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- About Us
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- About Us
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- Veterans
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There are numerous decisions to be made when arranging a funeral. Below are some common questions associated when making this decision.
A pre-arranged funeral is when a funeral is arranged in advance. Making these decisions today allows you to make logical, thoughtful arrangements your family will appreciate, as well as allowing you time to tend to every detail.
Pre-arranging your funeral can be very informal, and as simple as writing down your preferences and sharing your wishes with a family member. More formal arrangements in the form of a pre-need contract can be set up with a funeral home and can be pre-funded through life insurance, bank trust, or other methods such as revocable and irrevocable pre-need contracts.
If you need nursing home care or other monetary assistance in the future, your pre-funded service cannot be taken away from you. Yet if you move, your arrangements can move with you to the funeral home of your choice.
The revocability of your plan refers to the pre-funding of your funeral. A revocable plan allows you to un-fund your pre-arrangement at anytime and spend the money as you wish. If your revocable pre-arrangement was funded with a bank trust, your principal plus all interest will be refunded to you. If your revocable pre-arrangement was funded with an insurance policy or annuity, the cash surrender value, less surrendered charges, will be returned to you.
Most people choose to make their pre-funding irrevocable because they want to do what they can to ensure that the money will be there to pay for their funeral in the future. Irrevocable funds cannot be withdrawn for any reason prior to the death of the person for whom the pre-arrangement was made.
You need facts about yourself, such as, your address, social security number, religious affiliation, military service records, and the names of your family members. This is an opportunity to tell about yourself and the type of funeral service you prefer. You should discuss your preferences with family and friends. Feel free to ask these people to accompany you when making your pre-arrangements.
Advice from a funeral director is absolutely essential. A funeral director is well versed in all types of funerals, and is knowledgeable about the laws regarding funerals and final disposition, trusts, and insurance pre-funding rules. A funeral director will arrange to meet with you at a date and time of your convenience- at your home or the funeral home.


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Andrew Sandoval's Come To The Sunshine is the home of the bah bah bah's and the la la la's. Each week he ushers you into his record room for a two-hour tour of scintillating 1960's sounds by a stunning array of no-hit wonders. Hear beat, psych, folk-rock, garage, soft pop, baroque, singer-songwriters and so much more (mostly in MONO).
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subset: commoncrawl


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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Sometimes I just have to say something...
Apparently it's a scandal to have a blog called 'I like bubbles' when you have been a holy priest at some point. And while I smartly ignored the first post, after the second all I could think was 'are you really that childish? wow.'
I thought this sort of stuff would be below you Seri and Jov. Unfortunately Ambrosyne didn't entirely rise above it either.
Sad to say I now have two less blogs that I read :(
Rivs, I'll take your snarkiness above this sort of nonsense any day....
6 comments:
I don't know I thought it was more tongue in cheek, that might got out of hand. Actually I thought of a Blog War. We all make toons somewhere and duke it out, and post the winners, and losers.ReplyDelete
It's a game, and we blog about this game. So you can't take yourself, or others too serious. Oh and what the hell is snarkiness?
Ah, tongue in cheek...I might have a different sense of humor on this side of the puddle then.ReplyDelete
Snarky: A witty mannerism, personality, or behavior that is a combination of sarcasm and cynicism. Usually accepted as a complimentary term. Snark is sometimes mistaken for a snotty or arrogant attitude.
Recent blog:=- Sometimes I just have to say something...
- KlepsacovicSeptember 16, 2009 at 1:07 AM
It seemed like a silly post, not a mean one. I'd certainly take no offense if someone pointed out that I don't play a troll shaman anymore or pointed out that their racials are not overpowered. Okay maybe a little, it ruins the mystery.ReplyDelete
- TamarindSeptember 16, 2009 at 12:09 PM
I read it as just silliness ... but I didn't follow it after the REVELATION and then the REBUTTAL, so perhaps it just got out of hand? Is it still going on? Although I suppose if you start making a big deal out of people's blog names, you're on a slippery slope to insanity. For the record, my orbs are 100% righteous.ReplyDelete
Recent blog:=- The Male Gaze in Grizzly Hills or "It Shouldn't Bug Me But it Does"
I don't know if it's still going on. If this really was something funny just gotten out of hand, soit, but it gave me that little chill inside that made me feel not nice. That made me feel as if I should say, hey now, can we be a bit nicer to each other?ReplyDelete
And I'm not a 100% anything, most of the time I like bubbles, but I have a kitteh as well, and a pewpew hunter, and a lowbie warlock....and wow altitis anybody?
Recent blog:=- Sometimes I just have to say something...
Here I thought I WAS arrogant...and snotty. You do learn something every day :PReplyDelete


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Apple is known for being secretive to the extreme, but did you know some of their employees look like they're dressed up for Dungeons & Dragons LARPing while at work?
Here's stuff from the NYT article that we already knew:
Secrecy at Apple is not just the prevailing communications strategy; it is baked into the corporate culture. Employees working on top-secret projects must pass through a maze of security doors, swiping their badges again and again and finally entering a numeric code to reach their offices, according to one former employee who worked in such areas. Work spaces are typically monitored by security cameras, this employee said.
This stuff is common in normal companies even, and a good majority of tech employees have badges as a permanent fashion staple. But this, this is interesting:
Some Apple workers in the most critical product-testing rooms must cover up devices with black cloaks when they are working on them, and turn on a red warning light when devices are unmasked so that everyone knows to be extra-careful, he said.
That seems a bit over the top to me, but hey, you know what? It seems to be working for them. Waitaminute.[NY Times]


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· Rating details · 14,891 ratings · 1,309 reviews
A million copy seller, Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is a classic economic primer. But it is also much more, having become a fundamental influence on modern "libertarian" economics of the type espoused by Ron Paul and others.
Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the "Austrian School," which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.
Many current economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than 50 years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt's focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson, every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication. (less)
Paperback, 218 pages
Published 1979 by Three Rivers Press (first published 1946)
Original Title – Economics in One Lesson
Edition Language – English


text: In the computing world, detecting problems is far easier than fixing them. Take antimalware software: It's always been better at accurately finding viruses and the like than at cleaning up and repairing infected systems. That left security professionals with an ongoing conundrum for the past three decades: How can we be certain we've cleaned up a system once it's been compromised? Just because it tells you it's infection-free doesn't mean it is. Malware can modify one bit, and because you don't know which bit has changed, you have to do a complete recovery.The answer is you can't trust a system once it's been compromised unless you completely rebuild it. In today's world of insufficient backups, that task usually gets distilled into arduous and time-consuming tasks. For example, you may have to copy off all your data that isn't backed up, format the drive, re-install the operating system and software, then replace the data.[ Roger A. Grimes offers a guided tour of the latest threats in InfoWorld's Shop Talk video, "Fighting today's malware." | Stay up to date on the latest security developments with InfoWorld's Security Central newsletter. ]Some of my favorite security features, which protect against malicious hackers and malware, focus more on detecting than preventing or fixing problems. For example, most disk encryption software (such as Microsoft BitLocker Drive Encryption, Symantec PGP Whole Disk Encryption, or open source TrueCrypt) will alert you when the data it protects has been modified but cannot be repaired. No surprise here -- encryption and integrity are two different functions. Knowing you're exploited and knowing how to easily fix that exploit has always been a challenge.For the past decade, there've been a growing number of solutions trying to improve the missing piece of the puzzle. Tripwire, one of the early and best-known host-intrusion applications, can not only detect unauthorized changes, it can restore systems to their known, compliant states. The problem with Tripwire and other "snapshot" software programs: They can tell you if a measured system has undergone a change, but they have no way of knowing if the measured system itself was trustworthy in the first place. How is a software program supposed to know if a system of which it takes a snapshot is unexploited to begin with? Normally the answer has been to make sure that the system you measure is clean and trustworthy at the start, but that's hard to ensure in a large enterprise environment.Wyatt Starnes, a Tripwire co-founder, created a new company called SignaCert that tried to address the problem. SignaCert collects the file properties of tens of millions of legitimate files, including operating system files, software programs, driver files, and so on. The product uses that information to determine if a system has only known legitimate files. There's no need to start with a brand-new, clean system. Many other application control programs such as Bit9 Parity and Lumension Application Control have started providing the same service.Many OEMs, using hidden disk partitions or install disks, have long allowed system administrators to reset PCs to their original delivered states. Infected too badly to clean it up? Just start all over. A "renew" functionality formats the disk, which means the user can end up losing data that isn't backed up ahead of time. Either way, the user has to re-install now missing patches and other software programs and customizations that were added since the beginning. But at least the malicious modification is gone -- that's remediation, not just detection.Even operating systems are getting into repair and remediation. Windows 8 has new refresh-and-reset functionality. Refresh will reinstall Windows, but keep your files and other important custom data. Reset will take the system back to its original state. iOS and Android users have similar options.The feature doesn't help a user figure out what the infection was nor where it came from. Still, it's a big improvement over reformatting and reinstalling everything, which can take more than an hour. Now, it's 5 minutes and you're up and running again.It's an exciting time in the computer security world because more and more remediation options are coming in the near future. The days of detection-only protection schemes will be eventually phased out in favor push-button remediation. It's been a long wait.This story, "After infection: New schemes to restore your systems," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Keep up on the latest developments in network security and read more of Roger Grimes's Security Adviser blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.


text: bio Mark's work includes fine art, commercial, documentary and events. In addition to photography, he has worked in film, theatre, and dance, both as an artist and in management. His work has allowed him to travel throughout North America, as well as abroad. This diverse and extensive background helps to define his unobtrusive and unique approach to creating images. He brings a fresh and artistic vision to each project and he folds seamlessly into the environment he's working in. Mark has an M.F.A. in theatre and has studied with such greats as Joel Sternfeld, Paul Austin and Sara Rudner. Throughout his career, Mark has photographed dancers, musicians, actors, politicians, writers and everyday people.


