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American Films Of The Seventies Essay Research
American Films Of The Seventies Essay, Research Paper
1970s Hollywood has been characterized as a "renaissance" and a "revolutionary" decade, mostly because of the exceptional artistic and personal filmmaking that flourished in the early part of the decade after a period of industrial decline in the '60s, and that found popular acceptance with a young, critically attuned audience craving something new. As Warren Beatty put it, the "lunatics" were briefly "running the asylum," as young directors, writers, and actors gained a measure of creative freedom to experiment with conventions of Hollywood stories and genres. The resulting films cast an unsentimental and often critical look at American culture without happy endings or identifiable heroes. While the filmmaker was staking his claim as an artist during this period, the industry as a whole was recovering its ability to make vast sums of money. Hollywood's 1970s "renaissance" had, in fact, a dual nature, with the industrial impact of the new blockbuster serving as an emphatic reminder that despite rhetoric about directorial autonomy and artistry, the Hollywood industry is and has always been guided by the bottom line. The emergence of the new blockbuster could be seen in the early years of the decade, with the later popularity of Jaws and Star Wars effectively demonstrating that not only were the substantial successes of The Godfather and The Exorcist not a fluke, but that with the right marketing and merchandising strategies, even more money could be made. By the end of the decade, the "renaissance" of marketing and the blockbuster had effectively subsumed the renaissance of cinematic artistry and critical engagement.The beginning of "1970s" Hollywood is actually most accurately placed at 1967, due to the release that year of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty (who also produced it), Faye Dunaway, and Gene Hackman, and Mike Nichols' The Graduate, starring newcomer Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, and Anne Bancroft. These two (notoriously) groundbreaking and European-influenced films signaled the direction Hollywood was to follow, bolstered by their great popularity with a young audience that shunned Hollywood's increasingly tired big-budget musicals and spectacles, such as Cleopatra (1963), Doctor Dolittle (1967), Paint Your Wagon (1969), and Star! (1968). With their stories of disaffected youth rebelling against the moral and economic strictures imposed by the older generation, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate appealed to an under-30 audience caught up in the escalating cultural battles of the late '60s in the wake of the Vietnam War and the rise of the counterculture. Beatty and Dunaway's shockingly violent deaths at the end of Bonnie and Clyde and Hoffman and Ross' ambiguous reunion in The Graduate spoke to the burgeoning skepticism with cultural institutions like law enforcement and marriage. The violence in Bonnie and Clyde, the filmmakers said, was no worse than in TV news stories about Vietnam.The films' thematic gloom, relatively frank treatments of violence and sexuality, and seemingly looser narrative structures and editing styles were also in part inspired by '60s European art cinema. This mode of filmmaking promoted the idea of the director as a serious artist or "author," and focused on difficult subjects, relayed through obscure and formally experimental narratives meant to reflect the randomness of life and thought. The work of Italian directors Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita and 8 ?) and Michelangelo Antonioni (L'avventura and Blow-Up), Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (Winter Light, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona), and especially the French New Wave directors Fran?ois Truffaut (The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim) and Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou) were highly influential in this regard. Indeed, Bonnie and Clyde's screenwriters (Robert Benton and David Newman) originally submitted the script to Truffaut and Godard, as they had envisioned it as a New Wave film.Following the precedent set by the European art cinema, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols became part of a late '60s wave of new American directors and films with distinctive styles and serious thematic concerns. These styles and concerns spoke to the new generation of moviegoers' desire for something different and were finally permissible in Hollywood films by the new G/PG/R/X ratings system instituted in 1968 to replace the antiquated Production Code that had been in place since the early '30s. Since filmmakers did not have to tailor film content for an audience of all ages, they could pursue any adult themes they wished. Already considered a maverick for his adaptation of the sexually scandalous novel Lolita (1962) and his Cold War black comedy Dr. Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick redefined expectations about visual effects and storytelling in his philosophical science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Although its opacity confused some critics, it was embraced by younger audiences as the ultimate head-trip. Sam Peckinpah's western The Wild Bunch (1969) pushed the depiction of violence to the extreme in the process of debunking myths of western expansion and heroic bloodshed; Peckinpah used the freedom of the new ratings system to show exactly what happens when bullets hit flesh. George Roy Hill's huge 1969 hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid similarly took on the western, presenting Paul Newman and Robert Redford as charismatic hero/outlaws who die violently rather than reform themselves. John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969), an impressionistic character study of an odd friendship between Jon Voight's would-be gigolo Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman's grifter Ratso Rizzo, became the first X-rated film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Paul Mazursky's Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969) looked at the effects of the sexual revolution on the generation just over 30, a group already ensconced in a secure upper-middle class life but young enough to feel that they're missing out if they don't try wife-swapping or honest infidelity.The film that offered the most unequivocal proof of the power of the young audience and new contemporary concerns was 1969's Easy Rider. Co-written (with Terry Southern) by its stars Peter Fonda (who was also the producer) and Dennis Hopper (who directed), Easy Rider depicted the cross-country motorcycle trip by hippies Fonda and Hopper and lawyer Jack Nicholson to find the "real America." Even as Fonda acknowledges that they "blew it" before an abruptly violent end, the spectacle of their drug- and rock-fuelled odyssey proved to be highly popular, making millions of dollars after costing half a million to make. In a year that marked a historic low point for movie admissions in the U.S., Easy Rider's high profit ratio helped convince Hollywood studio executives that edgier (and cheaper) films made by a new group of directors, writers, and actors in their 20s and 30s were worth the risk, as were the artistically adventurous films of slightly older directors such as Arthur Penn and Robert Altman.It is the work of this group of filmmakers that is seen as the creative signature of 1970s Hollywood. Whether they came from TV (Penn, Altman), from within the film industry (Hal Ashby), or from the new film departments at universities such as the University of California at Los Angeles (Francis Ford Coppola), University of Southern California (George Lucas), or New York University (Martin Scorsese), their films were marked by their love of film history, especially old Hollywood movies, and the influence of the European art directors through their personal, yet often elliptical, approach to subject and style. Coppola habitually shifted between "big" films, winning an Oscar for his screenplay for Patton (1970) and directing the musical Finian's Rainbow (1968), and personal work like The Rain People (1969) and You're a Big Boy Now (1966). Between directing the Oscar-winning 1972 blockbuster The Godfather and its narratively complex (and Oscar-winning) sequel The Godfather, Part II (1974), Coppola made The Conversation (1974), a dark, small film about a surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman, and produced American Graffiti (1973) for his writer/director friend George Lucas. Like Easy Rider, American Graffiti was another small film that seemed to come out of nowhere to make millions; even if its depiction of the recent, more innocent past of the pre-Vietnam early '60s was part of the appeal, especially with its pop hit score, sad revelations of what happened to the fictional characters after the film's conclusion kept the film from being simply empty nostalgia.After following in the footsteps of his contemporaries, like Coppola and screenwriter Robert Towne, by making Boxcar Bertha (1972) for schlockmeister Roger Corman, Martin Scorsese heeded iconoclast director John Cassavetes' advice that he use his talents to try something different rather than make exploitation movies. Scorsese returned to the milieu of his debut film Who's That Knocking on My Door? (1968) with Mean Streets (1973), an unvarnished and visually kinetic view of petty gangsters from his old Little Italy neighborhood. An Oscar-winning editor for In the Heat of the Night (1967), Hal Ashby directed the cult romantic comedy Harold and Maude (1972); The Last Detail (1973), a critically successful film about male bonding starring Jack Nicholson; and Shampoo (1975), a critical view of the sexual revolution and Nixonism, co-written (with Robert Towne) and produced by its star Warren Beatty. Mike Nichols continued his examination of sexual mores and male behavior in the harsh Carnal Knowledge (1971), starring Nicholson as an eternal emotional adolescent. Former philosophy teacher Terrence Malick wrote and directed two extraordinarily beautiful films, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), that told stories of love and murder in elliptical narratives emphasizing visuals over dialogue, with character voiceovers occasionally as confounding as they were informative. Arthur Penn dealt with the 1960s directly in Alice's Restaurant (1969) before returning to a story of the past to comment negatively about the present in his comic anti-western Little Big Man (1970), starring Dustin Hoffman as a one-time cowboy and adopted Sioux Indian who has seen it all.Robert Altman made his name directing the popular antiwar comedy MASH in 1970, beginning a prolific five-year span of work that matched technical experiments in layered soundtracks and widescreen visual composition with leisurely episodic narratives centering on details of character psychology and behavior. In addition to MASH, films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Thieves Like Us (1974), and Brewster McCloud (1970) were as noteworthy for their atmosphere as for characters played by Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and such other Altman regulars as Shelley Duvall and Keith Carradine. His 1975 epic Nashville, about fame, the entertainment business, and politics, told through the interwoven stories of two dozen characters with a cast that included Carradine, Duvall, Lily Tomlin, Karen Black, Ronee Blakely, and Michael Murphy, is considered to be one of the artistic highpoints of the decade for its narrative invention and astute cultural commentary. Altman systematically worked his way through contemporary revisions of such classic Hollywood genres as the war movie (MASH), western (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), detective movie (The Long Goodbye), gangster movie (Thieves Like Us), and musical (Nashville). Like Altman, other '70s filmmakers frequently revised classic genres or created generic hybrids. These films revealed a knowledge of old Hollywood forms while rethinking them in a contemporary, often pessimistic manner. Both Coppola and Scorsese addressed the gangster film, as Coppola's Godfather movies used the Mafia as an operatic metaphor for the malignance of capitalism, and Scorsese's Mean Streets stripped away any of the small criminal's glamour while focusing on the moral struggles of Harvey Keitel's observer Charlie. Scorsese reworked the musical's vision of romance and happy endings along more somber lines in New York, New York (1977), while Bob Fosse used song and dance to meditate on life and death in All That Jazz (1979). The western was revised and eulogized from 1969 to 1976 in films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1970) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and The Missouri Breaks (1976), Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976), and Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974) was an outright western parody, with the heroes riding off into the sunset in a stretch limo. Brooks also parodied the horror film in Young Frankenstein (1974) and the Hitchcockian thriller in High Anxiety (1977). Director and film critic Peter Bogdanovich paid homage to the thriller in Targets (1968), screwball comedy in What's Up Doc? (1972), 1930s child star capers in Paper Moon (1973), and the power of movies in general in his social drama The Last Picture Show (1971). Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, and John Carpenter were among the directors who followed Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) in relocating the horror film's monsters closer to home and the self (and usually increasing the gore) in such new horror movies as Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976), and Halloween (1978). Polanski, Altman, and Penn transformed the hero of the detective film from the effective investigators embodied by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the 1940s to impotent figures at the mercy of their corrupt environments: Jack Nicholson can only look on in despair at the climactic violence in Polanski's Chinatown (1974); Gene Hackman is left circling in a boat on the ocean in Penn's Night Moves (1975). Altman's The Long Goodbye is just as bleak, but in a nod to the notion that the hard-boiled private eye is just a movie fantasy, Elliott Gould's "smart-ass" Philip Marlowe gets the last word and walks away at the end while "Hooray for Hollywood" plays on the soundtrack. In hybrid genre films, directors and writers transposed thematic and visual elements from one genre to another, disrupting assumptions usually attached to that genre. Some critics reacted negatively to Bonnie and Clyde because Penn presented the exploits of the Barrow Gang in a tone verging on slapstick comedy, thus making the escalation of violence that much more shocking. Halloween, a horror film set among small-town families, combined elements of family melodrama with its horror scenario. The western, a genre that seemed repeatedly to be announcing its own demise, was blended with several other genres during the decade. Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), written by former film critic Paul Schrader, combined the western, film noir, and horror in its story of extreme urban alienation, presenting Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle as a lone cowboy-esque psychopath prowling New York City in his cab, increasingly enraged at the "savages" he encounters. Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1972) also placed the western in the city, with Clint Eastwood's eponymous cop taking the cowboy's ambiguous position against civilization's bureaucracy by punishing its outlaws. Michael Cimino adapted the western's conflict between civilization and savagery to the war film in The Deer Hunter (1978), manifesting the personal toll of that battle through the Vietnam War. George Lucas returned to the old-fashioned good guy/bad guy values of traditional Westerns in Star Wars (1977), which at the same time reclaimed science fiction from 2001's metaphysical modernism in favor of a sense of unalloyed heroism.The dark tone of these films was often bolstered by antiheroes alienated from the world around them, struggling to maintain a sense of masculine self, and often losing out to a culture to which they cannot reconcile themselves or which is out of their control. Even friendship cannot spare these men their pain and isolation. Jack Nicholson was the exemplary lost or doomed man in films such as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Detail, Chinatown and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Robert De Niro's characters are compelled to action by violence in Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull (1980). Al Pacino achieves power at the expense of his soul in the Godfather films and struggles in very different ways against the system as a cop and a bank robber in a pair of films directed by Sidney Lumet, Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Gene Hackman's cop in The French Connection (1971) was not exactly likable; his characters in The Conversation and Night Moves end up broken men after trying to thwart crimes. In contrast to his glamorous off-screen reputation, Warren Beatty played a series of dreamers condemned to lose in Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Parallax View (1974), and Shampoo. "Golden boy" Robert Redford critiqued the American obsession with winning in The Candidate (1972) and Downhill Racer (1969). Like Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, loners Gene Hackman and Al Pacino forge a friendship only to have it disrupted by physical tragedy in Scarecrow (1973). Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, and Ned Beatty confront psychological and physical crises of masculinity that leave indelible mental scars in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972); Robert De Niro cannot save Christopher Walken's traumatized vet from the fate he chooses for himself in The Deer Hunter.Films about the troubled white male antihero were circulating at a time when American popular culture was attempting to address the political fallout of the '60s and '70s from the gains of the civil rights movement and women's liberation, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. Just as the breakout Hollywood films of the late '60s dealt with the turmoil of the moment directly (Easy Rider) or through historical parallels (Bonnie and Clyde), various '70s films were enmeshed in the complex politics of the time. Regarding Watergate, the central political scandal of the decade, such paranoid political thrillers as Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) evocatively dealt with individuals who stumbled upon vast government conspiracies and find themselves unable to stop what they discover. Even if Robert Redford's Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman's Carl Bernstein succeed in uncovering the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post in All the President's Men (1976), the story itself is a reminder of the corruption in Nixon's administration, as a teletype impassively catalogues the results of the Watergate investigation and Nixon's resignation at the film's conclusion.In the wake of civil rights and the more militant Black Power movement, African-American life was represented on screen in low budget "blaxploitation" action movies usually aimed at African-American audiences, as well as in more mainstream movies that went beyond previous Hollywood depictions of African-American life. Led by Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), blaxploitation films such as Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972) and Cleopatra Jones (1973) presented strong African-American heroes who triumphed over the bad guys and The Man. In an anomalous display of Academy hipness, Isaac Hayes' theme song to Shaft actually won an Oscar. The cycle, however, was exhausted by the mid-1970s due to objections to the violent and sexual content of the films and the repetitiveness of the plots. Different aspects of the African-American experience were also the subjects of various mainstream films produced in part as a response to the stereotypes of blaxploitation. Sounder (1972), starring Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson, and Black Girl (1972), directed by Ossie Davis, were family dramas that went beyond Hollywood stereotypes. Sidney Poitier directed and starred in a black western, Buck and the Preacher (1972), along with Harry Belafonte, and directed and co-starred with Bill Cosby in the comedies Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and its sequel, Let's Do It Again (1975). Michael Schultz's Car Wash (1976), with Richard Pryor, was partly a series of comic bits but also suggested the numbing nature of such dead-end work. Lady Sings the Blues (1972) was a dramatic Hollywood bio-pic of legendary singer Billie Holiday, with Diana Ross as Holiday and Richard Pryor proving his acting skills in a supporting role.Conflicting responses to the women's movement could be seen in the number of "women's films" that attempted to deal with being female in changing times but did not always offer progressive ideas. In Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), Ellen Burstyn learns how to fend for herself as a single mother but then heads towards marriage with Kris Kristofferson. Jane Fonda's prostitute in Pakula's Klute (1971) likes the independence of her work, but she has to rethink that stance when Donald Sutherland has to protect her from a homicidal stalker. Fonda has a liberating romance with Jon Voight's paraplegic Vietnam vet in Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978), but he sends her back to the marriage that oppressed her. The Turning Point (1977) contrasts the lives of two dancers, played by Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine, to suggest that a woman must choose either a career or a family, and the unhappiness of Bancroft's career dancer undercuts the equality of the choice. Diane Keaton's murder by one of her pick-ups turns the story of her liberated sexual life in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) into a vile cautionary tale; even if all of the men around her, especially her father, are horrid chauvinists, she is still the one who has to die. One film that offered a positive view of female friendship and a female character who pursued her work and romance was the period piece Julia (1977), starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, and based on an autobiographical story by Lillian Hellman. Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1978) does suggest that a woman isn't necessarily defined by her man when Jill Clayburgh's divorcee chooses her job over a trip to Vermont with artist boyfriend Alan Bates. The end of the decade, however, saw the popularity of such "male weepies" as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Ordinary People (1980) that featured self-involved women as the villains and men who could be both mothers and bread-winning fathers, one more sign of the extent to which Hollywood could not quite come to terms with feminism.The Vietnam War, unlike World War II, was such a divisive and inflammatory subject that the only film explicitly made about it while the war was going on was John Wayne's flag-waver, The Green Berets (1968). Otherwise, the chaos of the war was addressed only indirectly in films such as The Wild Bunch and MASH. A few years after the 1975 fall of Saigon, however, Hollywood films began to deal with the war and its negative impact; Coming Home was one of several Vietnam films released in 1978. Who'll Stop the Rain, starring Nick Nolte, dealt with the corrupting power of the war in its story of heroin smuggling from Vietnam to the U.S.; in Go Tell the Spartans, set in 1964, members of the military already have their doubts about getting involved in Vietnam. Michael Cimino's epic The Deer Hunter, starring De Niro, Walken, John Cazale, and Meryl Streep, got the most attention of the 1978 Vietnam films and won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (Walken), Best Picture, and Best Director (Fonda and Voight got acting Oscars for Coming Home). In his portrayal of how the war affected the lives of several working class steel workers, Cimino used the deer hunt, physical paralysis, and, most notoriously, Russian roulette to reveal the mental and physical trauma caused by the war. The film generated enormous controversy among those who objected to its negative depiction of the Vietnamese and its fictional devices, especially the Russian roulette sequences. Coppola's Apocalypse Now, released in 1979 after two years of delays, represented the war as a "heart of darkness" after the novella of that title by Joseph Conrad. Martin Sheen, as a captain already on the edge, begins a mission to find the violently AWOL Colonel Kurtz, during which he meets such figures as Robert Duvall's napalm- and Wagner-loving officer and Dennis Hopper's jittery photographer. Sheen's surreally violent final confrontation with Marlon Brando's Kurtz climaxes Coppola's portrayal of the war as a relentless nightmare.Even though it did well at the box office, Apocalypse Now has come to be seen as one of the films that marked the end of the 1970s Hollywood artistic renaissance. Its torturous three-year production and budget excesses, blamed largely on Coppola, made studio executives wary about giving directors too much freedom. This is not to say, however, that the new blockbuster Hollywood suddenly replaced the new artistic Hollywood. The economic renaissance occurred almost simultaneously with the creative one; traditional Hollywood institutions like the star system and the genre film continued to be popular in the midst of the director-driven wave of personal filmmaking and experimentation. Whether they were conscious critical revisions or more straightforward contemporary updates, various genres continued to thrive while others were revived. Despite the late '60s failure of Paint Your Wagon, film adaptations of such other Broadway musicals as Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972), and, most spectacularly, Grease (1978), found popular acceptance in the 1970s. The horror film drew audiences with The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Carrie, Halloween, and Alien (1979). Neil Simon's The Goodbye Girl (1977), with Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason, Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), starring Allen and Diane Keaton, and Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978), pairing Beatty with Julie Christie, helped the romantic comedy to endure; Annie Hall's Best Picture Oscar was a rare win for a comedy. Sylvester Stallone's phenomenon Rocky (1976) maintained the tradition of the boxing film. Science fiction with advanced special effects proved resoundingly popular with George Lucas' Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). A newer genre, the disaster movie, enjoyed a brief period of prominence by playing on fears of nature and technology run amok with all-star, and potentially all-doomed, casts. The Airport movies in 1970, '75 and '77 put such stars as Burt Lancaster, Helen Hayes, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, James Stewart, Jacqueline Bisset, and Olivia de Havilland either in cursed jetliners or on the ground dealing with the impending plane crash. The Poseidon Adventure (1972), with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelley Winters, capsized a luxury liner with a tidal wave; Earthquake (1974), with Heston, Ava Gardner, and Lorne Greene, used Sensurround to enhance its tale of Los Angeles being hit by the Big One. Irwin Allen's The Towering Inferno (1974), with Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Fred Astaire, William Holden, and Jennifer Jones among those trapped in or battling a burning skyscraper, was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar alongside more challenging films like The Godfather, Part II and Chinatown. Disaster movies often focused as much on the midlife crises of middle-aged white men as on their titular disasters, bizarrely cross-breeding elements of melodrama and science fiction with