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Got mine for £19.00 and in ice grey too ....
I love the internet !
Pro are doing an excellent job of supplying top quality, attractive components to bicycle lovers everywhere and with the PLT stem they have continued in the same vein. It's a very good looking and lightweight stem from Shimano's component arm but for an alloy offering this isn't cheap.
A lightweight alloy stem (125g for 110mm length) suitable for 1 1/8 inch steerer tubes, the PLT is supplied with an additional shim to take that down to 1" should you need it. Pro retail this stem at £49.99 and for that you get a stem with an interesting faceplate, instead of being a one piece unit this has two clamps that wrap vertically around the bars and are screwed into place top and bottom. Fiddly? Yes. Weight saving? Yes. Necessary? I'm unsure.
A stem is there to do a job, I don't really buy into the 'everything must be carbon' culture because for what a stem does, alloy does that very well. Carbon doesn't tend to handle the various stresses put through it as well as an alloy design does and the weight differences are mostly non-existent. Look at this stem: its very light at just 10g more (and over £70 less) than the Carbon fibre version you really can't complain.
When being ridden there were no signs of flex or stress and no telltale clicking sounds of stems that don't like what they're going through. The gentle rise on this added to the comfort too but with the flexibility of it being reversible this could certainly appeal to speed seekers and those looking to get as low as possible.
A very usable stem, for £50 an alloy stem should be good and the PLT is. Nothing exceptional but a solid performer with classy looks that should see it able to grace any bike (mountain bikes included, say Pro)
If you're thinking of buying this product using a cashback deal why not use the road.cc Top Cashback page and get some top cashback while helping to support your favourite independent cycling website
road.cc test report
Make and model: Pro PLT stem
Size tested: 31.8/110mm
Did you enjoy using the product? A reliable, if not exciting stem
Would you consider buying the product? It would be up there, I wouldnt automatically buy it over others but it would be in for consideration
Would you recommend the product to a friend? I would tell them the same, its a good stem but nothing spectacular.
About the tester
Age: 24 Height: 5ft 10 Weight: 66kg
I usually ride: felt ar4 My best bike is: i like my felt and my orbea ora tt bike equally
I've been riding for: Under 5 years I ride: Most days I would class myself as: Experienced
I regularly do the following types of riding: road racing, time trialling, commuting, club rides, general fitness riding, mtb, triathlon

subset: commoncrawl


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Welcome to the Motor Neurone Disease Association Forum.
If you are new to the forum then why not introduce yourself here? Only include information which can be made public.
Yesterday, 21:19
Yesterday, 12:41
This is a discussion group created for you to ask questions about motor neurone disease to our MND Connect team. Our team aim to answer as soon as possible. This group is covered 9 - 5 on weekdays. If you have a question, please post a new thread.
Yesterday, 16:40
14th December 2019, 22:48
Not all member discussion here will be scientifically proven. At the present time, the only drug that has been proven to slow the progression of MND is Riluzole.
3rd December 2019, 16:43
Find support in your area and share information about branch and group events.
3rd November 2019, 22:03
WAV Citroen Berlingo owned by...
4th December 2019, 13:46
Discussion on all medication that you've experienced and have been prescribed by professionals.
7th November 2019, 10:17
Discussion on all technology that you've found useful. From tablets, to software and apps.
13th August 2019, 15:43
Help with everything financial, from Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to Continuing Healthcare (CHC).
11th December 2019, 11:22
27th October 2019, 16:26
Learn from the experience of others and share your own tips for living with motor neurone disease.
19th November 2019, 16:35
14th December 2019, 21:02
News and information about the forum and the work of the MND Association.
6th December 2019, 09:05
We would like to hear your ideas and comments regarding the forum. We will try and resolve any issues you have.
12th September 2019, 17:50
There are currently 372 users online. 10 members and 362 guests
Most users ever online was 10,770, 25th November 2019 at 10:38.
Welcome to our newest member, PaulineH


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Tired of waiting?
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The very first fully motion captured flash animation.
This baby was 15 years in the making...well, it felt like it.
I wanted to make this due to the fact it bugged me in the movie that Jake managed to nail Neytiri with little to no knowledge of Na'vi mating practices. I mean, I'm assuming it's pretty similar, but considering they have magic hair veins that connect with nature, there's obviously some pretty big anatomical differences...
Wow, there's people starving in Ireland and it's stuff like THAT which keeps me up at night.
Happy Harry
Newgrounds accounts are free and registered users see fewer ads!
sooo truee
So, that's how they have sex. Interesting.
this is so funny
Very funny, good work
thanks very epic games level of quality my main nigga.
Just $2.99 per month or $25 per year.
Click here to see all the perks and browse our Wall of Honor.


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A Study of Tocilizumab in Comparison to Etanercept in Participants With Rheumatoid Arthritis and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors
|The safety and scientific validity of this study is the responsibility of the study sponsor and investigators. Listing a study does not mean it has been evaluated by the U.S. Federal Government. Read our disclaimer for details.
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01331837
Recruitment Status : Completed
First Posted : April 8, 2011
Results First Posted : July 13, 2017
Last Update Posted : July 13, 2017
Hoffmann-La Roche
Information provided by (Responsible Party):
Hoffmann-La Roche
- Study Details
- Tabular View
- Study Results
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
|Tracking Information
|First Submitted Date ICMJE
|April 7, 2011
|First Posted Date ICMJE
|April 8, 2011
|Results First Submitted Date ICMJE
|March 24, 2017
|Results First Posted Date ICMJE
|July 13, 2017
|Last Update Posted Date
|July 13, 2017
|Actual Study Start Date ICMJE
|August 2, 2011
|Actual Primary Completion Date
|March 25, 2016 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)
|Current Primary Outcome Measures ICMJE
|Original Primary Outcome Measures ICMJE
|Composite of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) consisting of cardiovascular death, non-fatal myocardial infarction and non-fatal stroke of all classifications [ Time Frame: 5.5 years ]
|Change History
|Complete list of historical versions of study NCT01331837 on ClinicalTrials.gov Archive Site
|Current Secondary Outcome Measures ICMJE
|Original Secondary Outcome Measures ICMJE
|Current Other Pre-specified Outcome Measures
|Not Provided
|Original Other Pre-specified Outcome Measures
|Not Provided
|Descriptive Information
|Brief Title ICMJE
|A Study of Tocilizumab in Comparison to Etanercept in Participants With Rheumatoid Arthritis and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors
|Official Title ICMJE
|A Clinical Outcomes Study to Evaluate the Effects of IL-6 Receptor Blockade With Tocilizumab (TCZ) in Comparison With Etanercept (ETA) on the Rate of Cardiovascular Events in Patients With Moderate to Severe Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA)
|Brief Summary
|This randomized, open-label, parallel-group, multicenter study will evaluate the rate of cardiovascular events with tocilizumab in comparison to etanercept in participants with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Participants will be randomized to receive intravenous (IV) 8 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg) tocilizumab every 4 weeks or subcutaneous 50 milligrams (mg) etanercept weekly, with or without non-biologic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD).
|Detailed Description
|Not Provided
|Study Type ICMJE
|Study Phase ICMJE
|Phase 4
|Study Design ICMJE
|Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary Purpose: Treatment
|Condition ICMJE
|Rheumatoid Arthritis
|Intervention ICMJE
|Study Arms ICMJE
|Publications *
|Not Provided
* Includes publications given by the data provider as well as publications identified by ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier (NCT Number) in Medline.
|Recruitment Information
|Recruitment Status ICMJE
|Actual Enrollment ICMJE
|Original Estimated Enrollment ICMJE
|Actual Study Completion Date ICMJE
|March 25, 2016
|Actual Primary Completion Date
|March 25, 2016 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)
|Eligibility Criteria ICMJE
Inclusion Criteria:
Exclusion Criteria:
|Sex/Gender ICMJE
|Ages ICMJE
|50 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult)
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers ICMJE
|Contacts ICMJE
|Contact information is only displayed when the study is recruiting subjects
|Listed Location Countries ICMJE
|Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czechia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States
|Removed Location Countries
|Brazil, China, Czech Republic
|Administrative Information
|NCT Number ICMJE
|Other Study ID Numbers ICMJE
2010-020065-24 ( EudraCT Number )
|Has Data Monitoring Committee
|Not Provided
|U.S. FDA-regulated Product
|Not Provided
|IPD Sharing Statement ICMJE
|Not Provided
|Responsible Party
|Hoffmann-La Roche
|Study Sponsor ICMJE
|Hoffmann-La Roche
|Collaborators ICMJE
|Not Provided
|Investigators ICMJE
|PRS Account
|Hoffmann-La Roche
|Verification Date
|June 2017
ICMJE Data element required by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the World Health Organization ICTRP


