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Building Brawl-Handling Interacting Characters in EA Sport's MMA
The EA Tiburon Studio, based in Orlando, is no stranger to player vs. player interaction. As the studio behind the Madden juggernaut, the Fight Night series and several more sports-related titles, they essentially wrote the book on interactions between game characters. Their latest release has pushed the authenticity of character interactions and deformations closer to real life than ever before.
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a brutal, bloody sport that requires close contact between fighters with muscles and sinew only hidden by an occasional tattoo. Capturing the full effects of the body's deformation to a hit or a kick is essential to the realism of the sport and the studio has revealed some interesting facts about their knowledge in creating such realism.
Figure 1: EA Sports MMA, the most realistic fighting game ever
[subheading]The Development Dream Team[/subheading]
The EA Tiburon team responsible for the MMA title was refreshingly open about their processes and techniques and the interview questions shed some light on this tricky endeavor. The responsible party includes Rob Hyder, the Lead Producer; Simon Sherr, Animation Director; Volga Aksoy, Graphics Engineer; Rob Williams, Gameplay Engineer; and Jerry Phaneuf, Art Director.
Game development for the MMA title started back in 2007 with a team of five or six putting together basic game functionality, designs and an animation prototype. From here the team grew steadily and the entire project was completed in just over two and half years.
The key to completing this game in a relatively short timeframe was that the team had access to a lot of technology that was created for the other EA Tiburon released games. This allowed them to focus on making a great game without having to build everything from scratch. The team harvested animation, rendering, sound, AI, speech, load/save and online pieces, which put them ahead of schedule.
A good example of this was the animation system. Rob Hyder mentioned, "Our animation system allows animators and designers to create base gameplay without the need of an engineer. Adding new punches, adding ground positions, changing timing windows, changing damage or reaction severity; all of this can be done independent of any coding. This gives us much faster iteration times, and it allows our engineers to focus on other more difficult problems like physics/animation interaction or putting in online features like Live Broadcast."
[subheading]Capturing the Fighter's Nuance[/subheading]
Each MMA fighter has a unique look and style and capturing these is paramount to the game experience. The polygon budget for a single fighter (including shorts and gloves) was roughly 40,000 triangles with the head having 8500 and the body around 11,000.
The various texture channels also added to the realism of the fighters. Each fighter had 1024x1024 textures for the albedo (diffuse), regular normal, flexed normal, specular mask (with specular cosine power as a separate channel), sweat breakup normal, damage and blood zones, reflection cube map and ambient occlusion texture channels. They also included several runtime-generated textures like SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion), SSS (Sub-Surface Scattering) and shadow maps, which contributed to the final look of the fighter.
A good example of how textures were used to create realism was in creating the sweat trails. These sweat trails (Figure 2) were created using a specular mask that is ramped up over the duration of the fight. It is combined with a sweat normal texture that starts to blend in over the regular normal map when sampling the reflection cube map. There were also sweat particles that spawn from predetermined points to fall to the ground.
Figure 2: The "sweat trails" develop over the course of the fight.
Tattoos (Figure 3) and scars are another common defining element of many fighters. Volga describes how these were baked into the diffuse texture, "When a fighter is being loaded into memory, the necessary tattoo images are also pulled into memory as well and baked into the albedo (diffuse) texture of the fighter using a 'UV translation' mesh, so that the tattoo image can be warped properly to match the UV layout of the required zone on the fighter body or face. Once the tattoo is baked into the texture and DXT compressed at runtime, the pre-loaded tattoo image is unloaded from memory as it won't be used anymore."
Figure 3: Tattoos are baked into the diffuse channel and then unloaded from memory.
Clothes, unlike tattoos, are standalone meshes with their own textures and shaders. They are skinned to the same joints as the fighter they are fit to. As part of the Create-A-Fighter feature, any logos that are added to a fighter's shorts are baked into the texture at load time. This prevents having to load the logo textures while rendering. To make sure that the body does show through the clothes, a z-bias was added to the shader that renders the clothes.
The hair was modeled using a "hair cap" to define the base color and scalp volume; "hair cards," which contained the alpha to coverage polygons, were used to create the semi-transparent hair. The team was fortunate that there weren't any really long hair models, so physics wasn't an issue.
To capture the fighter's motions, each fighter was recorded performing a base set of motions along with any fighter-specific strikes using a portable XSens MVN motion capture suit. These recording sessions took place at the studio in Vancouver and also at Orlando's Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA) facility.
The motion capture data was used as a starting point. The data was loaded into MotionBuilder and heavily keyframed to match the gameplay requirements and visuals. All fighters share the same source animations, but the procedural animation system lets the team tune the visuals in real-time giving each fighter a unique look and feel.
During the motion capture sessions and as the game development progressed, the team had the chance to interact with the various MMA fighters. Rob Hyder describes this, "One of the best parts of this project was the time we got to spend with the fighters. These are great folks, very humble, very real, and often times funny, insightful, and wise. There were some worries about whether these guys were going to be cool to work with. My team actually used this concern that I had about one of the fighters, Jason'Mayhem' Miller, to play a prank on me. Jokes aside though, Mayhem is a really cool guy and our team loves working with him and the rest of the fighters in our game."
[subheading]Setting the Ambiance[/subheading]
The fight audience was pulled from the Fight Night crowd and retrofitted for this game. It consists of 10 basic animations that are offset and spaced apart. Simon says, "The key is avoiding large repetitive motions that would pull the eye away from the fighters and/or animations."
The venue lighting is supplied using light maps that are stored as 8-bit RGBE textures and all specular surfaces had environment maps applied with normal maps to break up the highlights.
Lighting the fighters was accomplished using a relatively dim directional light coupled with the surrounding ambient light that is emulated through the environment maps. For subtle lighting across the fighter's face, Volga said, "we also used a novel SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) technique as well as SSS (Sub-Surface Scattering in UV space) that is specifically tuned to work for all of the different skin tones we have in the game. As for specular highlights, we used the Kelemen-Szirmay-Kalos model for the directional light as well as using reflection cube maps to capture the subtle breakup of the reflections over the skin during the sweat buildup."
Figure 4: Several lighting techniques were used to light the venue and the fighters.
To animate the ring ropes, collision discs are placed along the length of the ropes whose extents are compared to the skinned limits of the fighter mesh and the results are fed to the ring ropes vertex shader.
The sound effects were created by an Academy award-winning sound designer. Rob Hyder describes how some of the Foley sounds were obtained, "I believe that one of the most successful was a large beef roast that he purchased and then proceeded to punch and hit with various implements until he got the sounds he wanted."
[subheading]Landing a Punch--Creating Fighter Interactions[/subheading]
Regardless of how realistic the fighters look, it is the interaction between the fighters that has a greater impact on the realism of the fight. The team made heavy use of motion blends for procedural animation tuning to create the fighter interactions. Simon describes this system, "We have a system that allows us to layer, override, and subtract or add animation to any part of the body at any time (similar to Photoshop layers). We also have several tools for controlling the visuals of blending animations and make heavy use of those tools on MMA."
Contact between the fighters was created using a non-uniform player scaling system, a relative IK system and a series of what the team called "touch tags." These touch tags used the HumanIK feature included in MotionBuilder to adjust the animation in and out of a specified target.
The HumanIK feature in MotionBuilder was also used to define foot positions and prevented the foot from slipping as the body moved. It was also used to retarget animations to various skeletons and to maintain contact with opponents. Finally, the feature was used to track the fighter's head, which the team referred to as "head tracking with attitude."
Figure 5: Autodesk's HumanIK feature was used to maintain contact between fighters.
The MMA team tried to avoid the use of any physics-based system when animating the interactions between the fighters. Simon mentioned, "we felt that it was important to maintain that visual ideal of "intention" in our actors on screen, so we use Fight Night physics to clean up interpenetrations, but we use other procedural animations systems, which are very often "informed" and driven but not posed by physics simulation. The idea was to give the artists control over the characters' posing while allowing physical simulation to often drive the animation decision tree."
To create the effect of an impact on a fighter's face during the slow-motion replays, a cloth simulation was used. This worked by having the artists paint a mask over the face vertices that indicates which vertices to include in the cloth simulation. During the simulation, the direction and force of the punch was fed into the simulation as an extra force.
Particle systems were used to trigger blood spray, sweat cloud spray, spit spray, dripping blood from gaping wounds, and ambient sweat dripping. The blood, sweat and spit used a high perparticle cohesion value to create a "stringy" effect as they travel through the air.
The MMA team spent a lot of time researching skin rendering. This is apparent in the damage model that was developed for MMA including how cuts break and develop further by bleeding and running. The face also becomes deformed to accommodate swelling.
Another trick that added to the realism of the fight was to allow the blood to transfer to the opponent's body and to the canvas. To get blood on the mat, the team simply renders a special pass of the particle system into a texture that is only sampled at runtime. After a few seconds, the blood particle starts to fade out, but its position is rendered onto the mat's blood texture where it persists throughout the match.
Concerning the game's AI system, Rob Williams describes the team's four AI goals, "First, don't be a sap. The computer does not take any action taken by the opponent as a cue to do a negatively predictable behavior. Second, be yourself. A certain level of predictable behavior must be built-in, at least enough so a fighter performs in a way that agrees with their real-life counterparts. One fighter may prefer or be more skilled at stand-up striking, while another may prefer or be more skilled in the ground game. Third, mix it up. Within the constraints of behaving as the real-life fighter, unpredictability can be done by collecting the preferred actions of the fighter and choosing one at random, with actions more greatly preferred by the particular fighter given greater likelihood of being selected. Finally, live and learn. In all situations the computer observes which fight tactics yield positive results for the computer, and which behaviors yield negative results, just as a human fighter does in a real match."
EA Sports new MMA game has been called "the most-realistic fighting game ever." With advanced tools and skilled artists, the results are dramatic. The effort put forth by this team has added realism not only to the character's look, but also to how they interact with other fighters and with the environment. Certainly the team has pushed the envelope. For MMA fans and gamers that enjoy realistic fighting games, this is definitely one to check out.
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February 3, 1932 - July16, 2013
Pine Bush, NY
Robert Vernon Harold, Jr. of Pine Bush died Tuesday, July16, 2013 at Orange Regional Medical Center. He was 81 years old. Born to the late Robert Vernon, Sr. and Clarice Booker Harold in Brooklyn, NY on February 3, 1932. He met the love of his life, Jessie D. Bynes and they were married in Brooklyn on March 23, 1949.
Bob was a kind and considerate man who was loved not only by his family but by all who knew him. He worked as a District Superintendent for the New York Housing Authority and enjoyed being able to help others in his public service.
He and his fellow NYCHA superintendents were founding members of the WENCROYS, a social and networking organization for city housing employees. He was always proud of the assistance the organization provided to many workers. He was an ardent fisherman and member of a Far Rockaway Fishing Club.
Bob was a faithful member of the Arthur Campbell Masonic Lodge#11 in Brooklyn. He and his wife Jessie moved to the Pine Bush area in 1971 from New York City and adapted well to life outside the big city.
He is survived by his loving wife of 64 years, Jessie, at home; sons: Dennis R. of Petersburg, VA, Gregory E. of Poughkeepsie, NY, Anthony L. and his wife, Edna of Baltimore, MD; sister, Edith Green of Brooklyn; grandchildren: Michelle, Gregory Jr., Tracey, Matthew, Jessica and Conor; five great grandchildren and numerous nephews, nieces and cousins. He was predeceased by two sons: Robert III and Jeffrey J. and a sister, Patricia.
Cremation will be private and a memorial service scheduled at a later date.
Arrangements entrusted to the Applebee-McPhillips Funeral Home, Inc., 130 Highland Ave., Middletown, NY 10940.

