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Wolves pledge playoffs in ticket campaign
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Minnesota Timberwolves have been saying all season the playoffs are the goal this year. Now they're banking on it.
The Wolves are promising anyone who renews their season ticket or purchases a new one for next season a 10 percent discount if the team does not make the playoffs this year. The Wolves are currently in ninth place in the Western Conference, one spot out of the playoff field.
"It's sort of a part pledge, part challenge," Timberwolves chief marketing officer Ted Johnson said.
It's also the latest in a series of aggressive marketing tactics aimed at getting fans to consider the Timberwolves again after years of struggling and getting them on the bandwagon as the team has started to show signs of promise. They started a sometimes painfully honest advertising campaign four years ago, telling fans they were beginning a "re-re-re-rebuilding" plan, alluding to the difficulty they had re-inventing themselves after trading star forward Kevin Garnett to Boston.
With fans turning away from the product, they went to great lengths to try to keep them coming to Target Center, slashing ticket prices and increasing the amenities given to season-ticket holders. During one of the roughest years of the recession, owner Glen Taylor even offered fans who purchased a season ticket the chance for a full refund if they lost their job in the calendar year. They also drew some jeers league-wide when they took out an ad in the local Star Tribune of Minneapolis acknowledging that they weren't going to win the NBA title before the 2010-11 season began.
Now that the team is more competitive, with All-Star forward Kevin Love, dynamic point guard Ricky Rubio and bruising center Nikola Pekovic giving coach Rick Adelman a strong core, the Wolves are trying to seize some momentum.
"It's just the next chapter in that process," Johnson said. "We were very open and honest with our fans when we didn't think we were going to be as competitive and we were asking their patience to bide their time and join the journey with us. Now that the expectations have changed we're willing to put skin in the game. We know our expectations of ourselves will be to challenge for that (playoff) spot."
It can still be considered a bold maneuver.
The Wolves started the season fully confident that they were going to make the playoffs for the first time since 2004 in the powerful Western Conference. But Rubio only returned from a torn ACL in his left knee in the middle of December and has been bothered by back spasms that have kept him out the last four games. Love missed the first three weeks of the regular season with a broken hand, then broke it again last week and is expected to be out for several weeks. The team is also missing Brandon Roy, Chase Budinger, Malcolm Lee and Josh Howard because of knee injuries.
Through it all they've managed to stay afloat at 15-15, but the playoffs are no sure thing. Another ad appeared in the Star Tribune on Monday morning, saying that "the days of the 'building season' are over." Johnson said the campaign didn't need to be discussed with the basketball side of the franchise because it is essentially an extension of what president David Kahn, Adelman and the players have been saying from the outset.
"If you commit to us for next year, we know that part of that is you're making a commitment to a team that is competitive," Johnson said. "We're in the playoff hunt and our expectation is to challenge for the playoff spot. Just like we're asking you to make us a commitment now for next season, we're willing to make a commitment to you."


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42 comments
Rachel, gorgeous top! I love the embroidered details and this color is superb!ReplyDelete
Abby | Life in the Fash Lane
What a great top Rachel! The embroidery details adds great texture.ReplyDelete
xo Sheree
IG: @poshclassymom
Great look! And what a gorgious background!ReplyDelete
Fancy Friday linkup is on Today at www.nancysfashionstyle.com
Loving the embroidery on those sleeves! You're right---OTS tops never seem to get old! Have a great weekend :)ReplyDelete
Super cute look and yes you need to be holding a margarita to complete this look. ;) Love the denim you are wearing, too! I really need to get some more off the shoulder tops, the one I have is just not enough!ReplyDelete
Great outfit! I really love the detail on the sleeves! Super cute!ReplyDelete
That top is so cute! Love the embroidery detail! It's perfect with your frayed denim!ReplyDelete
Doused In Pink
It's a gorgoues top!ReplyDelete
Obsessed with that top! The embroidered sleeves are perfection! Wishing you an amazing weekend babe!ReplyDelete
Loving the fit and hem of those jeans! I have the shoes in red and at that price might need another color. ;)ReplyDelete
Amy Ann
Straight A Style
I love the detailing on the sleeves...it's such a fun statement look for summer! This blue on you is amazing too :)ReplyDelete
OMG, I LOVE this top Rachael!! The detail on the sleeves is to die for! Gorgeous look!ReplyDelete
xx, Elise
What a great top and the color is so nice and vibrant. You know a top is worth every penny when you wear it year after year. Fabulous. Enjoy margaritas, that's what we are making tonight too.ReplyDeleteReplies
Thank you so much! Enjoy your margaritas and have a wonderful weekend!Delete
What a great top and the color is so nice and vibrant. You know a top is worth every penny when you wear it year after year. Fabulous. Enjoy margaritas, that's what we are making tonight too.ReplyDelete
loving that outfit! that shirt is so vibrant and a great color choice for you - also your shoes are amazing! enjoy margaritas!ReplyDelete
Gorgeous outfit! Love the top and shoes!ReplyDelete
Oooh such a fun top!!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousJune 10, 2016 at 11:19 AM
Such a great look! I absolutely love that top!ReplyDelete
xo Lacey
Gorgeous! Your off the shoulder top is amazing. Such a pretty color <3ReplyDelete
Wow! This top make me madReplyDelete
So stylish, si chic
I love your style and your blog.
Visit mine if you want.
Lovely top and thanks for the pointers on the heels sale.ReplyDelete
Rachel xo
Gorgeous look, I love the off the shoulder top and those shoes are so cute! xoReplyDelete
Beautiful top! I love the details on the sleeves!ReplyDelete
Have a wonderful weekend!
Andrea's Wellness Notes
The sleeves add a really nice touch of color to the outfit without being overwhelming!ReplyDelete
Tamara - loveofMode.com
The embellished cuffs of your top are really eye-catching!!ReplyDelete
Thank you for linking up on Fancy Friday.ReplyDelete
My pleasure, thank you for hosting!Delete
How pretty! I love your sandals! =)ReplyDelete
- Cielo
Mermaid in Heels
Aww, really love your blouse dear! Its color suits you so much! <3ReplyDelete
Have a lovely weekend!
beautiful pictures ! i love the shoes !! :)ReplyDelete
Amazing photography, you are looking so elegant dear!ReplyDelete
Thank you so much Dedra!Delete
Wow, this outfit is gorgeous, I love your shoes!ReplyDelete
Love the colorful sleeve detailing and thanks for hosting the linkup!ReplyDelete
Chow Down USA
You look so pretty in that tunic! Very nice outfit! I would be very happy to stay in touch! Let me know if you wanna follow each other on bloglovin, or just follow me and I will follow back : )ReplyDelete
conscious lifestyle of mine
Loving the detail on your sleeves!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousJune 13, 2016 at 11:57 AM
I love that top! So cute! And with your shoes, it's perfection.ReplyDelete
Loving those heels! I'm starting to get addicted to off the shoulder tops :-) Yours is super cute!ReplyDelete
Jeans and a Teacup
So in love with the top, looks so cool and pretty :)ReplyDelete
- Lily Widjaja
I love the off the shoulder look and I cannot say how much I love the strappy fringe sandals! I totally want some. Would love if you can link up to http://the-wardrobe-stylist.com/2016/06/13/tips-finding-wholesale-dresses/ReplyDelete
love the colour in this outfit post, very nice for this time of year too :) x xReplyDelete

subset: commoncrawl


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Dinosaurs' long reign on Earth may have had more to do with lady luck than with superiority, according to a study published today in Science. The study challenges the old notion that dinosaurs out-competed their reptilian contemporaries.
It is a longstanding mystery why dinosaurs became and remained so plentiful for more than 180 million years. The traditional theory: dinosaurs suddenly replaced other land animals because of special traits that gave them an evolutionary advantage, such as being warm-blooded, nimble and able to occupy varied habitats. This new research presents a fresh mathematical analysis of previous fossil data that indicates that ancestors of modern-day crocodiles had as diverse body types as early dinos, with whom they co-existed for some 30 million years.
Although the data doesn't directly contradict the idea of dinosaur superiority, the authors say it is likely that these crocodilians were even more successful than dinosaurs, the latter of which may have survived major extinctions due to sheer luck.
"If you dissect the past, you can see that luck is a big part of everything in the grand scheme of evolution," says lead author Stephen Brusatte, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History.
The idea that dinosaurs lived at the same time as similar reptile species is nothing new. And data from the past few years has many paleontologists rethinking whether dinosaurs were really so special after all. The fossil record shows that dinos lived alongside comparable groups of reptiles for millions of years without overtaking them.
For example, the early dinosaurs were contemporaries of crurotarsans, croc ancestors, during the late Triassic period about 230 to 200 million years ago. This reptilian group ranged from quick predators to two-legged vegetarians to leisurely grazers. Then, as the Triassic turned into the Jurassic, the creatures roaming the planet changed drastically. Most crurotarsans disappeared from the fossil record. But many dinosaurs survived—and flourished, diversifying into meat-eating giants, armored warriors and winged aviators.
Brusatte and researchers from the University of Bristol in England expanded this research by analyzing the existing fossil record to show crurotarsans may have even been more successful than dinos. First, the team constructed a new family tree to separate the dinosaurs from the croc ancestors. They then assembled a database of 65 dinosaur and crurotarsan species that included over 400 skeletal features, such as whether they had beaks or shorter arms than legs.
If dinosaurs were more fit for the environment, they should have had a higher rate of evolution and more diverse body types. Instead the researchers found that the two groups evolved at similar rates and that the crurotarsans had a wider range of body types, suggesting that they had actually adapted to more lifestyles and ecological niches.
The authors argue that because dinosaurs and crurotarsans were living parallel lives together for so long, it is unlikely the dinosaurs necessarily ruled. If you could travel back to the Triassic, Brusatte says, you would have guessed that the crocodilians would have won out. "There's no way you could argue that dinosaurs were superior to them," he says. Instead, he thinks an extinction event at the beginning of the Jurassic some 205 million years ago—like runaway global warming or an asteroid crash—may have just been bad luck for the crurotarsans.
Many paleontologists consider these findings a major step in dinosaur science. "It's really refreshing," says Kristi Curry-Rogers, a dinosaur paleontologist at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn. "It definitely challenges the standard story of dinosaur evolution…. In the world of dinosaurs, we see a lot that portrays them in ways that science doesn't really follow."
But not all experts agree. "I think that the conclusions of the authors aren't warranted," says Kevin Padian, a dinosaur paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Good luck isn't an evolutionary force…. Extinctions aren't random." He believes that dinosaurs are different enough from crurotarsans that they may have had a competitive edge.
Whether dinosaurs rose to fame from fitness or a roll of the dice should become clearer as paleontologists discover more fossils to fill in the sparse record of dinosaurs' early history and elucidate what caused the extinctions at the end of the Triassic. Rogers says that Brusatte's analysis will probably challenge people to support their claims of dinosaur superiority with stronger evidence. "It gives people something to shoot at that is based on data," she says, "and not just assumption."
Was the Dinosaurs' Long Reign on Earth a Fluke?
Dinosaurs stomped all over the planet for millions of years. Now some researchers think it was more a matter of luck than vigor
Dinosaurs' long reign on Earth may have had more to do with lady luck than with superiority, according to a study published today in Science. The study challenges the old notion that dinosaurs out-competed their reptilian contemporaries.