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HUD-certified event helps with home buying, foreclosure
American Dream event at city Convention Center through Monday
If you're having trouble making your house payments or need help buying a new home, you may want to visit the Baltimore Convention Center over the next few days.
The American Dream event is a free Department of Housing and Urban Development-certified program running through 8 p.m. Monday that's sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America.
"We have every major lender here in the country, and if we can document and verify that (someone's) mortgage is unaffordable, the lenders can go as low as a 2 percent interest rate and, in some cases, we do see outstanding principal balance to keep people in their homes," said NACA Communications Director Darren Duarte.
New home buyers can qualify for fixed-rate mortgages with no down payment and closing costs. For the first time, NACA is also providing an independent foreclosure review process.
"Any homeowner who lost their home in foreclosure and who thinks the lender may have done them wrong somehow can come here and apply for a remedy," Duarte said.
All of the services are free. The event is drawing people from all over the country, including New Jersey resident Everald Gayle.
"It's worth the drive because it helped my friend. My friend introduced me to the program, and I want to come see what NACA can do for me," Gayle said.
"It's just the fact that you can go and talk to the bank face to face that's actually great, because they can give you an answer right away," said Las Vegas homeowner Mario Avola.
Event organizers said consumers don't have to have perfect credit, and for many, it will make every difference in the ability to keep their homes.
"I can only hope. I've been through a lot of other programs, and I've been denied," said homeowner Nathan Hill. "Something like this can happen to you, and it's like your whole world is caving in."
"The economy is so bad right now. My second job that I always had, even when I purchased my home, I no longer have," said struggling homeowner Valerie Matthews.
"We've helped hundreds of thousands of people, and our goal is to eventually put ourselves out of this kind of business," Duarte said.
Officials said those who attend don't have to have all their documents with them, but it can speed up the process and, in some cases, ensure success.


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List of The BEST Air Duct Cleaning in Parrott, GA, 31777
Air Duct Pros of Parrott
Searching for the highest quality Air Duct Cleaning services in Parrott? Click to work with trusted professional HVAC cleaners who takes pride in providing results for your family! Call Us Today For Free Quote!
Phone : 855-340-9096
Air Duct Cleaning Service in Parrott, Georgia
We offer free consultation for your air duct cleaning!
- Have you been dusting in your home or office more frequently?
- Are there recent complaints about allergies or respiratory problems in your area?
- When you turn your HVAC on, does it emit any strange odors?
- Are there any build up of dust on the vent grills?
- Are there black marks and streaks around your vent grills?
The good news is, you don't have to do anything about it! Air Duct Cleaning Service in Parrott will handle all the air duct and vent cleaning for you. Leave the dirty work to us. You will be in very good hands as our undisputed cleaning services keep your home or office clean.
When you hire us to clean your ducts, you will get:
- The best air duct cleaning service you have ever laid your eyes on.
- The use of state of the art equipment that are also energy efficient.
- The services of well trained technicians.
- Services that are insured.
- Same day services for quick results.
- A free on-site estimate.
- A wide range of cleaning systems for you to choose from.
- Friendly technical support & customer services, even after the sale/installation
According to the EPA, the average home can collect about 40 pounds of dust annually. That is alarming!!! We're just talking about a residential place here. What more if we are to talk about a commercial space?!
All this dust can lead to major health issues, such as difficulty in breathing, allergic reactions, and sinus infections.
To keep the air you breathe in your home or office, your ducts need to be thoroughly cleaned every two to three years.
We Provide:
- Prompt, efficient, and friendly customer care
- Same day services and very quick response time
- Highly competitive prices for our services
- Free consultation
- Negative pressure plus brush cleaning
- Free HVAC inspection with every job
Air Duct Cleaning Parrott, GA; Air Duct Cleaning 31777; Commercial Air Duct Cleaning Parrott, GA; Residential Air Duct Cleaning 31777; Air Duct Cleaning Cost Parrott, GA; Air Duct Installation 31777; Air Duct Replacement Parrott, GA; Vent Installation 31777; Vent Replacement Parrott, GA; Air Duct Installation Cost 31777; Air Duct Replacement Parrott, GA;


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The V-neck Layered Pullover
The V-neck Layered Pullover
Free US shipping and returns
Our signature Looker, the V Neck Layered Pullover pre styles a shirt and sweater combination with ease. Knit with our finest wool and cashmere blend yarn, this sweater is paired with a collared georgette shirting textile with the illusion of 2 pieces in one. Lightweight, cozy and perennial, our Looker is a style you will reach for often!
Model (5'7.5", size 2) wears a size S. (Oversized, take a size down if you prefer closer fit)
70% Wool 30% Cashmere with 100% Polyester Georgette
-Relaxed fit
-V neck
-Dropped shoulders
-Curved high low hem


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The Travel Channel premiered a three-hour block of Extreme RVs shows on Jan. 29 featuring an array of recreational vehicles and mammoth motorhomes including X-Factor producer Simon Cowell's Anderson Mobile Estate; a 45-foot long, $320,000 Class 8 motorhome conversion on a Freightliner Coronado chassis from Middlebury, Ind.-based Show Hauler Motorhome Conversions; and the pop-top Cricket travel trailer that was inspired by NASA's Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV).
According to the RVing Examiner, the Extreme RVs show was produced by North Hills, California-based Brentwood Communications International Inc. (BCII) who also produce a number of automotive-based prime-time cable TV shows including American Trucker, Hot Rod TV, Car Crazy (all on SPEED) and Rides and Overhaulin' (TLC).
BCII said the first episodes of the Extreme RVs show will feature "nine different RV builds ranging from massive multi-million dollar star trailers to extreme off-road capable exploration vehicles. It will also feature some unique trailer builds including an extreme vintage trailer makeover."
To view videos on the Extreme RVs website click here.