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Today's Highlight in History:
On Jan. 15, 1943, work was completed on the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Department of War (now Defense).
On this date:
In 1559, England's Queen Elizabeth I was crowned in Westminster Abbey.
In 1777, the people of New Connecticut declared their independence. (The republic later became the state of Vermont.)
In 1862, the U.S. Senate confirmed President Abraham Lincoln's choice of Edwin M. Stanton to be the new Secretary of War, replacing Simon Cameron.
In 1913, actor Lloyd Bridges was born in San Leandro, Calif.
In 1929, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta.
In 1947, the mutilated remains of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, who came to be known as the ??Black Dahlia," were found in a vacant Los Angeles lot; her slaying remains unsolved.
In 1961, a U.S. Air Force radar tower off the New Jersey coast collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean during a severe storm, killing all 28 men aboard.
In 1967, the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League 35-10 in the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, retroactively known as Super Bowl I.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon announced the suspension of all U.S. offensive action in North Vietnam, citing progress in peace negotiations.
In 1989, NATO, the Warsaw Pact and 12 other European countries adopted a human rights and security agreement in Vienna, Austria.
In 1993, in Paris, a historic disarmament ceremony ended with the last of 125 countries signing a treaty banning chemical weapons.
In 2009, US Airways Capt. Chesley ??Sully" Sullenberger ditched his Airbus 320 in the Hudson River after a flock of birds disabled both engines; all 155 people aboard survived.
Ten years ago: White House budget director Mitchell Daniels predicted federal deficits would balloon to the $200- $300 billion range over the next two years. Mickey Mouse and The Walt Disney Co. scored a big victory as the Supreme Court upheld longer copyright protections for cartoon characters, songs, books and other creations worth billions of dollars.
Five years ago: Mitt Romney scored his first major primary victory in his native Michigan. During a visit to Saudi Arabia, President George W. Bush warned that surging oil prices threatened the U.S. economy and he urged OPEC nations to boost their output. Actor Brad Renfro, who as a youngster had played the title role in ??The Client," was found dead in his Los Angeles home; he was 25.
One year ago: Addressing a conference in Beirut on democracy in the Arab world, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demanded that Syria's president, Bashar Assad, stop killing his own people, and said the ??old order" of oneman rule and family dynasties was over in the Middle East. At the Golden Globes, ??The Artist" won best musical or comedy; ??The Descendants" won best drama.
Today's Birthdays: Actress Margaret O'Brien is 76. Actress Andrea Martin is 66. Actor-director Mario Van Peebles is 56. Actor James Nesbitt is 48. Singer Lisa Lisa (Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam) is 46. Actor Chad Lowe is 45. Alt-country singer Will Oldham (aka ??Bonnie Prince Billy") is 43. Actress Regina King is 42. Actor Eddie Cahill is 35. Rapper/ reggaeton artist Pitbull is 32. Electronic dance musician Skrillex is 25.
Thought for Today: ??One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means." ? Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968).


