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The great dictator
Huw Richards
April 20, 2012
South African legend Bennie Osler was known to throw passes he considered inadequate back at the guilty scrum-half © Getty Images
It was 50 years ago next week that one of the great figures of South African rugby died. Bennie Osler was only 60 when he died on April 23, 1962, and his achievements were still fresh in the memory of many observers of the South African game.
He was, with post-war loose forward Hennie Muller, one of only two players to give his name to a chapter in A.C.Parker's 1970 history of the Springboks. The chapter on the 1924 to 1933 period left little doubt as to his importance, since it was called The Bennie Osler Era.
For that decade he bestrode the South African game, playing every single Test match at outside-half. He was, wrote Parker "the greatest individual match-winner and tactical kicker that South African rugby has produced". More than 40 years on, there are still a fair few experts who would continue to argue that case.
Maxwell Price recalled "a stocky, dapper figure, with hands ever ready and always on his toes". He put the fear of God into opponents and sometimes, it would appear, his own team-mates.
Parker wrote of him as 'The Great Dictator', subordinating three-quarters to whichever game he chose. An obsessive practiser by the standard of his times, training five times a week in the run-up to the season then four times weekly while playing, he was known to throw passes he considered inadequate back at the guilty scrum-half and to starve his centres if he felt they had not reached the necessary level of fitness.
Contemporaries from his days playing for Cape Town University in the early 1920s recalled a sharp and incisive attacker with an eye for an opening. But at top level he was firmly identified with a kicking game, among the first of a line of cannon-like Bok kickers later represented by outside-halves like Gerard Bosch, Naas Botha and Morne Steyn.
Parker, who had seen huge amounts of rugby by 1970, wrote that "As a line-kicker one has not seen Osler's equal". The British writer O.L.Owen noted his "ability to plant the ball exactly in the spot most awkward for the other team".
Bennie Osler Factfile
He was also a famed dropper of goals, marking his debut against the British Lions in 1924 with what then counted as a four-pointer and using them to devastating effect in the greatest performance of his career, landing two in his 14 point contribution to the 17-0 beating of the All Blacks at Durban in 1928. Osler took ruthless control of the second-half as the Boks inflicted what remains the second heaviest ever All Black defeat in points terms - it remained top until Australia beat them 28-7 in 1999 - in spite of playing the last 40 minutes with only 14 men.
His style was rather less appreciated when he captained the Boks to Britain in 1931-2. The invariably outspoken E.H.D Sewell described him as "a complete failure". Osler himself recalled that "I played the worst rugby of my career". Yet the Boks won all four internationals, albeit without ever attaining double figures and his cross-kicking for wing Morrie Zimmerman proved a lethally effective tactic.
It was not as if Osler had not been clear about his game plan, saying before the tour that: "We play to our strengths and would be foolish to adopt any other approach. We have a magnificent pack of forwards and our strategy ideally suits the heavy fields that we will encounter in Britain".
In 1933, his final series, there were complaints about the limitations of the Bok game in the five-Test series against Australia. Some accounts report his decision to run the ball in the second Test, which ended in a 21-6 win for the tourists, as almost deliberately aimed at proving his critics wrong, but Price records that he was concussed early in the game and remained little of it.
But Price also reckoned that Osler may unwittingly have inflicted damage on the South African game, arguing that it was ruined for the following decade at least by "the many young fly-halves who tried to emulate his matchless tactical kicking". Many of those young players will have been among the youngsters of the 1920s and 1930s who, Parker remembered, would shout 'I'm Bennie Osler' as they played in parks and on beaches.
His international career was ended by the simple fact of the Boks not playing a Test between 1933 and 1937. When the 1937 team set off for Australasia captain Phil Nel said 'Goodbye to dullness and safety-first methods'.
But the legend, and Osler's records, lived on. He retired as the most-capped and highest scoring Springbok with 17 caps and 46 points. Both marks went down against the 1938 Lions when Boy Louw won his 18th cap and Gerrie Brand's 14 points in his final Test took his career tally to 55. But he retained his standing as the most capped Springbok back for the rest of his life, John Gainsford finally overtaking his total in 1963, and remained the most capped outside-half until Keith Oxlee finally went past him two years after that.
He was, said Parker, a player who "imposed his personality and technique on South African rugby". Seeing the grinding, ruthless pragmatism which can characterise Springbok teams even in the era of freeflowing Super Rugby, it could be argued that his influence has never entirely worn off.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
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Thanksgiving is a holiday of family and friends and of remembering what is important in your life. If your family is like mine, what is most important on Thanksgiving is food. Lots and lots of food.
Thanksgiving is the only time of year that some of my favorite family recipes make an appearance at the table, and all of those dishes are tied to strong memories. As my family has gotten older and the kids have moved all over the country, I worried that some of the recipes would be lost. The obvious solution was to write a cookbook.