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Senate bills defy House GOP on cuts
Senate Democrats continued to pick up Republican support Thursday as they moved ahead with domestic appropriations bills that defy deep cuts proposed by the House GOP in order to protect defense spending in a post-sequestration world.
Six to eight Republicans have consistently supported the four bills reported thus far by the Senate Appropriations Committee, despite the GOP leadership's opposition to the total $1.058 trillion cap set by Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.).
Story Continued Below
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), himself a veteran of the Appropriations panel, met with committee Republicans Wednesday. But prominent "yea" votes Thursday included Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former member of the GOP leadership and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.), who chairs the National Republicans Senatorial Committee.
( Also on POLITICO: Senate Democrats set marker on spending levels)
How long the bipartisan honeymoon will last, no one is sure. But it gives Mikulski some running room and shows a new level of defiance among GOP moderates, frustrated by the hardline taken by the House —even as no progress is being made on budget talks.
"It is our responsibility as appropriators to consider the merits of each bill and to make our own decisions," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told her colleagues at a markup Thursday. "Have members actually reviewed what is in the House transportation and housing bill as a result of the allocation that they have received? Are we to be just a rubber stamp for the House?"
Collins' comments came in defense of the Senate's own transportation and housing bill, approved 22-8 with six Republican votes despite being $10 billion over the House version.
( PHOTOS: 25 longest-serving senators)
Soon afterward, the panel approved an energy and water bill adding about $4 billion to what the House Appropriations Committee reported Wednesday. Eight Republicans backed that bill, including Alexander, who had suggested earlier this week he would oppose the measure to protest Mikulski's framework.
In truth, the Senate and House committees are being forced to operate in two parallel universes.
The Senate's $1.058 trillion discretionary budget falls within the initial goals set in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and last winter's fiscal cliff deal. But it chooses to ignore the subsequent failure of Congress and President Barack Obama to reach any agreement on avoiding sequestration in March
Those cuts brought spending down to roughly $984 billion and absent some budget agreement, a second round of cuts will hit home in December or January cutting that total to about $967.4 billion.
House Republicans are working with the lower number but then adding major changes of their own by shifting tens of billions to defense at the expense of Obama's domestic agenda. In doing so, the House is also defying sequestration since the added defense funds will disappear quickly if the law is not changed. And this has emboldened Mikulski that she must spell out a vision that defies what she fears is the "new normal" of sequestration.
A key player is her ranking Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, who has consistently voted no and believes the proper course it to mark bills toward an aggregate total of $967.4 billion. But Shelby has taken a tolerant view toward those voting with Mikulski, with whom he himself has worked for many years.
"You have individual senators who are going to vote for bills that they think have some merit in them," Shelby told POLITICO. "But at the end of the day I believe they will stay with our numbers."
"A lot of this will be ultimately futile," Shelby said. But he conceded that with this level of Republican support Mikulski could potentially move some bills before hitting his own $967.4 billion cap.


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Menlo Pediatric Dental
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NEWTOWN, Conn., Dec. 14 (UPI) -- Adam Lanza killed his mother Friday, then went to the Newtown, Conn., grade school where she taught and killed 26 people, 20 of them children, police said.
A law enforcement official said the 20-year-old gunman took his own life after he inflicted the horrible carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, The New York Times reported.
"Evil visited this community today," Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said. "We are all in this together."
Another adult was wounded in the shooting spree at the school. Police found the body of his mother, Nancy Lanza, shot dead at the residence in town that they were believed to have shared.
Residents of the shattered community of about 27,500 people and the surrounding region gathered for a vigil Friday night to pray and support the grieving families, the Hartford (Conn.) Courant reported.
Stephen Gray of Hartford said he had watched the day's events unfold on television.
"It just got worse and worse," Gray said. "I just had to be with other people and hopefully feel a little better."
Jane Carroll of Hartford said the shootings were "just so sad, so very sad."
"We're just sending prayer. There's nothing else we can do -- just prayer," she said.
"I'm just pretty heartbroken," said Amanda Pepin, who attended with her 9-year-old daughter, Gia Stanco. "I can't imagine that happening to my child."
"We might not be able to make sense of this today or tomorrow, but it's not impossible for us to come together to show our children that we love them," Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra said.
Lanza, described variously as dressed in black or combat gear, used two handguns, a Sig Sauer and a Glock, the Times said. Police also found a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle at the scene that they believed he had brought along, the newspaper said.
MSNBC reported officials had initially misidentified the shooter to NBC News as Lanza's 24-year-old brother, Ryan. But a senior official later said Ryan Lanza was cooperating with authorities and was not believed to have been involved. He told police his brother had a history of mental illness, the network said.
A motive, however, had not been determined, the Courant said.
Two law enforcement officials said the guns used in the massacre were purchased legally and were registered to the gunman's mother, MSNBC said.
State Police Lt. Paul Vance told reporters the gunman shot up two classrooms in one section of the school, which serves children in kindergarten through fourth grade.
"We heard, like, lots of bangs," 9-year-old Brendan Murray told CNN.
School therapist Diane Day said she was sitting with the principal, other staff members and a parent when the shooting started, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"We were there for about 5 minutes chatting and we heard, 'pop pop pop,'" she said. "I went under the table.'
Day said Principal Dawn Hochsprung, who was reported to have been among those shot, and a school psychologist immediately ran out of the room.
"They didn't think twice about confronting or seeing what was going on," she said.
"At first we heard a bunch of kids scream, and then it was just quiet and all you could hear was the shooting."
The school's lead teacher was shot through the door as she pressed her body against it to hold it shut, Day said.
"She was our hero," Day said.
Vance said 18 children were dead at the school and two others were pronounced dead at Danbury Hospital. The bodies of six adults and the gunman also were found in the school.
Police escorted a second man out of nearby woods and took him into custody.
"I saw some of the bullets going past the hall ... then the teacher pulled me into her classroom. ... It sounded like someone was kicking the door," one child told reporters.
"I saw policemen -- lots of policemen in the hallway with guns," 9-year-old fourth grader Vanessa Bajraliu told the Courant. "The police took us out of the school. We were told to hold each others' hands and to close our eyes. We opened our eyes when we were outside."
A shaken President Barack Obama, wiping away tears, said, "Our hearts are broken today."
The president, who ordered the nation's flags lowered to half-staff, went through a litany of such incidents.
"We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics," Obama said.
"We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news I react not as a president but as anybody else would -- as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.
"The majority of those who died today were children -- beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own. Among the fallen were also teachers -- men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams.
"Nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one."
Vance said police were summoned to the school in the scenic community about 65 miles northeast of New York City shortly after 9:30 a.m. and began an "active shooter search" of the building.
Police "did search every nook and cranny and every portion of the school," Vance said.
Newtown Police Lt. George Sinko said the shooting was "the worst thing we've experienced in town." He said crisis intervention counselors were available to the community.
"We just have to think about the families right now and do what we can for them," Sinko said.
WNBC-TV, New York, reported the gunman went to the school after first killing his father. Vance said search warrants had been executed for the shooter's home.
Malloy issued his condolences after meeting with parents.
"You can never be prepared for this kind of incident," he said, adding that it leaves a "mark on the community and every family impacted. ... These were beautiful children who had their lives taken away from them."
A first-grade teacher hid in the bathroom with her class and tried to keep them calm, ABC News reported. She said one of the children told her, "I just want Christmas. I don't want to die."
Alexis Wasik, 8, told ABC classmates were screaming and crying, and that she felt sick to her stomach. Her mother said she couldn't believe something like this could happen in Newtown.
"You drop your kids off, say, 'Have a good day,' 'I'll see you later.' You never expect anything like this. Not here," the mother said.
Officers and teachers led children, many of them crying, single file to a staging area at a firehouse where parents picked them up, the Courant reported.
"We ran down to the firehouse and there was a man pinned down with handcuffs on," a young boy told CNN.
"Who would do this? What kind of person would do this?" screamed a young man whose sister attended the school.
Another young man said his sister heard several loud booms, MSNBC reported.
The Newtown Bee reported numerous ambulance crews were on the scene, but a triage nurse told CNN they were sent away.
"We were told there was nothing for them to do," she said.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who head "Mayors Against Illegal Guns," called for action at the national level to deal with gun violence.
Bloomberg said Obama should send a bill to "fix this problem -- and take immediate executive action."
"Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough," Bloomberg said. "We have heard that rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership -- not from the president and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response."
The Times said Friday's shooting spree was the second deadliest in U.S. history, after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, when 32 died.


