…Helped the 200 medley relay win the gold medal, 400 medley win the silver medal, and the 200 and 400 free relays capture bronze medals at the America East Championships… Both of the medley relay teams broke the UMBC school record.
2012-13: Won gold in the 100 breaststroke and 100 freestyle, setting a new school record in the 100 breast (1:02.90) event, at the America East Championships… Also won a silver medal in the 100 fly at the conference meet… Helped lead the Retrievers to gold medals in the 200 medley, 200 free, and 400 free relays… Her times of 50.83 in the finals of the 100 free and 55.32 in the 100 fly finals both rank second all-time in UMBC program history… The 200 medley relay team set a new school record (1:42.70) at the America East meet, and a new UMBC Aquatic Complex record (1:46.06) against East Carolina on Jan. 26… Won seven individual events during the dual meet season.
2011-12: Swam a season-best time of 1:04.74 in the 100-yd breaststroke en route to placing third at the Patriot Invitational... Also claimed top-ten finishes in the 50 free (5th), 100 fly (10th) and 100 free (10th) at the invitational at George Mason... Won five individual events during the dual meet season, inclduing two against George Washington on Oct. 29... Also helped the Retrievers win five relays during the dual meet schedule.
2010-2011: Helped claim second in both the 200 (1:43.70) and 400-yard medley (3:44.25) relay at the America East Championships... Both relays broke UMBC school records... Placed third in the 100 breast, ninth in the 200 breast and 11th in the 100 fly at conference meet... Placed fifth in the 100 breast at the Patriot Invitational... Helped set the UMBC Natatorium record in the 200 medley relay against Rider... 100 breast (1:03.81) and 200 breast (2:20.38) times at the America East meet ranks third and fifth on UMBC's all-time list... Named to the America East All-Conference Team.
Background: Earned All-American citations by the National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association in the 200 medley relay in 2007, the 400 free relay in 2008 and 2009 and the 200 free relay in 2010…. Broke her own 100 fly record her junior year at Bella Vista.
Personal: Daughter of Carrie Baynes… Has a younger sister, Julienne… Majoring in emergency health services… Born Dec. 2, 1992.


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LaDonna Kitterman was born on August 13, 1988, in Oxford, Mississippi, and was raised by Jim and Pearl Kitterman. When LaDonna was a few days old, her parents left her at her grandparents' house and never contacted her or them again. Her grandfather, Jim, worked as a handyman and always had plenty of jobs around Oxford. Pearl took in ironings.
LaDonna was a very happy child and didn't know about her parents' abandonment until she was old enough to start school. She thought of her grandparents as Mom and Dad, and they loved her very much.
LaDonna loved school and was well-liked by most of her classmates. She was active in her church, participating in after school programs and summer Bible school when she was younger and later leading some of those same programs when she became a teenager.
LaDonna knew at an early age that she would not be going to college unless she earned a scholarship because there just wasn't enough money for that. Since she made average grades, she also knew that scholarships would be harder to come by.
She was checking the job ads looking for work when she saw one for nurse's aides and decided she had nothing to lose. She wasn't sure if she would get the job since she had no professional training, but she helped take care of her grandfather and she hoped that would count.
Pearl prayed for LaDonna to get a job because she and Jim were getting old and she was worried about LaDonna's future. When LaDonna got a job at Yoknapatawpha Acres, she and Pearl were both thrilled that she had reliable way to provide for herself for the long term as well as an in at a place that could care for Pearl and Jim if it ever came to that.


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Science is always "under construction" in the Works Theater: A live showcase of dazzling demonstrations in a one-of-a-kind industrial setting. Taste a frozen marshmallow, see the glow of molten metal, or feel the zap of electricity. Watch chemical reactions in action or launch a fiery rocket into space. It's all in the Works!
*Please note: Some Works Theater programs may contain water-vapor fog, strobe lighting, and loud sounds.
Planning to visit us? Check out today's show schedule.
Shows are available for group bookings Monday through Friday. Add a show for just $2 per person!
Talk with us about which shows are available on your selected date. Register early for best selection!
To schedule a visit for your group, call 412.237.3410.
Soar through the Solar System in our Works Theater! Early learners will explore space chemistry as they visit Earth and its "pals" (the other major planets) and learn why Earth has the right stuff for life!
Sponsored by: Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh; Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh
Content themes: Early Learners, Physical Science, Astronomy
Grades: PreK & Kindergarten
Capacity: 30 Students
Learn the states of matter and see the chilling effects of super-cold liquid nitrogen. This ever-popular set of experiments demonstrates just how "cool" solids, liquids, and gasses can be!
Content Themes: Physical Science
Grades: 1–6
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The West Craven Eagles are a different team than when it lost to New Bern, 10-5, on March 5.
The West Craven Eagles are a different team than when it lost to New Bern, 10-5, on March 5.
A new coach in David Fernandez, a new attitude, and improved play has the Eagles in position to turn their season around.
On Thursday, the Eagles exacted some revenge on the Bears with an 8-3 victory in New Bern.
West Craven scored six of its eight runs in the seventh inning, busting a 2-2 game wide open and into an 8-2 advantage.