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Artist: Grace Absi
Title: Les piramides
Country: USA
Medium: Acrylic on Paper
Marks: Signed
Paper Size: 30 x 23 inch
COA: Certificate of Authenticity Is Included
Grace Absi was born 1967 in Beirut Lebanon, her talent was first recognized in school when she draw banners and signs, she spend great deal of her childhood painting acrylic on fabrics & glass. In 1989 she received her degree in architecture. In 1994 she travel to Spain for vacation where she get impressed with the beauty of the country and specially the seven Islands where she decided to stay and she reside in Puerto de la Cruz, Canary Islands for seven years. She held her first solo exposition at Sandysky Art Galleries, she continued to draw her elegant paintings, at the same time attending to art classes and learning new methods.
In 2000 she moved to Florida. In 2003 moved to south California and still, she continues to paints her masterpieces. Her one of a kind art creation is of a unique vitality & romantic imagination and transferable message of which the principle of modern and contemporary art is founded. Her elegant fine arts beauty & diversity is uniquely marvelous, it combines the romantic portraits, landscapes and the flowers in their natural beauty features a spectacular collection of oil paintings on canvas.


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Enter battlemode – a new 2 versus 1 multiplayer experience.
A fully-armed doom slayer faces off against two player-controlled demons
fighting it out in a best-of-five round match of intense first-person combat.


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One of the most common bread-and-butter treatments within the surgical profession is the hernia operation. Some 20 million groin hernia repairs are performed each year – 100,000 in the UK and three-quarters of a million in the US (BMJ, 2004; 328: 59-60). They are so routine that even infants with a herniated belly button undergo them.
A hernia is the protrusion of a small loop of intestine through an inner muscle wall. The most common variety is the inguinal hernia, where a small loop of intestine protrudes through the inguinal canal in the groin as a result of excessive internal pressure, coughing or strain. They are more common in men, who have more than one chance in four of suffering from such a hernia at some point in their life. In contrast, women are more likely to suffer from a femoral hernia, where a section of bowel forces its way through the relatively weak muscle ring at the femoral canal, at the top of the thigh.
With a hiatus hernia, part of the stomach slips upwards into the chest area through the aperture in the diaphragm.
Most hernias are 'reducible' – they will become smaller due to the effects of gravity or gentle pressure and cause no problem. But when the protruding gut becomes stuck in the abdominal wall, the bowel could then become 'strangulated', where the blood supply is cut off. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting and severe pain. If left untreated, a strangulated hernia can lead to gangrene of the trapped bowel section.
What does the surgery involve?
A hernia operation attempts to 'patch' up the abdominal wall by using either the patient's own body tissue or a piece of prosthetic material, such as polypropylene mesh. This patch is sewn in via:
* open surgery, such as the Lichtenstein operation, the most common type of open mesh operation
* laparoscopy, or keyhole surgery. In this case, three small incisions are made, through which are threaded a tiny fibreoptic cable and camera lens along with various surgical instruments; the surgeon is then guided by the images transmitted to a video monitor. Keyhole hernia repair is considerably more complicated than open surgery, taking about three times as long and requiring greater technical skill from the surgeon.
What doctors don't tell you
There is no doubt that surgical techniques to correct hernias have improved dramatically over the past 10 years. The old method of open surgery, which involves placing sutures (stitches) in the abdominal wall, often requires a repeat operation because, in a large percentage of cases, the stitches come apart. Such a 'recurrence' may affect one-fifth of all cases, rising to 50 per cent after the third operation. Doctors maintain that the open mesh (Lichtenstein) operation has reduced the recurrence rate to only 2-5 per cent of all patients.
Nevertheless, there are still many hidden issues:
* Surgery may not be necessary. The dangers of leaving a groin hernia alone are vastly overplayed and surgery vastly overprescribed. A study by surgeons at the University College and Middlesex School of Medicine in London put the strangulation rates for inguinal hernia at 2.8 per cent a year, rising to 4.5 per cent after two years. The rate of complications rises more steeply within the first three months of hernia onset, which suggests that if you have a new hernia, you are at a greater risk of complications than someone who has had one for years (Br J Surg, 1991; 78: 1171-3).
* Your doctor can make a mistake and cause injury. Misplaced staples or overzealous cutting in all types of hernia surgery can cause permanent injury of nerves in the thigh.
* Blood clots, groin seromas (a collection of fluid), and problems of the spermatic cord or testicles may also occur.
* The stitches can give way, thereby requiring a repeat operation. Despite the more positive much-touted figures, a recent study put recurrence rates at 10 per cent among laparoscopies and 5 per cent for open surgery (N Engl J Med, 2004; 350: 1819-27).
* Complications are more frequent than initially thought. The above-mentioned study had a complication rate of an alarming 40 per cent in the laparoscopic group and 33.4 per cent in the open-surgery group.
* Keyhole repair is very risky. As the doctor, like a videogames player, is being guided via a videoscreen, it's easy to miss; needle and other instrument injuries are common, including bladder perforation, respiratory problems, vascular injury, major haemorrhage and intestinal obstruction.
* Injury to the bowel can be fatal. A study of 90 patients who had undergone keyhole surgery for their hernia recorded four incidents of bowel injury (4.4 per cent). Of these patients, one developed sepsis (overwhelming infection) and multi-organ failure, and died. Other studies have reported death rates of 0.6-3.4 per cent – which means that, out of every 100 patients, more than three could die (Hernia, 10 March 2004; e-published ahead of print).
* Open surgery can leave the patient with persistent pain. In a study of 142 men, pain persisted for more than three years in 4 per cent of them (Hernia, 2003; 7: 185-90).
* Surgery may result in numbness or pain during sex. Up to 9 per cent of patients suffer numbness, while others have shooting pains during ejaculation (Hernia, 2003; 7: 185-90). The operation has also led to testicular atrophy.
* The long-term effects of having a foreign material in your body are still not known. There are, as yet, no studies into the long-term effects of the polypropylene mesh used in open mesh surgery. Indeed, the surgeon who developed mesh repair in Europe restricted its use to the over-50s because of the unknown long-term fate and side-effects of the prosthetic mesh implants (Lancet, 1994; 344: 375-9).
The use of surgery is usually justified for a femoral hernia. If left untreated, more than a fifth of all such hernias will strangulate after three months, and nearly half after 21 months. Indeed, some 40 per cent of sufferers are admitted to hospital as emergencies (BMJ, 2004; 328: 59-60).
Michelle Clare


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Flipps Disrupts Mobile to TV Entertainment and Raises $2.4M to Grow 10M User Base and Expand Premium Content
--Tim Draper and Earlybird Venture Capital invest
--Works with over 250M TVs worldwide without additional hardware or cost
--Over 10M Downloads of the free Flipps mobile application
30 Apr, 2014, 07:30 ET
SAN FRANCISCO, April 30, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Flipps, the easiest way to stream quality entertainment from your mobile device to a TV, raises $2.4M USD from Earlybird Venture Capital and existing investors including Tim Draper. Flipps will use the investment to build on its rapidly growing business in the US and Europe while expanding its ever growing library of premium content. Flipps is a mobile app for entertainment enthusiasts who want to easily discover and project unique content onto any connected TV using their mobile device (as a remote control) without any additional hardware or set up. Download the Flipps mobile application for free on iOS and Android and start streaming to a connected TV instantly.
Flipps Market
Flipps' patented technology immediately works with over 250M connected TVs and is compatible with over 5,000 manufacturer models requiring no set up, no pairing of devices, no cables, no dongle and no set top box. The Council for Research Excellence confirms that TV is still the primary viewing platform with 84% of viewing hours. Additionally, Nielsen cites that searching for and viewing online entertainment on a mobile device continues to accelerate rapidly with the latest year-over-year increase of 37%. With over 10M downloads of its mobile app, Flipps is successfully addressing both of these trends by combining the richness of TV viewing with easy content discovery on a mobile device.
Flipps for Consumers: Discover & Enjoy Unique Entertainment on your TV via your Mobile Device with Zero Effort
Flipps' intuitive mobile interface makes it easy to discover movies, music videos and more on your smartphone or tablet and stream to any nearby connected TV. Flipps has amassed over 100 channels in its growing library of licensed content including popular online TV series like Back On Topps, hit Hollywood movies, and news from The Washington Post. "Watching quality entertainment on your TV has become overly confusing with the need for costly hardware devices and complicated remote controls. People should just be able to lean back and watch what they want, when they want without needing an engineering degree," states Kosta Jordanov, CEO of Flipps. "At Flipps, we've figured out an easy and universally compatible way to turn your smartphone into a magic wand of entertainment that projects onto the big screen."
Flipps for Content Owners: Expand Reach to over 250M TVs Globally & Scale
Flipps selected publishers can now expand their reach across hundreds of millions of TVs worldwide without the need to develop proprietary apps or specialized software to accommodate thousands of different TV models. Integration is quick and easy, and Flipps takes full care of content delivery. "Flipps helps content owners save tremendous resources because integration onto the Flipps video adaptive platform is effortless and scalable," according to Dan Lupu from Earlybird Venture Capital. "With our investment, Flipps accelerates its incredible growth and will finalize more deals with forward thinking publishers eager to reach new audiences." The Flipps distribution channel also offers flexible monetization solutions in the form of advertising and subscription models.
Famed Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper states, "Flipps has created a scalable new TV distribution channel. It is an elegant user experience where TV goes mobile – wherever your mobile device goes so goes your TV. Flipps is turning an entire industry on its head."
About Flipps
Flipps delivers quality entertainment to any nearby TV from your mobile device without any additional hardware. The company has offices in San Francisco, New York and Sofia, Bulgaria and is backed by Tim Draper, Earlybird Venture Capital, Hasan Aslanoba, LAUNCHub and Teres Capital. Flipps holds a patent for its back end technology that allows users to magically 'flip' their content to the big screen. The Flipps mobile application is free and available on the App Store and Google Play. More information can be found at www.flipps.com.
Engage with Flipps:
Facebook: facebook.com/FlippsTV
Twitter: twitter.com/FlippsTV
About Earlybird Venture Capital
Established in 1997 Earlybird has raised over EUR 700 million ($900 million) in fund commitments. We have backed 100 companies, some of which have sparked significant innovations in business and technology and resulted in large scale ($1bn+) IPOs and trade sales. Earlybird backs European companies with global ambitions, and our active portfolio currently includes 27 companies across the consumer Internet and enterprise services space.
Flipps is a part of the Earlybird Digital East Fund, which invests in disruptive consumer Internet, mobile, and enterprise technology companies originating from Turkey and CEE.
Earlybird's investor base includes some of the most renowned institutional investors worldwide. More information can be found at www.earlybird.com.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140429/82173
SOURCE Flipps