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Photograph: Copyright Richard B. Hallick, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
The international biochemical community has lost a valued colleague with the death of Richard I. (Dick) Gumport in Chicago on Oct. 13. Gumport devoted his research career to the study of enzymes that act on nucleic acid substrates and to the characterization of biologically important protein-nucleic acid interactions. Moreover, he contributed generously to his profession through his service as a journal editor, as an educator and administrator and through his commitment to the promotion of international scientific cooperation.
Born in Pocatello, Idaho, on June 23, 1937, Dick Gumport worked his way through the University of Chicago with a variety of jobs and received a Bachelor of Science in general biology in 1960. His lifelong commitment to nucleic acids and the enzymes that catalyze their reactions can be traced to his doctoral studies on RNA polymerase, completed in 1968 at the University of Chicago with Samuel B. Weiss. The commitment was strengthened and broadened by Dick's subsequent research as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow with I. Robert Lehman at Stanford University from 1968 to 1971. With Lehman, he identified a covalent intermediate in the DNA ligase reaction, namely an adenylyl moiety derived from the NAD+ (or ATP, depending on the source of the enzyme) substrate linked to an active site lysine residue as a phosphoramide. Dick often cited his experiences in the Stanford biochemistry department as inspiration for his ideal of an academic department as a close-knit community of collaborating scholars.
Dick joined the faculty of the biochemistry department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971 and spent his entire career there. He was the first full-time faculty member in the fledging Urbana campus of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and he devoted much energy to the biochemical education of medical students and to administrative service to the medical school. At Illinois, Dick's research initially centered on phage T4 RNA ligase. In collaboration with Olke C. Uhlenbeck, he demonstrated that RNA ligase could be used to join oligoribonucleotides, and he developed this method as a valuable tool for synthesis of RNA oligomers of defined sequence. Subsequently, Dick extended the use of RNA ligase to the joining of oligodeoxyribonucleotides, which was widely adopted in DNA synthetic chemistry. Recognizing the extraordinary value of DNA oligomers of known sequence as research tools, Dick became one of the pioneers in adapting newly developing methods of chemical synthesis of DNA oligomers, which could then be joined to form larger oligomers using RNA ligase. DNA oligomers prepared in Dick's lab were used in pioneering studies with techniques that are now universally used: site-directed mutagenesis, primers for sequencing, templates for in vitro synthesis of RNA and mapping the specificity of protein-nucleic acid interactions. Often, Dick gave his oligomers to other researchers with no expectation of co-authorship.
Dick and Jeffrey Gardner, his colleague in Illinois' microbiology department, conducted a productive collaboration for more than 20 years. They investigated the mechanism of site-specific recombination in bacteriophage lambda via characterization of integrase, integration host factor (IHF) and Xis and FIS interactions with DNA and the roles of these interactions in the regulation of the directionality of recombination and in forming nucleoprotein complexes. They also collaborated on research on the mechanism of transcription attenuation in regulation of the Escherichia coli threonine biosynthetic operon.
Dick's interest in DNA synthesis led him to develop methods for the incorporation of base analogues into synthetic oligomers for use in detailed characterization of DNA recognition by proteins, both in collaboration with others and in his own laboratory. He conducted an extensive program of research into DNA recognition by the EcoRI and RsrI restriction endonucleases and methyltransferases, a group of four proteins chosen because they all bind to the same DNA sequence but catalyze different reactions and have little amino acid sequence homology. His studies provided valuable insight into the details of DNA recognition by these enzymes.
As is clear from this description, Dick Gumport believed strongly in research collaboration rather than competition. He was devoted to the highest standards of research integrity and effective education, and he gave abundantly of his time in support of those ideals. He served as associate head of the department of biochemistry at Illinois for 12 years and as acting head for one year, and he was associate dean of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Urbana campus, from 2002 to 2007. Dick generously devoted his efforts to the work of several American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology committees and served for 10 years on the Journal of Biological Chemistry editorial board. An avid traveler, Dick enthusiastically supported international cooperation in biochemistry. He was among the American biochemists who traveled to China after the end of the Cultural Revolution as part of the China-United States Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Examination Administration (CUSBEA) program in 1984 and in many subsequent years. He formed scientific collaborations with biochemists in Russia, Finland and Turkey. Dick was honored by the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship in1979 and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
No retrospective of Dick Gumport's life and career would be complete without remembering his wonderful sense of humor. It provided a sense of perspective and made him a delightful colleague. "Academic politics are so vicious," he'd say, "because the stakes are so small." His e-mail messages closed with a quote from Mark Twain: "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investments of fact."
Below are reflections from his friends and colleagues.Dick embodied the ideals of the true intellectual university professor. He was a citizen of the world with an insatiable curiosity, rock-solid integrity and a clear eye for reality filtered by a sense of humor that would have made Mark Twain envious. He was a mentor to many and showed us all how to live according to strong and honest values. He leaves an incredible void, and we miss him profoundly.Bradford Schwartz
Dean of the Urbana campus
University of Illinois College of Medicine
Knowing Dick for more than 30 years both as a colleague in the restriction enzyme field and as an executive editor of Nucleic Acids Research, I grew to respect and admire him greatly. He combined the professionalism of a journal editor and scientist with the fun-loving exuberance of a committed researcher. I cannot remember a dull moment when Dick and his wife, Bobbie, were around. Laughter and friendship (plus a little alcohol) were the order of the day. He was very much a scientist's scientist, who set a marvelous example of how to live and love life both in and out of the laboratory. I miss him greatly.
Richard J. Roberts
New England Biolabs
Dick and I arrived as rookie assistant professors from West Coast postdocs in the fall of 1971. Since we shared long hair, an abhorrence of neckties and an interest in nucleic acids, it was perhaps inevitable that we became firm friends and collaborators. Dick first suggested that the newly discovered T4 RNA ligase could solve my difficulties in making RNAs of defined sequence and then took the lead in making T4 infected cells, purifying and assaying the enzyme. By the summer of 1973, we had successfully shown that the enzyme could join two RNA fragments, and the resulting paper got us tenure and launched our careers. Dick was a joy to collaborate with— optimistic, careful, funny, hard working and thoughtful. Above all, you could trust Dick. Looking back, Dick not only taught me how to work with enzymes, but he provided an environment that made doing science fun.
Olke C. Uhlenbeck
Professor and chairman
Department of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology
Northwestern University
Dick and I had a wonderful scientific collaboration that lasted 25 years. I was trained as a geneticist, but Dick's knowledge and background in nucleic acid-binding proteins gave me an appreciation for the power of biochemical approaches to problems.
Two of Dick's most prominent characteristics were his wit and wonderful sense of humor. I remember a particularly long group meeting, where it seemed that no progress had been made in one of our projects. Dick took out the fountain pen he always carried and wrote me a note. I thought he was going to suggest that we end the meeting. When I read the note it said: "This is why the university pays us these fantastic salaries."
Jeffrey F. Gardner
Professor of microbiology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
***Dick had a wonderful, quirky sense of humor, and he peppered the lab with absurd pictures and sayings. Over the sink was a drawing of a snail, titled "The Pace of Research." As a graduate student in his lab, I thought that it was just a funny cartoon. However, I came to understand that it represented what made Dick such an outstanding scientist and effective mentor. He taught us that, to do science right, you must be careful and methodical— in technique, of course, but especially in your reading of the literature and design of the experiment. However, what made Dick so special was that this rigor was coupled with an unusually kind and generous spirit. He considered every scientist, from undergraduate student to seasoned primary investigator, to be a colleague. I feel exceptionally privileged to have had him as my thesis mentor.
Deborah Hinton
Chief, gene expression and regulation section
Laboratory of molecular and cellular biology
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health
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Change Center: Restart Checklist
Column Display Related Tasks Related Topics
The Restart Status column indicates which servers or other resources need to be restarted for configuration changes to take effect. After you click Activate Changes, select the servers you want to restart and click Stop. Once the server has stopped successfully, click Start.
Column Display
Name Description Name
The name of this restartable resource.
Resource Type
The type of this resource.
Restart Status
This column indicates if a restart is required for this resource before all of the changes will take effect.
The current status of this resource.


