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You probably know that the stereo JPEG images are actually plain JPG file containing the two frames next to each other (for left and for right eye) and with an extension JPS (example above). This makes it quite simple to view, edit, convert and whatever else you need to do with them or event to make JPS files with almost any image editor there is. Unfortunately the same thing cannot be said about about the fairly new MPO (multi-picture file format) that is still being used by just a few digital cameras, among which is also the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1 camera that is able to shoot Stereo 3D pictures. It seems that Fujifilm has decided instead to go for JPS to rely on MPO files for storing the two frames required for the Stereo 3D image, but this actually makes the pictures you take with the camera almost unviewable on anything else than the camera itself or the optional 3D digital frame Fujifilm is also offering. But can we as owners of Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision or any other S3D capable setup do something in order to view these S3D images taken with the camera? We already know that Nvidia is going to add support for MPO file format in their stereo picture viewer soon, but what to do until that happens… fortunately I was able to find a solution, not very easy and elegant, but hey it works. :P
I still don't own a Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1 digital camera, but earlier today I was pointed to a review of the camera at Akihabara News with some example pictures taken in MPO format. Now the review is not great and very detailed, not to mention not covering much about the 3D functionality of the camera which is a key point in this product, but anyway I'm thankful for the images I could work on. Now lets get back to the MPO file format, which seems to be some kind of container for multiple frames (not just two) that seems to be using JPEG compression for the pictures it stores. Unfortunately there is still not a lot of software or actually more like almost no such software for viewing, editing, converting etc. these MPO files the easy way. The one program that I was able to find that can at least open and do some very basic manipulations with the MPO files was STOIK Imagic 5.0, which is not free, but it still has 15-day trial that probably should be enough for now. Then you'll also need some sort of an image editor much like Photoshop, but almost anything with a bit more advanced editing functions should do the work.
So here is the short guide you need to follow:
– Download, Install and Run STOIK Imagic 5.0
– You need to navigate to the folder where you put the MPO images
– Right click on a MPO file and choose Split MPO file to get the two frames in separate JPG files
– Start your image editor, Photoshop or other and open one of the two JPG files you got in previous step
– Use the Canvas size function of the image editor to double the width of the first picture you've opened
– Import the second image (frame) and put it on the right side of the first one already present in the working canvas
– Export the final image you've got of the two frames next to each other into a single JPEG image and then rename the file to JPS
– To download the STOIK Imagic 5.0 image editor software…
– To download AkihabaraNews' example MPO files converted by me in JPS


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Discussing the Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder With Your Child—Autism Toolkit
View spanish version, share, or print this article.
Parents may wonder about when and whether to tell their child about his autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis. Following are some commonly asked questions about discussing diagnosis of an ASD with a child:
Should we tell our child about her ASD diagnosis?
Parents may worry that finding out about an ASD diagnosis will be hard on their son or daughter. Some children can initially find the news upsetting, especially if they are very sensitive to any suggestion that they are different from their peers. Many individuals with ASDs, however, have shared that learning they were on the autism spectrum suddenly made clear why so many things had been difficult or why they had been treated differently. With increased awareness of ASDs, diagnosis also may provide a reason for their behavior that they think other people might understand. For some, diagnosis can take away the notion that past problems had all been the result of some personal failing; replacing this with the notion of a legitimate condition helps explain their challenges.
When should we tell our child about his ASD diagnosis?
While it is important to tell an individual with an ASD about his diagnosis, there is no exact, �correct� age or time to tell a child. A child's personality, abilities, and social awareness are all factors to consider in determining when he is ready for information about his diagnosis. For example, a parent may decide to talk about ASDs when a child begins asking questions such as, �Why am I different?�
Considering the potential effect of the information, how can we best explain to our child that she has an ASD?
Before you begin, assess what your child already knows and how well she will be able to take in or process a discussion about ASDs.
Deliver the news at the right level. Prepare to explain ASDs in terms your child can grasp. Too vague an explanation may not satisfy an inquisitive teenager, while too technical an explanation may confuse or frighten a child of any age. If circumstances lead to a very early first discussion about your child's differences, you may choose not to use the actual ASD label but discuss how some children learn differently or need help with certain things at school; the actual label can be given after waiting until your child's understanding grows. For older children or teens, using the term ASD can be important. As they get older, they may read school documents or reports listing the diagnosis, or others may use the term assuming they already know. It is better if they are told their diagnosis by someone they trust and have the opportunity to have their questions answered.
Be positive. When sharing news of a diagnosis with your child, you will want to keep things very positive. It's also a good idea to choose a time when you and your child are feeling good and when you won't be interrupted or distracted.
Tailor your explanation of ASDs to your child's own situation. Start with discussing your child's positive attributes, then address areas that are challenging for your child. It is important to tell your child that you love all the �good stuff� about her and you wouldn't ever want her to change. Undoubtedly, however, your child has been struggling in some areas because of the ASD. It's OK to acknowledge these difficulties while emphasizing that it is not her fault that some things are tough.
Describe ASDs in terms of everyone being unique or different. It may be helpful to illustrate how all children learn differently by giving examples of children she knows who excel in certain areas but might need help in others. One example might be an excellent athlete who cannot sing a tune.
Let your child know there are a lot of other people with ASDs. Your child is definitely not alone, and it is important to let her know this. Your child may be interested and benefit from meeting others with ASDs. Your child's pediatrician or school may be able to help you find support or social groups where your child can meet others with ASDs.
Raise your child's awareness. Even before you discuss your child's diagnosis with her, it may be helpful to read books or watch shows together in which characters have ASDs or other disabilities. In this way, awareness of individual differences is presented gradually and as part of everyday life.
Stress that you love her just the way she is. Sharing information about ASDs in a positive, matter- of-fact, and age-appropriate way helps set the stage for a child's ability to understand, accept, and adapt to the reality of an ASD diagnosis. Keep in mind that the whole concept of �having an ASD� is a lot to take in. It is going to be a process that takes some time, with new questions asked and deeper understanding gained as your child matures.
American Academy of Pediatrics HealthyChildren.org:
Foden T, Anderson C. ASD diagnosis: what do we tell the kids?
National Autistic Society. Diagnosis: telling a child about their diagnosis.
Family handout from
Denver Data Feed

subset: commoncrawl


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Heaven knows why you've stumbled upon this site. For reasons enumerated here, I'm not really updating it anymore. Nevertheless, I'm glad you've sought this place out, and welcome.
I am fortunate enough to make a living as a writer, mostly if not exclusively for magazines. Here are some of the people and things I've written about:
The future of Miami Beach vis-à-vis climate change.
The British Invasion bands of the 1960s.
The black players who integrated the NBA in the 1950s.
Whether or not Diamond Jim Brady really ate that much.
February 21, 2016 Link General Posts
Twenty-five years ago, when I was a cub editorial assistant at Spy magazine, I was obsessed with the Metropolitan Diary feature that ran every Wednesday in the New York Times. (It now runs in the Times on Mondays.) Obsessed in a love-hate way. Metropolitan Diary was, and is, an assemblage of reader-submitted vignettes about life in the big city, and I liked its fundamentally upbeat tenor—a welcome respite from the grimmer stuff in the hard-news sections of the paper. It helped, too, that in those days, the Times sent a bottle of Champagne to every reader whose submission was printed; a charming touch.
Yet I was also driven mad by Metropolitan Diary's sameyness: how, the more you read the section, the more you realized that the contents of one Diary were nearly identical to that of all the others, with only minor details changing from week to week. I eventually concluded that all printed Metropolitan Diary submissions fell into one of six categories:
1. Codgerly reminiscences of New York City as it was
2. The awful poetry of the bourgeoisie
3. Stories in which New Yorkers are nicer than expected
4. Stories involving a "well-dressed woman" or a "woman of a certain age"
5. The awkward and/or misspelled signage of immigrant shopkeepers
6. Out of the mouths of precocious New York babes (amusing kid stories)
Metropolitan Diary was so formulaic that I thought it would be funny if I wrote a total of 36 Metropolitan Diary submissions—six in each category—and had other members of the Spy staff rewrite these submissions in their own hand, and then mail them to the Times over a three-day period, thereby flooding the submission pool. My goal: for the Times to run a Metropolitan Diary written entirely by me, though the paper would be none the wiser.
My bosses, Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter, signed off on the idea, and I executed it as described above. I remember that I had Martin Kihn, a young fact-checker at the magazine and now a successful writer whose book House of Lies is the basis for the Showtime TV series of the same title, submit under his name a story about how he, a putatively old man, was one of the few New Yorkers who could remember when figgy pudding was a readily available foodstuff, and not just a line in the song "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." I remember that I had my friend Henry Alford submit an "awful" poem because he and I were mutually fascinated by a poem that had run in Metropolitan Diary by an older gent who became melancholy drinking coffee from a ceramic mug that had been made in grade school by one of his now-grown children. The poet referred to the vessel as his "morning mug of memories."
I further remember that I had a sunny colleague named Gina Duclayan submit a story in which she, a newcomer to the city, was riding on the subway when her train screeched to a halt between stations. The wait in the dark seemed interminable until Gina and the friend she was with (in my story) started singing, tentatively at first, their own rendition of Bobby McFerrin's then-current song "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Slowly, the hardened faces of exasperated commuters softened, until, by the time the song neared its end, just about everyone in Gina's subway car was singing along boisterously. But then! The train suddenly lurched forward and resumed its trip—at which point all the commuters resumed poker faces, as if nothing had happened.
I was naïve in thinking that my rig-the-Diary scheme would work. The Times, it turns out, receives hundreds and sometimes even thousands of submissions to Metropolitan Diary each week; my 36 submissions were a mere drop in the bucket.