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Is your child already enthusiastic about rhyming games, Scrabble, anagrams, or Pig Latin? Try adding a new kind of word game to your collection: riddles!
What is gray, has four legs, big ears, a tail, and a trunk?
A mouse going on vacation!
Riddles are an excellent way for kids to learn how to really listen to the sounds of words, understand that some words have more than one meaning, and how to manipulate words. Riddles also help build a rich vocabulary and strengthen reading comprehension. And finally, riddles are familiar and fun — a good incentive for thinking about words and reading. Here's how to get started with riddles:
Riddle books
There are lots of wonderful riddle books (see Reading Rockets' booklist, Lots of Laughs). Dive into one and just start reading some of the riddles out loud — the questions and the answers. Talk about the structure of the riddle (question/answer) and why the answers make silly sense if you understand the multiple meanings of the words. Share your thinking about the word play to help your child understand the riddle more clearly. Riddle books are especially entertaining for family trips or long drives, and can inspire original riddle-making by parents and kids alike.
Homonym fun
Homonyms — words that sound the same but have different meanings — provide a great opportunity for word fun. Say a word out loud, and see if your child can generate more than one meaning for the word. For example:
ball: a round object used in games
ball: a fancy party
moose: the animal with antlers
mousse: a chocolate dessert
Word meaning and context
Show your child how to figure out what a word means by thinking about the words around it. For example, the word "school" can refer to your child's classroom or a group of fish. Once your child becomes aware of the double meaning of "school" he can start to appreciate or even invent riddles like this:
Why are fish so smart?
Because they swim in schools!
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At the age of 72, with the Naismith Hall of Fame on his résumé and his standing as the only basketball coach ever to have won both an NCAA championship and an NBA championship, you have to wonder why Larry Brown is riding the team bus nearly four hours down I-35 through Waco, Georgetown (not that Georgetown), Round Rock, and Austin to San Marcos and Texas State University; why at six one morning, he drives his Chevy Malibu to a Houston high school to scout a kid while Coach K flies in on his private jet; why last July alone he hauled himself around the country to Philly, Indiana, Las Vegas, Orlando, two outposts in the Texas hinterlands, and Hampton, Virginia, where John Calipari of Kentucky and Bill Self of Kansas, two of Brown's closest friends, sat seigneurially in the stands focusing on three or four prime recruits; why he spends his afternoons on the practice floor teaching basketball to hardworking young men who are not and will never be among the basketball elite and who, Brown jokes, have to Google him to find out who he is; why he tolerates games in half-empty arenas where the cheerleaders are louder than the crowd and where he can't help but pop up off the bench during nearly every possession, gesticulating at his players like a ground crewman directing a plane to the gate, and why he risks suffering the losses even though his veins bulge, his face reddens, and he has been known to break out in a rash during a game; above all, why he has left his family back in Philadelphia — his beautiful young wife and his teenage son and daughter, whom he adores — to live in a residential hotel in Dallas, where he eats takeout food and spends most nights alone.
"He doesn't need this," admits his assistant coach, Tim Jankovich. "He could be drawing a 4-iron around a tree."
So why is Larry Brown subjecting himself to this?
Brown's career seems to invite metaphors, and you can find one in the grind of the metal saws, the deafeningly rapid ca-chug, ca-chug, ca-chug of the jackhammers that fill the air around his office during the $57 million renovation of 56-year-old Moody Coliseum, where the Southern Methodist Mustangs play their home basketball games. (You can also find it in another SMU rehabilitation project directly across from Brown's office on Dublin Street: the George W. Bush Presidential Center, scheduled to open later this year.) But it is not only the stadium that is being renovated. The Southern Methodist University basketball team, Brown's latest stop in his 40-year coaching career, is also undergoing massive reconstruction. Brown has always considered himself a reclamation expert. "One place had a winning record that I went to," he says of his 14 basketball stops, "and that was Detroit. Rick Carlisle laid a foundation that gave us a chance to win a championship. The reality is that I never felt I left a place in worse shape than when I got there."
But SMU is a challenge even for Mr. Reclamation. Set on a pastoral campus in an upscale patch of Dallas and with a student body of 6,000, SMU has little basketball tradition. It has made just 10 appearances in the NCAA tournament over the school's nearly 100-year history, the most recent in 1993. Last year's team, under Matt Doherty, finished second to last in Conference USA. Doherty had recruited fairly well under the circumstances, and he attracted transfers from Nevada, Kansas State, and Texas, but the horizons weren't bright, especially considering that SMU is headed next year to the Big East, which is one of the main reasons Brown was hired.
And then there is the history. SMU's football team in the mid-1970s through the early 1980s had committed transgressions so egregious, mainly paying players large sums from a slush fund, that the NCAA did what it had never done before and hasn't done since: It sentenced SMU to the "death penalty," canceling the entire 1987 season and all the home games in 1988 — though the school inflicted an even tougher punishment on itself by canceling the road games, too. That was 26 years ago, but the cloud still hangs over the school. Athletic director Rick Hart admits that it "is part of our culture" and "something we have to be cognizant of as we develop plans and build relationships."
But Brown has a vision. "I see what John Thompson did at Georgetown," he says. "He went from [being] a high school coach and built that program to where it was as good as any." Brown is betting he can do the same thing in Dallas.
But that's not what brought him to Dallas. Like everything with Larry Brown, that's more complicated than it sounds — very complicated.
Here's what you probably know about Lawrence Harvey Brown. You know that he is regarded as one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, with what the New York Times once called "one of the most impressive résumés of any player or coach." You know that he is a disciple of Carolina great Dean Smith, who coached Brown there in the early 1960s, and that Brown's mantra is The Right Way, which means that basketball isn't just about wins, it is about process. As Eric Snow, who played point guard for Brown on the Philadelphia 76ers and whom Brown brought to SMU as his director of player development, explains Brown's philosophy, "You always care about your teammates and you care about the game." You comport yourself with dignity both on the court and off. In effect, you follow what amounts to a Poetics of basketball on the basis that basketball isn't a game but rather a way of life.
This approach has made Brown a coaches' coach, a guy who sanctifies the game, so much so that one of his rivals for Texas recruits, Trent Johnson at Texas Christian, often praises Brown to the kids they are competing to sign. "It's not normal," Brown says proudly of his friend's endorsement. "But it's the way it should be. We should all care about each other." Though he has stirred controversy, Brown has dozens of friends in the coaching fraternity, many of whom got their starts as Brown assistants or players — everyone from Calipari to Self to Mark Turgeon at Maryland to Gregg Popovich — many of whom invoke Brown the way Brown invokes Dean Smith. They revere him.
But if Brown is a coaches' coach, he is notoriously hard on players, mercilessly hard. It was said that Brown yelled so much at Eric Snow because he couldn't yell at Allen Iverson, but Snow avers, "He yelled at Allen, too." Those Iverson clashes were legendary. Iverson wanted to win just as badly as Brown, but he wasn't about to subscribe to a Poetics of basketball. His basketball was war — not The Right Way but The Tough Way. And there is Brown's preference for veterans over youth, which earned him opprobrium when he sat LeBron James during the 2004 Olympics and the team wound up with a disappointing bronze medal — a black mark on his record that Brown defends by saying that many prospective players bailed after 9/11 and that the team barely had time for practice. And he was so insistent on doing things his way, The Right Way, that he was likely to play a less talented player who got it than a more talented one who didn't. "He's going to bruise some egos and brush some people the wrong way," Jerry Stackhouse once said. "He has everywhere he's been."
And that's the other thing you know about Larry Brown. He leaves. He always leaves. Even when he says he is going to stay, he leaves — 11 times and counting. At Davidson, his very first head coaching job, he departed even before he began. (He says they reneged on some promises.) Sometimes it seems he leaves because he wears out his welcome. Sometimes it seems he leaves because the fit isn't right or the vibe is off. Sometimes it just seems like he leaves because of wanderlust. And sometimes you get the feeling that leaving is so endemic to him that even he doesn't know why he leaves. When he was named head coach of the Indiana Pacers in 1993, one general manager quipped, "And what team will he be coaching on Tuesday?"
With the nomadism often came the drama. At UCLA there were recruiting violations, though Brown says that he was fully exculpated. "I happened to be the coach when they finally made the ruling, but I wasn't involved with any of that." At Kansas he was embroiled in a scandal over $1,244 being given to a potential transfer from Memphis State named Vincent Askew. (Brown admitted that he gave Askew $364 for a plane ticket to visit his ill grandmother, who died soon after, telling the New York Times, "I'd give it to anybody if they told me his grandmother was passing away.") The investigation closed with a three-year probation, including Kansas's forfeiting the right to defend its national championship.
In Los Angeles, there was the Danny Manning drama — Manning, who had been Player of the Year on Brown's 1988 NCAA championship Kansas team but who, as a pro, was tired of Brown's negativity and balked at playing for him. At Philadelphia, there was the Iverson drama. "There were so many things that went on!" Brown laughs now. "I didn't think I could make it to the next practice let alone the next day or the next week with Allen." But for all their confrontations, they are close now. "I know God put me here to coach him," Brown says. "I'm convinced of that." At Detroit, there was the health drama, when Brown had to leave the bench for treatment of an ailment and the Pistons management felt he was keeping them dangling as to whether he would be able to return. At New York, there was … well, what drama wasn't there? And at his last stop in Charlotte, there was the Michael Jordan drama, when Michael insisted Brown just decided to up and leave and Brown insisted that Michael fired him.
So that's what you know about Larry Brown. Here's what you think you know about him if you're a longtime basketball fan. You know that he is never satisfied. Never. You know that he is a perfectionist who cannot seem to find the perfection he craves. "Why would you want to do something and not be special and want the best?" he says, nonplussed. You know that he is, in the words of his old Carolina Cougars and Denver Nuggets GM Carl Scheer, an "enigma" who is often his "own worst enemy." And you may know that he is, again in Scheer's words, "fighting the demons inside," whatever those demons may be. Another old ABA compatriot, Doug Moe, is blunter: "Larry is not happy unless he's miserable."
"Everyone wants to psychoanalyze me," Brown says. "I don't know why." His life, however, certainly provides loads of material. Brown's maternal grandfather, Hittelman, was a Jew from Minsk who claimed to have baked for the czar. ("That's what I heard," Brown laughs. "Why change the story?") They immigrated to America in 1910 and opened a bakery in Brooklyn. "We moved like Gypsies," Brown's mother, who died two years ago at the age of 106, once told Sports Illustrated, anticipating her son's famous migrations. She met Milton Brown when she was 26, and they married soon after, then had two sons, first Larry's older brother, Herbert, who has been an NBA head coach, and then, four and a half years later, Larry. Milton was a furniture salesman who had migrations of his own, living in Brooklyn but covering the territory of West Virginia and Ohio. In 1947, after suffering a heart attack and then getting a promotion to cover Pennsylvania, he resettled his family in Pittsburgh. Four months later, when Larry was only 6, Milton died suddenly of an aneurysm. Larry wasn't told of the death until a month later, instead being reassured that his father was just out on the road.
"I lost my dad, but I inherited all her [his mother's] brothers and uncles and everybody," he remembers. "I had so many people who took a personal interest in me — male figures." His mother's family was all back in New York, so that is where the Browns moved — first to Brooklyn, then with his aunt to a cramped apartment and then to rooms above the family's new bakery in Long Beach, out on Long Island. There Larry slept in the attic with his brother and sometimes, when his grandfather was too tired to walk home, with Grandpa Hittelman, who, Brown remembers, snored furiously so that Brown had to time his breathing in sync so he could sleep.
What Brown also remembers is that while his mother was busy at the bakery, working from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, he was across the street at Central School on the basketball court. His mother said that Larry and Herbert loved to play ball with their father, and whether this was compensation or not, Larry says that he would spend hours there, often alone, shooting basket after basket after basket, until the sun would set and his mother would blink the lights in the bakery window, signaling that it was time to come home. Brown was a gifted athlete — maybe a better baseball player than a basketball player. But he loved basketball with an almost metaphysical devotion, became a high school star, once scoring 45 points in a game, and was recruited by the great Frank McGuire to play the point at Carolina.
It is easy to surmise that basketball became a kind of connection for Brown to the missing man in his life. It is also easy to surmise that having lost his father, Brown was always looking for surrogates and stability. He met Joe Glass when Brown was a summer camp counselor to Glass's children in the Poconos. The Glasses virtually adopted him, and Joe Glass eventually became his agent, though the relationship remained much more familial than professional. When Corinne Glass died in 2011, and Joe Glass passed away three months ago, the death notices listed Larry as their son.
But if Brown was searching for a family to replace his broken one, it was as a player at Carolina that his search and his love of basketball conflated. McGuire became another father figure, and when he left after Brown's sophomore year to coach the Philadelphia Warriors in the NBA, Brown cried. It was McGuire as much as anyone else who taught him that his deportment off the court was as important as his deportment on it. Fortunately, McGuire was replaced by Dean Smith, and what Brown learned from Smith was something even more profound. He learned that The Right Way created a basketball family every bit as tight and as loyal as his own, maybe tighter and more loyal. Family was everything, and basketball was family.
To his admirers, it is as much the essence of Larry Brown as it is of Dean Smith. He is fiercely loyal, and he thinks not only of his team but of his coaching tree as family. As assistant coach Jankovich puts it, "He's very gracious to so many people." Brown and Calipari even instituted a yearly retreat, ostensibly to bring coaches together to share ideas, but also to help out-of-work coaches network. And Brown is constantly making calls to members of his "tree" trying to find positions for friends. In fact, when you ask Brown about the role that Judaism may have played in his career, he mentions Knicks coach Red Holzman, a fellow Jew, occasionally stopping at the court where Brown and other Long Beach Jews played basketball, but mainly he mentions the way that Jewish immigrants took care of one another when they settled in New York.
And that's precisely what mystifies some people. How can Brown continually go to a team, preach the idea of family, and then abandon it? And that is also what has prompted some amateur psychologists to attribute Brown's apparent dissatisfactions and his restlessness to a fear of getting too close and then being abandoned again as he was by his father, or to his fear that the family will eventually disappoint him, as families invariably do, and so he better leave before it does. Whether these are the demons that are supposed to haunt him, one family friend from childhood once described young Larry to Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated as ineffably sad, with "rings under those big dark eyes that made him look like he was going to cry."
Brown dismisses all the psychologizing. In the first place, he says that far from being tortured and glum, "I love every moment that I'm around," which may seem a bit Pollyannish for someone who has so much trouble staying put. In the second place, he says that he always had a reason for leaving every situation, a "really good reason." He left UCLA because J.D. Morgan, the athletic director who had hired him, died. He left Kansas because his wife at the time didn't like it and his marriage was falling apart. He left San Antonio after management had made some changes that disturbed the chemistry and, more, disturbed David Robinson, who is, says Brown, "a very sensitive kid." When the team got off to a slow start, owner Red McCombs called Brown early one morning and asked him to his office, where he fired him. Told about the firing, Gregg Popovich, a Brown assistant and one of his closest friends, remonstrated with McCombs to rehire Brown, which McCombs tried, but Brown felt it was time to go. Within two hours of the firing, Brown got a call from the Clippers. The offer had an unexpected bonus. While house hunting in L.A., Brown met his third and current wife, Shelly, who was the Realtor. "If she comes with the house, we've got a sale," he joked to a friend who had introduced them.
There were other times when Brown left because he and his superiors didn't see eye to eye or he felt undermined or, in Detroit, he had what he calls a "revision" to his hip surgery and his bladder shut down. (He wound up at the Mayo Clinic, where doctors thought they saw a cancerous spot, even while the Pistons brass felt he hadn't needed the hip surgery in the first place and that he might be malingering to get out of town.) In short, Brown says he never left a job on impulse or to seek greener pastures or to assuage those alleged demons lurking in his soul. In fact, Brown professes to have liked just about everyone for whom he worked, even the Knicks' Jim Dolan, who all but called Brown crazy.
And Brown goes even further. If there were problems along the way, Brown says, "I blame myself." Wanting so desperately to be part of a family, wanting so desperately for things to be harmonious and happy, something he has seldom had in his personal life, he admits, "I always followed the chain of command" rather than try to form a "personal relationship" with ownership. Brown says that having that relationship would have been disrespectful to management and presumptuous of him. "Every owner that I ever worked for wanted me to have a relationship with him," Brown says, "and with very few did I feel like I could do it and [not] overstep my bounds." And again, Brown talks about a "vision of how it works." In the vision, the entire organization is a band of brothers. "There can't be any separation," he says. Everyone in the executive suite as well as on the court works together. Everyone understands The Right Way. There is no infighting or dissension. His model now is San Antonio, where they are "all my guys."
But none of that really explains what he is doing at SMU. To begin to understand that, you have to understand not only that he loves basketball, but also just how much Larry Brown loves basketball; how obsessive he is about basketball; how, when he goes for his long daily walks with members of his staff, he talks basketball incessantly; how, as he and Jankovich begin comparing notes before practice, the hours melt away; how, when he was a senior at Carolina, he was briefly suspended for making an illegal turn, which Coach Smith erroneously believed was due to drinking, and Brown thought "my life was over." You have to understand how deeply he has internalized basketball so that he is utterly bereft without it. And you have to understand what happened when it was taken away from him after more than 50 years, and when he doubted he could ever get it back. You have to understand that for the first time in his life, Larry Brown was in basketball exile.
It began with the Detroit situation, which oddly enough may have been the peak of his professional coaching career. In 2004, Brown had taken the Pistons to the Finals against the Lakers, where they blew the second game when Brown let his players convince him not to foul with a three-point lead and Kobe Bryant promptly sunk a 3 with 2.1 seconds left to send the game into overtime, which the Lakers won. When Brown headed to the back of the team bus after the game to take responsibility, his veterans ordered him back to the front. "We're not coming back to L.A.," they told him. And they didn't.
The next year Brown had the Pistons in the Finals again, taking the Spurs to a seventh game before losing, but this time there were the health problems and the Pistons' concerns about whether he would be well enough to coach the next year. Detroit offered him a front-office job, but Brown was adamant that if he was healthy enough to stay in Detroit, it was going to be as the coach, and to this day he firmly believes that the Pistons could have won three or four more championships had he remained. Meanwhile, during the 2005 playoffs, Brown had not-so-discreetly discussed a front-office position with the Cleveland Cavaliers — he claimed as an insurance plan if his health didn't permit him to be on the bench. (He says he refused Detroit's front-office offer because he didn't think it would be fair to a new coach to have him hovering.) In any case, Pistons owner Bill Davidson was reportedly incensed at the Cleveland flirtation, and Glass negotiated a settlement of Brown's contract, which had three years and $21 million to run.