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The door to Ann McKee's office is a shrine to the human brain: artistic, scientific, and comic. An iridescent Andy Warhol carrying a Campbell's Soup can keeps company with a newspaper photograph of the anatomist and neurologist who created the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell University. A teenage boy slouches across a 2006 cover of The New Yorker, the lobes of his not-yet-adult brain depicted under a baseball cap. "MySpace" dominates his prefrontal cortex, an illustration of just how much has changed in social media, sports, and brain science. A bumper sticker asks, "Got brains?"
Brains she's got. Brains in glass jars in the storage room across the hall from her office. Brains blown up in digital images taken from autopsies she has done on some of America's most famously deceased athletes. Brains stored in a deli case in white plastic tubs that might otherwise accommodate 10 pounds of potato salad. Brains in baggies, slices of tissue that, she says, remind some people of the pickled ginger served with sushi.
This is the Brain Bank at the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center in Bedford, Massachusetts. Here, in a small room dominated by stainless steel, McKee performs autopsies. She examines the brains of athletes — men and women — who, without really knowing it, put themselves in harm's way. She sees the brains of soldiers who knew the risk. In all of them, she sees what happens when the brain is assaulted.
Among other things, Ann McKee is chief neuropathologist for the VA, Boston University's Alzheimer's Disease Center, the Framingham Heart Study, the New England Centenarian Study, and the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, which was created in 2008 to examine the impact of collisions between oversize human beings in pursuit of balls, yards, pucks, wins.
She is a mother, a painter, and a frustrated jock who says she can't keep up with her family. She is exhausted and inexhaustible. "I think it shows, but I can't stop."
Only she thinks she looks her age — 59. "Most neuropathologists look and sound like they've spent time in formaldehyde," says David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center. "Ann, well … "
"She's a brilliant scientist who happens to be a little blonde bombshell," says Eleanor Perfetto, widow of former offensive lineman Ralph Wenzel, whose brain tissue is currently being studied in McKee's lab. Like McKee, Perfetto, a pharmacist who has a Ph.D. in public health and a senior position at Pfizer, knows the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated world. "That's why people look at her and think, This is a woman who cuts up brains? There's such a dichotomy. Her work is something a lot of people would not want to do, and certainly not a lot of women. She's so unexpected."
"I'm a Cheesehead," McKee says.
This explains the framed 1968 Green Bay Packers yearbook and the January 22, 1969, cover of Sports Illustrated with Jerry Kramer cradling Vince Lombardi in his arms. Her pooches at home wear Green Bay Packers dog tags. Within reach of her desk, she has a roster of empty-headed bobbleheads — Brett Favre in green-and-gold, in white-and-green, in purple-and-white; and Aaron Rodgers, Favre's estimable successor in the huddle and in her affections. And a hero of another kind of artistry — a ringer in street clothes named Vincent van Gogh.
Every football Sunday, she parks herself in front of the TV in her authentic Packers foam Cheesehead ($17.95 at packersproshop.com) and Rodgers's no. 12 jersey and prays that none of the men on the field end up on a dissection table. To date, she has found ravages of CTE, the neurodegenerative brain disease that has become her life's work, in over 70 athletes, nearly 80 percent of those she has examined. Among them: 18 of the 19 NFL players she has autopsied; three NHL enforcers; and a boy just 17 years old. McKee, who received $1 million in funding from the VA as well as a home for her lab, has also documented evidence of CTE in combat veterans exposed to roadside bombs.1
"The coolest thing about Ann is she spends all day doing autopsies on NFL players and can't wait for the weekend to put on her Packer sweatshirt and climb into bed with a big bag of popcorn and a beer," says Gay Culverhouse, former president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who now advocates on behalf of former players.
"Well, I don't usually do it in my bed," McKee says.
The Packers' loss to the Giants in the playoffs was a blow, but also an opportunity to work. By Super Bowl Sunday, she had recovered sufficient equilibrium to host a family party. She wore her Cheesehead — and even volunteered to send me a photograph. "I love it — I love football," she says, her face falling like the pocket collapsing around her favorite quarterback. "I'd like to put everything I know about it in another room when I'm watching it. But it's hard to do it through the whole game. I have enormous admiration for the physical athleticism and ability. It's strategic but requires skill that most people don't have. I get extremely caught up in it. At the end of the game I think, How could I watch this?"
The day America gave itself to Super Bowl XLVI feels as long ago as the Roman Empire. Since then?
• March 2: NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announces the findings of an investigation into bounty hunting by the New Orleans Saints, a system — football's favorite word — organized by defensive coordinator Gregg Williams.
• March 21: Goodell suspends Williams as well as Saints general manager Mickey Loomis and head coach Sean Payton.
• April 4: A tape recording of Williams's pregame exhortation is released: "Kill the head, the body will die." (Those pregame, pep talk fighting words sicken Perfetto. "I've seen what happens when the brain is killed," she told me a month before her husband's death. "It is a long, agonizing journey for that body to die.")
• April 19: Ray Easterling, former Falcons safety, commits suicide. He and his wife were lead plaintiffs in the first class action suit filed against the NFL, in August 2011, seeking damages for seven former players. A year later, there are approximately 113 suits pending, involving more than 3,000 players, which have been consolidated into a master complaint in federal district court in Philadelphia. This class action suit charges the NFL and official helmet maker Riddell with negligence and hiding information linking football-related head trauma to permanent brain injuries.2
• April 30: Headstrong, an Off-Broadway play about a former NFL player living with post-concussion syndrome, premieres.
• May 2: Goodell suspends four Saints players, including Jonathan Vilma and Scott Fujita, a member of the NFL Players Association executive committee who has advocated for independent neurologists to be on the sidelines. That same day, Junior Seau, a future Hall of Famer who did not have a diagnosed history of concussions, was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest — the same awful methodology Dave Duerson chose when he killed himself, leaving a suicide note asking that his brain be left in care of Ann McKee and her team. The findings of CTE in Duerson's brain were released on May 2, 2011.
• June 13: Pop Warner football, which registered more than 285,000 children ages 5-15 to play in 2011, bans head-to-head hits and limits contact in practice to 40 minutes a day. That night, Terry Bradshaw, the former Steelers quarterback who now receives treatment for short-term memory loss at the Amen Clinic in Newport Beach, California, told Jay Leno: "In the next decade, we will not see football as it is."
It is a measure of the sea change in public perception that Junior Seau was immediately popularly diagnosed with CTE, despite the existence of personal problems that might have played a role in the suicide. On July 12, his family announced that part of his brain tissue had been donated to the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for study. Two weeks later, Goodell announced the creation of NFL Total Wellness, a new program of mental health benefits, including Life Line, a free telephone service staffed by mental health professionals and suicide prevention experts. The next day the medical examiner in Richmond, Virginia, confirmed a diagnosis of CTE in Easterling's brain.
The potential cost of employment in McKee's favorite sport is never far from her mind. She reaches for Green Bay Brett and flicks his molded-plastic noggin with her finger. The oversize head bobbles and wags, lurching back and forth on its spring like a kid trying out a pogo stick. Only the smirk on his prefab mug remains fixed.
"Get the irony?" she says.
Over the last four years, McKee has become the most visible member of a cohort of research scientists and family members — wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the dead, dying, and demented — who have forced the issue of chronic brain trauma into the forefront of American consciousness. The process has engendered enormous publicity as well as criticism and jealousy in the scientific community, which is every bit as competitive as the NFL. Her work has brought "a great deal of acclaim, exposure, and recognition," says neurosurgeon Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University and co-director of CSTE. "But at the same time it's brought a great deal of pressure. Not everybody greets her findings with the same degree of enthusiasm."
War-painted denizens of the upper deck may view her as The Woman Trying To Destroy Football. In fact, she is The Woman Trying To Save Football From Itself. The process has engendered a particular intimacy with those who entrust their loved ones to her posthumous care. Virginia Grimsley, whose husband, John, was the first NFL player diagnosed by McKee, says, "He's in good hands with her. They're all in good hands with her.
"If Joe Six-Pack was as educated as the wives that have gone through this and as Dr. McKee, Joe Six-Pack would sit down, shut up, and continue to drink his six-pack," Grimsley says. "She's not trying to destroy football."
McKee says: "I'm just trying to tell football what I see."
What she sees through her microscope is mediated by a painterly sensibility that suffuses how she talks about her work, how she approaches it, and how she presents it. She was an art major freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. She gave it up in favor of making a living, but she never quit making art. "I think you have to be creative to make a difference in science," she says. "So being artistic, it's not always going with what is accepted. I'm not your run-of-the-mill scientist."
It took an artist to see beyond Joe Theismann's splintered tibia, Johnny U's gnarled fingers, and Bo Jackson's necrotic hip to the head-banging obvious and to grasp the importance of aesthetics in changing public opinion. "Actually, I do think that makes a big difference," she says. "I think that laying out something in a visually pleasing way is very important. I look at Mad Men and how you advertise to get your point across. In order to swing public perception and gain acceptance for your work, you have to be your own advertising firm."
She photographs every brain before autopsy and memorializes slivers of tissue in irrefutable portraits of disease that line the hallways of her lab. Exhibit A: a montage she created from sections of 27 damaged brains, white matter arranged like so many Marilyn Monroes by Andy Warhol. "This is Eric Scoggins," she says. "This is Wally Hilgenberg. This is Mike Borich, a college player. We got it from the coroner, so it's not a complete section. This is John Grimsley. This is Dave Duerson. Up here we have Derek Boogaard, the hockey player."
Some painters revisit a single image again and again — a billowing sail or perhaps a lily pond — finding the particular in the generic. Tau, a protein in brain cells that turns rogue with repeated trauma, is McKee's subject; the brain is her canvas. "If you look at the paintings of Van Gogh, he saw things other people didn't see," Hovda says. "Good neuropathologists see things through a microscope that you and I don't see clearly, and I have spent a lot of time looking through a microscope. It's because they have an artistic appreciation for what they are seeing and the ability to recognize it as pathology. She has demonstrated pathology in a way that is beautiful and irrefutable."
To gaze upon McKee's montage is to see the unseen. Daniel Perl, professor of pathology/neuropathology at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, who has known and worked with McKee for two decades, says: "I think she has completely changed the way we see the experience of playing football."
Can I see a brain?" I ask.
"Sure, we can go to the morgue," she says.
She leads the way down the hall to an unprepossessing room in an unprepossessing brick building on the campus of the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital. Currently, there are 125 brains registered to the Brain Bank, among them 21 veterans who experienced mild traumatic brain injury. Chris Nowinski, co-director of CSTE and founder of the Sports Legacy Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to concussion awareness, secures the donations. Five hundred athletes — including him — have promised their brains to McKee.
They arrive in buckets packed in Styrofoam boxes, inside plastic bags on wet ice. Sometimes, after hours, deliveries are made to her home. Once, inadvertently, a box was left with a neighbor. "I can only imagine what they were thinking," she told Mark Kram of the Philadelphia Daily News in 2009. It hasn't happened since.
The contents are precious, so on-time deliveries are essential. "Our greatest fear is that something will get lost," she says. "We have to go from hand-to-hand-to-hand."
At the lab, the brain is weighed, photographed, and preserved in fixative, a Formalin derivative that firms the tissue and makes it easier to cut. Half will be frozen at 80 degrees below zero Celsius for future investigators; the other half becomes McKee's raw material.
McKee regards each as a charge, a challenge, a privilege, a person. "It's actually the person of the body," she says. "If you don't have a brain, you have no identity."
She sees beauty in the infinite handiwork of the human brain and the complexity of its structure. "I do love the way the brain looks. I love the way it's shaped. When I see a brain that's been damaged, it hits you like — "
She stops.
"You see tearing of certain structures. You see holes where they shouldn't be. You see shrinkage."
She has seen brains that have defied aging and those that have aged prematurely; brains that have sustained damage from a concussive rocket blast 150 feet away and brains damaged from one too many head butts at the line of scrimmage. She has seen so many brains she has lost count. "Somewhere in the thousands," she says. "One hundred and fifty a year for 25 years — what's that?"
In the morgue there is a single autopsy table, and a drawer labeled FEET FIRST, HEAD BY DOOR. Her colleague Dr. Victor Alvarez opens the drawer, revealing the remains of an unidentified donor swaddled in a crisp white hospital sheet, a bundle as small as an Egyptian mummy. "Just like on TV," he says.
At McKee's behest, Alvarez retrieves the atrophied brain of an elderly veteran from a white bucket. Fixative had rendered it the color of a peeled potato too long exposed to the air. The weight was scribbled in Magic Marker — 1,017 grams.
"Should be 1,400," McKee says — the size of a small chicken. "The NFL guys should be 1,600. Some of them weigh half that much."
Alvarez placed the brain on a black cutting board atop the stainless steel table and took up his scalpel. He paused, almost imperceptibly, before making the practiced and decisive cut.
It felt like a sacred pause.
"That moment of awe lasts a long time, because you not only open the box but then you investigate, take photographs," McKee says. "There's a somberness that sometimes comes over the room because you're now starting to become involved."
There is excitement too. She doesn't want anyone to get the wrong idea of what she means by this. It is the exhilaration bred from intellectual rigor, the thrill of scientific discovery and the tantalizing prospect of finding a way to diagnose the disease in the living and intervene in the degenerative process before too much damage is done. The work is compelling and consuming. One morning, two new donations were delivered to the lab at the same hour a widow arrived to see where her husband had been diagnosed. McKee asked: "Do you mind if I just … ?" The visitor understood: She just couldn't wait to take a look.
By definition, pathology begins with the denouement. "Now you're at the end, and then you're going to slowly unravel the mystery, the puzzle," McKee says. "You start with what the brain looked like at death, get an idea of how impaired it was, and then over the next few months you're going to unravel the rest of the story."
She may know if the donor on her table played football or hockey or launched one too many headers on goal. Scientific bias precludes any further familiarity. Googling will have to come later. "I have to know the name," she says. "A number of times it's come up they want me to just use numbers, and I can't do that. It's got to have a name because it is a person, a life."
She was born into a football family in a football town some 30 miles from Lambeau Field. As a young girl she was known as AC — as in the spark plug — because she was the fastest kid in school.
Growing up she loved Barbie as much as she did Bart Starr. Of course. "She got Ken and all those wigs," McKee says.
She was a cheerleader in high school — "The only sport they allowed me to do." Her brothers played college football — as did her father, whose 1930s team picture from Grinnell College hangs in the conference room where we met. "We would spend nearly the whole summer at Post Lake," she says. "Our best friend was the high school coach, and so Mr. Dillon would have us run the tires every morning and we did football practice. That is what we'd do all summer. My brothers would let me play."
McKee on McKee: "I had promise."
She was the youngest of five children, seven years younger than the next-oldest sibling, Chuck, a star high school and college quarterback. "I just admired him like crazy," she says. "I went to every game of his. One time when I was 8 I put a sign in the yard because people would go past our house to get to the stadium: 'Chuck McKee lives here.'"
The NFL was interested, but he wasn't. "He didn't think it was so good for him, actually," she says. "He didn't say it was about his brain, but I think he was looking at his longevity. He went to medical school instead. He's a huge reason why I'm in this business."
Last on the familial depth chart — "shorter, slower, dumber — last to the table, the last in everything," she learned to "fight and scratch for position." Good training for future tussles with the NFL. A twice-divorced mother of three, she presides over an almost empty nest — her 26-year-old daughter is a med student and a newlywed; her 22-year-old son played soccer, not football. He was a great goalie, his mom says, and would have been a great wide receiver. "I would have loved him to play, because it's what you do in my family. His dad didn't want him to play. And I thought my husband was the biggest wimp because of that. Turns out now it might have helped him."
Her 16-year-old daughter lives at home in Massachusetts. "I'm still dealing with driving carpool," Mckee says, rolling her eyes. "I've been a mother for a l-o-o-o-n-g time."
The no-nonsense pantsuits and plain button-down shirts she favors in public appearances may be appropriate to her very particular workplace, but do not succeed in lowering her profile. Hip red reading glasses that magnify piercing blue eyes are accompanied by an unexpectedly girlish giggle and a mordant sense of humor. She has stared down congressmen and NFL officials with those baby blues. ("She's not exactly Jack Klugman," says Robert Stern, a co-director of CSTE.)
Initially McKee was greeted by the league as enthusiastically as Vikings fans at Lambeau Field. She first met with what was then called the "Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee" at NFL headquarters in New York on May 19, 2009. She remembers sitting at an "enormous boardroom table with a bunch of non-smiling men in suits. The atmosphere was cool and noticeably testosterone-filled," she says. "There were a total of two females in the room.
"The reception was one of complete dismissal. The men representing the NFL had made up their minds that anything I had to say was not accurate or not applicable. After I spoke, there was continued denial that the findings had any merit, and they proceeded to let me know that."
"If she sat in the corner and I showed the pictures, the response would have been the same," says Dan Perl, who also addressed the meeting. But over the years, McKee's heightened profile and accumulated results have engendered some not-so-subtle sexism. "Being marginalized by the NFL and a lot of our colleagues — that has a lot to do with being a woman," says Perl.
The October 28, 2009, hearings before the House Judiciary Committee represented another Rubicon. Before swearing an oath, she had to decide, "How much did I believe it?" The demented condition of a childhood hero — the Packers' splendid safety Willie Wood — was deeply affecting, as was her testimony and that of Culverhouse, and Perfetto, all of which left Congressman Lamar Smith fuming and Congressman Ted Poe grumping about "the end of football as we know it." Why, if Congress gets involved, Poe groused, "we would all be playing touch football out there."
"I love the scowl she gave the congressmen," Virginia Grimsley says. "I'd like to give them a scowl myself."
Within a month the NFL had accepted the resignations of the co-chairmen of its discredited brain injury committee and configured a new one: the Head, Neck and Spine Committee. Cantu serves as a senior adviser, as well as medical director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. In April 2010 CSTE received $1 million in unrestricted funds from the NFL, part of which has funded McKee's research whether it's something the NFL agrees with or not.3
But giving voice to the dead on 60 Minutes, in the pages of the New York Times, and before Congress (four of 25 pages on her CV are devoted to media appearances) has also made her a target. Richard Ellenbogen, co-chairman of the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee and chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine, says she needs to publish more in peer-reviewed journals and conduct studies with controls comparing incidence in collision sports with other athletes, such as rowers and female basketball players. He also says she has crossed the divide from hard science into advocacy. "She's possessed," says Ellenbogen. "She is no longer impartial."
This is a charge Cantu adamantly rejects: "She is a scientist first, not an activist first."
McKee sighs. "You get enemies in this business." She must tread a not-so-fine line between SLI's advocacy mission and the publishing protocols of medical research. "This was discussed from the day we started working together," Nowinski says. "She recognized she would be criticized in academic circles for talking about [some of] the work before academic publication. A lot of the blame — pushing for some of the information to get out comes from me."
Hovda, whose research into the neurobiology of concussions demonstrated the vulnerability of the brain to second insults, says McKee's science is rigorous, significant, and does not overinterpret the available data, which is inherently limited by the facts of neuropathology — you only get to diagnose people who are already dead.