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This is supposed to be Star Wars. But it will never be Star Wars without George Lucas. From the Fanfiction Awakens to this movie, the characters developed in the original trilogy are ignored and poorly written. all of the new characters fail at everything they were trying to do. Rose stopping Fin from being a hero was terrible. Luke considering killing Darth Snape is too out of character. Turning the empire into Nazis is laughable. This was not Star Wars, this was Disney Wars and has ruined my opinion of Disney with Star Wars. Can someone start a petition for George Lucas to write his own versions of episodes 7, 8, and 9? We don't even need films, just books of the real story with Kira the Jedi. But as for now, all I can think is Step into the grand tour, grand tour grand tour, step into the grand tour, Star Wars GT! I hope Star wars bombs from here on out.
It looks really good but the anti-white racist SJW degradation is beyond forgivable. Another classic piece of media destroyed on the alter of a political narrative over the stories lore and good story telling. Good going guys you ruined another cultural staple and turned even more people against you. Another series crossed off the list.
It's not coincidence that Lucas made Luke literally rescue his father from the Dark Side. Proposing that there's no absolute good and evil, that both Jedi and Sith were equally wrong because of their dogmatism and that both of those factions used the Force and viewed themselves as good (as a mean to reinforce their power) is treason against the core morality that was deeply embedded in Lucas' original philosophy, one that he tried to build in the tradition of ancient mythology: he carefully showed how this relativistic "grey view" of good and evil is just a trick used by the dark side. Remember Palpatine's and Anakin's conversation at the opera. It was meant to mirror the Temptation of Christ in the desert, the serpent at the Tree of Good and Evil or the conversation between Buddha and Mara. Evil tries to twist the morality of the hero, painting both moral opposites as the same, as relative. A pure Jungian archetype. That's why Lucas sold his soul. He literally did. He sold a creation that conveyed these ideas beautifully to a company that wants to deconstruct them and negate their validity and use them to further advance the destructive globalist agenda which is aimed at breaking down everything into chaos gray zones, lack of meaning, addiction etc where everything is the opposite to what it was before.
I'm sure he's sad with what Disney is doing with his carefully crafted mythology but this is the perfect depiction of why more and more are reporting being unhappy, depressed, unwanted, not loved…… Not having understood the meaning or ways of navigating in life because it all has been based on big lie. The truth has always been there right there right infront of them. "That evil & good is subjective, lightness darkness is not equal, we need to choose the tree of life"
By supporting this movie u are consenting to create "Order out of Chaos from wickedness & suffering"
My wife and I walked out of the theater extremely disappointed. The movie just lacked substance and story. It gave the audience more questions and answered largely anticipated questions horribly...It was also full of plot holes and just ruined long time loved characters from the original trilogy. Episode VII did a good job setting this movie up for success, but this movie just was a dump on the series. When Disney bought Star Wars, I feared they would kill it...and this movie is my fears come true.
The only positive thing I can say of this movie is that there are some scenes that are visually spectacular. On the whole, however, the characters are unlikable caricatures with sloppy dialog. The story itself is a convoluted, meandering mess with nearly a third of the screen-time being utterly pointless. All the lose ends of the previous movie are either ignored or bluntly stated to be pointless. "Mary Sue" Rei Mary Sue's her way through everything as she did in episode 7, leaving no tension or attachment to her boring, vacant character. Add a dash of clumsy political ideological allegory and you end up with two and half hours of my life I wish that I could have back. I will not bother with episode 9.
The movie is not original either. The entire Rey story is stolen from ESB. She travels alone to a distant plant to meet a strange reclusive Jedi Master for training, while there she discovers an ominous cave that will hint the truth about who she is before disobeying the Jedi Master and confronting an enemy that reveals who her parents are (Dagobah = Ach-To). That is the main plot of ESB beat for beat. Meanwhile the rebels bunkered-in fight AT-AT's on a salt/snow planet that they must retreat for their lives (Crait=Hoth). While visiting a corrupt wealthy planet the good guys meet a shady character they ask for help but he betrays them (Canto Bight=Cloud City). Do not tell me Last Jedi is any more original than Force Awakens.
The movie lacks any continuity from the Force Awakens even though they take place moments apart. Why was a map left to find Luke, why is the Resistance completely wiped out, why didn't Hux return to Snoke, how is Finn and his jacket okay when he just had his spine sliced by Kylo Ren? Plot ideas and interesting characters that Force Awakens created are abandoned with total disinterest (Snoke, Knights of Ren, Phasma). The 3 new hero characters are robbed of major hero moments and are isolated the whole movie. The movie wastes our time with 2 secondary plots that accomplish nothing other than a very cool explosion and a long prequel-esque escapade to a Casino planet. A good story teller would've at least had Leia pilot that ship into Snoke like a mofo and time it so the explosion stuns Snoke, saves Rey, giving Kylo the opportunity to kill Snoke. The way they wrote this movie both the good and bad guys looked weak and stupid when both should be impressive. Finn and Rey's competence in combat against much more experienced fighters remains an ongoing mystery that might just be a result of awful storytelling.
Terrible film. Even from a basic plot and character point of view it sucked. We got to see the destruction of Luke's Character which was a real low point in my opinion. I think people who like this film simply like pretty lights and visuals and the fact it checks every PC box imaginable. Just a bad film. How did people get paid to make this film? It's like welfare for hollywood types. Show up, create a turkey, collect a paycheck. If you like the original trilogy, avoid.
If it were totally standalone, it would be an average kind-of-enjoyable thing with many plotholes. But like this...it destroys the mythology, and offers nothing except meh-meh to replace what it destroyed. I WANTED to be surprised, but not in such a way that the surprises all ring hollow and/or unconvincing.
Let's see why...
Luke contemplating killing Kylo...nope. This happens to be a personal obsession of Rian's - "if you met Hitler while still a kid, would you kill him?" Check out his movie Looper for proof of this. And it could have been convincingly placed in this mythology...only it isn't. Something like that has to be earned, not shoehorned in. And yeah, it does character-assassinate Luke, this is simply not him, not even if he changed. An example (only one of the possible ways this could have been made convincing, and no it wasn't my idea to start with, got it from someone on the Net): if Ben/Kylo and all or most of Luke's students got converted by Snoke and rebelled, Luke may have been forced to kill them while crying, then could not bring himself to kill his own nephew.
I really tried to enjoy the movie, i forced myself to like it, but everyday I get angrier at the realization that rian Johnson just made the worst star wars movie. Please Disney, please lucasfilm, stop killing star wars, stop killing something i loved so much
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Oakleaf Hydrangea: A Charming, Native Shrub
As much as I enjoy working with the festive hydrangeas native to Asia (nature's ponpons!), I was thrilled to learn there are a few varieties of hydrangea native to the U.S. Allow me to present my current favorite: the Oakleaf Hydrangea.
Hydrangea quercifolia hails from the woodland areas of the Southeastern United States, but it is hardy in zones 5 - 9. Estimates vary drastically as to the average size, from 4-8ft tall to 26ft! Hmmmm...any experienced gardeners want to weigh in?
Regardless, it will thrive in full sun to partial shade and prefers moist, well-drained soil. If you're in a colder area, some sources recommend protecting your shrubs during the winter (covering them in burlap, for example). We covered ours with big piles of fluffy snow during their first two Illinois winters and they not only survived but are thriving. It should also be noted that the bark, leaves, and buds of the oakleaf hydrangea are all toxic if consumed in large quantities, so dogs should be kept away from them.
Now that all the business is out of the way, let's talk about how pretty oakleaf hydrangeas are!
• The bushes are large, full, and rounded, with a thick, even distribution of leaves and flowers.
• The cones of delicate flowers are lovely when they're new and creamy white, when they've turned blush-pink, when they begin to dry in the autumn, and especially when they're completely dried. Ooh, I love them.
• The oak-like leaves are my favorite part of the plant. They have a clean structure, an intriguing combination of green, gold, and brown and they turn gorgeous shades of bronze and wine in the autumn. Delightful!
• As if all that wasn't enough, the bark of older shrubs peel away in the winter to reveal a golden inner bark.
The beautiful examples shown above, left to right:
1. & 2. Fine Gardening
3. Sidewalk Shoes
4. Naturescapes
5. Mommy's Treasures
6. Digatree
7. Bear Creak Nursery
8. Garden Guides
(Images: as linked above)


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The simple-to-use phone app and rock solid training show you how to become a successful digital entrepreneur quickly and easily. And lucky for you, Online Sales Pro only costs $37/month. If you don't already have a business to promote, don't worry you're covered. Online Sales Pro has a world-class affiliate program. When you use our marketing strategies and share the app, you'll get paid $20/month commissions per customer you refer!
The OSP Affiliate Program allows OSP customers to market our top lead generation tools, which have helped over 40,000 marketers generate more leads and improve their businesses.
We offer 54% commission on all monthly subscriptions generated, for the life of the customer, through your unique affiliate link.
No worries, you can launch your OSP business in your spare time. When you use the Online Sales Pro system and put in just a couple hours per week, there is no reason that you won't be on your way to growing a full time online business that gives you the lifestyle and freedom that you are after.
When your leads come in, the app will send your phone real time push notifications. Harness the power of the system, by following up via via text, email, and by phone. If you don't know what to say, or you get confused on what you should do, our app is already loaded with scripts and rebuttal you can send your leads. You never have to worry about what to do, or what to say. And don't worry, Online Sales Pro will do the heavy lifting for you; bring in leads, and OSP will email them for you!


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ACParadise Network: American Cosplay Paradise American Cosplay Experience American Cosplay Snapshots
Thank you very much for stopping by my little corner of the "American Cosplay Paradise"! I hope you'll enjoy what you find here. The pics are from my cosplay site (there are several more there that I haven't posted here). So, if you have time and would like to learn a bit more about me, my costumes, see more pics, etc. please come to my website! I love getting visitors ^_-.
Recent Updates
Newest Favorites
Newest Fans
Recent Comments
- DarkSamuraiX1999 says, "Wow you look amazing, shiny XD"
- For Lei Fang from Dead or Alive
- kitsunepixie says, "The one of you doing the splits looks like it would make a great banner! Great job with everything!"
- For Yohko Mano from Devil Hunter Yohko
- kitsunepixie says, "WOW! This is a costume I haven't seen before. Great job!!"
- For Night Wind from Unico
- makio says, "like ur outfit... how long did u take to make it"
- For Jill Valentine from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
- makio says, "really sweet pic with squall"
- For Rinoa Heartilly from Final Fantasy VIII


