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At her group therapy sessions for women despairing of low sexual desire, Lori Brotto likes to pass around a plastic tub of raisins. The women, usually six to a group, sit around two pushed-together beige tables in a fluorescently lighted conference room at the British Columbia Center for Sexual Medicine in Vancouver. A little potted tree is jammed randomly in one corner. Ragged holes scar one wall where a painting used to hang. The décor doesn't speak of sensuality. That is the job of the raisin.
Brotto asks each woman to take a single raisin from the small tub. A slender, elegant 34-year-old psychologist, a mother of two with a third child on the way, she began her career studying the libidos of rats. She is now one of the world's leading specialists in what is known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder in women. She is in charge of defining the condition's criteria for the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly called the D.S.M, which the American Psychiatric Association is preparing to publish in 2012 or 2013. The book is the bible of psychiatric diseases, from autism to sleepwalking, relied on by researchers and clinicians throughout the United States and Canada. Studies suggest that around 30 percent of young and middle-aged women go through extended periods of feeling dim desire — or of feeling no wish for sex whatsoever. "Black raisins," Brotto said, laughing at her own arbitrary preference as she described her methods. "I don't like brown raisins or green raisins or cooked raisins."
She handed me the script she has developed for the exercise. We sat, in August, in her orderly, compact office, with a reproduction of "The Kiss," by Gustav Klimt, mounted above her desk. She wore a blue paisley skirt and a cream-colored blouse; her short dark hair was cut stylishly and angled close to her jaw. The couple in the painting, with the woman either bending sublimely in the man's emphatic embrace or wincing away from his lips, floated over Brotto's copy of the current D.S.M., which lay open to the disorder that has become her obsession.
"I'd like you to start by examining your raisin," the script reads. "Study its shape, its contours, its folds. Touch the raisin with a finger. Look into the valleys and peaks, the highlights and dark crevasses. Lift the raisin to your lips."
MORE THAN BY any other sexual problem — the elusiveness of orgasm, say, or pain during sex — women feel plagued by low desire. The problems often overlap, but above all the others that can thwart an erotic life, the remoteness of lust is what impels women to seek treatment. And as Brotto discusses the disorder, she is not talking about something physical. She regularly wires the genitals of her patients to a photoplethysmograph to measure whether the women respond with surges of vaginal blood flow while they watch a pornographic video. Almost always, they do.Continue reading the main story
Brotto is dealing in the domain of the mind, or in the mind's relationship to the body, not in a problem with the body itself. Beneath Klimt's couple, she opened yellow case folders and described the desolation and bewilderment recorded in her notes. She spoke about a woman in her 40s who, years ago, had sex with her husband as often as seven times in a day but who now, more than a decade into a marriage with this still-handsome man, cringes at the very same gesture, the very same touch to her back, that once electrified her. Two or three months might go by now without their having sex. "It's fine for me not to have sex at all," Brotto quoted the wife, and commented, "I hear that from a lot of women." And yet, at the same time, the lack of libido isn't fine at all. "What exactly is turning me off?" Brotto read the wife's plaintive question.
Brotto talked as well about another woman in early middle age, who had no period of lust to look back on, whose sexual indifference had prevailed throughout her long — and emotionally close — marriage, just as it had with her earlier partners. She told Brotto, "I'm actually O.K. with never having sex again." But she, too, isn't really. She longs to feel driven, to initiate, to ignite, Brotto said, and lately the woman visited an annual sex fair in Vancouver, with its booths of erotic books and lingerie, and gave a party at her home where a saleswoman peddled sex toys; she told Brotto she hoped that such adventures, along with Brotto's help, would transform her. "I want to have sex where I feel like I'm craving it," Brotto quoted from yet another file, giving voice to a desperation shared by many of her patients. "I want to feel horny. I want to want."
As she considers her cases, as she carries out related research and pores over the studies of other sexologists and as she molds criteria for the next D.S.M., Brotto is careful to keep in mind that not all women who feel erotically uncharged are desperate to change. Some may not be dismayed in the least. As is so often true in the poorly financed realm of sex research, relevant surveys are scarce, and statistics can't be cited with much confidence. But judging by what figures exist, Brotto says, between 7 and 15 percent of all young and middle-aged women — an age range that researchers generally set between the neighborhoods of 20 and 60 — feel distressed over the absence of desire. Next to nothing is known, she adds, about a host of basic questions, like whether most women with the condition have been affected from the start of their sexual lives or became afflicted during the course of adulthood. She estimates that the hundreds of cases she has seen are divided about equally between the two categories but laments that there are no studies to supply a solid answer. Little is established, either, about why women may be somewhat more likely to become devoid of desire as they get deeper into middle age — and even this tendency itself is far from proven and is contradicted by some data. In any event, Brotto points out, while menopausal women generally lubricate less, their genitals still respond to with rushings of blood when they sit in front of erotic videos.
Brotto speaks, as well, about how varied the experiences of her patients with low desire can be, and about the "enormous heterogeneity" of women's sexuality in general and thus the extreme difficulty of establishing meaningful norms or outlining dysfunctions. The current D.S.M.'s criteria for hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or H.S.D.D., criteria that apply for both women and men, are nothing if not terse: "persistently or recurrently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity." That is basically it. And Brotto talks about the sense, among an array of sexologists and therapists, including herself, that this language fails to reckon with women's complex sexual beings — that the criteria are much too simple and maybe much too male.
All of the variations and unknowns and insinuations of patriarchal perspective help make Brotto's work on the D.S.M. more than a little fraught. But then, the chapter called "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders" in the 900-page manual barely holds an unfraught sentence. The American Psychiatric Association has appointed a panel of 13 psychologists and psychiatrists to revise the chapter for the new edition, to be titled the D.S.M.-V; it will be the fifth version (not counting a couple of intermediary alterations) since the A.P.A. put together the original manual in 1952 and the first since 1994. The 13 have divided the conditions according to their specialties, and as they aim to improve diagnostic language, they're shadowed by sometimes-fierce detractors who argue that certain — or all — of the chapter's disorders should be deleted.
The section on deviant desires, to take one example, is denounced by advocates for alternative sexuality as stigmatizing those whose lusts, no matter how unusual, are harmless, or those whose erotic play, no matter how unsettling, is consensual. Should a man with a foot fetish be branded as mentally ill? Should a woman who finds ecstasy in being elaborately bound and enduring denigration or pain? Should such people be labeled with psychiatric diseases, though the rest of their lives have no serious dysfunction? Until 1973, homosexuality was among the D.S.M.'s disorders, and critics of the present chapter point to the condemnation the volume once inflicted on gay men and lesbians — condemnation that both reflected and bolstered the prevailing cultural perspective — by way of arguing that the current manual, the D.S.M.-IV, is full of unfounded and damaging sexual judgments. Many on the panel, which probably won't, in the end, do much in the way of deleting conditions, maintain that the chapter on sexuality and gender identity doesn't brand people too readily with disease. They note that, aside from exceptions like patients with pedophilia, only those who are distressed meet the threshold for diagnosis. In turn, the critics respond that such distress stems not from within the individual but from the infliction of societal standards, from the culture's disapproval and aversion and therefore, in part, from the D.S.M. itself. This, they emphasize, was why the A.P.A. finally removed a last remnant of the homosexuality diagnosis — what was known as "ego-dystonic" homosexuality — in 1987.
Though many therapists dismiss the manual as useful for only the numbered codes they scribble on reimbursement forms, subtly the D.S.M. permeates the consciousness of the profession. The book is required reading for almost every psychologist and psychiatrist in training. It delineates the conditions studied by researchers, and it quietly underlies our comprehension of ourselves. Its disorders define norms. Brotto has been constructing an expanded set of criteria for H.S.D.D. with the awareness that she may be shaping, amid a good deal of debate, the way vast numbers of women understand their sexual selves.
Brotto's route toward such rumination — and toward the raisin exercise — was mapped out by chance. As a first-year undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, she knew only that she wanted to do research, any sort of research, no matter the discipline. She knocked haphazardly on office doors, hoping for a professor who would have her as an assistant. None would; she was too young. "Until," she recounted, "I found myself in the office of someone who said, 'Sure, I'll take you on, as long as you don't mind watching rats have sex.' "
She hadn't considered studying sex at all. "I grew up," she told me, "in a very strict Italian Catholic don't-talk-about-sex environment." A silver cross hangs on a slender chain from the rearview mirror of her car. But she agreed to the professor's offer, and under his tutelage she sat in a chamber of cages, counting the copulations of male rats as she investigated the effects of antidepressants on their libidos. As she continued on toward a doctoral degree, she steered away from animal research and toward clinical work, in part, she said plainly, "because the rat room smelled."
