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USA Will Face Scotland on Feb. 9 in Jacksonville, Fla., and Feb. 13 in Nashville, Tenn.
CHICAGO - U.S. Women's National Team head coach Tom Sermanni has named the 29 players for a training camp leading into the USA's first two matches of 2013, on Feb. 9 in Jacksonville, Fla., and Feb. 13 in Nashville, Tenn. The USA will face Sermanni's native country of Scotland in both games.
Sermanni, who was appointed the new head coach of the USA at the end of October, will be coaching in his first event with the U.S. team. He named 17 of the 18 players who helped the USA to the Olympic gold medal in London last summer, as well as numerous players with previous National Team experience and a handful of young talented players.
"I'm excited to get out on the field and work with the team for the first time," said Sermanni. "For this particular part of the cycle, it's important to look at the established players in the squad but also the up-and-coming players and the ones who we think have the potential to really fight for positions on the team. For me, this period is really about observation and evaluation of some players who I know very well, some I've seen play only a bit and some who I will be seeing in a competitive environment for the first time."
Forwards Abby Wambach, the 2012 FIFA Women's World Player of the Year, and Alex Morgan, the 2012 U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year, are coming off a stellar year in which they combined for 55 goals, tying a 21-year-old U.S. record for most goals by two players in a calendar year.
The training camp also marks the return of defender Ali Krieger to the U.S. team for the first time since she suffered a serious knee injury during the Olympic Qualifying tournament in Canada just over a year ago. Krieger, one of the heroes of the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Team, played the past five years in Germany and has returned to the USA to play in the NWSL for the Washington Spirit.
Several players who have been battling to make WNT rosters over the past few years and who have recently been playing in Europe were called up for the start of 2013: midfielder Yael Averbuch, who is playing for FC Göteborg in Sweden; defender Whitney Engen, who signed with Liverpool FC in England; goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris, who was playing for FCR Duisburg in Germany and has been allocated to the Washington Spirit; midfielder Keelin Winters who was playing for FCC Turbine Potsdam in Germany and has been allocated to the Chicago Red Stars; and forward Christen Press, the 2010 MAC Hermann Trophy winner at Stanford, who was second in scoring in Sweden's First Division last season, scoring 17 league goals and 25 in all 2012 competitions for FC Göteborg. She recently transferred to Tyresö FF.
Press was an alternate on the 2012 Olympic Team along with midfielder Lori Lindsey and goalkeeper Jill Loyden, who were also called up for the camp.
Looking to the next generation, Sermanni named two of the stars of the U.S. team that won the 2012 FIFA Under-20 Women's World Cup in Japan last summer. Sermanni has given first full National Team call-ups to University of North Carolina defender Crystal Dunn, who played a dominating tournament at right back and assisted on the winning goal in the 1-0 World Cup Final victory against Germany, and to Santa Clara University defender Julie Johnston, the U.S. captain and winner of the Bronze Ball as the third-best player in the tournament, a rare achievement for a defender. Dunn recently won the MAC Hermann Trophy as the best player in college soccer. Dunn and Johnston are both 20 years old and have one year of college eligibility remaining.
Sermanni also called up 21-year-old midfielder Kristie Mewis, who was picked third overall in the NWSL College Draft by FC Kansas City. She has logged extensive training time with the U.S. team but has yet to earn a cap. She was the 2008 U.S. Soccer Young Female Athlete of the Year. With Mewis' selection, FC Kansas City will be the most represented team at camp with four players.
The youngest player called up is 17-year-old goalkeeper Jane Campbell, who was the starter for the USA at the 2012 Under-17 Women's World Cup in Azerbaijan. Campbell, who allowed just one goal in three matches at the World Cup and shut out eventual champion France, becomes the youngest goalkeeper called into the full National Team since an 18-year-old Hope Solo participated in her first training camp in 1999. The 5-foot-9 Campbell will not turn 18 until Feb. 17. Campbell is the first high school-aged player to be called into the full U.S. Women's National Team since forward Amy Rodriguez, who debuted at the Algarve Cup in Portugal in 2005. Midfielder Heather O'Reilly, who currently has 179 career caps, was called up at the age of 17 in 2002.
Additional Notes:
- From the 29-player training camp roster, Sermanni will name 18 players to suit up for each of the two matches against Scotland.
- The only 2012 Olympic Team member and 2012 Olympic Team alternate who were not named to the camp are defenders Amy LePeilbet and Meghan Klingenberg, respectively. LePeilbet has a lingering knee injury and Klingenberg is still recovering from shoulder surgery.
- Midfielder Tobin Heath, who recently signed with Paris Saint-Germain in France; midfielder Megan Rapinoe, who is playing for Olympique Lyonnais in France; goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris, who still has commitments with her German club; and midfielder Christen Press, who is playing in Sweden, will not attend the entire training camp. All four should be available for selection for both matches.
- Goalkeeper Jane Campbell will attend training camp for only the first week leading up to the first match against Scotland on Feb. 9.
- Abby Wambach currently has 198 caps and defender Rachel Buehler has 98. Should both play in both games against Scotland, they would hit 200 and 100, respectively, in the match in Nashville, Tenn., on Feb. 13.
- Wambach, who has 152 career goals, is six goals away from tying Mia Hamm as the world's all-time leading international scorer.
- This will be the first U.S. WNT event since the players were allocated to their NWSL clubs.
- The training camp will also take on added significance as U.S. head coach Tom Sermanni will be evaluating players to choose his roster for the 2013 Algarve Cup in Portugal that will run from March 6-13.
- Six players on the roster are uncapped: GK Jane Campbell, D Crystal Dunn, GK Ashlyn Harris, M Kristie Mewis, F Christen Press and M Keelin Winters.
U.S. Women's National Team Training Camp Roster by Position
GOALKEEPERS (5): Nicole Barnhart (FC Kansas City), Jane Campbell (Concorde Fire South), Ashlyn Harris (Washington Spirit), Jill Loyden (Sky Blue FC), Hope Solo (Seattle Reign FC)
DEFENDERS (9): Rachel Buehler (Portland Thorns FC), Crystal Dunn (North Carolina), Whitney Engen (Liverpool FC), Julie Johnston (Santa Clara), Ali Krieger (Washington Spirit), Heather Mitts (Boston Breakers), Kelley O'Hara (Sky Blue FC), Christie Rampone (Sky Blue FC), Becky Sauerbrunn (FC Kansas City)
MIDFIELDERS (10): Yael Averbuch (Göteborg FC), Shannon Boxx (Chicago Red Stars), Lauren Cheney (FC Kansas City), Tobin Heath (Portland Thorns FC), Lori Lindsey (Washington Spirit), Carli Lloyd (Western NY Flash), Kristie Mewis (FC Kansas City), Heather O'Reilly (Boston Breakers), Megan Rapinoe (Seattle Reign FC), Keelin Winters (Chicago Red Stars)
FORWARDS (5): Sydney Leroux (Boston Breakers), Alex Morgan (Portland Thorns FC), Christen Press (Tyresö FF), Amy Rodriguez (Seattle Reign FC), Abby Wambach (Western NY Flash)


