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Changing Concepts in EDP Feasibility Studies
by ROBERT G. WRIGHT Partner, Chicago Office
Presented before the Accounting Symposium sponsored by the National
Association of Accountants, National Machine Accountants Association, and National Office Management Association at the University of Florida, Gainesville—April 1961, and before the Rock-ford Chapter of the National Association of Accountants—May 1961
A COMPUTER feasibility study should develop answers to two major questions:
What is the best way of utilizing EDP?
Which computer, if any, best meets the company's requirements? The factors that govern the development of the answers to these questions are subject to continuous refinement and change.
Technological improvements are being developed continuously by the computer manufacturers.
Equally important developments are being made in application concepts. Gradually, users are learning that full utilization of EDP requires extension beyond routine bread-and-butter applications.
Broad, company-wide applications are beginning to materialize. These cross departmental lines and mechanize decision
processes that previously were performed more or less intuitively by human beings.
As a result of these improvements, feasibility studies today are apt to develop positive conclusions that could not have been developed a few years ago. Many companies that initially were merely bystanders
now find they can profitably apply EDP to their business needs. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to review current trends in the two factors mentioned above—technological developments
and changing application concepts—for these factors weigh heavily in any consideration of computer feasibility.
The most significant development in the past year or so was the introduction of solid-state computers, the so-called "second generation"
of machines. This break-through served as a needed stimulant to the industry, and the computer manufacturers and their customers were quick to respond. Several hundred machines have already been

subset: commoncrawl


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Slingin' Sammy Baugh, 94, a record-setting passer, punter and defensive back who led the Washington Redskins to two NFL championships in 16 seasons with the team and whose wide-open style of play helped usher professional football into the modern era, died yesterday at Fisher County Memorial Hospital in Rotan, Tex.
Baugh, a charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, had lived for the past few years at a nursing home in the small West Texas town of Jayton, about 30 miles from his beloved Double Mountain Ranch. His daughter-in-law, Jean Baugh, said he died of kidney failure and pneumonia. Doctors told her his body just wore out.
"Sammy happens to be just about the most valuable football player of all time, according to most pro coaches I've talked to," legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice said in 1942.
More than a half-century later, sportswriter Dan Jenkins called him "the greatest quarterback who ever lived, college or pro." Jenkins, a Fort Worth native, saw Baugh play at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and as the Redskins quarterback.
"Sammy Baugh embodied all we aspire to at the Washington Redskins," Redskins owner Daniel Snyder said. "He was a competitor in everything he did and a winner. He was one of the greatest to ever play the game of football, and one of the greatest the Redskins ever had. My thoughts and prayers are with his family tonight."
Baugh, a tall, rangy Texan, was a superb all-around athlete -- he signed a professional baseball contract with the St. Louis Cardinals the summer before joining the Redskins -- and would have been a star no matter whom he played for, but he happened to play for George Preston Marshall, the crafty showman and promoter who owned the Redskins.
Marshall transformed the TCU all-American into the quintessential cowboy. He insisted that Baugh buy himself a western hat and a pair of boots before flying up to Washington to sign his $8,000 annual contract. Never mind that Baugh was a small-town boy, not a cowboy. When Washington sportswriters asked him about the boots, he said, "They make my feet hurt."
Marshall, who had moved the Redskins from Boston after his wife convinced him Washington would be a good town for pro football, got a return on his investment almost immediately. As a rookie, Baugh led the team to its first division title and an opportunity to play the Chicago Bears, the fearsome "Monsters of the Midway," for the NFL championship.
Sunday, Dec. 12, 1937, was so bitingly cold that most Bears fans chose to listen to the NFL's fifth annual championship game on the radio. Maybe they had made it to church and back earlier, but Wrigley Field, temperature 15 degrees, wind chill minus-6? No way. Only 15,878, including 3,000 well-lubricated Redskins fans who arrived by rail from Washington, had that much faith and fortitude.
The players, of course, had no choice. Their hands and faces chapped and red, their feet skidding out from under them on the crystal-hard playing surface, their misery compounded by a stark and punishing wind off Lake Michigan, they lined up for the opening kickoff wearing rubber-soled basketball shoes.
No one expected it to be that much of a game. The Bears had gone 9-1-1 in their march to the Western Division title. Their lineup was studded with stars, and they were playing at home in their kind of weather. The Redskins, 8-3 in their first season in the nation's capital, were a good team -- they'd clinched the Eastern Division title a week earlier with a 49-14 defeat of the New York Giants -- but the Monsters of the Midway were as fearsome as their name. They were too big, too fast, too experienced.
The Redskins, on the other hand, had a secret weapon, although the exploits of rookie quarterback Sammy Baugh -- "Slingin' Sammy Baugh," from his baseball exploits -- had made him less of a secret as the season unfolded. On that championship Sunday, those hardy fans shivering in the stands at Wrigley Field witnessed a legend in the making, a star who, like Ruth or Jordan, transformed the way the game is played.
The first time the Redskins got possession of the ball, the Bears had them backed up near the goal line on an out-of-bounds kick to the 5-yard line. Baugh, who had never played in such treacherous weather, ambled onto the field, stood in his end zone and calmly assessed the Chicago defense. His breath misting, he watched the Bears, then walked over to the Redskins huddle.
"Punt formation," the 23-year-old quarterback told his teammates, "but we're gonna pass." Ten surprised teammates stared back at him.
"On two," he barked.
The Redskins broke the huddle, and Baugh dropped back to punt, a common strategy in those days before slimmer, easier-to-grip footballs and split-T offenses opened up the game. On the snap, the Bears' formidable front line scratched, clawed and burrowed ahead on the icy surface, intent on blocking the kick.
The 6-foot-2 Baugh, with his offense lined up in what was essentially today's double-slot spread, straightened and whipped a forward pass from the end zone, possibly the first such throw from that precarious field position (and certainly the first such throw on ice, with players in sneakers). Running back Cliff Battles gathered in the ball and rambled 42 yards before being pulled down. A few plays later, Battles scored on a reverse, and the Bears realized that with Baugh on the field -- he played both offense and defense -- they were in for a game.
The fans got their money's worth, despite the punishing cold. As shadows lengthened across the field, the lead changed hands four times, with Slingin' Sammy completing pass after pass. Midway through the third quarter, with the Bears leading 14-7, Baugh found his favorite receiver, former Notre Dame all-American Wayne Millner, who took a short pass on the Redskins 47-yard line and gingerly scurried the rest of the way into the end zone.
The Bears couldn't stop Baugh, legally that is. Bronko Nagurski, their hard-nosed fullback and linebacker, had only one mission on defense: stay with the rookie quarterback and knock him out of the game. Nagurski succeeded temporarily when he hit Baugh so hard the young quarterback missed most of the second quarter.
In the third quarter, Baugh suffered a badly gashed throwing hand when he was stepped on in a pileup. Anytime he went down, Bears defenders were kneeing him, twisting his ankle, grinding him into the gravel-pocked ice; they were trying to knock him out for good. Nagurski chased him 20 and 30 yards behind the line of scrimmage, even after the whistle blew. (In those days, defenders could continue hitting the quarterback until the whistle blew.)
Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich, a legend in his own right by the time he retired years later, described Baugh taking off on a 10-yard run through the middle of the Bears line before being brought down by "the beefy Chicagoans," four of them on top of him when he hit the frozen turf. "Somewhere, somehow in the pile, somebody gave his leg an awful wrench," Povich reported. "Baugh was the last to arise."
Still, Baugh kept pitching. With the score tied at 21 in the fourth quarter, he methodically picked apart the Bears' defense. With time running out, he tossed a 35-yard game-winner to Ed Justice, and any Redskins fans not yet frozen to their Wrigley Field seats went absolutely crazy.
Baugh threw for an astounding 335 yards that day, with touchdown passes of 35, 55 and 78 yards. "Baugh was a one-man team," one of the Bears coaches told reporters after the game. "He licked us by himself."
"When they call the roll of football heroes, the name of Samuel Adrian Baugh will be hovering near the top," Povich wrote.
During 16 seasons with the Redskins, Baugh would direct the team to four division titles and a second NFL championship in 1942. He retired after the 1952 season as a popular icon of football excellence and a folk hero of Washington sports lore.
For most of his career in Washington, he played both defense and offense as well as on special teams. But he was always best known as a pinpoint passer who could hit his receivers over long and short distances while under extreme pressure from a defensive pass rush. In nine seasons -- 1937, 1940, 1942, 1943 and 1945-49 -- he led the NFL in completion percentage. Twice he threw six touchdown passes in a single game. His career totals included nearly 1,700 completed passes, 187 of them for touchdowns.
He was also a superb punter, the last master of the all-but-forgotten stratagem of the quick kick, and a formidable defensive back. Against the run, he was a fierce tackler who could bring down the fabled fullback Nagurski. Defending against the pass, he was an interception threat. He had 31 over his career. In one season, 1943, he led the NFL in pass completions, in punting and in interceptions -- which he caught, not threw, with 11. He's the only player ever to lead the league in offensive, defensive and special teams categories.
