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Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks – LoafingDendrocygna autumnalis
December – Texas
L=21"...... WS=30" ...... WT=1.8 lb
Order: Anseriformes (Ducks, Geese Swans)
Family: Aatidae (Ducks, Geese Swans)
Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks are more arboreal than most ducks and will frequently be seen loafing in trees and even on barbed wire or telephone lines. Prior to being renamed "whistling-ducks" this species was called the Black-bellied Tree Duck.
They are gregarious and are found in large flocks. When loafing or foraging it is common for sentries to watch for threats. Individuals form lifelong pairs and will separate from a flock in breeding season. Usually they nest in tree cavities. Their young are precocial (i.e. born with open eyes, downy feathers, and are capable of locomotion within a few hours of hatching) and will jump from the nest within 24 hours of hatching. To soften the fall from the 8-30 foot height parents will find or create a landing area that has thick herbaceous matter.
Lesser GoldfinchSpinus psaltria
Great Egret – Grabbing a fish from flight Ardea alba
October – Texas
L=39" ...... WS=51" ...... WT=1.9 lb
Order: Ciconiiformes (Herons, Ibises, Storks, New World Vultures, Allies)
Family: Ardeidae (Herons, Egrets, Bitterns)
Great Egrets inhabit diverse wetland settings, including small ponds, large lakes, estuaries, and tidal basins. They feed by foraging, primarily by walking slowly through the water and quickly striking with their bill. They also will regularly stand near or over the water and wait for prey. Occasionally, they will, as seen here grab prey from flight.
Forster's Tern – Diving for fishSterna forsteri
January – Texas
L=13" ...... WS=31" ...... WT=6 oz
Order: Charadriiformes (Shorebirds, Gulls, Auks, Allies)
Family: Laridae (Gulls, Terns, Allies)
Forster's Terns forage by flying over water and then either plunging directly into the water or hovering briefly before plunging. Typically only their bill and head goes into the water but sometimes their entire body will be submerged. So long as the fish caught is small it will be eaten as soon as the bird regains foraging height, about 25 feet above the water.
See next photo.
Little Blue Heron – Watching for danger Egretta caerylea
March – Texas
L=26" ...... WS=36" ....... WT=13 oz
Order: Ciconiiformes (Herons, Ibises, Storks, New World Vultures, Allies)
Family: Ardeidae (Herons, Egrets, Bitterns)
Eastern Phoebe – restingSayornis phoebe
December – Texas
L=7"...... WS=10.5" ....... WT=0.7 oz
Order: Passeriformes (Passerine Birds)
Purple Gallinule – ForagingPorphyrio martinica
February – Texas
L=13" ...... WS=22"...... WT=8 oz......m>f
Order: Gruiformes (Rails, Cranes, and Allies)
Family: Rallifae (Rails, Gallinules and Coots)
The Purple Gallinule is a striking and exotically colored bird. It has three very long front toes and an exceptionally long hind toe which enable it to walk on floating vegetation to forage for food. The name "gallinule" derives from the Latin "gallina" meaning "little hen". Purple Gallinules have proven to adapt well when their habitats have been modified. For example, they thrive in rice fields and eat invasive plant species such as water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) and hydrilla (Hydrilla verticillata).
Lewis's Woodpecker – guarding cache Melanerpes lewis
January – Colorado
L=9" ...... WS=10.75" ...... WT=3 oz
Order: Piciformes (Woodpeckers and Allies)
Family: Picidae (Woodpeckers and Allies)
Lewis's Woodpecker is named in honor of Meriwether Lewis who observed and recorded his sighting in 1805 while on the famous Lewis and Clark expedition.
This woodpecker has long slow wing beats similar to a crow in flight. It feeds mainly on insects in the spring and summer which it catches on the wing using its exceptionally acrobatic flying skills. In fall and winter Lewis's Woodpeckers switch to acorns and seeds which it will store in the bark cavities of trees. Once stored the bird will guard the area and the cache scrupulously. In this picture the Lewis's Woodpecker has finished storing seeds in a nearby tree and is now resting and guarding the stores.
White IbisEudocimus albus
Roseate SpoonbillPlatalea ajaja
Dark-eyed Junco – "Pink-sided"Junco hyemalis
October – New Mexico
L=6.25" ...... WS=9.25"....... WT=0.7 oz
Order: Passeriformes (Passerine Birds)
Family: Emberizidae (New World Sparrows)
The Dark-eyed Junco was considered 5 distinct groups, two of which had sub-species, until the 1970's when the American Ornithologist's Union grouped all five into one species. Still, the distinctiveness of the individual sub groups was recognized. Today the Dark-eyed Junco has the following five groups – "slate-colored", "Oregon", "white-winged", "gray-headed", and "Gaudalupe". The "pink-sided" shown here is a sub-species of the group "Oregon". Clearly, though these are considered to be one species the physical differences are notable.
Even with this confusion, the Dark-eyed Junco is one of the most common and most recognized birds in North America. It is abundant, tame, conspicuous in its foraging behavior, and frequents feeders and urban landscapes.
Carolina WrenThryothorus luduvicianus
BananaquitCoereba flaveola
Bananaquits are small, tropical birds of the Western Hemisphere not found in North America. They are fond of sugar and can be seen in banana fields, taking nectar from flowers, around homes where sugar is present, and drinking from hummingbird feeders (they are similar in size to hummingbirds).
Unidentified HummingbirdTrochilidae incognitus


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Dir: Sean Garrity. Canada. 2012. 98mins
Rejection sends a nerdy accountant from Winnipeg to Toronto's supposed swamp of sin for remedial sex education. Science fiction? No, just a Canadian screwball comedy. Quirky in its quests to shock and mock, this Canadian descent into hell may draw fans who've seen its nerd/hero/screenwriter Jonas Chernick on television The Border.
Chernick, a Canadian TV veteran isn't shy about exploring Jordan's endless humiliations and his sexual unattractiveness.
As nebbishes go, this one's neuroses aren't strange or lewd enough to win over US audiences where Woody Allen and his army of nerd imitators have set the bar high. Nor do any other markets outside Canada look promising, while genuinely raunchy material may also make the film hard to sell on television.
The classic nerd flight from the comfort zone shifts dysfunctional gears when bitchy princess Rachel (Sarah Manninen) dumps accountant and longtime beau Jordan Abrams (Chernick) after she falls asleep during sex, and sticks to her guns as he proposes marriage. The determined bean counter vows to get her back, and heads for Toronto for sex advice from lothario friend Dandak (Vik Sahay), and eventually from stripper Julia (Emily Hampshire) who pities the lovelorn soul who suffers from a massive hangover and the theft of his trousers.
In a novel deal, accountant Jordan swaps financial advice with Julia, who's broke, in exchange for sex training. Viewers won't learn much about sex here, but they may get a reality check on how accountants and banks operate – nothing if not a novel twist.
Director Sean Garrity follows Jordan's odyssey as a picaresque Walter Mitty story, with the additional humiliation of Jordan being taunted by co-workers and tossed back and forth by Rachel (played to the bitchy hilt by Manninen), who has sex with anyone she can in his absence.
Chernick, a Canadian TV veteran, isn't shy about exploring Jordan's endless humiliations and his sexual unattractiveness. Yet he brings complexity and some fresh laughs to nerd-dom with his accountant's-eye-view of life and love.
The most appealing presence in Chernick's script is Julia, confident in sex but hopeless in managing her own cash. Hampshire (Cosmopolis) plays her with a sexy composure, which battles with an improbable vulnerability when money enters (and leaves) her pockets. Production values are fine in this low-budget project, which offers no new visual tricks in its observation of titillation in the strip club that employs Rachel and takes Jordan's money.
In My Awkward Sex Adventure, sin – Toronto-style and Winnipeg-style – is predictably tame, if not just silly. The Canadian film is mocking its own notoriously wholesome country. It needs more to bring in a crowd beyond its borders.
Production companies: Banana-Moon Sky Films, Julijette Inc.
International sales: Archstone Distribution, http://archstonedistribution.com
Producers: Jonas Chernick, Juliette Hagopian
Executive Producers: Berry Meyerowitz, Jessica Labi, Juliette Hagopian
Screenplay: Jonas Chernick
Cinematography: Gavin Smith
Editor: John Gurdebeke
Production designer: Rejean Labrie
Music: Ari Posner
Main cast: Jonas Chernick, Sarah Manninen, Emily Hampshire, Vik Sahay

subset: commoncrawl


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UTSA ADA / Section 504
The University of Texas at San Antonio is committed to diversity and a campus culture of inclusion that is necessary for a rich learning environment and essential in preparing students to work, live and contribute to an increasingly complex society.
As part of this effort, UTSA is committed to the full inclusion of individuals with disabilities and continually improving the accessibility of our campus, programs and activities. This website was created to help the university move beyond compliance and toward seamless access for all.
Please take a moment to review the information available on our web page and feel free to contact us with any questions, comments or concerns.
Notice under the Americans with Disabilities Act