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"Games of Thrones" will premiere at 8 p.m. April 6 on HBO. The cable network announced premiere dates for much of its 2014 lineup Thursday, including new and returning shows. Take a look (all times are Central.
March 14
10 p.m. "Vice" Season 2
HBO partners with the premier new media company VICE on this innovative news magazine show, hosted by VICE founder Shane Smith, covering the kinds of stories often overlooked by mainstream media outlets. The weekly series is executive produced by Bill Maher, Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti, VICE's chief creative officer, with CNN's Fareed Zakaria serving as consultant.
March 19
9 p.m. "Doll & Em" Season 1
Written by and starring real-life best friends Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells, "Doll & Am" is a semi-improvised comedy exploring what happens when a Hollywood actress hires her childhood friend as a personal assistant while making a film in Los Angeles. A bittersweet, intimate portrait of female friendship, the series follows their relationship through unexpected complications and surprising twists. "Doll & Am" will premiere with two half-hour episodes back-to-back, followed by two episodes on both of the subsequent Wednesdays, March 26 and April 2.
April 6
8 p.m. "Game of Thrones" Season 4
Based on the popular book series "A Song of Ice and Fire," by George R.R. Martin, this hit Emmy-winning fantasy series chronicles an epic struggle for power in a vast and violent fantasy kingdom. Members of the ensemble cast include Emmy and Golden Globe winner Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Kit Harington, Natalie Dormer, Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner. Executive producers, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Carolyn Strauss, Frank Doelger, Bernadette Caulfield; co-executive producers, Guymon Casady, Vince Gerardis, George R.R. Martin. The first official trailer for season four will air at 8:38 p.m. Jan. 12 before the premiere of "True Detective."
9 p.m. "Veep" Season 3
Created by Armando Iannucci, this Emmy-nominated series stars Emmy winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus as former senator Selina Meyer, who becomes vice president, only to discover the job is nothing like she expected, but everything she was warned about. The show also stars Emmy winner Tony Hale, Anna Chlumsky, Matt Walsh, Reid Scott, Timothy C. Simons, Sufe Bradshaw and Kevin Dunn. Iannucci executive produces along with Christopher Godsick and Frank Rich.
9:30 p.m. "Silicon Valley" Season 1
Mike Judge ("Office Space," "King of the Hill") brings his irreverent brand of humor to HBO in this new comedy series, which looks at the modern-day epicenter of the high-tech gold rush, where the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success. The cast includes Thomas Middleditch, TJ Miller, Zach Woods, Kumail Nanjiani, Martin Starr, Josh Brener, Christopher Evan Welch and Amanda Crew. Matt Ross guest stars. Mike Judge, Alec Berg, John Altschuler, Dave Krinsky, Michael Rotenberg, Tom Lassally and Scott Rudin executive produce. The series was created by Judge & Altschuler & Krinsky.
"The Normal Heart"
Directed by Ryan Murphy and written by Larry Kramer, adapting his groundbreaking Tony Award-winning play of the same name, the drama tells the story of the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, taking an unflinching look at the nation's sexual politics as gay activists and their allies in the medical community fight to expose the truth about the burgeoning epidemic to a city and nation in denial. The film stars Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Julia Roberts, Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello, Jonathan Groff, Denis O'Hare, Stephen Spinella, Corey Stoll, Finn Wittrock and BD Wong.
"The Leftovers" Season 1
When 2 percent of the world's population abruptly disappears without explanation, the world struggles to understand just what they're supposed to do about it. Three years later, the new HBO drama series "The Leftovers" is the story of the people who didn't make the cut. Damon Lindelof and acclaimed novelist Tom Perrotta collaborate on "The Leftovers," which begins production of its 10-episode season in New York early this year for summer debut. Lindelof serves as the series showrunner. The cast includes Justin Theroux, Amy Brenneman, Christopher Eccleston, Liv Tyler, Charlie Carver, Max Carver, Carrie Coon, Ann Dowd, Michael Gaston, Emily Meade, Annie Q, Margaret Qualley, Amanda Warren and Chris Zylka.
"Boardwalk Empire" Season 5 (final season)
From Terence Winter and Martin Scorsese, "Boardwalk Empire" is set in the 1920s during Prohibition, and chronicles the life and times of Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, the undisputed leader of Atlantic City.
Sometime in 2014
"Olive Kitteridge" miniseries
Based on Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name and written by Jane Anderson, the four-part "Olive Kitteridge" tells the poignantly sweet, acerbically funny and devastatingly tragic story of a seemingly placid New England town wrought with illicit affairs, crime and tragedy, told through the lens of Olive (Frances McDormand), whose wicked wit and harsh demeanor mask a warm but troubled heart and staunch moral center. Richard Jenkins portrays Olive's husband, Henry.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Chinese boffins discover bizarro fish-oid creature with FOUR LIMBS
The THING that crawled OUT OF THE SWAMP
Chinese boffins have discovered fossil remains of what they believe is the world's oldest stem tetrapod – a four-limbed fish-like creature. The discovery could provide vital clues about the evolutionary path of vertebrates from sea to land.
Zhu Min and his research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, published their findings in Nature Communications this week.
They found the critter, named Tungsenia paradoxa apparently in memory of renowned Chinese geologist Liu Dongsheng, in Yunnan province, south-west China.
The new stem tetrapod is from the early Devonian period of around 409 million years ago, 10 million years earlier than the previous earliest record of these creatures - the finned Kenichthys.
A lack of fossil data has historically limited scientists' knowledge of the morphological sequence between tetrapods and lungfishes, and with it "fin-to-limb transition".
This discovery has apparently closed the gap between the oldest recorded lungfish fossil and the oldest stem tetrapod from 16 million to around six million years.
The researchers had the following to say about the x-ray image of the fossil skull:
The enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres and the possible presence of the pars tuberalis in this stem-tetrapod indicate that some important brain modifications related to terrestrial life had occurred at the beginning of the tetrapod evolution, much earlier than previously thought.
Sponsored: Beyond the Data Frontier


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Adanson's jumping spider has eight eyes, but the way they're put together doesn't actually seem that useful for, well, seeing things. These spiders use a previously unknown trick to judge their surrounds and leap great distances...all thanks to blurry vision.
Most animals, humans included, rely on two eyes with overlapping fields of vision to judge depth perception - the brain simply compares the two sets of visual data and uses that to figure out how far away various objects are. There are a few methods that other animals employ when their eyes don't overlap - chameleons, for instance, can play around with the lens of the eye to bring an object in and out of focus, revealing its distance.
This particular spider is able to live pretty much anywhere and moves around constantly, which makes the fact that we didn't know how it judges distance all the more astonishing. Adanson's jumping spider can judge distances accurately even when all but its main pair of eyes are covered, and those eyes don't overlap and can't change their focus. In order for these spiders to survive, let alone thrive, they must have a retinal structure unlike anything we've ever seen.
As New Scientist reports, that's precisely what Akihisa Terakita, Mitsumasa Koyanagi, and Takashi Nagata of Japan's Osaka University discovered when they examined just what makes this spider's eyes work. Crucially, they build on a clue from an earlier study that found another type of jumping spider had four layers of photoreceptors in its retinas - and, weirdly, the second deepest layer both contained tons of green-sensitive cells and always kept the color green out of focus. An entire layer of the eye was given over to purposefully blurry vision. New Scientist picks up the story:
The same is true of the Adanson's house jumper's principal eyes. That means the blurry image on the second layer contrasts with the sharply focused image on the layer below. As the spider closes in on its prey, the defocused image will get blurrier still, allowing the spider to gauge the distance.
Koyanagi confirmed that this is how the spiders work by testing them under pure green and pure red lights. Under red light, the total absence of green should trick the spiders' perception of its defocused images, making all objects seem closer than they are, so the spiders' jumps should fall short. That was exactly what happened.
We've never observed this sort of bizarre retinal structure before, though the researchers think it's likely that all other jumping spiders have a similar setup. So, good for the jumping spiders for coming up with a way to put bad eyesight to good use - though I'd strongly advise against those of us who need glasses trying to replicate their success.
Science via New Scientist. Image of jumping spider by coniferconifer on Flickr.


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Clothes-ing in on a cure
Four years ago, Dr. Elaine Scholes, a pediatrician at Denver Health, thought it was pretty neat that she was able to get 60 people to gather at Saks Fifth Avenue Cherry Creek for the first Key To The Cure mother-daughter fashion show.
Everyone had a blast.
So much so that in Year 2, attendance doubled and the format changed from an evening cocktail party to sit-down lunch in the store's second-floor designer department. It, too, was a whole lot of fun.
By the time Year 3 rolled around, there was hardly enough room to comfortably accommodate everyone who wanted to be there.
So in Year 4 the benefit for women being treated for cancer at Denver Health Medical Center reverted to its evening cocktail party status — with a few very cool upgrades.
A record crowd of 400, including Scholes, basically had free run of the store for about three hours, giving them ample time to eat, drink, shop and enjoy a mother-daughter fashion show emceed by Denise Plante, a KOSI radio personality and co-host of Channel 9's Colorado & Co.
Junior League sustainers Melly Kinnard and Debra Pain chaired the event and were happy to report that revenue was up 80 percent from last year. Ask them tomorrow, though, and the percentage may well be higher. "Every day that I ask, I'm told that more money has come in," Kinnard says.
Catering By Design did the food, setting up buffet stations that included dim sum, salads and dessert. Berry limeade and Italian sodas — served with or without a shot of vodka or rum — helped keep everyone hydrated, as did a selection of Balistreri wines. DJ Extraordinaire spun the tunes on the main floor, where guests could take a break on the white leather couches and chairs set up in the Key Private Bank Lounge.
DJ Select handled the music action upstairs as guests perused "Cup Half Full: Life in the Face of Breast Cancer," an exhibit by photographer Katy Tartakoff.
Denver Nuggets point guard Chauncey Billups was there to see his wife, Piper, model in the show with daughters Cydney, Ciara and Cenaiya, but spent time pre-show visiting with friends and fans.
Realtor Rollie Jordan put a bug in his ear about one of her big listings, an $18 million compound in Evergreen that had been home to pitcher Mike Hampton when he was with the Colorado Rockies. Jordan wasn't just there to sell real estate, though: She'd come to see her son Rhett's girlfriend, Rayna Bryant, model in show.
Rayna was one of the professional mannequins on the ramp; in addition to the Billupses, the celebrity contingent was made up of former CBS4 anchor Aimee Sporer Caplis and Caroline Caplis; Marilyn, Christi and Ashley Coors; vocalist Mary Louise Lee-Hancock (her husband is Denver City Councilman Michael Hancock) and daughter Janae Hancock; 7News anchor Bertha Lynn and daughter Maria Naves; and Down syndrome activist Michelle Sie Whitten and daughter Sophia Whitten.
Debra Pain modeled with her daughter-in-law and granddaughter, Lisa and Katelyn Kelin, while Melly Kinnard took a turn on the ramp with daughter Kerry Kinnard, founder and executive director of Dedicated to Diabetes.
Key Private Bank was the presenting sponsor, and vice president Kim Smith was there with several of her colleagues. Event partners included Taryn Edwards, 5280 magazine and Colorado Technical University.
Others enjoying the food and fellowship were Lisa Alexander, whose husband, Bruce, chairs the Denver Health and Hospital Authority board; David McReynolds, head of the Denver Health Foundation board; Bertha Lynn's husband, Judge Larry Naves, and her mother, Maria Lynn; retired dentist Julika Ambrose; Gale Norton; Julie Balistreri; Sheilagh Malo; Caz Matthews; Elbra Wedgeworth; Kathy Klugman; Judith Ann Newman; Shery McDonald-Galbreath; Estelle Klubock and daughter Ann Jill Drucker; Carlotta LaNier; Jamie Angelich; Layne Hunt; Gayle Novak; Danielle Washington LaCabe; Susan Mostow; Sue McFarlane; Pegie Frazier; Gary and Mary Margaret Wright; Nancy Stamper; Linda Goto; Margaret Stavros; Pat Cortez; Robyn Loup; Diane Mager; Jenny Scholes Pruett; and Paula Herzmark, executive director of the Denver Health Foundation.
Denver Health, she noted, provided $318 million in uncompensated care last year, a figure that is expected to top $360 million in 2009. The money raised at Key To The Cure is earmarked for the care received by female cancer patients who are unable to pay.
Joanne Davidson: 303-809-1314 or firstname.lastname@example.com