Baugh played on Redskins teams that included such future Hall of Famers as Battles, Millner and tackle Albert "Turk" Edwards. But it was mainly Baugh who became the primary author of a passion for Redskins football that came to envelop the Washington area with ever-increasing intensity each autumn.
In his first pro game, which was also the Redskins' first game in Washington, he caught Povich's eye. "There was Slingin' Sammy Baugh, putting his college reputation squarely on the spot, and justifying every advance notice with his magnificent forward-passing barrage against the Giants," Povich wrote. "No touchdown pass sped from the throwing hand of Baugh, but glory fairly dripped from the lean, lank Texas kid who was a marked man tonight, but made the transition from the college gridiron to the professional ranks with a tremendous thump."
There were 19,941 fans at Washington's old Griffith Stadium when the Redskins beat the Giants, 13-3, including 958 season ticket holders. Each had paid $9 for the package of six home games, or $1.50 a game.
From the start, the Redskins were a Washington sensation, and Baugh rode the crest of their rolling popularity wave. For the final game of the 1937 regular season, 10,000 Redskins fans boarded trains to New York for the victorious rematch with the Giants. The following week, 3,000 traveled to Chicago.
Baugh was the best passer in college football and one of the nation's outstanding professional prospects during four years at TCU, which he led to victories in the Sugar Bowl and the Cotton Bowl. Marshall, a flamboyant and innovative sportsman, signed him for his football team in 1937, the same year he transferred the Redskins' NFL franchise to Washington from Boston. Compensation was a $500 bonus and a salary of $8,000.
But to bring Baugh to Washington, Marshall first had to work a deal with the Pittsburgh Pirates, now the Steelers, who had a pick ahead of Washington in the NFL's 1937 college draft. The Pirates wanted Baugh, too, but they also wanted a Duquesne University football all-American who was a local favorite with the Pittsburgh fans. Marshall let it be known that he'd take the Duquesne player if the Pirates chose Baugh. So the Pirates took the local favorite from Duquesne and the Redskins got Baugh.
When he jogged onto the practice field for his first meeting with Redskins Coach Ray Flaherty, their encounter would endure in the oral memorabilia of Baugh legend.
"They tell me you're quite a passer," the coach is said to have observed, handing Baugh a football.
"I reckon I can throw," Baugh reportedly answered.
"Let's see it. Hit that receiver in the eye," said Flaherty, pointing to a man running down the field.
"Which eye?" said Baugh.
He led the Redskins to a second NFL championship with a 14-6 victory over the Chicago Bears in 1942, coming from behind after the Bears scored first on a 50-yard runback of a Redskins fumble. In that contest, Baugh stunned the Bears with an 85-yard quick kick on a third-down play, tossed a 38-yard touchdown pass to halfback Wilbur Moore and orchestrated an 80-yard drive for the final score that ended when Andy Farkas ran the ball into the end zone from the 1-yard line.
That game was sweet revenge for a 73-0 humiliation of the Redskins by the Bears in the 1940 NFL championship game. Playing at Griffith Stadium, 10 Bears players scored a total of 11 touchdowns. The Redskins, who had defeated the Bears, 7-3, on the same field three weeks earlier, botched a scoring opportunity early in the title game when the usually reliable receiver Charlie Malone dropped a Baugh pass on the goal line. At the time, the Bears had scored only seven points, and the outcome of the game was still in doubt.
Someone later asked Baugh if the result would have been different had Malone not dropped the pass.
"Sure," Baugh said. "The final score would have been 73-6."
Like any world-class athlete, Baugh hated losing, and his image on the field of play was that of a tough-hided, no-nonsense competitor. But in the huddle he could also be compassionate and forgiving of a missed block or a dropped pass, and he won the support and loyalty of erring teammates with simple admonitions such as, "Get it next time."
On the practice field, he was not so forgiving of his own performance. He liked to complete 100 consecutive passes before leaving for the day, and if he missed one, he'd often start all over again. "He could throw a pass standing on his head," Marshall once observed.
Samuel Adrian Baugh was born March 17, 1914, in Temple, Tex., and moved to Sweetwater in high school. He played on his eighth-grade elementary school football team and four years of high school football, but his main sport was baseball, and he was recruited to play third base at TCU. He did, but he also joined the football team, and he was an all-American as TCU won the 1935 national championship. In 1935, he also was the star of the College All-Star Game, which was sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, throwing a touchdown pass to beat the Green Bay Packers, 6-0.
He played minor league baseball briefly in the St. Louis Cardinals' organization as a shortstop, but he had difficulty hitting a curveball and was playing behind future major leaguer Marty Marion. Football seemed a better option. Two days after his 23rd birthday, he signed with the Redskins.
In Washington, his greatest success came during his early years. In 1948, when the Redskins had a 7-5 record, Baugh had his last winning season. He took the team to its fourth Eastern Division title in 1945, the last one of his career. That year's NFL championship game was played in Cleveland, where the Rams were playing their final year before moving to Los Angeles. At the kickoff, the temperature on the field had dropped to zero and there were gale-force winds. Cleveland won, 15-14, in part because of a Baugh pass from the Redskins end zone that hit the goal post and was scored a safety for the Rams. Under NFL rules of that era, the goal posts were on the goal line, and hitting the goal posts with an offensive forward pass meant two points for the opposing team.
During his final year with the Redskins, Baugh injured his hand in the fourth game of the season, and he was unable to grip the football for a month. He saw only limited action thereafter. In December 1952, he retired with a minimum of fanfare after the Redskins' last game and drove home to Texas, where he operated a cattle ranch in the offseason.
"The Redskins will always be my team and Washington will always be my second home. I'll never forget these most wonderful 16 years of my life, and I'll never be able to thank the fans enough," he said.
For five years after leaving the Redskins, Baugh coached football at Hardin-Simmons College, now university, in Texas, compiling a record of 23-28. He also was a coach of freshman football at Oklahoma State University, a backfield coach at the University of Tulsa and head coach for two years of the New York Titans, later the New York Jets, of the fledgling American Football League.
He was head coach of the Houston Oilers in 1964 and had a record of 4-10. But the job interfered with his cattle operations in West Texas, and he left after one year to return to his 6,300-acre ranch near Rotan, where by then he had become the Texas cowboy that Marshall had envisioned back in 1937.
In 1938, Baugh married his college sweetheart, Edmonia Smith, in Sweetwater; she died in 1990.
A son, Bruce Baugh, died in 2006.
Survivors include four children, Tod Baugh of Billings, Mont., David Baugh of Rotan, Stephen Baugh of Midland, Tex., and Frances White of Lubbock, Tex.; 11 grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.


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text:
"She's always late!" the sixteen-year-old sobbed. She'd set up the ironing board and its accessories like a shrine to housewifery. Heat shimmered in the air, had already slightly compromised the plastic of the spray bottle. Only Bonita could master the pleats of Suzanne's ghastly uniform skirt. Other girls did not care. Still others had punctual housekeepers. Or parents who ironed.
"Suse is so anal," her brother, Danny, noted from the table, where he and his father were studying their computer screens over breakfast, sharing news items and a bowl of pineapple. "She takes three showers a day, which is more than some people take in a year. In the future, that will be illegal. Seriously, I skip showers so that our carbon footprint won't be so terrible."
"Do you know there's a second part to that expression? The 'retentive' part?" his father asked. "It's amazing how comfortable people are tossing that around—'anal retentive.' People are very casual with the psychology. So blasé about the butt."
"God damn it!" the girl cried. "Please please please!"
"Also," Danny said, "she exaggerates. Constantly."
"Literally," his father said. Richard liked to make his son smile by using his favorite word incorrectly.
Suzanne had done everything she could: curled her hair, made up her face, donned her shirt and shorts and shoes and socks, packed her backpack, checked her assignments, opened the back door, cleared a path to the ironing board. She had spread the khaki skirt on the narrow end, where it sagged practically to the floor. Others at her school—the school she'd begged to attend, and which she worked at Dairy Queen to help pay for, a private élite place run by nuns, where boys were not allowed—had altered their uniforms, raising the skirt's hemline far above the knee. Still others arrived at the gate wearing sweatpants or jeans, and then pulled on the required garment like a burlap bag, something they'd kick to the floorboards of their cars minutes after the last bell rang.
"Lo siento!" Richard heard, along with the clatter of Bonita's heels. "Lo siento, Susana, mija!" And the hiss of steam as the iron met the cloth, and further Spanish as Bonita apologized and soothed, his daughter's name a shushing on her lips, Soos, Soos, Soos. He finally let out his breath. "Thank God," he murmured.
"Amen," Danny said.
"I have choir and then work," Suzanne called to her father as she rushed out the back door. These days, she spent more time apart from her family than with them. That would be the story from now on, Richard thought, the incremental move away.