the tradition of Grand Hotel-style all-star vehicles.The disaster genre's all-star casts and the 1970s successes of various stars maintained the viability of Hollywood's custom of making a movie's star (or stars) the prime audience draw, along with or despite the film's "quality." The Sting (1973) re-teamed Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and improved upon the popularity of that star pair in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Redford was already a favorite star attraction that year for the romance The Way We Were (1973), co-starring Barbra Streisand. Milos Forman's hit and Best Picture winner One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest had the advantage of being based on a best-selling novel, but Jack Nicholson as misfit McMurphy was also an ideal match between star and role. For other star vehicles, the perceived artistic value of the movies mattered far less than the attraction of the leading player; they were just star-driven entertainment. In part making fun of his tough guy persona from the Dirty Harry movies and the westerns while playing into it, Clint Eastwood bolstered his star popularity with the orangutan comedy Every Which Way But Loose (1978), the highest-grossing film of his career until Unforgiven. Burt Reynolds had been praised for his acting in Deliverance, but it was the comedy chase movie Smokey and the Bandit (1977) that proved how much of a draw Reynolds could be as a light-hearted good ol' boy. The 1970s star most identified as a blockbuster attraction in his own right, for a year anyway, was John Travolta. While the Bee Gees disco soundtrack and trendy subject were part of the appeal of Saturday Night Fever (1977), the movie's enormous success was also greatly due to TV star Travolta's presence in the lead role. His acting was praised even when the film occasionally was not, his disco dancing imitated, and he himself desired. Grease, the most popular movie of 1978, seemed to solidify Travolta's star power as a song-and-dance actor and sex symbol; one of the most important aspects of the movie that made it "critic-proof" was his presence. Grease and Saturday Night Fever were part of the mode of filmmaking that came to dominate Hollywood practice from the late 1970s through the present: the blockbuster. While the studios gave more creative freedom to the young renegades in the early '70s, they did not entirely abandon bigger-budget films meant to appeal to a wide, and as the decade went on, increasingly younger audience. Indeed, it was movies made by some of those new filmmakers that raised the standard for how much money a blockbuster could make and solidified the industry's economic recovery after 1969; a recovery had been signaled partly by the substantial successes of the romance Love Story and the first Airport movie in 1970. Coppola's The Godfather had the rare distinction of being as wildly popular as it was artistically accomplished and thematically adventurous; despite a restrictive R-rating, it decisively broke the all-time box office record set by The Sound of Music in 1965. In 1973, George Roy Hill's The Sting came close to matching The Godfather's record, and William Friedkin's The Exorcist topped it. The new blockbuster turned a corner in 1975 with the release of Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Spielberg, one of the youngest of the new generation and whose only previous theatrical feature was the small road movie The Sugarland Express (1974), did not inspire confidence from his studio, Universal, when the shoot went way over budget and schedule. He was vindicated when Jaws, a PG-rated summer thriller, broke records yet again and became the first movie to return over $100 million to a studio. Spielberg's reign only lasted until 1977. For his next film after American Graffiti, George Lucas wanted to take the special effects advances of 2001 further and make the first feature of what he envisioned as a multi-part science fiction epic, but despite his prior hit, the project was considered a risk. When Star Wars was released, however, the combination of the visual effects, iconic characters, and heroic story for all ages turned the film into the most popular attraction of all time by far, as young fans went back to see it over and over. Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released late in 1977, proved that Lucas's effects-driven blockbuster was not an anomaly; its attitude of child-like awe similarly cemented the appeal of a more "innocent," less somber thematic point of view. Saturday Night Fever, released late in 1977 as well, continued the re-orientation of the blockbuster toward a youthful audience through its subject and star, despite its R-rated content. 1978's Grease became the most popular movie musical of all time, as audiences, especially the Travolta fans too young for Fever, defied the critical consensus that it was white-washed trash and enthusiastically embraced its somewhat clean, but definitely cute view of 1950s romance. The 1979 re-release of a PG version of Saturday Night Fever aimed at the Grease audience effectively confirmed that the under-18 demographic had become the most vital target for the new blockbuster.The increasing profitability of the blockbuster was due not only to the appeal of the films themselves, but also to changes in how movies were released and marketed (and ultimately conceived). The young audience became even more important because they would buy merchandise associated with the movies, as well as simply going to the movies themselves. Realizing by the late '60s that the old distribution system of opening a film gradually across the country, accompanied mainly by print ads, was no longer effective, the Hollywood studios began to adopt new marketing and distribution methods like TV advertising and saturation releases to many theaters all at once. TV's efficacy had been proven on a smaller, regional basis by the successful 1971 movie Billy Jack; the TV ads accompanied its release in a large number of regional theaters. Jaws became a turning point for distribution as well as box office when it opened in over 400 theaters, preceded by three nights of TV ads during prime time on all the networks. Inspired by the success of Jaws, the number of theaters for a potential blockbuster's opening increased steadily throughout the rest of the decade; Grease opened in over 900 theaters. Besides TV ads, movies were marketed through other products such as soundtracks and toys. Saturday Night Fever and Grease demonstrated the potential profit in linking a movie's music with its marketing, as both films were preceded by the release of hit singles from their soundtracks to build anticipation for the visual spectacles. The music was an ad for the movie and vice versa; the soundtracks themselves became music business blockbusters. Star Wars and Close Encounters also had popular orchestral soundtracks and hit themes. The selling of Star Wars toys became the equivalent of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in terms of setting a standard for non-music merchandising; hundreds of millions of dollars of Star Wars products had been sold within a couple of years of its initial release.With the new blockbuster's repeatedly record-breaking successes, the Hollywood industry had not only recovered economically by the late '70s, but had learned how to make more money in different ways from various movies than it ever had in the past. The escalating budgets of blockbusters like Close Encounters and Superman (1978), however, began to hint at the increasing dependence the studios would have on pre-sold or easily marketable "high concept" attractions like the presence of a star, or a sequel to a previous hit to hedge their ever-larger bets, at the expense of the riskier artistic projects. Movies like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever were easy to sell precisely because they were high concept films: movies whose story and appeal could be reduced to one key image or ad graphic, like a shark or a white-suited Travolta, that would be reproduced in TV and print ads, posters, and on different products like T-shirts, records and toys. The profitability of this kind of marketing in turn encouraged the production of high concept movies in the last years of the decade (and beyond) with simplistic storylines describable in "25 words or less" and aimed at an under-21 audience that would avail themselves to that marketing with little effort. Even if a lot of money was spent, the film had a better shot at being sold effectively enough to make it back. Superman already had a known logo; all it needed was a movie. The increasingly expensive, character-driven, thematically complex and adult-oriented films of the Hollywood director-artists, however, could not be reduced to snappy TV ads or spun off into toys; it was fortunate for the United Artists studio that Apocalypse Now found its audience.Unfortunately, United Artists was not as lucky with Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's 1980 follow-up to The Deer Hunter, which became synonymous with big-budget overinvestments in the young '70s filmmakers. Demanding and receiving full creative freedom from the studio, Cimino eventually spent an estimated $40 million (Grease cost approximately $9 million, Star Wars, $10 million) on a sprawling western epic with no stars and an obscure narrative. Critically lambasted, the original version was swiftly pulled from theaters and made only about $1.5 million after it was re-edited and re-released, helping to bankrupt United Artists. The critical praise that Scorsese's Raging Bull received the same year did not help the expiring '70s artistic renaissance either, as it did not make the money to match its excellent notices. 1980's top box office attraction underlined the industry's direction in the next decades: The Empire Strikes Back, the much-anticipated sequel to Star Wars.
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This past Summer I visited a great little shop in San Francisco called Souvla. For dessert I enjoyed their creation of Frozen Greek Yogurt served with Greek Olive Oil and Flaky Sea Salt. I was skeptical, but one bite in I was hooked. I loved it so much I couldn't wait to attempt my own homemade version.
Unfortunately, because I don't live in SF it's just not as easy as I'd like to pop-into Souvla to enjoy this treat. Whipping up this homemade Frozen Greek Yogurt scratches the itch for me, until I can make my way into the city to visit Souvla again.
Experimenting this week with O Olive Oil's products a light bulb went on in my head. As mentioned in previous posts, O Olive Oil's Meyer Lemon and Blood Orange Olive Oils are so tasty on their own you could pretty much drink them straight from the bottle. So I thought using these two oils on their own rather than the flavor getting slightly lost in an ingredient list would be best. (Here's where the light bulb went on.) What if I married Souvla's concept with O Olive Oil's flavored Olive Oils? I tried it, and pretty much ate the entire batch, by myself, at 10:00 in the morning. I'm not embarrassed to admit it.
Disclaimer and Warning #1: You may find the hardest decision to make once you is to decide which deliciously flavored olive oil to drizzle atop your fresh batch of Greek Frozen Yogurt: O Olive Oil's Meyer Lemon or Blood Orange Olive Oil? (Let this be the hardest decision we make today, right?!)
Disclaimer and Warning #2: I found that this frozen yogurt does not keep well in the freezer. It becomes as hard as ice and is pretty much un-scoop-able. So… You'll have to eat the entire batch at once. (See! It wasn't so bad that I ate the whole thing… by myself… at 10:00 in the morning…)
It may sound quite strange to add olive oil and flaky sea salt to frozen yogurt, however, please, please, please trust me on this. The flavor party happening in your mouth is seriously like Mardi Gras, Fourth of July, Greek Independence Day And New Year's Eve at midnight all at once. (If you think this is a weird combination, try putting peanut butter on your Sloppy Joe sandwich. I've done it. It's delicious. I know… I need help…)
The tartness of the frozen yogurt combined with the subtle citrus flavoring in the olive oil and a little bit of salty from the flaky sea salt, and oh… don't forget about the tangy bite of pomegranate is a fun combination and quite impressive to serve to your family or friends. If you're not willing to risk it, the Greek Frozen Yogurt by itself is tangy and light, and takes no time at all to prepare. With just 3 ingredients this is a simple, quick and easy dessert to make at the last minute.
(By the way, if you haven't read my review of Souvla, please do! And visit them!)
1 cup whole milk (or lowfat)
¼ cup white sugar
2 cups Greek yogurt
Flaky sea salt
Fresh pomegranate seeds
In a medium bowl combine milk and sugar and whisk until the sugar is dissolved.
Add the Greek yogurt, and whisk until it is smooth and creamy. A good way to tell if it's ready to go into the ice cream maker is if the mixture sticks to the spoon or spatula.
Set up your homemade ice cream maker. (I use a Cusinart, but any maker with a freezer bowl will work).
With the machine on, pour the mixture into the freezer bowl. Watch the yogurt carefully because it will get frozen very quickly. It will take no more than 10 to 15 minutes to turn into frozen yogurt.
Scoop into ice cream bowls, and drizzle with your choice of olive oil. Sprinkle with flaky sea salt and fresh pomegranate seeds. Get yourself a second serving!
O Olive Oil graciously gifted me their products to experiment with. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you for supporting O Olive Oil which allows me the opportunity to create content, such as this, for Figs & Feta. If you can't find their products in your local grocery or specialty store, you can order them online.
©2014 by Alexandra Salidas Roll, Figs & Feta, LLC.
Recipe and photos by Alexandra Salidas Roll of Figs & Feta, LLC. Please do not reprint this recipe without permission. If you would like to feature this recipe on your blog or site, please rewrite the method of preparation and link your post to this one as the original source. Thank you!