I made my cookbook a few years ago by just uploading a word file and cover. Simple! Once I had my files ready, it only took a few minutes to publish and I had the perfect Christmas gift for my entire family.
All those delectable recipes have now been saved in my book The Midwest Meets the South. Though grandma absolutely refused to let me print her famous yeast roll recipe in a book, so some secrets remain just that.
With the Lulu Studio it is now easier than ever to turn your Thanksgiving feast into more than a picked-over turkey carcass and memories. Just choose your binding, type in your recipes, add photos and publish your book. Easy as pie (which you should definitely include a recipe for in the cookbook). You can get started here.
If you add family photos and the stories behind your meals, this simple cookbook can become a keepsake for generations.
Lulu Studio will be my first choice, when I make a second edition. (Grandma, I will get that yeast roll recipe one day!)
Happy eating everyone!
Featuring a variety of writers from all around the world, Lulu guest posts bring expert knowledge to the Lulu Blog for you to enjoy!

subset: commoncrawl


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Licensing | About CDE | State Board | Offices | Staff Directory | Careers at CDE
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Introduction to the Colorado World Languages Standards
"Standards for world languages learning: Preparing for the 21st century"
"Knowing how, when, and why to say what to whom."
In the 21st century society, the study of more than one language is not only absolutely essential to the core curriculum, but also imperative to the economic growth and continued prosperity of the United States. Language and communication are essential to the human experience. "Knowing how, when, and why to say what to whom" are the words that encompass all the linguistic and social knowledge required for effective human-to-human interaction. Students must be linguistically and culturally equipped to communicate successfully in our multilingual, multicultural world. It is vital for students to develop and maintain proficiency in English and in at least one other language. Students from non-English speaking backgrounds must also have opportunities to develop proficiency in their first language.
Supporting this vision are four assumptions about language and culture, learners of language and culture, and language and culture education:
Competence in more than one language and culture enables people to:
- Communicate with other people in other cultures in a variety of settings
- Look beyond their customary borders
- Develop insight into their own language and culture
- Act with greater awareness of self, of other cultures, and their own relationship to those cultures
- Gain direct access to additional bodies of knowledge
- Participate more fully in the global community and workforce
All students can be successful language and culture learners, and they:
- Must have access to language and culture study that is integrated into the entire school experience
- Benefit from the development and maintenance of proficiency in more than one language
- Learn in a variety of ways and settings
- Acquire proficiency at varied rates
Language and culture education is part of the core curriculum, and it:
- Is tied to program models that incorporate effective strategies, assessment procedures, and technologies
- Reflects evolving standards at the national, state, and local levels
- Develops and enhances basic communication skills and higher order thinking skills
All students will apply the language skills learned:
- Within the school setting
- At home, in the community, and abroad
- To interpret global events from multicultural perspectives
- To expand cross-cultural and intercultural understanding
- For increased career opportunities
- To become lifelong learners for personal enjoyment and enrichment
The Colorado Academic Standards for World Languages are based on these four assumptions. For these assumptions to be successful, the target language must be used most of the time. Acquisition of language occurs when students understand messages through listening, reading, and viewing. Students demonstrate acquisition through speaking and writing. The best environment for second language acquisition is one in which teachers use the target language instead of teaching about the target language. This environment sets the scene for students to better produce and use the language that will help them later to be prepared as multilingual global citizens.


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ISS Expedition Eight crew biographies
The two man Expedition Eight crew, comprising Commander Michael Foale, and Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri, will welcome the Soyuz TMA-4 crew on board the International Space Station when they arrive on 21 April 2004.
The Expedition Eight crew has been on board ISS since 20 October 2003 when they arrived with the Soyuz TMA-3 together with Spanish ESA astronaut Pedro Duque. Expedition Nine, comprising Commander Gennadi Padalka and Flight Engineer Mike Fincke, who will arrive with the Soyuz TMA-4, will replace the Expedition Eight crew.
On 29 April 2004, after a six-month stay on board ISS, the Expedition Eight crew will return to Earth in the Soyuz TMA-3 together with ESA astronaut André Kuipers.
C. Michael Foale
NASA astronaut
Michael Foale was born 6 January 1957 in Louth, England. He is married with two children.
Foale graduated from Queens' College, Cambridge, with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics, Natural Sciences Tripos in 1978. He went on to complete his doctorate in Laboratory Astrophysics at Cambridge University in 1982.
He held several posts at NASA's Johnson Space Center before being selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in June 1987.
Foale is a veteran of five previous spaceflights, including a 145-day mission to the Russian Mir space station in 1997. During his previous missions Foale has been on three spacewalks (EVAs).
Michael Foale is currently Commander of ISS Expedition Eight.
Alexander Yurievich Kaleri
Soyuz-TMA Commander, Instructor/Test cosmonaut, S.P. Korolev RSC Energia, Russia.