Bonita had brought her son, Isaac, with her, as she always did, but she let Richard know that the boy wouldn't be going to school today, because he was suffering a bout of what she had only ever been able to describe as "nervioso," rubbing her stomach to illustrate her son's mysterious and chronic affliction. His mother pronounced his name "Ee-sock," although the boy preferred "I-zack." Unlike his mother, he spoke fluent English. He and Danny were the same age—eleven. Bonita used the family's street address as her own so that Isaac could attend the nearby public school. Most days, the boys would walk the three blocks together, the very fair Danny alongside the fairly dark Isaac. When they were younger, they'd held hands. For the past three years, since Richard's wife had died, the boys had been permitted to be in the same class, even though they distracted each other, communicating almost telepathically. No one challenged them when they requested a joint trip to the nurse's office; no one admonished them when they were absent on the same day. There seemed to be an endless bounty of understanding at that modest brick school, situated at the heart of a neighborhood populated by university professors and medical personnel, with equitable two-income, two-car, two-children homes, staffed by nannies and gardeners and housekeepers, an insulated hub of bleeding-heart liberalism.
Still, no matter how well-meaning a school it was, no matter how conscientious about maintaining Spanish signage and notifications, Bonita was intimidated by its administration. Before, it had been Richard's wife who played intermediary; now it was Richard who phoned in the excuses for the boys; Richard who attended the parent-teacher conferences, too, Bonita sitting beside him nodding, listening but only half-understanding what was being carefully noted about her son. She had five other children, older than Isaac, a few on their own already, all of them independent enough. Where Isaac's siblings had gone to school, in Gulfton, there had been no counselling services or narrative reports. There had been grades and failures, expulsions and swats. Isaac's brothers and sisters had put Bonita through many trials—arrests, pregnancies, car accidents—but Isaac's trouble, its invisibility, was new to her.
He was tentative, alert to any little sound or look of disapproval; if you moved too quickly, he flinched, as delicate and lithe as a water bug. He often cried; his stomach seized whenever he was confronted with something he was afraid of, and he was afraid of many things—loud noises and crowds and dogs and busy streets and elevators and balconies and the dark and his nightmares and chaos in general and change of even the smallest sort and, most of all, his father, who, during his rare appearances at home, was a drunken and brutal man. Bonita's other children had been toughened by their bad dad and their rough neighborhood and their over-all hard luck, rendered sturdy by duress, but Isaac had been made too tender.
"You want to play hooky with Isaac?" Richard asked Danny. Isaac smiled shyly from the doorway, his silver front tooth catching the light. Whenever Richard spotted that tooth, he had the same thought: if his wife had still been alive when the tooth was knocked out, she'd have seen to an ivory replacement.
"This morning, but not this afternoon," Danny said. "Can you go this afternoon?" he asked Isaac. "It's pizza-party day, remember?"
Isaac's panic often eased after a few hours of an ongoing game the boys called "town," on the living-room rug. Isaac loved Danny. Next year would be the heartbreaking, stomach-aching change from the sanctuary of elementary school to the hormone hell that was middle school; Richard hated to think of it. He suspected that Isaac would eventually recognize himself as homosexual, that others might know it sooner than he, that Bonita's challenges as mother to this boy would become only more overwhelming.
Richard had an urge to play hooky himself—to seize Suzanne away from the nuns, then bar the doors and hunker down. "Be good, boys," he said to them as he reluctantly put together his backpack and travel mug. Only now did he notice that Bonita was wearing a pair of jeans that his wife had given her long ago, hand-me-downs. Every year, a plastic bag of last year's clothing had made its way to Bonita; when his wife died, Bonita had shaken her head at the offer of the entire closetful, turned her face as if to keep from witnessing further shameful behavior from her employer. "No," Richard had agreed, swiftly closing the door on the dresses and shoes. Also: his children sometimes visited those dresses, which still smelled, they said, like their mother.
The trio before Richard made a pretty picture, the two smiling boys and the kind, hardworking woman. "Adios," he told her. "Hasta luego."
"Bomb threat?" Richard joked when he arrived at the Chronicle to find a group of co-workers milling and muttering outside. But, in fact, that was why everyone had been evacuated.
"Credible," they kept repeating. An official bomb squad was rumored to be on the way. When rain began falling, Richard and his advertising staff headed across the street to the breakfast place they liked. There had been layoffs in editorial the previous Friday; it was logical, wasn't it, that this would follow? A betting pool was started, various malcontents cited. Richard put three bucks on Lawrence Lattimer.
"Lawrence?" his co-workers cried.
"It's always the mild-mannered ones," Richard said. "Always the last guy you'd ever guess." By noon, the building had been declared safe, the threat empty. Then it wasn't Lawrence Lattimer, Richard decided, trudging up the stairs to his department. Lawrence would have followed through, blown an emphatic hole in the place that had betrayed him. No, an empty threat would come from someone like Jill King, the flighty intern who had flirted outrageously and then claimed sexual harassment. Her gestures were inflammatory yet random. She'd probably phoned in the threat and then gone online to stalk a former boyfriend. Later, she'd hit the mall and successfully shoplift a complete outfit, feeling it was owed to her. Or something like that. She wasn't serious enough to stick to her word.
He was on his office line explaining Isaac and Danny's absence from morning classes when his cell went off, the special home ringtone that he never ignored. "Hang on a sec," he said to the school secretary.
"They go out!" Bonita said without preamble. "No here!"
"Are the boys at school?" he asked the secretary.
"No, sir."
An hour, Bonita guessed, when he asked how long they'd been gone. As was always the case when he and Bonita spoke to each other—neither remotely fluent in the other's language—the information exchange was crude yet functional. It was she who'd phoned him to report his wife's car crash, she who'd fielded the notification from the highway patrol. She who'd had only to say "La señora" and then wail to let him know. What Richard understood today was that the boys were on a collecting mission, in search of some necessary prop for the narrative developing on the living-room rug. There were cars, stores, blocks; they made a town and filled it with houses and businesses, tracks and roads and paths. On occasion, they left their indoor game to fetch a pile of twigs or sand or stones. Once, they found a turtle and built an elaborate habitat for it in their little city. Somewhere beyond the back door there must have been a critical piece, a shared imperative driving the boys out together.
He wasn't going to get any work done today, after all, Richard thought, clattering down the stairs.
He and Bonita divided the neighborhood in half and began walking. It reminded him of searching for the family dog, an irritating terrier that would never stay penned. Except that he wasn't calling or whistling, just speed-walking with the familiar hopelessness of dread, the urge and need to do something. He was trying to think like Danny and Isaac. Would they have walked to the comic shop? It was a couple of miles away, but it was the only place that Richard could imagine them going on foot—and their bikes were still in the garage. Same with their skateboards and scooters and trikes, two of each of the wheeled toys they'd mastered together. Richard had already envisioned teaching them to drive, taking them to the parking lots and cemeteries where he'd taken Suzanne when she was learning, last year. Bonita did not drive; she was, after nearly three decades in Houston, still afraid to navigate its streets and highways. She and Isaac rode the bus; it took them an hour each way to Richard's home.
"His place," Richard said aloud and abruptly turned around, convinced suddenly that the boys had gone to Isaac's. Just the week before, Danny had said, out of the blue, "It's weird I've never seen inside their apartment." Plenty of times he'd come along when Richard dropped off or picked up Bonita and Isaac. But the pair were always waiting in the murky ground-floor vestibule or rushing through it, on their way to their two-bedroom unit on the third floor, which was far too small for their large family. One of Isaac's chief complaints was that he never knew who would be asleep beside him when he woke up in the morning: brother, sister, nephew, niece.
"Jessss," Bonita agreed, nodding thoughtfully, drawing out the word, when Richard found her and asked if it was possible that the boys had wanted something of Isaac's to complete their game. As usual, Bonita failed to buckle her seat belt when they got in the car, and Richard didn't correct her. The pinging alarm would soon silence itself. This vehicle was a replacement for the one that had been totalled three years earlier; his wife had not been buckled in, either. "Lo siento," Bonita said for the hundredth time, shaking her head in self-chastisement.
"It's not your fault," Richard assured her. "They know better. Está bien." Sitting beside each other in the car made them both nervous, Richard supposed; they hadn't ridden together minus the children before. Her distinct smell, the fact of her vanities—the orange-tinted streaks in her hair, the powdery makeup, the bra strap cutting into her shoulder, her impractical high-heeled shoes—strikingly present. Female and male, close to the same age, arranged together in their traditional spots. Other drivers on the freeway could have plausibly assumed that Richard and his passenger were a couple. When Richard exited toward Bonita's neighborhood, the observations of others became less benign. These were people on foot, lounging on porches, leaning against poles, gathering at curbs, and then sauntering slowly into the street, forcing cars to give way, throwing Richard direct and challenging glares. It felt a bit like crossing the border, the convenience stores and groceries and taco trucks all offering their wares in Spanish, the smell in the air of Mexican food, a wariness in both the visitor and the visited. Bonita had come to Texas long ago; Richard had no idea whether her status was legal, knew only that her children had all been born here.