subset: commoncrawl


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Begin Your Journey Here
At West Shore Community College, we believe learning is a life-long journey. Our commitment to this philosophy shows itself in our individualized approach to each person's educational experience. At West Shore you will become more independent and more sound in your thinking, make better decisions, grow in self-esteem and gain greater control over your life.
An education at West Shore will give you the skills you need to face the many challenges in a rapidly changing world. You will not only gain the ability to think critically and communicate effectively, you will also acquire the hands-on skills and confidence necessary to continue to adapt and learn and grow, long after you leave our campus. An education at West Shore will stay with you and serve you, in your local community and in the world.
If you think you can't afford college you need to think about West Shore. A full-time (30 contact hours) course load at WSCC costs about $3,300. If that seems like a lot, compare it to private colleges that charge over $20,000! This is why magazines like Fortune say that community colleges are the best way to get the most for your college tuition.
You Can Transfer Easily
If you're thinking of pursuing a bachelor's degree, you can get the first two years of your general education at West Shore. Quite often, West Shore students find themselves being recruited by many colleges and universities. West Shore students who have earned an associate's degree have transferred to colleges like the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Central Michigan University, Grand Valley State University, Western Michigan University, Ferris State University, and many others.
It Makes Sense
At West Shore you'll get more than a degree. You'll have access to top notch learning resources, including state-of-the-art computer labs, library and media resources. Even with all these great resources our greatest resource is our faculty.
Who Chooses WSCC?
In short, everyone. From seniors in high school to senior citizens, we have students with many different priorities, students from different walks of life. At West Shore our students come from every town and community in our service area, from Bear Lake to Bitely.
We have a great variety of student services for our diverse student body. We understand that our students manage college, family and work. When you choose West Shore, you're also choosing a support system that will help you achieve your goals. You can take classes during the day, in the evening, and even over the summer. Our student support services, including financial aid, tutoring, and academic advisement, are available for all students. We want you to succeed.
If you've been thinking about going to college but thought that it wasn't possible, think again. It may seem like a huge challenge, but with the challenge comes a great reward—an education. An education that will equip you with the tools to do whatever you choose to do in the future. A college doesn't have to be far away and expensive to be good. At West Shore Community College you can be your best. We're affordable and you will be well prepared to either transfer to a four-year college or university or enter the workforce.
West Shore is the right place to begin your college education. Our reputation has been built by offering a variety of quality programs and courses to meet the educational needs of our community and by showing a caring attitude that will make your education pleasant, personal and satisfying.
West Shore Community College — where students really do come first!