And that's what led to the biggest debacle of Larry Brown's illustrious career. Already while he was with the Pistons, rumors circulated that he would be moving on to Denver or Los Angeles, even as Brown insisted that Detroit would be his last coaching destination, to which Pistons president Joe Dumars had said, "Part of the territory." Within days of his departure from the Pistons in July 2005, he was being courted by Isiah Thomas, the GM of the New York Knicks, and by the Knicks' star point guard, Stephon Marbury. Two years earlier, during the summer of 2003, Thomas had been assisting Brown with the Olympic team when Thomas was fired as head coach of the Pacers. That's when Brown invited him to his basketball retreat in Memphis with Calipari, where Thomas became a member of Brown's coaching family. Thomas called the retreat a "life raft."
Now Thomas returned the favor. Eight days after leaving Detroit and having turned down the Cavs job, Brown was introduced as the new head coach of the Knicks with a five-year contract at $50 million. He insisted yet again that this job would be his last, though he joked, "God, I think I've said that everywhere I've been." Still, the Knicks were special for Brown. He loved New York. He had idolized Red Holzman. And he wanted to be the one to bring the Knicks back to relevance.
But from the outset, things were not good. The Knicks didn't know The Right Way, and Brown, in training camp, compared them unfavorably to a "college team." Worse, Brown didn't have a supply of worthy veterans in New York on whom to rely. He had guys like Jalen Rose, Quentin Richardson, Malik Rose, Maurice Taylor, even Antonio Davis, all of whom were past their primes. And, as Brown was wont to do, he clashed with his point guard, the temperamental Stephon Marbury, for whom The Right Way was a joke.1 The team was terrible, and for the first time Brown seemed to surrender. He publicly called Trevor Ariza "delusional" when Ariza complained about his minutes. He said of pint-size guard Nate Robinson, "He's not a point guard. Right now, he's a highlight film." He used an NBA-record 42 starting lineups, to no avail. The team finished 23-59. What was even more astonishing for a Larry Brown team, it finished 27th in points allowed. The Times headed one column, "Brown, these Knicks worst in franchise history."
It didn't help that the Knicks, with this awful roster, were nearly $75 million above the salary cap.
By season's end, the Knicks were a shambles. Owner Jim Dolan accused Brown of requesting that he waive virtually the entire roster, including its star, Marbury, which, he told reporters, would have cost the team $150 million. Further, he said that by asking him to do so, Brown was really asking to be fired. (Brown says that his request to move big contracts is exactly what Donnie Walsh did when he took the helm and revived the team.)
What happened next was opéra bouffe. Brown, not yet fired and still dangling, was forbidden to speak to the press, even to the point where police arrived at the practice facility and threatened to arrest reporters who talked to the coach. A few days later, Brown drove away from the facility, pulled onto an access road, and addressed a group of reporters who had staked out a traffic light hoping to speak to him. He didn't have much to say. "As many questions as you have, I have," he told them. A few days later, he said, "I feel like a dead man walking."
Within the month, he was gone — fired "for cause," the Knicks said, adding that they didn't intend to honor his contract. Eventually, with NBA commissioner David Stern as the arbiter, Brown settled for a reported $18 million. And just like that it was over. Years earlier, when he was rumored as a candidate to fill a previous Knicks coaching vacancy, Brown had admitted that he was "too sensitive" to coach the Knicks. Now he says he was too naive. "I was set up, having the staff that I was asked [to take] — except Herb Williams, who was phenomenal." This may be a case of revisionism, caused by Brown's umbrage at Thomas, since two of his coaches — David Hanners and Phil Ford, a former Carolina point guard — were his own hires. Still, three others — Brendan O'Connor, George Glymph, and Mark Aguirre — were Thomas guys who had no particular fondness for Brown. The man who had always wanted his team to be family wound up with one of the most dysfunctional basketball families ever. "It was destined to fail," he confesses. "I had this feeling when I took the job. I don't know if I ever truly felt comfortable."
He wound up taking a front-office job with the Sixers in Philadelphia, where his family had continued to live, and then in 2008 heeded a summons from Michael Jordan to coach the Charlotte Bobcats, another reclamation project and a chance at redemption. "Are you going to try to win?" Brown asked Jordan before taking the job. And Brown said Jordan told him, "Absolutely, we're going to try to win." By Brown's second season the Bobcats had made the playoffs for the first time. Things seemed rosy again. But after the season, Jordan traded Tyson Chandler and cut ties with Raymond Felton, Brown's two favorite players, players who "kind of exemplified what I believed in," while keeping Stephen Jackson, one of the most tempestuous players in the league. In justifying the deals, one of Jordan's money men told Brown that when you looked at their contracts, D.J. Augustin was a better value at point guard than Felton, which really meant that Augustin was cheaper.
He now says that he should have known he was going to be fired when Jordan made those deals, but he stayed, in part because his two daughters from his first marriage lived in the Charlotte area and because he wasn't far from Coach Smith. But it wasn't long before the other shoe dropped. On opening day in 2010, after a Bobcats loss to Dallas, Jackson, seething at Brown for having sat him, stormed into his coach's office and unleashed a verbal fusillade. Brown wanted to manage the issue himself once Jackson had calmed down. The next morning, however, Jordan and GM Rod Higgins met with Jackson without including Brown. Brown says, "I knew that was the end." By late December, the team was 9-19 and riddled with injuries, but Brown felt they had a soft stretch in the schedule coming up, and he wasn't about to bail on Michael Jordan, whom he admired. In fact, Brown had been getting calls from representatives to prospective buyers of the Bobcats who wanted to know if he would stay should the team be sold, and he told them all that he would leave if Michael left. The loyalty wasn't reciprocated. Jordan called him in to terminate him, then announced to the press that Brown had resigned.
"I didn't resign. There was no way I would resign at that time," Brown says now. "It was Christmas."
In the past, dramatics aside, Brown could always expect the phone to ring, always expect another offer, another crack at a basketball family. But this time, for the first time, the phone didn't ring. "I was miserable," he recalls. He couldn't watch a pro basketball game on television or attend one in person because it was too painful. When the phone did ring, it was his coaching family — Calipari and Self and Turgeon among them — calling to ask his advice, but Brown felt they were humoring him, trying to bolster his spirits. He had known David Kahn, the president of the Minnesota Timberwolves, since Kahn had been a reporter for the Daily Bruin when Brown was at UCLA, and Brown had later hired him as an assistant on the Clippers. As it turned out, Kahn was the only NBA executive who interviewed him for a coaching vacancy in this period. Brown recognized the irony. He had never had to interview for a job before. "My point is, if you're David Kahn," Brown says, "you don't even interview me. You give me the job." Kahn wound up hiring Rick Adelman. So badly did he want back in that Brown talked with another close friend, Celtics coach Doc Rivers, about joining Rivers's staff as an assistant — "I have no problem with being an assistant coach," he told the Boston Herald — but Rivers said he owed his own assistants his loyalty, and the two agreed that if the Celtics had another opening, they would revisit the issue.
So Brown became an itinerant basketball genius. He would visit Kentucky, Kansas, Rutgers, Maryland, Delaware, holding clinics, helping out his coaching friends at practice, watching his former acolytes teach the game and learning from them, drinking in the atmosphere. "I went wherever I could." Because Villanova was nearby and because Jay Wright was another close coaching friend, Brown would go there to help out when he wasn't on the road. The work excited him, but it also ate at him. "I look in the mirror and I realize I'm 72," he says. "But I didn't feel any difference inside. I still wanted to learn. I want to be around kids. I would have gone anywhere."
Brown says now that he always felt he was more of a college coach than a pro coach and that he wanted to return to a campus. The biggest lure and the biggest hurt was North Carolina. When Dean Smith decided to resign, he told Brown how much he loved him but that the job belonged to his longtime assistant, Bill Guthridge, especially since Smith had left his successor a cupboard stocked with talent. Brown had never wanted to replace Smith. He knew that no one could fill those shoes. But when Guthridge left in 2000, things were entirely different. Smith called him and told him that he had recommended Roy Williams, who had succeeded Brown at Kansas, because Brown had been away from the college game too long. But if Williams declined — as he eventually did before taking the job when it opened again three years later — Smith said, "It's your job." Brown was ecstatic. This was the vision come true — what Brown calls his "dream."
With Brown thinking it was a formality, Dick Baddour, Carolina's athletic director, came to interview him at Brown's home in Bel-Air. What followed were what Brown calls "the most humiliating two hours I ever spent in my life." Baddour proceeded to tell Brown all the reasons that he shouldn't take the job. Crushed, Brown immediately phoned Smith and told him that Baddour didn't want him and that he couldn't possibly work with someone who so disliked him. Smith said he could get him the job anyway, but Brown didn't want to be forced down their throats. "If they had offered me the job, I would've walked from California," he says now. But they didn't, and he didn't want to pressure Smith to get that offer. So it was back to the NBA.
But he still thought about college. He got an offer from Stanford, but his children were headed to high school and he didn't want to leave Philadelphia. He was interviewed by Princeton, but they decided to go for an alum. After Charlotte, he says, there was only one offer, Colorado, which he declined. He thought there would be others. There weren't. "I don't think I was on many people's radar," he says.
Steve Orsini looks like an athlete, compact and muscular, and he talks like one, direct and forceful, which is apt since he had been a fullback at Notre Dame in the 1970s before joining the Dallas Cowboys' front office for 10 years and then getting into college athletic administration. Orsini says that when he left his job as AD at Central Florida to take the AD job at SMU in 2006, SMU's president, R. Gerald Turner, gave him a mandate. Turner told him that before the death penalty the pendulum had swung too far toward athletics and that after the penalty it had swung too far in the other direction. Now he wanted Orsini to find the proper balance and to get better results for the university's athletic investment. In effect, he wanted the athletics department to be relevant.
Orsini's philosophy was that the quickest way to build a competitive program was to get a "name" coach, and he put it to the test when he decided to terminate SMU's football coach, Phil Bennett, who had gone 6-6 and then 1-11 in his last two seasons in 2006 and 2007. Orsini replaced him with June Jones, the offensive guru who had coached Hawaii to a 12-0 season before running into a Georgia buzzsaw in the 2008 Sugar Bowl. Jones didn't come cheap. To pay him, Orsini instituted what he called "The Circle of Champions": a group of over 20 donors who committed $500,000 apiece to the football program. But Orsini's faith was rewarded. Jones has taken the team to four bowls over the past four years, football attendance has risen 55 percent during his five years at SMU, and revenues have risen accordingly.
And that led to the basketball program. Orsini decided to "aim high" for a new coach. He wanted one of the most prominent names in the business. Though a football guy, he had been appointed to the NCAA basketball committee, which meant that he knew the big college coaches, he would "hang" with them, as he put it, at tournaments and meetings, and he says there were several among them who were "very interested in the job" — people you wouldn't have expected. As for Brown, he wasn't on Orsini's list, and when Brown phoned to express interest, Orsini admits he didn't return the calls. As Brown himself puts it, "I was not their first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice, fifth choice."
But Brown's coaching family pushed him. Brown thinks it was Mark Turgeon who first called Orsini to make Brown's case, but Orsini says that the entire coaching tree "came a-calling." As Orsini characterizes it, it was, "Dad wants this. We've got to help him." Orsini asked them to convince him that Brown would be motivated to come to a place like SMU after already being in the Hall of Fame. They tried. Finally, Orsini says, he called Brown — though he didn't mince words. He told him that he wasn't high on the list and advised him, "Don't call us. We'll call you."
But the coaching tree still didn't desist. They kept checking in, kept wanting to know where Brown stood — a "volume of calls," as Orsini describes it, from the profession's biggest names — from Self and Calipari and Turgeon and Wright. Brown had all but given up hope when he got a call that SMU wanted to interview him after all. The session, one of five with the final candidates, was held in a conference room at the Hyatt Hotel at the airport — a two-hour discussion with Orsini, President Turner, and several trustees. Brown had to address his past. He declared that he wanted to return to college coaching, he wanted to make a difference, he wanted to teach, and he wanted to explain to his players that basketball was as much about life skills as about athletic skills.
As for his nomadism, Brown promised that he would hire a first-rate staff that would be able to operate without him. Bill Self had already called Brown about hiring one of his former assistants, Tim Jankovich, as an assistant coach. At the time, Jankovich was himself one of the rising stars of basketball coaching, having led Illinois State to a 21-14 record, and his entire team was returning along with two great redshirts. Jankovich, who had studied Brown and considered him a legend right alongside Dean Smith, agreed to an unusual arrangement. He would become the "coach-in-waiting" to Brown, his successor should Brown leave before his contract was up. Brown brought up Jankovich at the interview, which assuaged any doubts about the runaway coach. For his part, Jankovich says that he saw working with Brown as his destiny. "We didn't deliberate very long," Orsini says. Brown was offered a five-year contract. Though he is being handsomely paid, he didn't even discuss salary. He was more concerned that his staff would be well paid, and it is reported that Jankovich is getting $700,000 a year — the highest salary for an assistant coach in college basketball. That required another Circle of Champions, this time for basketball.
And thus began what may very well be the last chapter of Larry Brown's coaching career.
Almost as soon as the signing was announced last April, the Larry Brown mystique began to sweep through SMU. "He is a celebrity" is how Rick Hart, who replaced Orsini as AD, puts it. "The interest level has increased with everybody." Donations rose, and season-ticket sales doubled even before the team had played a game. The players felt it, too. "Coming out of high school in DFW, SMU wasn't cool," Nick Russell, a Mustangs guard, says. "But I mean now, with Coach Brown here, who wouldn't want to come here?" According to Jankovich, "Coach Brown's hiring legitimized SMU in one minute. And it's coming to bear in our recruiting."
Recruiting is something that Brown hasn't done in 25 years, and he admits it is one of the adjustments he has to make. Back in his UCLA and Kansas days, he says, "You knew the guidance counselor, the coach, and the parents. That was it. No layers. And that's all changed. There are so many different layers," by which Brown means AAU coaches, financial planners, family members, hangers-on. And Brown says that he actually had to miss a practice for the very first time in his life so that he could recruit a high-schooler in New Jersey whom he loved. And he has had to bone up on the rules, too — things like the number of timeouts, the size of the coaching box, when you can make substitutions.
But in some ways the bigger adjustments are the ones SMU will have to make to Brown. In his previous college assignments, Brown made a point of teaching his players life lessons. He would take them to dinner and show them how to use the silverware. He would take them to movies. He would hold pizza parties for them. An elegant dresser himself — a trait he says he learned from a cousin who gave him his old clothes and warned him that he should be concerned about how he looked — he would give them advice on how to dress. It was all part of The Right Way. Already he is trying to institute the same things at SMU: luring faculty to mentor team members, bonding with other school teams, sharing meals with his players, opening his practices to anyone who wants to see them.
And then there is the adjustment to doing things Brown's way on the court. If he is aware that these are basically teenagers — he has alerted his staff not to be too rough on the kids and not let him be too rough — he hasn't mellowed when it comes to instruction. "Intense is a very good word," says Jankovich of Brown's style. "Very demanding. And this time of year he is very detailed in practice. He loves to teach the game." It has often been said that no one is a better teacher of basketball than Brown, and watching him at practice is like watching a Nobel laureate teach quantum physics. Pacing the floor in a baggy SMU sweatshirt and droopy shorts, he positions players, carefully explains defending the flex duck-in or the UCLA double or playing the 2 defense shell, checks with his boys to make sure they understand, checks with Jankovich to see if he has anything to add (not incidentally, a way of giving Jankovich authority), runs his team through the plays again and again and again, picking up the tiniest errors that only he would see, and throughout conveys the larger message. "The whole theme is to be together," says Nick Russell, "to be a family."
SMU has opened at 12-12, and Brown has the team playing hard if not always beautiful basketball. He is still trying to figure out the team's capability. One of the first things he did when he took the job was dismiss the team's starting point guard, an undersize crowd-pleaser named Jeremiah Samarrippas, because Brown realized that he would have to recruit over him and he knew Dean Smith's rule that you never recruit over a player. He had to soul-search about releasing another player, Leslee Smith, who had been injured the previous season, especially since Smith kept lobbying Brown. Brown finally advised him to go to junior college before trying to sign up with another major college program.
What Brown is left with is a depleted roster with some very hard-nosed, indefatigable players who listen closely to their coach and desperately want to get better. "We have a huge hill to climb," Brown sighs. "We don't have depth. We have nine guys who are suited up now. We have to figure out how to shorten the game." But thinking of the Big East, Brown adds, "You better get us this year because we're going to be special real soon."
Doherty left him three transfers who are solid players and three others who have had to sit out this season. And on National Signing Day last year, Brown got commitments from three recruits on whom he was very high, including Sterling Brown, the brother of NBA reserve Shannon Brown, whom Larry Brown coached at Charlotte. When the Brown family called to give him the news, the coach was beaming. "You have made me a happy man," he said. "I promise you, Sterling, we're going to make you better. You're going to be a big part of what we're trying to do." And to Sterling's father: "I promise you we'll do the right thing by your son."
And that's it. When you get past all the talk of demons and all the head-shrinking, Larry Brown may be at SMU for the simplest of reasons. He is there to do the thing he most loves to do. If you ask him what it is about basketball that is so captivating, he shrugs that he likes all sports, anything with a ball, that he is even a huge fan of Manchester United. But when you keep pressing, he finally concedes that it is not all sports. It is basketball. "I've always felt in my heart that it's the greatest team game ever, if it's played right," he says. "Because there's one ball and 10 guys, so there's a lot of stuff you got to be doing when you don't have the ball, when you're not guarding the ball." In short, basketball, above all sports, demands that you always see yourself as part of the unit. But someone has to teach that. It doesn't come naturally. You have to teach The Right Way or, Brown says, "it's an ugly game."
And maybe that is why Brown always leaves, not because he has an itch but because he has a personal mission. The great film critic Robert Warshow once described Shane as "something like the Spirit of the West" who "emerges mysteriously from the plains, breathing sweetness and a melancholy" that has "taken on spirituality." And when Shane has accomplished his mission, slaying "a Spirit of Evil just as metaphysical as his own embodiment of virtue, he fades away again … " Maybe Larry Brown is basketball's version of Shane, a man who has taken on the spirituality of his game, who tries to slay the ugliness of the game when it is corrupted by selfishness, and who then fades away, riding off into the sunset to bring his basketball metaphysics to another place, another group of players. But Brown himself, a man not prone to deep introspection, has a simpler explanation for why he has fought so hard to arrive at his 14th coaching destination at an age by which most coaches have long since retired: "I just want to be relevant."
Neal Gabler is currently the Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at Washington College, where he is working on a biography of Senator Edward Kennedy.