At her building, she was out of the car before he'd turned off the engine, running awkwardly, her purse forgotten on the seat. Anyone watching might reasonably have guessed that Richard had done something terrible to her, that she was fleeing. His habit in the past had been to wait until the light came on in her apartment upstairs, until Bonita showed herself on the balcony and waved to him. How foolish he felt now, following her, carrying her large pink leopard-spotted bag. On the walkway was a trail of trash—a diaper, a Frenchy's bag, a smear of food that someone had walked through. The pack of dogs that usually lay panting in the vacant lot next door were howling in the distance.
The building's door was open, for which Richard was grateful—the men and the dogs outside made him uneasy. Up the stained stairs he climbed to the third floor. Like much of Houston, this habitat had had its brief heyday, maybe fifty years before; it had been a fashionable singles complex, built well enough to survive only its first set of tenants intact. Now it was a shoddy ruin, a place with broken balcony railings and pocked with a hundred ugly satellite dishes, a dry swimming pool filled with forsaken furniture and fenced off with concertina wire. Bonita's apartment was both too high for the rickety balcony to seem safe and too low to keep out a persistent climber. A breeding ground of anxiety and temptation.
A silver-haired man in coveralls stood on a step stool in the hall, repairing or disabling the sprinkler head on the ceiling.
"Excuse me," Richard said to him, "do you know which is Gutierrez?"
"Como?" the man asked, stepping down with difficulty, in his hand a tool that Richard thought belonged in the garden or perhaps the kitchen, a small rakelike thing. Eye to eye, he realized that the guy was close to his own age, that his white hair was premature, and that the man was as confused by what Richard held as Richard was by the little rake.
"Bonita," Richard explained, gesturing at the purse. "Isaac and Bonita y mi hermano—no, mi hijo—aquí?" He indicated a door that might match the balcony he knew was hers. The man was frowning at Bonita's belongings. "Soy Richard," Richard added lamely. "Trabajo?" he said, hoping the word would inspire some kind of sensible cognition. Richard's wife had spoken Spanish, so she had done all the talking. She and Bonita had often had lengthy conversations that left Richard with only the scantest broad understanding, through the few words he recognized, all subtleties lost. Had he pointed this out, his wife would have told him that it was a fair representation of men's general understanding of the world: they grasped its fundamentals but not its minutiae. "Gross motor skills," she would have said. "As opposed to fine."
The man in the coveralls put himself between Richard and the door to Apartment 3-C, rapping briskly on it, the clawed tool in his other hand. Richard was glad that the building had a handyman who wished to protect its tenants; Bonita and Isaac occasionally spent nights alone here, when the older brothers weren't around. From Richard's wife, Bonita had learned how to have the locks changed so that her husband could not legally reënter the place. Richard's wife had also helped Bonita get divorced, and then had insisted on restraining orders when neither a locked door nor a legal document convinced the ex-husband that he wasn't wanted.
"And sometimes," Richard's wife had been forced to concede, "Bonita actually does want him." That was the tricky part the law couldn't touch.
"Gracias," Richard said to the man in coveralls, who nodded, still skeptical of the hapless Anglo with the woman's handbag. "Isaac?" Richard called out. "Bonita? Danny? Open up, guys."
When Isaac finally cracked the door, the handyman stepped inside. Just before the door closed in Richard's face, he saw the raw panic in Isaac's eyes and understood that this character in the hall was Bonita's ex-husband.
"Fuck!" Richard banged on the door now himself. "I'm calling the police," he threatened. A door down the hall opened and a head leaned out, then popped back in like a turtle's. "I'm calling right now unless you open this fucking door! Danny!" he yelled. "Danny! Bonita! Open the door!" He was ransacking Bonita's purse in search of her phone, tissues and candy and a tiny Bible spilling onto the floor. Just as he found it, the door flew open.
"Dad," Danny said, pressing into his father's ribcage. "I'm sorry."
"It's O.K. Where's Isaac?"
"He locked himself in his room."
"You go get in there with him, O.K.?"
From the kitchen came an animated exchange of Spanish. Not angry, Richard thought, but opinionated, people in passionate relation to each other, Bonita's voice the more strident, the ex-husband's explanatory, if not apologetic, pleading. Richard listened for some sign that he should intervene, follow through on the threat of phoning the authorities. He stepped around a plastic-covered dining table to wait outside the kitchen doorway. The buffet against the wall was stacked with canned goods, which reminded him of Bonita's first day working for his family, a decade or so ago. She had retrieved from their trash the unopened but expired boxes and cans of food that his wife had thrown away in preparation for a housekeeper. An embarrassing moment, not unlike this one, in which Richard had not known how to properly explain why Bonita shouldn't consume the outdated food, or shouldn't accede to her criminal ex-husband's wishes. Above the buffet hung pictures of Isaac's siblings and nieces and nephews and sisters- and brothers-in-law, each and every one a school or studio portrait, groups in matched attire grinning at the photographer. A few included the father, who, on occasion, had made his way into the annual photo, as he had made his way into his ex-wife's home and maybe sometimes into her bed. Perhaps that would be today's story, Bonita being a naturally forgiving woman, weak in the face of some lingering, nostalgic habit of love. Love for the man in coveralls, that figure who came to Isaac in nightmares and made him scream, who might or might not have been responsible for knocking out Isaac's front tooth—a story that Richard's wife would have got to the bottom of.
Richard left his listening post and joined the boys in Isaac's room. It was protected by a deadbolt. This despite the fact that the door itself would have easily shattered or splintered at the mildest use of force. The room, like the rest of the apartment, was very tidy and held a few familiar touches: a castoff desk and chair from Richard's home, gifts the two boys had got in common: a lighted globe, a poster of SpongeBob. "We just needed this guy," Danny was explaining, in his palm a drunk-looking Duplo clown, while Isaac sat trembling on the bed with his hands over his ears. "We were making an amusement park in the town, and this is literally the only guy who fits in the cannon. Nobody else has the right feet." Richard sat beside Isaac and gently took the boy's hands into his own, explaining the problem with what the boys had done, the worry they'd caused, riding the buses alone, the risk of accident and mishap, the menace of malign strangers, adding that he and Bonita weren't angry so much as scared. Isaac burst into tears, and Danny just looked perplexed.
"If it's so dangerous, how come we let Bonita and Isaac do it?" he asked. "They do it every day, twice. And also, I think, statistically, buses crash a lot less often than cars." Danny would be a lawyer, Richard thought, not for the first time. He was logical, and passionate about fairness, fearless in an interesting way. Right after Danny had spoken, however, he seemed to realize precisely what he'd said, and then he, too, was sniffling, burrowing into Richard from the other side. A time would come, Richard thought, when he and his children wouldn't think of that terrible car crash and death every day, when they would no longer be ambushed by missing her.
Through the thin walls, they could hear the voices carrying on in the kitchen, his and hers, cajoling, laughing, then the embarrassing noise of nothing. Intimacy. And then the sound of his being sent away, a quiet, reluctant goodbye.
"Is O.K.," Bonita eventually called at the locked door. "Is O.K., se fue. Isaac?" Simultaneously, the boys pulled away from Richard, wiped their eyes, put on their game faces. Richard unlocked the door. "Is O.K. now," Bonita told him, her eyes also tearful. "He go." It was hard to say who initiated their embrace, only the second in their long association. It seemed a mutual impulse, sadness, need—the same feelings they'd shared at the funeral, three years ago. Bonita's shoulders heaved. Tears: they did not require translation. How convenient it would be, Richard thought, Bonita's wiry hair against his neck, her face on his shoulder, how terribly useful if they could simply wed, he minus a wife, she with her problematic ex-husband, and regroup together like a sitcom family in the fortified comfort of Richard's house across town, an arrangement that would be possible if they could just ignore that troubling enigma of love.
"Oh, no," she cried, smiling when they separated, wiping at the mascara on his shirt. "How you say?" she said to the boys, wiggling her fingers.
"Spiders," they replied together.
"Dad?" Danny said from the back seat. Richard checked the rearview; his son's tone was hesitant. "Dad, inside your head, do you hear conversations?"
"Like memories? Like of disagreements?"
"No, like . . ." He tipped his chin to look upward. "Like instructions," he finally settled on.
Richard considered this. "Not exactly," he said. "I mean, I think in words, and the words are about making decisions, sometimes, although also sometimes I just—"
"No, not like that," his son interrupted. "Like some other voice, not your own."
"Sure. I hear people I know, or knew, when they said impor—"
"No, no, no. Nobody you know, not you or a friend or a relative."
"What are you talking about?"
"Isaac said not to tell anyone this."
"But you're worried."
"Don't tell Bonita."
Richard checked his blind spot and merged onto the 59. Rush hour was just about to kick in; the exchange from downtown was already filling, an army of headlights in the oncoming dusk. "Whatever you tell me, son, nobody will ever know I got it from you. O.K.?"
"O.K. So Isaac says that inside his head people are talking."
"He hears voices?"
"I guess so."
"And what do they say?"