The bull's-eye on her back is likely to remain there as long as postmortem exam remains the only way to diagnose CTE. Progress toward identifying the disease in the living has been rapid — compared to the agonizingly slow pace of Alzheimer's disease research. Blood tests for tau, diffusion tensor imaging, functional MRI, and biomarkers that will allow doctors to image the disease are all in development. Already, Hovda says, researchers at UCLA can image tau and beta-amyloid deposits in laboratory animals, and may be able to do so in humans within the year. "I'd love to put her out of this business," he says. "And I bet Ann would love me to put her out of business."
McKee says: "I'll keep this up as long as it takes."
Longevity runs in her family.
She never expected to get inside the head of the NFL. She thought she would become an internist and turned to neurology and neuropathology not to get away from people but to get closer to what makes them uniquely themselves. "They entrust me with their privacy, really," she says. "What a person's tissues look like, what struggles they were going through during life, and then what disease they have at death is a very private matter. That's as naked as you could possibly be. It's revealing yourself and revealing your internal structure."
For 25 years she studied tau in perfect anonymity, trying to understand its pivotal role in aging and Alzheimer's disease.
"Why tau?" I asked.
"Because it's pretty," was the artist/pathologist's reply.
The tau protein, named for the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet, is a naturally occurring substance in brain cells. Its job is to hold together microtubules, which are rigid, hollow rods like beach reeds that serve as conduits between brain cells. Tau provides "the scaffolding to support its shape and also to help transport molecules, nutrients, back and forth," McKee says. "Without tau the cell would collapse and the transport functions would be critically impaired."
With repeated head trauma tau turns insurgent, a guerrilla force occupying and killing more and more of the brain. "It falls off the microtubules, and so they fall apart too," McKee says.
Each concussive blow to the head — a right cross, a body check into the boards, a helmet-to-helmet collision in the open field, a header inside the goalie's circle — becomes a potential IED, a bomb hidden on a neural pathway. Think of it this way, she says: "This transport function of the cell is just like a road. And the road just fell apart."
Dementia pugilistica — punch drunkenness — first appeared in the medical literature in 1928. In 2002, Bennet Omalu, then a neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh, diagnosed the first known case of CTE in former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster. He joined forces with Chris Nowinski, who procured three more donations, including former Eagle Andre Waters. All showed evidence of CTE.
In 2003, McKee performed an autopsy on a 72-year-old veteran who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease 15 years earlier. She found toxic tangles of tau common to Alzheimer's and CTE, but they appeared in a totally unfamiliar pattern. And there was no evidence of the beta-amyloid plaques also present in Alzheimer's patients.
After the autopsy, she learned he had been a world-champion boxer. "That was the aha moment," she says. "I kept asking my colleagues if they had another boxing brain. I couldn't get it out of my mind."
McKee's laboratory does the neuropathology work for the Framingham Heart Study, the landmark multi-generational investigation into causes of heart disease. "I went back and stained all the Framingham heart disease cases we had, looking for a pattern of change that looked anything like this. I have drawers and drawers and drawers of these slides, and nothing looked like it.
"Then [in 2005] we got another through the Alzheimer's Center. There wasn't any history of head trauma. I went through all the medical records and nothing, so I got the name of the family. And I called the daughter, and she said, 'Well, he did box professionally in his 20s.' So, that was like, 'Okaaay.'"
In 2008 Nowinski came calling. He had parted ways with Omalu. He was also suffering the consequences of his WWE career, when he was known as Chris Harvard. Four wrestling concussions and two others on the gridiron had left him with severe headaches and impaired short-term memory — although he hasn't forgotten the taste of blood in the back of his throat that accompanied hits he took as a defensive tackle for the Crimson. (Thanks to a recent pickup basketball game, the count is now seven.)
He consulted Cantu about his symptoms. The doctor-patient relationship evolved into a professional alliance. They created SLI and later partnered with Robert Stern, director of Boston University's Alzheimer's Disease Clinical & Research Program, to create the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy with the goal of acquiring and examining brains of deceased athletes exhibiting symptoms of premature dementia. All they needed was someone to do the autopsies. "Have I got the neuropathologist for you!" said Stern.
McKee sounds a lot like a football coach when she talks about her team at the Brain Bank, except, she says, her people give 400 percent. Over the course of three or four painstaking months, McKee's staff will cut half the brain into slices the thickness of white bread. They will use a high-tech deli slicer called a Microtome to shave 50-micron slivers of tissue — 0.001968 inches — which will shrink to less than half that size and be stained, fixed to slides, and magnified, perhaps 100 times, under the microscope.
"Handwork," she calls it.
Unstained, tau is unidentifiable. Staining makes the texture and the damage palpable. Some pathologists use a blood-red color to dramatize areas of disease. McKee favors brown, the color of dried blood.
On the day I visited, she spoke about the woman who prepared her slides for the last decade and whose devotion to her craft, despite failing health, was that of a mother hoping to find a way to protect her son. "An artisan," McKee calls her. "Like a person who makes a mosaic out of a million little pieces. It can take three or four hours just to lay the tissue out on the slide" — not including cutting and staining — "because you get it when it's wet and you have to manually smooth down every single teeny-tiny wrinkle."
John Grimsley, a linebacker who suffered three concussions in college and eight in the NFL, was the first NFL player whose tissue they examined. What McKee saw was so unprecedented in her experience that she twice asked Dan Perl to come look at the slides. It was a case of: Do you see what I see? He did. "When you look at the tangles, you say, 'Wow,'" Perl says.
While McKee and her staff dissect and preserve tissue, Stern, who oversees the CSTE registry, interviews family members to develop a case history: number of years and position played and in what decade, number of concussions suffered and symptoms noted. The most frightening finding is that "the biggest problem isn't the concussions, actually," McKee says. "It's the sub-concussive hits that mount up every single time these guys line up."
It's been estimated that there are 1,000 to 1,500 of those kinds of hits per season per person in the NFL. "A big job liability," she says.
In November, Stern received a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study 100 former players between ages 40 and 69 with symptoms consistent with CTE who played positions at the greatest exposure for getting hit in the head — defensive linemen, linebackers, offensive linemen, and defensive backs. The goal is to establish risk factors for the disease and genetic predisposition. "If we can figure out the genetic risk, we could be much smarter about informing individuals who are considering playing these sports what their relative risks are," McKee says.
Despite new NFL rules limiting the number of padded practices, and protecting defenseless receivers, the cumulative effect of violent collision remains dire. McKee believes there is "a window of reversibility" of perhaps one year before the disease has had "a chance to gain speed [and] cause the cells to die."
Stern: "With each brain that comes in, especially the younger ones, and especially the ones without any known significant history of concussions, but a whole lot of sub-concussive blows, that's where she gets really scared. That's where we all get really scared."
Posters hanging in the conference room show the sickening march of the disease — an 18-year-old who looked like he had cigarette holes burned in his brain; Owen Thomas, a junior and co-captain of the University of Pennsylvania football team who never suffered a concussion; Dave Duerson, who played 11 years in the NFL.
McKee has developed a four-tier system for staging the disease that first invades the front cortex — the province of judgment, insight, inhibition, and concentration — and then begins to "work its way inward, penetrating the essence of a person."
Staging is determined by the amount and distribution of tau. In Grade 1, a few hot spots appear on the surface, clustered around small blood vessels. "You see those holes on the side walls, the holes and tangles in a circle around the hole?" she says, pointing to Owen Thomas's damaged brain tissue. "That's a 21-year-old brain!"
The blood vessels vex her and perplex her. "Why the blood vessels?" she says, tracing a painterly splatter on his brain with her forefinger. "What am I missing?"
She was talking to the disease, not to me.
In Grade 2, the spots multiply but most brain tissue is undisturbed. Thomas had Grade 2 of the disease when he committed suicide; the 18-year-old had Grade 1.
In Grade 3, the neurofibulary tangles she likens to skeins of unraveling yarn invade multiple lobes of the brain. Besieged, the medial temporal lobe atrophies. The hippocampus, essential for learning and memory, is attacked. The amygdala, which governs aggressiveness and rage, is assaulted. Symptoms multiply and intensify: headaches, depression, insomnia, anxiety; loss of impulse control, executive function, and emotional regulation; tremors, vertigo, slurred speech and a staggered gait; and finally dementia.
A slide of Dave Duerson's tissue demonstrates the awfulness of Grade 3 CTE. Under the microscope his brain tissue looks like the bark of a tree. "You see all those little spots of damage?" McKee says. "And he doesn't even have the worst case of this. This is really substantial disease, especially since he's only 50."4
Women lose lovers, friends, husbands, partners. Men lose their way, their memories, their lives. Ministers forget verses from the Bible. Hall of Famers fail to recognize themselves on trading cards. Outpatients get lost en route to the doctor. "A lot of ex-wives step in to help their ex-husbands," says Culverhouse, who created the Players' Outreach Program in Tampa Bay to provide health care and disability benefits for former players. She has an Ed.D. from Columbia University, a terminal illness, and a history of concussions from falling off too many horses. (She, too, has promised her brain to McKee.) Her clinic schedules appointments on Saturdays so players aren't recognized. "One of the ex-wives set the GPS so her former husband could get to our medical center," she says. Hours after his appointment, one of the nurses found him driving around the parking lot in circles. "No one had reset the GPS."
With each new report about reckless, homeless, abusive players, drug addiction and suicide, McKee wonders: How much is attributable to brain disease and how much to the corrosive effect of celebrity and entitlement on a particular personality structure?
"There are horrible life changes in terms of memory, emotion, and lack of impulse control, which heaps gobs of negativity on them, divorce, addiction, businesses that fail," Cantu says. "It's a vicious cycle, a perfect storm. The final event for those that die young is not the brain damage per se but what the brain damage has led them to do, which is what caused Dave Duerson to put a gun to his chest."
Duerson's last conscious act was to preserve his brain for science. That choice, Cantu says, also guaranteed a very painful death.
The most affecting of McKee's visual aids is a triptych she created documenting the progression of the disease. When she paints, she prefers oils, figurative painting. This digital portrait is deconstructed 21st-century abstract art.
The first panel, a slice of healthy brain tissue, reminds me of one in a series of Sam Francis paintings called "Blue Balls" but rendered in purples and whites. The second panel, a section of John Grimsley's brain, looks like a Jackson Pollock — Shimmering Substance, perhaps. The last panel from the boxer, who was her patient zero, calls to mind Willem de Kooning's Excavation.
The images have entered the public domain and the collective sporting unconscious thanks to permissions granted by family members. Still, Virginia Grimsley had the wind knocked out of her one day a year or so after her husband's death when she saw one of McKee's brain images flash across the TV screen: John's brain. She reminded herself — "It's good. It's all good. It has to come out."
Then she left a message for Nowinski. "You might want to warn the families."
Nowinski had hand-delivered John's slides to Houston in advance of the Family Conference, a conference call with family members during which she and Stern present their findings. Grimsley doesn't remember much from that time. Her synapses were snapped when her 45-year-old husband, a lifelong hunter, accidentally killed himself while cleaning a new gun. She now believes that he forgot that there were bullets in the chamber. She asked her boss, a pediatrician, to be on the call when she got the results from Stern and McKee. But it turned out Grimsley didn't need a translator because, she says, McKee is "so plain-English."
For McKee, the Family Conference is her first chance to fill the holes in the lives she sees under the microscope. For the wives, mothers, and daughters she calls "the crusaders," it is an opportunity to reclaim their loved ones from memories and reputations ravaged by disease.
"They're the only witnesses, which is also what intrigues Ann," Nowinski says. "The worst things are only seen by one person, and these stories never would see the light of day without them."
This is when she feels most like a clinician. "I'm being a doctor to people, but now the people are the families they've left behind."
She is asked "a million questions," Nowinski says, and stays on the line as long as there are answers she can give. "She allowed me to talk," Grimsley says simply. "I think she got a sense of who John was. This is not just brain tissue to her. This is someone's life, someone's memory, someone's husband, someone's son, someone's father."
After two and a half hours, Grimsley finally had a way to understand how a man who made his living as an outdoor guide ending up shooting himself to death. For the first time since his death in February 2008, she could exhale.
Tom McHale's slides arrived by mail at his widow's home along with a caution from McKee: "You might want to wait to open them until we are on the phone together."
Lisa McHale couldn't wait.
The impact was concussive. Her body shook. Her mind went blank.
McHale, who now works as a liaison between families and SLI, had been so sure they wouldn't find anything; so positive he had never suffered a concussion during nine years as an NFL offensive lineman. But doctors at the drug rehab center where he was treated for repeated relapse, depression, and irritability had no answers for them. "You seem to have embraced all that we have," a doctor told Lisa and Tom days before his death. "I've treated professional athletes before and I've had a similar problem, and I don't know what the problem is. Maybe it's the humility thing. Maybe you just can't reach that level of humility."
Lisa thought: You don't know my husband at all.
But she was no longer sure she ever knew him. Where was the sweet boy she met in college at Cornell? Who was this addict who used drugs with their three children in the house? Who succumbed to the overdose that killed him after Lisa told him he had to leave? Maybe I just remember Tom wrong, she thought. Maybe I glamorized him — because nobody's that good, and nobody changes that much.
After McKee presented her findings, McHale told her: "You gave me back my Prince Charming."
Sylvia Mackey heard from McKee and Stern two weeks before the Super Bowl in February, seven months after the death of her husband, John, the Hall of Fame tight end, no. 88 for the Baltimore Colts. She was the moving force in the creation of Plan 88, which pays $88,000 a year toward the care of players with dementia, and she is still fighting for the benefits she and other widows are due. She wasn't apprehensive about receiving McKee's report — she was relieved that the results confirmed what she already knew inside. Her 45-year-old son cried.
She says the diagnosis of CTE and frontal temporal dementia explained John's fixation with what she calls his "man bag," a black leather shoulder bag he took everywhere, including to Bobby Mitchell's charity golf tournament in Washington, D.C. "You couldn't touch it," she says. "At a photo session, a lady reached for it and he pushed her back and cursed at her. It was the last time he was invited."
The bag contained the Sharpies he used to sign his autograph: John Mackey, no. 88. The prosaic tools of the celebrity trade were a reminder of who he had been. "We had to send that bag to the assisted living facility," she says. "Finally he forgot about it."
By then he couldn't remember anything at all.
On June 18, Eleanor Perfetto called Nowinski to make arrangements for her husband's brain to be delivered into McKee's care. Ralph Wenzel, who was 69, had been institutionalized since early 2007. Perfetto had long considered herself a widow.
Ralph disappeared little by little after being diagnosed with dementia in 1999. "One morning he got up and went into the bathroom before I could get him dressed," she says. "He came back and said, 'I need to get dressed. There are people in the bathroom.'"
Perhaps he was confused by his own nakedness. The doctors weren't sure.
By Christmas of 2006, belligerence had supplanted hallucination and delusion. He went to live in a lockdown facility. A month later, Perfetto and Wenzel gave an interview to Bernard Goldberg of HBO's Real Sports, though she did all the talking. By then, Wenzel, a high school physical education teacher in his second career, could barely speak. "He hadn't spoken the whole day," Perfetto says. "They probably filmed him six or seven hours. They were hauling the equipment out of the facility. He walked up to Bernie like he wanted to say something. Bernie said, 'Yes, Ralph, what is it?'
"Ralph looked at him very seriously and he said, 'The kids. The kids.'"
Ann McKee doesn't sleep.
"How could she?" Mackey says.
Complete brain rest, the prescription for concussed athletes, is not an option for her. "I wake up in the middle of the night and I work," she says. "I get up and write part of a grant proposal. I dream about their slides. I dream about their lives. I can't put this to bed."
Painting is her refuge — the one place in her life that tau has not infiltrated. She works with a private instructor at an art studio and tries to get there twice a week. "The reason I love art is if you're really painting you are not thinking about this," she says, nodding at an example of brain portraiture. "You have to completely spiral your brain in a different direction. Once you get into that zone, you're resting your brain. I still struggle with this work being very analytical and art being very non-analytical. So to put the two together is a real brain cramp."
She says her house and garden are a wreck. She's embarrassed to have people over. Nowinski sees the toll elsewhere. "She covers it up incredibly well in public," he says. "But there's times she talks about how this research is slowly killing her."
In October 2011, McKee and Kevin Turner were honored at the fourth annual SLI Impact Awards dinner in Boston for their work on behalf of brain-trauma awareness. Turner, a college star for the Crimson Tide and fullback for the Patriots and Eagles, was embarrassed to share the award with her. "What did I do?" he says. "I just got diagnosed with ALS."
Turner, the subject of a new documentary, American Man, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig's disease — in May 2010. Two months later, McKee published a study linking traumatic brain injury with an ALS-type disease, which she has subsequently documented in 11 athletes, amateur and professional.
Turner was among 40 to 50 athletes at the banquet who had promised their brains to McKee. But unlike most of them, he is unlikely to survive her tenure at the Brain Bank. As he accepted a hug and a plaque, he knew that the woman with whom he shared the podium and an embrace will someday receive a Styrofoam box containing his brain and spinal cord. "I want her to use it all," he says.
The guests included family members of traumatic brain injury victims — Perfetto, McHale, and Mackey among them — and athletes of every age and pursuit. "Most were men, and they wanted to meet her because to them, she's a rock star," Nowinski says. "She's the person they're trusting their legacy to. They trust her to take care of their brain and how they're remembered. So I had everybody line up in a receiving line as she went up to the podium to accept the award. Everybody cried. Everybody got a hug."
I reached Kevin Turner in his pickup truck at a fast-food drive-in in Birmingham, Alabama. He was grabbing a sandwich en route to his younger son's basketball game. He pulled his boys out of football after listening to Cantu explain the vulnerability of the brain between ages 6 and 14, which made him less popular than he once was in Birmingham. He will allow his older son, Nolan, to return to the field this fall for freshman year in high school once he turns 15. "My youngest, he's 8," he says. "He doesn't know it yet, [but] he's going to take a break until high school."
By the time I caught up with Turner again six months later, Cole had turned 9 and was complaining bitterly about playing flag football instead of "real football." Things had gotten harder for his father too. He can no longer zip his pants or get himself a glass of water or reach into his pocket for his wallet. (He carries a bag now.) His sons know where he keeps the credit cards. They pump the gas and help change the gearshift when dad is driving, as he was when I reached him again.
He pulled over so we could talk, and a police officer stopped to make sure he was OK. Turner told him he was fine. "I can still breathe, so I can't complain," he says.
He still lives alone but is looking to hire someone to be his hands. He can't rely on his daughter and sons anymore. He doesn't go out to eat much. It's hard to get a fork in his mouth, to get to the bathroom in time, to change the channel on the remote, to answer the telephone. A lot of calls go unanswered.
In June, talking was a problem. It's better now. "One day it felt like there was something in my mouth. I was trying to spit it out," he says. "It felt like I had just come out of the dentist. I couldn't feel my lips."
Turner told me in February that he hoped to visit McKee's lab to see where the work is done. He wondered "what they'll be saying when they're digging into my head — 'here's one of his dumb jokes. We need to take that part out.'"
He also said he was worried that knowing him will make McKee's job more difficult. He wants to have a conversation with her, perhaps in September when he is scheduled to attend a conference in Boston on traumatic brain injury and ALS. "I think I know what I'm going to say," Turner told me. "I'd hope I'd say, 'I'm so happy it's in your hands. I want you to be smiling and thinking about how much fun I had my whole life.' I don't want her to have a bad day at the office."