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TreatsPat Doherty
Oil painting on Wood New
Natural wood edges
Ready to hang
Signed on front and back
18" h x 18" w x 1.5" d |2 lbs. 8 oz.
Pat Doherty
Corte Madera, California
Pat Doherty follows in the tradition of Bay Area artists who paint what they love. Her culinary series is a reflection of her surroundings; Pat is a third generation San Franciscan now living in Marin. The Bay Area is the perfect place to find the petit fours and decadent pastries featured in her work "Sweet Choices." Similar in subject matter to Wayne Theibaud's desserts, Pat's unique style starts with a rich color palette and an angled picture plane to achieve depth. The subjects are often simple, but Pat takes the time to understand them and develop a mastery of light and shadow. The art has a certain humor and light-heartedness as well, especially with her series of dogs and bite-sized confections. Pat's style is inspired by her previous work in the graphic design industry, when she was the art director of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, art director of San Francisco magazine, and senior art director at a private design firm. Pat's work has been featured in American Art Collector magazine, several solo shows, including the Caffe Museo in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as many group shows, including frequent showings at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art.
Here's more work from Pat you may enjoy
Hear what collectors say about Pat's work
I love the painting but it is for my wife's 60th birthday next May so I am sure she will be happy to review it shortly after she has seen it in six months' time.
The painting is fantastic and exceeded any expectations I had from the IJ article. It is a Xmas present for a good friend in Montana and my only regret is having to wait until December to send it. to her.- E Marquis