"How would I know?"
Fair enough, Richard thought. Was eleven the right age for schizophrenia to set in? His wife, master of all matters psychological, could have confirmed this. And more immediately relevant: was eleven the right age to scare his son with the idea of his best friend being schizophrenic? The problem with telling somebody something was that he wouldn't later be able to unhear it.
"Bonita and I will take Isaac to the doctor," Richard promised. His wife had done this in the past. When the mysterious nervous stomach had first flared up, she had insisted to Bonita that the condition was serious. In Isaac, she had, perhaps, seen some of her own anxiousness, an insidious presence that Bonita did not recognize.
"We should have never left the house," Danny said, shaking his head.
"If I had a nickel for every day I thought that," Richard agreed.
Suzanne was home when they arrived, filling the house with the sweet chemical smell of soft-serve. She often brought home "mistakes," confections lacking the trademark swirl, or misunderstood orders, edible but wrong. Danny especially appreciated the Peanut Buster Parfait mistakes, his favorite. But Suzanne wasn't due back until midnight tonight; Richard sighed, assuming she'd been fired. This day—would it never stop sending up trouble? But, no, she hadn't been fired. She was tearing up the house in search of her cell phone.
"The last time I know I saw it was like two in the morning last night!" she shrieked from her bedroom. She'd thought it was in her backpack, she reported. Then she'd figured it had fallen out in the car. After an anxious hour at the Dairy Queen counter, she hadn't been able to stand it any longer.
"And it's nowhere!" she wailed. Like Isaac, Suzanne panicked at problems that others might approach more casually. She had always been high-strung, particular about details, a self-critical perfectionist like her mother, unconvinced of her beauty, easily flustered. On her forehead a crease from premature concern, a skeptical tuck of her lip when she deflected a compliment.
"She ruined our town," Danny complained. "She kicked everything over."
"Have you called it?" Richard asked Suzanne, and received only a withering glance. The three of them spent the next half hour ransacking the place, reminding one another to try to think like Bonita, who might have found the phone earlier in the day and put it somewhere she thought logical. Long ago, Richard's wife's missing diaphragm had finally been located in a basket of bath toys; the parts of the food processor tucked away in the tools drawer. She was sometimes too thorough, Bonita; once, she had rearranged all the books in the house, after dusting the shelves, restoring them not in alphabetical order but by color and size: short red books together, tall yellow ones side by side. Richard's wife had pulled him into the study just to marvel—at the sight, and at the labor it would take to undo.
So Danny checked the bowl of remote controls on the coffee table and Richard crawled around the kitchen floor reaching under the counters and between the appliances. Suzanne kept up a continuous chant of "God damn it"s.
"We'll get you another," Richard called out to her. "Really, sweetheart, it's probably time for an upgrade, anyway."
"Mom's messages are on it," Danny said quietly, when they met up outside Suzanne's bedroom door to watch her heave her mattress and its bedding to the floor.
"Oh, shit," Richard said. Just the week before, he'd opened a cookbook and found not only his wife's handwritten notes in the recipe but a few of her fingernails between the pages. She had been a lifelong biter. In a flash, he'd seen her leaning over the book, chin in palm, pinkie between her teeth, humming while waiting for something to boil or reduce on the stovetop.
"We can get them back," Richard said, of the messages. "Probably," he added, because he wasn't positive.
"This has been a terrible day," Danny said. "Even though nothing exactly bad happened."
"Agreed," Richard said. Naturally, they were now both thinking about the worst day, the one on which Danny and Suzanne's mother had been killed after driving into the path of an eighteen-wheeler. For an instant, a wave of rage filled Richard, a plosive pure fury at his wife for not being here where she was needed.
On days like these, terrible but not exactly bad, he could entertain the dismal possibility that her accident hadn't been an accident. "Before you ask me," Eve had said when Richard began to propose marriage, twenty-five years ago, "I have to tell you a secret."
"I'm listening." He'd smiled indulgently.
"No, seriously. It's bad. As a teen-ager, I used to play this dangerous game when I was driving. Closing my eyes. Turning off the lights. Speeding. It was pretty out of control. I was that unhappy. I really didn't care if I lived or died." She'd closed her eyes to recall it there at the restaurant, their table abruptly an island in a sea of meaningless chatter. Red splotches appeared on her cheeks, beads of sweat on her upper lip. That worried crease on her brow, which she would share with her future daughter, and her young voice, forever thereafter in Richard's head. "Just so you know," she'd told him. "You can change your mind about me. Just forget marrying me and move on."
But that had turned out not to be true. He couldn't. ♦


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NASCAR had come a long way from the days when it was dismissed as Southerners driving around in circles turning left. There was rising attendance at tracks, increasing television ratings for races and growing demand from marketers to be sponsors.
But all that was halted — and even reversed — by a brutal one-two punch from the recession and changing demographic trends. The economic recovery, sluggish as it has been, is helping Nascar on the financial front. But there remains a crucial issue: attracting the next generation of fans, adding to the existing loyal base — primarily older, rural white men — people who are younger, urban and multicultural.
Nascar has been working since 2009 on plans to stimulate long-term growth, which involved studies, focus groups and a change in advertising agencies. The longtime incumbent, the Jump Company in St. Louis, was replaced in July by a Madison Avenue giant, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, known for sophisticated work for blue-chip brands like American Express, Dove and I.B.M.
"I don't think people saw that coming," Kim Brink, managing director for brand, consumer and series marketing at Nascar, said of the choice.
Nascar is not as far afield for Ogilvy & Mather as it might have seemed, said John Seifert, chairman and chief executive at Ogilvy & Mather North America, because it is "an iconic brand, bigger than a sport," as well as "a client who wants to transform itself and not be irrelevant in the future."
Since the selection, Ms. Brink said, the agency's flagship New York office has been developing "a new brand direction and a new creative platform" for Nascar, which are to include commercials in Spanish and more emphasis on Nascar's online offerings like nascar.com and the 2013 edition of Fantasy Nascar.
The initiative is to be formally introduced on Sunday during coverage of the Daytona 500 on Fox. Nascar drivers are to contact fans and followers this week in social media like Facebook and Twitter to alert them the effort is coming.
Creating the ads "was unbelievable fun," Mr. Seifert said. "We did everything short of bringing a Nascar in, which we plan to do in a week or two."
That feeling comes through in the initial elements like television commercials presenting drivers in larger-than-life poses. They deliver brief, emotional comments directly to the camera, often finishing one another's sentences.
For instance, in a spot called "Rivals," Brad Keselowski says, "In order to finish first ..." The thought is completed by Clint Bowyer, who declares, " ... somebody's got to finish second." Kasey Kahne chimes in, "I hate second."
The spot finishes with Jimmie Johnson saying, "Love your rivals ..." and Mr. Keselowski concluding, " ... 'cause you need someone to beat."
In a commercial called "We Are," the drivers offer pithy phrases that are meant to pique interest in their personalities. "We are mad scientists," says Kevin Harvick, who is followed by Austin Dillon asserting, "We're outlaws turned heroes"; Matt Kenseth saying, "We're part athlete"; Ty Dillon declaring, "Part astronaut"; and Carl Edwards stating, "And all show-off."
The commercial ends with Juan Pablo Montoya describing Nascar as "the loudest party on earth." Mr. Harvick says, "We live on the corner ..." and Mr. Edwards completes the thought with " ... of Mayhem and Main." Dale Earnhardt Jr. gets the last word: "Where anything can happen. And usually does."
A version of "We Are" in Spanish features Mr. Montoya, Nelson Piquet Jr. and Daniel Suarez. Some comments they make echo those made by the drivers in the English-language version. And some remarks are original to their spot, as when Mr. Montoya calls Nascar drivers "gladiators on asphalt" and says, "And although we are from different nations, we all share the same flag" — i.e., a racing flag.
There are, all told, 43 drivers appearing in the first stages of the campaign. They are the stars, said Terry Finley, senior partner and group creative director at Ogilvy & Mather New York, because "the way into the sport is the driver."
The goal is to draw "a new line in the sand, if you will," he added, and counter stereotypes about drivers as "dumb rednecks." To underscore that, one commercial, titled "Chess," compares the strategies of drivers to moves by chess players.
Another goal is to infuse the campaign with "authenticity," Mr. Finley said, through touches like interspersing archival film amid moments from contemporary races and including in "Rivals" a pair of famous long-ago competitors, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough.
Also to that end, the drivers were encouraged to deviate from the commercials' scripts and "ad-lib a little," said Dan Langlitz, account director at Ogilvy & Mather New York, because "that's when you get true color from them."
Including the Spanish-language aspects of the initiative, Nascar is expected to spend more this year than in previous years on marketing in traditional, digital and social media. Nascar also receives free commercial time during the races covered by its broadcast and cable partners like Fox, Fox Deportes, ESPN, Speed and TNT.