Born 13 May 1956 in Yurmala, Latvia. Married with one son.
In 1979, Kaleri graduated from Moscow's Physics and Technology Institute (MFTI) as a specialist in Aircraft Flight Dynamics and Control. He continued at MFTI and in 1983 gained a postgraduate qualification in Mechanics of Fluids and Plasma.
In 1984 he was enlisted in the NPO Energia cosmonaut corps. He qualified as a test cosmonaut in November 1986.
Kaleri has been on three previous space missions, each of them a long stay mission to the Russian space station Mir. He has made four spacewalks during his previous missions.
Alexander Kaleri is currently Flight Engineer of ISS Expedition Eight.
Last update: 17 March 2004


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Okay, so you're asking, why a post about Zambonis? I will tell you. Zambonis=hockey. Hockey=most amazing sport. See?
These truck-like cleaners were attributed to Frank Zamboni who was a U.S. inventor and an Italian-American (all the more reason to like him). He began in the electrical business, branched out to electrical refrigeration units, and then opened his own ice rink in 1940.
Eventually, he figured out a way to resurface his ice rink more quickly and the job went from 90 minutes to around 10 minutes. He patented his machines in 1953. While the term Zamboni is patented, it's sometimes broadly used to refer to any brand of ice resurfacer (not exactly accurate). He was elected into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1990 for his contributions to the sport. I just think the machine is pure awesomeness (as do most 5 year olds).
A Zamboni works by shaving off the surface of the ice with a very sharp blade. Then an auger picks up the shaved ice while hot water is sprayed to create the new ice surface. Cool, huh? They have a maximum speed of about 9-10 mph so we're not talking NASCAR here but it's all good. They still have the cool factor.
Maybe, one day, I'll even get to drive one around (highly unlikely due to my over-enthusiasm but a woman can dream)! In the meantime, although I'm impatient waiting the 6-7 minutes for the Zamboni to finish (so I can finally see some HOCKEY), I'll enjoy watching it make its laps (yes, I am easily amused).


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AAN releases updated guideline for treating essential tremor
The American Academy of Neurology is releasing an updated guideline on how to best treat essential tremor, which is the most common type of tremor disorder and is often confused with other movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease. The guideline is published in the October 19, 2011, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Essential tremor affects the hands, head and voice and can be disabling for the estimated 10 million people in the United States living with the disorder. Essential tremor usually starts after age 40, although symptoms can appear at any age and may cause problems with daily activities such as eating, writing, sewing or shaving.
According to the guideline, the high blood pressure drug propranolol and the drug primidone, which is used to treat seizures, are the most effective at improving shaking in people with essential tremor. The guideline also found the seizure drugs gabapentin and topiramate, along with the high blood pressure drugs atenolol and sotalol and the anxiety drug alprazolam, can be helpful.
"More and better research is needed since not all people with essential tremor benefit from these drugs," said lead guideline author Theresa A. Zesiewicz, MD, with the University of South Florida in Tampa and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. "For people who are not benefitting from these drugs, it's important they work with their neurologist to explore other types of treatments."
The guideline found two types of brain surgery, deep brain stimulation and thalamotomy, may be helpful in treating essential tremor for those patients who do not benefit from drug treatment.
In addition, there was weak evidence to show the high blood pressure drugs nadolol and nimodipine, as well as the seizure drug clonazepam and botulinum toxin A, may be helpful in treating people with essential tremor.
This updated guideline differs from the Academy's 2005 guideline in that it does not recommend using the seizure drugs levetiracetam and flunarizine or the drug 3,4-diaminopyridine (used in rare muscle diseases) to treat tremors of the arms and legs. In addition, the updated guideline found insufficient evidence to support using clozapine, a drug used to treat schizophrenia, to help people with essential tremor.


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The oem "horns" on my 2000 RT just don't cut it in Chicago traffic.
Whaddaya like as a LOUD replacement? What's an easy or good or effective brand and install, pls?
I always like those dual tone Fiamms on my airheads. Scared the crap outta the cagers. Almost woke up a couple of 'em!


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So, currently me and my 4 friends are all sophomores in Computer Science and we are all working the same job during the summer at a help-desk so moral of the story is we will all be able to program for hours a day every day. So we want to make a game, we are wondering what language would be best, We know Java extensively but we have already decided that we probably wont be able to work with that. We also know C but we don't know anything about library's or graphics. So if you guys had to recommend something would you recommend sticking with C and figuring out the graphics or would you recommend learning c++ (we hear it is pretty similar) and learn the graphics and stuff for that? Our game is going to be 3d, 3rd person if that helps. Thanks for any info you guys can give us, it will be much appreciated.}
**Edit** oh and i forgot to mention, would it be smart to use an engine and try and learn all of that? or just do it hon solo all from scratch?