I managed to get precisely one of my submissions printed, on December 13, 1989, as sent in by my colleague Monica Mahoney, now a clothing designer. It was one of those awkward-signage bits:
"Hand-printed sign, spotted by Monica Mahoney in the window of a deli on upper Broadway: WE HAVE CROISSANTS, PASTA SALAD, BRAN MUFFINS, EVERY KIND OF YUPPIE FOOD—YOU NAME IT!"
In the years since, I have become an occasional contributor to the Times, legitimately rather than under mischievous pretenses, and Henry has become a regular contributor to the paper's Styles section. It's a better way to get published, if less subversive.
One last thing: My failed scheme's finest moment, in my opinion, did not involve my words' being published. A few days after she submitted her story about singing in the subway car, Gina received a lovely personal note from Ron Alexander, the gentlemanly fellow at the Times who edited Metropolitan Diary. He welcomed Gina to New York and told her he was enchanted by her story—but that it couldn't run, alas, on the grounds that it was too similar to Diary pieces that had already been published.
March 2, 2014 Link General Posts
February 17 will herald the return of NBC's Tonight Show to New York, a scenario I've harbored fantasies about since I was a Carson-loving kid. It always smarted that I came of age in a wounded era when New York City had lost both Johnny and the Dodgers to what my great uncle called the Golden West. I was delighted to be asked by Vanity Fair to profile the gifted gentleman who's bringing Tonight home, Jimmy Fallon, for the cover story of the new issue. A teaser for the story can be found here.
This Fallon piece is the third I've done in a relatively short time about a funny person I admire. I've also been fortunate to immerse myself in the peculiar worlds of Steve Coogan and Martin Short, should you need further light reading in these dark, wintry weeks.
January 8, 2014 Link General Posts
How to do an article pegged to the first anniversary of the Newtown shootings that is respectful yet not dreary, that reminds us not to become inured to 12/14's horrors yet is not grisly or strident? I'm still not sure if I have the answer, but I wrote an article for Vanity Fair's December 2013 issue (out now) that approaches Newtown in a different way—by focusing on the lives of some of its residents as they were lived in the 24-hour period before the tragedy occurred.
I'll let the editor of the magazine preview the piece rather than blather on further. But I do hope you'll give the story a look.
UPDATE: The story is now live here on Vanity Fair's Web site.
November 9, 2013 Link General Posts
In the early aughts, I came up with the idea for a Vanity Fair feature called "The Rock Snob's Dictionary," a sort of deadpan reference guide to such people and things as Nick Drake, the Stooges, Rickenbacker guitars, and the Ibanez Tube Screamer FX pedal—stuff that Rock Snobs hold dear. So dear, in fact, that they are affronted if you profess to be more knowledgeable about this stuff than they are. For help, I enlisted two friends, Steven Daly, a writer and former rock musician, and Bob Mack, an old Spy magazine compadre who later fell into the Beastie Boys' orbit. Steven and Bob were precisely the sorts of ornery human beings with whom I would engage in argumentative, showoffy discussions about the holy scripture of rock.
Well, that "Rock Snob's Dictionary" feature became a book (co-written with Steven), and that book begat a series of "Snob's Dictionary" humor books and a Web site that hasn't been updated in years but remains rich with fun, inconsequential material. And now, all these years later, the new entertainment wing of Vanity Fair's parent company, Condé Nast, has worked with me to build a "Snob's Dictionary" series of Web videos based on the rock-, film-, and food-related dictionaries I've co-authored. I asked if we could get the actor and comedian Judah Friedlander, best known as Frank from 30 Rock, to be our narrator, because Judah can do just the sort of strident, grad-studentish tone—arrogant but self-aware and maybe just the slightest bit kindhearted in his bid to educate—that I heard in my head. Thankfully, Judah was game.
Two videos are up so far: this one, about American International Pictures (for Film Snobs), and this one, about the aforementioned Nick Drake (for Rock Snobs). Eight more Snob's Dictionary videos are en route in the next couple of months, with further batches likely to follow.
A note on Nick Drake, by the way: I love his music; Steven doesn't. I tended to write my dictionary entries from a perspective of self-mockery, making fun of my own precious tastes, while Steven wrote from a place of roiling Glaswegian anger. (And, in the early days, Bob Mack was the angriest of all; it was he who coined the phrase "trustafarian pretty-boy" to describe Gram Parsons, and who once graffito'd a Village Voice ad I'd clipped for a Richard Thompson concert with the words NO! BAN THE ROCK-CRIT ESTABLISHMENT!) The books' sense of conversation is why the whole thing works, and why I always bring in collaborators on Snob projects. In the spirit of cultural snobbery, I invite you to suggest further topics for Snob video shorts. Try to be less strident than us.
August 7, 2013 Link General Posts
For Vanity Fair's June issue, I did this plot-dense piece about why Rebecca, The Musical, an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel for the stage, has not yet made it to Broadway. The article defies tidy explanation, so my best advice is to just set aside some time and read it. Maybe I'll do some Web updates if and when its various storylines resolve.
May 25, 2013 Link General Posts
(The man of the hour)
So we've just witnessed Charles Ramsey's transformation from, in short order, anonymous dishwasher to TV-news hero to Auto-Tuned internet meme. It's been both fun and discomfiting. Fun because the guy's a natural raconteur (even to the 911 operator: "Hey, check this out. I just came from McDonald's, right? So I'm on my porch eatin' my little food, right?") and discomfiting because A) his fame has come via the revelation of a horrific scene of captivity; and B) because the attention he's commanded has run the gamut from admiration to ridicule.
Like Sweet Brown ("Ain't Nobody Got Time for That"), Antoine Dodson ("Bed Intruder"), and Michelle Clark ("Kabooya"), Ramsey is a lower-income African-American whose camera time came as a result of tragedy. (Brown's apartment complex caught on fire, Dodson's sister survived a rape attempt, and Clark's community was ravaged by a violent hailstorm.) If the people who leave comments on YouTube are anything to go by, a lot of viewers regard these individuals purely as figures of fun: found objects repurposed in the service of a new digital minstrelsy. And that's reprehensible.
But YouTube commenters don't necessarily represent the greater part of YouTube viewers—a lot of the former are ignorant kids and unevolved doofuses—and I think there's a more charitable and uplifting way to look at the fascination with Ramsey et al. These endlessly replayed local-news clips are, in a way, like the field recordings made by the father-and-son folklorists and ethnomusicologists John Lomax and Alan Lomax in neglected pockets of America during the Depression years and beyond. These mini-monologues appeal because they capture authentic, idiomatic, unmediated American voices that are more alive to us than the glib, slick patter that usually comes through the speakers of our TVs and laptops.
In his book Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus coined the term "the old, weird America" to describe the Delta and backwoods milieux where the Lomaxes' finds sang their songs, and where the archivist Harry Smith's favorite balladeers and bluesmen came from. The inference was that America is no longer weird—that its old variety of strange ethnic, regional, and racial subcultures was snuffed out by suburbanization, prosperity, and cultural homogeneity.
But Charles Ramsey reminds us that the weirdness is still with us. It's just been updated and accelerated. Whereas, in the old days, sixty-two years would pass between when John Lomax recorded Vera Hall of Alabama singing "Trouble So Hard" a cappella and when Moby sampled Hall for his song "Natural Blues" (from the album Play, the soundtrack to many a bourgeois dinner party in the early Aughts), now all it takes is a day for some clever white twerps to transmute a field recording into a thumpin' hit.
Yes, there's an uncomfortable sense of patronization that goes with all this—the celebration and embrace of heretofore marginalized black individuals for their "realness." But in Charles Ramsey's case, at least, the net result is positive. When we as a nation are able to find a silver lining to that otherwise unspeakable crime story in Cleveland, that's a dead giveaway that we're responding, first and foremost, to Ramsey's humanity, not to how funny he is.
May 10, 2013 Link General Posts
Heaven help me, I'm giving Twitter another try. About four years ago I set up an account and teenyposted steadily for a while, but I simply never mastered the form—basically because I was putting too much thought into it, doing misguidedly ambitious things like writing young-adult vampire novels as a series of tweets. Also, Twitter, to this day, upsets my acute, Des Esseintes-like aesthetic sensitivity. I find its feeds visually noisy, what with all the hashtags and ampersets and bit.ly and pic.twitter cmprssns of wrds.
But, in the interests of "branding," "professionalism," and "not sliding out of view and thereby spending my remaining days penniless in a rented room where a bare, solitary bulb hangs listlessly from the ceiling," I am re-embracing the medium! Follow me or give me a howdy at @MrKamp.
April 29, 2013 Link General Posts
Last month's Vanity Fair, the one with Taylor Swift on the cover, included a long article I wrote revisiting the mania surrounding the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibition that toured the U.S. in the late 1970s, as well as the political and cultural forces that conspired to make the tour happen. I had fun doing the article and put a lot of work into it, but, based on the crickets-chirping non-response it elicited, hardly anyone read it. (Perhaps you will, now that it's online?) Ah, well. This is much less of a crisis than the one Egypt's tourism industry is currently suffering because of post-Arab Spring political instability in the Morsi era.
My Egyptophile sources tell me that, if you can summon the bravery and funds to get over to Egypt right now, it's a great time to visit the pyramids, Luxor, and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, because hardly anyone else is visiting and the lines of years past are nonexistent. The Egyptian Museum is where the King Tut relics from the '70s tour are currently housed, and all indications are that, tales of looting aside, the Tut stuff is intact and okay. (It's my understanding that the Egyptians will never again let Tut's famous gold mask travel, so Cairo is now the only place you can get to see it.)