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Proposals to force banks to separate their retail and proprietary-trading operations will affect more German lenders than originally thought, according to an unnamed official of the advisory group that has made the ring-fencing recommendations.
Click here to read the story from Bloomberg....
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nm » from archive
Jumping to Conclusions - http://www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?Function=edetail&Obje...
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Of course, it's not so odd that we jump to conclusions. We are meaning-making creatures. Without any conscious effort, we make meaning of or interpret what we observe or experience. This is a survival strategy. In hunter-gatherer days, it wouldn't have served us well to see a cheetah heading our way and to analyze methodically whether it was approaching us to be petted or to make us its lunch. If we didn't react immediately, we'd be a delectable morsel.


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Average Price of a Movie Ticket
With the rise of inflation and the costs of big budget movies, the average ticket price is now over $8 in 2013. Year after year, we have seen a rise of about 20 cents. What is impressive this year, is we've seen a jump by 40 cents as reported by ScreenCrush. Why is this happening? Because movie studios aren't making as much profit from movies, and they need a way to make more money from ticket prices. That is why theaters are charging more.
Bring in the Mega Movies
Now we are seeing a trend in 3D movies and IMAX movies as well to create a better movie experience. More bang for your buck. And that includes a lot of bucks. Taking my wife to see a 3D IMAX movie costs us around $36 just for the tickets. That means we have to have buttery popcorn as our dinner. (The price of popcorn at a theater today is another topic.)
Just this year, we saw a bundled ticket package for World War Z. For $50 you got the movie, a poster, 3D glasses, and a pre-order of a HD version of the movie. Not bad of a deal when you think about it. But what will this lead to in the future?
"Going to the movies is going to cost you $50, maybe $100, maybe $150," Lucas said at a recent panel discussion at USC's School of Cinematic Arts.
Lucas and Spielberg go on to equate the future of the move theater experience to that of a broadway show or even a sporting event. If this is the case, then shouldn't we as movie goers demand a movie that is worth these prices?
More Than SpectacleWhich brings us to the movie Gravity. For those of us who have seen this movie, there is no doubt that it is a beautiful looking movie. The special effects created in the movie really help to create the look and feel of zero gravity and the solitude of space. Was it enough? Were we just bamboozled by the images on the screen, and hypnotized by the large, slowly rotating Earth in the background that we applauded a lackluster story of survival? Don't we want a great story with great visuals no matter the price?
Let's look at Avatar. Again, we have that amazing 3D experience that help pull us into the story. The story itself wasn't original. But it had action and excitement that carried our attention to the end.
How about The Matrix? It pretty much raised the bar for all action films with its special Bullet Time cameras. And it provided a fairly original story, even if the sequels fell flat. And it didn't rely on 3D or IMAX. Isn't that what we are after? But do we need to only see action movies? What about movies like Rush or The King's Speech? Don't these deserve an IMAX experience? I would say yes to both.
We want high-caliber films as movie goers. And that is pretty obvious. If Hollywood wants our money, and we want to go out and enjoy the experience. Then we need to know which movies are worth it.
That is why www.Filmigos.com exists. Hollywood, if you want my money then make great films. Or else, I'm keeping my wallet shut until I can watch it on TV.


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Testing for state dependence effects in a dynamic model of male unemployment behaviour
A dynamic random effects probit model is estimated on the first six waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to test for state dependence effects in male unemployment behaviour. Estimation of the model is based on the marginal likelihood approach. In the model an individual's unemployment probability at a given point in time within the period 1985 - 1989 depends on his labour force status in the previous period and on the cumulated duration of past unemployment. Controlling for observed and unobserved population heterogeneity, we show that there are strong state dependence effects in individual unemployment dynamics with respect to both the incidence and the duration of an individual's past unemployment. These results are compatible with the 'scar theory' of unemployment which holds that an individual's previous unemployment experience may have long-term effects because it induces a depreciation of human capital and/or acts as a screening device in employers hiring decisions.
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|Contact details of provider:
| Postal: L 7,1; D - 68161 Mannheim
Phone: +49/621/1235-01
Fax: +49/621/1235-224
Web page: http://www.zew.de/
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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Wu, De-Min, 1973. "Alternative Tests of Independence Between Stochastic Regressors and Disturbances," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 41(4), pages 733-750, July.
- Gert G. Wagner & Jürgen Schupp & Ulrich Rendtel, 1991. "The Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for Germany - Methods of Production and Management of Longitudinal Data," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 31a, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
- Heckman, James J & Borjas, George J, 1980. "Does Unemployment Cause Future Unemployment? Definitions, Questions and Answers from a Continuous Time Model of Heterogeneity and State Dependence," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 47(187), pages 247-283, August.
- Narendranathan, Wiji & Elias, Peter, 1993.
"Influences of Past History on the Incidence of Youth Unemployment: Empirical Findings for the UK,"
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics,
Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 55(2), pages 161-185, May.
- Narendranathan, W. & Elias, P., 1990. "Influences of Past History on the Incidence of Youth Unemployment: Empirical Finding for the U.K," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 369, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
- James J. Heckman, 1981. "Heterogeneity and State Dependence," NBER Chapters,in: Studies in Labor Markets, pages 91-140 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)
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The Latest Laptop Product with High Definition 3D FeatureSeptember 13, 2010 # 9:30 pm # Computer and Notebook # 4 Comments
It's really so much fun to view the 3D images since it's clearer and gives us more realistic images than 2D. 3D technology has been through significant modifications and developments. People perhaps were quite familiar with the 3D movie theater in the old days but today we can now enjoy 3D features and images in many gadgets as well such in TV, camera and others.
Today 3D technology can also be found and enjoyed from the laptop as presented by HP Envy 17 3D. This laptop is a handy laptop measuring only 17.3 inch and comes up with high definition display which is applicable for 3D technology. The HP Envy 17.3 3D comes with one pair of HP active shutter 3D glasses as a package included in the sales. These glasses are a must-use when you want to view the 3D features and images on HP Envy 17 3D.
This laptop is actually not designed for travel but instead for home users since in fact it'll be quite odd when you always have to carry and wear the glasses on your travel journey. When you want everyone to enjoy the 3D images from this laptop the 3D glasses can also be found in computer stores.


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Abandoned baby 'almost choked to death' after being stuffed inside bag
Child was rescued by passersby who heard its cries; police have not said if parents were found
A newborn girl was discovered swaddled inside a zipped bag that was left on a roadside in Xiamen city this week, and was rescued before it choked to death.
Passersby heard an infant's muffled cries while walking on Jiahe Road in one of Fujian province's largest cities at around 8am on Wednesday, according to Xinhua.
One of them, a woman identified as Ms Guo, said she turned around to look for the source of the sound and thought it was coming from a "suspicious" brown bag.
When she unzipped it, she was shocked to find a baby, face-down, in the bag.
Guo said she immediately turned the baby, whose face was blue, into the upright position. "The baby's face was already oxygen-deficit," the Xinhua report said, quoting the woman.
A new-born girl not even a month old was seen in a bag left on a street in Xiamen, Fujian Province, on 9th morning pic.twitter.com/phMj940S6t
— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) July 10, 2014
Guo yelled for someone to make an emergency call and soon two or three other people came to help.
They gave the baby some water and called police. They soothed the baby until it stopped crying.
The state mouthpiece People's Daily said in its Twitter account that the child was barely a month old.
It was as yet unclear whether the parents have been identified by the authorities.
China has seen thousands of abandoned children across the country in recent years, prompting the government to establish care centres – called "baby hatches" – in major provinces where parents can anonymously leave their children into safe hands without fear of legal repercussions.
According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, there were 570,000 orphans and abandoned children as of 2012, but only 95,000 of them could be accommodated in 463 state-owned mainland orphanages.
The project has been controversial as it is criticised as encouraging parents to abandon their children, which is illegal on the mainland and punishable by up to five years in jail.
About 25 such hatches have been established on the mainland in 10 provinces and major cities.
The first baby hatch was opened in Shijiazhuang in Hebei province more than two years ago. The Ministry of Civil Affairs decided to expand the project nationwide before the end of next year.
Abandoned: Heart-breaking pictures of parents leaving their children in China's notorious 'baby hatches'
However many baby hatches have struggled to accommodate the amount of children being left at their doorsteps. In March, a centre in Guangzhou was forced to temporarily suspend operations after the ran out of beds.
The Guangzhou baby hatch reportedly received 262 abandoned babies in the first three months of the year, but it only had room for 100.
Similarly, hatches in Urumqi and Zhengzhou had to shut due to the lack of funding and manpower.
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text: Official Call Date Correction: Form Submissions Posted on: February 26, 2017 by: GOP editor Please note there was an error in the original Official Call posted yesterday. It has been corrected to read: "All completed official forms must be received by 5:00 PM, March 9, 2017, to be considered. Share this:FacebookTwitterEmailGoogle