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Instead of Kris/Jon, they're the new Ray/Yolanda. Navigationally challenged, but good at the tasks and with a serious problem in roadblock division (Ray did skydiving (?) and bungee jumping (??) which left Yolanda to perform the final 3 roadblocks). After this leg he has one more roadblock left (I might do some roadblock analysis for this season).
also wanted to add, no extra clips this week, you see CBS didn't put out the so-called press release this week and with the press release comes the extra clip, so Happy Holidays CBS Ho Ho Ho
Since I know it's Ron & Christina who get eliminated I bet the Speed Bump gets completed during the wait time after landing.Or it could happen amid tasks and R&C have some big problem.
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Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:03:36 GMT (1.8 minutes ago)
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• Fits most vehicles


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In the decade since Jeffrey Loria bought the Florida Marlins, no major-league team has drawn fewer fans. The fact that the Marlins have played all their home games in the Dolphins' football stadium, which seats seventy-five thousand, only underscores the indignity. Last August, during an afternoon game that had been rescheduled in anticipation of Hurricane Irene, an enterprising Marlins fan completed a lap of the grounds and counted only three hundred and forty-seven spectators, including him. He tweeted his tally along with the comment "Still not the smallest crowd I've seen here." The team typically claimed season-ticket sales of five thousand in recent years, although David Samson, the Marlins' president, and Loria's stepson by a former marriage, freely concedes that was a lie. "It was always two thousand," he told me, and later estimated that, by this standard, the Marlins not only were the least popular baseball team ("by three standard deviations") but ranked a hundred and twenty-fifth among pro sports franchises nationally, below all the hockey teams, and below even a handful of minor-league teams.
They are now the Miami Marlins, as a result of a deal that Loria and Samson struck with Miami-Dade County politicians. The politicians got their city's name attached to the unloved local baseball team; and the Marlins got about five hundred million dollars to help pay for their new ballpark, in Little Havana, on the site of the former Orange Bowl. The deal may have cost the former Miami mayor Carlos Alvarez his job—he lost a recall election spurred by a Tea Party billionaire—and the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into the stadium's financing. But, on a morning in late February, Loria arrived at the Marlins' spring-training complex, in Jupiter, eighty miles north of Miami, with the untroubled look of a man whose lifelong ambition was finally being realized. The stadium wasn't just any old luxury-box conduit he'd succeeded in building; it was a lasting work of architecture, a contribution to the skyline of a major American city, "in the spirit of Richard Meier," he said. "Lots of glass, lots of steel, beautiful white surfaces everywhere, curves, things that delight the eye."
Loria, who is seventy-one, has a strikingly broad face that accentuates the tautness of his bronzed skin, and narrow eyes that are cautiously delighted. He grew up in Manhattan, graduated from Yale and Columbia Business School, and made a fortune as an art dealer, specializing in twentieth-century paintings and sculpture. While still in his twenties, he wrote two books, "Collecting Original Art" and "What's It All About, Charlie Brown?," a kind of precursor to "The Tao of Pooh." Baseball was his other passion—he was All City as a second baseman, at Stuyvesant High School, in the late nineteen-fifties—and in 1989, in his middle age, he bought a minor-league team in Oklahoma City. Next, he upgraded to the Montreal Expos, but he failed in his attempts to get public funding for a new stadium there, and left the team on the cusp of extinction when he traded up for the Marlins, who quickly won him a World Series ring, in 2003. The fans remained skeptical.
In Jupiter, Loria stopped to lean against a chain-link fence near one of the practice fields. He greeted people coming and going, corrected their grammar ("You haven't 'run' that fast, not 'ran' "), and used a towel to swat at a persistent insect. His mind seemed partly elsewhere. "You walk into that ballpark and see it, you're going to say, 'Oh, my goodness,' " he said, and began describing a towering mechanized sculpture by the Pop-art all-star Red Grooms that had been built to enliven the outfield backdrop. "It's only going to be activated when somebody hits a home run on our team. There are two marlins that spin around. One dives into the water while the other's exiting the water—a great splash of water. Another marlin goes straight up to the top of the sculpture and spins. There are flamingos that flap their wings. There's an L.E.D. light show. There's music. There's a pair of doves that fly in opposite directions. There's—what's the word?—a cacophony of things going on." He didn't mention the tropical aquariums that have been installed behind home plate, or the outpost of a South Beach hotel lounge, the Clevelander, under construction next to the bullpen in left field. Who could have predicted that the man often blamed for killing the Expos would prove to be the second coming of Bill Veeck?
"I think it's important for people to use their eyes and to be entertained," Loria went on, describing the unlikely convergence of his two great loves. "Baseball is an entertainment business in many ways." He was wearing a black cap with the team's new logo—a rainbow-colored "M," with a flourish resembling a marlin's dorsal fin and bill—and explained that the uniform redesign, in which he played an active role, had been two years in the making. "The colors did not just come arbitrarily," he said. "The red-orange is for those incredible sunsets. The yellow is the sunlight that you see during the day. The blue is the water that surrounds the community." Goodbye, teal. The colorscape at the new Marlins Park, meanwhile, was "sort of an homage to Miró's palette," Loria explained. "The outfield is all green—Miró's green."