�It�s always a rivalry game with New Bern in anything,� West Craven coach David Fernandez said. �I�m proud of the girls for hanging tough when we were down 2-0 and not just going away with a big conference game waiting tomorrow.
�Their resiliency through the coaching change and the ups and downs has been great.�
New Bern scored two in the first, but didn�t light up the scoreboard again until the seventh with one run, when it was too little, too late.
West Craven�s huge seventh inning was ignited by a Rachel Riggs� RBI single, bunt singles from Courtney Pierre and Hailee Register and an enormous three-run double from Robin Dail.
�Coach has been preaching to us to stay tough and not get down about anything, so we just did that tonight,� Dail said.
�When I came up in the seventh and bases were loaded, I knew I had to do something to get them in and I got the big hit. It�s great as a senior to beat them (New Bern) because they get all the talk, so it gives us a lot of pride.�
Mariah Harris picked up the win on the mound for West Craven and went 3-for-5 with two triples.
The Eagles rise to 6-8 overall on the season, while New Bern drops to 8-10.
West Craven will host South Central Friday and New Bern welcomes in New Hanover.
Jordan Honeycutt can be reached at 252-635-5670 or at email@example.com Follow Jordan on Twitter @JHONEYnbsj29


text:
I am searching for the right expression that describe the state of something that is planned to be For example, I plan to bake a cake, and try to hide that from my kids. How do I ask for a hiding place for my not yet baked cake? With emphasis on the planned activity of baking.
Can I say
Do you know a hiding place for my to be baked cake?
Or do I say
Do you know a hiding place for my cake to be baked?


text:
In Portlandia, Brunch Is Never That Simple
[There was a video here]
Tonight's season finale of Portlandia was a rather different beast than previous episodes: instead of a series of sketches with one recurring story, "Brunch Village" was one story that brought a few characters together. While it wasn't as strong as some previous episodes, the journey that Peter took from indecisive wimp to conquering hero was well rendered, with the added layer of him claiming a decisive victory over indecision. Plus, lampooning brunch is right in the show's wheelhouse.
So that's it for season two of Portlandia, I thought most of it worked really well. With something as kitschy and zeitgeisty as this show, it can be easy to fall into a second season trap where inflated expectations don't gel with no longer fresh material and I think Fred and Carrie did a fine job of avoiding that pitfall. While it's true that no singular sketch reached the height of "This Bar is Over" or "Put a Bird On It," the season really hit its stride in the middle episodes and came off really nicely.


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Gbzh wrote:Salut tout et tous.
Bon, ça fait 2-3 semaines que je me suis m'habitué aux logiciels, et j'ai enfin compris que mon pano head maison droit être remplacer, mais par la quelle ???
Je travaille dans l'immobilier et j''utilise AP et PT pour les photos panoramiques des maisons que je vendre. J'utilise un sony A35 avec un Samyung 8mm fisheye. Je ne cherche par à faire des gigapanos, ni le HD, mais les panos simple et surtout léger pour télécharger plus rapidement. Je cherche une tête qui est facile à utiliser, compact et assis léger et sans avoir besoin de braquer le banque non plus.
Donc après pas mal fouiné sur le net j'ai une liste de 3 modèles pour +/-200 € pièce :
- Nodal Ninja 3 avec rotateur de base
- PanoMaxx II
- La nouvelle Bushman Gobi
J'aimerai bien avoir vos avis si ils sont stable, facile, etc, etc. Merci d'avance et Kenavo !
Gbzh wrote:Hi Mediavets,
Thanks for the answer.I don't know how good your French is,
but just in case I'll give you a quick run down of my needs.
Basically I am a freelance estate agent here in Brittany France and am adding panoshots for the properties, I wouldn't go as far as saying virtual tours, but 1-3 sphericals to get the feel for a place. I am purposely keeping the image quality low so that it loads up easily for every one, and they are more to give an idea of the rural settings of the properties I market, as opposed to being works of art.
I actually use a Samyung 8mmm Fisheye (not a Sigma) as these are early days for me.
Up until now I have used a homemade bracket in landscape position and have done 3 shots + nadir and wenith.
Obviously once I buy my pano head, this might change with the portrait position, but you get the gist.
As you said the NN3 is the longest established, but everyone suggests getting a rotator for them, where the other two it seems very much an option.
The panoMaxx seems similar to the NN3, For the click mechanisms I am not too worried as I am(will be) using a standard set up.
And finally concerning, and finally the Gobi is the newbie, but the light weight and compact side appealed to me.
Your feed back (and any one elses ) is more than welcome.
Gbzh wrote:Your feed back (and any one elses ) is more than welcome.
Gbzh wrote:My appologies to the moderator!!
Being English living if France I flit between the two, must of missed a click! (also answer Mediavets unasked question!! hehe)
And to answer Mediavets (asked) questions, the main reason is to get neater stitches, especially when it comes to the nadir, the horizontal plain works out fine, the zenith is usually the sky, so no real problem there. But I find hand held nadis, unless on grass or gravel, don't always work out quite right, even more so when I do the inside shots over tiled floor or on patios for example.