Lots of eccentric plotlines and sub-plotlines of my V.F. story wound up on the cutting-room floor, among them the fact that singer Pearl Bailey, an ardent Richard Nixon supporter, muscled her way onto Nixon's June '74 tour of Egypt and the Mideast—his final overseas trip before he resigned—as the president's so-called "Ambassador of Love," performing for the president and his Egyptian counterpart, Anwar Sadat. A year later, when Sadat paid his first state visit to the U.S., hosted by Gerald Ford, Bailey subbed for an ill Johnny Cash—one of Sadat's faves—as the entertainment, pulling Sadat out of his chair for a dance (he blushed), mugging in reading glasses borrowed from Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and in general acting genially bonkers.
The most poignant bit cut from the V.F. story is how Tut-mania represented a sort of high-water mark for U.S.-Egypt relations—or at least the hope for sustained, stable, mutually beneficial U.S.-Egypt relations. The Tut show was the first gesture of diplomatic goodwill that Sadat granted the U.S. after switching allegiances from the Soviet Union to America, and it's not overstating things to say that the positive feelings this gesture engendered played a part in the lead-up to the historic Camp David Accords signed by Sadat and Israel's Menachim Begin in 1978, on Jimmy Carter's watch. (Personal note: It was at this point in my schoolboy life that everyone began addressing me as "Kamp David.")
Sadat is to Egyptians a little bit like Mikhail Gorbachev is to Russians—an overseas rock star who doesn't get much love at home. (A much bigger cult of nostalgia surrounds his nationalist predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser.) Yet he was was precisely the kind of strong, West-friendly leader that the U.S. State Department can only dream of Egypt's having now. His assassination in 1981 was a violent bookend to the period of genuine U.S.-Egypt love that began with Nixon's 1974 trip and crested with Camp David and Steve Martin.
April 3, 2013 Link General Posts
(Shadow Morton, before the Ba-CAH-di took its toll.)
"Little nose and big hair. Very strong hair. I think he's very talented, and very bizarre." That's how Jeff Barry, the great Brill Building songwriter behind such hits as "Be My Baby" and "Da Doo Ron Ron," described Shadow Morton to me. Morton, like Barry a songwriter but otherwise utterly unlike Barry or any other songwriter, died of cancer on Valentine's Day at the age of 71. The New York Times obit of him quotes extensively from the oral history of the Brill Building that I wrote in 2001 for Vanity Fair.
Morton was a degenerate punk with just enough front and talent to make an indelible stamp upon pop music. He was from Long Island and was the driving creative force behind the tough-chick Queens girl group the Shangri-Las, writing or co-writing such amazing songs as "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," "The Leader of the Pack," and "Give Him a Great Big Kiss." You can get a fuller sense of what he was like in the V.F. piece, but, briefly: In 1964, Morton hustled his way into the office of Barry and Barry's then wife and songwriting partner, Ellie Greenwich. Then he hustled himself into believing he could write a song, "Remember." Then, when that song became a hit, he hustled Barry and Greenwich's bosses, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, into making them believe he had a follow-up at the ready... about, you know, some guy with a motorcycle who falls in love with a girl. Leiber wasn't impressed. Morton, extemporizing, told Leiber, "It gets better." Leiber asked "How does it get better?" Morton, now really sweating it out, said, "He... dies." The song that Morton subsequently wrote to fulfill this wholly B.S.'d scenario was "The Leader of the Pack." Polished by Barry and Greenwich, it became the Shangri-Las' signature tune, Morton's biggest annuity, and a cultural touchstone. (Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" took its title from the song's spoken opening line.)
Thirty-odd years after Morton's heyday, I met him for an interview at Joe Allen, a New York theater-district hangout where he was a regular. (I think he lived on the block, possibly above the restaurant.) He had the hunched shoulders and tinted shades of a horse-playing hoodlum—an aged version of Boogie, Mickey Rourke's character in Diner. But he still had the little nose and big hair—was still handsome in a dessicated way. The removal of his shades revealed one eyelid to have a droop. From a fight? A neurological condition? I don't know. He was a sobered-up alcoholic, and, like many in such circumstances, he was ashamed of his past behavior under the influence yet eager to talk about it. He kept talking about "the Ba-CAH-di" that did him in: "It wasn't me mouthin' off to Leiber, it was the Ba-CAH-di"; "I got too caught up in the Ba-CAH-di to care when the next hit was gonna come." Shadow (his real name was George; Barry assigned him the nickname to describe his penchant for unreliability and abrupt disappearances) seemed especially remorseful about his behavior towards Mary Weiss, the striking lead singer of the Shangri-Las; he said the Ba-CAH-di had made him do some things to her so terrible that he didn't want to go into them.
Still, Morton retained the mischievous air of a hustler. He brought an attractive young woman along for company, their connection ambiguous besides her evident obligation to giggle at his wisecracks and absorb his occasional nudges. I asked him if the the dreamboat tough guy that Weiss sings about in "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" ("Big wavy hair, a little too long") was, in fact, him.
"Yeah," he said, smiling like Jack Nicholson, "you picked up on that, good for you!" One of the wonderful things about Morton's songs is their structural irregularity—since he was musically untrained (and, for that matter, behaviorally untrained), his Shangri-Las hits include all sorts of strange atmospheric shifts and spoken-word passages that "proper" songwriters would have never essayed. "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" has a dialogue exchange in which the other girls say, "Yeah, well I hear he's bad!," to which Weiss thoughtfully replies, "Mmm, he's good-bad, but he's not evil."
"Good-bad," Morton said. "That was me. That's how I saw myself."
February 16, 2013 Link General Posts
(Michael Hainey, king of the investigative memoir.)
More than twenty years ago, as we were ratifying a new friendship over drinks, my pal Michael Hainey, then a fellow member of Spy magazine's junior varsity and a recent arrival from Chicago, told me about his father. Bob Hainey died abruptly in 1970, when Michael was only six years old. The elder Hainey was a newspaper man, an editor at the Sun-Times. "It's never added up to me," Mike said. "He worked on the South Side, but his body was found on the North Side. What was he doing there? I'd love to, like, do a real investigation of it some day."
This desire never strayed from Michael's thoughts, and now, years in the making, comes his wondrous new book, After Visiting Friends (Scribner, out officially on Feb. 19). Let me be clear: My recommendation of this book is not forced gush on behalf of a friend. Mike's quest for the truth about his father, and his telling of it, makes for one of the best reading experiences I've had in ages. In fact, a part of me wishes I didn't know Michael because then I could have approached the story the best way one can as a reader: having no idea what lies in store.
Briefly: It's a detective story, a hard-times story, a Chicago story, a family-sticking-together story, a glimpse of an old-time milieu of whiskey-splotched newsprint journos with an iffy code of ethics, a boom-chicka-boom evocation of the Nebraska railroad heartland of Bob's youth, a memory exercise refracted through a poetic sensibility (Mike writes poetry, too), and, most movingly, just... a plunge into the past colored by the melancholic realization that the past is ultimately irretrievable.
Here's a lovely little bit that's characteristic but doesn't give the plot away:
Life in the shadow of O'Hare. ORD—what this land was before the airport was: Orchards. Men took it for the airport's original name: Orchard Field. The origin of ORD. Acres and acres of apple trees. As a boy, I rode my bike to O'Hare, circumnavigated its fenced-in perimeter. That's how I found the forgotten orchards. A patch of the past. In the fall, their apples rot unwanted. All that remains.
I urge you to read on. It's worth it.
February 12, 2013 Link General Posts
I thought Ed Koch was going to die in 1990. I thought he would be like Bear Bryant, the legendary Alabama football coach, or my old boss at GQ magazine, Art Cooper, both of whose identities were so caught up in what they did for a living that neither man lasted more than a few weeks beyond retirement. When David Dinkins was inaugurated on New Year's Day in '90, I assumed that Ed Koch, without the NYC mayoralty, would cease to be.
I was wrong, to Koch's credit. Simply being a New Yorker, as opposed to the king of New York, was more than enough to sustain him. He was a neighbor and I saw a lot of him, both in person, eating the salty food he wasn't supposed to eat (at Minetta Tavern, or in line at Balducci's before it became Citarella) and in The Villager, the homely neighborhood weekly of Greenwich Village, where he reviewed movies. (He hated Avatar, which was "hyped beyond the point of forgiveness," and remarked of Walk the Line, "I sing better in the shower than Joaquin Phoenix.") And he was always popping up on NY1, the endearingly shabby, spiritually pre-Bloombergian local-news channel that comes with your cable box in the big city.
There was plenty not to love about Koch, such as his callousness towards his black constituents and his not-good-for-the-Jews stridency in purporting to represent what all Jews think about Israel, Jesse Jackson, and, well, everything. But I retained affection for the guy and am stricken by his passing. That it occured just a day short of the fifth anniversary of my father's death is resonant, too. As charismatic old Jews go, my dad was an altogether warmer, gentler force than Koch, but he grew up in the same Ashkenazic milieu of bagels, salt-cured fish, Depression-era penury, unquestioned duty to country, astounding work ethic, and recreational kvetching. With Koch down, I feel like we've lost another of Dad's cohort, and not just in the ethno-gastric sense. Like my father, Koch was a product of a time that celebrated the "common man," when leading a middle-class life was a good thing, a desired path rather than a sad consolation prize for the un-entrepreneurial and unbeautiful. New York City used to be a place where you could be this nice sort of middle-class. But it isn't anymore. Ed Koch, over these last 23 years, was a vestige of that place, as much so as Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop and Kossar's Bialys.
February 1, 2013 Link General Posts
Yauch hit the hardest somehow. For deeply evocative twinges of distant childhood, Jon Lord. Also, no fooling, Phyllis Diller.