text: roschler 158 Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 Unlock the power of Evernote's rich set of search operators for finding notes with BitQwik. You can filter search results by the date created or modified, by file type such as PDF files and more, by the tags used or the source application that created the note, and many, many, other useful ways. BitQwik is the Siri-like natural language search tool for Evernote users that understands plain English! Check out just some of the sample searches now. Also, Getting Things Done practitioners or Evernote users that manage their todo lists frequently with Evernote should read this page now. "Evernote power users rejoice: the folks at BitQwik have made a search program that'll bring your abilities to seek out the notes you want more powerful than ever. The great thing about this application is its ability to work with natural language – that meaning you can type in basically anything and it'll know what you're saying." - SlashGear Review of BitQwik. UPDATE: BitQwik is officially in the Evernote Trunk, Productivity section. MAJOR FEATURES LIST: - Access to nearly all of Evernote's powerful reach search grammar via a natural language Siri-like interface. No need to learn Evernote's complex search grammar syntax or keyword set - Support for mixed logic queries that combine AND & OR queries in the same query - The ability to search for strings inside the source URL of notes during a search (E.g. - notes I clipped from the nytimes.com) - Support for nested tags in a search so that the parent tag and all its children are automatically included in your query - The ability to do searches that involve multiple notebooks, and the equal ability to exclude notes that are in one or more notebooks - TagHunter: The built-in tag exploration and management tool that has a powerful fuzzy matching technology Download BitQwik now Note: BitQwik is a Windows program but you can run BitQwik on a Mac PC by following these instructions. Also, TagHunter is now part of BitQwik so its powerful advanced tag exploration features are in BitQwik too! Don't forget to follow this topic if you want to be notified when new versions are posted! Why don't more people use Evernote's powerful search operators? Because you have to memorize the names and the syntax of the special search operators and that is hard. For example, suppose you want to search for all your notes that do not have the words "school" or "breakfast" in the title, that you created in March of 2012, and were made with Evernote Hello. You would have to enter the following into the Evernote search box to find them: -intitle:school -intitle:breakfast created:20120301T000000 created:20120331T000000 sourceApplication:hello With BitQwik you simply type: Show me notes that do not have school or breakfast in the title that I created in March and were made with Evernote Hello Or any almost other sentence that means the exact same thing! There's no special commands or syntax, just plain English sentences that state what you want. If you have any comments or questions, please post a reply to this thread and I'll answer them. Remember, BitQwik is brand new software so expect plenty of bugs and for it to misinterpret what you are trying to say fairly often. But in a few weeks that will all change and it will be the smooth, fun experience it is destined to be. Here is a screen shot of the main screen and below it the resulting search shown in the Evernote client: Link to comment


