text:
Originally published in the October 1992 issue of GQ, as "Tangled Up in Blue." A postscript from the author follows.
Nighttime in Los Angeles, on a quiet street off Melrose Avenue. An otherwise normal evening is marked by an oddly whimsical celestial disturbance: Baseballs are falling out of the sky.
They are coming from the roof of a gray apartment building. One ball pocks an adjacent apartment. Another bounces to the street. A third flies off into the night, a mighty shot.
This is West Hollywood in the early eighties, where anything is not only possible but likely. West Hollywood shakes its head and drives on by.
But if a passerby's curiosity had been piqued and he'd climbed to the roof of a neighboring building to divine the source of the show, he would have been rewarded by a most unusual sight: a man of striking looks, with long blond hair, startlingly and wincingly thin, hitting the ball with a practiced swing—a flat, smooth, even stroke developed during a youth spent in minor-league towns from Pocatello to Albuquerque.
This is not Tommy Lasorda Jr.'s, routine nighttime activity. A routine night is spent in the clubs, the bright ones and dark ones alike.
Still, on occasion, here he'd be, on the roof, clubbing baseballs into the night. Because there were times when the pull was just too strong. Of the game. Of the father. He could never be what his father was—Tommy Lasorda's own inner orientation made that impossible—but he could fantasize, couldn't he? That he was ten, taking batting practice in Ogden, Utah, with his dad, and Garvey, and the rest of them?
And so, on the odd night. On a night he was not at Rage, or the Rose Tattoo, he'd climb to the roof, the lord of well-tanned West Hollywood, and lose himself in the steady rhythm of bat hitting ball—the reflex ritual that only a man inside the game can truly appreciate.
"Junior was the better hitter," recalls Steve Garvey. "He didn't have his father's curveball, but he was the better hitter."
"I cried," Tom Lasorda says quietly. He is sipping a glass of juice in the well-appointed lounge of Dodgertown, the Los Angeles baseball team's green-glorious oasis of a spring-training site. It's a place that heralds and nurtures out-of-time baseball and out-of-time Dodgers. A place where, each spring, in the season of illusion's renewal, they are allowed to be the men they once were.
On this February weekend, Dodgertown is crowded with clearly affluent, often out-of-shape white men, each of whom has parted with $4,000 to come to Dodgers fantasy camp. In pink polo shirts and pale-pink slacks—the pastels of privilege—they are scattered around the lounge, flirting with fantasy lives, chatting with the coaches.
"I cried. A lot of times. But I didn't cry in the clubhouse. I kept my problems to myself. I never brought them with me. I didn't want to show my family—that's my family away from my house. What's the sense of bringing my problems to my team?
"I had him for thirty-three years. Thirty-three years is better than nothing, isn't it? If I coulda seen God and God said to me 'I'm going to give you a son for thirty-three years and take him away after thirty-three years,' I'd have said 'Give him to me.'"
His gaze skips about the room—he always seems to be looking around for someone to greet, a hand to shake, another camper to slap another anecdote on. Tom Lasorda floats on an ever-flowing current of conversation.
"I signed that contract [to manage the Dodgers] with a commitment to do the best of my ability," he says. "If I'm depressed, what good does it do? When I walk into the clubhouse, I got to put on a winning face. A happy face. If I go in with my head hung down when I put on my uniform, what good does it do?"
These are words he has said before, in response to other inquiries about Tommy's death. But now the voice shifts tone and the words become more weighted; he frames each one with a new meaning.
And he stops looking around the room and looks me in the eye.
"I could say 'God, why was I dealt this blow? Does my wife—do I—deserve this?' [But] then how do I feel, hunh? Does it change it?" Now the voice grows even louder, and a few fantasy campers raise their eyebrows and turn their heads toward us.
"See my point?"
The words are like fingers jabbed into my chest.
Then his eyes look away and he sets his face in a flat, angry look of defiance.
"You could hit me over the head with a fucking two-by-four and you don't knock a tear out of me," he says.
"Fuck," he says.
The word does not seem to be connected to anything.
He was the second of five sons born, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a crowded little city-town a half-hour north of Philadelphia, to Sabatino Lasorda, a truckdriver who'd emigrated from Italy, and Carmella Lasorda.
By the age of twenty-two, Tom Lasorda was a successful minor league pitcher by trade, a left-hander with a curveball and not a lot more. But he was distinguished by an insanely dogged belief in the possibility of things working out. His father had taught him that. On winter nights when he could not turn the heat on, Sabatino Lasorda would nonetheless present an unfailingly optimistic face to his family, and that was how Tom Lasorda learned that nothing could stomp on the human spirit if you didn't let it.
Tom Lasorda played for teams at nearly every level of professional ball: in Concord, N.H.; Schenectady, N.Y.; Greenville, S.C.; Montreal; Brooklyn (twice, briefly); Kansas City, Missouri; Denver; and Los Angeles. Once, after a short stay in Brooklyn, he was sent back to the minors so the Dodgers could keep a left-handed pitcher with a good fastball named Sandy Koufax, and to this day Lasorda will look you in the eye and say "I still think they made a mistake" and believe it.
The Dodgers saw the white-hot burn and made it into a minor-league manager. From 1965 to 1972, Lasorda's teams—in Pocatello, Ogden, Spokane, then Albuquerque—finished second, first, first, first, second, first, third and first. Sheer bravado was the tool; tent-preaching thick with obscenities the style.
In 1973, the Dodgers called him to coach for the big team, and he summoned his wife and his son and his daughter from Norristown, and they moved to Fullerton, Calif, a featureless sprawl of a suburb known for the homogeneity of its style of life and the conservatism of its residents.
In 1976, he was anointed the second manager in the Los Angeles Dodgers' nineteen-year history. His managing style was by instinct, not by the book, and his instincts were good enough to pay off more often than not. In his first two years, the Dodgers made the World Series. In 1981, they won it. In 1985, they didn't make it because Lasorda elected to have Tom Niedenfuer pitch to St. Louis's Jack Clark in the sixth game of the playoffs, against the odds, and Jack Clark hit a three-run home run. In 1988, though, he sent a limping Kirk Gibson to the plate and gave us a moment for history.
From the first, Lasorda understood that he had to invent a new identity for this team, the team that Walter O'Malley had yanked out of blue-collar-loyal Brooklyn-borough America and dropped into a city whose only real industry was manufacturing the soulless stuff of celluloid fantasy. His clubhouse became a haunt for show-business personalities, usually of distinctly outsized demeanor—Sinatra, Rickles—and he himself became the beacon of a new mythology, leader of the team that played in a ballpark on a hill on a road called Elysian, perched above the downtown, high and imperious. Because, really, aren't there too many theme parks to compete with in Los Angeles to manage your baseball team as anything other than another one?
In sixteen years, the tone of the sermon has seldom faltered, at least not before this year. This year, through no fault of Tom Lasorda's, his fielders have forgotten how to field, in a game in which defense has to be an immutable; and if this is anyone's fault, it's that of the men who stock the farm system. His pitching is vague, at best. So the overwhelming number of one-run—is, in fact, testament, again, to Lasorda's management. No one has questioned his competence.
His spirit has flagged considerably, but his days, in season and out, are as full of Dodger Blue banquet appearances as ever, with impromptu Dodgers pep rallies in airport concourses from Nashville to Seattle. Unlike practitioners of Crystal Cathedral pulpitry, Lasorda the tent-preacher believes in what he says, which, of course, makes all the difference in the world. Because of his faith, Dodger Blue achieves things, more things than you can imagine. The lights for the baseball field in Caledonia, Miss.; the fund for the former major leaguer with cancer in Pensacola: Tom showed up, talked Dodger Blue, raised the money. Tom's word maintains the baseball field at Jackson State and upgraded the facilities at Georgia Tech.
"I was in Nashville," Tom says, still sitting in the lounge, back on automatic now, reciting. "Talking to college baseball coaches, and a buddy told me nine nuns had been evicted from their home. I got seven or eight dozen balls [signed by Hall of Fame players], we auctioned them, and we built them a home. They said, 'We prayed for a miracle, and God sent you to us.'"
Nine nuns in Nashville.
In the hallway between the lounge and the locker room hang photographs of Brooklyn Dodgers games. Lasorda has pored over them a thousand times, with a thousand writers, a thousand campers, a thousand Dodgers prospects—identifying each player, re-creating each smoky moment.
But on this day, a few minutes after he's been talking about Tommy, he walks this gauntlet differently.
"That's Pete Reiser," Tom Lasorda says. "He's dead." He points to another player. He says, "He's dead." He walks down the hallway, clicking them off, talking out loud but to himself.
"He's dead. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead."
Back in his suite, in the residence area of Dodgertown, I ask him if it was difficult having a gay son.
"My son wasn't gay," he says evenly, no anger. "No way. No way. I read that in a paper. I also read in that paper that a lady gave birth to a fuckin' monkey, too. That's not the fuckin' truth. That's not the truth."
I ask him if he read in the same paper that his son had died of AIDS.
"That's not true," he says.
I say that I thought a step forward had been taken by Magic Johnson's disclosure of his own HIV infection, that that's why some people in Los Angeles expected him to...
"Hey," he says. "I don't care what people...I know what my son died of. I know what he died of. The doctor put out a report of how he died. He died of pneumonia."
He turns away and starts to brush his hair in the mirror of his dressing room. He is getting ready to go to the fantasy-camp barbecue. He starts to whistle. I ask him if he watched the ceremony on television when the Lakers retired Johnson's number.
'"I guarantee you one fuckin' thing," he says. "I'll lay you three to one Magic plays again. Three to one. That Magic plays again."
As long as he's healthy, I say. People have lived for ten years with the right medication and some luck. Your quality of life can be good, I say.
Lasorda doesn't answer. Then he says, "You think people would have cared so much if it had been Mike Tyson?"
On death certificates issued by the state of California, there are three lines to list the deceased's cause of death, and after each is a space labeled TIME INTERVAL BETWEEN ONSET AND DEATH.
Tom Lasorda Jr.'s, death certificate reads:
At Sunny Hills High School, in Fullerton, Calif.—"the most horrible nouveau riche white-bread high school in the world," recalls Cat Gwynn, a Los Angeles photographer and filmmaker and a Sunny Hills alumna—Tommy Lasorda moved through the hallways with a style and a self-assurance uncommon in a man so young; you could see them from afar, Tommy and his group. They were all girls, and they were all very pretty. Tommy was invariably dressed impeccably. He was as beautiful as his friends. He had none of his father's basset-hound features; Tommy's bones were carved, gently, from glass.
"It was very obvious that he was feminine, but none of the jocks nailed him to the wall or anything," Gwynn says. "I was enamored of him because he wasn't at all uncomfortable with who he was. In this judgmental, narrow-minded high school, he strutted his stuff."
In 1980, at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Cindy Stevens and Tommy Lasorda shared a class in color theory. Tommy, Stevens recalls, often did not do his homework. He would spend a lot of his time at Dodgers games or on the road with the team. At school, they shared cigarettes in the hallway. Tommy would tell her about the latest material he'd bought to have made into a suit. She'd ask him where the money came from. Home, he'd say.
"He talked lovingly about his father and their relationship—they had a very good relationship," Stevens says now. "I was surprised. I didn't think it'd be like that. You'd think it'd be hard on a macho Italian man. This famous American idol. You'd figure it'd be [the father saying] 'Please don't let people know you're my son,' but it was the opposite. I had new respect for his father. There had to be acceptance from his mom and dad. Tommy had that good self-esteem—where you figure that [his] parents did something right."
In the late seventies, Tommy left Fullerton, moving only an hour northwest in distance—though he might as well have been crossing the border between two sovereign nations—to West Hollywood, a pocket of gay America unlike any other, a community bound by the shared knowledge that those within it had been drawn by its double distinction: to be among gays, and to be in Hollywood. And an outrageous kid from Fullerton, ready to take the world by storm, found himself dropped smack into the soup—of a thousand other outrageous kids, from Appleton, and Omaha, and Scranton.
But Tommy could never stand to be just another anything. The father and the son had that in common. They had a great deal in common. Start with the voice: gravelly, like a car trying to start on a cold morning. The father, of course, spends his life barking and regaling, never stopping; he's baseball's oral poet, an anti-Homer. It's a well-worn voice. Issuing from the son, a man so attractive that men tended to assume he was a woman, it was the most jarring of notes. One of his closest friends compared it to Linda Blair's in The Exorcist—the scenes in which she was possessed.