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Vol. LXIII, No. 17
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Hill-Kinchla. Caroline Hill, daughter of Genevieve and Lee Hill of Barnstable, Mass., to Tad Kinchla, son of the late Ron and Juli Kinchla of Princeton, on January 18.
A childhood friend of the groom, Jody Brandt, formerly of Princeton, officiated at the ceremony, held at the Barr Mansion in Austin, Texas. A reception followed at the Artisan Ballroom.
The bride graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and for the past several years has been a producer at CNN. The groom graduated from Brown University and is the bass player for the band Blues Traveler.
Following a honeymoon in Tulum, Mexico, the couple will reside in Austin, Texas.
Angrisani-Fratangelo. Sarah Margaret Angrisani, daughter of Mrs. Caroline Purnell Tompkins of Princeton and Albert Angrisani of Princeton and New York City, to Glenn Joseph Fratangelo, son of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Fratangelo of Great Neck, N.Y. and Delray Beach, Fla., on December 6 at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton.
The wedding co-officiates were the Rev. Michael Walker of Nassau Presbyterian Church and the Rev. Jeffrey Mays of Christ Congregation.
The bride was escorted by her father. The maid of honor was Jane DeGeorge of Princeton. The best man was the grooms father.
The reception was held at the Nassau Inn.
The bride is currently attending Hunter College of the City University of New York for her masters degree in Early Childhood Special Education. The groom is currently attending Cornell University for Hotel Investment and Asset Management.
The couple resides in New York City.
Town Topics® may be purchased on Wednesday mornings at the following locations: Princeton McCaffreys, Coxs, Kiosk (Palmer Square), Krauszers (State Road), Olives, Speedy Mart (State Road), Wawa (University Place); Hopewell Village Express; Rocky Hill Wawa (Route 518); Pennington Pennington Market.
Copyright© Town Topics®, Inc. 2011.
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No Sign of Progress
Apparently, though, I'm not alone. Those masters of meta data at Chelsea Art Galleries [dot] com (who have recently had a very appealing face lift) have sifted through the text of gallery press releases and found some rather disturbing trends:
In a study of the language in more than 3,400 gallery press releases from 2006 and 2007, chelseaartgalleries.com found that women still are significantly underrepresented, and it appears to be getting worse.But wait...it gets worse, separating out the bluer chip galleries (as measured by those who are invited to participate in Art Basel and Miami Art Basel), the study found the disparity only increases the further up the food chain you go:
In the press releases sent out by Chelsea galleries in 2006, the words "his" and "he" were 48% more common than "her" and "she". The following year, 2007, the gap had grown to 64%. The same trend holds for the more specific word combination "his/her work". In 2006 "his work" beat "her work" with 38%, in 2007 the difference was 56%.
Does 2008 promise to be better? With only 282 press releases to analyze, it's still too early to tell, but it doesn't look like an improvement - currently the gap between his/him and her/she is 78%.
We looked at some 1,000 press releases, and the gender gap is significantly larger for these [blue chip] galleries. In 2006, it was 93%, and in 2007 it was 152% (e.g. he/his was mentioned 2.5 times as often as she/her). The difference for the galleries that don't go to the Art Basel fairs (and usually represent younger artists), is still there, but smaller: In 2006 it was 33% and in 2007 it was 41%.There's a fascinating chart with the study that indicates that whereas the word "art" was the most often found word among press releases in Chelsea in 2006, the word "his" ranked first in 2007. One could conclude from this that what's being sold in Chelsea is masculinity more so than art (OK, it's a stretch, but...). Clearly what's being shown more than anything else, though, are paintings. In 2006 the word "paintings" was the 14th most popular among the press releases studied, and in 2007 it was the 15th. No other medium even made the top 32.
What is there to do about the disparity though? I hate to open myself up as the proxy whipping post and suggest folks can beat up on me here for my part in it all, but I can't plead innocence either. I hope by posting this I make up a bit for the lopsided program this season. Things do get better next seaon, I swear.
Image at top: Jennifer Dalton, Art Guide (March/April, 2006), 2006, mixed media (map, colored pins, painted wooden frame), 9.5" x 10.5" x 1.25"
Labels: art exhibitions, gender disparity


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Wayne has career-high 12 catches as Colts remain perfect
INDIANAPOLIS -- Indianapolis' 16th straight regular-season victory will fit neatly into the Colts' record book.
This week's game tapes will show the Colts how imperfect they really are.
With Peyton Manning out of sync and the offense struggling to score touchdowns Sunday, the Colts turned to a former quarterback -- Joseph Addai -- for a 22-yard TD pass that gave Indy an 18-14 victory and its own version of a perfect regular season.
"We need these games if we're going to push toward our goal, which is the Super Bowl," receiver Reggie Wayne said. "We're going to need these close games, we're going to need to fight through a little adversity and push forward. We were able to do that today. It was a grinder. We figured out a way to win."
Clearly, there's plenty of work to do after Sunday's sluggish offensive performance -- despite all the accolades.
Jim Caldwell became the first rookie coach since the 1970 merger to win his first seven NFL games. Indy extended its franchise record and became the eighth team in league history with 16 straight wins. The Colts are now the last undefeated team in the AFC again, the fourth time in five years.
But this was not typical Indy.
While Manning finished 31 of 48 for 347 yards, he missed high, wide and even short, failing to match the incredible efficiency he had in Indy's first six games. The three-time MVP also failed to throw a TD pass for the first time since Nov. 30, 2008, leaving that job to Addai, the high school All-American quarterback.
It was Addai's first TD pass as a pro and the first by a Colts non-quarterback since Ken Dilger threw one in 2001. The result was perfect: Wayne lunging toward the end line, getting both feet on the ground to give Indy its first lead 7 seconds into the fourth quarter.
Wayne had a career-high 12 catches for 147 yards.
"I was just trying to get the ball out there," Addai said. "In practice, I'm just kind of spotting up there, kind of looking, reading my keys. I don't really have a key to read, but I kind of sit back there like a real quarterback."
For San Francisco (3-4), it was another frustrating day.
The 49ers have now lost three straight despite getting a solid performance from Alex Smith in his first start in nearly two years. Smith was 19 of 32 for 198 yards with one TD and one interception. He was sacked four times behind a makeshift offensive line that may have sustained another devastating blow when left tackle Joe Staley went down on the first play of the game. The 49ers are already without right tackle Tony Pashos for the rest of the season.
Yet thanks to Smith's steadiness, Frank Gore's long run and the continual contributions of Vernon Davis and Michael Crabtree, the 49ers controlled the game for most of three quarters.
It was good enough -- almost.
"A couple dropped balls make the difference in a game like this," 49ers coach Mike Singletary said. "Any missed opportunities in a game like this are going to bite you in the end. The only thing I can say is we came here to win the football game."
The Colts' defense had to keep Indy in the game after allowing Gore to slip through the middle, break two tackles and sprint 64 yards for a score on San Francisco's second series. It was the first TD Indy allowed since Week 4. Gore finished with 13 carries for 91 yards and five receptions for 43 yards.
Manning, meanwhile, settled for field goals.
After the Colts closed to 7-6 early in the second quarter, the 49ers answered with Smith's 8-yard TD pass to Davis with 33 seconds left in the half.
Two problems: They left Manning enough time to move back down the field and Davis' celebration led to a 15-yard penalty that gave the Colts even better field position.
The Colts took advantage. Manning needed three plays to set up Stover for a 31-yard field goal to make it 14-9 at the half, and then Manning opened the second half by taking the Colts 52 yards for Stover's fourth field goal of the day.
That's how it stayed until the Colts pulled out the halfback option.
"I thought we weren't quite as sharp as we have been at times," Manning said. "There's definitely some areas we can improve on."
Even with 16 straight wins.
Game notes
Singletary said Staley sprained his right knee and cornerback Nate Clements had a bruised right shoulder. ... Manning had been sacked twice all season coming into Sunday. The 49ers got him three times. ... Colts cornerback Kelvin Hayden left in the third quarter with a knee injury and linebacker Tyjuan Hagler hurt his elbow in the fourth quarter.
Game Information
- Referees:
- Ed Hochuli


text: Adobe Systems said it will release patches for two critical vulnerabilities disclosed last week that are actively being used by attackers.The company said on Saturday the patches will be released sometime this week. Both vulnerabilities can be exploited if a user can be tricked into opening a malicious PDF, which is usually sent to targeted victims by email.The latest vulnerabilities were discovered by security vendor FireEye, which said it supplied its findings to Adobe. An analysis by Kaspersky Lab of the exploit using the vulnerabilities found that it bypasses the "sandbox" built into Adobe Reader, which is a technology designed to contain attempts to install malicious software.Kaspersky said the exploit had a level of sophistication seen in cyberespionage campaigns. The malicious software delivered to infected computers can record keystrokes as well as steal passwords and information about a computer's configuration.Adobe normally issues monthly patches on the second Tuesday of the month, the same day as Microsoft, in order to make it easier for system administrators to update systems. But the company will release emergency fixes out of its normal schedule for vulnerabilities that are deemed to pose a significant threat to users.The vulnerabilities, CVE-2013-0640 and CVE-2013-0641, affect Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 9 through 9.5.3, 10 through 10.1.5 and 11 through 11.0.1, according to Adobe. Microsoft's and Apple's platforms are affected. Patches will also be issued for Adobe Reader version 9 and earlier for Linux.Last week, Adobe released security updates for its Flash and Shockwave software that fixed a total of 19 vulnerabilities. Earlier in the month, Adobe released an emergency update for Flash Player to quash two vulnerabilities that were being actively exploited.Adobe's products are installed on millions of computers, which makes the company's software a favored choice for hackers.Send news tips and comments to email@example.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk


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Microsoft will release Windows 7 on October 22, the company has confirmed. The date will put Windows 7 on store shelves a full three months earlier than originally planned. It follows Microsoft's recent announcement that Windows 7 would ship "in time for the holidays" and matches rumors of a fall release spread around the Web in April.
Of course, there are still plenty of things that'll take place between now and October. Here's the breakdown of some key events and revelations leading up to the Windows 7 release.
Windows 7 Upgrade Option
Microsoft is expected to unveil an upgrade program for the Windows 7 release. The program will likely let you get Windows 7 for free or with a discount if you've recently bought a Vista-based PC that meets certain conditions.
So what are those conditions? That's not yet clear. Microsoft has confirmed the program will be called "Windows Upgrade Option." Early speculation suggests it may mirror the Vista Express Upgrade program, which provided free or discounted upgrades for users who'd bought XP-based systems in the months leading up to Vista's release. That program didn't exactly run smoothly, though: PC World expressed concern over hidden costs associated with the upgrade, and many consumers complained of delays and other issues in getting their upgrade requests processed.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Steve Guggenheimer is set to deliver a keynote address at the Computex 2009 conference in Taipei on Wednesday. The address, entitled "Windows Makes Life Simpler," should provide additional details on how the Windows 7 upgrade program will operate.
Windows 7 Release-to-Manufacturing
Another step in the Windows 7 release process will be the transition into the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) phase of development. That's the final phase before the software becomes available to consumers, and — as its name suggests — entails Microsoft sending the Windows 7 code to PC manufacturers so they can start preparing new systems for the October 22 release.
Windows 7's RTM phase is expected to begin in late July or early August.
Windows 7 Compatibility Center
Microsoft's official Windows 7 Compatibility Center will launch in conjunction with the software itself, according to a FAQ posted on the site. The Compatibility Center will allow you to make sure your devices and applications will work with Windows 7 before making the upgrade.
Vista's Compatibility Center launched with a very different timeline: The service went online in July 2008, a full year-and-a-half after Vista's release. In an ironic twist, the Vista Compatibility Center also seemed to have some compatibility issues of its own — the site was completely inaccessible to users during its first days online.
Microsoft, no doubt, is hoping Windows 7's release and reception will be a far less bumpy experience. If early coverage is any indication, that wish just may come true.
Don't take our word for it, though — try Windows 7 out for yourself. The Windows 7 Release Candidate is still available for download as of now. Microsoft has said the functionality and features will remain relatively constant from that version to the final release.
Connect with JR Raphael on Twitter (@jr_raphael) or via his Web site, jrstart.com.