Loria gazed out at his players, several of them newly acquired in a rare splurge to accompany the relaunch. ("After years of shopping at the Dollar Store, they decided to go down to Neiman Marcus," Josh Friedman, a Miami radio commentator, told me.) "Whether it's a collection of paintings or a group of talented athletes, it's about making them all fit, making them juxtapose against one another and work off one another and complement one another," Loria said. There, off in the distance, fielding grounders, was his new shortstop, the ex-Met Jose Reyes, to whom he'd just committed a hundred and six million dollars, helping to complete an "all-Latino infield," as he put it: fitting for Little Havana. Immediately to Reyes's right was Hanley Ramirez, the team's former shortstop, who was less than happily moving to third—Jackson Pollock switching to a brush for the good of the gallery. "I pointed out to him that it was an opportunity to be an All-Star at two positions." The second baseman Omar Infante passed by and nodded shyly. "Vacuum cleaner," Loria said. "Shffff! What hands!" The veteran lefty Mark Buehrle, a new addition to the starting rotation (fifty-eight million), teased the owner from the batting cage, inviting him to practice bunting. "I feel like a father with twenty-five kids," Loria said.
Here, too, came the voluble new manager, Ozzie Guillen, arguably the most heralded of the new hires. Guillen, talking boisterously with an assistant coach, introduced a coarser tone to the proceedings. "I heard you say the F-word," Loria chided.
Guillen ignored the remark, slapped his boss's hand, and patted him on the shoulder several times. "If I get this man to where he should be, it gonna be a raise," he said.
Loria lifted his eyebrows. "The World Series?" he asked.
"Oh, no, that's up to them," Guillen said, and turned to look back at the players on the field.
"Oh, so they should get the raise," Loria said.
"I get paid to win World Series," Guillen continued.
"O.K.," Loria said, verging on impatient. "So just do it."
Guillen shook his head. "They gonna do it," he said, and gestured at the field again. "My job? Hey, listen, if I get involved in the game more often, that means we're horseshit. See, I stay away from them? That means we winning."
"Be smart," Guillen said, before disappearing into the clubhouse. "Make sure Ozzie's not involved during the game. As soon as I start making moves, I might fuck it up."
"It'll never be boring with him," Loria said.
Guillen reappeared sometime later with a fungo bat, which he used to play an imaginary round of golf behind the backstop. "I guess Loria's in town," he announced, after noticing an assistant who was filming batting practice. "Everybody's working. Jeffrey just show up, and everybody has something to do. Look, I got a fungo in my hands!" He released the bat, laughed, and rested his arms on the backstop, next to the cameraman. "This is the best job," he said. "Do nothing."
Guillen is forty-eight and still spry by managerial standards, although he has consumed enough vodka and Budweiser—"I drink a lot, bro"—to obscure any trace of his welterweight days as a Gold Glove shortstop. ("You hit .220, you better catch that shit," he likes to say, selling his career average short by forty points.) His mustache has expanded into a goatee, and his habit of protruding his jaw, in mock incredulousness, can give him the aspect of a bulldog. He is a born performer—he says he sometimes wishes he had become a toreador instead of a ballplayer—and one of his recurring acts is to call into question what a major-league manager actually does to earn his paycheck (two and a half million dollars a year, in his case). "This is not instructional league," he said this spring. "We not teaching here." He's not strategizing, either, if he can help it. "They don't have to play my style," he argued. "What's any manager's style?"
Nor does Guillen pore over his roster in an attempt to familiarize himself with personnel. "A lot of people say I'm un-fucking-prepared," he volunteered one afternoon in his office, and did little to dispel the notion, shuffling distractedly through some papers on a fake-mahogany desk that he deemed too big for his purposes by at least seventy-five per cent. "I no like this desk," he said. "This is overrated." He required only space enough for his can of dip tobacco and his scented candle (peach cilantro, to counteract the clubhouse stench). His audience wanted to know who would be pitching, where, and when. Guillen finally shrugged and said that the pitching coach was next door—why not ask him? "That's why you got fucking guys there as the coaches."