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MK50 2024 - White - Aurifil 50 WT 100% Cotton Mako Large Spool Thread
These spools contain: 1422 Yds/1300 m
Established in 1983, Aurifil is an accomplished Italian company based near Milano, with a full-grown experience in producing superior quality cotton threads for professional and domestic quilters. Aurifil threads are made from Long Staple Egyptian Mako cotton. The 50 weight Mako cotton thread is the most popular and versatile thread and is ideal for:
Hand Appliqué
Ideal for all types of hand applique. From needle turning to using prepared shapes, the 50wt is thin and with all the colors available you can match your shape perfectly.
Hand Piecing
A great weight for hand piecing.
50wt is a wonder for both Bobbin lace & Machine lace.
Machine Appliqué
Ideal when a very fine finish is desired. This weight disappears so your fabric is the feature. Use for a straight stitch, small zig zag , Blind hemming stitch , and Blanket stitch.
Machine Embroidery
Great results every time. Use 50wt in the bobbin as well, or your regular bobbin thread – in which case tighten the top tension a little. Use a Microtex 80/12 needle.
Machine piecing
Gives a great result with a nice flat seam every time.
Machine quilting
Use for very detailed machine quilting with a lot of back tracking such as feathers and heavy background quilting . Perfect for quilting that creates texture when you don't necessarily want to see the quilting lines. Use the same thread in the bobbin and a Sharp/Microtex, quilting or even denim needles 80/12.
Longarm quilting
Perfect for creating texture where you don't want the thread to be a feature. Backgrounds, stitch in the ditch, basting quilts, whole cloth quilting, micro quilting for dense background designs.
Stitchesngiggles4u accepts the following forms of payment:
Paypal (Visa, Master Card, Discover, American Express and eChecks)
Utah Residents pay 6.75% Sales Tax - Paypal will add the tax to your purchase when you pay.
Domestic Orders:
U.S. orders over $49.00 SHIP FREE!!!
We USPS calculated shipping on all orders. If shipping amounts seem high, message me and I'll look into it, sometimes Etsy over-estimates shipping.
All orders generally ship next business day via USPS. I will provide you with tracking info.
International orders
International orders are shipped via USPS Priority International Mail.
International orders ship via USPS calculated shipping. Etsy estimates have been quite accurate for me so far, but if the shipping amount looks significantly off, message me and I'll be able to look into it. If shipping cost is significantly less than what Etsy charged you then I'll refund the difference
Etsy calculates those rates base on weight/size of the order, and destination. While these estimates are usually very close to the exact shipping cost, sometimes the shipping estimate is wrong. In cases of over-estimation of $1.00 (USD) or more, I will refund the excess.
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Buyers are responsible for any customs and import taxes that may apply. I'm not responsible for delays due to customs.
Just contact me within: 3 days of delivery
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But please contact me if you have any problems with your order.
Because of the nature of these items, unless they arrive damaged or defective, I can't accept returns for:
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Buyers are responsible for purchase and return shipping costs. If the item is not returned in its original condition, the buyer is responsible for any loss in value.
If you purchase more than one cut option of the same fabric it will be cut as one continuous piece unless you request otherwise. This allows you to order continuous cut pieces of fabric.
If you need to order 1-1/2 yards of fabric, order 1 yard cut and then a 1/2 yard cut
To order 2-1/4 yards of fabric, order 2 yard cuts, and then order a 1/4 yard
Information I Collect
To fulfill your order, you must provide me with certain information (which you authorized Etsy to provide to me), such as your name, email address, postal address, payment information, and the details of the product that you're ordering. You may also choose to provide me with additional personal information (for a custom order of fabric), if you contact me directly.
Why I Need Your Information and How I Use It
I rely on a number of legal bases to collect, use, and share your information, including:
- As needed to provide my services, such as when I use your information to fulfill your order, to settle disputes, or to provide customer support;
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Information about my customers is important to my business. I share your personal information for very limited reasons and in limited circumstances, as follows:
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I retain your personal information only for as long as necessary to provide you with my services and as described in my Privacy Policy. However, I may also be required to retain this information to comply with my legal and regulatory obligations, to resolve disputes, and to enforce my agreements. I generally keep your data for the following time period: 4 years.
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I may store and process your information through third-party hosting services in the US and other jurisdictions. As a result, I may transfer your personal information to a jurisdiction with different data protection and government surveillance laws than your jurisdiction. If I am deemed to transfer information about you outside of the EU, I rely on Privacy Shield as the legal basis for the transfer, as Google Cloud is Privacy Shield certified.
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If you reside in certain territories, including the EU, you have a number of rights in relation to your personal information. While some of these rights apply generally, certain rights apply only in certain limited cases. I describe these rights below:
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Change, restrict, delete. You may also have rights to change, restrict my use of, or delete your personal information. Absent exceptional circumstances (like where I am required to store data for legal reasons) I will generally delete your personal information upon request.
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Complain. If you reside in the EU and wish to raise a concern about my use of your information (and without prejudice to any other rights you may have), you have the right to do so with your local data protection authority.
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Lunar mosaic earns a Guinness World Record
27 July 2009
A team of astronomers in the UK have used specialist cameras and high-end amateur telescopes to produce a professional-quality mosaic of the Moon - earning them a Guinness World Record.
The enthusiasts recorded nearly 1000 image panes and 1.2 million frames of video, altogether totalling 1.1 terabytes of data. These were then digitally stitched together to create the mosaic. The final image incorporates 288 panes resulting in an incredible 87.4 megapixel image of the lunar landscape. Amazingly, features as small as 1km in size can be seen, besting some images taken with large professional observatories.
Guinness World Records presented the team with their certificate at an event hosted by the famous British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, who helped with the project.
The final image will be displayed at planetariums around the UK, and is also available to buy. All money raised will be donated to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust charity.
Learn more about this incredible project via its official website: http://www.lunarworldrecord.com
Search IYA2009 Updates
National Nodes: 148
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Organisational Associates:33
National Websites: 111
Cornerstone Projects: 12
Special Task Groups: 11
Special Projects:16
Official Products:8
Media Partners:22