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The Department of Radiation Oncology provides state-of-the-art therapy and compassionate care for patients with all types of cancer and certain benign tumors. Our cancer specialists work closely with pathologists, medical oncologists, and cancer surgeons. We use the most advanced technology available to provide the best possible treatment that is personalized for each individual patient. As academic physicians, they continually strive to advance the field of radiation oncology by transforming the latest scientific discoveries into new ways of curing cancer with the fewest side effects. Areas of current progress include pediatric radiation therapy, intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy, and low dose rate (LDR) prostate seed implants.
The Department of Radiation Oncology's coordinated team approach provides patients with sophisticated radiotherapy treatment planning and delivery that is unsurpassed anywhere in the world today. From the reception staff who greets you each day to your attending physician, the Radiation Oncology group wants your experience in the Department of Radiation Oncology to be as professional, courteous and successful as possible. We encourage you to voice any questions and concerns you have during the process of receiving care in the Department of Radiation Oncology.
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i'd like to introduce myself, as i'm new here.
my name's greg, i'm 22 and live in israel.
this project seems to be of a very professional level, and i'm hoping to see it come to completion.
i'v started on the muton model. there seems to be some mixup with the concept art. i guess that the concept art shown here is out of date? (fuxor - plz confirm)
fuxor gave me the attached image.
i'v started with the head (see attached pics)