More significantly, the father's world was no less eccentric than the son's: The subset of baseball America found in locker rooms and banquet halls is filled with men who have, in large part, managed quite nicely to avoid the socialization processes of the rest of society.
Then, the most obvious similarity: Both men were so outrageous, so outsized and surreal in their chosen persona, that, when it came down to it, for all of one's skepticism about their sincerity, it was impossible not to like them—not to, finally, just give in and let their version of things wash over you, rather than resist. Both strutted an impossibly simplistic view of the world—the father with his gospel of fierce optimism and blind obeisance to a baseball mythology, and the son with a slavery to fashion that he carried to the point of religion.
But where the illusion left off and reality started, that was a place hidden to everyone but themselves. In trying to figure out what each had tucked down deep, we can only conjecture. "You'd be surprised what agonies people have," Dusty Baker, the former Dodger, reminds us, himself a good friend of both father and son, a solid citizen in a sport that could use a few more. "There's that old saying that we all have something that's hurting us."
In the case of the son, friends say the West Hollywood years were born of a Catch-22 kind of loneliness: The more bizarre the lengths to which he went to hone the illusion, the less accessible he became. In his last years, friends say, everything quieted down, markedly so. The flamboyant life gave way to a routine of health clubs and abstinence and sobriety and religion. But by then, of course, the excesses of the earlier years had taken their inexorable toll.
As for the father, there's no question about the nature of the demon he's been prey to for the past two years. Few in his locker room saw any evidence of sadness as his son's illness grew worse, but this should come as no surprise: Tom Lasorda has spent most of four decades in the same baseball uniform. Where else would he go to get away from the grief?
"Maybe," Baker says, "his ballpark was his sanctuary."
It's a plague town now, there's no way around it. At brunch at the French Quarter, men stop their conversations to lay out their pills on the tables, and take them one by one with sips of juice. A mile west is Rage, its name having taken on a new meaning. Two blocks away, on Santa Monica Boulevard, at A Different Light, atop the shelves given over to books on how to manage to stay alive for another few weeks, sit a dozen clear bottles, each filled with amber fluid and a rag—symbolic Molotovs, labeled with the name of a man or a woman or a government agency that is setting back the common cause, reinforcing the stereotypes, driving the social stigmata even deeper into West Hollywood's already weakened flesh.
But in the late seventies, it was a raucous, outrageous and joyous neighborhood, free of the pall that afflicted hetero Los Angeles, thronged as it was with people who'd lemminged their way out west until there was no more land, fugitives from back east.
In the late seventies and the early eighties, say his friends and his acquaintances and those who knew him and those who watched him, Tommy Lasorda was impossible to miss. They tell stories that careen from wild and touching to sordid and scary; some ring true, others fanciful. Collected, they paint a neon scar of a boy slashing across the town. They trace the path of a perfect, practiced, very lonely shooting star.
His haunt was the Rose Tattoo, a gay club with male strippers, long closed now. One night, he entered—no, he made an entrance—in a cape, with a pre-power ponytail and a cigarette holder: Garbo with a touch of Bowie and the sidelong glance of Veronica Lake. He caught the eye of an older man. They talked. In time, became friends. In the early eighties, they spent a lot of time together. Friends is all they were. They were very much alike.
"I'm one of those gentlemen who liked him," says the man. "I was his Oscar Wilde. He liked me because I was an older guy who'd tasted life. I was his Marne. I showed him life. Art. Theater. I made him a little more sophisticated. [Showed him] how to dress a little better."
They spent the days poolside at a private home up behind the perfect pink stucco of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Tommy lacquering himself with a tan that was the stuff of legend. The tan is de rigueur. The tan is all. It may not look like work, but it is; the work is to look as good as you can.
He occasionally held a job, never for long. Once, he got work at the Right Bank, a shoe store, to get discounts. His father bought him an antique-clothing store. He wearied of it. Tommy, says one friend, wanted to be like those women in soap operas who have their own businesses but never actually work at them.
Tommy's look was his work. If there were others who were young and lithe and handsome and androgynous, none were as outre as Tommy. Tommy never ate. A few sprouts, some fruit, a potato. Tommy spent hours at the makeup table. Tommy studied portraits of Dietrich and Garbo to see how the makeup was done. Tommy bleached his hair. On his head. On his legs. Tommy had all of his teeth capped. Tommy had a chemabrasion performed on his face, in which an acid bath removes four of the skin's six layers. Then the skin is scrubbed to remove yet another layer. It is generally used to erase scars or wrinkles. Tommy had two done.
But he smoked, and he drank. Champagne in a flute, cigarette in a long holder, graceful and vampish at the same time: This was Tommy at the Rose Tattoo. His friend also remembers how well Tommy and his father got along. His friend would drive Tommy to the Italian restaurant where he'd meet his father for Sunday dinners.
"He loved his father, you know. They got along perfectly well." His friend was never his lover. Only his friend. That was all. That was enough. "He was very lonely."
On occasion, the nighttime ramble led him far from the stilted elegance of Santa Monica Boulevard. In the punk dubs, amid the slam-dancing and the head-butting, Tommy parted the leathered seas, a chic foil for all the pierced flesh and fury, this man who didn't sweat. This man who crossed himself when someone swore in public.
Penelope Spheeris met him at Club Zero. She would go on to direct the punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization and, years later, Wayne's World. They became friends. They met at punk clubs—the blond man in custom-made suits, the striking woman in black cocktail dresses and leather boots. In 1981, she interviewed Tommy for a short-lived underground paper called No Mag.
PENELOPE: Have you been interviewed very much before?
TOMMY: No, but I'm very...oral...
PENELOPE: People who would see you around town, they would probably think you were gay.
TOMMY: I don't care.
PENELOPE: What do you do when you get that reaction from them?
TOMMY : I like all people. And it's better having comments, be it GOOD, BAD or WHATEVER. I don't mind at all, but I dress quite...well, I wouldn't say it's FLAMBOYANT because it's not intentional. It's just intentionally ME.
PENELOPE: O.K., but you understand, when somebody looks at a picture of you, they're going to say, this guy's awfully feminine.
TOMMY: I'm there for anyone to draw any conclusions.
PENELOPE: Are you?
TOMMY: Well, I mean, I've done different things...of course...I have no label on myself because then I have restrictions. I would really hate to state anything like that.
PENELOPE: When you were young did your dad say, "Come on, Tommy, Jr., let's go play baseball"?
TOMMY : Never. They always allowed me to do exactly what I pleased. I don't know how they had the sense to be that way. As parents they're both so...well, very straitlaced and conservative. I don't know how I was allowed to just be ME, but I think it was because I was so strongly ME that I don't think they thought they could ever STOP IT...
PENELOPE: Do you feel like you should be careful in the public eye?
TOMMY: I feel like I should, but I don't.
PENELOPE: Do you think the press would be mean to you if they had the chance?
TOMMY: I'm sure they would, but I'll take ANY PUBLICITY.
PENELOPE: Why?
TOMMY: Because that's what I want...I do everything TO BE SEEN.
"I found him totally fascinating. He was astoundingly beautiful, more than most women," Spheeris says now. "I became interested in...the blatant contrast in lifestyles. Tommy Lasorda Sr., was so involved in that macho sports world, and his son was the opposite..."
She laughs.
"I was astounded at how many clothes he had. I remember walking into the closet. The closet was as big as my living room. Everything was organized perfectly. Beautiful designer clothes he looked great in."
Often in the early eighties, when fashion photographer Eugene Pinkowski's phone would ring, it would be Tommy. Tommy wanting to shop or Tommy wanting Eugene to photograph his new look.
When they went shopping, they would fly down Melrose in Tommy's Datsun 280Z, much, much too fast, Tommy leaning out of the driver's window, hair flying in the wind, like some Valley Girl gone weird, hurling gravelly insults ("Who did your hair? It looks awful") at the pedestrians diving out of the way.
He was a terrible driver. Once he hit a cat. He got out of the car, knelt on the street, and cried. He rang doorbells up and down the street, trying to find the owner.
Tommy would call to tell Eugene he was going to buy him a gift. Then Tommy would spend all his money on himself. Then, the next day, Tommy would make up for it. He would hand him something. A pair of porcelain figures, babies, a boy and a girl, meant to be displayed on a grand piano—very difficult to find, very expensive.
Then the phone would ring. It'd be Eugene's mother, saying she just got a bracelet. From his friend Tommy.
"He was a character," Pinkowski says at breakfast in a Pasadena coffee shop. "He was a case. He was a complete and total case."
Then he looks away.
"He was really lonely," Pinkowski says. "He was sad."
When he was being photographed, Tommy was always trying to become different people.
Eugene captured them all. Tommy with long hair. With short hair. With the cigarette. Without it. With some of his exceptionally beautiful women friends. Tommy often had beautiful women around him, Pinkowski recalls—vaguely European, vaguely models. Sometimes Tommy had Pinkowski take pictures of them.
Mostly he took pictures of Tommy. Tommy with a stuffed fox. Lounging on the floor. In the piano. Sitting in a grocery cart.
In red. In green. In white. In blue. In black and gray.
His four toes. Tommy had four toes on his right foot, the fifth lost in a childhood accident. He posed the foot next to a gray boot on the gray carpet. Then he posed it next to a red shoe on the gray carpet. The red looked better.
Tommy and his foot were a regular subject of conversation, often led by Tommy.
"Tommy was a great storyteller, and he'd tell you stories of his dad in the minor leagues," Pinkowski says. "Everybody'd like him. He was very much like the old boy. He could really hold his own in a group of strangers. And he'd do anything to keep it going. To be the center of attention. He'd just suddenly take his shoe and sock off at dinner and say 'Did you know I was missing my toe?'"
One day, Tommy wanted to pose wrapped in a transparent shower curtain. Tommy was wearing white underwear. For forty-five minutes they tried to light the shot so that the underwear was concealed, to no avail. Tommy left, and returned in flesh-colored underwear.
There was nothing sexual about Tommy's fashion-posing. Tommy's fashion-posing was designed to get Tommy into fashion magazines. Tommy was forever bugging the editors of Interview to feature him, but they wouldn't.
"As beautiful as he was, as famous as his father was, he thought he should be in magazines," Pinkowski says now. "He was as hungry as Madonna. But Bowie and Grace [Jones] could do something. He couldn't do anything. He could never see any talent in himself."
The closest Tommy came was when he bought himself a full page in Stuff magazine, in 1982, for a picture of himself that Eugene took.
He would pay Eugene out of the house account his parents had set up for him. On occasion, Eugene would get a call from Tommy's mother: We don't need any more pictures this year. Still, Tommy would have several of his favorites printed for his parents. One is from the blue period.
At the Duck Club, down behind the Whiskey, in 1985, Tommy sat in a corner drinking Blue Hawaiians. To match his blue waistcoat. Or his tailored blue Edwardian gabardine jacket. This was during his blue period. In his green period, he was known to wear a green lamé wrap and drink crème de menthe. But the blue period lasted longer. The good thing about the blue period was that on the nights he didn't want to dress up, he could wear denim and still match his drink. And, sometimes, his mood.
"He walked around with a big smile on his face, as if everything was great because he had everything around him to prove it was great," Spheeris says. "But I don't think it was...When you're that sad, you have to cover up a lot of pain. But he didn't admit it."
The nature of the pain will forever be in debate. Few of his friends think it had to do with the relationship with his parents. "The parents—both of them—were incredibly gracious and kind to everyone in Tommy's life," says a close friend of the family's.
Alex Magno was an instructor at the Voight Fitness and Dance Center and became one of Tommy's best friends. Tommy was the godfather of his daughter. "We used to ask him, 'You're thirty-three, what kind of life is that—you have no responsibilities. Why don't you work?'" says Magno. "You lose your identity when you don't have to earn money, you know what I mean? Everything he owns, his parents gave him. I never heard him say 'I want to do my own thing.' When you get used to the easy life, it's hard to go out there. I don't think he appreciated what he had."