In simple terms, Guillen's job is to talk—to provide the soundtrack for Loria's visual delights. In his eight years managing the White Sox, before signing with the Marlins, last fall, he became the sport's prime magnet for microphones and tape recorders, even if half of what he said was unintelligible or unfit to broadcast. (He is sometimes said to speak neither English nor Spanish, "just Ozzie.") His candor endeared him to the beat guys, if not always to his bosses, to whom he seldom deferred. And his willingness to expound on open-ended questions, of the "tell us what you saw out there" variety, helped distract journalists from bothering his players, who were often grateful. Not that Guillen has ever hesitated to rag on his players if the mood strikes. "You see Buehrle pitch spring training?" he'll ask. "Better go look at the minor-league system. It can be pretty ugly. It's gonna feel like, Oh, my God, who did we sign?" Guillen revels in his honesty. On his twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, a few weeks ago, he was asked by his twenty-six-year-old son, Oney, how he was planning to celebrate. "I'm going to fuck your mom very well tonight," he said.
Earlier that day, I had watched practice with Oney, who explained his father's blunt nature and quick wit in terms of his upbringing in Venezuela. Guillen's parents divorced when he was nine, and he was more or less adopted by a man who happened to be the uncle of the Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio. He quit school, and left Venezuela at sixteen, speaking little English and weighing less than a hundred and fifty pounds. "He said, 'I have to be loud, because if I wasn't I wouldn't be noticed,' " Oney told me. "It's crazy. He goes, 'I don't even speak good English, and they're paying me a shitload of money to go talk on ESPN.' " In Venezuela, Ozzie Guillen has become something of a national hero.
At one point, Ozzie buzzed past us in a golf cart and yelled, "Eyewash!" The players were lined up behind home plate and taking turns running to second, legging out would-be doubles. "Those guys know how to run the fucking bases," Oney said, translating for me. " 'Eyewash' is basically: You're not really doing anything important—you're just pretending to do something. You just want other people to look at you." It was a common refrain of Guillen's, I learned. Four- and five-hour practices in February, such as the Marlins had endured in previous years, were just for show: eyewash. (Unlike in Guillen's own playing days, professional athletes now work out year-round and require little conditioning to return to form.) Banning alcohol in the clubhouse, as the Red Sox had just done, in an act of public atonement for last September's sodden collapse? Eyewash. ("They will drink somewhere, somehow.") Guillen's embrace of free speech was nearly matched by his distaste for pomp. One had to wonder if high-concept uniforms and flapping flamingos didn't fit the criteria as well.
A number of minutes passed with no sign of the manager's returning. "See, my dad went inside and Joey's doing all of this," Oney said, referring to Joey Cora, the former second baseman and Ozzie's best friend, who was using a fungo bat to conduct an infield drill. "Right now, he doesn't have a TV in his office, so he's probably just sitting there. He likes to eat popcorn. He got an iPad—he just likes playing dominoes on it."
Eyewash or no, thoughts of branding were inescapable in Jupiter. Loria and Samson had agreed to let their overhauled team be the subject of Showtime's documentary series "The Franchise," and welcomed production crews to camp with no restrictions. "I make it very clear to the players, 'Hey, that's the way Marlins gonna be,' " Guillen explained, after a team meeting in which the open-door policy was laid out. " 'Be not a bore. Just show the people from the front office you're not a bore.' " Easy for some: Jose Reyes, Hanley Ramirez, and the center fielder Emilio Bonifacio took to calling themselves the Dominican Trio, and perfected a series of handshakes and gestures while hitching rides around the practice fields on a golf cart. By early March, Bonifacio's ritual of forming a sideways "V" over his eye and shouting "Lo viste?" ("Did you see that?") had been merchandised, with a shipment of T-shirts bearing the team's new slogan. Martha Stewart was photographed performing the gesture with Loria and his wife at an event in Miami.
Others, like the outfielders Logan Morrison and Bryan Petersen, were more proactive. Not content with mere supporting roles, they decided to film their own reality series, "The Petey and LoMo Show," for SBNation.com's YouTube channel. Last year, Petersen started a production company, Legit Films, back home in California. (He also keeps a skateboard and a Trader Joe's bag above his locker.) Morrison is the team's leading tweeter—aside from Guillen, that is, who was once fined by the league for posting during a game—with ninety-seven thousand followers. "Both of us are pretty creative guys, I guess you'd say," Petersen told me. "The premise of the show is what big-leaguers do when they get bored in spring training." They formed a Vespa-riding gang, the Dirty V's; freestyled to Justin Bieber's "Never Say Never"; vandalized a house rented by some teammates; and, in keeping with the new Marlins spirit, attended ArtiGras, Jupiter's arts festival, where they engaged in a painting competition.
The cleanup hitter formerly known as Mike Stanton, a.k.a. Bigfoot, announced on Twitter that he would henceforth be answering to Giancarlo, his given name, prompting confusion on the copy desks of the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post. Leo Nuñez, the team's closer for the past three seasons, was also going by his given name, but this posed a problem of another order. His proper name, it turned out, was Juan Carlos Oviedo; Leo Nuñez was a childhood friend in the Dominican Republic whose identity he had borrowed in order to appear younger. The State Department has yet to issue him a visa to return to the United States as his true self. Guillen liked to joke that, if and when the legal situation was resolved, he'd be blessed to have thirteen pitchers with only twelve bodies: "We gonna have Nuñez in the seventh and Oviedo in the eighth."