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WASHINGTON (AP) - US officials say North Korea has taken a step back from its recent escalation of regional tensions by removing from their launch site a set of medium-range ballistic missiles that had been readied for possible test firing.
The two US officials who confirmed the North Korean move on Tuesday spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss a matter involving sensitive US intelligence.
Two Musudan missiles at a site in eastern North Korea had been in what American officials described as launch-ready status for some weeks. It's not clear why they removed the missiles in recent days, but Pentagon press secretary George Little said on Monday that US officials have seen a "provocation pause" by North Korea.
Mr Little did not comment on the missiles' status.


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How Hawaiian Telcom, Hilo Hattie and Central Pacific Bank Rebounded from the Brink
It's much the same with businesses. When they're thriving, their income statements all look alike – tidy family portraits of profits and tranquility. It's when companies fail that all their neuroses and idiosyncrasies come into view. That's when you discover dysfunctional capital structures, crazy expenses in the attic, crackpot expansion theories. By then, though, it's often too late. It takes a special leader – a combination of analyst, mother hen and disciplinarian – to save a failing company. It also takes the right team, rigorous planning and a measure of luck. Here's a look at three Top 250 companies that (maybe) made it through the turnaround, and the perspectives of the men who led them there.
Hawaiian Telcom
No. 19 on the Top 250
"You can't pretend something's not broken if it's broken," says Eric Yeaman, CEO of Hawaiian Telcom.
Under Yeaman's leadership, the company successfully emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy last November, but, when he arrived in 2008, it was clearly broken. "When I came on board," he says, "company morale was pretty low. We were in the papers; we were losing customers; and the company was losing $150 million a year." For a company with as many problems as Hawaiian Telcom had, bankruptcy is often the only answer. But bankruptcy comes with its own set of problems.
Some of the company's difficulties were technical, related to the change of ownership from Verizon to a local hui partnered with The Carlyle Group, the private equity firm that orchestrated the buyout. For example, many of the company's back-office functions, like customer-service, billing and product development – all systems that Verizon had handled on the Mainland – had to be recreated here from scratch. That process didn't go well. Other problems had to do with Hawaiian Telcom's management and corporate structure. All these problems affected the bottom line.
The first step was to quantify the problems. "There are some real basic things you've got to look at," Yeaman says. "Revenue, cost structure, profitability or lack thereof, and cash flow – where is the money coming from and where is it going? What is the productivity of your business? What can you do to increase revenue, decrease costs and better allocate your capital? And how do you compare to your peers?" That last point is critical for a company in a capital-intensive industry like telecommunications. "After all," Yeaman says, "to attract capital, you need investors, and investors are going to compare you to your peers."
But the heart of Hawaiian Telcom's problems was that the company was simply over-leveraged. It couldn't generate enough revenue to cover the enormous debt racked up by The Carlyle Group when it bought the company. "We needed to restructure the balance sheet," Yeaman says. "There was no way this company was going to survive with its current debt structure. We needed to do something to stabilize the company, which was losing $10 million a quarter in revenue. You can only cut costs so much before you run out of levers to pull."
Of course, Chapter 11 is largely a process to figure out what a company is actually worth. Working backward from that figure, you can calculate how much debt the company can really afford. "That's the cornerstone of the restructuring process," Yeaman says. "You have to come up with what you believe the value of the company is, based on a plan that you think makes the most sense for your business. Once you come up with a plan, you have to defend that plan during the restructuring process. There are going to be people on both sides. Some try to drive the value down; some try to drive the value up. Our responsibility is to come up with a fair valuation."
That backward calculation is a powerful tool. Indeed, for companies in bankruptcy, it's often the main ingredient of the turnaround. "Do it once, and do it right," Yeaman says. "Otherwise you end up in Chapter 22." Hawaiian Telcom seems to have done it right. Entering bankruptcy, the company had about $1.2 billion in debt, including both secured and unsecured creditors. When it emerged from bankruptcy two years later, the calculated value of the company was just $460 million – $300 million in debt and $160 million in equity for the secured creditors. The rest of the company's liabilities – and all the existing shareholder equity – were wiped out.
"We drew a line in the sand," Yeaman says. "We felt our debt level needed to be at $300 million because that was the right capital structure." In other words, he says, given the revenue the company expected to generate, that was the most debt the company could afford to service. Ultimately, the company's creditors and the court agreed. The effect on expenses was dramatic. "It reduced our interest costs by over $60 million a year," Yeaman says. In addition, he points out, the company stabilized revenues. "We were losing $10 million a quarter – $40 million a year, approximately – in revenues. For the last seven quarters, though, we've stabilized revenue at about $100 million a quarter, give or take a million or a million and a half."
Hawaiian Telcom's plan also looked forward. "The other thing we wanted to do was position the company for growth," Yeaman says. To that end, the company invested millions of scarce dollars to develop new products and services: VOIP for business; an Ethernet-based product; several new managed-services options; and IP VPN, or virtual private networks that can run over the Internet. Moreover, in June, the company finally received permission from the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs to launch its long-awaited digital cable TV service. "Those were all products we wanted to launch while we were in reorganization," Yeaman says. "That way, when we did emerge, we would be well-positioned to grow."
For now, Yeaman's tenure with the company looks like a success. In the first quarter of 2011, Hawaiian Telcom actually turned a modest profit. Just as important, the market has smiled on the company since it emerged from bankruptcy in November 2010. "Since the stocks first began trading again," Yeaman points out, "the value of the shares went from $16 to today's value of about $28 a share. That's about a 75 percent increase. In the same time, the S&P didn't go up that much, and our peers actually went down 9 percent in that period."
Hilo Hattie*
Almost at the same time Yeaman was leading the turnaround at Hawaiian Telcom, Mark Storfer, COO of Hilo Hattie, was chaperoning that company through its own Chapter 11 saga. Storfer, a well-known business consultant in Hawaii, already had a reputation for dealing with troubled companies. "I was at Liberty House as COO in 1998 when we filed for Chapter 11," he says. "That company was in reorganization for three years, then we successfully emerged and sold the company to the Macy's division of Federated Department Stores." Storfer clearly knows something about unhappy families.
So, when California businessman Ted Nelson was considering buying troubled Hilo Hattie from founder Jim Romig, he hired Storfer to help with the due diligence. That began Hilo Hattie's whirlwind path to Chapter 11. "I quickly realized," Storfer says, "that, in order to survive, we would need to seek protection from federal Bankruptcy Court, which we did in October 2008." That turned out to be just one small step in the company's turnaround.
Hilo Hattie, which has gone through three owners in as many years, is an excellent example of plans gone awry. First, the company negotiated a favorable payment arrangement with its creditors, only to have that deal quashed by the plummeting economy and filing for bankruptcy. One of the advantages of Chapter 11 is that it's sometimes easier to get financing, because bankruptcy lenders move to the front of the creditor line. Storfer says Nelson had bankruptcy financing arranged in advance to help get the company out of Chapter 11. "Unfortunately, when we filed in the fall of 2008, that was the economic meltdown. Ted's financing dried up very quickly."
In the end, Donald Kong, whose company, Royal Hawaiian Creations, was one of Hilo Hattie's largest creditors, acquired the stock from Nelson and brought the company out of bankruptcy. As with Hawaiian Telcom, Chapter 11 erased most of the rest of the company's liabilities. "The court only required Hilo Hattie to pay 5 percent of its debt," Storfer says. (He notes, though, that the court doesn't always wipe the slate clean this way. "In the case of Liberty House, we repaid most of our debt. That's because Liberty House was better capitalized and was able to demonstrate in court that it could generate sufficient future profit.")
While it's helpful to start with a clean slate, to really turn around a troubled company, you've got to know what went wrong to begin with. In Hilo Hattie's case, that part was clear. "It was a textbook mistake," Storfer says. "Expansion – aggressive, fast, poorly thought out store expansion to the Mainland. We had stores in Florida, Tennessee, California, Nevada and Arizona, and I can say, with hindsight, what happened: poor site selection, poor planning, poor demographics and huge capital investments over a short period of time. Most of the stores were only opened about a year and we had to close them all. Jim Romig, the founder, is a friend of mine, but I'm sure if he had it to do over again, he wouldn't do all that expansion – at least not the way he did."
So, while the cure for Hawaiian Telcom might have been bringing new services to market, for Hilo Hattie, it was getting back to basics. That included painful cost cuts – layoffs, rent reductions and store closures – but it was mainly a renewed focus on the company's Nimitz flagship store rather than a planned move to Waikiki.
"The Nimitz location was fine," Storfer says, "but we needed a reason for visitors to come here. It had to be more than just the product." Now, Hilo Hattie has a hula studio, a kumu hula and hula dancers. Visitors can see a hula show or take lessons or visit the company's aloha shirt museum. There's also a "Hawaiian-style" Internet café where guests can enjoy Hawaiian food and beverages. "I think we're the only place in town selling Dole Whips," Storfer says. It's all part of a new strategy to create a destination shopping experience.
Is the plan working? "The numbers are all pointing in the right direction," Storfer says. "We submitted a five-year sales and profitability plan to the court and, one-and-a-half years in, we're right on target. We're showing increases of 30-plus percent in sales, which is above our competitors, we understand.
"Of course," he adds, "the figures of the last couple of years were easy to beat; not like the heyday numbers of 2005 and 2006."
* Did not supply information for Top 250.
Central Pacific Financial
No. 31 on the Top 250
John Dean, who became CEO of Central Pacific Bank in March of 2010, points out that not all turnarounds are bankruptcies. Nor do they always have the same causes. Troubled banks, for example, may have different symptoms than failing utilities or retailers. Dean estimates that "of all the banks that have failed over the last 100 years, something like 97.5 percent of these failures were driven by poor asset quality." That's certainly the case for CPB and its parent, Central Pacific Financial Corp., which were buffeted by bad real estate investments on the Mainland.
The cure? Like Storfer, Dean talks about controlling costs and improving efficiencies. Like Yeaman, he believes strongly in building teams and fostering the right corporate culture. But, for a bank, much of the process is simply about attracting capital. In fact, Central Pacific only recently emerged from a consent decree with the federal government that required the bank to improve its balance sheet by adding hundreds of millions of dollars to its reserves. Dean, like Storfer, is a turnaround veteran – this is his fourth troubled bank – so he understands that he was hired, in part, because of his ability to attract this kind of capital. That's a role he'll likely play as long as he's at Central Pacific.
But, as Dean points out, sometimes the success or failure of a turnaround is based largely on forces outside the company's control. Hilo Hattie, for example, may have arranged financing in advance of bankruptcy, but those plans crumbled with the rest of the economy. Dean notes that banks are just as subject to these market forces. "In banking, the market is critical," he says. "Are the markets in your favor or are they going against you? If the real estate prices in the market you're serving are headed south, it's a much more difficult problem, because, in effect, every quarter you've got to mark your book to market. You reevaluate it, and guess what? It drops another 5 percent." That means you need still more capital. It's a death spiral.
"Fortunately," Dean says, "by the time I got here, that market was starting to level off. It was still bad, but that's much better than a falling market. That was in our favor."
The other market that was critical for Central Pacific's turnaround was the market for banks themselves. "We needed to raise private equity to refinance and recapitalize the bank," Dean says. "A lot of private equity money had already been raised in the market, originally to acquire and refinance banks that were failing or that regulators had seized. By the time I arrived here, though, the markets were shifting and there was a growing interest in recapitalizing banks."
So, while Dean will probably get the credit for Central Pacific's turnaround, he's a little more circumspect: "You need a little bit of luck," he says. "And, to be honest with you, we had things going in our favor."