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Add To Favorites In PHR
Dr. Jennifer Merchant reviews medical content for Healthwise, a nonprofit organization with a mission to help people make better health decisions. Dr. Merchant is a neonatologist practicing at St. Luke's Magic Valley Medical Center in Twin Falls, Idaho. Her practice interests include developmental follow-up of NICU graduates, neonatal neuroprotection, and car seat testing in preterm infants.
MD: University of Minnesota Medical School, 1994
Internship: University of Minnesota Medical School, 1994–1995
Residency: University of Minnesota Medical School, 1995–1997
Fellowship: University of Minnesota Medical School, 1997–2000
Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, American Board of Pediatrics
The final approval of Healthwise content is always made by a clinician with no financial conflicts.
This reviewer reported no financial conflicts.
Current as of: January 10, 2014
Author: Healthwise Staff
This information does not replace the advice of a doctor. Healthwise, Incorporated, disclaims any warranty or liability for your use of this information. Your use of this information means that you agree to the Terms of Use. Learn how we develop our content.
To learn more about Healthwise, visit Healthwise.org.
© 1995-2018 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.
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The year's top cases impacting subrogation actions.
Immunity from Subrogation
This year was a particularly active one for courts addressing immunity in subrogation cases. In 2012, two Federal Circuit Courts wrestled with governmental immunity for subrogation claims, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that Pennsylvania state, county and municipal governments are immune from liability for workers' compensation subrogation claims.
The Second Circuit (binding on District Courts in New York, Connecticut and Vermont), addressed the Federal Sovereign Immunity Act (FSIA) as it applies to subrogation claims against foreign governments in USAA Casualty v. Permanent Mission of the Republic of Nambia. The court looked at whether foreign governments are immune under the FSIA for subrogation property-damage claims caused by a foreign government's violation of New York City building codes.
The FSIA provides that foreign governments are generally immune from jurisdiction, and hence liability, within the United States unless a specific exception to FSIA's broad immunity applies. Among others, the exceptions include tortious activity, unless the tort is committed as part of discretionary activity.
The Second Circuit held that the foreign government had a duty to comply with New York City building codes when it renovated a townhouse used as a mission to the United Nations. The Republic of Nambia could not delegate the duty to comply with New York building codes to its construction contractors. Finally, the court held that while the decision to renovate a structure is discretionary, once a foreign government decides to undertake a construction project, compliance with building codes is mandatory, and the foreign government is not immune and is subject to jurisdiction in the United States. This could open the door for cases against foreign governments and their agencies for violations of construction and building codes.
Government Agencies
In Re: Katrina Canal Breaches Litigation, the Fifth Circuit (binding on District Courts in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi) tackled U.S. federal tort immunity as it applies to property claims against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for claims arising out of Hurricane Katrina. In September 2012, in a surprise reversal of its previous decision in March 2012, the Fifth Circuit expanded tort immunity for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
First, the Fifth Circuit held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies enjoy almost absolute immunity for flood damages resulting from flood control projects under the Flood Control Act of 1938. Second, the court held that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers enjoys broad immunity for non-flood control projects that result in flood damages. The only exception is for non-discretionary activities, namely violations of clear statutory and regulatory responsibilities.
The Fifth Circuit decision has potentially broad implications for government immunity cases going forward. Since the court interpreted the Federal Tort Claims Act, the Fifth Circuit's ruling will apply not only to flood claims against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers but also to other types of claims against federal agencies. Moreover, since many state tort claims acts are modeled after the Federal Tort Claims Act, claims professionals can expect to see an increase in federal and state agencies asserting immunity--arguing that the activity that caused the loss involved a discretionary act, and therefore the government is immune.
As a result, if faced with a potential claim against a government agency, it is critical to identify whether the agency involved violated a statute or regulation. The first step is to retain experts who are knowledgeable about statutes and codes. Such experts can assist in determining if, in fact, the government's action violated a statutory or regulatory requirement. This can help build the argument that the governmental activity was nondiscretionary and will subject the government to tort liability for violating those requirements.
Immunity was also an issue on the workers' compensation side. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that a 1993 amendment to Pennsylvania's workers' compensation statute provided complete immunity to government actors for related subrogation claims in Frazier v. WCAB (Bayada Nurses Inc.). After interpreting conflicting provisions in the statute, the court ruled that a workers' compensation insurer has no subrogation rights against a negligent government actor. Moreover, the court also held that the workers' compensation carrier has no lien rights from a claimant's settlement with a government agency. For claims professionals, this means that workers' compensation carriers for private employers may not subrogate against state, county and municipal actors.
Property Damage Repair
Two state Supreme Courts addressed property damages this year. The Georgia Supreme Court addressed insurance coverage for stigma damages in Royal Capital Development, LLC v. Maryland Casualty Company. Stigma damages involve the potential loss of market value of property even after the property is fully repaired because of the stigma associated with the property damage. Numerous states have disclosure laws requiring sellers of real estate and personal property to reveal prior damage. Arguably, the property's market value is less after the repairs because the property owner has to disclose the prior loss at the time of sale.
In Royal Capital, the insurance carrier paid for the cost to repair a commercial building to its pre-loss physical condition. However, the insurer denied coverage for the alleged loss of value the insured was claiming due to the stigma associated with the building's damage and subsequent repair.
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled that stigma damages are valid since the purpose of an insurance policy is to place the insured, as nearly as possible, in the same position they would have been in without the damage. The court wrote "recognition of diminution in value as an element of loss to be recovered on the same basis as other elements of loss merely reflects economic reality...the measure of damage...is intended to place an injured party, as nearly as possible, in the same position they would have been in had the injury never occurred."
The Royal Capital decision is likely to spur an increase in coverage claims for stigma damages. To the extent that an insured alleges stigma damages, claims professionals will likely have to undertake the standard cost of repair analysis and might have to engage valuation professionals to determine if the property suffered stigma damage.
It is clear from the Royal Capital and other stigma damages cases decided in the last few years that claims for stigma damages are viable. It remains to be seen if carriers will pay stigma damages and seek recovery in subrogation claims. Regardless of whether stigma damages are uncovered losses and part of insured claims for uninsured losses, claims professionals have to ensure that the stigma damages are properly documented during first-party adjustment in order to maximize the ability to recoup stigma damages.
While the Georgia Supreme Court potentially opened the door for increased damages in Royal Capital, the Texas Supreme Court raised the evidence requirements for proving property damages in Hennan v. McGinty. The case involved water damage to a home and claims for the cost of repairs. The homeowner presented evidence from an expert who used a computer program that was "widely used in the insurance industry" as the basis for his repair cost estimates.
The Supreme Court of Texas held that repair estimates, repair bills and invoices are not sufficient evidence that the repair costs were "reasonable and necessary." In so doing, the court expressly rejected the argument that the repair estimates were inherently reasonable because they relied on a widely used insurance program for estimating losses.
Based on this decision, computer-generated estimates and even actual repair bills, without specific testimony that the repairs were reasonable and necessary, are no longer sufficient evidence to prove damages in property-damage subrogation cases in Texas. Regrettably, the court did not provide instruction or clarification as to what evidence is needed to prove that damages are reasonable and necessary. Claims professionals should be prepared to defend the cost of repairs by documenting why the repairs were necessary to fix the property and why the cost of repairs were reasonable under the circumstances involved in each case.
Whether deciding governmental immunity defenses, or the measure of damages or the standards of proof required to establish the cost of repair, these top 2012 court cases underscore new challenges and opportunities for claims professional seeking recovery.
Looking Ahead
2013 will bring major subrogation case rulings with the U.S. Supreme Court slated to decide the fate of subrogation for health insurers under the Employees Retirement Security Act in U.S. Airways v. McCrutchen. The Second Circuit will also revisit the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001. The court will decide a broad spectrum of appeals arising from litigation against alleged foreign sponsors of al Qaeda, brought by both victims of the September 11 attack and property insurers that paid in excess of $4 billion for property and economic losses. Among other things, the court will decide the legal issues surrounding the Sovereign Foreign Immunities Act and Fifth Amendment Due Process in the context of the events of September 11, 2001 and largely define the standards governing whether parties injured as a result of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil may hale foreign sponsors of terrorism, including foreign governments, into U.S. courts to answer for their conduct.
Like 2012, 2013 is poised to be an equally eventful and impactful year that could change the landscape for subrogation actions.
William N. Clark, Jr., is a member of the subrogation and recovery department at Cozen O'Connor, ranked among the 100 largest law firms in the United States. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.com. For information on emerging subrogation and recovery issues, visit http:/subrogation-andrecoverylawblog.com and follow @CozenSubro on Twitter.
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Thrombolytic therapy is the use of drugs to break up or dissolve blood clots, which are the main cause of both heart attacks and stroke.
Alternative Names
Tissue plasminogen activator; TPA; Alteplase; Reteplase; Tenecteplase; Activase thrombolytic agent; Clot-dissolving agents; Reperfusion therapy
Thrombolytic medications are approved for the immediate treatment of
According to the American Heart Association, you have a better chance of surviving and recovering from certain types of heart attacks if you receive a thrombolytic drug within 12 hours after the heart attack starts.
Ideally, you should receive thrombolytic medications within the first 90 minutes after arriving at the hospital for treatment.
A blood clot can block the arteries to the heart. This can cause a heart attack, when part of the muscle dies due to a lack of oxygen being delivered by the blood.
Thrombolytics work by dissolving a major clot quickly. This helps restart blood flow to the heart and helps prevent damage to the heart muscle. Thrombolytics can stop a heart attack that would otherwise be deadly.
The drug restores some blood flow to the heart in most patients. However, the blood flow may not be completely normal and there may still be a small amount of muscle damaged. Additional therapy, such as cardiac catheterization or angioplasty, may be needed.
Your health care provider will base the decisions about whether to give you a thrombolytic medication for a heart attack on many factors. These factors include your history of chest pain and the results of an
Other factors used to determine if you are a good candidate for thrombolytics include:
- Age (older patients are at increased risks of complications)
- Gender
- Medical history (including your history of a previous heart attack, diabetes, low blood pressure, or increased heart rate)
Generally, thrombolytics will not be given if you have:
- A recent head injury
- Bleeding problems
- Bleeding ulcers
- Pregnancy
- Recent surgery
- Taken blood thinning medications such as Coumadin
- Trauma
- Uncontrolled (severe) high blood pressure
Most strokes are caused when blood clots move to a blood vessel in the brain and block blood flow to that area. For such strokes (ischemic strokes), thrombolytics can be used to help dissolve the clot quickly. Giving thrombolytics within 3 hours of the first stroke symptoms can help limit stroke damage and disability.
The decision to give the drug is based upon:
- A brain CT scan to make sure there has not been any bleeding
- A physical exam that shows a significant stroke
- Your medical history
As in heart attacks, a clot-dissolving drug isnt usually given if you have one of the other medical problems listed above.
Thrombolytics are not given to someone who is having a hemorrhagic stroke (a hemorrhagic stroke means there has been bleeding in the brain). They could worsen the stroke by causing increased bleeding.
There are various drugs used for thrombolytic therapy, but t-PA are used most often. Others drugs include:
- Lanoteplase
- Reteplase
- Staphylokinase
- Streptokinase (SK)
- Tenecteplase
- Urokinase
Alternatives to thrombolytic therapy include interventional therapies done via catheters such as balloon angioplasty (PTCA), with or without stenting, thrombectomy (removing the clot).RISKS
Hemorrhage or bleeding is the most common risk. It can be life-threatening.
Minor bleeding from the gums or nose can occur in approximately 25% of people who receive the drug. Bleeding into the brain occurs approximately 1% of the time. This risk is the same for both stroke and heart attack patients.
Heart attacks and strokes are medical emergencies. The sooner treatment with thrombolytics begins, the better the chance for a good outcome.
Anderson JL. ST segment elevation acute myocardial infarction and complications of myocardial infarction. In: Goldman L, Schafer AI, eds. Cecil Medicine. 24th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders Elsevier; 2011:chap 73.
Antman EM, Morrow DA. ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction: management. In: Bonow RO, Mann DL, Zipes DP, Libby P, eds. Braunwalds Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine. 9th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2011:chap 55.
Kushner FG, Hand M, Smith SC Jr, et al. 2009 Focused Updates: ACC/AHA Guidelines for the Management of Patients With ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction (updating the 2004 Guideline and 2007 Focused Update) and ACC/AHA/SCAI Guidelines on Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (updating the 2005 Guideline and 2007 Focused Update): a report of the American College of Cardiology Foundation/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines. Circulation. 2009 Dec 1;120(22):2271-306. Epub 2009 Nov 18.
Zivin JA. Ischemic cerebrovascular disease. In: Goldman L, Schafer AI, eds. Cecil Medicine. 24th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders Elsevier; 2011:chap 414.
Review Date:
Reviewed By:
Michael A. Chen, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Harborview Medical Center, University of Washington Medical School, Seattle, Washington. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M. Health Solutions, Ebix, Inc.