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MONTPELIER, VT—A bag of Murley's Steak & Onion Potato Chips deeply disturbed Montpelier-area snacker Vince Houghton Monday, delivering an artificially created flavor so similar to actual steak and onions as to be unsettling. "I figured, you know, it would have a beefy sort of taste, maybe from bullion powder or something," Houghton told reporters after taking his first-ever bite of the meat-flavored chips. "But it tasted exactly like barbecued top round smothered in chopped Vidalia onions." Added Houghton, who continued to eat the chips despite their unsettlingly realistic taste: "What kind of chemicals are in these things to make them taste so steaky, anyway? There are no beef products whatsoever in the list of ingredients."
This Week's Most Viral News: September 29, 2023


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Hello Everyone!
First of all, Thank you to everyone who played along with our August challenges!
It's time to announce our August winners!
There were so many awesome interpretations linked up for both challenges,
it makes it a really hard task to narrow down to three.
And as always, it is great seeing such diverse creative ideas!
Our Design Team has voted and here's our August
Top 3 Picks
( in order of link up)
#2 ~ Lisa M
#2 ~ Lisa M
One of you will be contacted and invited to be our Guest Designer for the month of October!
Please grab our new TOP 3 blinkie below so that you can BRAG on your own blog:
And now for our August RANDOMLY drawn winner…
#18 Leah Burgett
You have won the following prize:
#18 Leah Burgett
You have won the following prize:
Please leave a comment below AND...email us at firstname.lastname@example.com
with August Winner in the subject line and we will get your prize sent out to you!!!!
Here's our WINNERS blinkie below to add to your blog:
Thank you for stopping by today!
Make sure you visit tomorrow for the reveal of our
September Book Inspired Stash Challenge
and to meet our
September Guest Designer!


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How Free Is Your State?
Now that America is guaranteed another three-and-a-half years of liberal leadership in the White House, individuals and businesses are eager to reduce the burden of government any way they can.
Big Government isn't confined to that federal district on the East Coast we hear so much about. It also lurks in the extra taxes you pay for a gallon of gas, the paperwork you have to file to start a business, and the restrictions you face when you want a Big Gulp.
With so many rules and regulations flooding out of Washington, D.C., wise Americans are avoiding the additional red tape pouring out of our state capitals, county offices and city halls.
To help in the fight, the Mercatus Center has released Freedom in the 50 States. In this latest edition, Will Ruger and Jason Sorens scored each state on more than 200 metrics covering both economic and personal freedoms. From tax rates to business licenses to gun control to property rights, this study covers freedom from every angle.
And instead of just issuing a dull white paper, Mercatus created a fun, interactive map that allows you to see how states have changed over time, drill down on your pet issues and even create a list of your own.
So, who came out of top?
North Dakota, according to the freedom index, is the freest state in the United States. It scores exceptionally well on regulatory and fiscal policy. Moreover, North Dakota scores slightly above average on personal freedom. It is also the state that improved the most over the last decade.
Still, the authors note that the Peace Garden State can increase liberty further by reducing the size of the government sector and eliminating unnecessary occupational licensing.
And the lowest branch on the liberty tree?
New York is by far the least free state in the Union. It is therefore no surprise that New York residents have been heading for the exits: 9.0 percent of the state's 2000 population, on net, left the state for another state between 2000 and 2011, the highest such figure in the nation. New York has, by a wide margin, the highest taxes in the country…[and] is also the most indebted state.
But even the home of Cuomo and Bloomberg can unchain their citizens by reducing spending, paying down debt, abolishing rent control, and… well the list is too long to reprint here.
My home state of Arizona is the most improved from the 2011 report, jumping 12 spots, while Oregon plummeted a shocking 16 points. Further delving into the data reveals some interesting facts:
- Hippy-dippy, anything-goes California now ranks 47th in personal liberty. (Alaska is number one.)
- There's a good reason that so many Beltway Republicans live in Virginia (#6 in overall freedom) while Democrats choose Maryland (#40).
- Obama's home state of Illinois has tumbled from the 29th most free in 2001 to the 45th most free today.
Whether they realize it or not, all states are engaged in a contest of competitive federalism. If governors and legislators want to attract more residents and businesses, they better work hard to improve their score for the next freedom index.
Follow me on Twitter at @ExJon.


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Women's Self-care Collection
General MedicineHealth screenings for women
Prevention is key to living long and living well. Getting regular check-ups and preventive screening tests are among the most important things you can do for yourself. Take time to review these guidelines for screening tests.
In search of the perfect physician
Who will answer your health questions? The Internet? The news? How about your doctor? Here's how to find a doctor who meets your needs.
Your health may be "all in the family"
Knowing your family medical history can save your life...and your children's and grandchildren's. How does genetics research help diagnose familial diseases early?Diabetes and cardiovascular disease: what's the link?
Cardiovascular disease is the leading complication and cause of premature death among people with diabetes. Unfortunately, many people with diabetes do not understand the risk of cardiovascular disease or what they can do to prevent it. Learn more here.
Mental Health
Nutritional Concerns
It's easy, inexpensive, amazingly good for you, and has few undesirable side effects. Yet it's all too often overlooked when people consider which form of exercise is best for them. It's walking. Read more here.Exercise and pregnancy: a healthy combination
Learn about The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's and the American College of Sports Medicine's exercise recommendations for pregnant women.
Breast Care
Fibrocystic breast changes: are they normal?
Many women have fibrocystic lumps in their breasts. How can you find out if these lumps are benign? And how can you relieve the pain they may cause?
Did you know that only 10% of breast cancers present with pain as a symptom? Find out what does cause breast pain and which treatments may help.
Gynecological Care
Health and BeautyUnderstanding hair loss
Women suffer from hair loss too, not just men. Read more here.The skinny on liposuction
The fashion world has decreed that there is no room for flabby abs, thick thighs, or love handles. In response, droves of average citizens with a little extra flesh here and there are turning to liposuction. Read more here.
Relationships and Health
Intimate partner violence: recognizing abuse
How can you spot abusive behavior in your relationship, or in your friend's, or your sister's? Know the signs and know what to do.Sex after a hysterectomy: never better
Besides having the usual worries about undergoing major abdominal surgery, women are concerned about how a hysterectomy will affect their health and lives, especially their sex lives. In fact, studies have shown that concerns about sexual functioning are foremost in women's minds before surgery. Read more here.A less invasive sterilization option for women
A procedure called Essure allows permanent sterilization for women. Unlike other sterilization procedures for women, no invasive surgery or general anesthesia are required. Learn more here.
True or False?True or false: eating yogurt can help reduce your risk of vaginal yeast infections
Although yeast infections can be treated with medications, for an unfortunate few they have a tendency to recur despite adequate treatment. Can eating yogurt help avoid repeated infections?True or false: women who live together tend to have synchronized menstrual periods
There is controversy over whether or not synchronous menstruation is in fact true, and if it is, what is the cause.
Natural and Alternative Treatments
The National Women's Health Information Center
The National Women's Health Resource Center