He loved the Dodgers. He attended many games each season. His father regularly called him from the road. In his office at Dodger Stadium, the father kept a photograph of Tommy on his desk.
Tommy loved the world of the Dodgers. He loved the players. To friends who were curious about his relationship with his father's team—and all of them were—he said it was great. He told Spheeris they were a turn-on.
"He was a good, sensitive kid," says Dusty Baker, now a coach with the San Francisco Giants. "There was an article one time. Tommy said I was his favorite player because we used to talk music all the time. He loved black female artists. He turned me on to Linda Clifford. He loved Diana Ross. He loved Thelma Houston.
"Some of the guys kidded me. Not for long. Some of the guys would say stuff—you know how guys are—but most were pretty cool. That's America. Everybody's not going to be cool. Most people aren't going to be. Until they have someone close to them afflicted. Which I have."
Baker spent last Christmas Eve distributing turkey dinners with the Shanti Foundation, an AIDS-education group in California.
"There are a lot of opinions about Tom junior, about how [his father] handled his relationship with his son," says Steve Garvey, who more than anyone was the onfield embodiment of Dodger Blue. "Everyone should know that there is this Tom [senior] who really loved his son and was always there for him. The two loving parents tried to do as much for him as he chose to let them do...Junior chose a path in life, and that's his prerogative. That's every individual's right."
Garvey attended the memorial service for Alan Wiggins, his former teammate on the San Diego Padres, who died of an AIDS-related illness last year, after a seven-year career in the majors.
"He was a teammate, we always got along well, he gave me one hundred percent effort, played right next to me. I think the least you can do, when you go out and play in front of a million people and sweat and pull muscles and bleed and do that as a living, when that person passes away, is be there. It's the right thing to do."
Garvey was the only major league baseball player at Wiggins's service. I ask him if he was surprised that he was alone.
"Not too much surprises me in life anymore," Garvey says.
In the mid-1980s, Tommy's style of life changed. It may have been because he learned that he had contracted the human immunodeficiency virus. According to Alex Magno, he knew he was infected for years before his death. It may have been that he simply grew weary of the scene. It may have been that he grew up.
He entered a rehabilitation program. He became a regular at the Voight gym, attending classes seven days a week. Henry Siegel, the Voight's proprietor, was impressed by Tommy's self-assurance and generosity. Tommy moved out of his West Hollywood place into a new condo in Santa Monica, on a quiet, neat street a few blocks from the beach—an avenue of trimmed lawns and stunning gardens displayed beneath the emerald canopies of old and stalwart trees. "T. L. Jr." reads the directory outside the locked gate; beyond it, a half-dozen doorways open onto a carefully tiled courtyard. The complex also features Brooke Shields on its list of tenants.
He was a quiet tenant, a thoroughly pleasant man. He had a new set of friends—whom he regaled, in his best raconteurial fashion, with tales of the past.
"Tommy used to tell us incredible stuff about how he used to be...everything he'd done—drugs, sleeping with women, sleeping with men," says Magno.
"He went through the homosexual thing and came out of it," Magno continues. "Gay was the thing to be back when he first came to L.A. Tommy used to tell his friends he had been gay. He didn't pretend. He let people know he had been this wild, crazy guy who had changed. He was cool in that. When you got to meet him, you got to know everything about him."
Including that he slept with guys?
"Yes. But...he didn't want to admit he had AIDS because people would say he was gay."
This apparent contradiction surfaces regularly in the tale of Tommy Lasorda.
"I think he wanted to make his father happy," says his Oscar Wilde. "But he didn't know how to. He wanted to be more macho but didn't know how to. He wanted to please his dad. He wished he could have liked girls. He tried."
No one who knew Tommy in the seventies and the early eighties recalls him having a steady romantic relationship. Pinkowski remarks on the asexual nature of the masks his friend kept donning—and about how his friend kept some sides of himself closed off. "He'd never talk about being gay. He'd never reveal himself that way. He'd never say anything about anybody that way."
"Of course he was gay," says Jeff Kleinman, the manager of a downtown restaurant who used to travel the same club circuit as Lasorda in the early eighties. "No, I never saw him with another guy as a couple. [But] just because a man doesn't have a date doesn't mean he isn't gay! To say he wasn't gay would be like saying Quentin Crisp isn't gay. How could you hide a butterfly that was so beautiful?"
"Please," says his Oscar Wilde. "He was gay. He was gay. He was gay."
"Gay," of course, is not a word that describes sexual habits. It speaks of a way of living. No one interviewed for this story thought that Tommy wasn't gay; reactions to his father's denial range from outrage and incredulity to laughter and a shake of the head. Former major league umpire Dave Pallone, who revealed his own homosexuality in an autobiography two years ago, knows the father well, and also knew his son.
"Tommy senior is, as far as I'm concerned, a tremendous man," says Pallone. "I consider him a friend. I have a lot of empathy for what he's going through. [But] as far as I'm concerned, I don't think he ever accepted the fact that his son was a gay man. I knew him to be a gay man, and I knew a lot of people who knew him as a gay man.
"We don't want to be sexual beings. We just want to be human beings."
"If nothing else, his father should be proud that he repented," Alex Magno says. "He'd come a long way—denying what he used to be, so happy with what he'd become."
I tell him his father denies the illness.
"He died of AIDS," Magno says. "There's no question. But what difference does it make? He was a good man. He was a great man. You shouldn't judge. He had had no sex for a long time. We didn't know how he could do that. I mean...but he was incredible. He gave up everything. That's what he said, and there was no reason not to believe him. He was totally like a normal man. He was still feminine—that gets in your system—but there was no lust after men."
In the last two years of his life, Tommy's illness took its toll on his looks. He was not ashamed. though. The surface self-assurance remained. One night, he made an entrance into Rage—thinner, not the old Tommy, but acting every bit the part. He still showed up at Dodger Stadium, too, with his companion, a woman named Cathy Smith, whom Tom senior said was Tommy's fiancée. When he did, he was as elegant and debonair as ever: wide-brimmed hats, tailored suits.
"Nobody in their right mind is going to say it's not difficult—I know how difficult it is for them to try and understand their son," Dave Pallone says. "And to accept the fact he's not with them and what the real reason is. But...here was a chance wasted. The way you get rid of a fear is by attacking it...Can you imagine if the Dodgers, who are somewhat conservative, could stand up and say, 'We understand this is a problem that needs to be addressed...We broke down the barriers from the beginning with Jackie Robinson. Why can't we break down the barriers with the AIDS epidemic?'"
A close friend who was with Tommy the day before his death vehemently disagrees.
"If his father has to accept his son's death right now in that way, let him do it," she says. "If he can't accept things yet, he may never be able to..but what good does it do? [Tom's] world is a different world. We should all do things to help, yes, but at the same time, this is a child who someone's lost. Some people have the fortitude, but they simply don't have the strength...There comes a point, no matter how public they may be, [at which] we need to step back and let them be. You can't force people to face what they don't want to face without hurting them."
"There's something wrong with hiding the truth," Penelope Spheeris says. "It's just misplaced values. It is a major denial. People need to know these things. Let's get our values in the right place. That's all."
"I'm in a position where I can help people, so I help people," Tom Lasorda says. We are strolling through the night in Dodgertown, toward the fantasy-camp barbecue. "You don't realize the enjoyment I got with those nuns in that convent. I can't describe how good that made me feel."
I ask him what his dad would say if he were alive.
"I think he'd have been so proud of me. My father was the greatest man."
He tells me that his winters are so busy with appearances that "you wouldn't believe it." I ask him why he doesn't slow down.
"I don't know," he says. "I like to help people. I like to give something back."
On Valentine's Day, 1991, Eugene Pinkowski's phone rang. It was Tommy. His voice was weak.
"He was typical Tommy. He was really noble about it. He was weak, you could tell. I was so sad. He said, in that voice, 'I'm sure you've read that I'm dying. Well, I am.'
"Then he said, 'Thank you for being so nice to me during my lifetime.' He said, 'I want to thank you, because you made me look good.'"
On June 3, 1991, with his parents and his sisters at his bedside, in the apartment on the cool, flower-strewn street, Tommy Lasorda died.
His memorial service was attended by Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles. Pia Zadora sang "The Way We Were," one of Tommy junior's favorite songs.
Tom Lasorda asked that all donations go to the Association of Professional Ball Players of America, a charity that helps former ballplayers in need.
In the coffee shop in Pasadena, it is late morning, and Eugene Pinkowski is lingering, remembering. His Tommy portfolio is spread across the table. Tommy is smiling at us from a hundred pictures.
I ask Eugene if Tommy would have wanted this story written.
"Are you kidding?" he says. "If there's any sort of afterlife, Tommy is looking down and cheering. This is something he wanted. To be remembered like this. He'd be in heaven."
First, the obvious answer to the obvious question: Yes, Tommy was livid when it was published. Tracked me down in a motel in Indiana, screamed over the phone, talked of how he thought we were friends, although our relationship had consisted of a half-dozen interviews over the years in which I quoted him and presented him in my newspaper exactly as he wanted to be presented, which did not cleave to my idea of friendship. On the other hand, as a father, I was torn. Did I have a right to go against a father's wishes? To display for all of the world to see a part of his son he didn't want seen? Especially since the more I reported, the more obvious it became that this was a love story about a father and a son? But ultimately, on balance, I had no choice. I had to adhere to what Penelope Spheeris had referred to: values.
The first time I saw Tommy Jr. was a decade earlier. He was on the field during BP. Assuming he was a woman, I asked a writer, "Who's that?"
"That's Tommy's son," he said.
"Really? That's incredible. Who's written the best piece about this?"
No one had. Not a single Los Angeles writer, seeing the diaphanous beauty on the field, talking to his father, Mister Baseball, had seen fit to explore it. By the time I joined GQ's staff, the plague had blown up. I had visited a friend at St. Vincent's who was in the terminal stages of an HIV-related illness, and smuggled in a chocolate milkshake from McDonald's for him, and fed it to him, but he couldn't keep it down. I could never get the image out of my mind. Then I reported, and reported, and wrote and rewrote—and took note that all Tommy Sr. had spoken of was how the son's death had affected him and his wife, and not of his kid, and how difficult it must have been to be one thing to himself, and something else to please his dad—and waited, and waited, and finally, the death certificate I'd asked for from the county arrived in the mail, and I knew what I had to do.
There was a plague, and it was gutting the arts world in my city, and it needed to be cured, and quickly. Expecting the father to ask that donations go to the Gay Men's Health Crisis? That would have been too much. But what if Tommy Sr., one of the most highly visible men in all of professional sports in those days, had simply acknowledged his son's sexuality and his cause of death? It could have saved more lives than we can ever know.
Ultimately, I wrote the piece confident that it would advance the cause. I was wrong. Two decades later? No vaccine. More locker-room enlightenment about gays in sports? Despite current events, ultimately, no. In corporate sportsworld, talking the talk is very different from walking the walk. As a for-profit goliath, fed by young men who learn homophobia at an early age, governed by men who were themselves raised in a primitive society, Big Sport's seeds of gender-preference bias have been sown very, very deeply, and uprooting them is going to take more than a story or two and more than a handful of men who come out every few years. It's going to take loud voices and even louder fury. It's funny that Tommy cites Magic, isn't it? The man who earlier this month spoke so wonderfully of his pride in his gay son? I couldn't help wondering what Tommy Sr. thought when heard about how Magic was so supportive of his son. I wonder if he even listened.
Peter Richmond is at work on two books for imprints of Penguin Publishing: Lord of the Rings, a biography of Phil Jackson, scheduled to be published this fall, and Always a Catch, a young-adult novel, to be published in the autumn of 2014. His most recent book is Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders, which was excerpted on Deadspin. Find more of his work at his website.
The Stacks is Deadspin's living archive of great journalism, curated by Bronx Banter's Alex Belth. Read his introduction here.
Top image by Jim Cooke.