According to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, Nascar spent $24.3 million to advertise in major media during the first nine months of last year, compared with $16.1 million in the same period of 2011. The full-year total for 2011 was $24.1 million, Kantar Media reported; ad spending totaled $22.9 million in 2010 and $40.6 million in 2009.


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With less than two weeks to go, Republican Rand Paul leads the race to replace Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning. An exclusive Kentucky Poll finds 48 percent of likely voters plan to vote for Paul, 43 percent for Democrat Jack Conway, and nine percent remain undecided.
Commissioned by WKYT, WYMT, The Lexington Herald-Leader, and WAVE in Louisville, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research of Washington, D.C., interviewed 625 registered Kentucky voters on Monday and Tuesday.
In the battle to represent Kentucky in the U.S. Senate, Bowling Green ophthalmologist Rand Paul has become a tea party darling. Even though he's never held political office, Paul has become one of the most talked about faces of the tea party, the conservative splinter of the GOP that favors smaller government, less taxes.
"Looking at these numbers, his anti-Washington tough talk seems to be resonating with Kentuckians as the race with Attorney General Jack Conway boils over," says WKYT political editor Bill Bryant.
As the race turns ugly, it's not just Kentucky that's following the battle between Paul and Conway. The national spotlight has shown on a Conway ad questions Paul's involvement in a college group that mocked Christianity and Paul's refusal to shake his opponent's hand after a debate.
On Wednesday, Paul's wife told reporters she was shocked by the TV ad questioning her husband's religious beliefs. Kelley Paul called it "a desperate, shameful attack on our family."
"Kentucky is being very closed watched right now around the country and could give the tea party movement one of its biggest election night victories," said WKYT's Bryant.
While Paul leads by five percentage points, factoring in those who remain undecided and a four-percent margin of error could swing either way.
Paul's biggest support is among men, Republicans and independents while women and Democrats are Conway's strength.
Paul seems to have stronger grip on his own party with 81 percent of Republicans say they'll vote for him. Thirteen percent of Republicans say they'll cross party lines and vote for Conway.
Conway's influence within his own party isn't as commanding. The poll found 65 percent of Democrats say they'll vote for their own party's nominee and 24 percent will cross over to Paul.
The poll also found with Paul with strong leads in four of Kentucky's six Congressional districts. Conway is ahead only in the sixth district, which includes Lexington and most of central Kentucky, and the third district of Louisville.
"I think this election is really about the President's agenda; do you support the President's agenda or do you not support it?" Paul told Fox News moderator Chris Wallace during one of the race's debates. "I think his agenda is wrong for America."
"I am a proud Democrat. I'm certainly not going to be on the left of Barack Obama," Conway said during the debate. While he endorses parts of Obama's efforts, he does disagree with Obama on issues such as supporting an extension of President Bush's income tax cuts for all income brackets and opposing the system of greenhouse gas reduction know as "cap and trade."
Poll Methodology
The Kentucky Poll was conducted on behalf of WKYT, WYMT, The Lexington Herald-Leader, and WAVE-TV by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, Inc. of Washington, D.C. from October 18-19. A total of 625 registered Kentucky voters were interviewed statewide by telephone. All said they were likely to vote in the November general election. Those interviewed were selected by the random variation of the last four digits of telephone numbers. A cross-section of exchanges was utilized in order to ensure an accurate reflection of the state. Quotas were assigned to reflect voter turn-out by county.
The margin for error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than plus or minus 4 percentage points. This means that there is a 95 percent probability that the "true" figure would fall within that range if the entire population were sampled. The margin for error is higher for any subgroup, such as a gender or regional grouping.


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Having played two games at the CAF Africa Cup of Nations, Angola has earned just one point thus far, and the Palancas Negras have their work cut out for them if they want to extend their stay in South Africa beyond the group stage.
However, team captain and star striker, Alberto Mateus Contreiras, commonly known as Manucho, says the team remains upbeat and are drawing surprising inspiration from Sudan's performance last year. "At the last AFCON finals in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, Sudan found themselves in a similar situation: after two matches they had just one point," he explained after their 2-0 defeat to South Africa on Wednesday.
"But they were the team that joined Côte d'Ivoire in the next round, going through with four points after beating Burkina Faso in their last game. We went home with four points after losing our final game against Côte d'Ivoire. So we are hoping that history can repeat itself, but this time with us going through."
Cape Verde's 1-1 draw against Morocco in Wednesday's second Group A match means that Angola are no longer in a position to advance to the next round without results going their way Sunday's matchday.
As a goal-scorer it is normal that there is always a lot of pressure on me. I am used to that, and I simply have to deal with it.
But to stand any chance of going through, they need to win their next game. Manucho, who is playing in his fourth AFCON finals - having scored eight goals previously - is aware that their final Group A contest against Cape Verde's Blue Sharks will be anything but easy. "We just have to try to put the South Africa game behind us and focus for the next match. I am sure this will be a difficult match because Cape Verde has proven to be a good side."
The striker, who spent several seasons on Manchester United's books, but saw very little playing time with the English giants, said he was disappointed with his side's performance against Bafana Bafana, who won through Siyabonga Sangweni's first half strike and substitute Lehlohonolo Majoro's goal on the hour. "We took too long to come into the game. South Africa went forward and by the time we finally started putting some pressure on them, it was too late."
Now playing his club football for Real Valladolid in Spain's La Liga, Manucho believes that playing the game in a near-capacity 56,000-person Moses Mabhida Stadium, which was built for the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, helped the hosts to take the match to the Antelopes, who did little in resistance. "The huge crowd really got behind the team, and we did not get any of the breaks as often happens in these matches."
Pressure as a striker
The 29-year-old, whose father, Alberto Goncalves, was one of his first coaches at his youth club in Angola's capital Luanda, was tightly marked by the South African defence throughout the 90 minutes and had just one real chance, when Bafana goalkeeper Itumeleng Khune did well to save his powerful header late in the game
But the big striker says he is feeling no extra nerves despite Angola's two scoreless outings. "As a goal-scorer it is normal that there is always a lot of pressure on me. I am used to that, and I simply have to deal with it. Every team wants to mark the other side's scorer out of the game."
In 2006, the Palancas Negras had a fairytale journey all the way to the finals of the FIFA World Cup in Germany. Having only just escaped the horror of a civil war, Angola's appearance in the mundial - where they drew against Mexico and Iran and lost to their erstwhile colonisers Portugal - was very much a 'Cinderella story'.
Although they have been ever-present at the AFCON finals since then, they have never quite reached the heights that many believed they could after their FIFA World Cup appearance. Overall, this is Angola's seventh time at the continental championships, but only twice have they gone further than the group stages - in 2008 and 2010 as hosts - and there has been little to suggest that a third quarter-final appearance is on the cards.
Manucho though, is not surprised it has taken the team some time to adjust to the competition. "In 2006 we had a lot of experienced players, most of whom have since retired. This time around, that is not the case. We have a young side that is undergoing a rejuvenation process. Many of these young players are playing in the tournament for the first time. It is quite normal that they will stumble now and then," he explained.
But whilst the side might have stumbled, they remain in the race and with that can continue dreaming of a second appearance on the global stage, perhaps even as AFCON winners, who qualify for the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup in Brazil this summer.


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Electronic House has done some serious homework, compiling price, bandwidth and plan information from most US ISPs, from sluggy dial-up to hyperspeedy fiber. (I couldn't spot Cablevision, but there were others I hadn't even heard of.) Due to cable build-out and the territorial nature of phone companies, you can't do as much comparison shopping as the charts would suggest. And man, wouldn't I love it if it were a sortable database where I could see all my options by region? Wishlist aside, though, it's a very helpful resource for, say, figuring out if you're getting screwed by an older monthly rate. I, myself, will be making a customer-service call shortly. [EH]
Are You Getting Screwed? Quick-Glance ISP Pricing Chart


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pzcapflow necesitaba un nuevo diseño de página web y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 23 diseños de 4 diseñadores freelance.
CapFlow Investments, Inc.
We're a new company starting from scratch so we're on a limited budget. We would like a professional looking web page to lend credibility to our brand.
We provide services to owners of apartment buildings. Most of our clients are older and professional. They tend to be very nuts and bolts and don't go in for a lot of flash. It's all about the bottom line. Since we are selling a financial investment, clarity and professionalism is important to build confidence in our abilities. We are located in the San Francisco Bay Area and are initially target the local San Francisco apartment market.
The web site is primarily informational, describing our services. It will not be content heavy, just enough to generate curiosity about what we do. There will be four pages:
Home Page -
Contains general description about what we do along with some testimonials.
About Us Page -
Contains brief descriptions of the the founders.
Services Page -
More detailed description of the service we offer.
Contact page -
Contains a form that they can fill in if they wish more information.
We already have a logo that will be attached to the project. Please use this as part of your design. Photos of San Francisco or apartment buildings would also be appropriate to incorporate in the design.
The design should accommodate possible future expansion. We may add a page for blog/news, and customers testimonials.
Example, content is also attached. This describes more detail about what we do.