Was privileged to actually know:
December 22, 2012 Link General Posts
For Vanity Fair's new comedy issue, I wrote a profile of perhaps my favo(u)rite of all the funny Canadians, Martin Short. The piece is now online here, and, as it happens, Short is hosting this weekend's Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live.
One note: In my kicker, I mention, in talk-show plugeroo style, that Marty will be appearing at a theater in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 14. That appearance has actually been cancelled because of S.N.L. preparations. But the Yellowhammer state's loss is the nation's gain.
December 13, 2012 Link General Posts
Since the Rolling Stones are in town for their abbreviated 50th-anniversary tour, I thought I'd share a memory of my one extended encounter with a Stone. It was with Charlie Watts. This was 1996. I was assigned to do a one-page thingy on him for Vanity Fair, on the occasion of a new album he was putting out with his swing band. I've always been enervated by those who say "Charlie Watts looks so old!" or "Charlie Watts is a corpse!," because Watts is about as perfect-looking as a man can look. He is white-haired, slim, and 71—and becomingly all of those things. He was only in his mid-fifties when I met him, but he has not changed much since. I took the assignment to look at him as much as to talk with him. I can't find the article but I remember that I led with, "Are there others out there for whom Charlie Watts is the focal point of the Rolling Stones?"
We met at the Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he was staying. He had an elaborately furnished suite whose skyline beauty he did not take for granted. "I mean, look around here," he said, motioning his arm panoramically. "It's like bloody Cary Grant, innit?"
I recently heard it said somewhere—perhaps by Keith Richards himself—that whereas most bands are anchored by the drummer, with the bass and guitar following, the Stones are anchored by Richards, the senior guitarist, with Watts, the drummer, hanging a half-beat behind him: one of the secrets to the Stones's sound, their distinctive controlled sloppiness. This would have been useful knowledge for me the day I met Watts. It took about ten minutes for me to figure out, but he was hanging behind the beat even in conversation. It sounds cute, like exaggeration for the good of a story, but it's true: Every time I asked a question, he answered the question before last. We fell into a sort of conversational fugue, wherein his answers overlaid my questions, which I adjusted on the fly to be belated follow-ups to his belated answers. Strangely, it worked: What was meant to be a perfunctory, transactional half-hour appointment became a two-hour talk, and Watts, to my delight, was in no hurry to be rid of me.
But I should add that what made this episode stranger, and perhaps contributed to the peculiarly laggy rhythm of the talk, was that this was my first time out of the house since the birth of my first child. My daughter had been born only three days earlier, and my wife and I were still consumed by the joy and terror of not quite knowing how to live in this state: with a baby. Severely sleep-deprived, I'd shaved for the first time in days and put on my nicest clothes, knowing that Charlie was himself quite the clotheshorse. Near the end of the interview, after I'd become perhaps too comfortable in Watts's presence, my fuzzy-headedness got the best of me. I unleashed upon him a question that I'd always wanted to ask a Stone or ex-Beatle: What is it like to live a life where you've nothing left to prove, nothing necessarily to motivate you artistically, but still plenty of life ahead of you?
Except I asked this question in the most sloppy, logorrheic way possible, with some mortifying addendum along the lines of, "I always imagine that for someone like you, life must be something like a perpetual Sunday brunch, where you're always sitting on the veranda with people bringing you mimosas and café au lait, with a wedge of cantaloupe and a tray of croissants in front of you, and no set plan for the day."
The fugue stopped. There was silence. Watts stared at me stonily for what felt like half an hour but was probably thirty seconds.
Then, finally, he looked down, looked up, and said to me, "Cantaloupe melon? Bloody 'ell, I've never 'eard that one before."
December 7, 2012 Link General Posts
This site was launched in 2006, in what we can retrospectively call the autumn of blogging: when it was still exhilarating that individuals were able take their words, whimsies, and ventings of spleen directly to the reading audience with no middleman, but also when blogger glut and blogger fatigue were already setting in. In other words, my site came along at a time when a writer like me could still be excited to have, you know, this unfiltered outlet, man, yet this excitement was quickly snuffed out by A) the realization that I was joining the party too late to attract an audience just because I was a professional writer with a site; B) the realization that blogging is just not my métier, though I admire those for whom it is; C) the advent of Facebook and Twitter, which is where people would increasingly choose to spend their internet time, rendering the already-theoretical audience for an author site even more theoretical; and D) my tendency to bring the spontaneity of any blog post to a halt with a tedious, alphabetized list.
All of this is a long way of explaining why, if you're still reading, I post so infrequently on this site. That said, I felt bad for the ol' gal that is davidkamp.com (and, yes, I've anthopomorphized this site into a wizened lady who was Bryn Mawr class of '33, a Carole Lombard-like beauty in her day who now bides her time at the assisted-living facility, living for her grandchildren's infrequent visits, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door). So I thought I'd at least post some links to some Vanity Fair stuff I've written, since V.F.'s site has been good about posting my work.
Here is a story I wrote for the December issue about Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, whose return is nearly upon us.
Here is a big piece I wrote for the October issue about the birth of the James Bond movie franchise, now riding high again with Skyfall.
Here and here are the first in what I hope to be many installments of a revival of an old V.F. feature from the 1920s, the Impossible Interview—in which two people unlikely to meet in this life on this earth are thrown together for a dialogue captured in a bright, grabby illo by a gifted artist. (In the old days, the Impossible Interviews were illustrated by none other than the great Miguel Covarrubias. Now the illustrations are done by the magnificent Mr. André Carrilho of Portugal.)
Finally, just because V.F. has started putting up more archival stuff on the Web, here is a piece I resented getting assigned to me 15 years ago: a cover story on a young actor of whom, in 1997, no one outside of Hollywood had ever heard—Matt Damon. He and this pal of his, Ben Affleck, were getting heavily hyped for this movie they had co-written and were now about to star in, Good Will Hunting, and it fell to me to hold up V.F.'s end of the hypeage deal. My aggrievedness is evident in the story's lede, though I'm not proud of the tone that my younger self took; that kid (me, not Damon) should have been damn well pleased to be writing for a national magazine, period. Anyway, I spent a night watching Monday Night Football with Damon and Affleck in Matt's hotel room in the Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan. The boys were still unused to such settings, psyched that Harvey Weinstein was putting them up in a five-star hotel with unlimited domain over the room-service menu and the minibar. They turned out to be welcoming, funny, and thoughtful guys—Damon, a product of a liberal Cambridge, Mass., household, ambivalent about his pending stardom and wealth, Affleck trying to make sense of the fact that his next movie was a zillion-budget Michael Bay epic called Armageddon. (He kept bellowing the title aloud, jokingly, like an irony-attuned WWE announcer.) I also admired the candor with which Damon's mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, expressed to me her concerns about the whole exercise we were undertaking. "What happens in a consumer society is that people become objects of attention in a way that doesn't seem healthy to society," she said. "I'm happy that Matt is happy in his work, but I'm not convinced he has to be on the cover of a magazine about it. It's a little hard for me to accept. It's all so out of the ordinary that I worry he might not grow as I want him to."
The good thing is, Matt and Ben turned out all right.
November 30, 2012 Link General Posts
Last year's NFL lockout prevented me from enjoying one of my favorite August rituals: visiting the New York Giants' training camp in Albany, New York. But this year, the Giants returned to Albany, and thus, I did, too, with my son and my friend Peter Richmond in tow. Peter and I, who co-host a "miserabilist" Giants-fan radio show that now has its own Facebook page, are always on the lookout for a training-camp character to become enamored of. Three years ago we found one in a personable fringe prospect with the awesome name Leger Douzable. (Douzable, a defensive tackle, has since bounced around the NFL, getting a few starts with the Jacksonville Jaguars; he is currently a Tennessee Titan.)
This year "our guy" turned out to be a non-fringe guy: Martellus Bennett, who may very well begin this season as the Giants' starting tight end. Bennett was signed as a free agent after playing four years in the shadow of the Dallas Cowboys' star tight end, Jason Witten. In Dallas, where he was a second-round pick, he is considered something of a bust, more of a talker than a producer. But Bennett, who has exhibited his art and is married to a fashion-blogging Sarah Lawrence grad, is already worth his roster spot as a fine run-blocker, and, more importantly for our purposes, as a Darryl Dawkins-style quote machine. Early in camp, he talked up his physical condition by saying, "I'm stronger than I've ever been, I'm faster than I've ever been. I could run all day. I'm kind of like a black unicorn out there. It's amazing to watch."
The "black unicorn" comment has inspired fan art and gotten a lot of play in the press. It also prompted me to seek out Bennett at camp. On the practice field, he did indeed stand out: at a rangy, powerful-looking 6' 6", he looked, if not like a mythical hornëd creature, then at least like the sort of big, power-forward-style tight end that the New Orleans Saints have in Jimmy Graham. Off the field, he was the only Giant to proceed past us in non-athletic gear, in his stylin' t-shirt (a leopard-print bomb?) and straw hat. Bennett happily posed for a photo with my half-his-size son (see photo above). I asked him, "Did you really call yourself a 'black unicorn'?"
"Yeah!" he said. "That's pretty good, don't you think?"
August 16, 2012 Link General Posts
My son posed the above question to me recently, wondering why the most African-American-identified sport in the U.S. doesn't have one single transformative historical figure the way baseball has Robinson. By a stroke of good fortune, GQ has just re-posted in its archives an article I wrote in 2001 addressing this very question.
The first men, plural, to break the color barrier in the NBA were a low-key group, in part because the NBA was still a low-key league, barely on its feet, when integration happened in 1950. Also, the integration of the NBA was less momentous than baseball's because blacks and whites had already played basketball with and against one another at the college level. I'll never forget how Earl Lloyd, the first black man to log minutes in an NBA game, framed this for me: "Most of the people who played baseball at that time were from below the Mason-Dixon Line, and most of 'em never seen a college. I mean, you got some guys from down south—hell, their first pair of shoes were baseball shoes! But my teammates were very intelligent, man."