text:
Here's a sampling of images from Lorenzo Driving Competition 2015. These images can be purchased through the shopping cart or by contacting me directly.
Whips or others who would like to see a more comprehensive gallery for a particular turnout (and haven't yet asked for it) should also contact me with name, email address, and entry number. I'll send you a link when the gallery goes up.
CD pre-orders will be completed this weekend and in the mail on Monday.
Congratulations and thanks to all exhibitors and organizers . . it was a wonderful and visually beautiful event!
Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
July 15, 2008
By: John Kasprak, Senior Attorney
This report identifies and explains state law on patient access to medical records in a question and answer format. Throughout the report, the terms "medical records" and "health records" are used interchangeably reflecting their usage in statute. In some cases, the term "hospital records" is also used. It covers laws passed in the 2008 session.
Do Patients Have Access to Their Medical Records?
Yes. The law requires a health care provider, except in limited circumstances, to supply a patient, upon request, complete and current information the provider has about the patient's diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. The provider must also notify a patient of any test results in his possession or requested by the provider for purposes of diagnosis, treatment, or prognosis. (CGS § 20-7c(b)).
A patient may obtain copies of his or her medical records by asking the provider in writing. The patient's attorney or authorized representative can also make such a request from a health care provider. Such records include bills, x-rays, copies of lab report results, prescriptions, contact lens specifications under certain conditions, and other technical information used to assess the patient's health condition. (CGS § 20-7c(c)).
The provider must supply the health record within 30 days of the request. (CGS § 20-7c(c)).
When Can a Provider Withhold This Information?
By law, a provider can withhold medical information from a patient if he reasonably determines that the information would be detrimental to the patient's physical or mental health or would likely cause the patient to harm himself or someone else. In such a case, the provider can supply the information to an appropriate third party or another provider who can release it to the patient. (CGS § 20-7c(d)).
Is There a Cost to Obtain Medical Records?
A provider can charge up to 45 cents per page, including any research fees, handling fees or related costs, and the cost of first class postage, if applicable, to furnish the patient's health record. Beginning October 1, 2008, a provider can charge up to 65 cents per page. Also, the provider can charge a patient the amount necessary to cover the costs of materials for providing a copy of an x-ray. (CGS § 20-7c(c); PA 08-184, § 32).
A provider cannot charge for supplying a health record if the person documents that it is necessary to support a Social Security claim or appeal. (CGS § 20-7c(c)).
Can Medical Laboratory Test Results Be Reported Directly to a Patient?
State law does not allow the direct reporting to patients of laboratory test results. But they may be reported to patients upon the written request of the provider who ordered the testing. Generally, this prohibition is designed to protect the patient by insuring that proper explanation and interpretation of laboratory findings are given, and possible harmful misinterpretations avoided. (DPH Regs. § 19a-36-D32).
What about Information Concerning Psychiatric or Psychological Conditions?
The law specifically says that its provisions for patients' access to their records (cited above, CGS § 20-7c(a)-(d)) do not apply to "any information relative to any psychiatric or psychological problems or conditions." (CGS § 20-7c(e)).
Which Providers Are Covered By These Provisions?
The law applies to people licensed or certified to furnish the following health care services: medicine and surgery, chiropractic, naturopathy, podiatry, athletic training, physical therapy, occupational therapy, substance abuse counseling, radiography, midwifery, nursing, dentistry, dental hygiene, optometry, optics, respiratory care, pharmacy, psychology, marital and family therapy, clinical social work, professional counseling, veterinary medicine, massage therapy, electrology, hearing instruments, and speech pathology and audiology. (CGS § 20-7b(b); § 20-7c(a)).
Can a Patient's Medical Records Be Released to Another Provider?
If the patient asks in writing, a provider must furnish a copy of the patient's health record to another provider. This includes x-rays and copies of lab reports, prescriptions, and other technical information used in assessing the patient's condition. The written request must specify the name of the provider who is to receive the record. The patient is responsible for the reasonable costs of providing the information. (CGS § 20-7d).
Can a Person Access His Hospital Records?
Yes. By law, a health care institution (which includes a hospital and other health care facilities, see CGS § 19a-490), must provide a copy of a patient's health record upon the written request of the patient, his attorney, or authorized representative. The health record includes copies of bills, lab reports, prescriptions, and other technical information used in assessing the patient's condition. (CGS § 19a-490b(a)).
The institution must also give the patient or his designated provider a reasonable opportunity to examine retained tissue slides and retained pathology tissue blocks. When the patient, his attorney or his designated health care provider asks in writing, a health care institution must send the original retained tissue or slide or original retained tissue block directly to the institution, lab or physician the patient designates. (CGS § 19a-490b(a)).
Another statute requires each private or public hospital receiving state aid to allow a patient it treats and discharges, or his physician or attorney, to examine his hospital record, at the patient's request. The
record includes the history, bedside notes, charts, pictures, and plates kept concerning the treatment. The patient, or his physician or attorney must be allowed to make copies of such information. (CGS § 4-104).
Can the Health Care Institution Charge for These Records?
An institution can charge up to 65 cents per page, including any research, clerical, and handling fees or related costs, and first class postage, if applicable. The institution can also charge the amount necessary to cover the costs of materials for providing a copy of an x-ray or for furnishing an original retained slide, an original tissue block, or a new section cut from a retained pathology tissue block. (CGS § 19a-490b(a)).
The institution cannot charge if the health record is necessary for a documented Social Security claim or appeal. An institution must provide the requested health record within 30 days of the request, unless the patient's request was received less than 30 days from his discharge. In that case, the institution must provide the record when it is completed. (CGS § 19a-490b(b)).
An institution cannot deny a records request because of a person's inability to pay the required fees. The person must have an affidavit attesting to his inability to pay. (CGS § 19a-490b(d)).
How Long Must a Health Care Provider Keep a Patient's Medical Records?
Generally, a provider must retain a patient's medical records for seven years after the last treatment date, or three years from the patient's death. (Department of Public Health (DPH) Regs. § 19a-14-42).
Pathology slides, EEGs, and ECG tracings must also be retained for seven years, but as subsequent ECGs are taken, previous ones may be discarded if the results are unchanged. (DPH Regs. § 19a-14-42(a)).
Lab reports and PKU reports must be kept for five years and X-ray film for three years. (DPH Regs., § 19a-14-42(b), (c)).
What Happens When a Health Care Provider Dies or Retires?
A provider who terminates a practice (or his executor or responsible relative in the case of death) must inform patients by notice published in a local newspaper and a letter sent to each patient seen within the past three years before the date the practice was discontinued. The patients' medical records must be kept for 60 days after the notice. (DPH Regs. § 19a-14-44).
What if a Patient Changes Providers?
If a patient changes providers and asks the former provider to transfer the records to the new primary care provider, the first provider need no longer retain the records. (DPH Regs. § 19a-14-43).
How Long Must a Hospital Retain a Patient's Records?
Medical records must be filed in an accessible manner in the hospital and kept a minimum of 25 years after the patient's discharge. Original records can be destroyed sooner if they are microfilmed by a process approved by DPH. (DPH Regs. § 19-13-d3(d)(6)).
What Happens to the Records if a Health Care Institution Closes?
When a health care institution that ceases operations gives up its license to DPH, it must provide the department with a certified document specifying where its patient health records will be stored and the procedure for patients, former patients or their authorized representatives to access the records. (PA 05-272; CGS § 19a-490b(e)).
Must Health Care Providers and Institutions Keep Medical Records in an Electronic Format?
The law allows licensed health care institutions to create, maintain or use medical records or medical record systems in electronic format, paper, or both if the system can store medical records and patient health care information in a reproducible and secure manner. (PA 05-168; CGS § 19a-25c).
State law also allows health care providers with prescriptive authority to use electronic prescribing systems. (PA 05-168; CGS § 19a-25b).
JK: ts