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0 Members and 1 Lonely Barbarian are spying on this topic.
When the Omen Star has been in the first house of stars important events have occurred: The Dragon Line Wars, The War of the Stone Rose, The birth of Zarath and his rise to power, the coming of the Messenger, and many other events of historical note. The Omen Star is rising, the rest of the portents do not look good……
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R. A. Dickey, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, sometimes seems like a sports hero dreamed up by a bookworm. He is a knuckleball pitcher, already the most ungainly of athletic specialists, relying on physics to make jocks look foolish. He wears his brown hair shaggy in the back, and has a beard that would please a thru-hiker. In 2011, inspired by Hemingway, he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro—Kili, he calls it—and blogged about it for the New York Times. ("I take solace at least in the awareness of my own bravado.") Every celebrity has a charitable cause, but, this past winter, Dickey actually travelled to the red-light district of Mumbai in support of his: curbing sex trafficking in India. He wrote about that for the Daily News: "It made me want to grab every downtrodden person I could find and walk them through the door, into the light and possibility, beyond the vile and violent world they've grown so accustomed to." In spite of his millions, Dickey also professes to love public transportation, which he uses to visit museums in cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., on the days he's not pitching. "I mean, I figure, why not, you know?" he told me, in a Tennessee drawl. "I love art." Dickey is impossible not to admire, yet one can't help but wonder about those who embrace him too readily, now that they've seen him self-deprecating with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show." Are they even baseball fans, or do they just find it comforting to know that not all exceptional athletes are as boring as Derek Jeter or as vain as Alex Rodriguez?
Conspicuous cosmopolitanism can be its own form of vanity, especially in a sport with a culture as lethargic as baseball's. "Hurry up and wait," baseball people sometimes joke, about the preponderance of downtime that overwhelms their daily professional lives. Instead of embracing multitasking, the game's unwritten code seems to frown on it, and makes a virtue of enduring long afternoons between stretching and shagging fly balls with little more than sunflower seeds and headphones as distractions. In a losing clubhouse, at least, extracurricular activity is cause for suspicion, and, shortly before the Mets traded Dickey, last December, a column appeared in the Post accusing him of being a glory hound. Dickey was engaged in negotiations about his contract with the club. He was due to be paid five million dollars in 2013—good money, to be sure, but a pittance for a twenty-game winner—and his agent was seeking an extension, and a raise, to capitalize on his client's newfound status, at age thirty-eight, as one of the game's élite players. The column's author, Ken Davidoff, mocked Dickey's infatuation with his own "narrative," and accused him of being needy—"a handful"—and unloved by his less worldly teammates.
The precipitating event for this zinger was a holiday party that the team had organized, at Citi Field, to benefit victims of Hurricane Sandy. Whether or not Dickey was admired by his peers, he was, after three seasons on the roster, undeniably popular among Mets fans, a lone bright spot in the grim years that followed the near-bankrupting of the franchise owing to the owner's investments with Bernie Madoff. Dickey was asked to fly up from his home, in Nashville, to attend the party, playing the part of an elf. (Inevitably, a knuckleballer, even one who stands six feet two and weighs two hundred and fifteen pounds, would be cast as an elf.) There, also inevitably, reporters asked him about the status of his contract talks, and he took the opportunity to plead his case: he was old, yes, but well within a knuckleballer's prime, and a bargain at a wage that was only slightly greater than the league average. "I feel like we're asking for even less than what is fair," Dickey said. "When people say, 'It's business, it's not personal,' that just means it's not personal for them." To Davidoff, at the Post, this was Dickey showing his "true character," putting his own feelings above the mission of the team. The headline—"AMAZIN'S WON'T KNUCKLE UNDER DICKEY'S LAUGHABLE THREATS TO LEAVE"—gave the impression that the column's author was serving as a mouthpiece for management, which appeared to be more interested in rebuilding for the future. Sure enough, in a matter of days, the Mets had found Dickey a new home, in Toronto.
"My first thought in my heart was: You need to apologize, R.A., for the place that you did that," Dickey told me, the day after he'd passed his Blue Jays physical—"the day after all this crap," as he put it, referring to the fallout from the Post column, and what he perceived as a hurtful smear campaign by the Mets, to placate a frustrated fan base. "Because I did it at a holiday party that was there to celebrate kids who had been displaced from Hurricane Sandy."
Dickey was back in Nashville, where strangers stopped him occasionally to offer congratulations: the Blue Jays had agreed not only to take on his contract but to extend it by two years and twenty-five million dollars—considerably more money than he had made in his entire career thus far. Yet as he drove around town, fielding calls from his agent ("Hey, did we put the shoe contract to bed?") and ESPN ("It feels good to be wanted—my narrative is such that that hasn't always been the case"), I got the sense that Dickey felt he'd earned a Pyrrhic victory. He'd loved his time in New York, a city that had bigger ambitions than baseball. "Seemingly, there was this culture where you could celebrate who you were authentically made to be," he told me, and referred to the connections and friends he'd been able to make in the publishing and film industries while writing a best-selling book, "Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball," and participating in a documentary, "Knuckleball!," that premièred at Tribeca last spring. "You get to celebrate that part of you that gets overshadowed, because 'the game should just be the game,' and you can't operate outside that—you're not a human." He went on, "Now, it may have been more than what some people wanted. As far as the Mets were concerned, I don't know."
In "Wherever I Wind Up," Dickey recounts an anecdote from his first day in the majors, when a veteran pitcher, instead of saying hello, kicked Dickey's brown leather shoes into the middle of the clubhouse floor: "I guess my shoes were trespassing on his territory by a few inches." What stuck with him was not just the hostile act but its routine nature—the fact that nobody else seemed to mind, or even notice. "Why do you need to have a certain amount of big-league time or a particular set of credentials to be treated like a human being?" he writes. "Some baseball customs are just plain absurd. And downright dumb." He had resolved then to treat everyone with dignity, regardless of accomplishments on the field, and the notion that this might have been perceived as arrogance, that he wasn't a good teammate, now stung. He noted that Ken Davidoff had felt compelled to write a follow-up column, defending his assertion but citing only anonymous sources, and Dickey couldn't help wondering whose agenda was being served. "Wouldn't it be great if people said what they really meant?" he asked.
Dickey drove past a sign advertising "Holistic Pet Care," and his mood lifted. "I cannot believe there's such a thing," he said. "That's awesome." He mentioned that he'd been reading "The Master and Margarita," by Mikhail Bulgakov, and wished that he'd found the time to study more Russian history, to appreciate the breadth of the novel. "I know there's all kinds of metaphors that I'm missing," he said. Soon, he arrived at his kids' school, and joked about all the oversized vehicles in the parking lot, including his own Toyota Sequoia. He headed inside and returned a few minutes later with six-year-old Eli and nine-year-old Lila. Gabriel, his eleven-year-old daughter, was staying late for a theatre rehearsal. "Are you playing for the Blue Jays now?" Eli asked, evidently having learned of the big news from his classmates.
"I am, buddy," Dickey said. "I am a Toronto Blue Jay."
Lila ran off a list of baseball's bird names—Blue Jays, Cardinals, Orioles—and then, after a pause, asked her father how many zeroes there were in a million.
I first noticed Dickey in 2004, while writing about the chief knuckleballer at the time, Boston's Tim Wakefield. Dickey, then twenty-nine and pitching for the Texas Rangers, handed Wakefield his first loss of the season. It was a Sunday in early May, and the game was televised nationally, on ESPN. Dickey was still a so-called "conventional" pitcher, and an unheralded one, although he had a couple of notable quirks that lent some interest to the telecast. He lacked an ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow, which meant that he was incapable of straightening it, or of bringing his hand up to touch his shoulder. And he threw a specialty pitch, on occasion, that served as a good advertisement for the effects of high-definition television, then a new treat. "It's sick!" Theo Epstein, the Red Sox general manager, told me afterward. "It's one-third knuckleball, one-third breaking ball, one-third split-finger." Joe Morgan, the ESPN color analyst, called it "the Thing."
The Thing, in fact, was just a speedy knuckleball—one that didn't float so much as dart. It travelled at least ten miles an hour faster than Wakefield's butterfly. "We never disputed the name, because we didn't want people to think that the knuckleball was what I was throwing," Dickey told me, revealing an initial preference for the allure of something more mysterious—a different species of bug. Unlike Wakefield, a converted infielder who had never had a particularly lively arm to begin with, Dickey was formerly known for his heat. In college, at the University of Tennessee, he once hit ninety-six on the radar gun, and he was encouraged to take out a million-dollar insurance policy on his arm from Lloyd's of London. The Rangers drafted him in the first round. It was 1996, he had just finished his junior year, and he was headed to Atlanta to pitch in the Olympics. Baseball America put him and several other Team U.S.A. starters on the cover, and he was all set to sign for an eight-hundred-and-ten-thousand-dollar bonus. But when a Rangers trainer noticed the magazine photograph, in which Dickey's arm was hanging at an unusual angle, he suggested that they take some X-rays as a precaution.
Dickey hadn't known about his deformity, only that his flexion was more limited than most. If anything, this tightness had proved beneficial. He'd been a star high-school quarterback as well, and a capable shooting guard, attracting interest from college football and basketball coaches before he chose to pursue baseball exclusively. "It should hurt you to turn a doorknob," a doctor now told him. Small consolation that it didn't: the Rangers revoked their offer. Later, they gave him the option of signing for seventy-five thousand dollars. Unsure whether he'd get another chance, he withdrew from school and accepted the Rangers' charity, using the money to settle some of his father's debts, to pay off his insurance premium, and to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend. It would be fifteen years before he earned as much in a season as appearing on the cover of Baseball America had cost him.
The missing ligament and the knuckleball habit are unrelated, but, as Dickey sees it, they map a long trajectory as an outlier. "I started in professional baseball as what people were calling a freak of nature, and, as a knuckleballer, you're still in that category," he said. He didn't find success with the pitch until he had lost enough velocity on his fastball that a gimmick was his only option, and even then there were countless setbacks, enough to make a less adaptable man settle for the fleeting youthful stardom. Dickey was thirty, and down in AAA, with the Oklahoma City RedHawks, when he made the Thing his thing, in 2005. He gave up twelve runs and couldn't finish the sixth inning his first time out. Still, he kept at it, and, the next spring, he began the season in Texas—where, in his first start, he tied a record for futility, surrendering six home runs to the Tigers before he was relieved, in the fourth. Back down he went.
The Rangers had had enough, and the Milwaukee Brewers offered him a shot—in the minors. While he was pitching for the Nashville Sounds, in 2007, his desperation reached the point of recklessness, and he attempted to swim across the Missouri River, wearing flip-flops from the gift shop of a casino hotel taped to his feet. ("Washington crossing the Delaware, Joshua crossing the Jordan, Perseus crossing the river Styx—I think of all these epic feats as I look at the river," he later wrote.) He failed at that, too, and his teammates had to rescue him from drowning. But the muddy water seemed to have a cleansing effect—"like magic," in his telling—and his performance improved markedly in the months that followed, enough so that the Seattle Mariners were willing to take the next chance on him. As a reliever and spot starter with the Mariners, in 2008, Dickey tied another record, this time for the most wild pitches in an inning.
It wasn't yet a career, but Dickey knew then that he had the makings of a book, if nothing else. He'd rented a craftsman's cottage overlooking Puget Sound, in Tacoma, not far from the Mariners' AAA stadium. (He was wise enough not to count on remaining with the club in Seattle.) After long nights at the ballpark, he'd return home to an air mattress on the floor, where he'd sprawl out and write, attempting to explain his unusual perseverance by revisiting difficult events in his childhood, chief among them the multiple instances of sexual abuse he suffered.
Dickey's mother drank heavily, and his father, a machine operator on a construction crew and a night watchman at the county juvie, was a distant figure. Their kitchen was stocked with flatware filched from Western Sizzlin. Often, at night, his mother went out, dropping him and his younger sister off with a babysitter, and, on several occasions, in the summer before Dickey started fourth grade, the sitter was a girl who was four or five years older and curious about her emerging sexuality. She treated Dickey like a doll, leading him to her bedroom and ordering him to disrobe. He still recalls the confusion of being banished to another room, as if in punishment, when she decided that she'd had enough.
Since coming forward with this story, Dickey has found that the babysitter's transgressions don't strike many people as abuse, in the conventional sense. On Twitter, he said, "People were like, 'How can you be upset about having sex with a twelve-year-old when you're eight? That's most people's dream!' " He wasn't amused. "It's so foreign to them," he continued. "Your balls haven't even dropped yet. You have no idea that that's even part of the scope of what's going on in the world." His shame was such that he never told anyone about it until he was thirty-one.
In the fall of fourth grade, Dickey was visiting relatives in the countryside outside Nashville—"a place with farms and barns and one-room schoolhouses," he wrote—and throwing a ball against the roof of a garage, when a teen-age boy approached and began unzipping his pants. Dickey tried to run, but the boy grabbed him. "When I realized what was happening, my eyes, you couldn't have pried them open with a crowbar," he said. "Did he have dark hair? Maybe. There've been times when I've tried to recall all the details, but it's still hard." He waited even longer, after revealing the babysitter's violations, to mention this rape. "There was something about it being male-on-male," he said.
Dickey sought relief from the "darkness," as he put it, in books and sports, which turned out to be a productive outlet for channelling rage. "The symptoms that come out of being abused as a child often turn into the very same attributes that allow you to endure and grind it out on the field," he told me, and said that he knows of two other professional ballplayers who shared similar backgrounds. "It wouldn't surprise me if there are more." But, as an otherwise highly functioning teen-ager, he would sometimes pretend to be homeless. His parents by then were divorced. His mother had gone into rehab, and he was ostensibly living with his father, whose aloofness inclined Dickey to seek alternatives. Claiming to be spending the night out with friends, he'd look up rental listings in the want ads instead, as a source of vacant properties where he might be able to throw down a sleeping bag. He'd make sure to park down the block, out of view, and sneak in after dark, relying on a real-estate agent's habit of leaving a key somewhere obvious: under the doormat, beneath a flowerpot, behind a shutter. Looking back, he likes to think he was honing his survival instinct.
Dickey reconciled with his mother several years ago, and they have dinner together frequently. "We're real close," he told me. She's the only person he sees regularly who still calls him by his given name, Robert Allen. His relationship with his father, however, remains "very superficial." In spite of his stated wish, in "Wherever I Wind Up," that writing about his childhood would bring them closer, he has received no acknowledgment that his father ever read the book. "He has to know it exists, and what's talked about sensitively in it," Dickey went on. "You would think it would be, like, 'I'm sorry for what happened to you.' But I don't know if he is really ready to go there or not."
If Dickey is correct in his presumption, then his father's reluctance to discuss the abuse and its lingering effects is not atypical of a certain strain of male culture that Dickey hopes to change by continuing to talk about his struggles. "It's still kind of a pretty taboo big-boys-don't-go-there thing," Dickey said, and mentioned that only three or four of his Mets teammates had asked him about it. "I think the perception is that once you go to therapy, and once you admit that this has happened to you, that you get to the other side of it."
The writer in Dickey now finds himself wondering about his father's "real story," as he put it. "I know the legend from my father," he said. "But I don't know what it was really like for him, growing up where he did, and what he had to do. You hear, 'I walked four miles, round trip, in the snow with no shoes.' I mean, you just never know what's authentic." Harry Lee Dickey, according to the legend, at least, was a star ballplayer in his own right, nicknamed Horse, who, in 1974, received an offer of two thousand dollars and a bus ticket to join the Cincinnati Reds' farm team in Plant City, Florida. He never went. That was the year his son was born.
The drive home from Dickey's kids' school passed through the prosperous neighborhood of Belle Meade, featuring old plantations and horse farms, and Dickey, who grew up a few miles to the east, still viewed it with an outsider's amazement. "Generational wealth," he explained, gesturing at grand Colonials on a hilly cul-de-sac. "Great-great-grandfather-passed-down, stuff like that." Dickey's wife, Anne, grew up in Belle Meade. He met her when he was in seventh grade, on scholarship at the tony Montgomery Bell Academy—Momma's Boy Academy, to its rivals. She was the younger sister of his best friend, Bo Bartholomew, who introduced him to Christianity. Their mother was Miss Tennessee in 1966, and a runner-up for Miss America. Their father was a partner in a prominent law firm and a recipient of the governor's Outstanding Tennessean award. Anne went to Davidson, in North Carolina, and then transferred to be with Dickey at the University of Tennessee, where she graduated at the top of her class. Five hundred people attended the Dickey-Bartholomew wedding, in 1997, including Lamar Alexander, the onetime Republican Presidential candidate.
They were the envy of all their friends, at least for a while: the star athlete and the smart country-club girl. "It was sort of transient, but you were really united with a community of people," Anne told me, of their early minor-league days, when it was still possible to foresee a future according to the more familiar script. "Everybody would live in the same apartment complex and give each other rides." Anne subsidized the baseball dream by taking jobs as a sales clerk at The Limited and teaching aerobics to senior citizens. But as Dickey's progress stalled, during their late twenties, when they started having children, their contrasting backgrounds became a source of tension. "My dad always was, like, 'You need to finish school, R.A.,' " she said. "That was his big thing, every off-season. And he'd always have job ideas." Meanwhile, Anne's friends back home started making real money, and she was stuck with the guy whose greatest professional achievement was having been forgiven for testing positive for opiates, while pitching in Oklahoma City, in 2000, because he'd eaten too many poppy seeds in a casserole baked by the wife of the team chaplain.
Anne Dickey is blond and athletic, attractive without striving to be glamorous. She offered me a selection of teas that she'd confiscated from the Mets' road-trip hotels—a habit instilled during tougher times—and we sat at the dining-room table in the well-appointed faded-brick house that they moved into last fall. R.A. went off to the gym, and she talked, while keeping an eye on Van, their fourth child, as he attempted to make a Baby Jesus figurine drive a talking truck. "For some reason, I thought that a really good, successful year might bring some predictability," she said. "You know, we might actually know where the grocery is when we get somewhere." She sighed. "No, it's just more adventure." The previous day, she'd answered the doorbell in her bathrobe, and found a dozen members of the Canadian press, whom she entertained for two hours before the newest Blue Jay returned from showing me the formerly abandoned houses he'd once slept in as a teen. "It'll be great, and I'm not complaining," she went on. "It's just—it's hard to explain to non-baseball people.
"I'm going to write a book one day called 'Home Sweet Rental Home,' about all the ridiculous things we've been through," Anne continued, and added that it would be comic rather than earnest and searching, like her husband's. It would include details like the fact that Van had been conceived during the All-Star break, in 2010—"and guess when I was due?" she asked. "Opening Day!"
That year, 2010, marked the turning point in Dickey's redemption narrative. He was the first player cut from the Mets' spring-training camp, and learned, upon arriving at the club's minor-league complex, that his diminished status would require him to lose his beard, in keeping with organizational policy. ("It made us so mad," Anne said.) Thirty-five and clean-shaven for the first time in seven years, he reported to Buffalo, where he rented an apartment above a garage. A couple of weeks later, while he was pitching in front of three hundred people in frigid Lake Erie air, his knuckleballs started "dropping like rocks in a pond," as he wrote, and he came within one batter of a perfect game. Summoned shortly thereafter to Queens, he'd been a mainstay in the Mets' rotation ever since.
Anne wondered if Dickey had told me about the "great flood of Nashville," in May of 2010, the month that he got called up. He hadn't. "It just was one more example of something that was kind of stressful having to do alone, not knowing what the plan was, you know?" she said, and described staying up all night, putting gas in a sump pump, to little avail, as the rising water warped floorboards and compromised the furnace and the air-conditioning ducts. She didn't know then if they could afford to renovate. Anne's narrative had a snowballing momentum that was unimpeded by Dickey's professional resurrection. It also included the head lice that her older children got while their father was away in Africa, scaling Kilimanjaro, and Van's frequent sickness, which she attributed to mold in the house they rented in Manhasset, near Citi Field. Last summer, while R.A. was in the middle of a forty-four-inning streak without allowing an earned run, their nanny quit, and Anne and the kids moved in with her parents. And then there were the multiplying bunnies in a hutch out back, named for "Star Wars" characters. (Dickey has a decal of Darth Vader's chest on the back of his iPhone.) "We didn't mean to have all these rabbits!" she said, laughing. Anne estimated that R.A. had spoken to twenty church and school groups since his Cy Young season had finished ("and he's probably got ten more lined up"), and it occurred to me that the Mets might not have been alone in hoping that their onetime ace would learn the simple pleasures of hurrying up and waiting.
Dickey's literary efforts made Anne uneasy at first, not just the sexual-abuse revelations but also his depiction of their marriage, which included a confession of infidelity. "You know, in the South, people gossip so much," she said, but then added that she'd come to find it freeing. "Now it's all out there. So if they were talking about me, they may as well read about me." Lately, she'd been on the receiving end of a kind of apology tour from friends who had advised her long ago to give R.A. an ultimatum about his foundering career. One old friend told her, "He's just finally getting paid for all these years you went through hell for baseball and nobody gave a crap."
Success hadn't altered Dickey's frugality, and Anne asked me not to mind the forlorn-looking Christmas trees in the living room. "I'm like, 'You know, I like the eight-foot Fraser fir,' " she recalled, of their recent trip to a tree farm run by the Boy Scouts. "He's like, 'No, no. Kids, come on, we're going to find the most pitiful tree that nobody wants.' And I'm rolling my eyes—like, why does everything have to be so thought through and moral? I mean, just get a Christmas tree! 'No, we're not buying into commercialism.' We spent an hour and a half walking around and feeling sorry for trees." Anne added, "He doesn't worry about appearances or what other people think. I admire that in him, because I don't carry that same confidence."
Dickey's mastery of the knuckleball came with help from a few of the handful of living people capable of offering it, and his jerky delivery now could be described as a composite of his predecessors'. From the Hall of Famer Phil Niekro, also known as Knucksie, Dickey learned to fire his hips toward home plate. (Without this, the pitch is "lazy," Knucksie says.) Charlie Hough, the leathery ex-Dodger and Ranger, taught him his grip, with his fingernails pinching just below the horseshoe bend in the seams. Tim Wakefield advised him always to be conscious of his follow-through—to imagine reaching down for his athletic cup after every release. Yet the velocity of Dickey's knuckleball, which can arrive almost as quickly as a slider, is unique, and helps explain the uncanny control he now seems to exert over a pitch that's notorious for being uncontrollable. In the past three seasons, with the Mets, he walked slightly more than two batters per nine innings, a rate that placed him among the National League's best.
"It doesn't have as much time to flutter out of the zone," Dickey says, shrugging off his precision. "On a good day, I might try to make it swing and dart in a certain direction. Maybe I can make it knuckle and go down and in to a righty, or I get on the outside of it a little bit—sweep it away from a righty. On good days, maybe I can do that, but that's not normal." Normally, he doesn't concern himself with lateral movement or placement. "I only think about height," he says. He tries to fix in his sight a location two or three baseballs' width above his catcher's mask, and aims to release the ball there, straight down the plate, imparting perhaps a quarter revolution of spin, with the expectation that eighty per cent of the time the ball will dive into the zone at the last second—to the left, or the right, who knows?
A connoisseur, armed with a radar gun, might detect a couple of gears in Dickey's knuckleball, with the overdrive majority approaching and sometimes exceeding eighty miles per hour and a downshifted cluster settling in the lower seventies. Often, this disparity is intentional—a bit of guile in what is otherwise an art of repetition and playing the odds. "I'm working on how I can change speeds more effectively with it," he explains. "A lot of times, I'll throw the seventy-four-mile-per-hour one and think that I've thrown the eighty, or I'll throw the eighty and think that I've thrown the seventy-four. Just the feel of that takes time."
Improbably, Dickey has one of the best fastballs in the majors. It clocks in at around eighty-three, scarcely faster than his most biting knuckler, and is so often taken for a called strike that it more than makes up for the ease with which a decent high-school player could drive it into the gap, if he only knew to swing. Last year, Dickey threw about five hundred sort-of fastballs, and only twenty per cent of them came when they might most have been expected—when he was behind, deep in the count. The most common occurrence, by far, was on the first pitch of an at-bat. His fastball is a tease, used to unnerve opponents over a missed opportunity rather than to reassure an anxious catcher. It produces strikes with considerably greater efficiency than the average big-league heater—or, at least, it did, when used judiciously, and before his scouting report was made public.
Like all knuckleballers, Dickey is meticulous about his nails, taking calcium supplements and travelling with a customized manicuring kit. In an emergency, he is not above using acrylic; he once visited a place called Pink Nails, in Queens. He has also come to be particular about baseballs themselves. Last August, while facing the Colorado Rockies first baseman Tyler Colvin, he noticed a scuff on the game ball, and, instead of seeking a replacement from the umpire, figured he might benefit from the added aerodynamic disruption. Colvin crushed a game-tying home run, and Dickey hasn't settled for anything other than a pristine ball since.
His superstitions aren't especially onerous. Forty-five minutes before taking the mound, Dickey likes to hop in the Jacuzzi for eight or nine minutes. Then he takes a shower—a ritual cleansing before putting on his uniform—and begins to narrow his mental focus. Up until his shower, he welcomes small talk, unlike many starters, who treat game day like an extended meditation. But he will warm up only with the bullpen catcher, and that goes for his days off as well. This, too, he learned the hard way. During a short-lived stint with the Minnesota Twins, in 2009, he befriended the All-Star closer Joe Nathan, and they became throwing partners. Internalizing his comparatively j.v. status, he feared making Nathan chase after uncatchable knuckleballs, and wasted too much time throwing conventionally. His knuckles lost their mojo. What good is a manicure if you can't show it off?
While riding in the car with Dickey, I picked up what looked like an ordinary baseball card that was resting on the console by the transmission. The name and picture on the front of the card were unfamiliar to me. "Oh, man, that's a story," Dickey began, and flicked his wrist against my arm, commanding my full attention. "So, I don't know that guy. He's from Nashville, teaches at a place called Grassland. Diehard Mets fan—just loves the Mets. Had a tough upbringing, really well-respected teacher in the community. On his way back from a field trip: died, sitting on the bus. Suddenly. A mutual friend contacted me and asked if I would drop by the wake or the visitation. 'Oh, my gosh. Really? I don't know these people. That's kind of awkward.' Anyway, I feel God saying, 'Go ahead and do this.' So I did—went over there unannounced and walked into the visitation. And when I stepped in there, and it registered with the wife and aunt and uncle who I was, they just started, like, bawling, weeping, and I was just in a place where I felt this need to console her. It just was really overwhelming. I'd never been in a situation like that. I wrote her a letter and handed it to her and gave her a hug. Not being a fan, and not being enamored, whatever, it's hard for me to realize how much that may or may not have meant. But they were passing these cards out . . ."
Dickey has a natural social ease, a gift for reading audiences and adjusting his register to suit the situation. Having spent some time alone with him, as he mused introspectively, I was surprised when, after parking his car, he slipped seamlessly into the rhythms of jock culture. He'd arrived at a facility called D1 Sports Training, which was run by his brother-in-law Will Bartholomew. Dickey's off-season regimen for keeping his arm in shape included throwing footballs to some of Bartholomew's clients as they prepared for the N.F.L. Combine. The in-laws greeted one another with a broad-shouldered hug that gave way to a handshake, a snap, and a fist bump. "Blue Jays, baby!" Bartholomew said.
"They got nice unis," Dickey said.
"They got sweet unis!"
Dickey alluded to Toronto's Rogers Centre, a.k.a. the SkyDome, which offered the prospect of climate control, a boon for knuckleballers, whose effectiveness is more threatened by wind conditions than other pitchers'. "Oh, yeah, baby!" Bartholomew said. "Shredding 'em. Hoo-wee!"
Two minor-league baseball players were lifting weights, and Dickey introduced himself, asking questions about their backgrounds and attempting to guess the names of their respective farm teams, based on their big-league affiliations. "I'll be around, so if you need me, lean on me," he said, leaving them with admiring smiles as he grabbed a football and warmed up, preparing to relive his quarterback days.
The next time I saw Dickey, after leaving Nashville, he asked me if I'd had a chance to watch the trailer for the new "Gatsby" movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He was standing by his locker in the Blue Jays' spring-training clubhouse, in Dunedin, Florida, where I noticed an overturned copy of "This Boy's Life," Tobias Wolff's memoir of surviving a harsh upbringing. He mentioned that it had been recommended by the novelist Ann Patchett, whom he met at her independent bookstore, in Nashville.
Dickey had been absent from Dunedin for a couple of weeks, while participating in the World Baseball Classic, and the Toronto scribes were still getting used to his verbal presence. One told me that he'd read Dickey's book over the winter, as a primer, and was amazed to discover that Dickey sounded even more articulate when sweating, after workouts, than on the page. It was almost as though Wayne Coffey, the veteran sportswriter, who helped Dickey shape the book, had reined him in, at times, to fit the genre. During his first media scrum of the spring, Dickey used the words "purview" and "correlation" in short order.
Dickey was surprised by the extent of the Dunedin media presence, and by the seeming lack of jadedness about the particulars of his story. "It's almost like going to another planet," he said, and, apologizing for employing a Canadian stereotype, characterized his new interlocutors as "very polite." He added, "A lot of their headlines really reflect what the story is, rather than having nothing to do with the story."
"We may not be obnoxious, but we will be demanding," the radio host Mike Wilner told me, sounding a little defensive, when I relayed Dickey's initial impression. The acquisition of Dickey, and of several Miami Marlins, including the ex-Met Jose Reyes, in a firesale by the miserly Marlins owner, Jeffrey Loria, over the winter, had Toronto feeling like a big-league baseball town again, with expectations higher than they'd been in twenty years, since the World Series heroics of Joe Carter. Better still, the improvements in the Jays' roster had coincided with off-season turmoil afflicting the Red Sox and the Yankees, the traditional bullies of the American League East. (Overheard in the press cafeteria: "I never thought I'd be saying this, but I actually feel sorry for the Yankees.") Wilner told me that the Blue Jays' pre-season coverage was starting to eat into the Maple Leafs' airtime back home. As Canada's only baseball team, the Jays represented thirty million people, and Dickey, with his social-justice message, was poised to become an adopted national hero. "So many non-sports outlets want a piece of him," Wilner said. "I hope it's not too much that the club shuts him down."
Before signing his extension with the Blue Jays, Dickey met with the team's G.M., Alex Anthopoulos, and the manager, John Gibbons, warning them of his extracurricular interests and commitments: "That's part of who I am." The paperback edition of "Wherever I Wind Up" was due out soon, with an afterword in which he apologized for asserting, in the book's third sentence, that he would never lead the league in strikeouts. (His two hundred and thirty K's were tops in the N.L. last year.) So, too, was a young-adult-readers' edition, which he'd need to be promoting, and he'd submitted a first draft of a children's book, "Knuckleball Ned," to Dial, a Penguin imprint. After news of the trade broke, the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, got in touch to discuss cultural-outreach opportunities. Dickey was pleased by what he was learning about his new city's diversity, too. "I read that Toronto is only fifty-one-per-cent Canadian," he said. "In some ways, Toronto is like a New York."
New York would soon have a new pitching sensation to fawn over, in Matt Harvey, perhaps the second coming of Tom Seaver, but the Mets seemed to be taking measures to preëmpt knuckleball nostalgia before Opening Day. Jay Horwitz, the team's longtime publicity director, tweeted about "the last Mets pitcher to win 20 games," referring not to Dickey but to Frank Viola, who accomplished the feat in 1990. Dickey said that he found the apparent amnesia "humorous," and added that Horwitz had since called him to apologize.
Playing catch in the Florida sun, wearing his uniform baggy and belted high in the waist, with stirrups up to his knees, Dickey looked more like a contemporary of Cy Young himself than like a modern ace. Batting practice began, and he drifted around the outfield, shagging flies and pausing at one point to bend over and pick up a feather on the grass. The sensation of watching someone who'd stepped out of a time machine, or a children's book, was amplified when he stuck the feather in the top of his cap, and continued roaming the outfield as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
Dickey was still wearing the feather when he returned to the clubhouse, almost an hour later. "It fell down right in front of me, from what I like to imagine as the outstretched wing of an osprey," he said, and presented it to me, for inspection. "I do think it was an osprey. Probably with a fish in its talons."
John Gibbons, when I spoke with him in his office later, seemed happy to let Dickey be Dickey. "Most of us in this game, we come here, we're in the entertainment business," he said. "We do baseball, and we might do a thing or two on the side. But he's a special guy. That's where his heart is. God bless him." Trying to think of comparably cerebral players he'd known, Gibbons brought up the Dominican pitcher Miguel Batista, whom he'd managed in an earlier stint with the Blue Jays, back in 2004 and 2005. "Miguel wrote a book—I think it was on a serial killer, or something," he said. The book's English title was "The Avenger of Blood."
Gibbons professed his belief in the phenomenon sometimes known as the "day-after effect," or, more recently, the Dickey effect: a knuckleball hangover that leaves batters disoriented when returning to face conventional pitchers the next day. "We'd face Wakefield, and he could set you back a couple days," Gibbons said, recalling the frustration of managing against Boston. "You're chasing that thing, and the timing's off." Mets pitchers who followed Dickey in the rotation last year had even more success than Dickey, and Gibbons, hoping to benefit from a similar bump, had chosen the hard-throwing Brandon Morrow to fill the second slot in his rotation, for maximal contrast.
Dickey wasn't around when the TV in the clubhouse, tuned to the Canadian station Sportsnet, began airing a half-hour-long documentary about him. "Are you kidding?" one Blue Jay exclaimed as he passed by. "Every time I look up, it's R. A. Dickey." He turned to the veteran reliever Darren Oliver, who, at forty-two, is the only pitcher on the staff older than Dickey, and asked, "You see this?" Oliver looked up from his phone to see a closeup of Dickey's bearded face in a hangdog expression, as he talked about his efforts to raise awareness of sexual abuse. "Look at him, trying to be all serious," Oliver said.
Dickey's closest friend on the team, the catcher and fellow-Nashville resident J. P. Arencibia, told me that he hadn't discussed Dickey's troubled past with him. "I just think that people understand that he has a book," Arencibia said. "I mean, I'm sure he's open to talk about it, but it's not something that you talk about all the time." Arencibia added, "He's way different than everybody else. Great guy, though." ♦