text:
Amazon.com has purchased flexible touchscreen maker Touchco in an apparent attempt to beef up technology aboard its Kindle e-readers to better compete against Apple's iPad, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
The company plans to merge Touchco's technology and researchers into its Kindle hardware division, Lab126, in Cupertino, California, the newspaper reported on its Web site.
Touchco was formed by a team of computer scientists from New York University's Media Research Lab to develop low-cost, low-power multitouch screens with a technology called interpolating force-sensitive resistance (IFSR). The screens can be used in e-readers and a host of other devices and cost as little as US$10 per square foot, according to the report.
A notice on Touchco's Web site says simply that, "As of January 2010, the company is no longer doing business."
Amazon currently uses screen technology from market leader E-ink, which was bought by Taiwanese manufacturer Prime View International last year. E-ink technology is used in a number of e-readers, including Sony's Reader.
Neither Touchco nor Amazon could immediately be reached for comment.


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Who is The Sucklord? He's a Boba Fett-masked supercriminal whose passion for creating bootleg action figures has penetrated the rarefied world of high art. io9 hit up his recent gallery opening in NYC and learned of all things Suckadelic.
Yesterday marked the opening of "You're An Asshole For Buying This — The Suckadelic Art Toy Universe," a retrospective of The Sucklord's toy-making acumen at the Boo-Hooray Gallery in Chelsea. The show is a detailed look at the career of The Sucklord, whose bootleg action figures command high prices in toy collecting circles.
The Sucklord (née Morgan Phillips) was ex communicado, but his arch-nemesis Vectar the Intolerable (who possesses many, many, many an uncanny mannerism of The Sucklord) was happy to fill in.
What is the origin of The Sucklord?
It all started with a CD called Star Wars Breakbeats, which was an attempt to remix and recontextualize the essence of the original Star Wars and the original trilogy with hip-hop and electronic music. From that was born The Sucklord, who was called The Super Genius at the time, which is basically a Boba Fett hip-hop character, who's been a public representative for the idea. The basic idea was mixing Star Wars with hip-hop — all the other elements, the toy and supervillain shit, grew out of that as the project evolved.
The idea was to get sued by George Lucas, and as that process was going on, hopefully they would realize, "This is brilliant!" and hire Super Genius. But that never manifested and this thing took on a legend of its own and evolve into the toy franchise and videos. The Super Genius was jaded by the whole thing — he wanted to be hired by George Lucas and accepted by the vinyl toy world, and he wasn't, so he became a supervillain. He used to want to use these things to help people, but he became cynical. He started doing this for himself rather than the sake of Star Wars. He became The Sucklord, and any time someone came into The Sucklord's life that had any personality, [he or she] got masked, a character, and a toy.
Now we're making movies called Toy Lords of Chinatown [Ed. Note — That's Vectar in the purple mask], which is about the adventures of these characters making bootleg toys, fighting over turf, and full-out culturejacking each other. The first episode is out now, and the next episode should drop February 2011.
Tell us about the show that's going on in New York.
The Suckadelic Universe, as a toy brand, has been going on from 2005-2008 with these ongoing releases of random bootleg resin figures based on whatever the fuck The Sucklord imagined or his friends like Mary Paper$ and Spooky Booty. Then Christie's auction house became interested. The guy that worked there Simeon Lipman (a.k.a. "Ira Tyrannusberg") put some of these designer toys up for auction.
Then Johan Kugelberg, who runs the Boo-Hooray Gallery, is friends with Simeon and just through gladhanding and dick-sucking and self-interest and self-motivated, we made the connection. Johan likes to say "fuck you" to people and there's a big "fuck you" element to the show. This show represents all the Suckadelic shit and all the juvenilia from The Super Genius and even stuff prior to that, when he was in college. This is probably 15 years worth of work.
Not a peep out of George Lucas all these years?
The Sucklord did get a mention on the Star Wars blog and was mentioned in their custom toy shows, but as far as legal action, not a peep. The Sucklord has pretty much given up being hired by George Lucas. That dream died a long time ago. The new dream is to become George Lucas and to create a ghetto Star Wars, to follow the characters and merchandise and everything that goes along with it. We're going to continue to walk the fine line between doing this high-end shit, with big prices on bullshit, and trying to keep it accessible to regular people.
Some people seem pretty jaded with Lucas these days. Are you sensing an easy coup here?
Listen, The Sucklord's not mad at George Lucas. Obviously, he owes his fucking whole career to him. But the model you can apply to any creative endeavor. I'm trying to create what he did in a more street-legal way, a more hip-hop fashion. The Sucklord doesn't want to be that guy in the tower; we're all from New York, we're all a bunch of weird nerdy scifi b-boys. It's about refining the model though — creating an interesting world full of compelling characters and merchandising the fuck out of it forever.
Given that The Sucklord is a man of the people, what is his message to the masses?
Buy this shit, motherfuckers! You need this stuff! You need to have this because it is going to compel you whatever it is you're going to do in the world. The Sucklord's just a loser from New York with a few talents and a little support, and if you've got a good idea and discipline and are willing to suffer for it, you can do your thing. But until you get your thing together, buy his thing.
"You're An Asshole For Buying This — The Suckadelic Art Toy Universe" runs at the Boo-Hooray Gallery (521 West 23rd Street in New York City) everyday from 11 AM - 6 PM. More information can be found here. Top photo is GRAFF-ATT by The Sucklord. Middle photos courtesy of Garrett MacAllen. Special thanks to Jeff Newelt.