My home made brakets, is a massive part of technological engineering (not!) as it comprises of a pushbike stabiliser with the wheel taken off and painted black !!!! (Posher when its black!!) then wing bolted the tripod headplate to one end, and the recuperated base screw is slotted into the wheel adjuster slot so that you can adjust the nadir (well kind of!)
So I think I will probably go for the Gobi (unless some one says otherwise), the main reason being (besides budget) that it is light and compact and I already have a fair amount of kit to take around to the houses, so hopefully will fit nicely in my camera bag. Another minor reason is because I think it looks nice, as opposed to all the others being matt black; and unfortunately part of the real estate business is to do with looking posh and smart!
Thanks for your input Mediavet.
Gbzh wrote:Good point Med, but the Gobi has a " unique solution is a simple groove that allows you to rotate the vertical arm to shoot the nadir. No other head offers such ease of use." built in, so once again beats the NN3 on cost. Which certainly looks a lot easier.
PS for the Moderator : I think Kolor need to renegociate their price with Bushman!!
USER wrote:Err.. are they not offering it at the same price as Bushman?
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In 1600, Rome's Campo de' Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city's execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. The event was carefully timed. AshWednesday is the primary day of Christian penance. As for the year, Pope Clement VIII chose it because 1600 was a jubilee for the Church—a festivity that would be enhanced by the execution of an important heretic. Bruno rode to the Campo on a mule, the traditional means of transport for people going to their death. (It was also a practical means. After years in the Inquisition's prisons, many of the condemned could not walk.) Once he arrived and mounted the pyre, a crucifix was held up to his face. According to a witness, he turned away angrily. He could not speak; he had been gagged with a leather bridle. (Or, some say, an iron spike had been driven through his tongue.) He was tied to the stake, and the pyre was lit. When it had burned out, his remains were dumped into the Tiber. As Ingrid Rowland writes in "Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), the Church thereby made Bruno a martyr. But "a martyr to what?" she asks. That is the question that her book, the first full-scale biography of Bruno in English, tries, with difficulty, to answer.
Bruno was born in Nola, a small city east of Naples, in 1548. His father was a mercenary in the service of the Spanish crown, which had ruled Naples since the beginning of the century. According to Rowland, he was a lonely, bookish boy. At the age of fourteen, he was sent to Naples to be educated—a move that apparently left a permanent mark on his mind. At that time, Rowland writes, Naples was the fifth-largest city in the world, housing masses of "fishermen, seamstresses, vendors, porters, laundresses, carpenters, sausage makers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and water sellers who went barefoot in the mild climate and lived largely on bread and figs." Above those plain folk were the grandees who ruled the city; below them were the beggars and prostitutes who swarmed the alleys. No one knows where Bruno lived during his first years in Naples, but Rowland imagines him in crowded student quarters, "a solitary teenager plunged suddenly into urban chaos." This experience, she says, taught him survival skills, which he would need in his life. It may also have been the source of what would later be his governing image of the universe: fullness, infinitude.
At seventeen, he entered the Dominican monastery of San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, a learned institution staffed with sons of the nobility. That didn't mean that they behaved any better than other priests—or noblemen—of the period. During Bruno's time, friars of San Domenico were involved in cases of assault, theft, and forgery, not to mention the chronic problem of fornication. But this rich monastery was useful to Bruno. There, Rowland writes, he learned to move among the ruling class. He also acquired intellectual rigor. San Domenico was a conservative institution. It taught Scholastic philosophy—the world of Aristotle, revived and Catholicized by St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholars of the Middle Ages—as if no other philosophies existed. They did exist. From the early Renaissance onward, that world picture—limited, tidy, and comforting—had been challenged by a rebirth of the ideas of Plato, who had a very different slant on things: visionary, poetic. After Bruno's Scholastic training at San Domenico, Rowland says, he encountered Neoplatonism, and it transformed his thinking. She gives this a lot of space. As a Renaissance historian—see "The Culture of the High Renaissance" (1998) and "From Heaven to Arcadia" (2005), a collection of essays for The New York Review of Books—she has been dealing with Neoplatonism for years, and she likes the idea of philosophy as rapture. That's probably why she decided to write a book on Bruno. She sees Neoplatonism as his beacon, but she is glad for him that, before he stuck his head up among the stars, his feet had been planted on the ground by Aristotle and Aquinas.
That dichotomy becomes the basis of her portrait of Bruno. He had three personalities, she says. One was Scholastic—strict, system-building. The second was "a Platonist's poetic exaltation." He added a third, all his own: "a dark wit born in his parents' little house . . . and stiletto-sharpened on the streets of Naples." In time, the darkness came to rule his thoughts. In one of his books, he described himself as "irritated, recalcitrant, and strange, content with nothing, stubborn as an old man of eighty, skittish as a dog that has been whipped a thousand times." His nickname, he said, was "the exasperated."