text:
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What Bon Appétit is doing
Protecting tomato pickers in Florida
In the vast tomato fields of south Florida, farmworkers are exploited and abused, to the extent that one federal prosecutor called Florida "ground zero for modern-day slavery." In 2009, Bon Appétit executives and chefs visited Immokalee, FL, and witnessed these deplorable conditions firsthand. We were the first food service company to partner with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a farmworker organization with whom we forged a new agreement that frames acceptable working conditions and enforces those conditions with a strict code of conduct for tomato growers.
Educating consumers about conditions for farmworkers
- The Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States: In March 2011 the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation and United Farm Workers of America, with support from Oxfam America, released a groundbreaking report detailing the lack of laws and protections for crop farmworkers in the U.S. The report has become required reading in many university and law-school classrooms, and we were honored with the 2011 Cruz Reynoso-Ralph Abascal Don Quixote Award from California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA) for our efforts.
- TEDxFruitvale: Harvesting Change: In October 2011, the BAMCO Foundation hosted a special conference that focused on farmworkers and labor movements. The speakers included farmworkers, farmers, activists, artists, students, professors, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs, and the live webcast was watched by groups all around the country. The 23 videos are available on YouTube.
- Farmworker Awareness Week / National Food Day: Every year, our cafés that observe these March and October events spotlight farmworker issues with guest activities and educational materials. (See what some students thought.)
Empowering farmworkers and setting standards
We are proud to be an early member of the Equitable Food Initiative, a unique partnership among businesses and advocacy groups that have come together to develop standards, training processes, and a certification to protect farmworkers and produce safer, healthier food. (Read the New York Times story about EFI.)
Learn more
- Equitable Food Initiative
- CIW's Campaign for Fair Food
- Food Chains documentary
- Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook
- Farmworker Awareness Week
- TEDxFruitvale speakers on YouTube
- Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States report (PDF)