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Template:Arts and Hobbies Bronze Award/req
From MeritBadgeDotOrg
Mobile Menus: Cub Scouts - Scouts BSA - Venturing - Sea Scouts
Do nine of the following. (Activities or projects that are more available in your area may be substituted with your Advisor's approval for activities shown below.)
- CAD site visit. Visit a drafting company that uses state-of-the-art CAD systems and see how the new technology is used.
- Advertising plan.
- a. Choose a product that you are familiar with. Create an advertising plan for this product, then design an advertising plan layout.
- b. Using your resources, create a clean, attractive tabletop display highlighting your advertising plan for your chosen product.
- c. Show your display at your crew meeting or other public place.
- Theater production.
- a. Learn about backstage support for artistic productions.
- b. Attend a theater production. Then critique the work of the artist in set design, decoration, and costume design.
- New hobby.
- a. Choose a new hobby such as CD, sports card, or stamp collecting; in-line skating; or marksmanship.
- b. Keep a log for at least 90 days of each time you participate in your hobby.
- c. Take pictures and/or keep other memorabilia related to your hobby.
- d. After participating in your hobby for at least 90 days, make a presentation or tabletop display on what you have learned for your crew, another crew, a Cub Scout or Boy Scout group, or another youth group.
- Golfing.
- a. Tour a golf course. Talk to the golf pro, caddy, groundskeeper, manager, or other golf course employee about what it takes to operate a golf course. Play at least nine holes of golf.
- b. Tour a golf driving range. Talk to the manager or other driving range employee about what it takes to manage a driving range. Hit a bucket of balls.
- Physical training improvement.
- a. Develop a plan to assess the physical skill level of each member of a group such as your crew, a Cub Scout or Boy Scout group, a retirement home, or a church group.
- b. Once you have determined your starting point or base, develop a plan with each member of your group to develop a physical training improvement program.
- c. Test your group members on a regular basis over a 90-day period to see if there is improvement.
- d. Share your results with the group and/or your crew.
- Merits of sports.
- a. Lead or participate in a crew discussion on the merits of a young person choosing a sports hobby such as golf, jogging, or cycling for a lifetime. Discuss health benefits, opportunity to associate with friends, costs, etc.
- b. Ask an adult who is not active in your crew and who has an active sports hobby to join your discussion to get his or her point of view.
- Hobby store visit. Visit a hobby store. Talk with the manager about what the most popular hobby is relative to what is purchased and the type and age of people who participate in different hobbies. If they have free literature about beginning hobbies, share it with your crew members.
- Teach the disadvantaged a sport or hobby. Teach disadvantage or disabled people a sport and organize suitable competitions, or help them develop an appreciation for an art or hobby new to them.
- Hobby meet. Organize a hobby meet (a place where people gather to display and share information about their hobbies) for your crew, a church group, a Cub Scout or Boy Scout group, a retirement home, a group home, or another group.
- Photography contest. Organize a photography contest in your crew, another crew, a church group, a Cub Scout or Boy Scout group, a retirement home, a group home, or another group. Secure prizes and judges. Plan an awards program.
- Artwork for crew activity. Using your artistic ability, volunteer to do the artwork for an activity for your crew, another crew, a Cub Scout or Boy Scout group, a district, or council. Example: Do the posters and promotional materials for a district Cub Scout day camp.
Please report any issues with this page.


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Richard Nixon, Hopeless Romantic
The surprisingly tender love letters of one of America's most hated presidents.
On Monday, August 17, 1942, in what would be the first of many partings over the next two years, Pat saw her husband off at Washington's Union Station. Dick Nixon, then a 29-year-old lawyer for the government's Office of Price Administration, endured a gloomy train ride to Rhode Island for two months of rigorous officer training at Quonset Point, the first week of which, Dick wrote Pat, "was the longest I've ever known." He disliked studying naval science and ballistics and was no fan of the arduous physical training in the summer humidity. He found solace in his correspondence with his wife.
The Nixons' wartime letters are extraordinary documents, offering vivid evidence of the couple's strengthening bond and the evolution of their individual characters. Their separation allowed these emotionally straitened individuals, who had been married two years earlier, the space to discover and express their profound feeling for each other. Most of these letters were opened last January by the Nixon Foundation in commemoration of what would have been the late president's 100th birthday; they are revealed here in their full context for the first time. And they show a surprisingly tender side of the man who would go on to become a president remembered for his pursuit of domestic enemies, real and imagined, for controversial foreign-policy decisions like the secret bombing of Cambodia and for harsh recorded remarks about people he disliked. This was the side of Richard Milhous Nixon that only one other person—Pat Nixon—ever saw. This was Dick Nixon in love.
Story Continued Below
During and after the White House years the Nixon marriage was often characterized as loveless. In September 1969, in an article in the New York Times, journalist Judith Viorst characterized the Nixons as "people who have lost whatever they once had between them," and quoted critics who called the Nixon marriage "dry as dust." The Washington Post's Ben Bradlee thought Nixon had "sort of a dingy marriage: I have a feeling they never touched each other in any way." Yet insiders who witnessed the Nixons in private described a couple who faced extraordinary pressures, but maintained a warm connection, however frayed it might be at stressful times. Nixon aide Frank Gannon described his boss as "the guy with no game who couldn't believe that he got the hot girl." Connie Stuart, the East Wing chief of staff, Dwight Chapin, deputy assistant to the president and press secretary Helen McCain Smith all saw a playful and warm couple who sometimes held hands in private. But the wartime letters, written at a time of vulnerability and loneliness, reveal their marriage at its most affectionate and heartfelt.
When Dick and Pat Ryan met at a community theater play rehearsal on January 18, 1938, he found that he "could not take my eyes away from her." He drove Pat and a friend home from the rehearsal that night and told her, "I'd like to have a date with you." She replied, "I'm busy." On the third time he drove her home, he said, "Someday I'm going to marry you." She laughed.
Twenty-five-year-old Pat, a glamorous former movie extra actress whom students called "quite a dish," was in her first year teaching business courses at Whittier Union High, just outside of Los Angeles, when she first met Dick. After years of privation and hardship raising her brothers on her own after her parents died during her adolescence, Pat was happy living with roommates and having an independent career. She was beloved by her fellow teachers and by both female and male students, some of whom had crushes on her and even followed her home to spy on her.
Twenty-five-year-old Dick Nixon, by contrast, was unsettled in his life. He found his native ambition blocked. He was living in a small room over his parents' garage. He was working in a law job he had been reluctant to take, did not have a girlfriend and was back home in the California town he had tried to leave behind. He pursued Pat with the same determination and persistence he would later use to win seven elections. He hated ice-skating, but bloodied himself repeatedly to learn so he could go skating with Pat and her friends. On weekends, in order to spend time with her, he drove her to Los Angeles, where she stayed with her half-sister and went on dates with other men. He would return on Sunday afternoons and wait until she was ready for him to drive her home. Six months after they met, Pat went to Michigan to buy a car and did not contact Dick for three months. He eventually tracked her down and persuaded her to give him another chance. By the spring of 1939, Pat too began to love Dick, drawn in by his love of adventure, brilliant mind and high sense of purpose—the latter a quality she shared more than the public recognized.
Three-plus years later, at the midpoint of Dick's training, they met up for a weekend in New York City. As she recounted to his parents later, when Pat first spotted him in the crowd at Pennsylvania Station, Dick looked "so different: younger, real tanned, thinner, and of course very handsome in his blue uniform with all the braid and the blue cap." Dick, she said, wanted to dine "where we can sit with real silver, on a real tablecloth with someone to serve." They splurged on a meal at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. Dick felt all the lonelier on his train ride back to Quonset. At the base, he wrote her: "This weekend was wonderful. Coming back I looked at myself in the mirror and thought how very lucky I was to have you … I was proud of you every minute I was with you."
"I am certainly not the Romeo type," Dick explained. "I may not say much when I am with you—but all of me loves you all the time."
Pat also felt a keen sense of loss. After one late-night phone call, she wrote him what may be one of her first romantic missives: "It's two o'clock but I just had to write you to say how very much I love you." Her pet name for him was "Plum." After telling him about a movie she had seen, she wrote, "I miss Plum's hand very much." In a comment that, in her concern for her husband's burdens, foreshadows her feelings in later years in the White House, Pat wrote, "I hope I said nothing to worry you—when you are working so hard, etc. it would be awful to add to the load."
In October, after Dick was appointed a lieutenant junior grade in the U.S. Naval Reserve, he and Pat received an unwelcome shock. Dick had requested "ships and stations" as his first choice for active duty, with the expectation that he would be assigned to a battle fleet in one of the war zones. Instead he was sent to a naval station at an air base in Ottumwa, Iowa, amid the cornfields in the southeastern corner of the state, 85 miles from Des Moines. The naval air station was not even fully built. "Its uncompleted runway stopped abruptly in the middle of a cornfield," Dick later wrote. Soon the Nixons were itching to leave. In December, Dick spotted a listing on the mess announcement board asking officers in his age group to apply for immediate sea duty; he jumped at the opportunity. When a posting came through for New Caledonia, an archipelago over 2,000 miles north east of Australia, they hightailed it out of Ottumwa. By early May they were in San Francisco.