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Tornadoes, powerful thunderstorms kill 6 and level homes across Illinois, then sweep east
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WASHINGTON, Ill. – Storms that swept across the Midwest left at least six people dead and unleashed powerful winds that flattened neighborhoods, flipped over cars and uprooted trees.
Illinois was struck the hardest by the unusually powerful late-season tornadoes Sunday. Washington, a town of 16,000 about 140 miles southwest of Chicago, appeared to have the most severe damage.
State Trooper Dustin Pierce says the tornado there cut a path about an eighth of a mile wide from one side of town to the other. Entire blocks of Washington were leveled.
Other towns were heavily damaged, too, and officials at Chicago's Soldier Field evacuated the stands and delayed the Bears-Baltimore Ravens game.
Two people died in New Minden in southern Illinois, one in Washington and three others in Massac County in far southern Illinois.


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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – It was announced on Sunday that eight members of the MIT women's track and field team have qualified for the 2013 NCAA Division III Men's and Women's Outdoor Track and Field Championships. The Engineers will be making the trip to the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse for the Championships that will take place from Thursday through Saturday, May 23-25.
The final U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) poll for the season was released at the same time as the NCAA qualifying list, revealing that the Engineers had not only made it back into the top 25, but had cracked the top 20. MIT ends the season 17th in the nation.
Tech is led by seniors Brooke Johnson (Shoreham, N.Y.) and Lauren Kuntz (Pittsburgh, Pa.), who will be making their final trip to nationals. Johnson is the only MIT athlete that will compete in more than one event, being seeded 21st in the 5000m and eighth in the 1500m. Kuntz is seeded fifth in her signature event, the Pole Vault. At indoor nationals in March, Kuntz improved on both her seeding and her personal record to take second place in the event.
As she always does, junior Jaclyn Konopka (Novi, Mich.) will start things off for the Engineers in the Heptathlon. With the 4,625 points that she scored at ECACs this past weekend, which broke the previous MIT varsity record by almost 200 points, Konopka landed in ninth place in the seedings. Junior Martina de Geus (Los Altos, Calif.) will be running at nationals for the first time in her career, competing in the 3000m Steeplechase on the first day.
Entered alongside Johnson in the 1500m is freshman Sarah Quinn (Watchung, N.J.), who is seeded in 14th place with her time from ECACs that broke her own MIT freshman record by over four seconds. Sophomore Elaine McVay (San Ramon, Calif.) will compete in the 10,000m with her eighth place seeding. The last of the Cardinal and Gray to make it to NCAAs is freshman Cimran Virdi (Walnut Creek, Calif.), who will be making her collegiate national debut in the Pole Vault with her 18th place seeding.
The Championships will commence on Thursday, May 23 at 2:00 p.m. with the Heptathlon. MIT will be looking to improve on its performance from the 2012 NCAA Outdoor Championships, where it tied for 26th place with McMurry University.
Host website - http://www.uwlathletics.com/sports/2012/12/13/MTRACK_1213120030.aspx?id=122


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Great collections of Business and Finance Quotes, Thoughts, Sayings, Messages with pictures share and inspire friends or family. Business and Finance Quotes The one person who can make your business succeed is not an investor, or even a mentor. ~ Richard Branson Everybody's business is nobody's business. ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the …Read More »
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12:30 am
NHK Newsline NULL
1:00 am
Perilous Fight: America's World War Two In Color "Infamy (1919-1942)" This first episode takes viewers from the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II through Nazi invasion of Poland. Part 1 of 4G
2:00 am
Perilous Fight: America's World War Two In Color "Battlefronts (1942-1944)" The second episode covers the internment of Japanese Americans, the Warsaw Ghetto, preparing troops for Normandy and D-Day preparations. Part 2 of 4G
3:00 am
Perilous Fight: America's World War Two In Color "Wrath (D-Day-V-E Day)" The third episode focuses on the European theater during the months between D-Day in June 1944 & V-E Day in May 1945. Part 3 of 4G
4:00 am
Perilous Fight: America's World War Two In Color "Triumph (The Pacific, 1943-1945)" The series concludes by covering America's efforts to win the war in the Pacific : Tarawa, raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hiroshima, Japanese surrender. Part 4 of 4G
5:00 am
Saving Songbirds Travel from New England to Costa Rica and Jamaica to meet some of the most colorful and melodic migratory birds and the people who are dedicated to SAVING SONGBIRDS. Saving Songbirds, a NHPTV Windows to the Wild special, introduces viewers to researchers who employ creative means to assess the health of bird populations, and grassroots efforts by Vermont school children to help re-forest the mountains of Costa Rica. Also featured are scientists in Cape May, NJ, who track large flocks of migrating songbirds in total darkness, and Costa Rican coffee farmers practicing bird-friendly methods of cultivation and processing. D
6:00 am
6:30 am
Market to Market NULL
7:00 am
Second Opinion "Female Sexual Dysfunction" Sexual response is influenced by biological, social, psychological and cultural factors. Many women with sexual concerns can benefit from treatment that addresses medical and emotional issues. D
7:30 am
Essential Pepin "Family Favorites" Grilled Leg Of Lamb; Pork Loin Tournedos With Cream And Calvados; Puerto Rican Pork And Beans; Lamb Navarin. D
8:00 am
Lidia's Italy In America "Chicago: Chicago's Chicken Vesuvio" Lidia travels to the Windy City to visit Caputo's, a family-owned Italian grocery in Elmwood Park, a very Italian suburb of Chicago. Lidia also brings her viewers for a stroll along the main thoroughfare of Chicago's Little Italy, Taylor Street, which is currently undergoing a major Renaissance. Grandma joins Lidia in the kitchen as her taste-tester, while Lidia prepares Cauliflower Soup and Chicken Vesuvio. D
8:30 am
Simply Ming "Jody Adams & Pan Roasting" Pan roasting is a technique used all the time in restaurants-you start searing something on the stove, and finish it off in the oven. On this episode of SIMPLY MING, Ming shows you a favorite technique that all home chefs should add to their repertoire. It's easy, saves time in the kitchen, and guarantees great flavor. D
9:00 am
Mexico -- One Plate at a Time with Rick Bayless "Presenting: World-Class Wines of Baja" Baja California Norte produces many world-class, gold medal-winning wines. That fact may surprise most people in the United States. Rick takes us on a tour of the region along with renowned winemaker and visionary Hugo d'Acosta, founder of La Escuelita, a nonprofit winemaking school that opened in 2004. D
9:30 am
Sara's Weeknight Meals "Holiday Food Gifts" A thoughtful gift you make yourself speaks volumes, and food is the present everyone loves! Sara releases your creative spirit by teaching how to make Homemade Marshmallows with a Hot Chocolate Mix. For the wine enthusiast, her Homemade Cheese Crackers pair beautifully with some cheese and wine. Peppermint Bark looks very expensive but couldn't be easier to make. D
10:00 am
Cook's Country from America's Test Kitchen "Family Favorites" Bridget reveals how to make the ultimate Swiss Steak. Then, Jack challenges Chris to a tasting of tomato paste. Next, Adam reveals his top picks for immersion blenders. D
10:30 am
Joanne Weir's Cooking Confidence "Pizza with Pizazz" Joanne welcomes her student Geoffto class with a quick and easy salmon and pickled onion pizza. Then together they explore the idea of contrasts of flavor, texture, and color, making lemon turkey cutlets and an arugula and orange salad. Recipes: Lavash Pizza with Herb Salad, Arugula and Orange Salad, and Lemon Turkey Cutlets. D
11:00 am
America's Test Kitchen from Cook's Illustrated "Fall Classics" Test cook Julia Collin Davison shows host Christopher Kimball how to make the ultimate Pot-Roasted Pork Loin. Chris then discusses the differences between baking soda and baking powder with science expert Guy Crosby. Next, tasting expert Jack Bishop challenges Chris to a tasting of pork. D
11:30 am
Scrapbook Memories "Stickers and Stamps" Die cuts and stamps go hand in hand especially when they coordinate with each other. Then, it's Julie Fei-Fan Balzer and how to make you own personal background. Last, meet Suzy West with a unique and fanciful clear mini book. D
12:00 pm
Paint This With Jerry Yarnell "Resting Wren, Part 1" In this opening segment Jerry blocks in the entire painting creating the backdrop for the wren. Starting with a tinted canvas, Jerry blocks in the sky using a vivid turquoise that will make the Wren pop. The foreground grasses are painted in loosely and much attention is given to paint a fence post and wooden rails as the center of interest on which the bird will perch. D
12:30 pm
Idaho State of Mind NULL
1:00 pm
This Old House "Bedford Project, Part 16 of 16" As the Bedford project wraps up, landscape contractor Roger Cook and landscape designer Jenn Nawada Evans install both the new and old plant material, adjusted at the nursery for the change in the color of the house. In the kitchen, tile contractor Mark Ferrante installs the ceramic backsplash tile with a crackle finish that requires sealing three times to prevent seepage and staining through the cracks. In the dining room, interior designer Dee Elms is on hand as wallpaper hanger Mike Bradshaw starts installing the new hand-woven paper from Japan. D
1:30 pm
Ask This Old House "Staining A Cedar Fence; Installing Window Boxes" Host Kevin O'Connor works with painter Mauro Henrique to stain a cedar fence. Then, general contractor Tom Silva helps a homeowner install window boxes; landscape contractor Roger Cook helps plant them. D
2:00 pm
American Woodshop "Kitchen Projects" Band Sawn kitchen utensils (Custom Cutlery) and cutting boards just open up beautiful ways to add accents to the ultimate kitchen. A tiger maple spice box is built for the wall. D
2:30 pm
Rough Cut - Woodworking with Tommy Mac "Shaker-Inspired Step Stool" A Shaker-inspired Step Stool is Tommy's project on this episode of Rough Cut.G
3:00 pm
MotorWeek "Mazda3 Skyactiv" Road Test: 2012 Mazda3 SKYACTIV. Road Test: 2012 Nissan Versa. Goss' Garage: Under the Hood Cleanup. D
3:30 pm
America's Heartland A young blind teenager wins national honors for cattle raising. A New England town rallies around a young man to save a family farm. Oklahoma air rescue personnel come to the aid of injured farmers. D
4:00 pm
NOVA "3D Spies of WWII" Alarmed by rumors of advanced rockets and missiles, Allied intelligence recruit a team from British universities and Hollywood studios to an English country house. Team members use 3D stereoscopes to view millions of air photos of German territory, and are able to spot telltale clues that reveal hidden rocket bases. With 3D graphics NOVA recreates what WWII photo spies saw, and tells the suspenseful, previously untold story.G
5:00 pm
Antiques Roadshow "Tulsa, OK - Hour Three" Experts examine an 1826 English gadget cane, equipped with both a pistol and a telescope; and a vibrant 1931 Oscar Mayer in-store display. A circa 1600 Ming Dynasty cast bronze guardian figure is valued up to $100,000. Part 3 of 3G
6:00 pm
Priceless Antiques Roadshow Fiona Bruce presents more of the series' choicest cuts. Veteran ceramic expert Henry Sandon is finally cast in clay and a poignant selection of items remembers those who fell in the Great War.G
6:30 pm
Rick Steves' Europe "Croatia: Adriatic Delights" Rick explores the fabled Dalmatian Coast from dramatic Dubrovnik to crusty Adriatic island ports. Heading inland, he hikes through Plitvice Lakes National Park and enjoys the thriving capital city of Zagreb.G
7:00 pm
The Lawrence Welk Show "200 Years of American Music" Lawrence and his Musical Family tell the history of America from folk songs to pop tunes in this show that is new to public television. The band and all hands gather for "Yankee Doodle." Myron Floren plays "Skip To My Lou" and Guy and Ralna sing "Home Sweet Home."G
7:59 pm
Are You Being Served? "Think Tank" When sales in Ladies' Lingerie and Gentlemen's Ready-made begin to drop, staff members are asked to pool their ideas to improve sales.G
8:31 pm
Keeping Up Appearances - The Memoirs of Hyacinth Bucket "Skis" Hyacinth, determined to give Richard a pair of skis, tells him to strap them atop the car to cultivate the correct image without ever having to step onto them.G
9:01 pm
Last of the Summer Wine "Who's That Looking Sideways at Nelly?" While in disguise as a protection from his enemies, Hobbo accidently locks his neck, leading to misunderstandings when Alvin and Entwistle try to help.G
9:31 pm
Outnumbered Karen recreates "Britain's Got Talent." Ben takes a close interest in Dad's medical tests. Mum thinks Jake's healthy interest in girls is becoming unhealthy.G
10:01 pm
The Red Green Show "The Dandruff Foundation" The men find a charity for the Lodge to affiliate with as a way of avoiding tax and receiving government grants. Red makes a device to automatically clear snow from a driveway.G
10:30 pm
Vicar of Dibley "Spring" Alice is busy arranging the forthcoming christening for her and Hugo's new baby girl, but there is still much deliberation over the child's full name. Geraldine is flustered and bewildered by a surprise proposition.G
11:10 pm
Doctor Who Four "Planet of the Ood" The Doctor takes Donna to her first alien world, but the Ood-Sphere reveals some terrible truths about the Human race.G