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Why Read This Report
Enterprise collaboration is a long-established category of technologies (e.g., email, unified communications, and social networking) that continues to evolve. Properly deployed and adopted, it can provide the connective tissue of the customer experience (CX) ecosystem. This report details how application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals supporting collaboration initiatives should work with other stakeholders to establish a vision and strategy.
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Download Event Tenders apk free for Android smartphone
17 Jan
Event Tenders
Posted by The Appsworks in Business | Jan. 17, 2014 | 0 Comments
Apk file size: 0 bytes
Event Tenders is a free app brought to you by Stand Out Magazine. The app allows you to browse event industry tenders and new business opportunities, and source industry suppliers for your next event. If you are looking for kit and equipment you can also submit free of charge your own event tender.
The Appsworks part of our Business and have average installs from 100 to 500. Last Update Jan. 17, 2014. Google play rating is 100.0. Current verison is None. Actual size 0 bytes.


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Lexar 64GB High Performance microSD Extended Capacity (microSDXC) Card
Lexar LSDMI64GBBNL300A
Where to buy
- $36.63
Find the best deal for Lexar 64GB High Performance microSD Extended Capacity (microSDXC) Card sorting the prices, lowest to higest and/or higest to lowest. Chose the store before you read the seller ratings. The merchants are responsible for providing GoShopping.com with correct and current prices. Although we make every effort to present accurate information, we are not responsible for inaccuracies.
Technical Details
|Limited Warranty
|Lexar, Inc
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|Do more with your tablet, sports camcorder, or smartphone
Lexar® High-Performance microSDHC™/microSDXC™ UHS-I cards (300x) make it easy to quickly capture, play back, and transfer 1080p full-HD, 3D, and 4K video, as well as the highest-quality movies, photos, and songs. The cards leverage UHS-I technology to deliver high-speed, Class 10 performance up to 300x (45MB/s), and include an SD adapter for easy file transfer. These premium memory solutions give you the speed and space you
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|64GB High Performance microSD Extended Capacity (microSDXC) Card
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through meanderings, i found this hysterical meme on flickr: what if you made a pie chart of a song's lyrics? or some other graphic but quantified representation.
one of my faves: kiss off by the violent femmes. (yep, that one's for you, auntie psycho from rutgers 😉 [naughty lyric alert for those of you listening in the office.]
i'm going to have to try that at home.
Support Indy Press! Wreke has a story in here!
proud to be a winner!
buy my zazzle
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text:
Today is my four year anniversary as a WordPress blogger. Whoa! In true celebratory fashion, I'm hosting a giveaway! The lovely people over at Shabby Apple want to give one of you a $50 gift certificate to their online store. I own a few dress from Shabby Apple and have been very happy with the quality and style options. Some dresses look modern, some look like vintage dresses, and they're all lady-like and appropriate for work, which makes me happy.
To enter please leave a comment below telling me your favorite item/what you'd buy (I'm nosy and want to know!). This is open to those in the US only (sorry) and ends Friday, May 24.
**Comments are closed. Winner will be announced shortly.**


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Since taking on a rigorous recycling program, this southeastern town of 1,700 people is on target to produce zero waste, according to a documentary produced by the Seeker Network.
After noticing the deleterious effects of incinerating its garbage, the town adopted a mandatory sanitation program that's nothing to stick your nose up at. Since 2003, all residents now wash, clean and sort their trash into 34 categories.
The intensive process has ensured that 80 percent of all waste gets recycled, reused or composted, and 20 percent is sent to landfills.
But by 2020, Kamikatsu plans on having no use for landfills.
Since the town has no garbage trucks or collectors, residents are responsible for composting at home and bringing the rest of their discards to the city's recycling center, where the monitors make sure everything is being handled properly.
Read more and watch the video on the link below:


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Schmolz is offering to buy back the 2019 notes with a 9.875% coupon at 101% of nominal value plus accrued interest. The offer is open until November 8.Schmolz was obliged to launch the change of control put offer after a capital increase of around Sfr438m, agreed by ...
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A corporate trustee can play a positive and key role in sophisticated wealth planning. However, as our founding families experienced, and as our senior officers have witnessed, corporate trustees often can be more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to accomplishing family objectives.
At Sentinel, we understand the importance of the trustee's role and how trusts are incorporated into the larger picture of the family and its long‑term objectives. We are guided by the principle that decisions must be made in the beneficiaries' best interests in accordance with the intent of the grantor.
Many trust companies seek liquid assets that can be highly profitable to manage in bulk, preferably held in trusts with easy-to-administer provisions. They accept illiquid and complex situations only grudgingly. To the contrary, we do not shy away from that portion of a family's needs. We have significant experience with trusts containing complex provisions and owning non-traditional assets (such as closely held businesses, real estate and mineral interests, residences and personal property).
We can serve as sole trustee, co-trustee or as custodian. We also can serve as an executor, an area in which we have extensive experience, particularly with respect to complex estates and family situations.


text:
Trailer to encourage employment in Coal Mining.
LS Pan along rail tracks in pit shunting yard. CU crane grabber full of coal.
CU of miner working on coal face with pick axe. CU of miner hammering in wooden pit prop to hold up roof of shaft. CU of miner moving coal with shovel. VS of miners moving coal onto conveyor belt.
VS of modern looking pit head. MS of fountain at pit.
VS of mechanical coal cutting machines at work.
MS of miner getting changed in mine changing room. CU of miner taking a shower. CU of miner lighting cigarette outside pit.
MS of man in suit smoking pipe - superimposed over - MS of men training to be mine technicians. VS of men using mechanical equipment. CU of hand turning over pages in student book about mining. More shots of mining training.
MS of same man now in mining clothes and helmet - superimposed - over pit head scenes.
Intertitle reads: "Details available at your local Employment Exchange".
N.B. Great film to encourage men to take up jobs in the coal mines after nationalisation.
Trailer to encourage employment in Coal Mining.
- Archive
- British Pathé
- Issue Date:
- 06/01/1947
- Sound:
- Sound
- Media URN:
- 40419
- HD Format:
- Available on request
- Film ID:
- 1171.10
- Stock:
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Oppo Mobile service center in Sangli
List of OPPO Mobile Service Centers in Sangli
Oppo authorized mobile service centers in Sangli, Maharashtra provides warranty service to wide range of Oppo Smart phones like Oppo Galaxy A37, F1 Plus, R7 Plus, N3, R5, N1, Find 7, Neo 7 & Mirror 5 mobiles. Oppo has 1 smartphone service centers in Sangli. If you have any problem with your Oppo mobile phone, kindly contact the service centers officials.
OPPO AUTHORIZED MOBILE SERVICE CENTERS – Sangli CONTACT DETAILS:
Oppo mobile service center in Sangli
Name: ORANGE SALES
Address: Ajinkya Tower, Near Mali Theatre, Chandani Chowk
City: Sangli
State: Maharashtra
Pincode: 412207
Contact Number: 0233 6601999
Working Hours: 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
Working Days: Monday to Saturday [Sunday Holiday]
* Call the Oppo Service Center before visiting to ensure that the service center is open and address is correct.
** Please comment below if you find the information incorrect, we will fix it and keep the site data updated.