Brotto's postdoctoral training included a stint in Seattle at the University of Washington with patients suffering from borderline personality disorder, a disease of severe anxiety and distorted self-image and often of self-inflicted injury — like cutting — that expresses a desperate need to replace infinite despondence with finite pain. Her supervisor in Seattle had developed a treatment for borderline-personality patients that borrowed from the Buddhist technique of mindfulness — the keen and soothing awareness of immediate and minute experience, down to the level of breath or the beating of your heart. The supervisor saw this as a way to ground the patients in the present and to relieve their feelings of interminable torment. And Brotto, who was also working with surgically treated gynecological cancer patients on their sexual issues and frequently on feelings of depleted desire had the idea that the method might help with this problem. Women who talk about having no libido, she recalled thinking at the time, describe their disconnection and despair during sex in something of the same way borderline-personality patients talk about their entire lives. Maybe mindfulness could help draw these women away from detachment and connect them to sensation.
Brotto did a bit of experimenting on herself. Not that she suffered from any disorder, but she talks of herself sometimes in a researcher's terms as "an n of one," a single subject on whom she likes to test her ideas. Along with mindfulness, the treatment Brotto's supervisor devised for borderline personality uses cognitive therapy, which stresses altering patterns of thought to transform self-image and experience. One day at yoga class, Brotto tried the combination. She went through her usual yoga poses, but with "a cognitive reframe," she said. She told herself, "over and over like a mantra," that she was an especially sexual woman, "capable of a high level of desire, a high level of response." And, she recalled, "there was a deliberate intent not only to listen to my body even more than I normally would in yoga but also to interpret the signs from my body as signs of my sexual identity. So my breathing was not just breathing through the pose; it was breathing because I was highly sexual." Sensation and self-image became linked. She was in a particularly awkward and taxing position, bent over and balanced on one foot and one inverted hand, when she had a profound moment. It wasn't that anything she was trying mentally was itself so stunningly new. The power of positive thought is a cliché. And the acute concentration on the sensory echoes the sex therapy practiced by Masters and Johnson in the 1960s. Yet through melding the two something revelatory occurred. Suddenly her straining muscles and racing heart were affirmations "of my sexual vigor, my sexual arousability." She finished class with a thrilling sense of her own body, her own erotic potency.
Brotto took what she learned in treating borderline personality, including the use of raisin exercises to foster mindfulness, and what happened in yoga class, and applied it first with her gynecological cancer patients, then with a wide range of women with weak desire. Her results, published in the leading journals of sexual research, have been promising, with her subjects reporting stronger libidos and better relationships, though there are caveats: that desire isn't easy to measure; that patients are prone to report improvement on questionnaires given by those who treat them; that almost any method that gets people to think about sex may increase their interest in having it. Brotto is now studying the effects of her group sessions on a sample of 70 women who have or will soon gather in the stark conference room around the pair of beige tables to be led through her program of mindfulness and cognitive therapy. They are sent home with assignments — to observe their bodies in the shower and describe themselves physically in precise and neutral language, in phrases that hold no judgment; and, after another session, to repeat over and over, "My body is alive and sexual," no matter if they believe it. They are taught about research that shows that belief doesn't matter, that the feeling will follow the declaration. And they are instructed, in their sessions, to place the raisins in their mouths, to "notice where the tongue is, notice the saliva building up in your mouth . . . notice the trajectory of the flavor as it bursts forth, the flood of saliva, how the flavor changes from your body's chemistry."
This exercise is among Brotto's ways of training patients to immerse themselves in physical sensation. One hope is that such feelings will whisper to the women of their own erotic vitality. Another is that her patients will learn to be aware of the changes in their bodies — automatic reactions similar to salivating — before or during sex. An underlying theory is that while her patients' genitals commonly pulse with blood in response to erotic images or their partners' sexual touch, their minds are so detached — distracted by work or children or worries about the way they look unclothed, or fixated on fears that their libidos are dead — as to be oblivious to their bodies' excitement, their bodies' messages. The skill of fully attending to sensation is essential within Brotto's vision of women's desire — a vision that she imparts to her groups partly by introducing a diagram called "the Basson Sexual Response Cycle," whose circles and arrows have lately been imprinting themselves on the field of sex therapy and helping to guide Brotto's formulations for the next D.S.M.
he minimalism of the manual's present criteria for H.S.D.D. —"persistently or recurrently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity" — seems to presume that the workings of desire are straightforward, that healthy sexual beings are regularly sparked by lust, that they are busy imagining, and wishing for, erotic encounters. Meanwhile the flow chart of women's sexual experience created by Rosemary Basson, who is Brotto's colleague at the Center for Sexual Medicine and at the University of British Columbia, with which the center is affiliated, is complex and a bit difficult to describe. Basson, a British medical doctor who has been at the center for more than two decades, was first drawn to the field of sexuality as an internist in England. Assigned to a ward for victims of spinal-cord injuries, a floor, as she remembers it, with a steady supply of men paralyzed in motorcycle accidents, she sometimes found herself with a patient who worked up the courage to ask about how or whether he could ever have sex. She sought out a supervisor for advice and was told, she recounted, imitating the clipped, almost panicked reply, "Change the subject, change the subject." She has dealt directly with the subject of sex ever since.
"All through the '90s I was scribbling my circles," she told me in her wispy voice, as she penned out a diagram for me the way she long has for her female patients. She had on a pale flowing skirt with a pattern of leaves and wore her feathery brown hair cropped above her ears. There was something ethereal about her. Yet she drew with swift authority. A box with the phrase "reasons for sex" went at the top of the page. The beginnings of a large circle ran from one side of the box. And the diagram made clear that desire — at least the way many tend to think of it, as a lust or craving that spurs someone toward having sex — might or might not play a role in making a woman want sex and, in any case, isn't at all necessary for the sex to be satisfying.
A different manifestation of desire — not initial hunger—– appears about two-thirds of the way around Basson's circle. There, in the diagrams she began publishing in obstetrics and sexuality journals 10 years ago, come the words "responsive/triggered desire." For Basson, this is necessary to satisfaction. But it comes after arousal starts. So a typical successful experience might proceed something like this: first a decision, rather than a drive, to have sex; next, as Basson puts it, a "willingness to be receptive"; then, say, the sensations of a partner's touch; next, the awareness of being aroused; then the "responsive desire" along with increasingly intense arousal; and at last the range of physical and emotional payoffs that sex can provide and that offer positive reinforcement leading back to the top of the diagram, to the reasons for setting off on the circle to begin with.
All of this might seem awfully abstract, but Basson's lesson for women, which has been distilled by sex therapists into three words, "desire follows arousal," is a real rearrangement of expectation and a reweighting of sexual theory. The model with swollen red lips gazing out with molten need from the billboard or the MTV dancer pumping her half-covered hips at the camera — these icons in heat embody a cultural standard. And though some women, according to Basson, do feel such craving some of the time — at the beginning of a new relationship, for example, or possibly at a certain point in the menstrual cycle — and though a few women may sense such electricity surging regularly through them, these images, she suggests, are largely illusory ideals. More likely for most women, Basson argues, the start of plenty — and maybe the great majority — of sexual encounters is defined not by heat but by slight warmth or flat neutrality. And there's nothing wrong with this, she says, nothing disordered.
To reel back to the D.S.M.-III, published in 1980, is to recognize just how sizable a shift Basson's vision represents. The 1980 version of H.S.D.D. was called "inhibited sexual desire," and its simple criterion hewed close to its name. "Persistent and pervasive inhibition of sexual desire," the diagnosis reads. The implication is that there is a force within all of us, a natural and powerful sexual drive, that can be inhibited, and this assumption lingers in the current language with its stress on fantasy, on lust burning from within. Basson sees things differently. Explaining her sense of how desire operates, most of the time, in women, she said to me, "We're just not talking about innate hunger."