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Tuesday, August 23, 2011
* Make a Melted RAINBOW Crayon Canvas!
My awesome bloggy friend, Meg Deurksen from Whatever blog
made one of these Rainbow Crayon Canvases with her kids this week
and it was love at first sight for me.
Rumor has it, that these have been all over Pinterest this summer
but I've been playing with my kids and had no idea what we were missing out on!
So, instead of starting dinner on Thursday night, we made this instead!
The girls helped pick colors and lined them up in order
but the rest of the project was pretty much done by me while they watched
and had a dance party in the art studio.
We started by lining up crayons along the top of a square canvas
(from our craft supply stash) to figure out our spectrum order
and to see how many we'd need. (dark photos = crafting at dinner time)
The canvas is 14" x 14" with wrapped edges.
I used my glue gun on high heat and glued the crayons down
with their color names showing.
Once all of the crayons were glued down it was time to start melting!
I propped up the canvas against a stool in the art studio and put a newspaper
down on the floor underneath to catch any drips.
I used my hairdryer on high heat (but low blowing)
and it melts them but it takes FOR-EVER.
Also, you have to play with it because the blowing air
splatters the wax if you're not careful!
Once the colors really started melting, I used the hair dryer
to heat up the canvas on the back side and get the big blobs of wax
to run all the way down to the bottom of the canvas.
I wish I'd had one of these to hang up in my art classroom,
it would have been awesome with my color wheel clock!
I love the way it looks like a Morris Louis painting!
"E" wants to hang this one in her room.
I'll show you the even girlier version we made
for her little sister's room in my next post! : )
A special thank you to my friend Meg for inspiring such a fun, COLORFUL project!
pink and green mama
Posted by pink and green mama MaryLea
Labels: Color Wheel, Crayon Fun, Mixed Media, Rainbow
Blog Archive
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- * ReCycle Craft: Milk Carton Weaving!
- * ReCycle Craft: Paper Cup Weaving!
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- * Make a Melted RAINBOW Crayon Canvas!
- * Elmer's Back To School Giveaway!
- * Permanent Marker and Watercolor Resist Weaving
- * Permanent Marker and Rubbing Alcohol Technique f...
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- * Outer Space Themed Sensory Box
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Just an FYI - if your email account has happened to move (ie adelphia to comcast for example), please go in and verify you have your profile settings on this forum set correctly.
If you have setup your profile to notify you if postings are made to topics of interest, or if you got a private message on the board, those may not be getting through.
Turns out I'm getting bounced emails stating that 'xxx has sent you a private message' or 'yyy has responded to your post'. These messages are being tagged as SPAM which is why I have not noticed them until now.
I can NOT VIEW THE BODY OF THE MESSAGE that was sent!
This is only the notification email that a PM was sent to you or a topic was updated. The content of the PM is stored in the database and not sent with the email.
These bounced emails have no where to go except the host provider - me. I will check with Nat to see if he can setup a catch-all (or just bounce the messages).
The following accounts I KNOW have this issue, but others may also (but they do not have PM notification or watched any threads).
Dave Merrill
Jeannine Stergios
Tim Tenhave
Sybil Spence Rocca
Brian @ McCarthysites.com (donating hosting to worthy causes since 2002)


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Tuesday, November 14, 2017 1:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Pocono Cinema & Cultural Center
The extraordinary true story of an unexpected friendship in the later years of Queen Victoria's (Academy Award winner Judi Dench) remarkable rule. When Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), a young clerk, travels from India to participate in the Queen's Golden Jubilee, he is surprised to find favor with the Queen herself. As the Queen questions the constrictions of her long-held position, the two forge an unlikely and devoted alliance with a loyalty to one another that her household and inner circle all attempt to destroy. As the friendship deepens, the Queen begins to see a changing world through new eyes and joyfully reclaims her humanity.
Friday, November 10th- Thursday, November 16th
Friday | 4:30, 10:05
Saturday | 7:30
Sunday | 1:20
Monday & Wednesday |7:30
Tuesday | 4:30
Thursday | 3:30
Pocono Cinema & Cultural Center
88 South Courtland Street
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301


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A Game of Thrones: Genesis Screenshots
September 28, 2011
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Description: A Game of Thrones: Genesis Screenshots
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Emergency CareWe at VCA Noyes Animal Hospital are concerned about you and your pet. Should an emergency arise during office hours please call (847) 381-1920 and we will schedule you with a doctor immediatly.
In case of emergency after hours, please call the emergency department of one of the animal hospitals listed below:
Animal Emergency of McHenry County
1095 Pingree Road Suite 120
Crystal Lake, IL 60014
Phone: (815) 479-9119
Veterinary Specialty Center
1515 Busch Parway
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089
Phone: (847) 459-7535
VCA Aurora Animal Hospital
2600 West Galena
Aurora, IL 60506
Phone: (630) 896-8541 or (630) 301-6100
VCA Berwyn Animal Hospital
2845 S. Harlem
Berwyn, IL 60402
Phone: (708) 749-4200
VCA Arboretum View Animal Hospital
2551 Warrenville Road
Downers Grove, IL 60515
Phone: (630) 963-0424