He became a priest at the age of twenty-four and received the equivalent of a doctorate in theology three years later. He was apparently a brilliant student and also, now and then, an exasperated one. Upon moving into his cell at the monastery, he disposed of the holy art—pictures of the Madonna, St. Catherine of Siena, a pious bishop—that decorated its walls. Another time, in a discussion with an older priest, he defended the logic (not the substance) of an argument made by the fourth-century priest Arius that Christ was not fully divine—the so-called Arian heresy. Eventually, a copy of Erasmus's proscribed "Commentaries," with notes by Bruno in its margins, was found in the latrine that he used. Even at the height of the Counter-Reformation, which this was, such offenses, distributed over ten years in the monastery, seem trifling. They sound like notations from the F.B.I. file of some poor professor who dared to teach Gorky in the fifties. Nevertheless, Bruno, at around the age of twenty-seven, was informed that he was being investigated by the Inquisition. Was someone trying to get rid of him? (Why the latrine search, an unpleasant task in the sixteenth century?) Was he trying to get out of the priesthood? (Why annotate the Erasmus? Why not just read it?) Whatever the real story, Bruno, hearing of the proceedings, discarded his priest's garments and headed north, eventually crossing the border into Switzerland. To the Church authorities, that was as good as a confession; they defrocked and excommunicated him in absentia. To Bruno, apparently, it was a liberation, and he became the man we know, or think we know: the freethinker, the heretic, the man who would be burned.
For fifteen years, he travelled—to Geneva, Toulouse, Lyon, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Padua, Venice—never staying more than two or three years in any city. Wherever he went, he looked for a job teaching philosophy, and in some places he got one. In Paris, he gave a series of thirty lectures on logic and metaphysics. Elsewhere, he had less luck. At Oxford, when he gave a tryout presentation, the audience laughed at his accent and his Neapolitan way of talking with his hands. (He hated the English ever after. They "look down their noses," he said, "laugh at you . . . fart at you with their lips.") Sometimes he damaged his own cause. During his stay in Geneva, he published a broadsheet listing twenty mistakes that a highly placed professor had made in a single lecture. He was sued for slander and had to leave town in a hurry.
By about the age of twenty-eight, he was publishing as well as teaching. In his lifetime, he produced some thirty works—treatises, pamphlets, dialogues, poems, even a play. Some of these writings were in Latin, the language of his schooling; accordingly, they were rigorous, systematic, Scholastic. The others were in vernacular Italian, and these were often ebullient, concrete, and dramatic—Neoplatonic, by Rowland's definition. Either way, they advanced the concept of the universe that he said he had begun developing soon after his departure from Italy.
In this system, there were three main ideas. One was heliocentrism, the notion that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe. This revision of the standard, Ptolemaic cosmos was, of course, not original to him. It had been made by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, five years before Bruno was born. But while Copernicus's repositioning of the earth and the sun was a radical proposal—indeed, a heresy (the Church needed the Earth, the arena of salvation, to be the center of the universe)—in other respects his cosmos was quite orthodox: a finite structure consisting of fixed spheres that revolved in concentric circles, just as in Ptolemy. Bruno, on the other hand, proposed an infinite cosmos, consisting of innumerable heliocentric worlds. This, his second and most important idea, was also not new. It had been put forth by Nicholas of Cusa, a German cardinal, in the fifteenth century. But here, too, Bruno went further, claiming that the universe was a vast, wheeling, unknowable thing, and that all theories about it, including his own, were not descriptions but merely approaches—"models," as we would call them today.
Finally, Bruno developed an atomic theory, whereby everything that existed was made up of identical particles—"seeds," in his terminology. Other people, notably Lucretius, had had this idea, but, again, Bruno expanded it. Not only were all parts of the cosmos constituted of the same elements, but God, whom the Church strictly set apart from the material world, resided in these elements. It was his love, informing every "seed," that unified the world.
In all these ideas, there seems to have been a single preoccupation: immensity—things incalculably large and incalculably tiny, and all joined together in a kind of choral exultation. I think that this mental image, more than any quarrel with the Church, underlay Bruno's philosophy. In an Italian dialogue that he wrote in his mid-thirties, he paints a fanciful portrait of his home town, Nola. There, he says, fate has decreed
that Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl her hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. . . . Antonio Savolino's bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro's dog. . . . Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask.
Here the structural rule of Catholic theology, and of Western thought—hierarchy—is serenely discarded. The things of the world are numberless, and they are all equal, and interesting. In Bruno's cosmology, that rule applied not just to humble matters like the goings on in Nola but also to great and sacred things. In his book "The Song of Circe" (1582), the sorceress calls the universe to order, beginning with the sun: "Apollo, author of poetry, quiver bearer, bowman, of the powerful arrows, Pythian, laurel-crowned, prophetic, shepherd, seer, priest, and physician. Brilliant, rosy, long-haired, beautiful-locked, blond, bright, placid, bard, singer, teller of truth. . . . Reveal, I pray, your lions, your lynxes, goats, baboons, seagulls, calves, snakes, elephants. . . . The turtle, butterfish, tuna, ray, whale, and all your other creatures of that kind." To enumerate was Bruno's joy and, in some of his writings, such as these, the engine of his dizzying prose.