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Thank you for your loyalty! thankyou10 for 10% off
Fuchsia Swarovski Bicone Crystal Beads
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Swarovski Bicone Beads are the most widely used Swarovski bead in the beading world. The Swarovski Bicone Bead is found on many custom jewelry pieces! There are so many different color options for the Swarovski Bicone Crystal Beads, you can find any color for your custom jewelry pieces!
Bicone Color you are ordering is: Fuchsia
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Father christmas
Merry Christmas with Boowa and Kwala
Can you find the REAL Santa ?
Boowa and Kwala's Christmas stockings
Christmas time is here again
Christmas gifts
Father christmas
Let's swing!
This girl is ready to rock (and roll!) Color her in on-line and make her even more beautiful!
Play with Kwala's toy dog
Roll over him and Kwala will tell you what he does!
Monster chase
What has happened to our heroes? Print and paint.
Can you find the word?
Find the names of the pictures and write them on the small slate. Can you find the right word (and spell it) ?
Paint the town (and a taxi)
Use the same colors as we have used in our example and the taxi will be able to get on with some work !
Coloured snowflakes
Print and cut out these beautiful snowflakes. Create a lovely snowy fun-filled coloured landscape on your bedroom wall.
Strawberry Milkshake recipe
Here's Grandma Koala's special super scrummy receipe for delectable strawberry flavored milkshake. Kwala thinks this is the BEST EVER !
Boowa & Kwala
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text:
Setting Arbitrary Variables In A REXX Procedure That Persist After It Completes
MartinPacker 11000094DH Comments (8) Visits (17112)
Over the weekend I decided to try my hand at writing a JSON parser in REXX. I developed the technique outlined in this post to enable me to do that. I think it's new. Certainly I've not seen it before. (I don't want at this point to get into a discussion about why JSON parsing might be a useful thing to do. Suffice it to say it is possibly going to be second only to XML as a common data format in... [More]
XML, XSLT and DFSORT, Part Zero - Overview
MartinPacker 11000094DH Visits (14317)
In the distant past I've written about using DFSORT to parse XML. This post (and two follow-on posts) will describe an experiment to make such processing much more robust. In this post I'll talk about what the problem I'm trying to solve is. And why. And a brief outline of my solution. About XML This isn't meant to be the most detailed description of XML, nor a complete list of where it's used. I... [More]