text:
Story highlights
Al Qaeda-backed militants have taken control of towns in northern Syria
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) aims to impose a strict Islamist ideology
Swift al Qaeda expansion poses tough dilemma for U.S. and its European allies
Al Qaeda has swept to power with the aim of imposing a strict Islamist ideology on Syrians across large swathes of Syria's rebel-held north, according to a CNN survey of towns, activists and analysts that reveals an alarming increase in al Qaeda-linked control in just the past month.
Al Qaeda-backed militants known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are the predominant military force in northern Syria, according to activists and seasoned observers, and have a powerful influence over the majority of population centers in the rebel-held north.
Rami Abdul Rahman, from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said: "ISIS is the strongest group in Northern Syria – 100% – and anyone who tells you anything else is lying."
CNN conducted dozens of interviews with activists, local and international observers and residents of the towns affected by ISIS in preparing this study. Many of the Syrians CNN spoke to talked anonymously for fear of angering ISIS, saying ISIS has in some areas made it a crime punishable by flogging to even say their name.
The swift al Qaeda expansion poses a severe policy dilemma for the United States and its European allies who have long delayed their promised armed assistance to rebel groups as they struggled with fears that the weapons could end up in the hands of al Qaeda-backed extremists.
Observers say the delay has provided a vacuum in the often chaotic rebel ranks that the organized and fearless Islamists have moved to fill.
Many observers explain that the extent of ISIS's discipline and resources – they are said to have considerable cash at their disposal – means that the other rebel groups operating in the north do not seek to confront them.
Read more: Al Qaeda-linked group gains strength on NATO border
Charles Lister, analyst at IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, said: "Although not a numerically dominant force, ISIS is playing an increasingly pre-eminent role in the northern Syrian insurgency.
"Much of this is a result of its capability to exploit superior levels of financing and resources – essentially, to spread itself thinly enough to exert influence and/or control, but not too thin as to be overpowered by rivals."
Most activists point to a clear strategy by ISIS – which aims to dominate a large swathe of the north from the north-western town of Idlib to the north-eastern city of Raqqa and beyond – of focusing on population centers on the edges of rebel-held territory and slowly choking off central areas. Some ISIS figures have described a broader aim of trying to link the Sunni province of Anbar in Iraq to the Mediterranean coast, near the Syrian town of Latakia.
There are a number of smaller towns in northern Syria which – activists and residents have told us – are controlled entirely by ISIS: Keftin, Tal Rifat, Azaz, Ad Dana, Dar Ta Izzah, Binnish, Raqqa, Ma'arrat Misrin, Jarablus and Al-Bab.
The survey has established that ISIS also has a presence – which is often hard for other rebel groups to challenge – in the following towns: Sarmin, Salqin, Hraytan, Tabqa Dam, Hayyan, Al Eyramoon, Karm Al Meeyasir, Karm Al Qatarji, Al Atarib, Sarmada, Tal Halef, Menbij, Athimah, Maarat an-Numan, Saraqib and Ariha.
Watch video: Secret jihadi smuggling route through Turkey
While the main city of Aleppo remains in the control of a series of different rebel groups, ISIS has begun exerting control on key entry points into the city, and has recently gained control of the al-Sakhour neighborhood. The group is also gaining ground in controlling the northern access points to the city and territory in the rebel-held east.
ISIS' control around Idlib, another key city, is complicated by the regime's continued presence there, but the group has established a foothold to the north east in Sarmin, is present in the town of Saraqib, and is in full control of Binnish, a key town to Idlib's north.
Their grip over the rebel town of Raqqa is considerably tighter than elsewhere, despite the continued presence of rival and even aligned rebel groups who do not seek to challenge them. The Washington Institute think-tank says ISIS' grip on Raqqa makes it "the largest city al Qaeda has ever controlled in the Islamic world."
CNN al Qaeda expert Peter Bergen said the Washington Institute assessment could be correct, given the nature of ISIS's dominance in Raqqa, but pointed out that the U.S. Marine Corps admitted al Qaeda was in control of the Iraqi province of Anbar in 2006, which contained, at the time, around a couple of million people, and so could technically be considered larger.
In these ISIS-held areas, signs of the kind of Islamist society that the al Qaeda-backed militants seek to create have been swift to emerge; one woman activist drew comparisons with the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan. Rulings have been posted in some towns forbidding women to travel without a male relative and at certain times of the day, ordering them to cover up their hair with the traditional Islamic headscarf and not to wear trousers in public, and banning them from wearing make-up and seeking treatment from male doctors. Smoking and cameras have also been banned.
Watch video: Al Qaeda's growing influence in Syria
On Sunday one northern town, Jarablus, saw a poster erected by ISIS threatening thieves with having their hand cut off – an extreme form of punishment mandated by radical readings of Islamist, or Sharia, law.
While many Syrians have described the initial approach of ISIS towards towns they seek to control as friendly and peaceful, often offering generous cash incentives to cooperate, they are increasingly brutal in dealing with their critics.
One activist described how he was taken by ISIS militants from the town of Azaz and held in a blanket factory in Aleppo's northern suburb of Hyratan.
"I was tortured, beaten. They hung me from the ceiling and used electricity on me. They kept trying to make me confess being a British spy," he said, adding that the factory held 20 other prisoners, mostly from rival rebel brigades, and that the site was also used by ISIS to make bombs.
ISIS have released a series of slickly-produced videos about their growing control, and some skeptics say they are promoting stories of their dominance to increase their power over local populations.
Yet in recent weeks, many activists accept that ISIS' genuine hold on the rebel north has escalated to the point where rival groups are unable to challenge them.