Another idea of his, which has not attracted as much attention, because it is not a heresy, had to do with "artificial memory," the science of improving recall. This was not a side project. It was the subject of many of his Latin writings, and often the source of his income during his wandering years—he tutored people in memory skills. Ancient orators had used artificial memory systems, mentally attaching their ideas onto statues, or objects in the rooms of a building, so that later, in their minds, they could revisit those statues and rooms, retrieve their ideas, and thus give seven-hour speeches without note cards. Closer to Bruno's time, a Catalan mystic named Ramon Llull had refined the method, imagining memory as a system of concentric wheels. Bruno adopted Llull's schema and enlarged it. Rowland bravely tries to summarize the methods he developed. One involves storing words by their syllables, she says: "the first syllable as an 'agent' who is a mythological figure (the Egyptian Apis bull, Apollo, the witch Circe); the second syllable as an action (sailing, on the carpet, broken); the third syllable as an adjective (ignored, blind, at leisure); the fourth as an associated object (shell, serpent, fetters); the fifth as a 'circumstance' (a woman dressed in pearls, a man riding a sea monster)." Given these rules, Bruno described to his readers how, for example, one would remember the word numero, "number." In Rowland's paraphrase:
The "NU" . . . is the Apis bull, "ME" is "on the carpet," "RO" is "neglected." . . . Bruno, clearly influenced by Ramon Llull, advises envisioning these stored sets of syllables and their imagery on concentric wheels, each with thirty compartments corresponding to the various combinations of letters. The outermost wheel in the system stores the agents (or first syllables of words), the second wheel stores the actions (or second syllables), the third wheel stores adjectives (or third syllables), and so on inward to the fifth wheel. A single sentence thus becomes a pageant of mythological characters set in strange places, engaged in strange actions in strange company.
How marvellous, and how utterly incomprehensible! And this was only one of his systems. But Bruno may have used such methods—he was known for his prodigious memory—and with their endless numbers of combinations, as in a giant slot machine, they obviously contributed to his vision of an infinite cosmos.
Inconveniently, that vision was heresy from end to end. If there were countless worlds besides ours, this sidelined the Christian story. Creation, expulsion, salvation: such things might have happened, but somewhere off in a corner, while other things were happening on other planets. Also eliminated was God's difference from humanity. If, as Bruno saw it, God was present in every atom of the universe, then transubstantiation became a silly idea. (God was already in the wine.) Ditto incarnation. Bruno later said that he started having doubts about Jesus at the age of eighteen; in his mature philosophy, the Messiah has no place. Nor does original sin, or pretty much any sin. God "makes his sun rise over good and bad," Bruno wrote. Even devils were going to be pardoned. To lead a virtuous life, you had only to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As the reader may have noticed by now, much of this constitutes liberal Christian thought in our time. (What Bruno discarded was the Church's literalism—exactly what many of today's believers have done.) Likewise, Bruno's cosmology anticipated modern physics and astronomy. But it did not accord with the views of the sixteenth-century Church. It sounded like Protestantism, or worse.
That was why he had fled his homeland. For fifteen years, he lived in relative safety in the cities of the North, which, if not Protestant, were more tolerant than Italy. Then he did something inexplicable. Was he homesick? Had he become overconfident? In any case, he returned to Italy, and within a year he had been captured by the Inquisition.
Soon after recrossing the border, he took a job tutoring a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, in artificial memory, but Mocenigo made little progress, and he came to suspect that his teacher was cheating him, holding back some key to the method. So one day he locked Bruno in the attic of his palazzo and called the Inquisition. In his deposition, he accused Bruno of the heresies listed above, plus some more, and of saying (in Mocenigo's words) "that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies . . . that our opinions are the doctrine of asses, that we have no proof that our faith has any merit with God, and that he marvels at how many heresies God tolerates among Catholics."
Venice was a modern-minded commercial city, far less conservative than Rome or Naples. Furthermore, Bruno eventually recanted. Therefore the Venetian inquisitors let him live, but they did not release him, because the Vatican had got wind of the case and was demanding extradition. Venice complied, and in Rome Bruno was retried on essentially the same charges, with a few additions obtained from his cellmates in Venice. One of them reported that Bruno had called Christ "a dog cuckold fucked dog" and had given him the finger—a not unreasonable action on the part of a man who had been locked up for months in a Venetian hellhole, with four other, equally maddened prisoners. The proceedings in Rome, however, lasted longer—seven years. The Roman jurists, eventually headed by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, an eminent Jesuit theologian (he was later canonized), were more methodical than the Venetians. They tracked down his books, and read them. According to Rowland, they may also have worried that to execute Bruno, who in his exile had enjoyed the patronage of various noblemen, might be politically unwise. Bruno parried with his inquisitors. Twice he offered to recant and then withdrew the offer. We don't know all the particulars of the inquiry. (The trial records are lost. Only a summary, discovered in the Vatican in 1941, survives.) But, in the end, Bruno gave his inquisitors an unanswerable ultimatum: he told them that if the Pope came forward to certify that the actions he was charged with were definitely heretical, or that the Holy Spirit had said they were, then he would recant. If not, not. The Pontiff did not condescend to join in this discussion, and the inquisitors probably did not invite him to. They insisted on their own ability to recognize false doctrine. So, as in other heresy trials, the conflict came down to a simple quarrel: the Church's word versus the individual's understanding of his own experience. The Church won. Bruno was declared an "impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic," and he was condemned to die.