Nevertheless, for the NBA's black pioneers, there was still struggle, tension, and the constant potential for slights and humiliations. Not always the stuff of happy reading, but I'm at least happy that, for once, I can answer one of my son's questions with more than the usual distracted "Uh, we'll look it up."
May 14, 2012 Link General Posts
A Tour with Photographs by the Docent, Mr. Kamp's Younger Brother, David
In 1981, Ted Kamp left central New Jersey for the wider world, unaware at the time that he was a curator. He was simply a young man beginning the journey into adulthood, which would take him first to the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY—its non-coeducational past still sufficiently recent for his father's more paleolithic friends to remark with lewd grins, "Isn't that a girlie school?"—and then to Chicago, and then to the greater Los Angeles area, where he resides today.
What Ted Kamp did not yet know was that his mother was possessed of a sufficiently strong sentimental streak that she would leave his oblong attic bedroom more or less unchanged in terms of décor as the years, and then the decades, flew by. Some furniture would be shuffled and rearranged, some closet contents would be hauled off, but the walls—ah, those goldenrod walls would remain exactly as they were left in 1981, which is to say, as they had remained for the better part of the 1970s, since Ted Kamp seldom edited, "redid," or subtracted from his wall décor; rather, ke kept making incremental additions to his thumbtacked collage of American sports and cultural ephemera. By dint of this cumulative approach to decorating, and his mother's subsequent willful resistance to making over his room, even after he no longer occupied it, Ted Kamp created an Inadvertent Museum of the Seventies. Come have a look.
Fig. 1
The oldest piece in the collection is most likely the NEW YORK KNICKS WORLD CHAMPIONS poster (Fig. 1). It gives every indication of dating from 1970, the first of the Knicks' two championship years in the seventies, featuring as it does not only the stalwarts Willis Reed (No. 19), Walt Frazier (No. 10), Bill Bradley (No. 24), Dave DeBusschere (No. 22), and Dick Barnett (No. 12), but also Cazzie Russell (No. 33), who was swapped for Jerry Lucas of the San Francisco Warriors at the end of the '70-'71 season, and Mike Riordan (No. 6) and Dave Stallworth (No. 9), who, together, were sent later that same year to the Baltimore Bullets in return for the great (and conspicuously absent from this poster) Earl Monroe, a cornerstone of the Knicks' 1973 championship team.
Your docent's efforts to date this poster were initially thrown off by the presence of Phil Jackson (No. 18, the "1" on his uniform obscured in the photo). Jackson, though a Knick since being drafted out of the University of North Dakota in 1967, missed the entire 1969-70 season as he recuperated from spinal-fusion surgery. Yet he is shown in game action, reaching for a rebound. This is what crossed up your docent, who vividly remembers Jackson playing a crucial if graceless and hirsute reserve role on the '73 championship squad.*
The suspicions of '73 provenance were compounded by the fact that Ted Kamp did not ascend to his attic lair until some point in the mid-seventies. It is the hoariest of exercises to trot out a Brady Bunch reference when discussing things seventies-related, but it is nevertheless apt to note that it was on March 23, 1973—mere weeks before the Knicks clinched their second title—that ABC aired "A Room at the Top," the Brady Bunch episode in which Greg Brady claimed the attic as his own baroquely decorated, single-occupancy bedroom. Precisely when Ted Kamp moved to his new custom-modified attic bedroom is lost to the ages, but it was certainly some time after "A Room at the Top" had aired, and it is not a stretch to imagine that Ted Kamp and his parents were at least partly inspired by the episode to imagine that their modest three-bedroom home's large attic, if tidied up and retrofitted with electric baseboard heaters and nautically-themed curtains, would be a better place for Ted Kamp to spend his time than the small second-floor room he had shared with his older sister, by then pubescent and very irritable, since 1966.
One can only conclude that the makers of the NEW YORK KNICKS WORLD CHAMPIONS poster generously chose to include Jackson despite his inactive status during the '69-'70 season, and that the poster sat idly, rolled up somewhere, until Ted Kamp's attic room and future Inadvertent Museum of the Seventies came to be.
* It's hard to articulate, given his silken Zenmaster demeanor now, how awkward, shaggy, and perspiratory Jackson's style of play was: all elbows and flashes of armpit hair, every move to screen his man maximally effortful, every joule of energy expended.
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April 28, 2012 Link General Posts
The WNEW on-air staff circa 1977, with Pete Fornatale second from left.
For a disc jockey, Pete Fornatale had a nerdy voice. But it was soothingly nerdy—imagine the friendly, reedy bleat of Ned Flanders of The Simpsons, only tamped down by Jackson Browne instead of hopped-up on Gospel.
Fornatale, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 66, was the beau idéal of the FM D.J., and I was lucky, in my youth, to happen upon him in his 1970s heyday at the New York station WNEW. In 1977, I was a pre-teen growing wary of the Top 40 AM station that I listened to regularly, WABC: the rote playlists, the noisy commercials, and the unctuous baritones that all their D.J.'s seemed to have, the aural equivalent of pompadours and bad dye jobs. What broke my faith in WABC for good was a family car ride on August 16 of that year, when we heard the station jock on duty announce, in the same brassy, hustling tones with which he'd earlier introduced Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing," "Elvis Presley diiiiiiiied today!" Good god, did these men not have souls?
My older siblings were already listening to WNEW, where Fornatale had worked since 1969, and I followed them there. WNEW had what would prove, in retrospect, to be an all-star stable of free-form FM pioneers, among them Scott Muni, Vin Scelsa, Alison Steele, and Dennis Elsas, but Fornatale was the one who spoke to me, literally and spiritually. That voice, which to my AM-trained juvenile ears sounded so wrong for radio, made him seem like an underdog, a dork among the cool kids, which suited my own self-perception. And the eclecticism of his shows was liberating. It wasn't hip to like the Beach Boys at that time, but I loved them and Pete played them, and he was unafraid to intermarble the strange, twitchy new music of the nascent New Wave (e.g., the B-52s' "Rock Lobster" and Talking Heads' "Pulled Up") with the denimy, singer-songwriterly sounds of Browne, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell.
My brother was on WNEW's mailing list and late in '77 received a giant wall poster (above) featuring all of the station's D.J.'s peering through the windows of an old train car, its exterior graffitied (suitably for the period) with the slogan BUILT ON SOLID ROCK. It was gratifying to discover that Fornatale looked exactly as I expected him to: skinny, bespectacled, and bearded—your kindly adjunct professor of rock studies.
In the 1980s, I fell out of love with radio, and so, it seems, did Fornatale, who felt increasingly marginalized by formatting strictures and the rise of shock-talk. But the streaming-and-podcast era brought me back into the fold, with one station in particular, WFUV-FM, which broadcasts from the campus of Fordham University in the Bronx, enchanting me with its remarkably vintage-WNEW-like spirit. How apt, then, that this station turned out to be not only the very place where Fornatale got his start as a college sophomore in 1964, but also the place where he finally found a proper home again in his later years. (Scelsa and Elsas have also found safe haven at FUV.) Fornatale hosted a Saturday program called "Mixed Bag," each week devoted to a specific theme; as recently as two weeks ago he was on the air, commemorating the centennial of the Titanic's sinking with a characteristically all-over-the-place playlist.
The big WNEW poster still hangs upon a wall of my brother's old bedroom, which my septuagenarian mother has never bothered to redecorate, rendering it an unwitting shrine to the FM era. Pete and his colleagues smile out at a poster on the opposite wall of the Willis Reed-era Knicks, and a few feet away from a tacked-up still of James and Carly from the No Nukes concert film, and near a novelty bumper sticker that reads JESUS SAVES—BUT MOSES INVESTS! It's precisely the kind of mixed bag that would have made for a great Pete Fornatale show.
Listen here for an amazing 1977 in-studio appearance by an uncommonly chipper Brian Wilson on Pete Fornatale's WNEW show.
April 27, 2012 Link General Posts


text:
2014 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited 4WD 4dr Sport
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Trout Population Gets a Boost with Upcoming Releases
Fish & Game are about to commence a number of fishery enhancement releases over the coming month, including a Trust Power release of 400 adult rainbow trout into the Branch/Leatham Rivers.
Nelson Marlborough Fish & Game Manager Rhys Barrier says having a local source of trout and salmon grown on contract for Nelson Marlborough Fish & Game region will hopefully be of real benefit to licenced anglers.
"We will also be carrying out an immediate release of adult brown trout into the Riuwaka River (formerly Riwaka) in order to try and boost the flagging population in this river, which was once a superb fishery.
"Further releases into the Waimea fish out ponds, as well as the Waimea River will take place to coincide with the April school holidays".
As a result of previous releases into the Branch/Leatham, the numbers of rainbow trout have increased markedly in Lake Argyle, which is located in the Wairau Valley.
Last week Fish & Game staff counted record numbers of trout in their annual drift dive count with 420 medium and large rainbow and brown trout in Argyle Canal, which flows into Argyle Pond.
Barrier says "If you can get a windless day, this is a great option to take the kids on a day trip, or even better stay overnight at the Lake Argyle camping area".
Feedback from Marlborough anglers has been extremely positive from a December release of brown trout into the Taylor River Junior fishery.
"A number of junior anglers have been enjoying catching some of the 1kg+ fish that were released in time for the summer school holidays.
Barrier says "Licence holders are reminded to get out there and make the most of the current fishing opportunities, noting that some of these fisheries will be closing on April 30th".