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Britain's Advertising Standards Authority has banned two ads featuring Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington for misleading consumers by being overly airbrushed. It had to come to its conclusion without before-and-after shots, since apparently Roberts has stipulated in her contract that no unairbrushed shots can be released.
Instead, L'Oreal, parent company to Lancome and Maybelline, provided red carpet shots of the women. Sample line from the ASA assessment of L'Oreal's defense: they "believed the image used was consistent with the public perception of the model Christy Turlington who was a beautiful woman with a naturally fantastic complexion." They also said you could still see crows' feet.
A similar argument was made on Roberts' behalf; in turn, the ASA "acknowledged that Julia Roberts was an actress well known for her beauty, and that professional styling and make-up were used to create the image. We understood that high quality studio photography, and the inherent covering and smoothing nature of the product also contributed to the image of flawless skin." (Roberts was shot by Mario Testino).
Still, both ads were considered misleading. On the Roberts ad, the ASA wrote, "On the basis of the evidence we had received we could not conclude that the ad image accurately illustrated what effect the product could achieve, and that the image had not been exaggerated by digital post production techniques."
The complaints were first raised by MP Jo Swinson, who has crusaded against advertising aimed at women for manufacturing insecurities based on retouched images. She was the one who complained that L'Oreal refused to give "before" shots, though this isn't explicitly noted in the report. According to The Guardian, Swinson referred to "shocking" contractual agreements with Roberts that prevented the release of unretouched images: "It shows just how ridiculous things have become when there is such fear over an unairbrushed photo that even the advertising regulator isn't permitted to see it."
L'Oréal's Julia Roberts And Christy Turlington Ad Campaigns Banned [Guardian]
ASA Adjudication on L'Oreal (UK) Ltd [ASA]
ASA Adjudication on L'Oreal (UK) Ltd/Maybelline [ASA]