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ADDING INSULT TO MEDIOCRITY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art now proposes oozing the oil slick of a building that Swiss architect Peter Zumthor proposed a year ago for the museum campus across Wilshire to a site on a corner opposite. The long, sad tradition of architecture going so wrong at LACMA sees no sign of reversing itself — this is no Rialto Bridge swanning gracefully across Los Angeles's foremost ceremonial boulevard, but a cross between a pod, a pancake, and a freeway overpass, in black concrete. Perhaps the whole LACMA site is architecturally cursed by the spirit of vengeful mastodons and saber-toothed tigers still trapped in the pits, as, one after another, architects seem to fall into the slough of despond. In this case Zumthor is said to have admitted the shape of the building was actually inspired by the tar pool, so his capitulation to the pits, even as a metaphor, is voluntary and self-inflicted.
The modification of the original plan to shift galleries south away from the tar pool across Wilshire was forced by the Page Museum to protect its still active and vulnerable paleontological site. But as revised, the new proposal only confirms and extends the original mistake, an amoeba-shaped design that LACMA made public in an exhibition last year, "The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA." (The title of the show, incidentally, copied that of the first International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1980.) The entire project, the original core proposal and its Wilshire extension, should be rethought before any commitment becomes irreversible, probably with a change of architect, possibly with a change of museological scope and mission. If the museum proposes spending $650 million to replace the existing buildings by William Pereira and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, LACMA, Angelenos, and the collections deserve better.
As conceived, the Zumthor plan, core and extension, is a thin design. Zumthor proposes consolidating all galleries from the razed buildings within a single floor lifted on glass-enclosed service cores. The perimeter of the elevated glass-and-black-concrete gallery floor undulates, referring to the curving edges of the adjacent tar pool, or for old-time Californians, to the Southland's postwar glory days of ink-drop swimming pools.
From the point of view of architectural history, however, the concept is nearly a hundred years old, a floor excerpted from an undulating glass tower Mies van der Rohe proposed in 1922 for Berlin. Have we learned nothing since?
There are many recent precedents for museum designs that achieve better galleries in more convincing and even inspiring structures, designs that have succeeded both as economic drivers for their cities and as icons on the international cultural map. A design that should be pushing boundaries and precedent is instead retro, especially surprising and disappointing in a city that has long set a national and international standard for advanced architectural thinking.
The force driving the project is LACMA's director, Michael Govan, one of the best informed, most charismatic museum directors in the country, and he has already succeeded, through astute acquisitions, site reconfiguration, building expansion, programmatic innovation, and raw showmanship, in extroverting what had long been a dowdy, introverted museum. Without a lapse in curatorial excellence, he has made LACMA smart and cool. His stewardship and initiative have been commendable. His enthusiasms are contagious.
And he is not wrong to want a project. His well-rehearsed arguments for tearing down the existing Pereira and HHP complex are correct and accurate, even if painful to accept and challenging to fund. The financial argument — that it would take $350 million to upgrade the existing buildings to seismic code — is convincing, even if it's probably a fig leaf for the more serious concern: Pereira's concept of three museum pavilions in a park, with a fourth by HHP, divides and conquers the collections. Their very spaces keep the museum from achieving a synergy of its departments and collections. The whole is much less than the sum of its many separate parts.
Do the math. Follow the geometry. Each "pavilion," originally conceived as a structure floating in a garden lagoon (even Pereira couldn't resist the metaphor of the pool), is a box separate from the others, and each box is divided by floors into a stack of pancakes that keep galleries vertically separated. The galleries themselves are conceived as boxes separate from each other. The divisive spatiality of the pavilions inside and out works against any curatorial continuity for the collections. The spatial compartmentalization, both horizontal and vertical, fights the flow, turning any visitor into a salmon struggling against the current. The spatial error is so systematic and fundamental that it is uncorrectable. The buildings as they exist are keeping LACMA from realizing its full potential. They are not a pleasure. They diminish the experience.
The fault is not in wanting a project, but in the Zumthor design itself. As a museum director, Govan is unusually well-informed about architecture. He has had a long-standing interest in space and light and their relationship to displaying art, and years of hands-on experience shepherding no less than the Bilbao Guggenheim into existence, working as assistant director to then Gugg director Tom Krens. He then shepherded Robert Irwin's design for Dia:Beacon to completion, working with OpenOffice, when he was the Dia director, hiring Zumthor at the same time on an associated Dia:Beacon project. That Govan may be erring by promoting Zumthor's design is inexplicable given his insight, knowledge, and experience. The fault may be over-crediting an apparently monkish architect coming down from a village in the Alps with promises of architectural simplicity and authenticity. Zumthor has cultivated the aura of a self-effacing mystic, one whose rarefied sensibility answers only to the sublime. It is necessary, however, to separate the aura of the starchitect from the plan itself to see its deficiencies.
To bridge or not to bridge Wilshire is not a trivial question, and, as a proposal in and of itself, merits consideration. But the problem with the bridge, and the question of its necessity in the first place, originates at its core, the sprawling two-story complex that visitors saw at the museum last year when LACMA rolled out the design in a major charm offensive. The display also featured captivating images of the La Brea Tar Pits' fossilized menagerie. The centerpiece of the show was a huge model set at eye level, plus a video of a long, focused, mutually supportive dialogue between Govan and Zumthor, who clearly get along great.
The model of the 400,000-square-foot glass-and-black-concrete structure, had it been presented by a student in a graduate-level architecture school review, would have been shredded by the critics. Govan, who cut his teeth as a museum director in Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, believes in one-story museums: Wright designed what is effectively a single-story museum when he spiraled a ramp up seven stories, creating a single floor circling the magisterial void in an uninterrupted promenade that allows a sequential and continuous museum experience unbroken by staircases, elevators, or escalators. By an ironic coincidence, the same idea was realized by Bruce Goff, an admirer of Wright, in Goff's Pavilion for Japanese Art built in a corner of the Pereira LACMA campus: ramps lead from the entries up to landings where the art is displayed. The experience is continuous, within open spaces that allow visitors to see where they're going and have been, and also allowing them to see, compare, and anticipate art across the open spaces. For junkies of space, this is a thrilling promenade, but it also serves the art itself and the display of the collection as a whole. The interior is a paradigm waiting for takers.
Despite Wright's famous precedent and its very successful local reinterpretation in the Japanese Pavilion, Zumthor has proposed a flat, single-story museum lifted on glass-enclosed cores, all of it oozing opportunistically around the site as it seeks available space in the surrounding park. The directionality of the amoebic shape is not mandated by any imperative from interior plans, which were vague and severely underdeveloped in last year's model. The maquette showed a continuous corridor at the glass perimeter, as though the promenade were the deck of a black ocean liner offering a rail-side view of a park that isn't really a park. Meanwhile the extensive interior spaces, as presented, were no more than a messy pileup of rooms — "a rat's nest," in the harsh appraisal of a nationally prominent museum consultant.
The role of eight glassy cores on the ground floor that support the gallery floor above is vaguely devoted to "services" like entries and staircases, and to the idea of "transparency," a rather wishy-washy do-gooder ideal about allowing visitors in the park to press their noses up to the glass. The program on the ground is thin to the point of being wishful: Workshops? Open storage racks? How much ticketing space and how many cafés can a museum use? It's basically a sacrificial floor meant to jack the museum up to a single floor on the second level.
The very large model was billed, of course, as a work in progress, to inoculate it against criticism, but the proposal was both grossly premature and conceptually dubious, with cellular galleries that, without any overall organizational logic, had run amok. The grids of galleries switched directions and scale abruptly, without transition; galleries were squeezed into the amoebic pods; the relationship between the curving edges of the building and the boxy galleries went completely unaddressed. As displayed they implied monotony — many the same size, most the same height, without directive or explanatory corridors that would give them, and the visit, vectorial thrust and curatorial organization. The distance from the perimeter to the center also discouraged connection to the outside, leaving only the possibility of skylights or courtyards to relieve the interiors. Any visitor venturing into the thicket of galleries would need a ball of string to find her way out and about. The plan made one yearn for the infinitely more sophisticated 2001 plan by Rem Koolhaas, when, in his winning competition entry to redo LACMA, he proposed an ur-plan structured as a comparative time line across cultures. Its weak spot was that the building itself was an inflatable, but the plan had an idea, and a good one. It was a diagram without a building.
Normally with a plan that needs work, it would just be time to go back to the drawing boards. But Zumthor's portfolio inspires little confidence that he should be hired for a project of this size and cultural complexity in the first place. He has built only two museums, each somewhere between small and medium in size. A resident of the tiny Swiss town of Haldenstein, his claim to understanding Los Angeles is based on a short period of time he spent teaching at SCI-Arc in the 1980s.