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Saw 3 spirited horses gallup down a dusty trail beside us last night with heads high in the air. Half a dozen curious cows approached our campsite in the evening to wish us well & welcome us to the neighborhood. Pheebs doesn't know what to make of these big 4 legged critters & this may very well be the first time she has ever seen cows & horses. I just love having animals for neighbors.
We are the only folks here in our new location. Not another rig in sight anywhere. How great is that eh:)) Despite being in the northern end of the Sonoran desert we haven't seen a lot of cactus around. We also love the lush green color of many large Desert Broom plants. Noticed some nice yellow flowers blooming as well. The ground here is a hard packed fine gravely clay sand so we will have to keep an eye on the weather because it could be pretty soupy if it rains. The ground is also much friendlier to doggy paws & Jeep tires.
I could see the lights of Wickenburg on the horizon last night & a huge glow on the same horizon from the large city of Phoenix, Arizona. Not to worry, we will not be going anywhere near that big Phoenix place. We are about 66 miles away & that's plenty close enough to any big city for this small town boy.
I know fellow RVing Blogger Mike from MIKE & PAT'S TRAVELS is in the neighborhood somewhere so we'll be looking up Mike & Pat for sure in a few days.
One of the great things I like about Arizona is it's wide diversity of scenic landscapes. The desert around our present location is yet again different from other areas we have been. We are ringed by ever present mountain ranges but the desert floor is different. Greener than Bouse but we don't have the cactus so abundant near Ajo. More vegetation than Cochise County's Sulphur Springs Valley though. Mesquite trees & scrub make up the desert floor here forming a mini forest with scrub averaging 3 or 4 feet & trees reaching maybe 25 feet.
Jeeped ourselves into Wickenburg around 9:30 this morning to have us a look around & familiarize ourselves with the town. Wickenburg is one of those places a person is probably going to like right away. We did.
Headed ourselves right downtown to visit the old streets. Lots of parking & the town center is small enough to easily walk everywhere. Great southwest architecture & great southwest colors. The town has pulled out all the stops to make it people friendly. Focusing on it's history, we enjoyed the Cowboy Museum as well as our walk around the downtown area. Kinda reminded my of Jackson Hole Wyoming a bit.
Kelly was feeling a need for Mexican Food so we stopped into a place called Anita's. I was a bit alarmed when I didn't see hamburgers on the menu but was assured something called a shredded Chimichanga would not set my face on fire. Closed my eyes & wolfed it down pretending it was a McDonald's Big Mac.
This Wickenburg place is a mighty fine little town alright & for sure we will be back again over the next few days or so. Slipped into Safeway on the way back to the rig for some groceries & headed back out of town to our quiet little spot in the desert with all the cows.
We had about 40 visitors this afternoon & we really enjoyed their company as they gathered around our rig & fire pit. We had ourselves a great Happy Hour. Our company was particularly enjoyed by the Pheebs as she made herself a whole bunch of new friends. Their bathroom habits left a little to be desired but we didn't mind because it was just so great watching Pheebs interact with her new Pals & having so much fun. What a special little dog she is:))
The Last Paragraph: I have always been in the habit of sharing locations & information about boon docking spots with others & up until yesterday I have often blogged about our daily location. I am now re-thinking all that.
From the beginning, I oriented my blog around RV traveling & sharing our experiences of where we are, where we go & what we see. I have always tried to pass on information to other travelers in hopes they may see & experience many of the same things we do. I recently blogged a fair bit about the great scenic boon docking spots on Darby Wells Road in Ajo. Since then a few blog readers have journeyed there & enjoyed the beautiful scenery just as we did. I felt good inside knowing that I was directly or indirectly contributing to someone else's enjoyment of nature whether they be friends or strangers.
However, a long time boon docker at the Clark Dry Lake Bed near Borrego Springs a few years ago was miffed that I was blogging about the great boondocking opportunities there. He figured my telling everybody about it would attract too many people. Happened a few times since then & again recently at Darby Wells when a long time boon docker made it clear my blog could very well attract too many people to the area. I do understand the other side of this coin & being a private person myself I do understand not wanting to have a lot of people around. But, my blog is not a national travel magazine reaching thousands of RVing people so there is not going to be a flood of RV'ers flocking to an area threatening the few people who may like it there. In fact, we have noticed a decline in boon docking RV'ers the past 3 years compared to 5 years ago………..Anyway, this was just something that's been sitting on my chest for awhile & today was the day to finally get it off.
GROANER'S CORNER:(( A newly appointed young preacher was contacted by the local funeral director to hold a graveside committal service at a small country cemetery in Iowa. There was to be no funeral, just the committal, because the deceased had no family or friends left in Iowa. The young pastor started early to the cemetery, but soon lost his way.
After making several wrong turns, he finally arrived a half-hour late. The hearse was no where in sight, and the workmen were relaxing under a nearby tree, eating their lunch. The pastor went to the open grave and found that the vault lid was already in place. He took out his book and read the service in its entirety. As he returned to his car, he overheard one of the workmen say: "Maybe we'd better tell him that's the septic tank."
-Tourists see the world, travelers experience it.
- Home is where your pet is:))
BAYFIELD BUNCH PHOTO ALBUMS https://picasaweb.google.com/117858411710794543295
The only thing better than right now will someday be the memories of
right now...AL.