Heath Bell, the new closer, and a self-proclaimed "idiot" ("I'm kind of like Ozzie, but a player"), spent some time in the early goings contemplating a change of entrance music, to suit his new surroundings. "Can't just be, like, the new groove," he said. "See, a closer's song has to fit that person and it has to fit that moment. That's the way I look at it." With the Padres, he used "Blow Me Away," by Breaking Benjamin. "I'm known for that song out West," he said, and added that he'd been distressed to discover that his brand was not strong in the larger East Coast media markets. "It's, like, 'Have you not seen me pitch for the last three years?' " If Bell was knowingly channelling Kenny Powers, from HBO's "Eastbound & Down," he didn't let on. "If you ever heard the song, it talks about saving us all, and it's got bells ringing in the background, so it's kind of like 'Hell's Bells,' but it's not. My last name's Bell, so I kind of like bells." On second thought, he was thinking of just sticking with it. "Might be a little different spin, but the song's pretty much the same," he said. "If the season goes good, I might mix it up. On throwback days, I love to play Anita Ward: 'Ring My Bell.' "
And then there were the Guillen boys, Oney and Ozzie, Jr., pimping Dad's brand for their marketing agency, Triple Crown, and overseeing his Web site, OzzieGuillen.com, where the manager blogs occasionally under the tagline "Listen up, I've got a lot to say!" (A third son, Ozney, is a sophomore on the Miami Dade College baseball team.) Ozzie, Jr., is twenty-seven and getting used to the fact that he is now older than many of his father's players. "Everyone gets to be their own character," he told me, after running wind sprints with some relief pitchers who had dared him to keep up. "That's the best thing in any work atmosphere, that people get to be themselves."
Oney likened his father to the bombastic New York Jets coach Rex Ryan, another profane cable-TV star, and said, "Baseball needs more people like that—charismatics. Society and sports have become so watered down."
About a week into camp, Ozzie, Oney, and Ozzie, Jr., were pulled over by a state trooper while driving south from Jupiter to Miami. "Three Mexicans in a car—that's not a good thing," Ozzie later joked. "Guy chased me for maybe two miles. I was ready to fucking blow. 'I'm behind a truck. Why the fuck you stop me?' 'Where are you coming from?' 'Jupiter.' 'Oh, I knew it was you, Ozzie! How you doing? My nephew is gonna be there today.' " The officer asked for an autograph, and sent them on their way. So maybe there were Marlins fans out there, after all.
Forty thousand people, in fact, turned up at FanFest, which is where the Guillens and, evidently, the cop's nephew were headed. It was the public unveiling of the new ballpark, which seats thirty-seven thousand, and there were autograph signings and town-hall-style meetings with the players and management. Shortly after I arrived, I heard a man exclaiming, "Look at that. Look how big that is!" He had just ascended the spiral ramp to the concourse level and caught a glimpse of the "home-run feature," as the Red Grooms sculpture has come to be known. It's impossible to miss, looming as it does some seventy-two feet above the wall in left-center field, in bright pink, yellow, and green. I'd seen it described on blogs as "psychedelic" and an "acid trip come to life," but my flashback was to Candy Land.
David Samson, the club's president, met me on the concourse and led me on a tour of the perimeter, stopping occasionally to pick up litter. Samson is the public face of upper management—Loria likes to sit in the front row, but otherwise maintains a low profile—and he seldom moved twenty feet without receiving feedback from strangers: "Mazel tov." "This must be what Paradise looks like." "We waited for this for years and years." "For the record, you did the right thing, waiting all this long. Now you have a product. I would not have spent one penny at the other stadium. Seriously, man, you're a very good businessman, contrary to what everybody says."
He took the jabs in stride. "We could have had a new ballpark open in 2005, with no roof," he told me. "It's just not worth it." There was no roof above us now. The popular notion of Florida as all sunshine and beaches comes from visiting one's grandparents at Christmas, or from spring break, with weather of the sort Samson and I were enjoying: breezy, clear skies, seventy-five degrees. Samson wore his blue oxford shirt unbuttoned to the chest. In the summer, it rains just about every evening, and the humidity is enough to stifle most ambitions to go out, which is why Marlins Park has a retractable roof and a giant sliding window facing east, toward downtown. Ask a Marlins player to name his favorite thing about the new building and the chances are that he'll say, "Air-conditioning."
"We've been called a small-market team," Samson said. "It's absurd. We were a low-revenue team. Miami's not a small market by any stretch." He pointed out a concession specifically designed for children, with a lower counter, and a sweets station ("It's Miami—people love candy"). Other revenue-generating efficiencies were less immediately visible, like the ability, with digital technology, to target different demographics. "We have companies who don't want to advertise the same thing to people on the upper deck that they want to advertise to people on the main level," he said. "So picture a car company. They have a certain brand of car that they'll advertise on the vista level, and another kind of car that they'll advertise down below. And that's the same with Pepsi." Research shows that Hispanics prefer more sugar in their drinks, so a majority of the soda fountains at the Cuban-sandwich counter, say, will pour regular Pepsi, while the other fountains are more diversified, with Pepsi Max and Sierra Mist.