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There's nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. The Ace paperback cover promises mere thrills, and the writing provides real meaning. The combination of evident value and apparent secrecy makes Elmore Leonard fans feel more for their hero than Borges lovers are allowed to feel for theirs. When they tell you it's going to be good, what more can you hope for it to be?
Eventually, enough of these secret fans grow up and get together, and the writer is designated a Genius, acquiring all the encumbrances of genius: fans, notes, annotated editions, and gently disparaging comprehensive reviews. Since genre writing can support only one genius at a time—and no genre writer ever becomes just a good writer; it's all prophet or all hack—the guy is usually resented by his peers and their partisans even as the establishment hails him. No one hates the rise of Elmore Leonard so much as a lover of Ross Macdonald.
Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including "Total Recall," "Minority Report," "A Scanner Darkly," and, most memorably, Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner," have been adapted from Dick's books, and even more—from Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" to the "Matrix" series—owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics.
But Dick has also become for our time what Edgar Allan Poe was for Gilded Age America: the doomed genius who supplies a style of horrors and frissons. (In both cases, it took the French to see it; the first good critical writing on Dick, as on Poe, came from Europe, and particularly from Paris.) Like Poe's, Dick's last big book was a work of cosmic explanation in which lightning bolts of brilliance flash over salty oceans of insanity. Poe's explanation of everything was called "Eureka." Dick's was "VALIS." The second, literary Dick is now in the Library of America ($35), under the excellent editorial care of Jonathan Lethem, a passionate devotee, who also provides an abbreviated chronology of Dick's tormented life. Four of the sixties novels are neatly packed together in the handsome black covers: "The Man in the High Castle," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (the original of "Blade Runner"), and his masterpiece, "Ubik."
Dick's fans are not modest in their claims. Nor are they especially precise: Borges, Calvino, Kafka, Robertson Davies are cited, in the blurbs and introductions, as his peers. A note of inconsistency inflects these claims—Calvino and Robertson Davies?—but they are sincerely made and, despite all those movies and all that praise, have a slight, useful tang of hyperbolic defensiveness. One of the first things that everyone is inclined to say about Dick is that his subject and his mostly straight-to-paperback publication kept him from literary respectability, leaving him a neglected cult writer who is only now beginning to get his due.
On the evidence of the biographers, though, this doesn't seem quite true. While he served a fairly long apprenticeship—a series of almost unreadable realist working-class novels that he wrote in the fifties are now back in print—and struggled to make money, from the time "The Man in the High Castle" won a Hugo Award, in 1963, he was famous, admired, and read. He wasn't reviewed on the front page of the Times Book Review, but so what? Reading his life—either in the reflective French version, by Emmanuel Carrère, or in the thorough and intelligent American one, by Lawrence Sutin—one has a sense not of a man of thwarted ambition but, rather, of a man burning up with ideas and observations who found in a pop form the perfect vehicle for expressing them.
Dick's allegiance was not to literature but to writing and to the possibilities of writing as a form of protest and instant social satire. Another twist of fate, or circumstance, and he could have ended up as Rod Serling; another and he could have ended up as Marty Balin, writing lyrics for Jefferson Airplane. But it's hard to imagine any circumstances in which he would have ended up as Doctorow, or wanted to. There were a million places to write sci-fi in those years, publishers eager to have it, and readers eager to argue about it. You can find unfairly neglected writers in America; Dick, with a steady and attentive transatlantic audience, was never one of them.
Dick's early history is at once tormented, hustling, and oddly lit by the bright California sunshine of the late fifties. Born in 1928, he had a twin, a sister named Jane, who died when she was only a month old; like Elvis Presley, who also had a twin sibling who died, Dick seems to have been haunted for the rest of his life by his missing Other. He seems to have blamed his mother, unfairly, for her death, poisoning their relations. He had one of those classic, bitter American childhoods, with warring parents, and was dragged back and forth across the country. He had loved science fiction since boyhood—he later told of how at twelve he had a dream of searching in Astounding Stories for a story called "The Empire Never Ended" that would reveal the mysteries of existence—and he began writing quickie sci-fi novels for Ace in the fifties and sixties. "I love SF," he said once. "I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if'—it's 'My God; what if'—in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming." The hysteria suited him. He seems to have been a man of intellectual passion and compulsive appetite (he was married five times), the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe.
"The Man in the High Castle" (1962), the book that made Dick famous, is in many ways the least typical, and least interesting, of his sixties novels. It tells what would have happened if the Germans had won the Second World War, and, though skillfully done, it leaves his imagination too tethered to reality and "research" to resonate; not enough Martians come. It's in "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," two years later, that his style explodes.
Dick tends to get treated as a romantic: his books are supposed to be studies in the extremes of paranoia and technological nightmare, offering searing conundrums of reality and illusion. This comes partly from the habit, hard to break, of extolling the transgressive, the visionary, the startling undercurrent of dread. In fact, Dick in the sixties is a bone-dry intellectual humorist, a satirist—concerned with taking contemporary practices and beliefs to their reductio ad absurdum. If we oppress the Irish, why not eat them? Swift asked, in the model of all black satire—and if we can make quotidian and trivial the technology that has already arrived, Dick wonders, then why would we not do the same to the future yet to come, psychic communication and time travel and the colonization of Mars? Although "Blade Runner," with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick's antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick's future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.
In "The Three Stigmata," for instance, immigrants have been forced off an overheated Earth for colonies on Mars and elsewhere, and live in cheap communal hovels. For recreation and escape, the Martian colonists build "Perky Pat" dioramas: little doll houses inhabited by the Barbie-like Perky Pat and her Ken-ish boyfriend, Walt. Fanatical about the details of the miniaturized worlds—a whole industry flourishes to supply Lilliputian furniture and appliances—the colonists take a powerful, illegal hallucinogen called Can-D, which lets them "translate" the bodies and lives of Pat and Walt: for a brief, intoxicated moment they are Pat, or Walt, living in sixties-style San Francisco, and happy.
At one level, the Perky Pat cult is obviously a satire of middle-class escapism, and, particularly, of American television—if we are prepared to stare stoned at that box for blank escape, why not at a more convincing one? But if it was Dick's gift to find, again and again, these extended hyperbolic parallels, it was his genius to take them to a level of earnest madness that makes satire touch the edge of the sublime. He saw that his Perky Pat devotees would begin to grant their sad entertainment the force of divine revelation. They argue violently about whether the Perky Pat visions are just "trips" or, as the Perky Pat fundamentalists insist, real experiences of supernatural incarnation. Industrialized entertainment becomes the entering wedge of religion.
Dick's admirers identify his subjects as (in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin) "reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation." Later, as he became crazier, he did see questions in vast cosmological terms, but in these sharp, funny novels of the sixties he was taking on a more pointedly American question: Are there reliable boundaries between vicarious and real experience? Is there anything that can't be made into a form of show business, and any form of show business that can't be made into something more? Recreation and religion, and their intertwining, are the DNA of his worlds: the tedium of existence forces us toward "fun"; fun becomes the basis of our faith.
Yet Dick's societies of entertainment are, in turn, oblivious of their basis in organized violence. In "The Zap Gun," a Cold War satire from 1967, for instance, two monolithic competing political blocs, Wesbloc and Peep-East, have such an overabundance of weaponry that eventually they turn to "plowsharing" it, making weapons that are really toys and ashtrays. They depend on gifted psychic visionaries who see weapons as playthings—turning a military killer-automaton into a new kind of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot—and who are as rare, and as well paid, as movie directors here on the other side of the mirror.
The gift of Dick's craziness was to see how strong the forces of normalcy are in a society, even when what they are normalizing is objectively nuts. In "Clans of the Alphane Moon," from 1964, a mental hospital in a remote solar system has been abandoned by its keepers, and the lunatics have, over time, proliferated and organized themselves into a strange but functioning and interdependent country: a clan of paranoids supplies the statesmen, the Skitzes live in poverty but have wild poetic visions, the Deps provide a depressed realistic appraisal of the future, and the manics are the warriors. It's weird, but it's a working society, not a suicidal one. And a society that in some ways resembles Dick's own, that of the Johnson-Nixon years. Of the normalized madhouse on the Alphane moon, a psychiatrist says:
Leadership in this society here would naturally fall to the paranoids. . . . But you see, with paranoids establishing the ideology, the dominant emotional theme would be hate. Actually hate going in two directions; the leadership would hate everyone outside its enclave, and also would take for granted that everyone hated it in return. Therefore their entire so-called foreign policy would be to establish mechanisms by which this supposed hatred directed at them could be fought. And this would involve the entire society in an illusory struggle, a battle against foes that didn't exist for a victory over nothing.
In "Ubik" (1969), in turn, the first premise is that the ancient human dream of communication with the dead has been achieved at last—but, when you go to speak with them, there is static and missed connections and interference, and then you argue over your bill. At the beginning of the novel, one of the heroes, Runciter, tries to connect with his "passed" wife, Ella:
"Is something the matter, Mr. Runciter?" the von Vogelsang person said, observing him as he floundered about. "Can I assist you?"
"I've got some thing coming in over the wire," Runciter panted, halting. "Instead of Ella. Damn you guys and your shoddy business practices; this shouldn't happen, and what does it mean?" . . .
"Did the individual identify himself?"
"Yeah, he called himself Jory."
Frowning with obvious worry, von Vogelsang said, "That would be Jory Miller. I believe he's located next to your wife. In the bin."
"But I can see it's Ella!"
"After prolonged proximity," von Vogelsang explained, "there is occasionally a mutual osmosis, a suffusion between the mentalities of half-lifers. Jory Miller's cephalic activity is particularly good; your wife's is not. That makes for an unfortunately one-way passage of protophasons. . . . If this condition persists your money will be returned to you." . . .
Facing the casket, von Vogelsang pressed the audio outlet into his ear and spoke briskly into the microphone. . . . "This is very unfair of you, Jory; Mr. Runciter has come a long way to talk to his wife. Don't dim her signal, Jory; that's not nice."
The typical Dick novel is at once fantastically original in its ideas and dutifully realistic in charting their consequences. No matter what things may come, they will be exploited, merchandised, and routinized by the force of human weakness. And the interesting corollary: it won't matter; the world of speaking ghosts will work about as well as this one. A society of paranoids can work as well as Nixon's America did and, perhaps, in similar ways.
The other crucial thing one notices rereading Dick today is how much he belongs to a particular time, and how keeningly the music of that time runs through his books—not the music of the spheres, or of the future, but the AM-FM radio soundtrack of the sixties and early seventies. On the one hand, the screeching, treble, machine-gun announcements of public disasters; on the other, the chesty, cooing accompaniment of hipster reverie and psychedelic jamming. (You had to be there.) These two worlds were separate then, or felt separated—people did turn to progressive-rock stations with the feeling that the mixture of the d.j.'s deep, stoned voice and "Layla" was a form of rebellion against the Empire. (You really had to be there.) Dick's world is always structured around that sort of division: the public news is of one kind, private understanding another. A small, futile, but perceptive band of stoners and hipsters is ranged against the Empire; they don't win, but they do see_._
All this remains thrilling and funny; to detail Dick's conceits is to inventory a time. The trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut—or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien—as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack's habits, too, and he never really got over them. He has three, at most four, characters, whom he shuffles from hand to hand and novel to novel like a magician with the same mangy rabbits. There is the sexy young stoned girl; the wise or shrewish wife; the ordinary schlub who is his Everyman; and the Mad Engineer who is usually the Designated Explainer. He flogs these types into semi-life by means of Ellery Queen devices, including the depressing one of funny names. Then, there is the narrative falsely propelled by the one-sentence paragraph, the internal monologue that really isn't, and sometimes both together:
Sometime during the night, he reasoned, she had come into the room, and then some process had started in her or around her. She had sensed it and had crept off, hiding herself in the closet, so he wouldn't know; in her last few hours of life—or perhaps minutes; he hoped it was only minutes—this had overtaken her, but she had made no sound. She hadn't wakened him. Or, he thought, she tried and she couldn't do it, couldn't attract my attention. Maybe it was after that, after trying and failing to wake me, that she crawled into this closet.
I pray to god, he thought, that it happened fast.
That's from the beautiful and hallucinatory "Ubik," in which Dick also develops the mysterious idea of a "fading" universe, where objects slowly mutate back to their earlier essential forms; hi-fis become Victrolas as they sit there. With the ideas removed, though, it could be in any standard police procedural of the period. The trouble isn't that Dick suffers by some school-marmish standard of fine writing. It's that the absence of any life within the writing on the page ends up robbing the books of the vital force that pushes you past pages. As an adult reader coming back to Dick, you start off in a state of renewed wonder and then find yourself thumbing ahead to see how much farther you are going to have to go. At the end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences. His facility is amazing. He once wrote eleven novels in a twenty-four-month stretch. But one thing you have to have done in order to write eleven novels in two years is not to have written any of them twice.
That's probably why Dick's reputation as a serious writer, like Poe's, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren't read as they were written. And his paint-by-numbers prose is ideally suited for the movies. The last monologue in "Blade Runner" ("All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die"), improvised by Rutger Hauer on the set that day, has a pathos that the book achieves only in design, intellectually, because the movie speech is spoken by a recognizable person, dressed up as a robot, where Dick's characters tend to be robots dressed up as people.
In February, 1974, Dick, after having a tooth pulled by the dentist, and still high on the vestiges of sodium pentathol, opened the door of his house to get a prescription from a delivery girl—and had a vision that dominated and damned the last eight years of his life. The delivery girl visiting the already drug-addled Dick was wearing a fish medallion; Dick casually asked her about it, and she fingered it to show him that it was an ancient Christian symbol. Dick had an overwhelming, numinous experience of "unforgetting": he eventually saw (the vision came in bursts) that he and the girl were both early Christians in flight from Roman persecution and exchanging a coded language of gesture. He wasn't seeing, Shirley MacLaine style, that he had been a Christian in an earlier life; the point was that he was one now. The entire phenomenal world around him was an illusion created by a fallen female God, twin to a good immaterial God; he was experiencing not a flashback but a flash-in. Sometime in the first century—he later pinned it down to the year 70 C.E.—the passage of time had been deliberately stopped by the Empire, the Black Iron Prison. There was no 1974; there never had been. It was still the year 70. The Roman Empire had never ended.
Dick spent the rest of his life working out the complexities of this idiosyncratic Gnosticism, achieving, at last, a fantastically elaborate metaphysical cosmology—the central conception was of VALIS, for Vast Active Living Intelligence System—that he placed (under the signature of his alter ego Horselover Fat: the Greek meaning of "Philip" combined with the German meaning of "Dick") at the end of a visionary novel, also called "Valis" (1981). Dick's admirers can fight for days—and over hundreds of pages—about the meaning, the precise content, and the value of the "2-3-74" visions. As the people around him testified, hallucinations and fantasies, wild paranoid delusions, and plot-spotting filled his mind. He really did go crazy, and it wasn't the cute-crazy of the movies, with well-cast hallucinations and Jennifer Connelly to comfort you. It was true staring madness, hell on earth. But, as Lawrence Sutin insists, at another level Dick always had a saving, ironic awareness that his crazy visions might just be crazy visions, and this gave him, at times, a comic distance from them which deepened his writing.
"Valis," the novel, the first and best in a trilogy in which Dick struggled desperately to articulate what he had seen, is a hard book to read, and a harder one to forget. Without Dick's name, it almost certainly wouldn't have been published—it's just too static and strange. Yet, once you force yourself to read it, and read past the really nutty bits, it emerges as perhaps the most emotional and in an odd way the most artistically achieved of all his books. In a manner ironically reminiscent of mid-period Philip Roth—if you can imagine a mid-period Philip Roth in which three-eyed aliens living in a parallel dimension play a crucial part—Dick divides his persona into two voices. One belongs to Horselover Fat, who has had exactly the epiphany that Dick had in 1974, and is trying to cope simultaneously with the mental breakdown that the vision entails and with his sad personal circumstaces (one of his girlfriends is dying horribly of cancer, as was one of Dick's); the other belongs to "Philip Dick," who narrates the book, in an empathetic but disinterested tone, correcting Fat's (that is, his own) faults and speculating calmly on the real meaning of his epiphany.
There are many books with unreliable narrators under the control of sane authors; this is the only one I know where a sane, reliable narrator (on the book's own terms) is under the control of a clearly crazy author. What makes it heartbreaking is the author's consciousness, expressed sporadically through the fictional narrator Dick, that he (that is, the real Dick, embodied in the pathetic Fat) has undoubtedly gone nuts—but that, just as undoubtedly, he is in possession of the truth about the cosmos. His account of his vision is braided with the details of cancer treatments and the mordantly rendered specifics of time spent in a ward for the insane—a man who knows he's broken but believes that the breaking has poured forth a flowing truth.
"The core of my writing is not art but truth," Dick wrote a year before he died. "Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation." It doesn't dilute the force of his vision to see it as a metaphor, consistent with, but crazier than, the central metaphor of his earlier work: the social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicit threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered. The future will be like the present, he had once known, and now he saw that the past was like the future, too.
What is moving in Dick's madness is his insistence that the surest sign of the madness of the world outside him is the violence that we accept as normal. In "Clans of the Alphane Moon," he had already glimpsed the possibility that normal governing might be the work of paranoids. This Nixon-era vision becomes, in the VALIS books, a metaphysical truth. "The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one," Fat writes. That this is followed by an explanation of how those deaf-mute three-eyed invaders arrived in ancient Sudan from a planet in the star system Sirius does not diminish its force; if anything, it increases it, by reminding us of the price the visionary paid for it.
Until his death, of a stroke, in 1982, Dick never stopped crying out. He was buried at last beside his infant sister, Jane, the missing half he had longed for and eventually made into a part of his cosmic mythology, the much mourned female God. The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can't quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real—this thought today does not seem exactly crazy. The empire never ends. ♦