The Wairau River has been reported to be fishing well in the lower reaches, with an excellent population of brown trout, and a growing number of rainbow trout now living in the system as a result of periodic Branch River fish releases with Trust Power.
Salmon fishing was said to be slow to start with however reasonable numbers of salmon are now being caught.
Fish & Game Field Officer Jacob Lucas says that after a wet summer, fishing conditions in Nelson and Marlborough's Rivers are now excellent.
"Many rivers are hitting form, including local mainstays such as the Motueka and Wairau Rivers which are currently fishing very well, with the rivers in great shape, and good numbers of fish present,".
"While trout can be fussy at times, you'll find success at this time of year if you target willow lined edges, and riffle habitat, using small nymphs and dry flies or cicada imitations.
Lucas says "Trout are making the most of the terrestrial bonanza at the moment with passion vine hoppers and cicadas largely on the menu. Spin anglers are best to target the top water areas in the evenings, when trout sit just underneath the surface intercepting mayflies".
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text:
Export 13 results:Author [ Type] Year
Filters: Author is Gert Van Gompel [Clear All Filters]
"Towards accurate image reconstruction from truncated X-ray CT projections", Department of Physics, Antwerp, University of Antwerp, 2009. Download thesis (3.2 MB)
Journal Article
"Super-resolution for computed tomography based on discrete tomography", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 23, issue 3, pp. 1181 - 1193, 2014. Download paper (2.24 MB)
"Reconstruction of a uniform star object from interior x-ray data: uniqueness, stability and algorithm", Inverse Problems, vol. 25, no. 65010, June, 2009.
"Iterative correction of beam hardening artifacts in CT", Medical Physics, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 36-49, July, 2011.
Conference Paper
"Reconstruction of a uniform star object from interior X-ray data", Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, NSS08, IEEE, no. 2, Dresden, Germany, pp. 4115-4119, October, 2008.
"A new algorithm for Region Of Interest Tomography", SPIE Medical Imaging: Image Processing, vol. 127, San Diego, California, USA, pp. 2105-2113, February, 2004. Download paper (624.91 KB)
"A new algorithm for Region Of Interest Tomography", 19th Annual Symposium of the Belgian Hospital Physicists Association, January, 2004.
"Iterative correction of beam hardening artifacts in CT", The First International Conference on Image Formation in X-Ray Computed Tomography, 06/2010.
"Elliptical Extrapolation of Truncated 2D CT Projections using Helgason-Ludwig consistency conditions", SPIE Medical Imaging: Physics of Medical Imaging, vol. 6142, San Diego, Californa, USA, pp. 1408-1417, February, 2006.
"A discrete tomography approach for superresolution micro-CT images", IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, Rotterdam, pp. 816-819, April, 2010. Download paper (1.13 MB)
"Consistent Extrapolation of Truncated 2D CT Projections", Micro tomography 3D, Gasthuisberg, Leuven, Belgium, September, 2006.
"A 3-dimensional discrete tomography approach for superresolution micro-CT images: application to foams", The first international conference on image formation in X-ray computed tomography, pp. 45-48, June, 2010. Download full paper (816.87 KB)
Conference Abstract
"An iterative post-reconstruction method for beam hardening reduction without prior information", Liege Image Days 2008: Medical Imaging, March, 2008. Download abstract (42 KB) Download poster (262.82 KB)


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Posted by Editoress on 05/13/08
Pan American Championship Wrap-Up - Canada Second Overall!
By Denise Kelly - Team Manager
Ninety riders and all their supporters were greeted with another glorious day of sunshine on the last day of competition - the men's 177 km road race. A gutsy ride by the hometown team gave Uruguay something big to cheer about as Richard Mascaranas took the gold, with Luis Macias of Mexico in second and Ottavio Brugarelli of Brasil rounding out the podium. Zach Bell, Svein Tuft and David Veilleux, didn't fare so well as the race literally got away from them.
Attacks and breakaways began just after the gun went off. The 12.5 km loop followed the same flat start stretch as the TT, with palm trees and the ocean in the background. A false flat rise characterized the far end of the course with a fast decent that came out on the flats approximately 600 metres before the finish. The cigar shaped course gave many opportunities to take time checks and monitor breakaways.
Within the first few laps, small groups were jumping off the front with all the big teams represented - Chile, Argentina and Brazil all had 10 starters (the limit was 6 elites and 4 espoirs). Veilleux followed several of the early attacks but the makeup of those groups wouldn't cooperate to chase down the leaders. After 4 laps of the 14 lap race, the front group swelled to 25 riders with the Canadians conspicuously absent.
By the end of lap 6, the time gap had increased to 4.5 minutes. The Canadians went into high gear as they each took turns attacking. Bell looked to be clear with another rider but the group decided to chase them down. Tuft attempted several times as did Veilleux. The momentum was fast and furious as the gap came down to 2 minutes in just one lap. Then it fell apart. The group was content to roll along and the gap increased again.
At the front, the group of 25 had splintered into 3, with a Brazilian taking a flyer for over 2 laps. Eventually, 7 riders would stay clear with about a 45 second gap on 3 riders and a 2 minute gap over the rest of the original 25.
With 4 laps to go, the Canadians ramped it up yet again - team time trialling for almost 50 km The yo-yo effect was eliminated as the group was strung out single file for the duration of the race. A couple other riders attempted to share the pulls once or twice but most were either unable or unwilling to assist with the effort. The 6 minute lead was reduced to just over 3 and a half minutes after the concerted effort on the part of the Canadians. It wasn't enough to close the gap.
The sprint for the win was welcomed with the large crowd of Uruguayans cheering with delight as their country man took it home. Bell and Tuft drove it home until the end with Veilleux finishing second in the third group for 24th place.
The silver lining for the Canadians at these Championships was sweet. The maple leaf was hoisted for the sixth time, signaling the second place overall finish for Canada. Columbia was first with 11 gold, 3 silver and 4 bronze; Canada garnered 4 gold and 1 silver; and third place Cuba finished with 3 gold medals. The host country Uruguay finished 8th with 1 gold and 4 bronze.
It was an outstanding finish for Canada and, in particular, Svein Tuft with 4 gold medals and Zach Bell with a gold and silver. They definitely made their mark in the Southern climes, sending notice that they are ready to do business back in the North.
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This story originally ran May 25, 2009. The coroner's inquest remains uncompleted as of Dec. 2, 2011.
MONTREAL – A long-awaited and controversial coroner's inquest into the August, 2008 shooting death of Fredy Villanueva appeared Monday to be in jeopardy before it had even begun.
Nine of the 15 interested parties weren't present in the Montreal courtroom, François Daviault, lawyer for the Quebec coroner's office pointed out. Villanueva's mother was too traumatized and depressed to even attend court, Daviault said.
The three most interested parties the – two men who were injured at the same time Villanueva, as well as the Villanueva family – can't afford to cover their legal fees, he said.
Meanwhile, the two Montreal police officers involved in the shooting are represented by four highly skilled lawyers, whose fees are being picked up by the city.
"Not only must justice be served, but it must be seen to be served," Daviault said.
"What will be the public's impression if the three people most implicated in this aren't present because they can't pay?"
Villanueva's mother, Lilian Villanueva, had been scheduled to appear first at the inquiry, headed by Quebec Court Judge Robert Sansfaçon, acting as coroner. More than 40 witnesses, many subpoenaed, are reportedly scheduled to appear over eight days.
Several groups have withdrawn from the inquest and some people have said they plan to boycott it. The groups have complained that the inquest is too narrowly focused, as it will consider only the incident in which Villanueva and two others were shot and not the wider issue of police relations with ethnic groups and youths. Riots in Montreal North the day after Villanueva was killed underscored the tensions that only a broader commission can address, say groups including the Ligue des droits et libertés, the Coalition contre la répression et les abus policiers and Montréal-Nord Républik. The groups also raised objections over the government's willingness to pay the legal fees of the Villaneuva family, but not those of the surviving victims.
A Sûreté du Québec investigation has already concluded that neither of the two implicated police officers committed a criminal act.
In a statement posted on its website Monday, Montréal-Nord Républik said: "The narrow mandate of this type of inquest does not allow for a thorough study of the socio-economic conditions of the community or a true representation from the victims to the police. Essentially, the coroner's inquest aims to once again wipe away any doubt about the police officers and ignore the deeply-rooted causes of social tensions in Montreal North.
"The coroner's inquest by Sansfaçon will be a masquerade."


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(3) Portion defined For purposes of this subsection, the term "portion" means only the terms and benefits under a life insurance contract or annuity contract that are in addition to the terms and benefits under the contract without regard to long-term care insurance coverage.
26 USC § 7702B(e)(3)
Scoping language
None identified. Default scope is assumed to be the entire title.
Is this correct?


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WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Thursday warned Republicans the nation will go off the "fiscal cliff" if taxes aren't raised on the wealthy.
The warning came as some Republicans urged House Speaker John Boehner to stop fighting tax increases for the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers and President Obama traveled to the apartment of a middle class family in Virginia fearing a possible $2,200 increase in their tax bill if no agreement is reached.
The nation faces a Jan. 1 deadline for the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and draconian budget cuts that could send the economy back into recession.
Boehner said Monday negotiations are at a standstill and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Wednesday the White House is "absolutely" prepared to go over the "fiscal cliff."
"If there is no agreement, then the fiscal cliff has to be dealt with," Pelosi said Thursday. "Let's hope that we can have an agreement."
Late Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported talks between Boehner's office and the White House had resumed.
"Lines of communication are open," Boehner Michael Steel said.
Pelosi called the Republican plan calling for $800 billion in revenue and $900 billion in spending cuts "an assault on the middle class, on our seniors and on our future," CBS reported.
"It was not in furtherance of finding common ground," she said.