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Democrat, CA-34
The Equality Act is a deceptively named bill being pushed by the radical "LGBTQIA+" lobby. It would expand transgenderism even to the point of taking children away from parents who won't agree to gender "transition" and decimate the religious freedom of Catholic churches, schools, and other institutions to teach the truth about sexuality and the family. This vote was taken on February 25, 2021. This representative voted YES.
The resolution sought to revive the long-dead "Equal Rights Amendment", which would add a right to abortion to the Constitution and eliminate legal protections long given to women, such as alimony and exemption from the draft. This vote was taken on March 17, 2021. This representative voted YES.
The Women's Health Protection Act is one of the most extreme pieces of abortion legislation ever introduced. The bill would wipe out most state pro-life laws and make unlimited abortion until the moment of birth legal at the federal level. This vote was taken on September 24, 2021. This representative voted YES.
The bill would establish gay marriage under federal law for the first time. It would also grant federal recognition to polygamist and polyamorous marriages as long as they are recognized by the individual state. (The Supreme Court invented a right to gay marriage in 2015, but the Defense of Marriage Act remains on the books.) This vote was taken on July 20, 2022. This congressman voted YES.
This bill affirms that a baby born alive after an attempted abortion is a legal person, and must be provided with medical care This vote was taken on January 11, 2023. This representative voted NO.
This resolution condemns the domestic extremist attacks on pregnancy resource centers, pro-life organizations, and churches in the aftermath of the leaked Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Supreme Court decision in 2022, and calls upon the Biden administration to act to protect these organizations and churches. This vote was taken on January 11, 2023. This representative voted NO.
This bill would require public school districts to disclose curriculum materials to parents, require parental consent for student participation in surveys, and prohibit schools from selling student information. This vote was taken on March 24, 2023. This representative voted NO.
This bill would prevent federal funding from going to any sports program which allows males to compete on female sports teams. This vote was taken on April 20, 2023. This representative voted NO.
This Member of Congress is newly sworn in and does not yet have a voting record on the issues we score. This profile will be updated as new votes are taken.
"The integrity of our Church—and all we profess to believe—is at stake."
brian burch, president, Catholicvote