Not all sexologists are convinced. Some fault Basson for supplying no data to prove that her ideas actually evoke women's sexuality, for relying on clinical impressions rather than on hard science. Michael Sand, a clinical sexologist, and William Fisher, a psychologist, surveyed more than 130 women and found that it was primarily those with sexual dysfunctions, including low desire, who identified with Basson's ideas. The rest subscribed to more traditional, straightforward models that place being turned on at the start of typical sexual encounters. Basson, along with Brotto, defends her vision by saying that Sand and Fisher's study was flawed in its methods. I talked a few weeks ago with Sand, who has, since completing this survey, become the director of clinical research at Boehringer Ingelheim, a German pharmaceutical company involved in developing a libido-augmenting drug. He challenged Basson to offer rigorous evidence supporting her model and warned that her unsubstantiated theories, despite their apparent sensitivity to women's realities, may be distorting the truth of most women's erotic lives and diminishing the relevance of basic randiness.
As she creates language for the D.S.M.-V, Brotto credits others as well as Basson for their influence. Ellen Laan, a Dutch sexologist, has been doing research for more than a decade that highlights the role of external stimuli — as opposed to internally generated urges that function more like hunger for food — in sexual motivation. Yet Basson's insights, the allegiance her ideas have gained in the past several years among many sexologists and the happenstance of working with Basson at the center, have been crucial factors in forming Brotto's approach.
Brotto has recently proposed, to a group of three fellow panelists whose agreement will be a first step toward the A.P.A.'s approval, an elaborate diagnostic system for H.S.D.D. Instead of the current brevity, she suggests using a list of six criteria, ranging from the rarity of fantasy, as in the D.S.M.-IV, to being "not receptive to a partner's attempts to initiate." A patient with any four of the six would meet the threshold for the illness. She has also recommended renaming the condition; she'd like to shed the word "desire," with its overheated associations. Brotto's expanded criteria are meant, in part, to diminish the diagnostic importance of fantasy. Some data — however scant and even contradictory — hint that fantasy might not play as vital a role in women's sexual psyches as in men's. In women, erotic imagining may be less frequent — and its absence may not correlate well with women's dissatisfaction over their levels of desire. Brotto doesn't want the disorder of low desire to reflect primarily male standards of normality; she doesn't want to pathologize women for what may be perfectly ordinary. Her system will prevent women from being labeled with a condition largely because their minds aren't conjuring erotic situations.
One criterion Brotto advocates adding is a dim or missing sense of excitement during sex itself. This is one of her ways of including Basson's thinking — that desire often arises during, not before. But it leads to a troubling question. What if the lack of excitement is due to a partner's ineptitude? What if it's caused by a lover's emotional disconnection? Suddenly the realm of mental disorder, which is supposed to be delineated, as the introduction to the D.S.M. puts it, by "dysfunction in the individual," is being distorted by the role of others. Is it the patient who has the condition, or the partner, or the couple? In building on Basson's "responsive desire," Brotto's criteria run repeatedly into this fundamental problem. A partner's involvement is more or less inescapable.
Brotto stares squarely at this conundrum, knowing, she told me, that it can't be resolved, knowing that the best she can do is acknowledge it in some sort of introductory passage and continue on the path she thinks right. Meanwhile, the usual waning of erotic urgency over the course of long relationships, a decline that, according to many clinicians and one study, may beset women more steeply than men, could mean that proposed criteria like "absent/reduced sexual excitement/pleasure during sexual activity" are met by nearly everyone — another muddle of diagnostic logic. To address this problem, the disorder's current language encouraging clinicians to take the context of their patients' lives into account may need more emphasis in the D.S.M.-V.
Brotto knows too that there are sexologists who maintain that desire by any definition — whether the sheer lust Basson minimizes or the responsive variety she trumpets — is almost entirely a cultural invention rather than a biological reality; that it has been made to seem essential by the sex scenes in movies and the advice columns in magazines; and that it is best deleted from the D.S.M. Leonore Tiefer, a professor in the psychiatry department at New York University and the author of a collection of essays titled "Sex Is Not a Natural Act," argues that the contrivance is compounded by the pharmaceutical industry, which offers research money to sexologists who find ways, no matter if unconsciously, to inflate hugely the numbers of women suffering from an already-fictive condition — a disorder that the drug companies intend to cure. High numbers help to increase awareness, which stokes demand. To what extent this theory represents truth, as opposed to being merely plausible, is hard to sort out. When I spoke recently with officials at Boehringer-Ingelheim, which just announced the auspicious, if not overwhelming, results of large-scale trials of its desire-enhancing medication, Flibanserin, the officials were careful to cite only conservative figures on the women who might want such a pill. (Though the exact mechanisms of the drug are unclear, it seems to act on the brain's serotonin and dopamine receptors.) Brotto, like all the specialists in all areas working on the new D.S.M., is allowed to receive no more than $10,000 per year from any source connected to the pharmaceutical industry. This is an A.P.A. rule. But Tiefer's is hardly the only voice warning that, despite A.P.A. protections, drug-company influence can shape, indirectly as well as directly, the decisions of D.S.M. panelists.
Brotto is surrounded by skepticism. And she herself told me that it might take till the publication of the D.S.M.-VI, probably two decades from now, for science to establish sound norms for women's desire. But all the logical entanglements and reasons for doubt haven't worn her down in her work on the manual, not at all. Just before we met in August, she said, she slid out of bed in the middle of the night once again, struck by a moment of clarity, and added one of the criteria. And she's forever captivated by the mysteries of her field. While she spends lots of time focusing on the possible benefits of Buddhist techniques in treating low desire, she talked with me in fascinated detail, full of expertise on specific neural receptors, about the perplexing role of hormones, among them testosterone. Various pharmaceutical companies, at various times, have pursued testosterone as a remedy for women's lack of desire, and some doctors prescribe it for the condition — Laura Berman, Oprah's anointed sex expert, avidly promotes this method — though the Food and Drug Administration hasn't approved this use. Brotto and Basson are about to publish research demonstrating that low levels of testosterone in women do not correspond with low libido. Yet there is a paradox. Brotto explained that giving extra testosterone to women with desire problems can, it appears, spike sexual interest. For reasons unknown, the administered hormone has a unique effect. But there's a further complication. In studies, women given a placebo report a similar result, not quite as marked but definitely not insignificant either. To add to the intrigue, the women using a placebo often report testosterone's unwanted side effects: facial hair; acne. Speaking about all this, Brotto smiled in bewilderment — and in something close to awe at the inscrutability of the human mind, the organ that is the locus of desire.
Her face was alight, too, as she talked about the intricacies of her clinical cases — about a patient who lost her virginity in her 50s, about an unhappily married woman who has lately found something akin to sexual desire in her studio, in her painting. Thinking about the refrain that rises from the pages of her files, "I want to have sex where I feel like I'm craving it," I asked Brotto whether she thought it was possible for counseling of any kind to grant access to rushes of sheer lust, the feeling many of her patients long for above all when they first arrive in her office. She sighed. "I don't know," she said. Then, quickly, she steered the conversation back to the other version of desire, the sort that appears well along Basson's circle, the kind Brotto is confident can be fostered, the desire that takes its time.Continue reading the main story


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Let your venue set the tone for your big-day look.By: Naima DiFranco
Chapel Wedding
A magestic ballgown will look apropos amidst the grandeur of a formal wedding. Diamonds, pearls and a veil are ideal for the classic bride.
Get the look:
Gown: Monique Lhuillier
Elbow-length veil with lace edging: Blossom Veils
Pearl and diamond drop earrings: Adeler
Necklace with Swarovski elements: Helene Zubeldia
Platform heels with jeweled bow: Dyeables
More Types of Venues:
► Garden
► Beach
► Country Club
► City Hall
► Deco Hotel

subset: commoncrawl


text: Chevs of the 40s » Chevy Parts » Glass » Windshields » Item #DW318G 53-54 Windshield - Convertible & Hardtop - Grey Tint Item # DW318G 53-54 Weighs 1.0000lbs. This is the windshield glass that fits 1953-54 convertible and hardtop. Tinted grey glass. This part fits most 1953 1954 Chevrolet Cars; exceptions may apply. Please read the complete description to see if this part fits your specific vehicle and application. Share | Price: $418.00 Each Qty: Add to Cart This product can expose you to a chemical, which is known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm. For more information go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov The following items are recommended to be purchased with this item. Enter the qty to purchase and click Buy Now to order all items at the same time $144.75 1953-1954 Windshield Rubber - 150 Series & Wagon $103.29 1953-1954 Windshield Rubber With Moulding. Bel Air, 210, SDL, Wagon (exc HTP, CVT) $141.00 1953-1954 Windshield Rubber - Hardtop & Convertible Buy Now Reviews Product Reviews Login to Write A Review --> Fits Vehicle Models Product Fits Vehicle Models There are no specific vehicled models specificied for this part.