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Online communication is a wonderful thing but I firmly believe that there's enormous value to be had in getting together in meatspace for some proper face-to-face discussion. Take the gathering in New York of what later came to be known as HTML5 Super Friends. It was an intense two days of poring over the spec with really smart people. My brain hurt by the end of it but that was a small price to pay for such a rewarding experience.
When the finest minds in mobile recently gathered together in Nashville for the Breaking Development conference, the opportunity for extending the gathering was too good to pass up. By some clerical error, I was also asked along. Thus it was that I found myself in the company of these fine people in a secluded house in Tennessee:
- Josh Clark
- Brad Frost
- Lyza Danger Gardner
- Jason Grigsby
- Scott Jehl
- Scott Jenson
- Bryan Rieger
- Stephanie Rieger
- Luke Wroblewski
We called it Mobilewood. It was a blast.
It wasn't all hot tubs and campfires—although there was plenty of both. We worked hard and played hard. Luke did a great job of structuring the event, wielding his managerial experience to make sure that we never got bogged down. We began with some ambitious discussions which led to more focused brainstorming which in turn led to a number of individual projects.
It became clear from fairly early on that simply focusing on mobile alone would be missing the bigger picture. Instead of being overwhelmed by the ever-increasing range of devices out there, we need to embrace the chaos and accept there will be even more devices—and types of devices—that we can't even anticipate. We should embrace that. Instead of focusing on whatever this season's model happens to be, we should be crafting our services in a robust way, striving for universal access tomorrow as well as today.
The first project to launch is a manifesto of sorts. It's a called to arms. Or rather, it's a call to be future friendly:
- Acknowledge and embrace unpredictability.
- Think and behave in a future-friendly way.
- Help others do the same.
The future friendly site also contains a set of design principles, but they are the starting points for discussions rather than the end points for solutions. Consider them a work in progress.
You can also find a list of future-friendly resources that will most definitely grow over time—probably beyond the bounds of the site.
This is just the beginning. The future is ours to make—friendly.


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Sarah Evans, author of social media and PR blog "Commentz" regularly compiles interesting stats and facts about social media. She recently shared her most relevant ones with Ad Age. Some can be useful to healthcare marketers.
1. "In early March, Google removed from its Android Market more than 60 applications carrying malicious software. Some of the malware was designed to reveal the user's private information to a third party, replicate itself on other devices, destroy user data or even impersonate the device owner."
2. "Groupon is on track to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion in revenue this year alone. Facebook's 2010 sales were reported to be only around $2 billion in its sixth year of existence."
3. "A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more 'prosocial' than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions."
4. "99 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to password theft."
5. "Recent estimates put less than 10% of the population using Twitter, far less than other social sites."
6. "More than 3.34 million mentions were recorded over a one-month period of people making social asks."
7. "David Poltrack, CBS Corp., announced that, based on a new research study, 'age and sex don't matter when it comes to increasing TV ad effectiveness.'"
8. "An average of 40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google News the single biggest traffic driver."
9. "Almost one-in-four South Africans use social media as a tool to look for work, but are concerned about the potential career fallout from personal content on social networking sites."
10. "The percentage of US parents who allow their children between ages 10 and 12 to use Facebook or MySpace more than doubled from 8 percent a year ago to 17 percent now."
11. "33% of Facebook posting is mobile."
12. "Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%)."
13. "85% of media websites now use online video to cover news."
14. ""Social media advertising spending will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion by 2015."
15. "Facebook is approaching 700 million users and Google handles over 11 billion queries per month. World-wide there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers (9 out of 10 in the U.S.) and every two days there is more information created than between the dawn of civilization and 2003."
16. "Twitter reported that the network saw more than 4,000 tweets per second (TPS) at the beginning and end of Obama's speech [re: death of Osama Bin Laden]"
17. "65% of all social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past month [April]. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%."
18. Re: the Royal Wedding: "911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That's about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media."
19. "According to NPR's internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps' content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd."
20. "Twitter penetration rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, according to new data from online tracking firm comScore Inc., which suggests that nearly one in five Canadian Internet users over the age of 15 regularly visit Twitter."
21. "Traffic from social media has highest bounce rate. […] If you're looking for 'hyper-engaged' readers, those that click through five or more pages on your site, forget the guy who came from Twitter. A link from another content site is three times more likely to be engaged, and someone coming in from search, is also above average."
22. ""Digital services accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S. revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising and marketing-services agencies that Ad Age analyzed."
23. "Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2010: $41,390. Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2011: $230,000"
24. "Nearly seven in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device, including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs since they got a tablet."
25. "According to a Network Solutions survey, the use of social media among SMBs has grown over the years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent currently."