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Chip Spreader DAS-6000
1.Security and humanized design:
With a spring shock absorber and gas spring shock absorber dual shock absorption system, greatly improving the safety performance of walking, hot melt kettle has two front and rear feed port, feed pump switch located in the operating handle, easy to operate construction.
2.Temperature control box:
Japan Omron brand dual digital LCD thermostat timely display and adjust the heat transfer oil temperature, sealant temperature and irrigation hose temperature, temperature display intuitive and accurate, through three centralized temperature distribution switch can be controlled independently, easy to operate . Through the temperature controller, according to customer choice of different types of sealant set the control temperature, you can automatically monitor the temperature, control the machine's working condition, improve work efficiency and save fuel consumption.
3.Irrigation gun:
The unique electric control switch on the handle of the gun can remotely control the pump and reduce the waste of sealant.
4.Heat conduction oil system:
Melt with a heat transfer oil hot melt kettle, indirect heating, the temperature can be adjusted on demand, automatic temperature control system, will never burn the filling material. The hot melt kettle thermal transfer oil sandwich design than similar products using less heat transfer oil, to further improve the heating rate, reduce the replacement cost.
5.Special geometry structure of the combustion chamber:
Flame to 45° oblique angle to the combustion chamber wall, not with the hot-melt kettle in direct contact with the hot room air, combustion, high heat utilization.
6.Discharge hose:
270° on demand free rotation, longer life, high resistance hose fold fully meet the road maintenance in the construction of horizontal and vertical cracks in the actual work needs to ensure that the largest construction area.
7. The lowest charge height
Low operating position and filler port, the filler port is equipped with a splash plate, improve the safety of the feeding operation. Both the material box and the hose have heat insulation materials to avoid scalding the operator.
8. Electric agitator
Mixer motor imported brand variable speed motor motor, simple structure, easy to use, easy to maintenance.
9. Moving Way—Trailer type and Electric walking
Small size, light weight, both trailer/electric walking are ok, just two people can carry out construction, driving speed is 50 KM/H.


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Set of 3 Kitchen Cloths
(cloths are the same color)
These highly durable, environmentally friendly, microfiber Kitchen Cloths and Towels are super absorbent, quick-drying, non-abrasive and safe on most kitchen surfaces. Scratch-free and lint-free, they won't harm delicate surfaces like crystal and are excellent for drying dishes. Use them damp to clean grease, grime, smudges and more. The BacLock™* agent inhibits bacterial odor, mold and mildew growth within the product. This means cleaner cloths, less frequent laundering and reduction in cross-contamination. Use them dry to absorb moisture or attract dust and dirt like a magnet and trap it inside. They're perfect for a variety of surface jobs.
Available in 8 colors: Orchid, Buttercream, Pomegranate, Blue, Graphite, Latte, Salmon and Sea Mist.
Cloth size: 35 cm x 26 cm / 13.78" x 10.24"
Towel size: 65 cm x 35 cm / 25.59" x 13.78"
Abrasive cleaning solutions leave a film of broken-down dirt, grime and chemicals dried on your countertops, once the water evaporates. Most towels and cloths just push the dirt around and become soggy quickly.
Norwex Microfiber Kitchen Cloths and Towels completely dry surfaces and thoroughly clean kitchen countertops with only water.
All Norwex Microfiber products carry a two-year warranty. Please visit www.norwex.com for complete details.
*Contains BacLock™, an antibacterial agent for self-cleansing purposes only. The agent is solely designed to inhibit odor from bacteria, mold and/or mildew growth within the product.


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I'll help you become a Dominant Player.
In today's dynamic, digital world, great business leaders are more than just the products they sell and the brands they represent.
They inspire passion, call people to action and create value.
They change industries. They change people's lives.
Sound like something you might be interested in?


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The First Of The Production Supercars Cars Hits The Streets
The mid-engine Saleen S-7 has become a hit on the road circuits of America and Europe, winning four different GT Championships during the 2001 season. Now the first S-7 production vehicle for consumers has been delivered. During ceremonies at Saleen World Headquarters in Irvine, CA, in early June, President Steve Saleen handed over the keys to "a Lady in Red," the first S-7 road car. Check out the still photos of the car, but be sure to also view the video!


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You know you're not getting a traditional romantic comedy with "The Switch" just by looking at the posters going up everywhere for the Jennifer Aniston-Jason Bateman film.
It appears Bateman's picture is taken as he's inspecting a key ingredient after intercepting an insemination delivery headed to Jennifer Aniston's character.
"We liked the idea that it's going to surprise," co-director Will Speck tells PopcornBiz. "We wanted to show something that was not as conventional for a romantic comedy poster."
They certainly succeeded.
Further, the filmmakers wanted to focus on the key scene which explains the title of the movie. "The title is 'The Switch,' " says Speck. "So this is the act itself. Let's go towards that."
As Bateman himself said: "This is a romantic comedy but it's through an atypical route, and that starts with the poster."
As for filming the scene, there was a lot of debate about what should substitute for the vital ingredient -- the seed of life. They settled for a combination of glue and flour.
But once it came onto set -- there was instant debate between the directors, the production designers and Bateman about the proper consistency.
"The second it came on set, all of us had 17 opinions," said Speck. "We all stepped forward and said something like, 'Well, it actually is much milkier than that.' "
While his character obliges onscreen, at no point did Bateman offer up the real thing.
"Jason is not that method," says co-director Josh Gordon