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You might think that the reality show "Big Brother" is a bunch of vain, moronic narcissists locked in a house together making glorious/terrible television.
But in the 12th season, there is so much more! Along with the usual array of wannabes, the show's producers will plant a character with the direct purpose to shake up the house -- with radical cues and direction shifts fed directly to them from the viewers at home.
Yes, fans of "Big Brother," there is a secret, destructive agent working for you -- doing the collective bidding of the viewership. He or she will be known as the big brother "saboteur," according to CBS.com. The website spells out that we can actually use the mole to "wreak havoc." I didn't even know I had a "kill" button on my remote control, but I plan to use it. A lot.
We'll all find out who the secret agent will be after the July 15 live broadcast. And then we'll find out how to command our secret agent and presumably where to have the arms shipment delivered.
You might say that stupid reality show twists are for the feeble-minded. Sign me up!


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Click below to filter your search results
Committee Opinion Number 667, July 2016
(Reaffirmed 2018)
ABSTRACT: Emergency departments typically have structured triage guidelines for health care providers encountering the diverse cases that may present to their units. Such guidelines aid in determining which patients must be evaluated promptly and which may wait safely, and aid in determining anticipated use of resources. Although labor and delivery units frequently serve as emergency units for pregnant women, the appropriate structure, location, timing, and timeliness for hospital-based triage evaluations of obstetric patients are not always clear. Hospital-based obstetric units are urged to ...
Committee Opinion Number 501, August 2011
(Reaffirmed 2017)
ABSTRACT: The past two decades have yielded profound advances in the fields of prenatal diagnosis and fetal intervention. Although fetal interventions are driven by a beneficence-based motivation to improve fetal and neonatal outcomes, advancement in fetal therapies raises ethical issues surrounding maternal autonomy and decision making, concepts of innovation versus research, and organizational aspects within institutions in the development of fetal care centers. To safeguard the interests of both the pregnant woman and the fetus, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and t...
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409 12th Street SW, Washington, DC 20024-2188
Mailing Address: PO Box 96920, Washington, DC 20024-9998


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I will be doing a booksigning in Somerville at a yard sale Sat June 27th from 10am-4pm!
Copies of Blood of the Dark Moon and Blood and Mint Chocolates, two books in the Dark Moon series made available on CD in PDF format, will be sold along with handcrafted steampunk jewelry and accessories made from watch parts.
To read more about these works and others, go here: http://adriannebrennan.com/books.html
For samples of my steampunk wares from Time Lady Designs, go here: http://TimeLadyDesigns.etsy.com
This is a great opportunity for those who are in the Somerville area and would like to attend a very cool yard sale held by very cool folks, plus a booksigning! How can that get any better?
The address is 112 Woodstock Street #1 in Somerville, MA.
Love & Magic,
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Yard sale & booksigning at Somerville this Saturday June 27th from 10am-4pm!
I will be doing a booksigning in Somerville at a yard sale Sat June 27th from 10am-4pm!
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Well, it's here. After a winter of warm weather and sunny days, the snow and ice hit Indiana today. Of course, I never listen and I still had bare legs and high heels. Welcome winter!
Top: gifted, but I believe from Macy's
Skirt: Loft
Scarf: thrifted
Shoes: Jessica Simpson Collection
Coat:I bought it years ago
I hope everyone is having a great winter day!


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Montessori for Learning materials are suitable for Montessori classrooms, homeschools, ESL classes and more! There are also many awesome GAP fillers for your curriculum, please take a few moments to browse through the site.
My name is Kyle Sadler and Montessori is my passion. I have a desire to spread that passion to others and love to create new and traditional Montessori materials (with each creation, it is as if I am learning the material all over again!) This site is a place that I use to share the materials I create. Due to the cost of upkeep to the site, I do have to charge a small fee to keep it operational (only $4.95/month). You can cancel the subscription at anytime during the year. Download as many Montessori materials as you need each month- no extra charges.
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*After "LIKING", go to Montessori for Learning Facebook Page
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PRETEND for a moment that you are
Someone types the word "dresses" and hits enter. What will be the very first result?
There are, of course, a lot of possibilities.
O.K., how about the word "bedding"?
"Area rugs"? Crate & Barrel is a possibility.
You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:
The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for "skinny jeans," "home decor," "comforter sets," "furniture" and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic ("tablecloths") to the strangely specific ("grommet top curtains").Continue reading the main story
This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in "
With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google's stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites.
Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?
Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and "white hat" approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site's visibility. Penney's results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google's search results that he has ever seen.
"Actually, it's the most ambitious attempt I've ever heard of," he said. "This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You'd think they would have people around them that would know better."
TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google's results. We're talking, to be clear, about the "organic" results — in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google's algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss.
But it has described one crucial factor in detail: links from one site to another.
If you own a Web site, for instance, about Chinese cooking, your site's Google ranking will improve as other sites link to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking. In a way, what Google is measuring is your site's popularity by polling the best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links to your site as votes of approval.
But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them. And here's where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to
Who is that someone? A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie Brossart, says it was not Penney.
"J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies," Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, "We are working to have the links taken down."
The links do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like "casual dresses," "evening dresses," "little black dress" or "cocktail dress." Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.
Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase "black dresses" and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. "Evening dresses" appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. "Cocktail dresses" showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. "Casual dresses" was on a site called elistofbanks.com. "Semi-formal dresses" was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.
There are links to JCPenney.com's dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel,
Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at
When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.
Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company's guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine rankings, including what it refers to as "link schemes." The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google's results.
Often drastically. In 2006, Google announced that it had caught
BMW acknowledged that it had set up "doorway pages," which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding "if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration."
J. C. Penney, it seems, will not suffer the same fate. But starting Wednesday, it was the subject of what Google calls "corrective action."
Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.
"I can confirm that this violates our guidelines," said Mr. Cutts during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of paid links to JCPenney.com.
He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney's search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word "punished" — but Google did not later "circle back" to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.
He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months.
"Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do," he said. "But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job."
Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger. You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they're eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.
That said, he added, "I don't think I could do my job well if in some sense I was not offended by things that were bad for Google users."
"Am I happy this happened?" he later asked. "Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will."
And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a "manual action" against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.
At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for "Samsonite carry on luggage."
Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for "living room furniture."
By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.
In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country.
The next it was essentially buried.
PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.
Penney also issued a statement: "We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter," Ms. Brossart wrote, "but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position."
She added that while the collection of links surely brought in additional revenue, it was hardly a bonanza. Just 7 percent of JCPenney.com's traffic comes from clicks on organic search results, she wrote. A far bigger source of profits this holiday season, she stated, came from partnerships with companies like
Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards from the paid links. If you think of Google as the entrance to the planet's largest shopping center, the links helped Penney appear as though it was the first and most inviting spot in the mall, to millions and millions of online shoppers.
How valuable was that? A study last May by Daniel Ruby of Chitika, an online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average, 34 percent of Google's traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice the percentage that went to No. 2.
The Keyword Estimator at Google puts the number of searches for "dresses" in the
But in January, the company was crowing about its online holiday sales. Kate Coultas, a company spokeswoman, wrote to a reporter in January, "Internet sales through
There was considerable pressure from investors for Penney to deliver strong holiday results. It has been struggling through one of the more trying times of its century of retailing. The $17.8 billion in revenue it reported last year is the exact same figure it reported in 2001. It announced in January that it would close a handful of underperforming stores, as well as two of its five call centers and 19 outlets that sell excess catalog merchandise.
Adding to the company's woes is the demise of its catalog business. Penney has phased out what it called its Big Book and poured money into its Web site. But so far, the loss of the catalog has not been offset by the expansion of the Web site. At its peak, the catalog brought in about $4 billion in revenue. In 2009, the site brought in $1.5 billion.