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Track Surface Conditions Influence Likelihood of Racing Fractures
- Feb 1, 2005
- Topics:
A study recently published in the Japan Racing Journal found that as turf courses become wetter and softer, fracture risk is reduced. In contrast, muddy conditions on dirt courses lead to a greater risk of horses sustaining a fracture. Masa-aki Oikawa, DVM, PhD, of the Japan Racing Association's Equine Research Institute, noted that although several biological and non-biological factors contribute to racehorse injuries, some are more important than others. "The conditions of the track surface have a major influence on the occurrence of fractures in horses during training and racing," he said.
Using records from the Japan Racing Association and the Racehorse Information Management System, Oikawa analyzed data from 1987 to 2000 regarding track conditions, racing times, and fractures sustained during flat races on Japanese turf and dirt tracks. After examining the outcomes of 556,705 horses, he found that the incidence of fracture was 1.83% for the 14-year period.
To evaluate the effects of various track conditions on speed, Oikawa compared racing times for 50,564 horses in 4,117 races held between 1990 and 1994. Distances run varied from 1,200 to 2,500 meters on turf courses, and from 1,200 to 1,800 meters on dirt courses.
Statistical analysis revealed that for turf courses, times became slower and fracture risk was diminished as track conditions changed from "firm" to "soft." Oikawa explained, "A moist, soft track means less impact on the horses' legs, which means less speed and fewer accidents."
In contrast, racing times on dirt courses became faster, and the risk of fracture increased, as track conditions changed from "fast" to "muddy." According to Oikawa, "The high water content of a muddy track causes the overlying sand layers to thin, exposing the hard track bed beneath. Hard tracks provide less cushioning, but more speed."
As conditions deteriorated from "muddy" to "sloppy," dirt course times grew slower and the fracture risk was further increased. "Horses have more difficulty running on sloppy tracks than on muddy tracks due to the excessive surface water," he said. "Sloppy tracks place a greater demand on the horse and can contribute to fatigue-related stumbling."
Optimizing a track's cushioning capacity reduces fracture risk. The research suggests that the cushioning capacity of turf courses is maximal when the water content of the surface is maintained above a specific level. Cushioning capacity of dirt courses, however, is optimized when excess water is removed from the surface.
About the Author
Rallie McAllister, MD
Rallie McAllister, MD, grew up on a horse farm in Tennessee, and has raised and trained horses all of her life. She now lives in Lexington, Ky., on a horse farm with her husband and three sons. In addition to her practice of emergency and corporate medicine, she is a syndicated columnist (Your Health by Dr. Rallie McAllister), and the author of four health-realted books, including Riding For Life, published by Eclipse Press and available at www.ExclusivelyEquine.com or by calling 800/582-5604.
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Battle lines were drawn over two proposed zoning ordinances at public hearings Tuesday night: relaxing the zoning along the city's waterfront and allowing neon message signs by right in certain zones.
Battle lines were drawn over two proposed zoning ordinances at public hearings Tuesday night: relaxing the zoning along the city's waterfront and allowing neon message signs by right in certain zones.
Both the Planning Board and City Council heard diverse opinions by proponents and opponents during hours of hearings.
The "Waterfront and Transit Oriented Development District," proposed by Mayor Will Flanagan, which stretches two miles from the Brightman Street Bridge to Shaw Street and the Kuss Middle School, elicited polarized opinions that Planning Board Chairman Alan Silvia acknowledged after his board's hearings.
"They're two very controversial issues. Lots of folks are not happy with building 12-foot-high story buildings. I don't see it as a positive," Silvia said. Of his board and the waterfront zoning, he said, "I see a majority not supportive of that change."
After closing both hearings, the Planning Board has 21 days to issue an advisory recommendation to the City Council. In turn, the council must render decisions on both zoning ordinances within 90 days — by Sept. 12 or the day before the city preliminary election, City Clerk Alison Brett said.
Flanagan's proposal to help drive an economic waterfront engine by cutting through red tape in the permitting process would replace what's mostly industrial zoning with a new WTOD to allow mixed use by right and tap into the proposed railroad stop at Battleship Cove, among other key projects on the drawing board, Director of Planning James Hartnett said.
Dimensional regulations would allow: buildings up to 12 stories/150 feet; 2,500-square-foot lots; 50-foot frontage; none at sidelines; and 10 feet at the front and rear of waterfront projects.
Possible projects listed as beneficiaries of the rezoning included restaurants, banks, hotels, retail shops, public buildings, marinas and shipping, boat building, multi-family homes and a casino.
The most significant related project on the state and federal bridge project, now under design, is the $170 million Route 79/I-195 interchange improvements project.
Hartnett began to say that waterfront access that has eluded the city for decades will be satisfied by that four-year project. But because of uncertainties over the extent a waterfront boulevard will be created by tearing down the so-called spaghetti ramps, he corrected himself and said, "It will create a better situation."
"Many of the projects can't happen if we don't get zoning in place," said proponent Robert Mellion, president and CEO of the Greater Fall River Chamber of Commerce.
"The ordinance, the way it is designed, creates opportunity," Mellion said.
"I think we can help start the waterfront renaissance," said Anthony Cordeiro, who's developed commercial property for 25 years. "The more flexibility you have, the more chances of success you have."
Flexibility meant different things to different people.
Allowing automatically, by zoning, 12-story buildings with no sidelines and limited setbacks "potentially creates a literal wall to inhibit views of the waterfront," said James Soule, president of the Fall River Preservation Society.
"We want things to happen," Soule said. "It's just on some points there's room for adjustments."
Two candidates for mayor, Cathy Ann Viveiros and Stefanie Koorey, both asked the Planning Board to reject the zoning ordinance.
"My concern is the type of development. … I think what the ordinance does is it relaxes all standards on the waterfront … allowing everything and anything to be developed," Viveiros said. "The developers will benefit, but not the residents."
Viveiros rattled off a string of allowed uses "by right" and that, she said, should be the subject of a zoning board variances as they are now. She recommended "wholesale changes."
Koorey said the ordinance "lacks a vision of the waterfront" and puts "the cart before the horse."
She said it could cut back waterfront access for citizens and buildings as tall as the Point Gloria condominiums could hide the water.
James Finglas, city activist and spokesman for the Maplewood Neighborhood Association, noted the absence and near-absence of distance to neighboring properties, the water and the road.
Finglas questioned if the flexible zoning district differs from the city master plan and why that would happen.
"I don't know if it differs," Hartnett said. He cited economic development, a working waterfront, commuter rail and attracting higher income housing as master plan priorities.
"We can do all of the things necessary without locking us into all this," Finglas said.
Email Michael Holtzman at email@example.com.


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Bob Forsch, Ted Simmons, Curt Flood and George Kissell were inducted into the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame on August 15th. This was the second induction class for the Cardinals Hall, following the inaugural class in 2014. Simmons is the only one of the four 2015 inductees still living.
Catcher Simmons (St. Louis 1969-1980) and right-handed pitcher Forsch (1974-1988) were the top two vote-getters in fan online balloting for modern era players. Simmons was a six-time All-Star and won the NL Silver Slugger Award for catchers in 1980. Forsch's 163 wins is third all-time in franchise history. He played in three World Series (1982, 1985 & 1987) and is only Cardinals pitcher ever to throw two no-hitters.
The modern era ballot, which also included Cardinals legends Steve Carlton, Keith Hernandez, Mark McGwire, Matt Morris, Edgar Renteria and Joe Torre, was selected by a Red Ribbon Panel of Cardinals baseball experts of which I am a member.
The Panel also elected outfielder Curt Flood (1958-1969) as the 2015 veteran era inductee. Flood was a standout defensive center fielder who helped the Cardinals to three World Series appearances and two World Series Championships in his 12 seasons with the club. Later, Flood's refusal to accept a trade following the 1969 season was important step toward modern player free agency.
The Cardinals organization also reserves the right to annually induct an important figure in team history. The 2015 choice is George Kissell (1940–1942, 1946–2008), a lifetime Cardinal, who spent 65 years as a player, coach, scout and instructor. Kissell's teaching techniques and methods impacted generations while defining what is now known as "The Cardinal Way."
Link to The Cardinal Nation Blog's top 20 stories of the year countdown
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Brian Walton
Latest posts by Brian Walton (see all)
- Big Changes Coming to The Cardinal Nation Blog - June 24, 2017
- Walton on the Air Twice on Friday - June 24, 2017
- Cardinals Organization Roster Matrix: 2017 Short Season - June 19, 2017