text:
You're reading an outdated article. Please go to the recent issues to find up-to-date content.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 went into effect in January 2006, and it offers tax credits for purchasing energy--efficient appliances and products. It provides a tax deduction for commercial buildings that reduce annual energy and power consumption by 50 percent, and it originally only applied to buildings or systems placed in service in 2006 or 2007. However, late last year, Congress extended the EPAct of 2005 to encompass construction through 2008.
The EPAct of 2005 allows for a deduction equal to the cost of the energy-efficient property up to $1.80 per square foot. Interior lighting systems can receive a 60-cent-per- square-foot deduction, depending on the reduction of energy use below ASHRAE 90.1-2001.
Contractors now have more time to take advantage of the EPAct's incentives and tax breaks. For more information, visit the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) Web site at www.ferc.gov. EC


text:
[Clyde Champion Barrow Wanted Report, 05/12/1932 - Dallas, Texas Police Department]
Description: Wanted report for Clyde Barrow on the charges of robbery of an oil station using firearms at Lufkin, Texas on 5-12-1932. This is a copy report from Lufkin, Texas that was filed in Dallas, Texas.
Date: unknown
Creator: Dallas (Tex.). Police Department.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Legal Document


text:
How precocious!
Lost star Matthew Fox says he lost his virginity at a rather young age.
"I was 12," Fox, now 43, says in the May issue of Playboy.
And just like his hit ABC show (which wraps up next month), his first sexual experience was filled with adventure and intrigue.
His unnamed lover, he says, "was about two years older than me. It wasn't her first time."
Fox continues: "I can actually see the event in my mind's eye, like photographs. It was in Dubois, Wyoming, where the population sign probably says, to this day, about 1,000."
And he wasn't deflowered in a cozy bedroom, either: "It happened literally on the ground by a river while a rodeo was going on in town," he confessed. "It was absolutely terrible and awkward–just two f***ing kids lying down and pulling our pants down."
The actor, who leads the island survivors as Dr. Jack Shephard, also details his more satisfying erotic experiences as a football player at Columbia University. "My sex escapades at Columbia were in my freshman year," he says. "That's what you're supposed to do. We didn't get any of the benefits of being football heroes. There was plenty of sex but no football-hero sex."
These days, however, he's remained faithful to wife of 19 years Margherita — despite tabloid reports of his affair with a stripper.
"The story is not true, and I'm not going to comment on it," he tells Playboy.
"The subject of fidelity is very personal," Fox adds, and goes on to praise Margharita, mother to his two children.
"She's the love of my life. We have managed to both be intensely independent and maintain that strength in our relationship. I am a man, and I am an appreciator of women," he admits to the men's mag.
"At the same time, Margherita is the sh*t. I can honestly say we're good together. We've been together for 23 years, so let's leave it at that."
Playboy's new issue hits stands April 16. The final episode of Lost airs May 23.


text:
durka durka durka
happy birthday
Happy birthday
Happy birthday son!... ♡
I miss the old forum back when it was Dragonball-GT.com
Happy birthday son!... :3
citi citi citi citi citi citi citi
Hey you. <3 Let's chat sometime.
y u gay???
I am sorry ichi I thought feeding them a heavy metal would make them more kvlt and br00tal.
stop feeding my fucking fish mercury
if you could be a gundam for a day which would you be and why
if you were a gundam for a day what would you do and why
No dancing is evil and one day I will murder Kevin Bacon for offending my delicate sensibilities with his bohemian lifestyle.
but can you dance like john travolta
Send an Instant Message to Citizen Using...
Reluctant Philosopher
Charming Administrator
Head Moderator
Turbo Revvin Young Punk


text:
By Todd Trzaskos, North Country Correspondent
The Cornell Cooperative Extension Northeast NY Commercial Fruit Program has just announced an open position at the cold-hardy hybrid wine grape trial vineyard in Willsboro, NY.
I'm well acquainted with the vineyard, having volunteered there for a few years, and I'm connected to the area, due to family ties, and a lifetime of summers in the town. Were I in a different place in my life now, or if this was 15 years ago, I would not even be sharing this information. Rather I would be doing everything I could to assume the position myself, because I know that it will be an invaluable hands-on practice and learning experience for whomever is fortunate enough to be selected.
The trial vineyard is just under an acre in size, and is populated by 25 different varieties, 12 vines of each,
divided into panels of three vines, of which each panel group has been planted in random sections throughout the rows. It sits just about a hundred feet or so above the western shore of Lake Champlain, and has a commanding view of the Green Mountains of Vermont.
Good alluvial soil and glacial till sit atop a limestone bed left by the 4,000 year incursion of the Atlantic ocean, which occurred at the end of the last glacial period that decisively shaped the geology of the New York that we inhabit today.
Below is a consolidated description of the part-time seasonal position, based on the email that I received, and a complete position application is here: Download 2012 Tech Position - NENY Fruit Post :
Part-time seasonal technician position with Cornell University Extension's Northeast NY Fruit Program based at the Cornell Baker Farm, Willsboro, the site of the Fruit Program's Wine Grape Trial. The person hired will provide technical and program support to the NENYFP Extension Associate, Kevin Iungerman, in carrying out research and outreach that will enhance the profitability and sustainability of Northeast NY's commercial orchards and vineyards.
She or he will primarily participate and assist in the collection and recording of data in research plots at the Cornell Baker Farm Wine Grape Trial, and potentially at other regional orchards and vineyards. Willsboro Grape Trial activities will include scouting for insect pests and disease risks, spraying as needed, vine and bud development, and maintaining good records. The person will assist with horticultural projects and educational programs for the Cornell Northeast New York Fruit Program, including work in connection with the Northern Grapes Project, a research and extension effort supported by National Institute for Agriculture, USDA.
The position will entail 20 - 40 hours/week in April, May, June, July, August, September, and October. Work schedule and start and end dates are flexible. A locally residing person could possibly fill this position as a second job. This Position will be based at Cornell Baker Farm (Willsboro, NY) but duties may very occasionally occur elsewhere in the NENYF Program Area (Albany, Saratoga, Washington, Essex, and Clinton Counties) and as agreed upon.
Please contact Kevin Iungerman at [email protected] or at 518-744-0720 as soon as possible if you are interested in applying for this position or you wish to learn more.
You might also contact Richard Lamoy of Morrisonville, NY, at: [email protected] . Richard previously filled this position before departing to attend the growing demands of his own vineyard and winery. http://hipvineyard.com
This position will be filled as soon as possible.


text:
Ultra-portable scanning just got even slicker: On Monday, Apparent released a software upgrade to its USB-powered Doxie scanner. The Doxie 2.0 software now sports an Auto Adjust feature, which automatically determines contrast, cropping, and rotation settings for scanned documents.
With Auto Adjust, the Doxie can recognize the type of paper—whether it's a glossy photograph or lunch receipt—being scanned, and then crops, rotates, and adjusts the contrast accordingly. Other updated features in Doxie 2.0 include a new design, the ability to save batch PDFs, date stamps on scanned documents, SimStapler technology to easily create multi-page PDFs, and more.
For those unfamiliar with Doxie, it's a cute, compact device that lets users scan documents and photos and upload them as PDFs to sites such as Flickr, Tumblr, and Twitter, or to services like Google Docs, Dropbox, and Evernote. The scanner, which also has cloud integration for quick online sharing, debuted at Macworld in 2010.
Doxie is available for $149 from Apparent's online store. The company is offering all of the new features to existing Doxie owners as a free software upgrade. To use the software, Mac users must be running OS X 10.5 or later.
Doxie One


text:
🇪🇺 May 25, 2017
🇺🇸🇨🇦🇲🇽 May 25, 2017
Nintendo Switch
The King of Fighters '99: Millennium Battle
Two years have passed since the last King of Fighters tournament and nobody has seen Kyo Kusanagi or Iori Yagami since they defeated Orochi at the climax of the 1997 tournament, but out of the blue, new invitations are sent out to many characters, inviting them to a brand new tournament, though this competition is more of a secretive affair than the ones in '96 and '97. Unlike in previous games of the series, there are four characters per team instead of three, with the fourth serving as a "Striker", a fighter whose function is only to enter a match, attack the opponent and leave without replacing their teammates. In total, there are seven teams, each containing four characters, four Team Edit characters and a boss.


text:
Community Updates/2011-05-01
From Openmoko
Period 2011-03-01 to 2011-04-30
- Freerunner RFID Board - new hardware mod announced
- Freerunner Navigation Board v3 - new version ready
- GTA04 - engineering hardware (A2 revision) boots to Linux/Debian/LXDE - YouTube Video: [1]
Distributions lists releases and other significant updates in distributions that have some support for the Openmoko devices.
|Android Cupcake [Stable, January 2011]
The AoF community has uploaded an update of the stable Cupcake release of AoF. This release contains:
|Android Froyo [Experimental, April 2011]
The AoF community has uploaded an update of the experimental Froyo release of AoF. This release contains:
|Debian GNU/Linux
Debian is a universal operating system used on many embedded devices, servers and home computers. Using Debian on the FreeRunner gives access to the huge army of software packaged in the Debian repositories, already compiled for the Neo's ARM(v4) processor. Moreover, one can build one's own source files for programs without having to learn the OpenEmbedded way. For an existing Debian/Ubuntu user, choosing Debian for Neo FreeRunner makes phone a very familiar, trustworthy and flexible place to hack in.
|QtMoko [Stable, March and April 2011]
New experimental (v34) and then stable (v35) QtMoko release:
New Applications
GNUChess frontend for QtMoko
General News
Most important and change making mails on the mailing lists, blogs etc.. Coolest hacks, screenshots, themes etc..
Event News
- 2011-05-11-14 Linux Tag | Openmoko GTA04 on LinuxTag, Hall 7.2a, Booth 115, Berlin, Germany