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Dodgers' focus on October in season finale
Ryu delivers four innings as LA pulls starters early
LOS ANGELES -- The Dodgers concluded the regular season with a 2-1 loss to the Rockies, but the club's concerns are on October.
In anticipation of Game 1 of the National League Division Series on Thursday in Atlanta, the Dodgers rested their regulars, monitored pitch counts and spread work among the bullpen Sunday afternoon at Dodger Stadium.
But after the game, the Dodgers learned center fielder Matt Kemp would not be available in the postseason because of a recurring ankle injury.
"I'll be cheerleading," said Kemp, who will be on crutches for a month in an effort to heal the weight-bearing bone in his left ankle.
While Kemp is out for the playoffs and outfielder Andre Ethier is in doubt for the NLDS because of his own ankle issue, manager Don Mattingly said his club is "still good enough to win."
The best thing the Dodgers have going for them is a deep pitching staff.
Hyun-Jin Ryu went four innings in an abbreviated start, fellow starter Ricky Nolasco picked up an inning, and Chris Capuano bounced back with his second relief appearance in three games, a good sign for the left-hander following a three-week layoff due to a strained groin.
The Dodgers have not announced their starter for Game 3 of the NLDS, but it appears to be Ryu. If the series with the Braves reaches Game 4, Nolasco would likely take the mound. Clayton Kershaw will start Game 1, followed by Zack Greinke in Game 2 on Friday.
In an effort to keep Ryu fresh for October, the Dodgers pulled him after 76 pitches. Nolasco made 17 pitches in his lone inning.
"The pitch count was already set before I went out on the mound today, I'm just really unhappy that my pitch count was so high early that I couldn't go past four innings," Ryu said through interpreter Martin Kim. "But other than that, it was a pretty good practice game for me."
Capuano appears to be on the bubble for a spot on the NLDS roster. But he can provide the Dodgers with another left-handed option out of the bullpen against the Braves, who have several dangerous left-handed sluggers.
Rookie reliever Chris Withrow followed Capuano with a scoreless inning and may have done enough over the final months of the season to earn a role in the postseason. Closer Kenley Jansen, setup man Brian Wilson and lefty J.P. Howell are all givens, and the trio combined for two scoreless innings Sunday.
By the seventh inning, Mattingly had removed catcher A.J. Ellis, first baseman Adrian Gonzalez and outfielders Carl Crawford and Yasiel Puig.
Shortstop Hanley Ramirez, dealing with an irritated nerve in his lower back, got the day off. Infielder Nick Punto was sidelined with an in-grown toenail on his right foot.
Skip Schumaker drove in the Dodgers' only run with a single in the fifth inning. He'll be the starting center fielder in the NLDS if Ethier is unavailable.
Ryu took the loss, charged with two runs on eight hits, to close his otherwise successful rookie season. The left-hander won 14 games and posted a 3.00 ERA in 30 starts.
"Overall, I'm very satisfied with my first year," Ryu said. "Most importantly, I got away without having any major injuries. The pitch count and the games that I started was beyond what I originally thought it was going to be, so I'm very happy with the way my first season ended."
As he has done all year, Ryu pitched out of trouble for much of his outing.
In the first inning, Ryu allowed just one run on a walk and three singles to the first four batters. The Rockies had runners on the corners with one out in the second, but he escaped that jam. Ryu gave up three hits in the fourth, but again held Colorado to one run.


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I have a weird problem. I can cant turn my PC off. When I go to the start menu and select turn off it shuts down, but then start up again. Same happens if I press the off button on the actuall PC. The only way to turn it off for me is to hold the off button in for a few seconds. This is really really annoy me.
Any ideas?
Im running Vista.