"For the last 35 years, Penney has tried to be accepted as a department store, and during unusually good times, it does very well," said Bernard Sosnick, an analyst at Gilford Securities. "But in bad times, it gets punished by shoppers who pull back after having spent aspirationally."
MANY owners of Web sites with Penney links seem to relish their unreachability. But there were exceptions, and they included
The word "dresses" appears in a small collection of links in the middle of a largely blank Cocaman page. Asked about that link, Mr. Camichel said his records show that it turned up on his site last April, though he said it might have been earlier than that.
The link came through a Web site,
"You do pretty well," he wrote, referring to income from his links trading. "The thing is, the more you invest (time and money) the better results you get. Right now I get enough to buy myself new test devices for my Android apps (like $150/month) with zero effort. I have to do nothing. Ads just sit there and if people click, I make money."
Efforts to reach TNX itself last week via e-mail were not successful.
Interviewing a purveyor of black-hat services face-to-face was a considerable undertaking. They are a low-profile bunch. But a link-selling specialist named Mark Stevens — who says he had nothing to do with the Penney link effort — agreed to chat. He did so on the condition that his company not be named, a precaution he justified by recounting what happened when the company apparently angered Google a few months ago.
"It was my fault," Mr. Stevens said. "I posted a job opening on a Stanford Engineering alumni mailing list, and mentioned the name of our company and a brief description of what we do. I think some Google employees saw it."
In a matter of days, the company could not be found in a Google search.
"Literally, you typed the name of the company into the search box and we did not turn up. Anywhere. You'd find us if you knew our Web address. But in terms of search, we just disappeared."
The company now operates under a new name and with a profile that is low even in the building where it claims to have an office. The landlord at the building, a gleaming, glassy midrise next to Route 101 in Redwood City, Calif., said she had never heard of the company.
Mr. Stevens agreed to meet in mid-January for a dinner paid for by The Times. Asked to pick a "fine restaurant" in his neighborhood, he rather cheekily selected a modern French bistro in Palo Alto offering an eight-course prix fixe meal for $118. Liquid nitrogen and "fairy tale
Mr. Stevens turned out to be a boyish-looking 31-year-old native of
"The key is to roll the campaign out slowly," he said as he nibbled at seared duck foie gras. "A lot of companies are in a rush. They want as many links as we can get them as fast as possible. But Google will spot that. It will flag a Web site that goes from zero links to a few hundred in a week."
The hardest part about the link-selling business, he explained, is signing up deep-pocketed mainstream clients. Lots of them, it seems, are afraid they'll get caught. Another difficulty is finding quality sites to post links. Whoever set up the JCPenney.com campaign, he said, relied on some really low-rent, spammy sites — the kind with low PageRanks, as Google calls its patented measure of a site's quality. The higher the PageRank, the more "Google juice" a site offers others to which it is linked.
"The sites that TNX uses mostly have low PageRanks," Mr. Stevens said.
Mr. Stevens said that Web site owners, or publishers, as he calls them, get a small fee for each link, and the transaction is handled entirely over the Web.
Publishers can reject certain keywords and links — Mr. Stevens said some balked at a lingerie link — but for the most part the system is on a kind of autopilot. A client pays Mr. Stevens and his colleagues for links, which are then farmed out to Web sites. Payment to publishers is handled via PayPal.
You might expect Mr. Stevens to have a certain amount of contempt for Google, given that he spends his professional life finding ways to subvert it. But through the evening he mentioned a few times that he's in awe of the company, and the quality of its search engine.
So how does he justify all his efforts to undermine that engine?
"I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial," he said. "If you search '
To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you're not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.
WHY did Google fail to catch a campaign that had been under way for months? One, no less, that benefited a company that Google had already taken action against three times? And one that relied on a collection of Web sites that were not exactly hiding their spamminess?
Mr. Cutts emphasized that there are 200 million domain names and a mere 24,000 employees at Google.
"Spammers never stop," he said. Battling those spammers is a never-ending job, and one that he believes Google keeps getting better and better at.
Here's another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including
Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It's the sort of question that
Investigators have been asking advertisers in
Asked if Penney received any breaks because of the money it has spent on ads, Mr. Cutts said, "I'll give a categorical denial." He then made an impassioned case for Google's commitment to separating the money side of the business from the search side. The former has zero influence on the latter, he said.
"If you asked me for the names of five people in advertising engineering, I don't think I could give you the names," he said. "There is a very long history at Google of saying 'We are not going to worry about short-term revenue.' " He added: "We rely on the trust of our users. We realize the responsibility that we have to our users."
He noted, too, that before The Times presented evidence of the paid links to JCPenney.com, Google had just begun to roll out an algorithm change that had a negative effect on Penney's search results. (The tweak affected "how we trust links," Mr. Cutts said, declining to elaborate.)
True, JCPenney.com's showing in Google searches had declined slightly by Feb. 8, as the algorithm change began to take effect. In "comforter sets," Penney went from No. 1 to No. 7. In "sweater dresses," from No. 1 to No. 10.
But the real damage to Penney's results began when Google started that "manual action." The decline can be charted: On Feb. 1, the average Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3.
On Feb. 8, when the algorithm was changing, it was 4.
By Feb. 10, it was 52.
MR. CUTTS said he did not plan to write about Penney's situation, as he did with BMW in 2006. Rarely, he explained, does he single out a company publicly, because Google's goal is to preserve the integrity of results, not to embarrass people.
"But just because we don't talk about it," he said, "doesn't mean we won't take strong action."Continue reading the main story


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Robert Straub is fluent in Spanish and very knowledge about the area. There were no 'language problems' anywhere, making the trip run very smoothly.
How Glenn can find a stub tailed spadebill and white whiskered puffbird 10 feet in the woods and behind a tree is just amazing. Going boondocking thru the woods resulted in An Ornate Hawk Eagle mating. What more can a birder ask for!!!
Thank you sooo much for the Dry Tortugas tour. It was everything I was hoping it would be and more.
This trip was a spectacular exploration of an amazing unique habitat. Mind-boggling non-stop variety of waders, raptors, caiman, capybara and jaguars! A memorable moment included paddling alongside remarkable Giant Otters crunching fish as they fed and communicating with eerie ear-splitting screams. - Pantanal 2010
Thank you again Adrian and Toby for a wonderful trip, and thanks for the excellent report. I read it while sweltering in our heat, so the mention of rain only made me want to return to Scotland. - June 2018
We had extremely high expectations, and they were easily exceeded. We loved everything about the trip. Probably what impressed us the most is the way Kevin and his folks made sure everyone's interests were a point of focus. As birders, we felt like we received all the help we could have asked for, and I'm sure the photographers felt the same way.
This was so much more than a birding tour of Morocco; it was truly a cultural experience.
Thanks again for another wonderful birding trip. I really enjoyed the islands and the hidden corners of Scotland. Your good humor and friendship add so much to the trip.
Naturally, the hawk flights were the highlight of the trip but we enjoyed everything else as well; the morning bird walks, the boat rides, the museum in Xalapa, the food, and the very nice camaraderie between the participants and the guides. Robert is certainly a class act! He did his best to make sure all involved were happy with everything and, of course, he is an excellent birder.
I also want to offer high praise in regards to Alex. He is as gifted a birder as I have been with as (...)
I was not sure what I was getting into with this tour, as this was my first guided trip. I feel that I had gotten pretty far with photography on my own, and have built a bit of a following. That said, I also felt I've hit a bit of a plateau with processing and creativity in the field.
Working with Kevin in the field and seeing what he was able to create in the situations given was inspiring to say the least. This gave me a bit of re-kindled spirit towards(...)
Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and leadership. Jim and I thoroughly enjoyed our time with you and Toby in beautiful Scotland.
Adrian was an amazing guide, knowing virtually every bird we heard and saw. In addition to knowing them on sight or sound, he planned special stops to find individual birds that would not be available anywhere else.
In addition to identification, Adrian was also a font of knowledge about the animals we saw (birds and otherwise); I learned about more than just birds on the trip.
The lodges we stayed at were all great, giving us the opportunity to see wildlife in public spaces in the b(...)
This was my sixth Wildside trip. All have been fantastic! This is my second trip with Alex as my guide. Alex is very knowledgeable and very well prepared. The highlight birds for me were the Ridgway's rails, the THREE Ruffs and the 25 YES 25 California Condors and most were feeding only 100 yards away! The Pelagic trip was a real bonus seeing the Tufted Puffin and two Blue Whales. Looking forward to the two trips I've already booked for 2020.