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Multi-county group forms to address Great Lakes Restoration Initiative
ARENAC COUNTY — Three grants for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) could potentially impact the residents of Arenac County.
The GLRI is a special project within the Environmental Protection Agency that provides $475 million in grant money for the Great Lakes Region. Its purpose is to help eliminate the major problems in the area, which include invasive species, pollutants, and contaminated sediment.
Huron County Commissioner Kurt E. Damrow has been working to bring together groups of people from Bay, Arenac, Tuscola, and Huron counties (collectively called the BATH Group) to identify the area's needs and apply for grants.
The first round of GLRI grant applications was due Jan. 29, and the group put together three grants that seek aid for phragmites removal, septic tank replacement, and farm runoff.
Although the septic tank replacement is geared more toward leaking systems in Bay County, the phragmites removal and farm runoff will more directly affect Arenac County.
Damrow said the EPA recently sent out a letter that it was going to remove the word "big" from "big farms" in the farm runoff regulations. This change means that smaller farms will eventually be impacted by the EPA regulations, and one of the three grants will assist farmers in modifying their tile outlets to meet the increased regulations.
Damrow said that partnering with Arenac County is especially important when dealing with invasive species like phragmites.
"We really need their participation," Damrow said.
The Arenac County Board of Commissioners sent a letter of support to the EPA on Jan. 26 in support of the GLRI, and at least one resident of the county has attended previous BATH meetings, Damrow said.
Receiving funding is voluntary, but Damrow said he thinks the EPA will start to more strictly regulate the Great Lakes region once all the grant money is given out.
"The EPA wants the Great Lakes cleaned out," Damrow said.
The first round of applications requested nearly $3 million in funding, and Damrow said he thinks the second round could be double that amount.
The BATH Group's next meeting is Feb. 11 at 9:30 a.m. at the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DNRE) office on Ketchum Street in Bay City. The group will be discussing the three grants as well as gathering ideas for the second round of applications, which are due April 1.
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Talk:Walnut/Secure Distributed Computing
From Erights
Proof of Purchase
I found the explanation puzzling at first, because it mixes two separate issues: security and convenience. I suggest the following alternate end for the section. NowhereMan 21:37, 29 March 2008 (CDT)
Since we have a convenient trusted third party available that already had authority over all the panels anyway (the javax.swing.Component class object), we can use the "proof of purchase" pattern instead. We could define a globally available transferFocus function accepting two arguments:
- the panel that contains the focus
- the target panel that should receive the focus
With this function, the target panel would not need to receive excess authority anymore to be able to get the focus.
For practicality, we provided a Component.transferFocus method that, instead of the panel containing the focus, accepts as its first argument a list of panels that the client believes to contain, somewhere in their subpanel hierarchies, the focus. In the common case where a whole window lies inside a single trust realm, the client can simply present a reference to the whole window and be confident that the focus will be transferred.
The interesting thing about Component.transferFocus is that the recipient does not actually need the client's authority to reach the component that already has the focus. The Component class already has that authority. The client must send the authority merely to prove he has it, too.


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Aug. 26, 2011
Box Score
NORTHRIDGE, Calif. -
The Cal State Northridge men's soccer team (1-0) opened the season strong offensively, working to a 2-0 victory over the Canisius Griffins (0-1) on Friday night at Matador Soccer Field. The win was the 100th for head coach Terry Davila as a member of the Big West Conference.
The Northridge offense came out at a blistering pace and owned a 10-2 shot advantage after one half of play. Eleven different Matadors registered a shot during the match, led by forwards Edwin Rivas and Christian Gonzalez Diaz with four apiece, and eight individuals tallied a shot on goal with Gonzalez Diaz recording three.
The game was slow in pace for the first 20 minutes as both teams were figuring the other out in the early stages. Things started to open up for the Matadors after a shot by Canisius forward Asani Samuels was blocked in front of the net.
In the 26th minute, Northridge midfielder Chris Smith received the ball in space 30 yards from the goal. After taking his time to check his options, Smith fired the ball at the net and his shot soared over the goalkeepers head out of range before dipping just under the crossbar for the season's first goal. The score was the first of his career at CSUN.
The first of two chances for Canisius came in in the 33rd minute as a cross to Derek Maier was headed on goal, forcing goalkeeper Manabu Kaji to make a save to preserve the lead as the Matadors took a 1-0 advantage into halftime.
With the Matadors clinging to a one-goal lead, midfielder Gustavo Villalobos set up Gonzalez Diaz, whose shot found the net to double the margin in the 67th minute. Off of a corner kick, Villalobos centered a low cross to the top of the box. With traffic in front of the net, Gonzalez Diaz shot a low ball to the lower right corner of the net past a shielded goalkeeper.
A header by Samuels for the Griffins nearly erased the clean sheet in the 83rd, but Kaji sprawled to his left to punch the attempt wide of the goal. Kaji earned his first start in goal for the Matadors and recorded his first victory and shutout in one.
The Matadors return to action on Thursday, Sept. 1 at approximately 7 p.m. against the UNLV Rebels at home as part of the 2011 Cal State Northridge Labor Day Classic. The Cal State Fullerton Titans will face the defending national champion Akron Zips at Matador Soccer Field at 4:30. Northridge will go up against Akron on Saturday, Sept. 3 at approximately 7 p.m.


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Pilots face tough physicals, but 'shallow' mental exams
Editor's note: A previous version of this article misstated the physical exam schedule for cargo pilots. The story has since been corrected.
The FBI is helping Malaysian officials determine whether the pilots of missing Flight 370 could have intentionally diverted or crashed the plane, raising questions about whether better psychological screening for pilots could prevent rare, but violent incidents.
Malaysian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the flight that disappeared March 8 because someone familiar with the 777-200ER's controls is thought to have changed the plane's course less than an hour after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur, based on military radar tracking.
The FBI will examine Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah's personal flight simulator that he kept at his home for clues. The equipment has been flown to the USA.
The open question is whether one or both pilots aboard the plane might have diverted and possibly crashed the plane intentionally. The Federal Aviation Administration requires stringent physical exams for U.S. pilots, but monitors their mental health largely through their own reporting and prescriptions.
"The mental component is alarmingly shallow in its probing," said Greg Raiff, CEO of Private Jet Services in New Hampshire, an aviation consultancy that lines up charter flights for corporations, governments and sports teams.
Under FAA rules, commercial passenger pilots under age 40 have physical exams every year and those older every six months to keep their certificates to fly.
Before the appointment, the pilot fills out a medical history through part of the FAA's website called MedXPress. Besides typical physical characteristics, the questions ask about medications, ailments such as vision or heart problems and mental disorders such as depression or anxiety.
A doctor — called an aviation medical examiner — then meets with the pilot to check vision, lungs, heart, abdomen, extremities for swelling that could signal heart failure and urine for possible diabetes or renal failure, said Ryan Rees, who conducts the exams at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.
"Basically, the air medical is an overall survey to ensure that pilots don't put passengers or people on the ground at risk," Rees said. "If we see anything that raises a flag, we defer it for FAA review. All of the ones that we certify are also reviewed by the FAA, and they verify whether it was a good decision or a bad decision."
He estimated that 10% or 15% of the pilots he sees are declined immediately or deferred for further FAA evaluation.
Commercial pilots aren't allowed to have insulin-dependent diabetes, for example. But pilots can fly with high blood pressure that is treated with medication and with coronary artery disease that is closely monitored.
The FAA also can review driving infractions, such as drunken driving charges, which the agency asks pilots to report within 60 days of a conviction or administrative action.
Computerization, both of the medical histories and prescriptions, helps prevent a pilot who fails a medical from applying to a different doctor, said Rees, who has caught one or two that way.
"Warning flags pop up immediately," he said.
The 15- to 20-minute meeting also involves asking questions about the pilot's mental status for depression or suicidal feelings, and about medication such as anti-depressants.
"There's a lot of fantasies about flying in the air and ending things with as much damage as you can," Rees said. "That never is far from our minds as a possibility."
But psychological problems are rare in pilots who receive their certificates. Commercial pilots fly tens of thousands of flights each day in the USA without incident.
An FAA report in February of 2,758 aviation fatalities during a 10-year period found eight cases of probable suicide. Five of those pilots had commercial licenses, two of whom had a history of suicide threats or joking about suicide. But all the incidents happened in small propeller planes or a helicopter.
That report didn't cover a couple of commercial crashes where investigators suspected pilots steered their planes toward the ground:
• SilkAir Flight 185, which crashed into a river in Indonesia in December 1997.
•EqyptAir Flight 990, which crashed off the coast of Massachusetts in October 1999.
In a case without injuries, a JetBlue Airways pilot locked Capt. Clayton Osbon out of the cockpit in March 2012 after he began speaking nonsensically during a flight from New York to Las Vegas.
Osbon then moved about the cabin yelling about Jesus and al-Qaeda before flight attendants and passengers restrained him for an emergency landing in Amarillo, Texas.
At trial for interfering with a flight crew, Osbon was found not guilty by reason of insanity after arguing he had a "brief psychotic disorder" from lack of sleep.
Such cases are why Raiff of Private Jet Services says pilots should be examined more thoroughly. His company reviews medical certificates and seeks out experienced pilots.
"Really what you're relying on at that point is that an old salt who's been flying an airplane for 35 years has the highest probability of not going off the deep end, so to speak, on tomorrow's flight," Raiff said. "The No. 1 answer is make sure you know your pilots."