Zumthor is clearly Govan's personal pick, chosen perhaps because of their previous collaboration at Dia, but without a transparent, public process in Los Angeles. That Govan should have tapped Zumthor by fiat, without encountering any vocal public criticism, testifies to Govan's persuasive governance and the extensive private consultations the director and architect made in the run-up to the show. Govan's rather breathtaking sleight of hand, however, should not be given a pass: a private choice for such a public project half funded with public money and largely proceeding outside public comment sets a very arrogant precedent that wouldn't pass muster in a publically funded governmental building. Govan has privatized a public process.
The LA press has been remarkably timid in both its assessment of the process and in its criticism of the project: Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, one of the journalists who has made the hajj to Haldenstein, even accepting hospitality overnight at the architect's wood-frame vacation cottage, managed to only gently slap Zumthor's wrist about the bridge. The New York Times recently published a reportorial piece without critical comment. There is virtually no public voice in Los Angeles that has emerged to take on all the issues.
Some designers are one-building architects who make their reputations with a particularly brilliant, well-received design, and indeed, in 1996, Zumthor achieved international acclaim for a thermal spa at Vals, in the Swiss Alps, which instantly became an architectural pilgrimage destination. Though the cubic mass of the blocky structure is stern, relieved somewhat by large voids punched into its flat exterior walls, the inside offers a remarkable environment — beautiful, evocative, atmospheric, serene — the horizontal strata of the crafted stone walls echoing the geology of the surrounding mountains. In a deft play of elements, Zumthor captures and directs natural light to rake the surfaces, and he orchestrates pools that lap the stone steps. Though massive and blocky outside, the inside opens to the surrounding nature, and seems even to improve on it, creating a mysterious atmospheric effect that conditions visitors for the experience of stepping into its waters.
Like coloristic composers or writers, Zumthor went on to specialize in creating atmospheres by designing nuanced haptic environments. His books, Thinking Architecture and Atmospheres, develop the idea. On the frontispiece to Atmospheres, he quotes 19th-century English artist J.M.W. Turner writing to critic John Ruskin: "Atmosphere is my style." Scholars have interpreted Zumthor's work as an architecture of phenomenology: the buildings deliver multisensory experience.
At their best, his buildings are both auratic and experiential, and he has prospered in the penumbra of his designs by cultivating his priestly reputation and mystic persona. This Zen architectural master lets it be known that he doesn't come down off the mountain much, unless it's to collect a Pritzker Prize (2009), or to work on a big project like LACMA. Journalists trek by car up to his mountain refuge like pilgrims, earning their way there with a long, hairpin drive. He plays against type as a starchitect by designing for what he considers eternal values. In an implicit rebuke to the faddish technology of computers, he still sketches by hand. He is not a stylist, or in any way Pop. He does not consider his brand of Minimalism a style. He is, basically, an architectural fundamentalist, an ayatollah of elementalism.
Despite Zumthor's successes designing very select, smallish cultural projects, what gives pause is that he remains a boutique architect, with very little experience at the ambitious scale of LACMA. The leap from the scale of most of his work to LACMA in a single building is perhaps too far to make without other graduated work. An architect's most difficult challenge is the translation of scale to larger buildings: frequently the language doesn't work without significant adaptation or reinvention. Govan can't simply transplant Zumthor from Dia, a Minimalist enclave in a quiet town along the Hudson where Dia serves mass to the choir, to an encyclopedic museum in a different cultural ecosystem. What Los Angeles needs is Beethoven along Wilshire, not Ravel, extroversion not introversion, presence rather than reticence. Uprooted to Los Angeles, Zumthor's architecture may not take.
But beyond the issue of scale and projection is the question of capacity. The nature of the work so far, and his M.O., implies that Zumthor operates within a hermetically closed fundamentalist system of immutable values. The big warning signal that he is inappropriate for the commission — as opposed to simply not being ready — is the four-story Kunsthaus he designed in Bregenz in 1997, near Lake Constance, in western Austria. The structure is basically a rigid box veiled in a filmy glass that has a beguiling vaporous quality, admitting very even light inside: again, Zumthor does surfaces, materials, and light well. Inside, however, the architect reveals himself to be spatially limited, even challenged, piling three boxy galleries of column-free space atop the ground floor. Rather daunting flights of stairs at the rear of the building give access to the three floors of galleries. There is a total lack of connectivity between spaces, so no curator can overcome the spatial divide between floors if the show itself wants a visual connection. And despite notions of the phenomenology of experience in his buildings, each box is a sensory deprivation center, except perhaps for the light. The one-note building is spatially authoritarian. The simplicity is simplistic.
The boxes-within-the-box reveals that Zumthor is basically a box architect who does not flow spaces. Despite the wavy amoeba-like form of the LACMA proposal, he risks reiterating the very problem LACMA has suffered from since Pereira: the lack of connectivity between pavilions, floors, and galleries. A curvy, flat box is still a box. It's a closed form.
Cloaked in a carefully cultivated mystery, with all the hauteur of an architectural mystic, Zumthor successfully avoids the inconvenient question of whether he is really up to a job of this scale and complexity. Citing simplicity is the fundamentalist's defense against criticism: heathens just don't get the Zen of it all. But you can only stretch simplicity and nuance so far before it thins out into boredom. His proposal for LACMA is a one-idea building. Even if the undulating form swishing across the park into a running jump across Wilshire is iconic, beware icons: they can be rigid.
Govan believes that the flatness of a one-story museum is a virtue, delivering visitors into a continuous, uninterrupted promenade. He is basically right, even though there are many exceptions to this rule. But there are several ways of providing the one-story museum solution besides Wright's precedent of the ramp at the Gugg, and Goff's in LACMA's Japanese Pavilion. New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes created the same pathfinding trajectory through the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1971 with floors that spiral in half-level terraces, leading visitors on spilling steps in a continuous loop around the core of the multistory museum. The Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany, by London architect Zaha Hadid, offers a swelling and dipping topography inside that rises and falls in ways that define space. Other architects have experimented with adaptations of the Mobius strip as a way of achieving a continuous path through multiple levels.
The brilliant Vuitton Foundation for Creation, a contemporary art space by Frank Gehry in Paris, to open this fall, is technically a story-and-a-half tall, but behind a facade of billowing glass sails, the Los Angeles architect orchestrates a fascinating interior of highly differentiated galleries, some open to the sky, organized along a shifting and episodic trail that leads up and down as though through a landscape. Rooftop terraces upstairs, even more evocative of a landscape, are to be used for events and for sculpture. Gehry captures inside the spatiality of the surrounding park, translating all the events of a walk through a landscape within a building that offers a path of discoveries. The underbelly lifts up as a cascading pool flows down wide sloping steps, transforming what is basically a basement into a privileged spatial event and environment. Gehry designs complexity not for the sake of complexity but for enriching the experience: in what is an accordion of space that seems to breathe in and out, up and down, the Vuitton building offers a spatially sensuous experience, even though the word "phenomenology" would never pass Gehry's lips. The unusualness of the design outside — all sails, some of them spinnakers — heightens expectations for the encounter to come inside.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton. Photo © Iwan Baan, 2014
No such luck back at LACMA. The plans Zumthor presented offer very little hope for a comparable richness, not only because he gives scant suggestion for how to navigate the nearly ten-acre floor plate, but also because there is no play in the vertical Z dimension, no expansion and contraction, just pancake. Looking for a way to describe the design, observers have cited the amoeba-like shape; and in the context of California and its ink-drop swimming pools, and in the more immediate context of the tar pits, the metaphor of an ink drop or a pool of oil suggesting the shape of the museum is superficially attractive, or at least easily understandable and accessible. It introduces the project with an easy-to-grasp image that can be read into the proposal. But the metaphor is finally diminishing, deceptive, and unhelpful, since a drop of ink or a slick of oil has no vertical dimension: each is a surface; each is flat. The metaphor, though cute, limits the architectural potential of its development spatially. It doesn't give an architect much to design with. Some metaphors don't push a design.
Although the video claims that this undulating, free-form structure is new and innovative, any first-year architecture student has seen that undulating glass tower proposed by Mies van der Rohe nearly 100 years old, with its wavy edge of glass extruded many stories into the air. However, Zumthor hasn't corrected for Mies's own failure to design in the third dimension: Mies indeed "broke the box" in De Stijl floor plans where planes slip past each other. But he didn't pierce the pancake within which his wall planes slide: his planes never move up or down. More recently, in 2010, the Japanese firm SANAA did the minimalist, undulating Rolex Learning Center in Switzerland, but unlike Zumthor's proposal, its single-story plan engages and activates the ground plane and roof, so that the building rises and falls like the curves of a saddle. Besides its debt to Mies, Zumthor's plan for LACMA also owes a debt of gratitude to SANAA's work in general, including the single-story Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa, whose undulating plan features glass cylinders that scallop the interiors, bringing the outside in. His proposal is hardly original.