Rowland does the best she can with this material, but she has a big problem, which is that very little is known about Bruno's life. She is unable to tell us much of anything about his childhood, his teaching, his friendships, or his moral character. And, when she does have something to report, it is often a wild card, which she has trouble fitting into the rest of the story. She says, for example, that Bruno, after being thrown out by the Roman Catholic Church, was also excommunicated by the Calvinists, in Geneva, and by the Lutherans, in Helmstedt—clearly, organized religion was not for him—but we hear nothing about his prior conversion to these faiths. She also tells us that in his exile he applied repeatedly (she cites three separate occasions) to be taken back into the Roman Catholic Church, and was refused each time. That is curious. Returning to the Church, as Bruno knew, would have involved a major act of penance, including the disavowal of most of his writings. How could he—famously intransigent, a champion of free thought—have contemplated that? And, if he did, what possessed him, in a public lecture in Helmstedt, to compare the sitting Pope to the Medusa head, infecting the world with "ignorance and depravity"? Did he think that this would get him back into the Church?
What about his love life? Rowland writes that after his departure from the priesthood he "pursued women with Falstaffian matter-of-factness." Whom, when, where? She doesn't say. Whatever his sexual activities, a passage that Roland quotes from one of his dialogues suggests that he did have strong feelings about women. How could men pine, he asked,
for that bosom, for that white, for that crimson, for that tongue, for that tooth, for that lip, for that hair, that dress, that mantle, that glove, that slipper, that high heel, that avarice, that giggle, that scorn, that empty window, that eclipse of the sun, that throbbing, that disgust, that stench, that sepulcher, that cesspit, that menstruation, that carrion, that malaria, that uttermost insult and lapse of nature?
This is something other than matter-of-factness. Rowland tries to argue that Bruno didn't really hate women. She says that since this dialogue, written in England, ends with a tribute to Elizabeth I, Bruno "must have believed on some level, that male and female made no difference in the potential of an individual soul." But evidence for such a belief is nowhere in sight. Rowland is well aware of the gaps in her portrait of Bruno's life, and she tries to fill them with other material. For his years in the monastery, she again has almost no facts to go on, so, once she deposits him there, she switches gears and offers a series of history-of-ideas chapters—on Neoplatonism, on Kabbalah, and so forth—in order to let us know what intellectual trends might have influenced him at that time. She is a lively writer, and these chapters are interesting. Still, we're sitting there wondering, How's he doing in the monastery?
We do not get a firm hold on his ideas, either. In the past half century, there have been two large trends in Bruno scholarship. In the nineteen-sixties, the English historian Frances Yates claimed that he was a hermeticist, carrying on the tradition of the Renaissance mystics and alchemists. She called him a "poet-magician." Later, in the nineteen-nineties, this view was disputed by Hilary Gatti, a historian of science, who argued that Bruno's contributions were mainly to natural science, which grew so fast during his time. (Nine years after Bruno died, Galileo invented his telescope, and the information that he gained from it landed him, too, before the Inquisition, under Bellarmine. Rowland thinks that Bellarmine, feeling guilty over Bruno, may have pressed Galileo to recant, and thus saved his life.) Rowland wants nothing to do with the hermeticism theory, and though her book is dedicated to Gatti, she is also skeptical about Bruno's credentials as a scientist. To her, he was primarily a philosopher. Her discussions of his philosophy are often sketchy, however. Trying to explain why the Roman inquisitors took seven years to decide Bruno's case, she guesses that maybe they didn't understand his books. I think she had the same problem. At one juncture, poignantly, she suggests that Bruno may have held back some of his material, so as not to give away the store—the same charge that Giovanni Mocenigo made. As she wrote eight years ago in an essay in The New York Review of Books, but apparently could not bear to say in the biography, where so much more was at stake, "His surviving work supplies no clear explanation" of what constituted his philosophy.
The book has one great, compensating virtue. Whatever else Bruno was, he was wild-minded and extreme, and Rowland communicates this, together with a sense of the excitement that his ideas gave him. She quotes from a poem of his:
Suddenly I am raised aloft by primordial
I become Leader, Law, Light, Prophet,
Father, Author, and Journey,
Rising above this world to the others
that shine in their splendor.
I wander through every part of that
ethereal country;
Then, far away, as they gape at the
marvel, I leave them behind me.
That sounds thrilling, and Rowland relates it to other instances of the exuberance of the late Renaissance; for example, the language of Shakespeare. ("Hamlet" was written within a year or two of Bruno's death.) It's that feeling for the explosiveness of the period, and her admiration of Bruno for participating in it—indeed, dying for it—that is the central and most cherishable quality of the biography. Mocenigo, in his deposition, reported that one day, when he and Bruno were going to church, Bruno told him "that he knew how Christ had performed his miracles, and using the same art he intended to do as much and more." Rowland seems to smile as she considers this "excitable little Neapolitan," in a gondola, on his way to church, "bragging more and more extravagantly" about how he's going to displace the founder of the Church. Even when he's acting crazy, she is fond of him, and I like her for that.