Obama has called for $1.6 trillion in new revenue -- $950 billion coming from incomes of more than $250,000 -- and $2.4 trillion in spending cuts.
Obama visited the ground floor apartment of Tiffany Santana of Falls Church, Va., a high school English teacher, who responded to the president's email encouraging people to share their stories about how paying $2,200 more in taxes next year would affect their families. She and her husband Richard live with their son Noah, 6, and her parents.
"They're keeping it together, they're working hard, they're meeting their responsibilities. For them to be burdened unnecessarily because Democrats and Republicans aren't coming together to solve those problems gives you a sense of the costs on personal terms," Obama said.
Obama reiterated he will not sign any legislation that does not raise taxes for the wealthiest 2 percent of U.S. taxpayers.
GOP lawmakers said Wednesday they were willing to discuss raising rates on taxable income above $250,000 because they saw that concession as clearing the way for a broad deal that would also rein in the cost of Social Security and Medicare, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
"I and some others are advocating giving the president what he wants," Rep. Steven LaTourette, R-Ohio, told the newspaper.
He stressed this concession must be part of a package that slows federal borrowing and reduces the debt $4 trillion to $5 trillion.
"Quite frankly, some people in this 2 percent who call me, they're more worried about the fiscal cliff than about the rates going up a couple points. That has bigger risk for them," said LaTourette, who is retiring in January.
Rep. Thomas Rooney, R-Fla., told the Post, "If there are truly real entitlement reforms that are going to preserve Social Security and Medicare for generations to come, it's going to be very difficult for me to oppose" higher tax rates for the rich.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a fiscal and social conservative, told MSNBC: "Personally, I know we have to raise revenue. I don't really care which way we do it. Actually, I would rather see the rates go up than do it the other way, because it gives us a greater chance to reform the tax code and broaden the base in the future."
Boehner told reporters Wednesday: "I believe it is appropriate to put revenues on the table. Now, the revenues that we are putting on the table are going to come from -- guess who? -- the rich."
Republicans are increasingly worried they could be blamed if Washington doesn't resolve the impasse.
The U.S. government has $16.308 trillion in debt, putting it just beneath the $16.4 trillion limit set by Congress. The government is expected to run out of emergency measures to avoid hitting the debt ceiling by February or March, the Congressional Budget Office has said.
Obama warned Republicans Wednesday not to pursue a course that would set up a fresh battle over the debt limit, like the U.S. debt-ceiling crisis of July and August 2011, which Obama called a "catastrophe."
"I want to send a very clear message to people here: We are not going to play that game next year," Obama told the Business Roundtable trade group, referring to Republicans using the debt limit to negotiate further spending cuts.
"That is a bad strategy for America, it's a bad strategy for your businesses, and it is not a game that I will play," Obama told the big-business executives.


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IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano welcomed the strong support expressed by leaders from 47 countries for the Agency's "essential role" in the field of nuclear security.
"I am pleased that the IAEA´s efforts to make nuclear facilities and borders more secure to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism are recognized at the highest levels of government," he said after attending the two-day Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.
The IAEA Director General thanked the attending Heads of State, Heads of Government and other senior leaders for the moral and political support they gave to the Agency´s nuclear security activities.
"The IAEA needs stronger and more predictable funding to do its job better," he said. "I am grateful to all those who have matched their words of support today with much needed pledges to ensure that the IAEA has the resources it needs to make all of us more secure."
In their Communiqué of the Washington Nuclear Security Summit, the 47 states said they "reaffirm the essential role of the IAEA in the international nuclear security framework and will work to ensure that it continues to have the appropriate structure, resources and expertise needed to carry out its mandated nuclear security activities in accordance with its Statute, relevant General Conference resolutions and its Nuclear Security Plans."
In addition, the Work Plan, a supporting document to the Communiqué, made extensive reference to the work of the IAEA and how Member States could enhance it.
Background The IAEA helps its Member States to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism and to establish an effective response. In less than a decade, the IAEA has trained some 9 000 experts in 120 countries on all aspects of nuclear security; improved facility security in 30 states; supplied some 3,000 detection instruments to more than 50 states; helped repatriate more than one tonne of highly enriched uranium research reactor fuel to countries of origin; and the Agency´s Illicit Trafficking Database, with 110 states participating, is the most authoritative source of information in its field.


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Around one in a hundred deaths worldwide is due to passive smoking, which kills an estimated 600,000 people a year, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers said on Friday.
In the first study to assess the global impact of second-hand smoke, WHO experts found that children are more heavily exposed to second-hand smoke than any other age-group, and around 165,000 of them a year die because of it.
"Two-thirds of these deaths occur in Africa and south Asia," the researchers, led by Annette Pruss-Ustun of the WHO in Geneva, wrote in their study.
Children's exposure to second-hand smoke is most likely to happen at home, and the double blow of infectious diseases and tobacco "seems to be a deadly combination for children in these regions," they said.
Commenting on the findings in the Lancet journal, Heather Wipfli and Jonathan Samet from the University of Southern California said policymakers try to motivate families to stop smoking in the home.
"In some countries, smokefree homes are becoming the norm, but far from universally," they wrote.
The WHO researchers looked at data from 192 countries for their study. To get comprehensive data from all 192, they had to go back to 2004. They used mathematical modeling to estimate deaths and the number of years lost of life in good health.
Worldwide, 40 percent of children, 33 percent of non-smoking men and 35 percent non-smoking women were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, they found.
This exposure was estimated to have caused 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 from lower respiratory infections, 36,900 from asthma and 21,400 from lung cancer.
For the full impact of smoking, these deaths should be added to the estimated 5.1 million deaths a year attributable to active tobacco use, the researchers said.
While deaths due to passive smoking in children were skewed toward poor and middle-income countries, deaths in adults were spread across countries at all income levels.
In Europe's high-income countries, only 71 child deaths occurred, while 35,388 deaths were in adults. Yet in the countries assessed in Africa, an estimated 43,375 deaths due to passive smoking were in children compared with 9,514 in adults.
Pruss-Ustun urged countries to enforce the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which includes higher tobacco taxes, plain packaging and advertising bans, among other steps.
"Policy-makers should bear in mind that enforcing complete smoke-free laws will probably substantially reduce the number of deaths attributable to exposure to second-hand smoke within the first year of its implementation, with accompanying reduction in costs of illness in social and health systems," she wrote.
Only 7.4 percent of the world population currently lives in jurisdictions with comprehensive smoke-free laws, and those laws are not always robustly enforced.
In places where smoke-free rules are adhered to, research shows that exposure to second hand smoke in high-risk places like bars and restaurants can be cut by 90 percent, and in general by 60 percent, the researchers said.
Studies also show such laws help to reduce the number of cigarettes smoked by smokers and lead to higher success rates in those trying to quit.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Second Hand Smoke
Posted by Richard Lawry at 7:26 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Great American Smokeout
2010 American Cancer Society Great American Smokeout Facts at a Glance
• This year, the Great American Smokeout will be held November 18.
• Quitting and avoiding tobacco products is one of the most important steps to creating a world with less cancer and more birthdays. It helps Americans stay well by reducing their risk of cancer.
• The Great American Smokeout is designed to motivate and empower smokers with personalized tools, tips, and support to help them quit for good.
• The Society hosted its first Great American Smokeout in 1976 as a way to inspire and encourage smokers to quit for one day.
• Smokeout does more than urge smokers to quit for a single day -- it encourages people to help create a world with less cancer and more birthdays by committing to making a long-term plan to quit for good and/or by supporting laws that help protect communities from tobacco.
• The American Cancer Society and its nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy affiliate, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action NetworkSM (ACS CAN), have been successful in protecting the public from cigarettes and secondhand smoke:
• Today, nearly 75 percent of the United States population is covered by 100 percent smoke-free workplace and/or restaurant and/or bar laws, despite aggressive efforts by tobacco companies to defeat such laws.*
• Thirty-five states, the District of Columbia, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico now protect nonsmokers by prohibiting smoking in workplaces, and/or restaurants, and/or bars.*
• Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia have increased their cigarette taxes since 2000.*
• In 2007, 39.8 percent (13.4 million) of adult current everyday smokers had stopped smoking for at least one day during the preceding 12 months because they were trying to quit. **
• Tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the United States.*
Posted by Richard Lawry at 8:32 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
New Cancer Drug Shows Promise
An experimental cancer drug is proving effective in treating the lung cancers of some patients whose tumors carry a certain genetic mutation, new studies show.
Because the mutation can be present in other forms of cancer -- including a rare form of sarcoma (cancer of the soft tissue), childhood neuroblastoma (brain tumor), as well as some lymphomas, breast and colon cancers -- researchers say they are hopeful the drug, crizotinib, will prove effective in treating those cancers as well.
In one study, researchers identified 82 patients from among 1,500 patients with non-small-cell lung cancer, the most common type of lung malignancy, whose tumors had a mutation in the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene.
Crizotinib targets the ALK "driver kinase," or protein, blocking its activity and preventing the tumor from growing, explained study co-author Dr. Geoffrey Shapiro, director of the Early Drug Development Center and associate professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston.
"The cancer cell is actually addicted to the activity of the protein for its growth and survival," Shapiro said. "It's totally dependent on it. The idea is that blocking that protein can kill the cancer cell."
In 46 patients taking crizotinib, the tumor shrunk by more than 30 percent during an average of six months of taking the drug. In 27 patients, crizotinib halted growth of the tumor, while in one patient the tumor disappeared.
The drug also had few side effects, Shapiro said. The most common was mild gastrointestinal symptoms.
"These are very positive results in lung cancer patients who had received other treatments that didn't work or worked only briefly," Shapiro said. "The bottom line is that there was a 72 percent chance the tumor would shrink or remain stable for at least six months."