Pat decided to stay in the Bay Area, which had the best job opportunities, while Dick was overseas. She located a job as a correspondence clerk with the Office of Civilian Defense. After scouring the newspaper, she found a cheap bedroom and bath in a garage attached to a house at the top of a hill at 2829 Divisadero Street, an address Dick would soon come to know by heart. He wrote her there every day.
Pat and Dick returned to Whittier to store their car. After a brief visit, his family and a group of friends went to Union Station in Los Angeles to see the couple off. His parents and his 93-year-old maternal grandmother Alvira were heartsick at his assignment to a war, and not just because they worried about his safety. By joining the navy, Dick had ignored his family's Quaker heritage of pacifism. Nixon was not, however, a pacifist, and never considered being a conscientious objector. Joining the war effort "wasn't a move I made because I was a real brave fella," Dick later told biographer Jonathan Aitken. "It was just simply an innate inner feeling that it was vitally important to be where the action was."
On May 31, 1943, the day he left for the war zone, Dick undertook the somber task of writing his will—a task his legal practice left him well prepared to do—leaving all his property to Pat, appointing her "executive without bond" with "absolute discretion" in settling his estate. Asking for as "simple and inexpensive a funeral as possible," he concluded the brief document by telling Pat to remarry, should he die, and by making clear that remarriage would have no effect on her rights under his will.
Dick headed overseas on an unpleasant 17-day voyage crammed in with 3,000 fellow servicemen on the converted ocean liner SS President Monroe. "Your letters are my only happiness now," Dick wrote her. On their third wedding anniversary (June 21, 1943), Dick penned her letter on his knee in a Quonset hut, while "wishing that you and I could be riding down the coast of Monterey to spend a month at the beach." He spent an hour in a local cathedral "thinking of our years together and loving you every minute of the time … I think of our last few days in S.f.—our walks up Market [St.]—and into the stores. I really get a big bang out of shopping with you—and I hope you buy everything you want always." Reminiscing about the day they met in February 1938, he could not resist tweaking her. "Remember how you treated me then?"
Dick claimed that her job with the OPA was far more important than his had ever been there. "I'm really very proud—as I have always been. I like to tell the gang how smart you are as well as being the most attractive person they'll ever see. Dear Heart you are the tops! Small wonder that I have no other interest than you."
His separation from his wife, combined with his frustrating and ultimately undistinguished role on the outskirts of the real war, brought up old feelings of inadequacy, heightening his attachment to Pat. In a letter replete with the sentiment of his 1938 infatuation, he wrote, "the only thing that matters is that I love you more every day," his postscript describing her powerful impact upon his mood: "When I feel blue—I think of our times together—and it has a miraculous effect. You are a real tonic for me." Because wartime delivery was erratic and undependable and letters would arrive in batches, they agreed to number and date their missives.
Dick did not have with him a good photograph of his wife. He badgered Pat for nine months until she set aside her reservations about doing something self-indulgent and dragged herself to a portrait studio. The beautiful picture left Dick ecstatic. Now he had something tangible to brag about with his wartime buddies. "Everybody raved—wondered how I happened to rate! (I do too)," but the image of his absent wife intensified his loneliness amid the tedium and tension of war.
Dick served with the South Pacific Air Transport Command in General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific theater, supporting ground operations on New Caledonia, Bougainville and Green Island. He prepared flight plans for the cargo and transport planes, ordered supplies for the troops and helped evacuate the wounded and dead. Later he became head of an air transport operation.


text:
Dell is in talks with several private equity firms to go private, according to Bloomberg News.
The stock is up 14% on the news.
Bloomberg tweets: "several large banks have already been contacted about financing an offer."
Dell had an awful Q3, when it missed analysts' expectations of $13.9 billion in revenues and $0.40 in earnings per share. The actual numbers: $13.7 billion in revenue and $0.39 in EPS.
Dell is suffering from a decline in consumer interest in PCs.
PC sales were down almost 5% during the holidays, according to Gartner.
"Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by 'cannibalising' PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs," Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa told Reuters.
"Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC."
The truth is, it's a post-consumer PC world, and Dell is a PC company.
Here's a chart from our presentation on the Death Of PCs that couldn't make it any clearer:


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"If that 600-foot antenna in Bluffton goes down in a storm or something, we could be in real trouble when it comes to radio communications in this community," said Bill Gardner, president of the Amateur Radio Club.
That is why, when Sun City signed up to participate in the Great Central U.S. ShakeOut earthquake drill in April, the club stepped up to offer its services as ham operators.
When the "earthquake struck the community," club members assigned responsibilities in an emergency pulled "go boxes" out of storage, set the radios up in a designated area — in this case, the Pinckney Hall parking lot — and began monitoring conditions throughout the community, including housing at Riverbend.
"It was a success," Gardner said. "We were able to clearly communicate with everyone, stopping to ask residents and even the gate personnel if there was any 'damage.' It was of course a drill, but it showed what we can do."
Amateur radio operators are often called upon by their local government officials to participate in emergency drills. If official communications facilities are damaged or overloaded, hams can supplement existing methods by reaching out to other amateur radio operators to send or receive information. As for the term ham, the origin is long lost although it could just be shorthand for amateur.
Those even vaguely familiar with the term connect hams with QSL postcards, radio kits and Morse Code. Military veterans may connect hams with the MARS shacks that were set up on just about every base around the world. The Military Auxiliary Radio System was manned by amateur radio operators. During Korea, Vietnam and even into the Gulf War operators would receive and send MARSgrams and create phone patches for servicemembers to communicate with their families all over the globe.
"It's just one part of what we do, but it could be important in an emergency," Gardner said. "If it's a hurricane and the order is given to evacuate, we're gone like everyone else, but when we can get back, we'll be able to set up a system and go if need be."
That is the serious aspect of being a radio operator who must be licensed to some level of expertise by the Federal Communications Commission. Each operator is his or her own radio station and as such has a unique call sign. Ham operators identify each other by their signal as easily as by their names.
K1KMV — Gardner's sign — originated in Massachusetts where he received his first license.
"It used to be that if you moved you had to give up your signal and get a new one connected with your new address," he said. "Now that's not true. I've had this one from the beginning."
Nick Horvath, KJ4BSM, received his first license a little farther away — in Hungary.
"The only way we could get news was through Voice of America, so that got me into it," he said.
When he moved to America, his work required that he travel a lot, sometimes driving as many as 7,000 miles in one month. In order to help him reach his destinations over the 32 years with the company, he bought a CB — citizens band radio.
"Then I got a radio kit and learned Morse Code, but I ended up overseas and working 12 hours a day, I had no time and forgot a lot," he said.
When he moved to Sun City, he found the club in the community magazine and emailed member Sherwin Tames. Before long, Horvath was back into radio, complete with a license and a penchant for emergency communications.
Tames, W4QNW, is an avid contest participant. He spends his radio time racking up communications connections with as many other operators around the world as he can.
"I got into radio while I was in Fort Monmouth and walked into the amateur radio room. The operator was talking to a fellow with an English accent. When I asked him who he was talking to, he said it was someone in Kenya and I'm using only 10 watts," Tames said. "I was fascinated."
The contest goals vary, ranging from how many counties can he reach to how many countries. Sun spots and sun storms wreak havoc on radio communications and they run in 11-year cycles.
"We're coming out of that cycle now and the other day I was on the radio from 7 a.m.-4 p.m. using 60 watts and I talked absolutely around the world," he said.
During the meetings, speakers focus on different aspects of radio communications. At the most recent meeting, member Ron Frick, AI4HH, demonstrated some of the latest in software-defined radio — ham radio based primarily on computer programs vice the traditional hardware-defined method.
"It's a minimum of hardware and analog components with a computer to produce all modes," he told the group. "The majority of the work is done in the computer and the software allows for added signals and expansion vice adding hardware or completely rebuilding your radio."
The demonstration was fascinating,
Depending on the strength of the signal and the frequency, Frick tuned in to everything from the menu at an all-you-can-eat restaurant somewhere in the South to the alien-sounding signals of Morse Code users. It was everything a ham operator could use and more, providing expandable capabilities that would have been unimaginable years ago.
Ham operators not only communicate over the air waves, they sometimes meet in person.
Tames went on a cruise in February and in four of the five smallest ports his ship docked, fellow hams met him and they spent the day tuning and talking.
"It's a great way to meet people, especially doing the contests," Tames said. "As I worked my way around the world I picked up a Saudi Arabian station and when he signed off the next one I picked up was an Israeli station. It was wild."
The Amateur Radio Club meets at 7 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month in Pinckney Hall. Call Bill Gardner at 705-6177 or George Crane at 705-5556 for information or stop by Saturday at the Club Fair. Radios will be set up at the Pinckney Hall entrance facing Magnolia Hall and the pavilion.