My wife and I joined Kevin on his Belize tour March 2019. We both had a wonderful time and experience. My wife, not a photographer, came along and really enjoyed herself. The tour had ecology related info, area history, bird watching and photography. The lodges we stayed in were perfect and the food was even better.
Our trip has been wonderful. The falcons were amazing, a true wonder of the natural world. Like witnessing a a massive snow storm, except instead of snowflakes, the sky was filled with falcons. The people of Pangti were warm and welcoming and their accommodations entirely satisfactory. Though the falcons were the crown jewels, the rest of the trip was also thrilling, from watching the primates of the gibbon sanctuary to seeing rhinos up close from the back of an elephant. We were well (...)
Kevin, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the Amazon trip and your expertise in photography, birds, and the tropics in general. Truly, I don't know how you had the time in your life to acquire your depth of knowledge; didn't you ever sleep? In any event, keep doing what you are doing--I think you were born to lead eco-trips!
Wildside Nature Tours are THE best, we enjoyed Belize so much, the locations chosen for this 25th anniversary trip allowed more time at a particular location which we really enjoyed. You are as busy as you choose to be and still get the field opportunities offered. Belize was our second Wildside trip, what we have found was we arrived as strangers on both trips and left as family. Each day was filled with history, culture and Kevin's team know how to find those AWESOME shots. You can s(...)
One of my favorite tours! Good mix of birds and mammals. Fantastic photographic opportunities. Great food and lodging. Wildside does it right!
Adrian, thanks for a great trip! We thoroughly enjoyed birding with you again and appreciate all the extra effort you put into making the trip a learning experience as well as finding the birds.
Mammals and birds were everywhere. The crater was amazing as were the sheer number of wildebeest in the Serengeti. You certainly put us right in the middle of migration. This safari far exceeded my expectations. Thank you! - Feb 2015
Thank you Adrian for 3 fabulous weeks of wildlife watching. I expected this to be a birdy trip and it far exceeded my expectations. Your enthusiasm, knowledge and wit made every sighting, bird and mammal, into a lasting memory. I particularly enjoyed spending time sitting and watching the wildlife and waiting for the unexpected to happen. It never disappointed and neither did the entire trip.
Chris and Mandy were fantastic guides! They were attentive to our needs throughout the tour, working tirelessly to get all of us on the birds even in difficult forest conditions, as well as sharing their expertise on the fascinating evolution and current struggles of Hawaii's endemic species to survive in spite of introduced species and diseases. The pelagic trip was absolutely amazing, the accommodations were all lovely, the meals delicious, and we wound up with an impressive list of 89 s(...)
This is our fifth trip with Wildside. All five trips were fabulous and Kevin and his guides are terrific. This trip to the Galapagos is in a class of it's own and the trip every birder and nature photographer must do!! Kevin, Pedro and John K. were exceptional guides and hosts. The new boat, staterooms, staff and fresh food were all first class. I cannot recommend this trip enough. The wildlife was up close and amazing. We even got to snorkel with sea turtles, sea lions, rays, sharks and ou(...)
As the most novice birder on the trip, I was treated to a wonderful group of helpful participants--leaders, naturalists and fellow travelers. Patience abounded! What a store of information I have gathered, my head swims in colorful birds and other animals. Our stop at riverside villages was enlilghtening.
This was the most productive photo tour I have ever experienced, Kevin! Thanks!
Thanks again for leading a wonderful trip, Adrian. I loved your sense of humor and appreciated your patience and great people skills.
I first met Edison Buenaño in person at Biggest Week in American Birding in 2012. I have now birded with him several times in the U.S. and South America. Edison's combination of keen eyes, gifted ears, and great leadership skills make Edison one of the best birding guides I have ever met. He is patient with his customers and is not condescending in any way. I would not hesitate to recommend Edison as a guide to any person or group. He has earned both my trust and admiration.
Robert Straub is a tour leader who is enthusiastic and patient (and who seems to enjoy himself, too).
From the tropical Pacific coast, to ancient oak cloud forests, to stark treeless habitat at 11,000 feet, the Wildside Nature Tours Costa Rica birding adventure was a great success. Thanks to our guide – arguably the best birder I ever met and commanding an encyclopedic knowledge of natural history – we tallied 346 species in a little over nine full days of birding!
The spectacle of thousands and thousands of raptors streaming and kettling overhead cannot be described in words. Every birder should experience this in Veracruz at least once in their lifetime. - Veracruz 2013
We thoroughly enjoyed our trip to India. Adrian is an outstanding leader with a thorough knowledge of the birds, history and culture of India. He was extremely helpful and patient in finding and identifying the birds and was an excellent teacher on the fine points of identification of similar species.
The pace of the tour was fine, went to many good birding places including new ones for us, loved all the time we got to spend at raptor counts and marveled at the locations where we saw them; Chalchihuecan early in the AM, Cardel, Chichi, and west of Chichi later in the afternoon. We were privileged to go to the banding station. And the trip was flexible enough that we went to Cantona, where history combined with birds. The food was excellent. - Veracruz 'River of Raptors"
I can't begin to offer enough praise for Glenn. He was extraordinary on all counts. He was one of the most skilled birders I've had the pleasure of birding with, and his people skills were off the charts. It was a pleasure and an honor to have the chance to meet and spend time in the field with him. He's an amazing guy!
Robert Straub is the best guide that I have ever worked with. He really enjoys showing 'his' birds and 'his' chosen place to others.
Our small crew thoroughly enjoyed each hour of every day and weren't shy about saying so. I know they loved their Wildsides experience in Belize.
The Botswana trip with Adrian Binns was truly a trip of a lifetime.
As a new birder, I learned so much from Adrian's instruction and loved the camps we stayed at in Botswana. In addition, Adrian and the other folks on the tour were delightful travel companions.
Botswana is a magical place (and we saw many, many elephants in the wild, which I wanted so badly to see). I highly recommend this tour!
This trip to Kenya was an AMAZING experience of a lifetime! Couldn't believe we could see over 450 birds in so short a time. Seeing all three types of giraffes, 2 species of zebras, elephants, blk and wh rhinos, wildebeests, etc. in their natural setting was wonderful. And that lake of flamingos! WOW! The drama of the gnu and the crocodiles was truly an experience one could only have in Africa.
Adrian was the best of leaders and his Kenyan birding helpers were fabulous. We loved the (...)
The trip exceeded my expectations. The leaders were patient and answered all questions. The yacht crew were attentive and well trained. Food onboard was well prepared and satisfying. The time passed too quickly and every day brought new adventures.
Adrian, thank you for a wonderful Kenyan adventure. Your superb birding skills, knowledge, and your patience and good humor make traveling with you a delight. Assante sana!
The Wildside Cuba trip was a winner from start to finish. From all the endemics checked off; to our wonderful, hard working Cuban guides; to principal guide, the indomitable Gabriel Lugo; this trip is a must for your Western Hemisphere bucket list.
Thank you for making the Dry Tortugas an enjoyable experience. You are a terrific guide, full of information and very caring about your 'flock'. - April 2017
Joel and I wanted to thank you again for the wonderful trip to the Tortugas. We appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us and making the trip so enjoyable. It was truly a memorable trip!
You really want to see tropical birds but don't like to constantly change hotels? Can't or don't want to do a lot of jungle hiking? Not familiar with the tropical bird groups? The riverboat base with skiff rides along the water edges give an up-close look at a wide variety of birds, monkeys, sloths, and river dolphins. The few walks are not difficult and can be optional. Partner not a birder or a photography buff? As space allows, they can learn photography tips on one trip and go looking a(...)
There was no way we were going to Alaska on our own (for both knowing all the little tidbits and for safety... i.e. bears). I was more than impressed with Kevin's care, interest, knowledge, patience, and enthusiasm.
Gabriel's birding tour was one of the best birding tours we've ever taken. Based on the excellent reviews we found online, we booked a private half-day tour and the price was very reasonable. Gabriel is a well known birding expert in Puerto Rico and he knew all the best locations for spotting PR endemics and other sought after species. He is very professional, friendly, and a good driver. He picked us up at the hotel in a nice, clean car and had an excellent spotting scope. The tour tu(...)
You have the best coverage for getting all the Florida specialties, and you allow extra time to 'get the birds.'