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Geraldo Rivera faced public outrage last week when he criticized Trayvon Martin for walking the streets of his father's fiancée's Florida community wearing a hoodie. But Mr. Rivera was right to highlight the racial risks associated with black men's dress.
The clothes many black males wear and how they wear them are often racialized in ways that make black men and boys criminally suspect. So it wasn't Rivera's observation that was wrong-headed. It was his claims about who is responsible that were wildly misguided.
Rivera's observations are about the relationship between race, dress, and perceptions of criminality – a reality worth exposing at every turn. But he places blame on the Martins for not making their son sufficiently aware of the risks that his stereotyped dress made him vulnerable to. Rivera should have directed his blame elsewhere: news media that perpetually associate criminality with black males; legislators who frequently criminalize certain styles of black dress; and a criminal justice system all too willing to disproportionately monitor, harass, arrest, and incarcerate black boys and men because of mere "suspicion."
Studies by public-opinion researchers over the past two decades bear out a familiar pattern. First, local television news primarily reports on violent crime.
Second, television news reporters use images that disproportionately highlight black perpetrators, and often, black victims as well.
Third, landmark studies by political scientists and communication scholars have demonstrated that local television news viewers tend to identify blacks with crime and vise-versa – so much so that viewers' beliefs about black male criminality are exaggerated far beyond the evidence of actual crime reports.
Fourth and finally, dark-skinned black male criminals are the most memorable perpetrators of violent crimes. Research indicates that images of black men committing violent crimes stick in people's minds longer than those of white criminals.
It's no surprise then that 72 percent of 100,000 participants in Harvard University's long-running Project Implicit study – which measures automatic attitudes about race – automatically associate blacks with weapons, and whites with harmless objects. And this is the case for people from all racial backgrounds, not just whites (which, by the way, we should keep in mind as we try to assess George Zimmerman's motivations).
In concert with media, state and local government entities throughout the United States frequently criminalize styles of dress worn by black males through local ordinances. The most frequent and pervasive of these has been ordinances against "sagging" – a style of dress where pants hang below the waist. Such dress is almost exclusively associated with black males in particular and hip-hop culture more generally.
Depending on whether one is in Flint, Mich., Albany, N.Y., Georgia, Fort Worth, Texas, anywhere in the state of Florida, or on a cross-country flight, one might be fined, arrested, ejected from public transportation, kicked out of school, or removed from a plane for wearing pants below the waist.
These ordinances against "sagging" and other forms of black male dress have not only become a way of criminalizing clothing and those who wear them, they have become a means for excluding black males from public and private venues.
In fact, a rash of lawsuits have been filed in recent years attacking the discriminatory nature of nightclub dress codes. One of the more explicit of such codes, by an Indiana nightclub, prohibited – among other things – loose-fitting pants, baseball caps, hair pics, grills (jewelry worn over teeth), and gold chains. In another example, an ACLU lawsuit against a Virginia Beach nightclub alleged that patrons wearing cornrows and dreadlocks were prevented from entering the club because the manager did not want "hip-hoppers" in the club.
So news and entertainment media paint a portrait of black males as criminals, while public institutions use black male clothing and styles of dress as an index for excluding them based on their perceived penchant for criminal activity.
Both of these realities underlie widespread police policies that profile, monitor, harass, and often arrest black males because they are "suspect." The most prominent and widely reported of such practices in recent years is the NYPD's "stop and frisk" practice, which produced a record 684,000 stops in 2011. Blacks and Latinos comprised 87 percent of those stopped (they make up about 24 percent of the New York City population).
Some – the NYPD included – say that police just go where the crime is. But according to a 2008 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights, while stop-and-frisk rates in New York City are high, actual arrests are low. Arrest rates from these stops are about 4 percent for blacks, with similar percentages for all racial groups.
A recent New York Daily News article cited Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito (D) of East Harlem: "My community [which is on the top 10 list of stop-and-frisk neighborhoods] doesn't have one of the highest rates of crime. We don't believe the argument that the NYPD is saying, that it's to reduce crime is valid."
What is at issue here is not police officers' ability to use tactics that stem the tide of violent crime – because the statistics show that these tactics do not. What is really at issue is the fact that the weight of police ineffectiveness to combat violent crime gets lightened on the backs of black and brown bystanders.
According to an internal police department study by the LAPD covering the year 2004-2005, blacks – relative to whites – were 127 percent more likely to be stopped, 76 percent more likely to be searched, and 29 percent more likely to be arrested.
And contrary to the perception that such profiling is justified because blacks and Latinos commit more crimes, a 2011 report by The Leadership Conference finds that compared to whites who were stopped and frisked, blacks were 42 percent and Hispanics 32 percent less likely to be found with a weapon. Even comparing whites and blacks who consented to searches, police were 37 percent less likely to uncover weapons on black suspects, and about 24 percent less likely to uncover drugs or any other type of contraband than consensual searches of whites.
Frequent reviews of police department data across the US demonstrate that this pattern of disparate police treatment of blacks is increasingly the norm for police conduct, rather than an exception.
So was Trayvon Martin at risk for at least being suspected and followed because he was black? Unfortunately, yes – in Florida and many other parts of the US. Should his parents have warned him that dressing in a hoodie might exacerbate this risk? Perhaps. Dress and race are closely associated with criminality. Though, if they are like most black parents, they likely prepared their son to face racial discrimination. Are they ultimately to blame – even marginally – for his murder? Of course not.
Neo-conservative ideology makes it easy to blame individual victims for the discrimination and violence they face because of their racial group membership. And – if past practice is evidence, even liberals calling out for justice will limit that to the justice that Trayvon and his parents might receive by investigating and punishing – if charged and found guilty – his killer.
If change is to occur, we must first replace our exaggerated images of black male criminality with those more in line with reality, borne out by evidence.
For instance, a 2006 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics compared homicide victim and offender data over a 30-year period. It showed that the gap between black and white offenders is much smaller than what the images we see on television and film tell us. From 1976 to 2005, blacks account for 51 percent of all homicides perpetrators, whites 47 percent. Surprisingly homicides perpetrated by whites are more likely to be gang related.
We must be willing to start countering the scary black man narrative with statistics like these when children are still young. Recent developmental research shows that children pick up fear of people of different races from their parents, and do so at a very young age.
No matter how Trayvon Martin's story ultimately ends, we would be remiss if we let the conversation it has instigated pass us by without serious consideration and concerted action.
Charlton McIlwain is associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. He is co-editor with Stephen M. Caliendo of "The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity," and co-author, also with Stephen M. Caliendo of "Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. elections."


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Stolen lives: Profiles of the Cleveland kidnapping victims
She was, by all accounts, a typical teenage girl, who wore her hair in a ponytail, had mild acne, liked to shop and loved rapper Eminem.
But Tuesday, the now-27-year-old Amanda Berry emerged as the hero of a remarkable saga in which she and two other women were kidnapped and held captive for years in a Cleveland home.
It was Berry, police and neighbors said, who had the presence of mind to hail a neighbor, slip through an obstructed front door with his help and place a frantic call to 911.
"Help me. I'm Amanda Berry. I've been kidnapped, and I've been missing for 10 years," she said tearfully, before describing her alleged captor for the dispatcher.
The 110-pound, brown-eyed teenager disappeared at age 16 on April 21, 2003, while on her way home from her job at Burger King, according to police, local media reports and the television show "America's Most Wanted," which first featured her case the following year.
She was still wearing her Burger King uniform. Her 17th birthday party had been planned for the next day.
Berry was close to her mother and older sister, wanted to be a clothing designer when she grew up and began working at Burger King because she liked to buy things for herself, her "America's Most Wanted" profile said.
Her mother, Louwana Miller, never gave up hope that the girl known as Mandy was still alive, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The case attracted national attention when Miller went on Montel Williams' nationally syndicated television show in 2004 and consulted a psychic.
"She's not alive, honey," the psychic said. "Your daughter's not the kind who wouldn't call."
After Berry's mother died in 2006, there were occasional clues in the search for Berry, and police have conducted a number of searches over the years. All proved fruitless -- until Monday night, when Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were rescued from the house in Cleveland.
Also rescued was a 6-year-old girl. She is believed to be Berry's daughter.
Michelle Knight
Perhaps the most mysterious of the three women who were rescued from a house in Cleveland on Monday night after years in apparent captivity is Michelle Knight.
Knight disappeared in August 2002 but was apparently not treated as a missing person because family members thought she had left home voluntarily. Little information was immediately available about her Tuesday. Even her age was unclear: Police said she was 20 when she disappeared, but local media accounts said at various points that she was 18 or 21.
According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Knight was last seen at a cousin's house in Cleveland. Her grandmother, Deborah Knight, told the paper that family members had concluded that Michelle left on her own because she was upset that her son was removed from her custody. It was unclear why that might have happened or what became of her son.
But Michelle Knight's mother, Barbara Knight, told the paper that she always considered her daughter to be a missing person and that long after police stopped searching, she placed fliers on Cleveland's west side. Barbara Knight said she and her daughter were close and that the young woman would not have disappeared without even a phone call.
Gina DeJesus
When she was 14, Gina DeJesus would walk nearly 40 blocks from Wilbur Wright Middle School to her Cleveland home, winding through thriving commercial areas, blocks dotted by churches and neighborhoods dogged by drugs and prostitution.
It was one of those treks that led to her nine-year ordeal in captivity.
DeJesus disappeared while walking home from school April 2, 2004, and was not found until she was rescued from a Cleveland house Monday night with two other women, capping an amazing saga that riveted the nation Tuesday.
The 5-foot-1-inch teen with long, curly dark brown hair was very close to her family and didn't leave home much once she arrived there, according to local media accounts and her profile on the "America's Most Wanted" website. The television show first featured her case in 2005.
The depth of the family relationships -- and the pain caused by DeJesus' disappearance -- are starkly evident in postings on Facebook, a site that barely existed when she went missing.
In March, her aunt, Janice Ruiz Smith, wrote on a Facebook group dedicated to finding her: "To the person who took my niece Gina, please please let her go. I know deep in your heart, there is goodness. She has a family who loves her, and misses her very much. Please let her come home."
The posting added that Ruiz Smith would be putting up posters and handing out prayer vigil flyers.
Also in March, DeJesus' mother, Nancy Ruiz, noted the upcoming nine-year anniversary of her daughter's disappearance. "To all my loved ones, sorry for not being there for you," she wrote. "Been ups and downs, but lives go on. Gina, I love you and miss you so much. . . all of us are doing the best we can, just hang in there."
In the days after DeJesus went missing, the family's modest home turned into a media hot spot, according to accounts in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Television trucks were parked outside, and the mayor visited. But family members soon began to despair, when the frantic efforts to find her yielded nothing.
In an irony that triggered media reports and online commentary Tuesday, a relative of former school bus driver Ariel Castro wrote of her disappearance in 2004 for a Cleveland area community newspaper. DeJesus was being held captive in Castro's home.
"For seven weeks, Gina's family has been organizing searches, holding prayer vigils, posting fliers and calling press conferences," said the article with the byline Ariel Castro. "Despite the many tips and rumors that have been circulating in the neighborhood, there has been no sign of her."
A public records search Tuesday showed the suspect, who has been arrested, and the article writer are related, but the exact relationship could not be determined.
Washington Post research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.


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- Rent a Car
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Drive 😎 the Dodge Grand Caravan with Ramp 🚙 in Dubai for only AED 500/day. This special needs fits 5 passengers and 5 medium-sized bags. It is of GCC Specs and comes with Fabric Seats, Rear AC, Front Air Bags, Built-in GPS and other features.
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