Critics tend to appreciate Zumthor's quiet, understated designs as a reaction to more "sculptural" work, without understanding that Zumthor's work is itself highly formalistic in its iconic, totem-pole shapes and organizational rigidity: at Kolumba, a museum that Zumthor wove into and through a destroyed Gothic cathedral in Cologne, visitors are directed through the museum as though forced along the paths. The plan is authoritarian. The critics' (and his) comparison of Zumthor's LACMA design to the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer is inaccurate: Niemeyer in his prime would never have done anything as simplistic or two-dimensional. Critics and patrons tend to swoon at Zumthor's mystic use of light and the craftsmanship of his materials, failing to realize how restrictive his spatiality is. His scheme is not really an improvement over the campus that LACMA would be replacing. It's just different, another kind of box. More suave, perhaps, and curvy, but just as spatially dumb.
The elephant in the room in all this, or rather the mastodon looming over Wilshire, is of course Frank Gehry. The architect who shattered all architectural expectations for what a museum and even a building might be has been conspicuously overlooked. Does Govan have an oedipal complex vis-à-vis his old boss and mentor, Tom Krens, and so understandably wants to set his own path? Does one major building — Disney Hall — by the master suffice in his home city? Does Govan fear that anything Gehry would do would simply repeat Disney? Was Gehry too obvious a choice? Is he just putting his foot down about complexity, taking a stand on principle?
Gehry, who has designed many exhibitions over the decades at LACMA, is surprisingly good-natured, or at least diplomatic, offering supportive comments about the Zumthor design. But the praise is faint enough to actually be damning. Besides, Gehry should be seething, and not just because of the insult of being, once again, the prophet without honor at home, as he was many years before Disney. The design that is now on the table is puerile by comparison to Vuitton, or even the Guggenheim Bilbao or Disney Hall, both of which have been superseded in sophistication by Vuitton.
That LACMA chose to go to a rather self-isolated figure in the Alps to import a conceptually regressive scheme, rather than just drive down the Santa Monica freeway to Gehry's office escapes common sense. Certainly the choice of Zumthor was unexpected, and perhaps he deserves a nice show. Maybe Govan should commission Zumthor to design his own private house if he personally feels that strongly about the architect. Zumthor was apparently commissioned by Tobey Maguire to do his house, and we certainly all await its publication.
One doubts Zumthor's ability to rise to the occasion because he is working with a limited tool kit: none of his work has ever questioned the box or closed form, and he amputated his own spatial reach by eliminating complexity, or even simplicity, in the third dimension. LACMA is forced to bridge Wilshire because he is simply not equipped to break the pancake of his own devising and design spatial continuities on several levels: there is plenty of available space in the park. Building up, expanding in the third dimension, would allow him to gain the space he lost to the Page Museum on the north side of Wilshire, on the original site, without the expense of a bridge. Zumthor's own conceptual limitations have caused the problem that he is trying to solve with a bridge that isn't necessary. He also wastes a valuable site across Wilshire by landing the pod there, with its large footprint: the strategy is a spendthrift extravagance that kills a large property for other buildings (including buildings for LACMA, which apparently owns the land). All Zumthor has to do is build up, but going up in a single gestural sweep is not in his spatial repertoire, not in his skill set, not in his monolithic idea of a single-story museum that is flat. He is not what architects call a sectional architect. His flow is only horizontal, not vertical. He connects any stack of pancakes with staircases.
The flaw in Zumthor's architectural DNA is all the more inexplicable because all he has to do is look outside his office and home to understand how a town or village in the Alps negotiates its many vertical levels with climbing paths and roadways. The Alps is all Z dimension. Perhaps his spatial underdevelopment is the result of an architect who grew up in a stone building culture where space was not deeply liberated by the steel frame.
The beauty and spatial sophistication of Gehry's Vuitton Foundation, not to mention its skill in execution, is soon to cause another major architectural sensation, similar to Bilbao in 1997. If there are no second acts in public life, there is nonetheless a second Bilbao in Gehry's career. This is again Frank Gehry's moment. The design is a tour de force of space, form, and engineering, yielding a building that will enhance the museum visit by its ability to condition the viewer, mystify the experience, and heighten the anticipation of the visit. Why isn't Vuitton, or its equivalent by Gehry, happening in Los Angeles? Even the staid Philadelphia Museum of Art has hired Gehry to expand its august, classicized structure.
Cost is no excuse. There is no guarantee that Zumthor's Swiss perfectionism won't be less expensive than Gehry's gestural, spatially billowing work. And there is even question whether Zumthor's famously precise architectural detailing and exquisite materiality, made possible by the Swiss construction industry (in the context of the country's watchmaker mentality), can be realized in Los Angeles. Perfectionist Japanese architects are famously defeated by the level of craftsmanship available in the United States. Yoshio Taniguchi said he needed a budget that would allow his architecture to disappear when he designed the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York: instead Taniguchi disappeared. He was so disappointed in its detailing and craftsmanship that he had to be coaxed to come to his own opening.
Gehry wasn't born an architectural genius. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, he didn't have a mother who decorated his bedroom walls with images of Gothic cathedrals. He didn't grow up, as Wright did, playing with Froebel blocks. Gehry worked at it, and he worked at in Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s, when he palled around with the Light and Space artists of Venice and Santa Monica. Absorbing their lessons, experiments, example, and spirit, he left the drafting table and all the instruments that straightened space and straight-jacketed thought in favor of a hands-on design approach, one that liberated him from the strictures that then typified the corporate architectural offices along Wilshire Boulevard. At great professional risk, he found a way out of conventional design, learning his way into a self-confidence that allowed him eventually to follow his own instincts, to identify an intriguing idea and develop it.
By not choosing Gehry, LACMA is also turning its back on one of the most important art movements ever generated in the Southland — a movement that includes artists like Bob Irwin, Ed Moses, Doug Wheeler, Jim Turrell, Tony Berlant, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston. LACMA is ignoring Los Angeles's own artistic culture, one of the most important in the United States, one that Govan himself professes to admire.
At the 11th hour, Govan appears to be opening the project to Gehry through a back door. Having proposed bridging Wilshire, he is now calling for a tower to be built jointly by LACMA and Los Angeles's transit agency, Metro, to be designed by Gehry. Perhaps. But the proposal, far from sure, does not correct the basic mistake: Gehry is the obvious and legitimate heir to the LACMA commission, not only because he has been next in line for decades, but also because his talents and track record have earned him the job, and his talents are in LACMA's best interests. Well into his 80s, he remains at the height of his powers. Gehry is at his best in institutional projects; he should design the tower, yes (although without the unnecessary, expensive bridge), but he should also do the museum, as part of a larger, integrated complex on a campus that otherwise risks becoming a Noah's ark of architects and architectural specimens. Why not commission Gehry to do his Ninth?
The flawed design by Zumthor remains stubbornly on the table, more or less unchallenged. Govan's suggestion that the tower include a design museum may add another programmatic department to LACMA, but it aggravates LACMA's basic problem, which is that the museum needs to consolidate itself more cohesively on its own campus, or risk centrifugal fragmentation. Its center will not hold leaping across Wilshire.
The really brilliant program latent in the LACMA commission would be to have Gehry design an expanded museum that would include a generous wing for the Light and Space artists who influenced him so deeply, along with other artists of his generation he met later on the East Coast. Oldenburg, Serra, and Rauschenberg also inspired him once he started taking the red-eye. Arguably his work is an outgrowth of everything he saw, which is the very subject matter of what LACMA exhibits in its own contemporary collections. Add to the wings that would show the Light and Space artists — who are underrepresented in the LACMA collection — another wing for a Gehry archive, which is looking for a home. Gehry's oeuvre filled the Guggenheim for a retrospective in 2001, but LACMA has not spoken for the collection of one of the most innovative and influential architects of our time.
An expanded, holistically conceived commission could open a very interesting and unprecedented dialogue between the one architect in the United States who was most directly influenced by movements in contemporary art and the artists themselves. The curatorial leap between their art and his architecture is direct and natural: Gehry, no less than Zumthor, is an architect of Light: in both Bilbao and in Paris, he channels light in chimneys of space, illuminating lower floors from above. But Gehry is also much more than a single-issue architect: he adds Space to Light. Choosing Gehry would also tap into the huge reservoir of goodwill the architect already enjoys in Los Angeles, and the United States. He is now conspicuous by his absence at LACMA on Wilshire. Particularly intriguing is the possibility that Gehry could cut up, join, reassemble, and expand the existing Pereira and HHP pavilions in the way in which he transformed his own Dutch Colonial house in Santa Monica: no one, not even Gehry, has developed that paradigm in a large project, and an exploration of the idea is in the very least extremely appetizing, and it might be an appropriate, if unexpected, way of transforming and using buildings that no one wants to save.
LACMA, a museum that bills itself as encyclopedic, is in fact missing much of Los Angeles's, and the nation's, own most interesting history. Changing course now, and changing course radically, offers Los Angeles's flagship museum the opportunity of an institutional lifetime. Isn't Los Angeles sure enough of itself to accept its own, rather than banishing them to New York, and in Gehry's case, to Paris, Bilbao, Philadelphia, and Abu Dhabi, or to a quarantined exile across the street?
A U-turn on Wilshire could mean a museum of, by, and for Los Angeles. LACMA is now missing Los Angeles's own story — a local story, perhaps, but one of international importance and compelling, interdisciplinary scope.
Joseph Giovannini is a critic, architect and teacher based in New York. Trained at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, he has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Architect Magazine, and Architectural Record, and has taught at Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, USC and SCI-Arc.