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Updating GRASS Documentation
How-to for Updating GRASS Manual Pages
This page will provide general step-by-step instructions for updating and improving GRASS manual pages. Feel free to update and improve this page as well! See also SUBMITTING_DOCS in the source code.
As an example, the vector program v.in.ascii will be used to illustrate the steps required to update its manual page. These steps can then be generalized for your case.
- To begin, you must obtain the latest GRASS source code from the CVS repositories. Detailed instructions on how to do so can be found here.
- Once you have downloaded the CVS source code, open a terminal and change directory to where the source for a specific GRASS module is located - in this example, something like:
- Open a text editor and make your edits to description.html. Save your edits by overwriting the original description.html.
- Within a terminal, create a 'unified diff' (a standard way to show changes between two versions of a file) of the GRASS CVS repository version of description.html and your newly edited description.html:
cvs diff -u description.html > v.in.ascii.description.patch
The "diff -u" command will create a report in v.in.ascii.description.patch which shows any differences between the version of description.html still on the CVS server and your edited version; a '+' at the beginning of each line denotes edits and additions you have made, and a '-' at the beginning of each line denotes lines removed from the original description.html. The exact name of your patch file is arbitrary, but should be as descriptive as possible as in the above example.
The output of the diff -u should look something like this (the exact contents will of course depend on whatever changes you made to the file):
Index: description.html =================================================================== RCS file: /home/grass/grassrepository/grass6/vector/v.in.ascii/description.html,v retrieving revision 1.35 diff -u -r1.35 description.html --- description.html 31 May 2006 13:03:57 -0000 1.35 +++ description.html 26 Sep 2006 14:35:21 -0000 @@ -35,6 +35,10 @@ Use the -z flag to convert ASCII data into a 3D binary vector map. +Any edits you make to description.html will show up like this after you run diff -u! +Three lines of the original description.html will surround each block of edits you made +to provide context. + A GRASS ASCII vector file (in standard mode) may contain a mix of primitives including points, lines, boundaries, centroids, areas, faces, @@ -51,6 +55,8 @@
'K': kernel (3D centroid)

'A': area (boundary) - better use 'B'; kept only for backward compatibility

 + +This line is another edit made further along in description.html.... The coordinates are listed following the initial line containing the primitive code, the total number of vectors in the series, and the number
- Images can also be inserted in the html help page. See v.voronoi for an example. Note that images won't show up in the Grass manual pages (which are generated from the HTML), so they shouldn't be considered a substitute for an adequate textual description. Be sure to also send the image (preferably png format) along with your documentation patch.
- The following html codes are understood to some extent by g.html2man (brackets removed): A, B, BLINK, BODY, BR, CODE, DD, DL, DT, EM, H2, H3, H4, HEAD, HEADER, HR, I, IMG, LI, OL, P, PRE, SUP, TABLE, TD, TH, TITLE, TR, UL.
- Email a GRASS developer your description.html.patch for review as an attachment, along with a brief explanation why it is required. Please post a general message about your documentation update to the GRASS Developer's List before sending your patch to anyone in particular.
See also
- Job offer Documentation manager


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The two companies said Monday that Bluebird, which began during a pilot program late last year, will have no minimum balance, monthly, annual or overdraft fees.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and American Express Co. view the card as an alternative to debit and checking accounts that will help consumers better manage and control their finances. The companies say Bluebird was built on feedback from consumers who said they were bothered by the rising fees related to checking accounts and debit services.
Bluebird will be available next week at www.bluebird.com and in more than 4,000 Walmart stores.
Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., is the world's biggest retailer. American Express is based in New York.


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Colorful home accessories abound in Quince's Kakaako shop
A Home Run
Home is where the heart is. Especially if that home is filled with bright, eye-popping accents that perfectly capture your love of pattern and color.
Sadly, yours is not. At least, not until Saturday, when Quince, a brand new home accessories shop, opens its doors in Kakaako.
Owner Marissa Selders uses her experience in fashion, retail and interior design to fill the space with modern, whimsical pieces designed to transform any room into a stylish abode.
Don't let your closet have all the fun. Dress up your dining table with glossy melanine French Bull serving trays, platters, or lazy susans in multi-hued kaleidoscope and poppy designs. Top your counter with colorblocking wood lacquered trays and matching Paddywax ceramic candles.
Add modern, yet playful touches with bold, laser-cut placemats, candy-colored wire stools and sleek nesting tables. Then accessorize with whimsy: oversized jacks, shiny robot banks, colorful cooking timers, and heart-melting pug-shaped bookends.
Selders is also happy to lend a hand (and her pooch, Ari, a paw) if you don't know where to start. Our recommendation: Selders' own custom-made throw and lumbar pillows, a stylish mix of fabrics, colored piping and exposed zippers.
Trust us, your couch will thank you.
Quince officially opens Saturday at 683 Auahi St., adjacent to Pinch of Salt. Hours are Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m., and during Honolulu Night Market. For more information, call (808) 371-4413 or visit QuinceatHome.com.