text:
Thorne, Betaine HCL & Pepsin, 225 Capsules
Best By: April 2025
- Date First Available: August 2009
Shipping Weight:
0.22 kg
- Product Code: THR-41502
- UPC Code: 693749415022
- Package Quantity: 225 Count
- Dimensions: 13.5 x 7.2 x 7.2 cm , 0.22 kg
Product rank:
Frequently purchased together
Product overview
- Gluten Free
- Dietary Supplement
- GI Support
Betaine HCl & Pepsin promotes optimal stomach acidity, protein digestion, and enzyme activity.
Indigestion can be caused by many things – including inadequate amounts of hydrochloric acid (HCl) in the stomach. HCl secretion in the stomach does several positive things. It assists protein digestion by activating pepsinogen to pepsin, it renders the stomach sterile against ingested pathogens, it inhibits undesirable overgrowth in the small intestine, and it encourages the flow of bile and pancreatic enzymes. Hydrochloric acid also facilitates the absorption of a number of nutrients, including folate, vitamin B12, ascorbic acid, beta-carotene, iron, and some forms of calcium, magnesium, and zinc. Numerous studies have shown that hydrochloric acid secretion in the stomach begins to decline with advancing age. Overuse of antacids or acid blockers can also lead to low levels of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, which can result in poor protein digestion. Thorne's Betaine HCl & Pepsin comes from a porcine source.
Indigestion affects millions of people every day. For some, it's brought on by eating fatty foods. For others, simple carbohydrates (like bread and pasta) can cause gas and bloating. And for other individuals, spicy foods can cause them grief. Although what we eat greatly influences the frequency and severity of indigestion, this discomfort could also be related to an underlying problem – low hydrochloric acid (HCl) content in the stomach.
Situations such as illness, gall bladder removal, overuse of antacids, and normal aging can contribute to insufficient secretion of stomach acid, which can adversely affect digestive enzyme activity and lead to occasional indigestion, gas, bloating, and other forms of gastrointestinal discomfort. Maldigestion can also lead to digestive problems and poor absorption of nutrients, resulting in vitamin deficiencies (particularly fat-soluble vitamins like vitamins A, D, E, and K). Food allergies can develop when inadequately digested proteins are absorbed through a leaky gut. As large proteins are absorbed intact, the body might recognize them as foreign and create antibodies against them, resulting in an allergic response to the food. To ensure optimal digestion, an individual should make sure to have adequate HCl content in the stomach.
Suggested use
Take 1-2 capsules with each meal or as recommended by your health-care practitioner.
Other ingredients
Hypromellose (derived from cellulose) capsule, calcium laurate, leucine, silicon dioxide.
Tamper Evident: Use only if bottle is sealed. Store tightly sealed in a cool, dry place.
If pregnant, consult your health-care practitioner before using this product.
This product is not diluted with lactose. Do not take this product out of the capsule. This product is contraindicated in patients with peptic ulcers.
While iHerb strives to ensure the accuracy of its product images and information, some manufacturing changes to packaging and/or ingredients may be pending update on our site. Although items may occasionally ship with alternate packaging, freshness is always guaranteed. We recommend that you read labels, warnings and directions of all products before use and not rely solely on the information provided by iHerb.
|Supplement Facts
|Serving Size: Two Capsules
|Servings Per Container: 112
|Two Capsules Contain:
|%Daily Value
|Betaine Hydrochloride†
|1 g
|Pepsin (Porcine)
|47 mg
|*Daily Value (DV) not established.
†Equivalent to 16 grains.


text:
"Our save the dates turned out amazing! We are excited to send them out."
"Loved my save the dates!"
"Great quality paper and image. Worth every penny."
"We ordered save the dates for our wedding. Love that we were able to personalize."
"Very happy with the outcome of our save the dates! 10/10"


text:
The Collected Wisdom of Chet Haze
Here we are six weeks into 2012, and we've barely even stopped to contemplate all of the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that pours forth from Northwestern University rap star and Tom Hanks scion Chet Haze. We will now remedy that. Below, a thorough review of all of Chet's wisdom shared on Twitter thus far this year. Absorb that shit.
On Hoes
I will never approach a hoe that acts like she deserves a medal for simply being hot... Won't give you the satisfaction luv
The word "bitch" does not apply to all women. It applies to the bitch type. Both men and women #getitstraight
I like independent women who EARN their OWN money... Not leech from sucka rich dudes with mid life crises and Viagra
I would NEVER lay hands on a woman but I think I might if she called me, "the egg mcmuffin of boyfriends" LOL have u seen this shit?
The Man is the Head of the Family. But the Woman is the Neck. And she can turn the Head whichever way she wants.
What's your sex playlist called? Mines called "we fuckin" LOL I'm serious tho
I need to know... Which ladies out there wanna be my Valentine?
On Dudes
What's up with dudes dapping you up 4 times in 1 conversation... Then when they leave to bounce they dap again... Like bro... Come on
All the dudes out there bitchen on twitter about your females, maybe it didnt work out cuz youre the type to bitch on twitter about females
On The Almighty
This world we live in is imperfect. But imperfection cannot exist without perfection. God is Good. And Love is God.
Thank you Lord for Another Day to Strive
God is You and You are God. Its up to YOU whether you want to die an angel, or a devil.
A cynic sees coincidence, a person with Faith sees omens. So really, its a CHOICE YOU MAKE!! Do u WANT to be Insignificant? Or Holy?
Pray Everyday. It doesnt Help- it Works.
On Patriotism
But for real though, God Bless America. The Greatest Nation That Has Ever Been And Ever Will Be.
Yo allot of you emotional cats out there are the perfect example of how OVERLY P.C. Policies and Ideals are turning America #soft
On Respect
I could never respect a man who doesn't look me in the eye or have a firm handshake when I meet him #mannersistheuniversallanguage
"never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut" #Goodfellas
On Decisiveness
Good things come to those who DON'T fuckin wait in my opinion #kinetik
On Honesty
I don't judge people—- But I HATE Lies!!!!!
On Ambition
No One Ever Got Anything In This Life By Waiting Around For Handouts
I never give a fuck what a hater gotta say. Stay glued to ya laptops muhfuckas. Make room for the real muhfuckas goin out and GETTINIT!
On Shit That Cray
Fun Fact: Michael Clarke Duncan had to "slim down" for his role in the Green Mile... Now that shit cray!
On Political Science
Politicians are the best Actors in the world.
The Power of Money is what controls the World. Not Governments.
On Secrets
Take a second to imagine the technologies that exist RIGHT NOW that the public could never know about.
On The Conspiracy to Keep The Masses Ignorant Through Popular Culture
Is society being fed this mind numbing bullshit, or do we demand it? Or both?
Why arent there as many tv shows about great artists, philosophy, legendary acts of history, spirituality? Instead we get BS and ppv porn.
Is this a matter of ignorance being inherent of human nature? Or are there people in high places that decide, and WANT it this way?
Open your eyes and start asking fucking questions - ALL THE TIME. To those of you that already do, ASK MORE!
On Being Chet Haze
A Prince who is son to a Great King must have twice as Prosperous a reign as his Successor— otherwise he will be a Failure to Privilege.
The only people you can trust in this world are Blood and the very select few who just as well could be. #familyfirst
Sippin on a drank and listening to Beethoven. The end of a long, productive, #kinetik day. We're comin. But we're already here.
btw I drove my Dads hand me down PT Cruiser throughout ALL of High School.... I wish I was kidding.... I whipped that bitch tho
I've never been a Thug or a Hustla. Never spent (a lot) of time in the ghetto. But Best Believe— There is not a Drop of Pussy in my Blood.
Just came from my Broadway showtunes class, now on my way to Boxing, Lol does anyone else see the duality in this?
Sometimes I eat filet mignon. Other times I eat a big Mac. But u know what.... Either way I'm eatin
I'm Hungry
On Humor
Before you question me for being offensive, question yourself for being soft and without a sense of humor.
"Its not delivery is digourno," hahahah
On Twitter
To tweet is to not be busy... Therefore it is best to tweet less.


text:
Story highlights
Social media forums can provide sources for would-be terrorists
British security services monitor social media sites to track groups and individuals
Some experts think terrorists have "self radicalized" through social media
Others believe that ultimately there is almost always a terrorist "mentor"
The days of would-be terrorists needing to travel to far-off camps to make contacts and learn how to build bombs is rapidly receding. Social media forums like Twitter and Facebook provide a ready made Rolodex of sources – dig further online, mine those contacts further, gain admission to private chat forums and eventually you will find instructions for bomb making.
Last month al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM) launched a Twitter account that has already gained more than 5,500 followers, and AQIM's account is following seven people including the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab's official twitter handle and the al Nusra front in Syria, which in turn is following another rebel group in Aleppo.
You can see how rapidly the connections start to multiply and how easy it is for a budding terrorist to build up global contacts. Of course, it is impossible to prove any of these accounts are authentic, but many of their followers think they are, which is worrying in itself.
The British security service MI5 and its sister spy organizations GCHQ and MI6 all monitor social media, noting who is following whom on sites like Twitter, and providing vital information about alliances being forged between different groups and individuals.
But Professor Peter Neumann from King's College London points out that it's not without its challenges.
"This is the big problem because Web 2.0, the social media generates so much 'stuff' and there are so many people involved in chatting with radicals on the internet and to monitor that would require really huge resources and no intelligence service has completely figured out how to separate the 'chatter' from the 'real,' significant stuff," he said.
"You don't know, for example, if someone who chats online a lot is very dangerous or whether it's the opposite – someone who doesn't chat at all and is just listening is actually more dangerous because that person maybe more likely to be operational. There's a lot of the online environment that we don't know yet."
Jean Paul Rouiller from the Geneva Centre for the Training and Analysis of Terrorism says social media is vital to modern terrorist organizations.
"They would not have been able survive, they would not be able to recruit people. The human touch always needed, but social media is their shop- window," he said.
Behind the shop-window of Twitter and Facebook accounts are more limited private chat-rooms where terrorist leaders from around the world exchange information and tactics.
According to Rouiller, one notorious forum was run by French terrorist suspect Nabil Amdouni until it was closed down by the French, and who was arrested last summer in Toulon.
Rouiller claims that documents recovered during the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad suggest that bin Laden himself may have posted messages on this forum. The dead al Qaeda chief was very careful to stay away from electronic devices himself, but it is thought he wrote down messages on pieces of paper which a trusted lieutenant would then type and save on to a USB stick, finally passing this to someone else to post on the forum.
There is also the case of another militant Moezeddin Garsallaoui who, Rouiller says, used to log into a chat forum after drone strikes to show his family in Europe that he had survived. He never posted a message, but his mere presence in the forum left an electronic signature that proved to his wife Malika al Aroud he was still alive.
READ MORE: Who really killed bin Laden?
Some experts think there are examples of terrorists who have immersed themselves in this online world of extremism and have "self radicalized" without ever having met another terrorist in real life.
Major Nidal Hasan, who allegedly shot dead 13 people and injured 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009, is an example cited by analysts like Neumann, as a "self-radicalizing" terrorist . Authorities say he was in email contact with the Yemen-based preacher Anwar al-Awlaki in the months prior to the shootings, but because of the lack of a wider "plot" or conspirators, the Department of Defense has categorized the killings not as terrorism, but as workplace violence.
READ MORE: Dead cleric inspiring new terrorists
Others though, like Rouiller, say that while online material can put an individual onto the wrong track, ultimately there is almost always a terrorist "mentor" who plays a key role in pushing someone towards violence and that mentoring almost always takes place face-to-face, in somewhere like a mosque, high school or university.
The big question in light of the Boston bombings is whether the Tsarnaev brothers, suspected of setting the bombs, were also "home-grown", radicalizing solely online, or whether there was in fact a terrorist "mentor" that capitalized on their discontent and steered them towards violence. And crucially, if they are guilty, did they learn their bomb making skills from the Internet, rather than in a terrorist classroom in Dagestan?
Analysis: The appeal of Islamic radicalism