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The Torah provides very little guidance with regard to the procedures of a marriage. The method of finding a spouse, the form of the wedding ceremony, and the nature of the marital relationship are all explained in the Talmud.
According to the Talmud, Rav Yehuda taught that 40 days before a male child is conceived, a voice from heaven announces whose daughter he is going to marry, literally a match made in heaven! In Yiddish, this perfect match is called "bashert,' a word meaning fate or destiny. The word "bashert" can be used to refer to any kind of fortuitous good match, such as finding the perfect job or the perfect house, but it is usually used to refer to one's soul mate. There are a number of statements in the Talmud that would seem to contradict the idea of bashert, most notably the many bits of advice on choosing a wife. Nevertheless, the idea has a strong hold within the Jewish community: look at any listing of Jewish personal ads and you're bound to find someone "Looking for my bashert."
Finding your bashert doesn't mean that your marriage will be trouble-free. Marriage, like everything worthwhile in life, requires dedication, effort and energy. Even when two people are meant for each other, it is possible for them to ruin their marriage. That is why Judaism allows divorce.
Although the first marriage is bashert, it is still possible to have a good and happy marriage with a second spouse. The Talmud teaches that G-d also arranges second marriages, and a man's second wife is chosen according to his merits.
How do you know if you have found your bashert? Should you hold off on marrying someone for fear that the person you want to marry might not be your bashert, and there might be a better match out there waiting for you? The traditional view is that you cannot know who your bashert is, but once you get married, the person you married is by definition your bashert, so you should not let concerns about finding your bashert discourage you from marrying someone.
And while we're on the subject of G-d arranging marriages, I should share this delightful midrash: it is said that a Roman woman asked a rabbi, if your G-d created the universe in six days, then what has he been doing with his time since then? The rabbi said that G-d has been arranging marriages. The Roman woman scoffed at this, saying that arranging marriages was a simple task, but the rabbi assured her that arranging marriages properly is as difficult as parting the Red Sea. To prove the rabbi wrong, the Roman woman went home and took a thousand male slaves and a thousand female slaves and matched them up in marriages. The next day, the slaves appeared before her, one with a cracked skull, another with a broken leg, another with his eye gouged out, all asking to be released from their marriages. The woman went back to the rabbi and said, "There is no god like your G-d, and your Torah is true."
Mishnah Kiddushin 1:1 specifies that a woman is acquired (i.e., to be a wife) in three ways: through money, a contract, and sexual intercourse. Ordinarily, all three of these conditions are satisfied, although only one is necessary to effect a binding marriage.
Acquisition by money is normally satisfied by the wedding ring. It is important to note that although money is one way of "acquiring" a wife, the woman is not being bought and sold like a piece of property or a slave. This is obvious from the fact that the amount of money involved is nominal (according to the Mishnah, a perutah, a copper coin of the lowest denomination, was sufficient). In addition, if the woman were being purchased like a piece of property, it would be possible for the husband to resell her, and clearly it is not. Rather, the wife's acceptance of the money is a symbolic way of demonstrating her acceptance of the husband, just like acceptance of the contract or the sexual intercourse.
To satisfy the requirements of acquisition by money, the ring must belong to the groom. It cannot be borrowed, although it can be a gift from a relative. It must be given to the wife irrevocably. In addition, the ring's value must be known to the wife, so that there can be no claim that the husband deceived her into marrying by misleading her as to its value.
In all cases, the Talmud specifies that a woman can be acquired only with her consent, and not without it (Kiddushin 2a-b).
As part of the wedding ceremony, the husband gives the wife a ketubah. The word "Ketubah" comes from the root Kaf-Tav-Bet, meaning "writing." The ketubah is also called the marriage contract. The ketubah spells out the husband's obligations to the wife during marriage, conditions of inheritance upon his death, and obligations regarding the support of children of the marriage. It also provides for the wife's support in the event of divorce. There are standard conditions; however, additional conditions can be included by mutual agreement. Marriage agreements of this sort were commonplace in the ancient Semitic world.
The ketubah has much in common with prenuptial agreements, which are gaining popularity in America. In America, such agreements were historically disfavored, because it was believed that planning for divorce would encourage divorce, and that people who considered the possibility of divorce shouldn't be marrying. Although one rabbi in the Talmud expresses a similar opinion, the majority maintained that a ketubah discouraged divorce, by serving as a constant reminder of the husband's substantial financial obligations if he divorced his wife.
The ketubah is often a beautiful work of calligraphy, framed and displayed in the home.
The process of marriage occurs in two distinct stages: kiddushin (commonly translated as betrothal) and nisuin (full-fledged marriage). Kiddushin occurs when the woman accepts the money, contract or sexual relations offered by the prospective husband. The word "kiddushin" comes from the root Qof-Dalet-Shin, meaning "sanctified." It reflects the sanctity of the marital relation. However, the root word also connotes something that is set aside for a specific (sacred) purpose, and the ritual of kiddushin sets aside the woman to be the wife of a particular man and no other.
Kiddushin is far more binding than an engagement as we understand the term in modern America; in fact, Maimonides speaks of a period of engagement before the kiddushin. Once kiddushin is complete, the woman is legally the wife of the man. The relationship created by kiddushin can only be dissolved by death or divorce. However, the spouses do not live together at that time, and the mutual obligations created by the marital relationship do not take effect until the nisuin is complete.
The nisuin (from a word meaning "elevation") completes the process of marriage. The husband brings the wife into his home and they begin their married life together.
In the past, the kiddushin and nisuin would routinely occur as much as a year apart. During that time, the husband would prepare a home for the new family. There was always a risk that during this long period of separation, the woman would discover that she wanted to marry another man, or the man would disappear, leaving the woman in the awkward state of being married but without a husband. Today, the two ceremonies are normally performed together.
Because marriage under Jewish law is essentially a private contractual agreement between a man and a woman, it does not require the presence of a rabbi or any other religious official. It is common, however, for rabbis to officiate, partly in imitation of the Christian practice and partly because the presence of a religious or civil official is required under American civil law.
As you can see, it is very easy to make a marriage, so the rabbis instituted severe punishments (usually flogging and compelled divorce) where marriage was undertaken without proper planning and solemnity.
It is customary for the bride and groom not to see each other for a week preceding the wedding. On the Shabbat of that week, it is customary among Ashkenazic Jews for the groom to have an aliyah (the honor of reciting a blessing over the Torah reading. This aliyah is known as an aufruf. There are exuberant celebrations in the synagogue at this time.
The day before the wedding, both the bride and the groom fast.
Before the ceremony, the bride is veiled, a process called badeken, by the groom, or chatan. The veil symbolizes the idea of modesty and conveys the message that no matter how attractive physical appearances may be, the soul and character are paramount. This is an ancient custom and serves as the first of many actions by which the groom signals his commitment to clothe and protect his wife. The act is in remembrance of when Rebecca veiled her face before marrying Isaac. The badeken is symbolic of covering a treasure which one values.
The ceremony itself lasts 20-30 minutes, and is conducted under a chupah, wedding canopy, a symbol of the home to be built and shared by the couple. The chatan, followed by the kallah, bride, are escorted to the chupah by their respective set of parents. Just as one would rise in the presence of royalty, it is proper for the guests to rise upon the arrival of both the chatan and the kallah. When the groom reaches the chuppah the chazan, cantor, blesses him and asks G-d to bless the bride and groom. When the groom arrives underneath the chupah he dons a kittel, white robe, which symbolizes spiritual purity. Under the chupah the kallah circles the chatan seven times; just as the world was created in seven days, the kallah is figuratively building the walls of the couple's new home. Another explanation is that the seven circles correspond to the seven times in the Torah where it is written, ". . .and when a man marries a woman. . ." The chazan then blesses the bride and asks G-d to bless the chatan and kallah.
There are two separate parts of the wedding, kiddushin and the nisuin. For the kiddushin, the rabbi recites a blessing over the wine, and then a blessing acknowledging forbidden and permitted relationships in Jewish law. The first cup accompanies the betrothal blessing, and after these are recited, the couple drinks from the cup.
There is no requirement for a ring to be used in a Jewish wedding. Rather, a chatan must give the kallah an object worth more than one peruta, a small unit of value; however, it has become customary to use a ring. The man places the ring on the woman's finger and says "Be sanctified (mekudeshet) to me with this ring in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel." According to Jewish law, this is the central moment of the wedding, and the couple is now married.
After the kiddushin is complete, the ketubah, marriage contract, is read aloud in the original Aramaic text. The contract is then signed by two edim, witnesses. The ketubah is the property of the kallah and she must have access to it throughout the couple's marriage.
The nisuin then proceeds. The bride and groom stand beneath the chuppah, and the bride and groom recite seven blessings (sheva brakhos) in the presence of a minyan (prayer quorum of 10 adult Jewish men). The essence of each of the seven blessings is:
The couple then drinks the wine.
The groom smashes a glass (or a small symbolic piece of glass) with his right foot, to symbolize the destruction of the Temple.
The couple then retires briefly to a completely private room, cheder yichud, and are left alone for the first time. This time is also symbolic of the groom bringing his wife into his home.
Yichud is followed by a festive meal, which is followed by a repetition of the sheva brakhos. Exuberant music and dancing traditionally accompany the ceremony and the reception.
Marriage is vitally important in Judaism. Refraining from marriage is not considered holy, as it is in some other religions. On the contrary, it is considered unnatural. The Talmud says that an unmarried man is constantly thinking of sin. The Talmud tells of a rabbi who was introduced to a young unmarried rabbi. The older rabbi told the younger one not to come into his presence again until he was married.
Marriage is not solely, or even primarily, for the purpose of procreation. Traditional sources recognize that companionship, love and intimacy are the primary purposes of marriage, noting that woman was created in Gen. 2:18 because "it is not good for man to be alone," rather than because she was necessary for procreation.
According to the Torah and the Talmud, a man was permitted to marry more than one wife, but a woman could not marry more than one man. Although polygyny was permitted, it was never common. The Talmud never mentions any rabbi with more than one wife. Around 1000 C.E., Ashkenazic Jewry banned polygyny because of pressure from the predominant Christian culture. It continued to be permitted for Sephardic Jews in Islamic lands for many years. To the present day, Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews continue to practice polygyny; however, the modern state of Israel allows only one wife, unless you come to Israel with more than one wife, in which case you can keep the wives you have but you cannot marry new ones.
A husband is responsible for providing his wife with food, clothing and sexual relations (Ex. 21:10), as well as anything else specified in the ketubah. Marital sexual relations are the woman's right, not the man's. A man cannot force his wife to engage in sexual relations with him, nor is he permitted to abuse his wife in any way (a practice routinely permitted in Christian countries until quite recently).
A married woman retains ownership of any property she brought to the marriage, but the husband has the right to manage the property and to enjoy profits from the property.
The minimum age for marriage under Jewish law is 13 for boys, 12 for girls; however, the kiddushin can take place before that, and often did in medieval times. The Talmud recommends that a man marry at age 18, or somewhere between 16 and 24.
The Torah sets forth a laundry list of prohibited relations. Such marriages are never valid. A man cannot marry certain close blood relatives, the ex-wives of certain close blood relatives, a woman who has not been validly divorced from her previous husband, the daughter or granddaughter of his ex-wife, or the sister of his ex-wife during the ex-wife's life time.
The offspring of such a marriage are mamzerim (bastards, illegitimate), and subject to a variety of restrictions; however it is important to note that only the offspring of these incestuous or forbidden marriages are mamzerim. Children born out of wedlock are not mamzerim in Jewish law and bear no stigma, unless the marriage would have been prohibited for the reasons above. Children of a married man and a woman who is not his wife are not mamzerim (because the marriage between the parents would not have been prohibited), although children of a married woman and a man who is not her husband are mamzerim (because she could not have married him).
There are other classes of marriages that are not permitted, but that are valid if they occur and that do not make the children mamzerim. The marriage of minors, of a Jew to a non-Jew, and of a kohein to the prohibited classes of women discussed below fall into this category.
A kohein is not permitted to marry a divorcee, a convert, a promiscuous woman, a woman who is the offspring of a forbidden marriage to a kohein, or a woman who is the widow of a man who died childless but who has been released from the obligation to marry her husband's brother. A kohein who marries such a woman is disqualified from his duties as a kohein, as are all the offspring of that marriage.
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typical masnick overreach. damn, you are dense sometimes.
Connecticut Police Use Craigslist To Fight Prostitution; As Their Attorney General Grandstands To Take Away That Tool
from the what-a-tool dept
We've been covering Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's totally misguided crusade against Craigslist on the topic of prostitution. For years, he's complained and threatened Craigslist because prostitutes use the service. Of course, he's never taken legal action because he must realize that there is no legal action he can take. The law is pretty clear: the liability is on the users of the service, not the makers of the service. Even so, Craigslist has repeatedly changed the way its service works to appease Blumenthal, and while he initially seems happy with those changes, months later, he's always back to complaining (just in time for elections too…).
Of course, the point we've made all along in response to Blumenthal is that for smart law enforcement officials, Craigslist is an excellent tool for monitoring and cracking down on prostitution. In fact, it appears that some police in Connecticut are doing exactly that. Eric sends in the story of police in Naugatuck, Connecticut using Craigslist to crack down on prostitution in their city.
The police responded to a few ads that they believe were from prostitutes seeking money for sex, and arrested two women. Separately — and a bit more questionably — the police also put up an ad themselves, waiting for men to reply, and eventually arrested eighteen men who replied (including a city official). It's difficult to see how that latter part of the sting isn't entrapment, but they insist it's not. Either way, it does seem like a bit of a contradiction when the state's Attorney General is seeking to block Craigslist from dealing in such ads entirely while police in the state are using it as a tool against prostitution at the same time. Maybe they should talk to each other. But, of course, when Blumenthal's real purpose is not about stopping prostitution, but instead making sure he's re-elected, suddenly the seemingly contradictory actions make a lot more sense. Oh, and if Blumenthal is really looking to grandstand about Craigslist, why not complain about the fact that the guy who bought the Nissan Pathfinder used in the failed Times Square car bomb attack this weekend supposedly bought it via Craigslist. Surely, if Craigslist can be blamed for prostitution, now it can also be blamed for terrorism…
Filed Under: connecticut, liability, prostitution, richard blumenthal, section 230
Companies: craigslist