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"Lord, I give up" I said to myself in tears as I sat in the church bathroom with my two children. "I don't know what to do."
This wasn't the first service I spent in the bathroom. My one-year old daughter refused to remain quiet in the intimate sanctuary and my three-year old son kept shaking loose from me to dart towards the drum set in the pulpit. I'm new to the church so some people stared. Some with looks of compassion and understanding, while others stared with judgment and annoyance on their faces. I couldn't take it anymore. Why couldn't they just sit still like the other children? I didn't know how I was going to serve the church when I couldn't even keep my own children under control.
I've written about my son's special needs on my blog "Throw Up and Theology" in the past. He hasn't developed at the same rate as other children. It started with sensory issues. It took him months to learn how to feed himself. As he approaches four this year, he is still not speaking at the same level as other children. He struggles to communicate. Some days, I can manage it. Other days, I feel like a failure as mother. I worry about his future. What will happen to him if I'm not around to advocate for him?
In the midst of my spiritual wrestling and angst, the Lord reminded me of Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth was Jonathan's son who was crippled in his feet at age five because his nurse fell while running with him (2 Samuel 4:4). As a result, he spent much of his life in Lodabar. In Hebrew, lodabar means "pastureless." You could say he lived "below the bar" in a place that lacked many resources. However, in 2 Samuel 9, David looks for someone from Jonathan's house so that he can bless them. A servant tells him about Mephibosheth, and because of David's love for Jonathan, he allows Mephibosheth to eat at the king's table for the rest of his life. David blesses him despite his handicap.
This is a reminder to all of us who are struggling with something that God will raise up people to bless us and help us endure whatever hardship we are facing. I believe God brought Mephibosheth to my attention because his crippled feet didn't prevent him from being placed in a position of prominence. Despite his location in Lodabar, the Lord still enabled David to find him and give him favor. This is a reminder to all of us that no matter where we are in life and no matter what we're dealing with, we're never beyond God's reach. There is nowhere we can go that is beyond God's grace and love.
If you have a special needs child or deal with a handicap, encourage yourself by knowing that God has his hands on you. He sees your struggles and will give you strength for the journey.


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We launched Hadoop Developer In Real World course on Nov 2015 and we got excellent response from the Hadoop In Real World members right away. In few months we got several requests to create a Hadoop Administration course. We looked at other courses in the market to get a feel for what is already out there. Hadoop Administration is more than just installing and restarting services. To our surprise, we saw other courses in the market just covered installation, restarting services and couple of random topics. It was shocking !
We have created a video version of this post. Click here if you prefer watching the video.
So the very first thing we did was, we came up with a list; a list of things that every Hadoop administrator must know, which is essentially also the list of things that what employers look for in a Hadoop Administrator. So we decided to cover every single item in our list in our Hadoop Administration course. Our students also told us that they would like the course to help them clear certifications like Cloudera Certified Administrator for Apache Hadoop, CCAH for short. So we made the course CCAH ready, meaning we covered all the topics that are in scope for CCAH in our Hadoop Administrator In Real World course. In this post we will explain what is covered in Hadoop Administrator In Real World course.
In the very first chapter, we will explain the structure of the course and give you instructions on how to connect to our cluster. When you enroll in Hadoop Administrator In Real World course, you will get access to our 3 node Hadoop cluster hosted on Amazon Web Services. This cluster is shared by the students of Hadoop In Real World. With the cluster access you can execute MapReduce programs, access HDFS, execute Pig and Hive scripts etc. This cluster will help you get your feet wet right away.
We have designed the course keeping in mind that it should be easy for someone who is new to the Big Data and Hadoop world. So in the next 3 chapters will cover all the needed basics.
In the next chapter, we will introduce you to Big Data. At some point in your Hadoop Administration career you will be give a set of problems and you will be asked to design a solution using Hadoop. How can you be certain whether the problems in front of you can be solved by Hadoop? As an administrator, given a set of scenarios you should be able to ascertain whether the problem at hand is a big data problem or not. This chapter will help you with exactly that.
In the next HDFS chapter, you will learn what is Hadoop Distributed File System or HDFS for short and more importantly why you need HDFS when there are many file systems already available in the market. This chapter will teach you how to navigate and work with HDFS. You will also learn how read and write works behind the scenes in HDFS.
As a Hadoop administrator, you will not be asked to write MapReduce programs, that is the job of Hadoop developers but a good Hadoop Administrator must know how MapReduce works and have a good understanding of the different phases in MapReduce. Knowing how MapReduce works will help you troubleshoot performance issues and debug problems. MapReduce chapter will help you understand all the details behind MapReduce.
In the next Architecture chapter, we cover both MapReduce version 1 architecture and also MapReduce version 2 architecture or simply referred as YARN. We cover both versions because if you end up working for a client who is trying to migrate from MapReduce version 1 to MapReduce version 2, you will not be lost. Hadoop has Single Point Of Failures and in this chapter we will discuss what solutions Hadoop has in place to protect from those Single Point of Failures. We will talk about secondary namenode and Highly availability in this chapter.
Cluster Planning is the most critical element in Hadoop administration. Because the decisions that are made during cluster planning has a long term impact and has cost implications too. We are actually shocked to see other courses out there does not cover cluster planning at all. Any administrator who does not know how to plan a cluster can not call himself a good administrator. Due to the significance of cluster planning, CCAH exam covers a lot of questions on cluster planning. In the Cluster Planning chapter, we will talk about software & hardware requirements, preference between JBOD and RAID, sizing the cluster and network topology. In short, everything you need to plan a Hadoop cluster.
Next chapter is cluster setup. We want our students to learn how Hadoop is used in the real world and that is why any time we teach how to install and configure a hadoop service or setup a cluster we use Amazon Web Services. Because AWS is widely used in lot of production deployments. In this chapter we will install a Hadoop cluster on AWS on EC2 instances. We will also look at another widely used Amazon service named EMR in this chapter. As you go over the course, we want our students to practise what they learn, that is install, configure, uninstall services etc. You can practise in AWS but there is a charge associated with AWS. Instead of using AWS you can configure Virtual Machines to simulate a multi node setup. We will teach you how to set up VMs in this chapter as well.
In the next chapter, we have covered all the day to day essentials that are required for you to perform your day to day tasks as a Hadoop administrator. Let's say today is your day one on your brand new job as a Hadoop administrator, how do you get to know the details about your Hadoop cluster? You can ask around but that is no fun. In this chapter you will learn to get to know your Hadoop cluster, adding nodes to your cluster, protecting against accidental data loss, quotas, configure network topology, exploring logs etc. You will learn everything you need to perform as efficient as possible as a Hadoop administrator in this chapter.
When Hadoop first came out, there is no strong concept of authentication in Hadoop and quite honestly that was one of the weak points of Hadoop at that time. Later, Kerberos authentication was introduced and it got wide acceptance right way. Protecting a Hadoop cluster against improper access is an important task of Hadoop administrator. Don't you agree ? This chapter will teach you how to install, configure and enable kerberos authentication in your Hadoop cluster.
Namenode is the master node in a Hadoop cluster and it is also a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF). Hadoop was criticized widely to have a critical element like Namenode to be a single point of failure. Hadoop committers rose to the occasion and they introduced High Availability. High Availability offers a solution for namenode's single point of failure problem. In this chapter, we will configure Hadoop with High Availability using Quorum Journal Managers.
Next chapter on resource management is very important. Hadoop cluster is a significant investment for any company so it is very common for multiple teams to share a single production Hadoop cluster. Which means as administrators you need to answer question – How can you share a Hadoop cluster between teams and between users? This chapter has the answer for you. In this chapter we will talk about 3 different type of schedulers – FIFO, Capacity and Fair schedulers. We will discuss the differences between the 3 schedulers, configure and experiment with all 3 schedulers.
So far when we install or configure a service in any of the lesson we do it manually, step by step and we cover every single configuration details. We don't use any cluster management software like Cloudera Manager to install and configure services at the very beginning to install or configure service. Why? To be an efficient Hadoop administrator you need to know how things work behind the scenes in detail and tools like Cloudera Manager and Ambari hide all those details. This sounds like a good thing but when it time to troubleshoot an issue or tweak a property administrators who are not familiar with configuration details are usually lost. So that is why we cover the hard things like manual and step by step configuration first and easy things like Cloudera Manager last. In this chapter you will learn how to install services and work with cloudera manager. In addition to that you will also learn how to use cloudera manager for monitoring and troubleshooting.
In the next chapter we will introduce you to Apache Pig, Hive, Sqoop and Flume. As Hadoop administrator you will not be required to implement solutions using Pig, Hive, Sqoop or Flume but you are definitely expected to understand what they do and how to install and configure them. So that is what you will learn in this chapter.
Hadoop ecosystem is very energetic and it changes almost every day. Which means there are several popular tools in the ecosystem and new tools are coming in all the time. We plan to keep Hadoop Administrator In Real World as a living course, meaning we will keep the course live and add new tools as per the demand from our students. In the near future we have plans to include Spark and Kafka. We also have plans to include topics that are covered in Hortonworks Data Platform Certified Administrator, HDPCA for short, very soon.
We hope this post gave you a pretty good idea about the concepts and topics covered in the Hadoop Administrator In Real World course. Thank you so much for reading this post and thank you for being a part of Hadoop In Real World community.