text:
The first human-robot conversation in space will take place later this year aboard the International Space Station.
The chat will be between Kirobo, one of two humanoid communication robots developed under Japan's Kibo Robot Project, and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata after he arrives at the station sometime in November or December.
Kirobo will be on board the Kounotori unmanned resupply spacecraft scheduled to launch into space Aug. 4 from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center.
"I believe that this development is a significant milestone in the exploration of space," William I. Newman, professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California Los Angeles, told TechNewsWorld. "The use of robotics [in space] is essential."
Robots can relieve astronauts from mundane chores such as maintenance and upkeep of the station, or from potentially more dangerous activities such as repairing spacewalks or setting up habitats prior to a landing, said NASA spokesperson Daniel Huot.
What Makes Kirobo Tick
The Kibo Robot Project that produced Kirobo is a research project conducted jointly by Japan's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, Robo Garage and Toyota, together with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
The University of Tokyo and Robo Garage worked on the robot hardware and motion generation; Toyota created the voice recognition function; and Dentsu created the conversation content and managed the project.
Kirobo is about 13 inches tall, 7 inches wide and about 6 inches deep. He weighs about 2 lbs. and speaks Japanese.
The robot's capabilities include voice and speech recognition, natural language processing, speech synthesis and telecommunications, as well as facial recognition and video recording.
Planning for Kirobo's trip to the international space station commenced in February. Wakata, with whom the robot will converse, will be the station's first Japanese commander.
What they will talk about or how long they will chat is currently unknown.
Will the Real Kirobo Please Stand Up?
It's not clear whether the Kirobo robot astronaut is any relation to this Kirobo robot kit from Japanese firm Elekit.
Elekit's Kirobo has two light and two touch sensors and is programmed using IconWorks, a specialized software developed for the purpose. Programming apparently requires users to just arrange icons on a PC screen as desired and transfer the program to Kirobo through a transfer cable. The robot will then perform the actions required.
The Elekit Kirobo robot can trace a line, negotiate around obstacles or follow a light, among other things.
The CPU comes in a box that has several slots so users can create their own robot shell.
This Kirobo uses a RISC (reduced instruction set computing)-type PIC16F88 CPU with flash memory. It has DC motors, and runs for about six hours on four AA batteries. The device weighs about 8 oz. excluding the batteries.
Human-Cyborg Relations
Robotics "continues to be an integral function in humanity's quest to explore our solar system," NASA's Huot told TechNewsWorld. The international space station has Robonaut, a humanoid robot produced by NASA that is now in its second generation.
Robotics technologies will benefit unmanned space exploration, concludes a report that came out of meetings over the latter half of 2012 among more than 160 people in various universities as well as the California, Georgia and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology. Such advanced applications will, in turn, offer insights into how robotics can be used in daily lives.
While integration of robotic and human efforts in the long term will be very important, many barriers that continue to exist in human-robot communications must be solved first, UCLA's Newman said.
"I used voice recognition software to compose my message," he added, but "I rather doubt that my iPhone truly understood the words that I said."


text:
HD Tune Pro 5.70 Crack Full Key + Portable Free Download is a hard disk / SSD utility with many functions. It can be used to measure the drive's performance, scan for errors, check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.), securely erase all data and much more.HD Tune is an HD/SSD utility which contains various functions ranging from drive performance measurements to securely erasing all data. It is also capable of performing disk health checks (including scanning for errors and a temperature display). HD Tune Pro adds the following functionality compared to the free version:
HD Tune Pro 5.70 Crack Full Key + Portable Free Download
HD Tune Pro 5.70 Crack Full Key + Portable Free Download write performance benchmark, file benchmark, random access performance measurement and a cache test. It also sports a disk monitor, a folder view (which displays the disk usage per folder) and the ability to manipulate the AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) settings. HD Tune supports HDD (internal or external), SDDs, USB sticks, memory cards, iPods, etc.
HD Tune Pro 5.70 Crack Full Key + Portable Free Download
Features of HD Tune Pro•
- The program has been designed to assess the performance of the storage devices and to offer details about the transfer rate capability. A full benchmark test can be run or just a verification of the transfer rate with a single file with custom size.•
- There are about ten types of tests that can be performed to receive information about the transfer rate including the random seek, the sequential mode and the burst rate test.•
- You can use the program to find out if your drive supports advanced features such as automatic acoustic management, 48-bit address or upgradeable firmware. All this information and more are available in just a few seconds without installing other complicated programs.•
- The program can keep you updated on the status of your hard drive to detect impending device failures or an accidental data loss. You can use the program to scan for damaged blocks and sectors periodically. All the errors are highlighted to prevent the problems that your hard drive might have.•
- If you want to know the folders that occupy most of the disk space, the program can provide you with a full report in just a few seconds by scanning the folder structure. Based on this information you can identify unnecessary files or folders and free the occupied disk space.•
- An interesting feature is the ability to reduce the noise of the hard drive by using an Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) technique. If your device supports AAM, the acoustic management parameters can be adjusted through this program.•
- The program is easy to use even by the casual user.
- It takes about 45 MB of RAM and during the error scan or the benchmark test it can use about 50% of the CPU time. It has an impact on the computer performance only during the tests and not while monitoring the hard drive and updating the disk information.
What's New*
- added an option to show drive letters in drive selector
- improved support for OCZ and Samsung SSDs
- added support for Windows 10
- Basic tests: added option for continuous testing
- Erase: range can be specified
- Monitor: transfer sizes of 128 KB to 2 MB added
- Save options: current pass can be
HD Tune Pro 5 Key
HD Tune Pro 5.70 Crack Full Key + Portable Free Download IS HERE


text:
Commission's foremost responsibility is the
custody and care of juveniles committed to and
otherwise placed under its jurisdiction (including
the Aftercare/Parole function for committed
juvenile offenders). However, the Commission
has additional significant responsibilities
which include: serving an oversight role in
county juvenile justice issues; administering
the State/Community Partnership Grant Program,
coordinating through County Youth Services Commissions
the planning and expansion of local sanctions
and services; establishing standards for county
detention facilities and monitoring compliance;
and overseeing the implementation of education
programs in county detention facilities.
JJC is committed to: providing a safe living
environment for New Jersey's men, women and,
particularly, its children;
ensuring that juvenile offenders are held accountable
for their law breaking; and providing to juveniles
opportunities for personal growth and skill
development through rehabilitative efforts and
prevention services.


text:
This report investigates the social benefits of initial and continuing vocational education and training (VET) for individuals in Europe. Drawing on data from the European Community household panel, results show that initial VET is associated with positive changes in social outcomes for individuals. These social outcomes are mediated by the institutional setting in which VET takes place. Health benefits were mainly found in egalitarian contexts such as in Finland and Sweden, whereas benefits in terms of civic participation were mainly found in systems that reward participation in civil society, such as in Germany and Denmark. The benefits of continuing VET were found in systems known for their political efforts to improve training and working conditions in the workplace, such as in Scandinavian countries. Overall, the social benefits of VET for individuals materialise in all countries but their nature will change according to the institutional factors supporting the formation of certain types of benefit.
Publication details
Tiedostojen lataus
Vocational education and training for your own good - The social benefits of VET for individuals


text:
ARMED Drones To Be Used In Search For And Killing Of Rouge Cop Killer Christopher Dorner - So It Begins
Update: this just in - Authorities offer $1 million reward for information leading to arrest of ex-LAPD officer Christopher Dorner
We were hoping to evade coverage of the latest mass distraction du jour, that of the former LAPD officer Chris Dorner who recently went rogue following a three man murder spree and who has vowed to kill again as per his6,000 word manifesto, but the US government had made it impossible following confirmation
that the search for Dorner is now the first official drone-hunt in US history.
Yesterday, as a task force of 125 officers, some riding Snowcats in the rugged terrain, continued their search, it was revealed that Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil.
A senior police source said: "The thermal imaging cameras the drones use may be our only hope of finding him. On the ground, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack."
Asked directly if drones have already been deployed, Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz, who is jointly leading the task force, said: "We are using all the tools at our disposal."
The use of drones was later confirmed by Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio, who revealed agents have been prepared for Dorner to make a dash for the Mexican border since his rampage began.
He said: "This agency has been at the forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement. That's all I can say at the moment."
And once Dorner is found by remote-control, it will be again up to drones to secure his "elimination." If for no other reason than to perform a ground test of just how the recently enacted drone-facilitated extermination of US citizens sits with various instances of the US judicial system.


text:
|Pine cone as part of centerpiece on a table decorated for a holiday party at chic Los Angeles fabric showroom Harbinger. (above)
No rhyme, no reason, no theme, no scheme, no purpose…just some random stuff I saw this week that I'm liking right now. A little this or that or inspiration for the mansion, ranch, home, house, apartment, loft, condo, cottage or shack and anything in between.
Close ups on my week.
|COCOCOZY Logo Lucite Trays being packed up at our offices for shipping to customers! (above)
|Cute black and white painted ornaments at Sugar Paper. (above)
|Metal arrow Christmas tree ornaments from Sugar Paper. (above)
|A sweet thank you note card from my good friend AG. (above)
|Etched stemware glasses at Anthropologie. (above)
Do you like any of this Random Stuff?
Happy Friday!
P.S. Went to a very nice holiday party at chic textiles showroom Harbinger last night. Got a chance to catch up with owners Joe Lucas and Parrish Chilcoat and showroom manager Tami. Also was nice to talk with Brian Ferrick, super talented textiles designer and half of Ferrick Mason. Before running out to a dinner, saw stylish interior designer Ron Woodson of Woodson & Rummerfeld too. Party was a book signing for uber designer and t.v. personality Thom Filicia. Then headed to a dinner at Comme Ca. Fun night.
All photos in this post by Coco of COCOCOZY