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Saw Game Loader thread there, so I randomly decided to show my own crap I've made my own quite some time ago. I'd open the source, but it's in Delphi and, also, a complete hacked together sh*te - stock components alone make over 9000% overhead when drawing. And, of course, all information must be entered by hand, pictures edited by hand, because I got bored as soon as it worked enough for me.
It also plays title theme (or anything really), which is extremely annoying and can't be turned off. And it's slow (relatively), because it loads the whole flat file database (approx. 200 MB for me) in memory when launched and also saves it when closing. Talk about totally fscked up design. My hard disk loves me... not. That said, itself it weighs 825KB and the required bass.dll weighs 112 more. No runtime components needed.
It also fails to run FOSE (as in - it launches, but FOSE fails afterwards - it doesn't otherwise), for some reason I couldn't figure out.
(the problem was outlined here: http://http://www.ne...lexecute-works/ )
Now, how do you liek it? Do you liek it? *psschhhffchhh*


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Giving to RTS
We welcome your investment in the ministry of RTS. We are daily dependent on the support of the Lord's people to provide for the theological training of our young people. Mindful of the spiritual truth that we reap what we sow, we believe an investment in the life of RTS students will yield tremendous dividends as they are used of the Lord to win people to Christ. It is very likely that the lives of your children or grandchildren will at sometime be touched by the ministry of an RTS graduate.
We invite you to join other friends and alumni who have partnered with RTS to provide leadership and pastoral training to students who have given their life for ministry and to serve the Church.
God has called these young people into ministry and church leadership. They have come to RTS seeking the sound theology they need to be well equipped for practical ministry. They have willing and eager hearts. But tuition alone does not cover all the costs of education, and your prayerful financial contributions are needed to meet the challenge of preparing students for service. You may make an online gift right now. You may also be interested in learning more about Planned Giving.


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My DD is 13mo. She is in daycare from 9-5 each day and has been having (2) 4oz bottles while there along with her lunch and snacks. She has never been a huge eater, hence the 4oz bottles. She still nurses 2-3x a night. Now that she is 13mo they want to take her down to (1) 4oz bottle a day and give her water or whole milk in a sippy in place of the other bottle. DD has never been introduced to whole milk. I asked about a cup with BM but they will not do that because of concern that another child might get a hold of the cup. Should I try a larger bottle once a day and see if she'll take more?
This is the longest I've ever BF. With my two older boys, I could only do 6 weeks due to my situation then (was a teen in high school with first and had horrible recurrent mastitis/lack of knowledge with 2nd). So I'm not really sure what BF/working/daycare should look like at this point in our nursing relationship.
Guess I'm looking for insight/experience with the dropping the one bottle/switch to cows milk. I still plan on nursing at home as long as she likes. She LOVES nursing and I don't think she'll give it up anytime soon. Just want to give her whats best for her.
Thanks for your help!


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Health/Fitness » Health
Barber Study Trims Black Men's Blood Pressure
Trim your hair and your blood pressure? Black male customers at dozens of Los Angeles barbershops reduced one of their biggest medical risks through a novel project that shows the power of familiar faces and trusted places to improve health.
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Why Do Gay Men Love Monster Movies?
April 9, 2010
Long before the Big Moment in the shamelessly delightful "Clash of the Titans" remake, somewhere between the Winnebago-sized scorpions and the fatal gaze of a slithering Medusa, it occurred to me that I've been squealing with delight at monsters longer than, well, I've squealed for anything else. And I still can't get enough.
My first boyhood crush was on a dead man. He was a zombie named Quentin Collins, with eyes that pierced my gay soul and sideburns the size of the Florida peninsula. He stalked across my TV screen on weekday afternoons at precisely 3:30, when the series "Dark Shadows" introduced me to all manner of vampires, werewolves and ghouls.
Quentin was dreamy (literally, since he spent a lot of time staring into space in a zombie trance), and had a lonesome, lost quality I recognized but couldn't yet identify. I saved allowance money for the album ("Quentin's Theme" should be played at my wedding, or my memorial, whichever comes first), and replaced the Bobby Sherman poster in my bedroom for one of Barnabas Collins, the series' vampire star.
But it was never the killing that attracted me. It was the mysterious, gruesome, self-loathing monster. Here I was, in the midst of full pubescent hormonal freak out, with a body revolting against me and villainous carnal desires. I didn't just sympathize with the Alien and Pinhead and Freddy, I wanted to take them to lunch and find out how they managed to make it through the day.
My taste for cinematic horror took a break for a decade or so, during the worst of the AIDS crisis. Something about watching "Re-Animator" on VHS while my friend Lesley lay dying in the guest room, well, let's say it severely reduced the fun factor. AIDS was the monster, and my sympathy was spent. For at least ten dreary years I stuck to lame romantic comedies.
So if the state of my personal AIDS crisis can be measured in movie genres, my trauma must be subsiding because movie monsters are back with a vengeance. I've been popcorn-munching to zombies, saw killers and Halloween remakes and having a ball. Which brings me back to the Big Moment from "Clash of the Titans."
That would be Liam Neeson as Zeus, growling with magnificence as he commands "Release the Kraken!" No three cinematic words since "you complete me" have so enraptured my senses, and they are worth the wait. The Kraken gets unleashed and all manner of body parts start flying.
And I stand by my gay monster metaphors, because the Kraken is just a lonely gay kid, too. You should have seen the stir I created at the 1977 Junior Homecoming when I arrived, the school's weird gay creature, wearing platform boots with tight khakis tucked into them at the knee. I relished in unsettling the crowd and seeing the jaws drop and the fingers pointing at the beast. No Kraken could have cleared the dance floor as fast as my solo disco moment, just before being chased to my car.
It's hard running in platform boots. I could have used some monster scorpions for backup.
More From This Resource Center
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Kolvou, Choo, Gerbasi to represent ETSU
SARASOTA, Fla. (Nov. 8, 2012) – The ETSU women's tennis team puts together the finishing touches of its fall season at the Lakewood Ranch Tennis Center this weekend, competing at the Dick Vitale Intercollegiate Clay Court Classic.
The tournament begins Friday at 9 a.m., with first and second round singles and doubles play. The 32-man singles bracket and 16-team doubles draw will consist of student-athletes from some of the nation's top women's tennis programs. Those programs include six teams who were nationally ranked at the end of last season, highlighted by last year's NCAA champion, Florida. The other teams, along with their rankings from last year, are: No. 11 Alabama, No. 19 Notre Dame, No. 24 Tennessee, No. 41 Oklahoma State and No. 60 Memphis. ETSU and Mississippi State are the two teams who were not in the ITA's top 75 at the end of the 2012 spring season.
Representing the Buccaneers will be senior Antonia Kolovou (Larisa, Greece), redshirt freshman Lyn Yee Choo (Kuching, Malasia) and freshman Anna Gerbasi (Caracas, Venezuela). Both Kolovou and Gerbasi are in their first season with ETSU, while Choo is in her first competitive season after redshirting in 2011-12.
A portion of the tournament's proceeds benefit the The V Foundation for cancer research.
Daily recaps and updated draws will be available at ETSUBucs.com. Fans can also follow the tournament on Facebook by liking Lakewood Ranch Intercollegiate Clay Court Classic.
ETSU fans wanting to receive Buccaneer news, score updates, in-game promotions and much more sent to their mobile device can do so by signing up for "Buc Updates." Click here to sign up today!
For more information on ETSU women's tennis, please visit ETSUBucs.com and click on the women's tennis links.


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Hello world.
I'm ripping Cirerrek's AI scripts for use in Icewind dale EE. For that I'm using Nearinfinity in-built text editor, however the comments always gets deleted when I compile the code. So I was wondering how one could customise the auto-comment feature of Near Infinity.
I think it's the auto-comment feature cause, whenever a symbolic name for a spell, a string reference number or the item file string gets used, it will be automatically commented with the Spell Res file, the actual string text and name of the item.


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Susanne Thurn Wallpapers - Booth #7
Design: Handprinted Wallpaper
Materials: Acrylic colours on fleece wallpaper
Pitch: "THE IMPERFECT PERFECTION - All wallpapers are hand-printed in St. Pauli, Hamburg. Screen printing is a craftsmanship. The thick paint is a
haptic experience. Small irregularities, different surfaces and varying lines make every print unique. The patterns are especially designed for this kind of hand-printing. They blend into each other in such a way that no part equals another. I use only the highest quality water-based colours. The wallpapers are printed on off-white fleece material , 75 cm ( 29,53 inches) in width. All designs can be printed in the colours of your choice at an extra charge."
"INSPIRATION - I am a collector. I discover things in everyday life, nature and travels; and try to capture the aspects which fascinate me. These collections are the starting point of my ideas. I transform them into rhythmic patterns or compose them in limited editions prints on different materials. The world is full of things which want to be captured."
Designer: Susanne Thurn
Link: susannethurn.com
Location: Hamburg, Germany
• Main Info Post
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• About Design Showcase 2012: Every September we celebrate the best new creations for the home. We're hosting a select number of independent designers, makers and creatives from around the world, giving them some precious real estate and watching them pitch their wares. Our panel of judges and editors along with our general body of readers will select a few exemplary exhibitors for special mention.