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Matt & Wendy Wooley
Breeders' Cup '10
EquiSport Photos "Breeder's Cup" horse racing photos are Copyright Protected, and intended for MEDIA & EDITORIAL USE. Please contact us for media use. EquiSport Photos Or contact the track photographer, Reed Palmer at Churchill Downs, to purchase similar images for personal use. (Churchill, http://www.churchilldownsphotostore.com/)Read More


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As The Euro Tumbles, Spaniards Look To Gold
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The unremitting deterioration of the eurozone's sovereign debt landscape continues to fuel uncertainties about the longevity of the euro as a strong currency. Such uncertainties are not only leading to capital flight from the EMU's periphery to the core and destabilizing markets worldwide, but they are also beginning to frighten southern European savers into seeking refuge outside their 10-year-old currency.
Such is the case in my home country of Spain – the latest tumbling economy to threaten the euro's survival. As the crisis deepens, there is still a window of opportunity for Spaniards to turn to gold as a means to protect their wealth against the risks of increased foreign exchange volatility, forced re-denomination, or even a total currency collapse.
Spain: Too Big To Ignore
While the general consensus among analysts is that the common currency may withstand (and even desire) Greece's exit, Spain is both "too big to fail" and "too big to rescue."
Indeed, as the crisis finally hits Spain, the eurozone's fourth-largest economy, the country has witnessed the flight of €315bn ($397bn) worth of foreign capital in the past year – the equivalent of 22% of its GDP. Of this amount, €220bn ($274bn) vanished during the first six months of 2012. And in just-released numbers from the European Central Bank (ECB), private sector deposits at Spanish banks fell almost 5% in July (the biggest drop since the ECB began to record this data in 1997).
Brussels' inability to stop Spain (and potentially Italy) from spinning into an uncontrollable solvency crisis has spurred fear over a potential: disintegration: of the euro system.
Others warn, however, that signs of economic stagnation spreading to the core, along with rising political and social tensions across the continent, may be conducive to an equally wealth-destructing picture: the desperate adoption of expansionary monetary and debt mutualization policies long prescribed by officials in Brussels to "save the euro." In fact, ECB President Mario Draghi promised as much in his latest remarks on Thursday.
Naturally, either of these scenarios will severely punish creditors and savers in euro-denominated assets.
From Cement Bricks to Gold Bars?
For years, Spaniards have trusted home ownership as a safe and profitable savings channel. Up until the late 1990s, "investing in bricks," as the Spanish call it, was a relatively easy and affordable wealth accumulation strategy (according to the government, 83% of Spaniards are homeowners). The coupling of Spaniards' blind faith in ever-rising real estate values with the artificially low interest rates that came: with the euro – as well as a financial system plagued by politicians recklessly managing savings banks – conjured up a massive housing bubble.
Since Spain's entry into the euro system, the country has experienced such economic myopia that in the spring of 2007, Pedro Solbes, the then Socialist government's Minister of Finance, revealed the sale of a large portion of the country's gold. At the time, Minister Solbes argued that the precious metal "was no longer profitable," and that the proceeds from the sale would be "reinvested in sounder assets," such as Spanish sovereign debt. That year, Spain sold 157.8 tons of gold (32% of the national reserves) at an average $630 an ounce. We lost over $5bn of appreciation in the intervening years.
As the real estate bubble burst, and as Spaniards watched with astonishment the dire economic developments in Ireland, Portugal, and Greece, the prospect that an era of prosperity (albeit artificial) had come to a sudden end began to finally sink in.
This past May was a turning point for Spain, when BFA-Bankia,: the country's fourth-largest bank, became: de facto: nationalized. [Click here: to read J. Luis' coverage of this event.] Foreign capital flight spiked (€41.3bn left the country in May, and €56.6bn in June) and small depositors noticeably started to look for ways to protect their savings.
Following Bankia's debacle, Spain's Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro was quick to address the media in an attempt to calm the public. Montoro said that a "corralito,"or bank holiday, was a technical impossibility in Spain due to the country's membership in the euro system, and that all bank deposits were safe. The damage, however, had already been done – evidence of a failed financial system demanding billions of foreign aid to fill its holes and the possibility of Spain following Greece's path to economic meltdown had become too evident to conceal.
The sale of safe deposit boxes has since surged and mainstream media have begun to run stories on how to legally open accounts in foreign currencies abroad to protect savings.
Furthermore, since the ongoing "financial sector restructuring" is far from over and an estimated 2 million homes remain empty, the value of the real estate Spaniards possess continues to decline.
So, Spaniards are now seeing the value of their cherished "bricks" plummeting, the government raising taxes, and the future of their paper money – and even its mere existence – uncertain.
Under the current environment, gold may turn out to be the Spaniards' best hedge.
The Gold Market in Spain
According to Marion Mueller, vice president of the Spanish Precious Metals Association: (Asociacion Espanola de Metales Preciosos, or AEMP) and founder of: Orno y Finanzas,: an online publication which specializes in gold and finance, Spaniards' interest in gold is experiencing a noticeable boost.
"Up until very recently, to speak about gold as an investment or as wealth protection insurance was grin-provoking. That is changing," says Mueller.
She notes that since 2010, when the Spanish economic downturn became inescapable, a growing tendency to invest in physical gold developed among Spanish investors, brokers, and financial institutions. Demand for physical gold from the general public is also growing, but Spaniards are not yet as educated about the market as northern Europeans. "There is still confusion and lack of information about gold as a way to protect one's purchasing power," she explains, "and our goal at the AEMP and at: Oro y Finanzas: is precisely to try to inform people about gold."
Evidence of the growing demand for investment gold is also found in the rapid proliferation of cash-for-gold shops in Spain. This particular market responds to a different side of the crisis, as it caters to people who need to sell their jewelry to pay debts or make ends meet. However, in terms of its relationship with the upswing in bullion demand, scrap gold is not going back to the jewelry sector. Instead, Mueller explains, "100% of it is going back to feed the international gold bullion industry in places such as England, Switzerland, and Belgium."
As per a European directive, gold bullion in Spain enjoys a favorable tax treatment, as the investment-grade metal is exempt from Value Added Tax (VAT). In addition, in Spain, there are no special taxes or levies specific to the resale of gold bullion. There is thus great potential for gold (and silver) to become a money substitute among the population.
According to Mueller, Spain's increasing demand for physical gold has led to the emergence of specialized dealers in Spain. Not only are Spanish precious metals distributors sprouting, but well-known French and German dealers are beginning to offer bullion in Spain.
While access to physical gold in Spain is becoming easier and more widespread, "things might change," warns Mueller.
"The rise in gold prices is a reflection not of the crisis, but rather of the end of a monetary cycle," Mueller emphasizes. In her view, the current debacle in Europe may turn governments to intervene in the gold market. "We live in a period of maximum government control… you can rest assured that, if [the government] decides to intervene, it will."
Owning physical gold now, Mueller says, "remains the best protection against wealth confiscation."
Because the next several months may prove critical to the future of the euro system,: theECB has charted a course for devaluation. This may continue to buy the eurozone additional time before its endgame finally plays out, but any number of factors could still split the common currency. Either way, this is a critical: window of opportunity for Spaniards to learn how to safeguard their wealth.
J. Luis: Martin: is an International Relations analyst and business development consultant based in Spain. He is also founder of: The Truman Factor, a bilingual publication focusing on world economy and politics. Martin studied International Affairs at the American University of Paris and at the London School of Economics. His articles also appear in: El Confidencial in English.
This article first appeared in the September 2012 edition of: Peter Schiff's Gold Letter, a monthly newsletter featuring original contributions from Peter Schiff, Casey Research, and other leading experts in the gold market.: Click here: for your free subscription. To learn more about Peter Schiff's gold & silver dealer, visit: www.europacmetals.com.
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The Speaker: Or Miscellaneous Pieces, Selected from the Best English Writers, and Disposed Under Proper Heads, with a View to Facilitate the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking, to which are Prefixed Two Essays: I. On Elocution. II. On Reading Works of Taste
William Enfield
Stereotyped by Andrew Wilson, 1823 - 346 trang
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Thuật ngữ vą cụm từ thōng dụng
action affection appear army better cause CHAP consider continued death desire earth equal ev'ry expression fair fall father fear feel follow fool fortune give Gods hand happy hath head hear heard heart Heav'n hold honour hope hour human imagination it's kind king laws leave light live look lord manner means mind nature never night noble o'er observe once pain pass passion peace perfection person pleasure poor pow'r present proper reason rest round seems sense serve side soon soul sound speak spirit stand taste tears tell thee thing thou thought true truth turn virtue voice whole wise wish writing young youth
Đoạn trķch phổ biến
Trang 335 - tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die : to sleep...
Trang 227 - Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire ; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd, Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.
Trang 321 - Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; •> I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil, that men do, lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; \ So let it be with Caesar.
Trang 326 - For I can raise no money by vile means: By heaven, I had rather coin my heart, And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash By any indirection: I did send To you for gold to pay my legions, Which you denied me: was that done like Cassius?
Trang 315 - Let's dry our eyes: and thus far hear me, Cromwell; And, when I am forgotten, as I shall be, And sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention Of me more must be heard of, say, I taught thee...
Trang 157 - Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse: We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us. This day is call'd the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd, And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
Trang 307 - No matter where ; of comfort no man speak : Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs ; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth...
Trang 333 - But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porcupine : But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood.
Trang 194 - As a sick girl. Ye gods, it doth amaze me, A man of such a feeble temper should So get the start of the majestic world, And bear the palm alone.
Trang 344 - Thais led the way To light him to his prey, And like another Helen fired another Troy ! Thus long ago, Ere heaving bellows learned to blow, While organs yet were mute, Timotheus, to his breathing flute And sounding lyre, Could swell the soul to rage or kindle soft desire.