Bruno's writings were placed on the Church's "Index of Forbidden Books," so that they would not lead the faithful astray. As always, important people found a way to get hold of the proscribed material. Kepler told Galileo that one of his (Galileo's) ideas was a steal from Bruno. After the seventeenth century, Bruno seems to have dropped from view, but then, in the nineteenth century, he rose again, as a hero to the revolutionary movements of that time. In 1889, soon after Italy's establishment of a secular republic, a group of Roman students, with the help of eminent thinkers from across Europe—Victor Hugo, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen—raised a statue in his honor in the Campo de' Fiori. According to Rowland, the statue, which shows Bruno going to his death, looks nothing like him. It depicts a tall, glowering figure, in a cowl, with a book between his manacled hands. The real Bruno was a short, skinny man, who at the time of his execution hadn't worn a Dominican habit for twenty-four years. Furthermore, he was burned naked. The inscription at the base of the statue begins, "To Bruno, from the generation that he foresaw." In other words, the students claimed him for their story. Every year, on the anniversary of his execution, various groups of freethinkers—Masons, atheists, pantheists—gather at the monument, and a representative of Rome's mayoralty places a wreath at its feet. If Bruno had not been burned, would he receive these tributes? Maybe not, but he was burned, and he thereby entered our history. Fittingly, a crater of the moon was named for him, in 1960. ♦


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A new report claims police may be using racial profiling when making arrests for marijuana possession.
The ACLU's analysis of federal crime data, released Tuesday, found marijuana arrest rates for black people were 3.73 times greater than those for white people nationally in 2010. In some counties, the arrest rate was 10 to 30 times greater for blacks. In two Alabama counties, 100 percent of those arrested for marijuana possession were black, the ACLU said.
When it comes to marijuana use, about 14 percent of black people and 12 percent of white people reported in 2010 that they had used the drug during the previous year, according to data that the ACLU obtained from the National Drug Health Survey, a Health and Human Services publication. Among younger people ages 18-25, use was greater among whites.
The overall increase in marijuana possession arrests is largely attributable to drastic increases in arrests of black people, the ACLU said.
Blacks were arrested at a rate of 537 per 100,000 people nationally in 2001. In 2010, their arrest rate rose to 716 per 100,000. The 2001 number for white people was 191 per 100,00 and rose to 192 per 100,000 in 2010, the ACLU said. Despite the disparate rates, far more whites were arrested for marijuana possession in 2010, 460,808 compared to blacks, 286,117.
Ezekiel Edwards, lead author of the ACLU study, attributed the disparate arrest rates to racial profiling by police seeking to pad their arrest numbers with ``low-level'' arrests in ``certain communities that they have kind of labeled as problematic.''
``While this country moves in some ways in a more progressive direction on marijuana policy in a lot of places, in other places, people are getting handcuffed, jailed and getting criminal records at racially disparate rates all around the country,'' Edwards said.
Police simply operate from the standpoint that ``the use of marijuana is a crime,'' said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.
``We will try to educate our membership, to the extent the statistics are valid, to be aware (that) people other than blacks are smoking marijuana and to arrest them too,'' said Pasco, who had not yet seen the ACLU report.
Arthur Burnett Sr., a retired judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, said his 40 years on the bench showed him that police concentrate their numbers in black communities. It's easier to catch people with marijuana in communities where there are ``open-air'' drug markets, rather than looking in homes, basements or country clubs, said Burnett. He is the CEO of the National African American Drug Policy Coalition based in Washington.
Burnett said some black defendants, distrustful of authorities, may lash out, use profanities or be rebellious _ behavior that makes it more likely that an officer will make an arrest. Burnett said his coalition supports forming a commission to look at scientific evidence on the effect of marijuana use and ``overcriminalization'' of it.
The commission would determine whether to treat marijuana like tobacco, in which people are warned about consequences of its use. It would also examine the harshness of penalties for using pot.
``We don't need to treat it like heroin and cocaine,'' Burnett said.
The ACLU supports legalization of marijuana and regulation through taxation and licensing. It also supports eliminating criminal and civil penalties for marijuana possession. If those two options are not possible, the ACLU supports punishment for marijuana possession with only civil penalties, which is often referred to as decriminalizing marijuana possession.
The unequal arrests rates are not confined to a single region of the U.S. or in urban areas with larger black populations, the ACLU said. That discrepancy is found throughout the country, regardless of the size of the black population of the location and at all income levels, the data shows.
For example, in Morgan County, Ala., where African Americans represent 12 percent of the population and Pike County, Alabama, where 37 percent of the population is black, all those arrested for marijuana possession were black, the ACLU found.
African Americans living in counties with the highest median household incomes, $85,000 to $115,000, are two to eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. In counties with median household incomes of $22,000 to $30,000, the arrest rate for blacks is 1.5 times to five the rate as for whites, the report said.
The largest disparities were found in: Iowa, where blacks were 8.34 times more likely to be arrested than whites; Washington, D.C., 8.05 times greater; Minnesota, 7.81 times; Illinois, 7.56; Wisconsin, 5.98; Kentucky, 5.95 and Pennsylvania, 5.19 times greater.
Blacks face these greater chances for arrest for marijuana possession at a time when Colorado and Washington have legalized adult possession of small amounts of nonmedical marijuana, while a number of states and Washington, D.C. allow medical marijuana. Federal law still prohibits its use. Some states and some cities have eased punishments for possession of smaller amounts.
The findings are hardly surprising to the African American community.
Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, said arrest disparities like those for marijuana possession have led to mass incarceration and criminalization of African Americans, which in turn, has become the new Jim Crow, referring to laws that sanctioned racial segregation in schools and public facilities.
``Any arrest, even for marijuana, is a blot on someone's record and an impediment to future jobs and opportunities,'' Jealous said. ``For these reasons, a number of NAACP state conferences (chapters) have supported the decriminalization of marijuana.''
The ACLU is calling for the end of marijuana possession arrests, as well as the legalization of marijuana for those 21 and older.
Police Chief Cathy Lanier says she needs to take a closer look at the report but says her department is not specifically cracking down on marijuana possession.


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Walk this way: Mariners racking up free passes
OAKLAND -- While it is the A's who are known for their patient Moneyball approach to hitting and high value on walks and on-base percentage, the Mariners turned the tables in the first two games and drew a Major League-leading 12 bases on balls.
The Brewers had the second most walks in the Majors with nine through their first two games.
Justin Smoak and Brendan Ryan were tied for the American League lead with three walks entering Wednesday, and in Tuesday night's 7-1 win, the Mariners drew eight free passes, which equaled their season high for 2012.
It's all quite a turnabout for a team that walked once in the first two games last season. Both Ryan and Smoak didn't draw their third walk until the 10th game last year and Smoak's fourth walk didn't come until six games after that.
Smoak said the walks are no coincidence but rather a sign of being more ready to identify and hit good pitches.
"I feel like the end of last year and during this spring, I've just been seeing the ball better," he said. "It's just being in a better position to hit, being ready to react to anything and I feel like I'm where I want to be."
Ironically, Smoak said he now feels more aggressive at the plate.
"I feel like when you're aggressive, you're going to lay off pitches you shouldn't swing at because you're ready to hit and you know what's a good one to swing at," he said. "That's how I'd always been before, but the last couple years I got a little passive trying to wait for something specific instead of being in there ready to hit. I feel like it helps you lay off those borderline pitches or hard sliders or good changeups down in the dirt."
Smoak went 0-for-3 on Tuesday but hit the ball hard twice -- on a loud foul down the left-field line -- and drew a bases-loaded walk that showed the ultimate patience.
"No doubt," he said with a grin. "Bases loaded right there, you're ready to swing as soon as you step into the box. I was ready to hit, but there was nothing good to hit for four straight pitches. That's how it goes. Take 'em any way you can get 'em."


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First of all, you have no idea how your comments on my last post helped me. Not just because they gave me good direction and thoughtful suggestions, but also because it's such a blessing to have women who might not agree on everything come together to try and help. I really don't think I can express what it meant to me, so thank you for the respectful, kind ways in which you offered your experiences and ideas.
At Kate's appointment, her pediatrician went over several questions with me and it seemed based on that, there is a good chance she will be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. It was a really basic questionnaire and she suggested that we take her in for some more testing to get a better idea of what's going on. While I do think there is some ADD stuff, I also think there may be some sensory/emotional issues that come into play and before we even consider treatment (whatever that would be), we need to know exactly what we're dealing with. The cool thing about Kate's pediatrician is that she lives two doors down from us and is a strong Believer. Kate plays with her friends in their backyard almost everyday, so she gets to see her in action quite a bit 🙂
There are two local places that were recommended to us-one is called the learning lab I think and the other is Currey-Ingram (sp?) here in town. I know the latter is super expensive but seems really extensive. Has anyone around Nashville had experiences with either of these or any others? Would love to hear your thoughts if you have.
So, we are prayerful about getting her in somewhere to be further evaluated and then will seek the Lord's guidance as we decide the best course of action for her. I have already made several of the changes that were mentioned in your comments, and would welcome any additional thoughts along these lines. I've ordered a book on food choices for ADD kids and look forward to reading that. We did modify her diet drastically awhile ago but really didn't see any consistent change in behavior. I've added Omega 3 vitamins too, since many of you mentioned them.
Ok, I'm going to hit the sack but I just wanted to check in and say thank you! I'll keep you all posted as we go!


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Decadent Caramel Pecan Pie
Of all my pecan pie recipes, this is the most decadent. It oozes goodness. Even my two young sons, both hockey players, eat it slowly to enjoy every bite.
Total TimePrep: 45 min. Bake: 35 min. + cooling
Makes6-8 servings
- 1-2/3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup cold butter, cubed
- 1/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
- 2 egg yolks
- 1-1/2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons butter
- 1/3 cup maple syrup
- 3 eggs
- 2 egg whites
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 cups ground pecans
- Preheat oven to 350°. In a large bowl, combine flour and salt; cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Combine milk and egg yolks; stir into crumb mixture until dough forms a ball. Press onto the bottom and up the sides of an ungreased 9-in. deep-dish pie plate; flute edges. Cover and refrigerate.
- In a large saucepan, combine the sugar, butter and syrup; bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat.
- In a large bowl, beat the eggs, egg whites and vanilla. Gradually add hot syrup mixture. Stir in pecans. Pour into pastry shell.
- Cover edges loosely with foil. Bake 35-40 minutes or until set. Cool on a wire rack. Refrigerate leftovers.