The study is published in the Oct. 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In recent years, researchers have started to think of lung cancer less as a single disease and more as a group of diseases that rely on specific genetic mutations called "driver kinases," or proteins that enable the tumor cells to proliferate.
That has led some researchers to focus on developing drugs that target those specific abnormalities. "Being able to inhibit those kinases and disrupt their signaling is evolving into a very successful approach," Shapiro said.
The good news is that drugs such as crizotinib seem to work well in patients with the mutation, noted Dr. Roman Perez-Soler, chairman of the department of oncology at Montefiore Medical Center and professor of medicine and molecular pharmacology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. But the bad news is that it means that patients who don't have the specific mutation won't be helped.
Only an estimated 2 percent to 7 percent of non-small-cell lung cancers have the ALK mutation, according to the study.
"This is great news for people with this type of tumor," Perez-Soler said. "Researchers have identified a group of patients, unfortunately a small group, who because of a very specific genetic abnormality are extremely sensitive to these targeted treatments and as a result of that can benefit from this drug without toxicity. It's very encouraging."
In a second study in the same journal, crizotinib was effective in a 44-year-old man with inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor, a rare form of sarcoma, which is also driven by the ALK abnormality, said Shapiro, who was senior author of that paper.
Still, there are caveats. Over time, tumors can adapt to such targeted therapy, eventually rendering it ineffective, experts said. In fact, a third study in the same journal identified ways in which lung cancers had already started to mutate and overcome crizotinib.
Moreover, while drugs targeting a specific tumor genotype are promising, there could be so many different genotypes that it would be impractical to come up with drugs targeting all of them, Perez-Soler said. Still other tumors might be fueled by multiple abnormalities.
"Many cancers may be much more complicated," he said. "And every tumor is different. Each one has a number of sophisticated ways to overcome interventions to block growth, and some may be better prepared than others to do that. That is why you see heterogeneity in the response to the drug. There is no such thing as identical twins when we talk about tumors."
Researchers are currently enrolling patients for a larger, Phase III clinical trial of crizotinib, Shapiro said. The study was funded by Pfizer, which is developing crizotinib for clinical application, and by grants from the U.S. National Cancer Institute, among others.
Lung cancer remains one of the most deadly cancers and new treatments are desperately needed, the researchers said. "Advanced lung cancer still remains a very lethal disease," Shapiro said. "It's the biggest cancer killer of both men and women in the U.S. and worldwide, and the unmet clinical need is extreme."
Posted by Richard Lawry at 1:40 PM 0 comments


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Wednesday, June 29, 2011
There's a book in everyone....
These are a few more images from Barcelona. No explanations needed, I guess. That glittering sculpture in a balcony is so eye- catching, I couldn't resist clicking it...
This appeared in Bombay Times on monday....
Not everybody can be an Amitav Ghosh, but a book does indeed lurk inside each person.Book readings of super celebrity authors can either go horribly wrong, or wonderfully right. Fortunately, Amitav Ghosh managed to pull off a sublime evening when he read from his latest novel 'River of Smoke' ( part of the ' Ibis' trilogy). For one, he reads well (Vikram Seth is another author who makes his characters come alive at readings). This is a special skill and not many authors possess it. Mainly because most authors are writers not performers. Given the choice, most would prefer the relative anonymity of letting readers decide whether or not they like the book rather than participating in elaborate road shows where they are reduced to becoming performing fleas. But in today's tougher, more competitive times it's not enough for a writer to do his\her job of producing a book. It is obligatory to promote it. It's relief to his publishers that Amitav wears his talent lightly and goes about the exhausting business of public readings and signings with patience and grace. It says a lot about his professionalism. Not only is Ghosh a top rung writer with a vast global following, but he is also one of the hand picked contemporary writers whose name crops up as a contender for the prestigious Nobel. But unlike some particularly aggressive self- promoters with far less substance, Ghosh remains disarmingly modest and consistently considerate. Since we share the same publisher and publicist, I know how gallantly and charmingly he acknowledges the contributions made by each and every person working behind-the-scenes to make these events a success. Even while responding to tiresome questions from the audience, he does so without once losing either his cool or his shirt. V.S. Naipaul, on the other hand, is notorious for shutting up silly readers with a short and sharp put down. One young girl in Mumbai really asked for it when she raised her hand to enquire in a sing song voice, "Mr. Naipaul… what are your books about? I haven't read any of them." He glanced witheringly at her, and with a dismissive wave of his hand announced imperiously, "I refuse to answer such a stupid question. Next!" No, the girl didn't dig a hole and disappear into it – she giggled.
I genuinely believe there is a book in every person. Maybe even two or three. Some people choose to write it, most don't. That's the only difference. Going by the questions Amitav took last week, it did sound as if there were several potential novelists in the audience, looking for tips from the master. Unlike Naipaul, Amitav listened attentively to each question and replied with sincerity. The terrific thing about the evening was that the crowd was made up of hard core fans of the author – people who knew his work intimately and were genuinely interested in the latest one. This was such a refreshing change from the usual suspects who turn up for launches – any and every launch will do – not knowing a damn thing about the chief guest. These are the professional gate crashers who routinely show up at five star venues and hang around the bar, attacking every passing waiter and pouncing greedily on the canapés. They have never bought a book or a painting in their life…. but does that stop them from turning up to scrounge around shamelessly? Naah. This is not just a Mumbai phenomenon, mind you. I have seen similar types in London, New York, Berlin, Singapore, Hong Kong… the list goes on. My favourite memory of Amitav is watching him swat flies during a brief stopover in Patna, while we were on our way to the annual Bhuvaneshwar Book Fest. He was writing furiously throughout the long flight, and getting really bugged by those aggressive flies . Perhaps they'll feature in his next book?
15 comments:
- Sadiya Merchant said...
hehe wat id really like to kno is if d girl showed up at Mr Amitav's reading and asked d same question too! :o
wud really reallyyyyy like to read a kung fu panda 2 review frm u.
its awesomeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee n d dialogues superb!
pls pls plssss watch it n tel us wat u think! :)
- June 29, 2011 at 11:14 PM
- goodluck said...
Amitav is a great soul. Simple and charming. That sincerity shows in his writings as well.
- June 30, 2011 at 9:05 AM
- Simran said...
It's always wonderful to stop by your blog :)
And so true;everyone has a book within but few of them open it! And it's always nice to know about such remarkable personalities! :)
Keep sharing and take care
- June 30, 2011 at 9:31 AM
- Dreamlike said...
its become a habit now to check your blog at least once (often more)everyday when I sit on the net...its getting addictive
- June 30, 2011 at 9:45 AM
- Krunal said...
I was present at the Trident during the book launch and I even got to ask a question, although I was pretty nervous while asking but Amitav immediately relieved me when he began his answer by 'that's a good question', now at least I knew my question wasn't stupid.
- June 30, 2011 at 11:16 AM
- goodluck said...
Somebody seems to be fallin in love with.......Wants to meet her again and again, writes letters to her.
And he is saying Buddha hoga tera baap.
- June 30, 2011 at 12:09 PM
- चंद्रमौलेश्वर प्रसाद said...
Writing is an art and reading is an art and if you have both the arts in your hand [and not in the bush] then you have both the worlds.
- June 30, 2011 at 9:52 PM
- FrankieGoesToHyderabad said...
Well, it would be nice and convenient if we could divide the book launch attenders into Sensible Serious Ones and Superficial Ones & Hangers On. (We ourselves would be in the first camp of course...) But I think it's a bit less black & white. I go to launches with a mix of motives. I might well be amazed by the author's abilities and just want to tell them how much I admire their ability. But I also want to spend an hour mixing with attractive women with nice hair, and pretending to myself for just a short while that I too am a part of the glamorous world. And best of all, what if I happened to turn round and there, not two feet away, was Ms De, and I might even be able to string together an intelligent-sounding remark... and get a kind reply from her? Would those be bad motives? And anyway, if I wanted to really learn from the author so that I could improve my own writing, the best way would be to study their work. If I went to a launch and asked a 'serious' question of the author I know I would only be doing it for the moment's attention. Anyway... hey look isn't that that famous writer over there? Yes, the one standing next to... pass one of those canapes, would you? And some juice to dip it in...
- July 2, 2011 at 8:27 AM
- Flowerstousa said...
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- July 2, 2011 at 4:32 PM
- D Reddy said...
While you were away, Maria Susairaj got scott free..and Rgv proposes to hire her for his next drama...what do you say?
- July 2, 2011 at 5:00 PM
- Dr Padmaja said...
great fan of urs. love reading ur books. agree there's a book in everyone. just started writing a book. not sure how open u can be. not worried about myself but the story involves others. not very familiar with writer's ethics. can u guide me. Padmaja
- July 3, 2011 at 4:58 PM
- Mona said...
Great pics! Sixty is new 30 I guess :)
- July 5, 2011 at 7:01 PM
- Latha said...
These pictures are good. The beach looks superb as my screen saver. Thanx for sharing.
- July 7, 2011 at 7:22 PM
- Unknown said...
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- July 5, 2014 at 11:02 AM
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Suspicious packages found in Boston. Ties to Iranians, ya think?
Two of the packages did not contain explosives so far. Gee, who would have guessed.
Everytime jackass Bush makes one of his assinine statements, England thwarts a terror threat, or we find suspicious boxes somewhere. Sheesh.
This time it the cartoon network. It seem that they planted these boxes almost two weeks ago as a publicity stunt. Homeland security was so on top of this that the comedy channel had to call in suspicious packages to get things rolling. Problem was there is snow forcast and security may never have found the "bombs". Eff'n dopes.
Not much longer now. 719 days to go