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Last night, the Tulsa Shock lost to the Seattle Storm, 74-57. It was their 20th consecutive defeat. Like UConn as it closed in on UCLA's record college-basketball winning streak, the WNBA team is within reach of the longest losing streak in NBA history, 26 games, set by the 2010-11
New Jersey Nets Cleveland Cavaliers.
If the Shock keep losing—their record stands at 1-25—they would tie the
Nets' Cavs' mark against the Phoenix Mercury on Sept. 8 and break it against the Los Angeles Sparks on Sept. 9.
Tulsa's current winning percentage of .038 is lower than the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers' mark of .110, the worst in NBA history. The Shock would have to win 3 of their remaining 8 games to be better than the Sixers.
The Shock's single win so far this season came 39 days ago, on June 18, when they defeated the Washington Mystics 77-59 at home in front of a crowd of 4,400. Since they moved to Tulsa from Detroit two seasons ago, the franchise record is 7-53.
It does not get much worse than this.
The hero of the Shock's miserable season, by my measure, is their indefatigable team reporter, Danielle Parker, who has written game story after game story through this singularly bleak stretch of basketball history. The Shock have lost their 25 games by an average margin of about 15 points—the high being a 39-point blow-out against the Phoenix Mercury on July 10. On July 15, seven games into the streak, they gave up an 18-point lead to the L.A. Sparks and lost. Just over a month later, they gave up a 15-point lead to the same team for their WNBA-record-breaking 18th consecutive loss. Each time, Parker has found something to say.
I don't know if we should consider this a skill, but I can say from personal experience that it is a rather miserable task. When you're writing for a losing team—never mind if it's your own team—you start to look at the box score differently. You're not looking for notable stats in any traditional sense; you're looking for stats that might make the bleakest picture a little brighter.
"Statistically, the Tulsa Shock played one of its best games of the season," you might write (possibly through gritted teeth and shame). That they lost anyway, 94-82, must be mentioned but not dwelled upon. The PR writer's job is not like the local beat reporter's job, who can level jokes and criticism and get away with it; the PR writer must act like everything is going to be fine, and we'll get 'em next time. She must include coach quotes like "They hear us coming" to open a story on another loss and another blown lead. When there's nothing good to say, you just have to say something.
May 29: Shock 70, Storm 76 (Preseason Game)
After falling behind big in the first quarter, the Shock were unable to recover as they fell to the Seattle Storm in their first and only pre-season game of the 2011 season, 76-70 at Key Arena.
Notable sad number: The Shock's starting center and two forwards were a combined 2-for-18 from the floor.
June 4: Shock 73, Silver Stars 93
After jumping ahead early in the game, the Shock fell behind big at the end of the first quarter and San Antonio was able to sustain the lead, defeating the Shock, 93-73, in the 2011 season opener.
Record: 0-1
Notable sad number: Tulsa had 28 turnovers to San Antonio's 15.
The Shock's second game of the 2011 season very closely mirrored the first one as the team fell behind big early, fought back late, but still fell short, losing its second game of the young season, 75-65, to the Minnesota Lynx.
Record: 0-2
Notable sad number: The Shock scored just eight points in the first quarter.
June 10: Shock 62, Silver Stars 93
Roneeka Hodges scored 19 points to lead five San Antonio players in double figures, and the Silver Stars cruised to a 93-62 victory over the Tulsa Shock on Friday night.
Record: 0-3
Notable sad number: It was a 31-point loss.
Shock Improving But Still Fall to Sun, 90-79
Career games from point guard Ivory Latta and rookie Kayla Pedersen weren't enough to propel the Shock to their first win of the season as they fell to the Connecticut Sun, 90-79, at Mohegan Sun Arena.
Record: 0-4
Notable sad number: The Shock had just two team rebounds in the loss.
A 16-7 run by the Fever to finish the game omitted a 67-66 Shock lead late in the fourth quarter as Tulsa fell to Indiana, 82-74, at Conseco Fieldhouse tonight.
Record: 0-5
Notable sad number: This game had 12 lead changes and seven ties, and still ended in a loss for Tulsa.
A strong performance in the second half and smart defensive play gave the Tulsa Shock its first win of the season over the Washington Mystics, 77-59, June 18. Facing off against the Washington Mystics, who came in 1-3 for the season, the Shock scored 51 of its points in the second half to secure an 18-point victory, the largest margin of victory for the team since moving to Tulsa.
Record: 1-5
Notable sad number: Their only win of the season came against a 1-4 team. The Mystics now have the second-worst record in the league, at 5-21.
Shock Fall to Storm After Leading By 15 in First Half
The Tulsa Shock has been fighting to put to rest a habit of coming out with a weak first half then fighting to recover in the second. In their June 21 game against the 2010 defending WNBA champions Seattle Storm, they handily overcame that problem, but it was finishing the game that the team struggled with this time around, falling to the Storm 82-77.
Record: 1-6
Notable sad number: The Shock blew a 15-point lead.
Statistically, the Tulsa Shock played one of its best games of the season against the New York Liberty June 23. They scored more points in one game than they have all season long. They had their best field goal percentage of the year. Rookies Elizabeth Cambage and Kayla Pedersen both had recording-breaking games. Yet in the end, the Liberty would be the ones to close it out, 94-82.
Record: 1-7
Notable sad thing: "They scored more points in one game than they have all season long."
Crystal Langhorne scored 23 points, Nicky Anosike added 13 points and 10 rebounds, and the Washington Mystics snapped a four-game losing streak with an 83-63 win over the Tulsa Shock on Sunday. Matee Ajavon added 21 points and four steals for the Mystics (2-5), who got their first home win this season and avenged an 18-point loss at Tulsa eight days ago.
Record: 1-8
Notable sad number: Against a team that had been allowing opponents to shoot 50 percent from the field, Tulsa shot 35.3 percent from the field.
June 30: Shock 71, Lynx 101
Shock Lose to Lynx For Second Time in 2011
The Tulsa Shock and Minnesota Lynx both came into their June 30 meeting with hopes of breaking a losing-streak. Tulsa had loss three consecutive games; Minnesota had two. After 40 minutes of play, it was the Lynx that walked away with the 101-71 win.
Record: 1-9
Notable sad number: The Shock turned the ball over 27 times and lost by 30 points.
Eight days of rest and a new starting line-up was just what the Tulsa Shock (1-10) needed as they headed into back-to-back games against the Phoenix Mercury (7-4). Tulsa looked like a completely different team than the team that fell to the Minnesota Lynx, June 30. Nonetheless a tough third quarter would extend the Shock's losing streak to five, as the Mercury won 86-78.
Record: 1-10
Notable sad number: Tulsa shot 3 for 27 (11.1 percent) from the three-point line.
July 10: [Head Coach Nolan] Richardson Steps Down, Edwards Named Interim Coach
Last night following the Shock's game against Phoenix co-owner David Box met with Coach Nolan Richardson at which time it was determined it was in the best interest of the team and organization for the General Manager/Coach to step down and turn over coaching responsibilities on an interim basis to Teresa Edwards, the Director of Player Personnel for the team.
Record: Still 1-10
Notable sad thing: "While the record may not bear it out today," Edwards said, "[Richardson] is a winner in every aspect both as a coach and a citizen." [I should note that I worked with Edwards during the 2008 Olympics and even got to play some pick-up basketball with her. She did not respond to a request for comment on this post.]
July 10: Shock 63, Mercury 102
Shock Lose to Mercury For Second Time in Three Days
The Phoenix Mercury set a league record by opening the game with 11 consecutive fields goals and never looked back, defeating the Shock, 102-63, at US Airways Center on Sunday. The Mercury finished the first quarter with a 36-9 lead by shooting 15-of-17 from the field including 5-of-5 from three while holding the Shock to just 4-of-19 (21.1 percent) from the field. The 102 points given up and the 39-point margin of defeat were both season highs for the Shock.
Record: 1-11
Notable sad number: Tulsa lost by a margin of 39 points. They scored nine points in the first quarter.
WNBA scoring leader Sylvia Fowles had 21 points, and the Chicago Sky beat Tulsa 72-54 on Wednesday. Fowles, now averaging 20.4 points per game, added 13 rebounds in front of a franchise record crowd announced at 13,838 at Allstate Arena. The loss was the seventh straight for the Shock (1-12) and second for interim coach Teresa Edwards, who took over July 9 after Nolan Richardson's resignation.
Record: 1-12
Notable sad number: Tulsa's starters were a combined 10 for 40 from the field.
Shock Fall To Sparks Despite Holding 18-Point Lead
"They hear us coming."
Those were the words Tulsa Shock's (1-13) interim coach Teresa Edwards encouraged her team with, after losing an 18-point lead and falling to the Los Angeles Sparks (6-6), 79-74. The Shock started out with a strong overall game, offensively and defensively. The Sparks jumped out to an early 11-4 lead, but the Shock quickly recovered to finish the first quarter with a 23-21.
Record: 1-13
Notable sad thing: "They hear us coming."
Cappie Pondexter's grandmother had some simple advice for her: Take over the game. The New York Liberty star listened and helped her team bounce back from a disappointing loss. Pondexter scored 18 points, Essence Carson had 17 and New York cruised to a 88-57 victory over the Tulsa Shock on Sunday.
Record: 1-14
Notable sad thing: The Shock's best player, Ivory Latta, was sidelined once again by a staph infection.
July 26 was a big game for the Tulsa Shock. The night began by honoring Sheryl Swoopes, who was recently named one of the Top 15 WNBA Players of All Time. Swoopes would go on to pull down her 1,500th rebound of her career... The game was also big for the Atlanta Dream's Angel McCoughtry, who scored 37 of the Dream's 76 points... Her contribution on the court led Atlanta to its fourth-consecutive win, 76-68 over Tulsa.
Record: 1-15
Notable sad thing: "We're learning," Coach Edwards said after the game.
For a year, Sylvia Fowles played big sister and mentor to Abi Olajuwon. They faced off again Thursday night, with Fowles and the Chicago Sky staving off a late surge to hand the Tulsa Shock their 11th straight loss with a 64-55 victory.
Record: 1-16
Notable sad thing: Kevin Durant was courtside.
Sue Bird rebounded from a miserable night with her best one of the season. Bird scored a season-high 29 points and the Seattle Storm handed the Tulsa Shock their 12th straight loss with an 89-72 victory Saturday night.
Record: 1-17
Notable sad number: Tulsa's biggest lead: 1. Seattle's biggest lead: 18.
The Indiana Fever got a balanced effort from their starters and reserves and cruised to an easy win against the struggling Tulsa Shock. Jessica Davenport scored 17 points, Tamika Catchings had 15, and the Fever rolled to their fifth straight win, 85-65 victory Friday night, handing the Shock their franchise record-tying 13th straight loss.
Record: 1-18
Notable sad number: According to the game report, the Shock were now 0-5 in afternoon games and 1-13 in night games.
August 6: Shock 64, Silver Stars 72
Young's aggressive play helped the San Antonio Silver Stars end their three-game skid while sending the Tulsa Shock to a franchise-record 14th straight loss.
Record: 1-19
Notable sad thing: "That's one of the most positive games we've put together,'' [Coach] Edwards said. "We still had a lot of turnovers." They had 26 turnovers.
Ticha Penicheiro scored a season-high 23 points and the Los Angeles Sparks beat the Shock 71-66 on Tuesday night, handing Tulsa its 15th straight loss.
Record: 1-20
Notable sad number: For the second straight game, the Shock lost by less than 10 points.
Struggling as they have been during a long stretch of road games, Camille Little and the Seattle Storm were happy to be back home Thursday night—and they played like it. Little scored a season-high 19 points, and Seattle led from the start in a 77-63 win over Tulsa, handing the Shock their 16th straight loss.
Record: 1-21
Notable sad number: Tulsa's starting five was a combined 5 for 26 from the field.
Seimone Augustus scored 16 points and the Minnesota Lynx handed the Tulsa Shock their WNBA record-tying 17th straight loss with an 82-54 victory. In a matchup of the teams with the best and worst records in the league, the Lynx (18-5) won their 11th in 12 games, while Tulsa fell to 1-22.
Record: 1-22
Notable sad thing to try: "The Shock will try to avoid setting a new record for consecutive losses when they face the Los Angeles Sparks at home next Sunday. Tulsa is tied with the Atlanta Dream, who lost the first 17 games of their inaugural 2008 season."
August 21: Shock 67, Sparks 73
Sparks Hand Shock Record 18th Loss in a Row
The Tulsa Shock headed into its Aug. 21 game against the Los Angeles, tied with the longest consecutive losing streak for a season in the history of the WNBA. In danger of breaking that record, the team was determined to win this game, and if there was anyone the Shock could take it was L.A... The Shock led by as many as 15 points in the first half, but would be outscored and outrebounded in the second half, to fall to the Los Angeles Sparks, 73-67.
Record: 1-23
Notable sad thing to be unsuccessful at: The Shock blew a 15-point lead in their attempt to not hold the worst losing streak in WNBA history.
The Tulsa Shock have talked a lot about playing the entire 40 minutes this season, and that is exactly what they did against the league-leading Minnesota Lynx, Aug. 23. The Lynx were able to pull away late with a 78-72 victory, however, Shock players were feeling extremely positive about the game. Tulsa's only win this season came on June 18, 77-59 against Washington.
Record: 1-24
Notable admirable thing for Danielle Parker to write: "...however, Shock players were feeling extremely positive about the game."
[Lauren] Jackson had nine of her 14 points in the third quarter to help lead the Storm past the Tulsa Shock 74-57 Thursday night for Seattle's third straight win since her return from a hip injury... "We're warriors, we're fighting but it's a test of character for us,'' Tulsa coach Teresa Edwards said. "We have a lot of young ladies with a lot of pride.''
Record: 1-25
Notable sad thing: The season continues.
The Shock have eight games remaining, including one tonight against Los Angeles. We'll keep up with them in their ongoing attempt to not become the worst pro basketball team ever.


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