Thanks again Adrian for another great trip (#13 I think) of birding in a wonderful location. You're a great guide, but you're also an outstanding teacher. I know Kenya is one of your favorite destinations, and it was so enjoyable to see things through your eyes.
Best birding activity - at Lake Baringo with Francis, five owl species, and on the boat ride, the Fish Eagles, Little Bittern and Allen's Gallinule.
Best animal-bird interaction - the Red-billed Oxpecker going into the Rhino's ear(...)
I took the Galapagos trip that began June 16, 2019. The trip exceeded my expectations and they were already pretty high. Everything was praiseworthy--the logistics, the ship, the crew, the food, and the guides. Kevin, Pedro and John are all so experienced and knowledgeable, and fun to be with. Kevin is a very relaxed but efficient leader, so the atmosphere is always enjoyable. The photo opportunities were of course spectacular.
The pace was not leisurely! Early morning start and three ex(...)
We didn't just see, or tour, the Galapagos Islands with Wildside Nature Tours...we experienced the Galapagos Islands with all five senses, such that it will live in our memories as vivid as it was those magical twelve days of August, 2017, aboard the our yacht...may we yet again be so fortunate as to undertake such an adventure.
I just returned from the Tetons very enthusiastic about the leader, Kevin Loughlin. Not only does Kevin run a terrific workshop, he's a wonderful photographer and a charming man. during the workshop he was always teaching and helping all the attendees. Although he was not familiar with the Olympus OMD, he solved all of my issues because he knows photography so well!
Superb trip! Let's start with the snowy scenery -- just gorgeous. And then the birds. We saw many we had never seen before, and never could have expected to see otherwise. Adrian or Alex or Chris would spot a tiny dot at the top of a tree and say, "That's a ...." and we'd pull over and, sure enough, they'd be right. They were generous with their exhaustive knowledge, and we learned a lot. Their friendliness and good natures made the trip so much fun in so many ways. We came home exhau(...)
I think you are great professionals, knowledgeable birders and very caring about your fellow travelers. You are not afraid to share what you know and that is really important. I have been on other tours and yours are by far the best.
Just back from the amazing River of Raptors tour—Robert and Alex were incredible guides.
Once again we had a terrific birding trip with Wildside. Belize was a perfect tropical birding introduction for Pat and I. The accommodations and meals were great. The variety and numbers of birds was overwhelming. And I can't say enough good things about Glenn our guide. He was SUPER!!!! We definitely will be doing another Glenn guided trip in the near future. Thanks again for a wonderful week!
Our Wildside trip to Cuba in April 2019 was fantastic. For a long time I wanted to visit Cuba and this trip was one of the best tours I have been on and exceeded my expectations. The trip was so well organized and included some of the most beautiful locations in Cuba. We had a small group and a wonderful guide, Gabriel who met us in Miami and took care of the details for the whole trip. He is an experienced knowledgable birder and showed a great deal of patience to make sure we all saw (...)
I was lucky enough to meet and bird a little with the Wildside team at BWAB. You guys and gals are awesome - it was great meeting you all!
I just returned from your fantastic trip to Arizona. I had 70 life birds including Elegant Trogan, Montezuma Quail and Five Stripe Sparrow!!! Chris and Steve were great guides. I plan on going to your Maine and Northern California trips next year. Thanks for another great birding trip!
How many ways can we say thank you for this wonderful experience? During this trip we've enjoyed so much not only your expert bird identification but also all the side info on many species including mammals. You have a very sharp eyesight and excellent skills in getting us onto the bird. You are patient, keep all situations light with a nice sense of humor and calm demeanor that instills trust from your clients. Suffice it to say that we would not hesitate to travel again with you. - Keny(...)
Winter birding can be challenging but Alex, Chris and Adrian kept our spirits high with their laughter, expertise, and unmistakable talent for spotting target species. This trip would not have been the same without these amazing guides. As always, expectations were exceeded and I can't wait for my next Wildside adventure!
The best trip ever! The birds, animals, geology, and plant material are totally unique to the area and amazing. Kevin, Pedro, and John were wonderful leaders who were very knowledgeable, patient, and fun to be with. The yacht was extremely comfortable and the crew could not be more accommodating. In summary this was a great trip and would not change anything about it.
The prairie chicken tour was fabulous. Gary and I were so happy with Chris' leader abilities that we would love to go the FL + Dry Tortugas tour with him next April.
- Colorado, April 2018
I want to thank you for helping make our Dry Tortugas so enjoyable. We had a great time and the birding was impressive.
Got to meet a few of you at the Magee Marsh Boardwalk this past week. You guys were wonderful. Thanks for all your help and knowledge. Hope to see you again next year!
Dear Adrian, Your vast knowledge of birds, habitats were especially appreciated, and your thoughtful attention to all of your birders!
Thank you for all your efforts in arranging this wonderful trip, finding us all the target birds and for my surprise birthday celebration. - Morocco April 2017
Adrian - Thanks for a fabulous trip! The chickens really were spectacular, and Colorado is beautiful!
Thanks, Kevin, for an awesome and amazing week [in Glacier Nation al Park] and for sharing your terrific knowledge and experience with us. Your expert photography knowledge helped me to grow and be a better photographer. Your birding and nature skills have inspired me! Your passion for your work is contagious!
Loved the beautiful birds we saw on this trip! It is difficult to pick just one as a favorite. The pine marten was an amazing sight and who could forget the regurgitations of the Northern Hawk Owl who was so accommodating to stay in the same area all four days for all to enjoy? Adrian, Alex and Chris were wonderful guides who worked HARD to find all the birds who cooperated. As usual, a couple species were elusive, but that just gives us an opportunity to visit the area again in the fut(...)
Wildside Tours' four-day Dry Tortugas boat trip produced the goods in spades. Leaders Adrian Binns, who legally changed his name to suit his profession, and actor/birding guide Andy Samberg/Chris Brown were widely funny - and effective guides...we had SO much fun!
I would recommend Wildside Nature Tours for anyone who wants to explore this area of Alaska and I suggest that you do. The glaciers are grand and amazing (and shrinking), the bears are grand and I was in awe watching them, the whales are majestic and graceful, the scenery is beautiful.
Seldom does a trip touch my heart where I know I will remember all the details. Well there were too many details to remember, but the experience of seeing Alaska touched my heart and the best part was shar(...)
I just have to say ... you guys are superstars! With your awesome skills at showing birds to people, you made a LOT of people happy during the Biggest Week In American Birding! Thank you so much; we'll look forward to seeing all of you again, back here in Ohio or somewhere else around the world!
The Pantanal wildlife is spectacular. You couldn't ask for better photo ops of jaguars and an ocelot. We had over 250 bird species with good views on almost all of them. Adrian Binns and our local guide, Fisher, were very knowledgeable and helpful in spotting and identifying the birds. Adrian is the only guide that called before a trip to make sure it was what I was looking for. At the airport, Fisher made sure everyone was checked in before he left. Highly recommended.
I wanted to let you know that my Maine birding trip last week was beyond all my expectations. Chris and Alex were terrific hosts and guides. They went beyond the call of duty and their efforts paid off with a great Puffin trip. This is my third birding trip with Wildside and Chris Brown does a fabulous job picking lunch and dinner spots which really makes for a successful, well rounded trip.
Watching bats fly out at dusk from the Austin bridge; seeing spinning phalaropes at Hornsby water treatment plant; tracking down target Golden-cheeked Warblers at Balcones NWR; observing up-close Painted Buntings from multiple blinds at South Llano State Park. Austin and surrounding locales hosted a whirlwind of wonderful birds, habitats, and experiences! Guide Alex Lamoreaux provided great leadership and expertise in this highly-rewarding short trip.
Adrian, I was so impressed with your enthusiasm for the birds and constant effort to teach us, not to mention your ever-engaging wit.
You know how much this trip meant to me. It was so much more than I would have ever even imagined. I was a little worried that I would be disappointed because I held Galapagos on such high expectations. I feel silly for even thinking that!
I never felt so close to nature in my life. From the Sea Lion that happily played with us in the water to the Mockingbirds coming right up to my camera to the Boobies who had no worry about us passing right by, even when they had young with them. The s(...)
Thanks for making this a wonderful trip! Your skill, knowledge, patience and good humor are stellar 🙂 - Florida April 2017
Robert Straub is the best guide I have ever worked with. He really enjoys showing 'his' birds and 'his' chosen place to others. - Veracruz ABA tour 2009
Your birding expertise and spotting ability are amazing. Thanks so much for your patience, kindness, stories and great attitude, it was a memorable and fun trip.
Spain provided fantastic birding, culture, and food. We arrived a day early to visit Seville, a wonderfully walkable city with great architecture and parks. Donana wetlands teemed with ducks, waders, and shorebirds. We were mesmerized by vultures and eagles at the rocky cliffs. It was great fun to look for bustards in flowing grasslands. Scenery was stunning in the Pyrenees mountains; it was amazing to watch the Wallcreeper cling to crags high in a vertical cliff. We ate the most mouth-wate(...)
The Dry Tortugas had been on our bucket list and this trip allowed us to check it off in style. The boat was roomy and comfortable easily housing the eleven participants. The crew was friendly and accommodating, and the food was excellent (which is typical of Wildside tours). We enjoyed pelagic birding both to and from the islands and excellent birding on the islands. Adrian, our tour guide made sure everyone got on the birds. And he looked at hundreds of Brown Noddys to find the one Black (...)
Chickens close on the leks were the most unique N. American birding experience we have ever had, even after birding for about 40 years.
Just wanted you to know what a WONDERFUL time we had with you in India – a TERRIFIC guide, wonderful participants, great birds and SPECTACULAR TIGERS. Yes, ours was a great trip; I was so impressed with your enthusiasm for the birds and constant effort to teach us, not to mention your ever-engaging wit.
- Northern India 06
Adrian - I am still humming with all the adventures we had in East Africa. Just wanted to let you know that our Tanzania-Kenya safari was unbelievable!
What can I say? It was a trip of a lifetime. Even now, three weeks later, I have scenes of Africa in my night dreams and day dreams. - Tanzania, March 2009
A small group tour of the Galapagos on a private boat is definitely the only way to go. To visit these enchanted islands with a leader as experienced as Kevin Loughlin means that you will almost always be in the right place at the right time to catch all the action at the best times of day in the best light.
The Galápagos Islands are a unique destination that requires an experienced tour company to expose you to all its wonders. Kevin of Wildside Tours knows this place as well or better than anybody! You will be totally immersed in the wildlife and scenery-a sensual experience that will have you re-telling your trip over and over to friends and family. It couldn't get any better than what we experienced. My wife says NOTHING will ever top this as a birthday gift. Wildside is the best!!
Thank you for a tremendous custom trip you put together and led us on throughout Kenya and Tanzania this past month. From beginning to end it was a spectacular success due in principle to your masterful planning, professional work ethic and calm, deliberate and patient demeanor. - Feb 2017
The trip was really something, getting around to all the chicken leks...and finding all the great birds. Thanks for making my 700th ABA bird (Gunnison Sage-Grouse) special with the champagne celebration.
I've been lucky enough to go birding with Edison in a variety of places, and it's always a blast. His skill at finding and identifying birds, his enthusiasm for every bird, and his personal warmth and sense of humor all combine to make him a great leader in the field.
Wow! This trip was a stunner, and I am highly recommending it to everyone I know. I hope to take many more trips with you, Adrian. Having spent a month in Morocco almost 40 years ago I was thrilled to return with you. You are a terrific guide; you know Morocco, its birds, customs, people, places, language and cuisine. The enjoyment you provided surpassed my highest expectations. It was fun to see you greeting old friends there with hugs, and your comfort and ease were infectious to particip(...)
The India tour, with great views of birds, mammals, and iconic palaces as well as Rajasthan culture was easily the most memorable of some dozen overseas trips we have taken in the past few years.
– India, 2008
Edison loves the birds of South America (his home turf) like the Sword-billed Hummingbird loves a trumpet flower! He's a walking encyclopedia of field marks and call notes - an expert on neotropical birds and conservation, and equally as passionate about sharing his knowledge with the rest of us. He's also excellent company in the field and seems to know half the people in Latin America on a first name basis. Can't wait to go birding with Edison again!
Trinidad is a place like no other. There is the magic of seeing so many birds of different species and many very close. Time to practice those action shots. I learned so much about my camera and shooting from the photographer Roger Neckles. His enthusiasm was contagious. He knows where to go to find the birds. The background scenery is also special in your photos. Roger tries very hard to fulfill your every need. I requested to see the Gold and Blue Macaw not dreaming I would see one on my (...)
This was my third trip to the Dry Tortugas. Unlike all of the others, the boat 'Makai' was very comfortable and far more private. The group was small and friendly. The food excellent. The crew worked well together. Adrian worked hard to find every possible bird and to ensure the comfort of all aboard. Thanks for a great trip.
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Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue is the author of Room, shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and screenwriter of its film adaptation. Her other works include Frog Music, The Sealed Letter and Slammerkin. 'The Wonder' is an extract from her new novel, The Wonder, forthcoming from Picador in the UK, Little, Brown in the US and HarperCollins in Canada.


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Sandy Goble continued her fine play during the Table Mountain GC women's club championship tournament to garner the title of the 2012 women's club gross champion. Goble broke 80 each of the three days for a total score of 235.
Bruce Ballou won bragging rights for at least a year after his round of 73 held up to win the Lava Creek GC men's club championship.
Mike O'Donnell was not to be denied this year in the Canyon Oaks CC men's match play championship after losing last year in his semifinal match to the eventual winner, Jeff Fowler. This year O'Donnell defeated Justin Bowman, Dan Mehan and Rick Dollarhide in that order to claim the championship for the seventh time during his tenure at Canyon Oaks CC.
Tyler Collier, Pleasant Valley High class of 2014, won the prestigious Veritas World Junior Golf Championship in the 16-year-old age division. Collier had three great rounds of 71, 72 and 70 for a 3-under-par total of 213.
Chad Kimmelshue shot back-to-back sub-par rounds of 66 and 67 for a 133 total to win the El Rancho Chico club championship by five strokes over Jason Roberts.
Brian Worley defeated Ron West, the defending champion, in the 36-hole final match and will reign as the 2012 Tuscan Ridge GC men's champion.
Walt Jankowski emerged victorious in the Paradise Pines GC Golfer of the Year tournament. Jankowski shot a three-day score of 182 to win the title over his nearest competitor, Hal Long.
Debbie Maderos shot a two-day score of 143 to win the Butte Creek CC women's club championship by a five-stroke margin over Susan Martellaro. Martellaro was also the runner-up last year to Maderos. Martellaro did win the overall net title with a score of 144.
Ellie Fairchild continues to reign as the club champion of the Bidwell Park GC Women's Golf Club. Fairchild posted a three-day total of 248 to win the gross title. Glenda Kubo was the overall net champion.
Erin Poll emerged victorious to win the club champion trophy and bragging rights for a year in the Paradise Pines GC Women's Golf Club fall tournament. Poll posted a three-day total score of 280 to win the gross division. Joy Chin took the net title.
Linda Allen topped the field for the third year in a row to shoot the low gross score and claim the honor of reigning as the club champion of the Canyon Oaks CC Women's Golf Club. June Park took the low net title.
Sandy Goble posted an impressive even-par score of 72 to win the annual Table Mountain GC Women's Golf Club three-day Fall Classic.
Steve Christophel defeated Ben Pollock to lay claim to the men's club champion's reserved preferential parking space at Butte Creek CC. Shawn Blofsky defeated Ron Coleman for the net title.
Royal Hawkley took the low gross title in the Butte Creek CC senior men's club championship with a two-day score of 153, finally putting an end to Jim Sands' reign of four straight titles.
Sandy Allen shot the low gross score over the two-day Tuscan Ridge GC Women's Golf Club championship tournament to retain her title.
Glen Bleske outdistanced the field by a wide margin to earn the El Rancho Chico Golf Club player of the year honors.
Bob Leckinger edged out Ron Coleman to win Butte Creek CC inaugural player of the year title. Points are earned throughout the year, on the basis of net scores, in various designated tournaments.
Shelley Carney shot a net score of 70 to win the Canyon Oaks CC Women's Golf Club 2012 Hot Shot of the Year title, taking the title away from Nancy Vieira, the 2011 winner.
Happy New Year!
Ed Anderson's local golf column appears Tuesdays. He can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 839, Chico, CA 95927, or by emailing to firstname.lastname@example.com.