A woman wearing Marlins gear (new and old) approached Samson with a suggestion about installing high tables, near the concessions, where customers could eat hot dogs before returning to their seats. She was a season-ticket holder, a probable Sierra Mist drinker. He was unpersuaded. "If we do tables, there'll be people who actually hang out for multiple innings," he said. "We want flow." He gestured at a stylized art installation mounted on the wall above them, depicting the history of the Marlins franchise through iconic players and moments: from the gray-haired knuckleballer Charlie Hough, floating the first pitch, in 1993, to the catcher Pudge Rodriguez, hanging on to the ball in a bracing post-season collision, in 2003, and on up to the sensitive star Hanley Ramirez, following through on a home-run swing. "People will be here, and they'll look this way at the art, and then move on to the next piece of art," Samson said, demonstrating as he spoke. The woman rolled her eyes. "People who are coming to the game, they don't want to see the art," she said.
Samson waited for the philistine to move along, and then continued, "Watch what happens to the art. See, you have to walk. See how it's moving? It's 3-D. It's called 'Baseball in Motion.' Remember all the talk in the off-season about us trading Hanley? We knew we weren't trading him, because he was in this piece of art." He added, "We don't mind criticism. It starts with Jeffrey. Artists are generally not famous until they're dead."
I wanted to see the aquariums, so we ducked into an elevator with Mark Buehrle, who must outweigh Samson by at least a hundred pounds. (Samson's not a tall guy; in Montreal, he was sometimes called Little Napoleon.) Buehrle waited for the doors to close and then body-checked Samson into the wall. "Hey, this is a new elevator," Samson said. "Dude, first blood!" Buehrle replied.
Down at field level, Buehrle took refuge in the Marlins' clubhouse, which is dark and plush and features nine leather recliners—a lineup's worth—with drink holders on both arms, arranged in an arc around a bank of televisions the size of scoreboards: a man cave amid all the campy modernism. Samson led me out onto the field, where the aquariums' manufacturer was removing blue tarps from the backs of the tanks. There are two of them, each holding four hundred and fifty gallons and stretching from the dugouts to just behind home plate. "I'm the guy who would spend his whole allowance throwing Ping-Pong balls to win goldfish at the state fair," Samson said. "I figured, we can put brick, we can do padding—how boring!" In early February, the team invited a camera crew from National Geographic to watch the first baseman Gaby Sanchez throw a ball as hard as he could at the tanks, demonstrating their shatterproof design. "Didn't even make a scratch," Sanchez told me. "I was standing pretty close and I wheeled it."
Samson seemed to notice me squinting to find the small tetras and angelfish swimming around the coral. "This is only the beginning of the fish," he said. "These are the starter fish."
"People here get excited about fish behind home plate," Ozzie, Jr., said, a few hours later. "Come on. It's a fishtank!" He was getting restless after listening to too many inane questions during one of the town-hall portions of FanFest, and beginning to remember why he had once told a Chicago sports columnist that Miami was "the fakest place in the world."
But there were perks to the glitz. Soon a female television reporter appeared in the dugout, in heels, looking for players to interview and turning heads on the field. "You don't get that in the Midwest," Ozzie, Jr., conceded. "That's some 'Monday Night Football' stuff right there." He excused himself to go find out her name.
The Guillens were still adjusting to life at the center of the circus, as observers had lately taken to calling the new Marlins project. Ozzie, Sr., too, had dismissed Miami as fake last summer, at a time when he was angling for a long-term extension from the White Sox, which he was denied. Back in Jupiter the next morning, Guillen reflected on FanFest with his coaching staff, and brought up one of the questions he'd heard, about how many World Series titles it would take for the Marlins to rename the new building Ozzie Guillen Stadium. "I win one championship, you never gonna see Ozzie Guillen again," he said, as his players began stretching. "Soon as I gonna win this thing? Baaah. Done!" Last fall, he'd travelled to Barcelona, and now, in spare moments, he thought of returning. "Bringing baseball to Spain gonna be my next job," I heard him say. "Just fly me there and I talk baseball Monday to Friday. Saturday, watch bullfights."
The Showtime crew left camp (they'll be in and out all season), and the initial media rush to capture the new arrivals in their new duds subsided. "This it?" Guillen asked one day, when the pack of reporters waiting for his monologue had shrunk noticeably. "It get boring already?" Yet boredom, in spite of the Marlins' mission, is baseball's constant, its great equalizer. "Every month is one boring game, two, three boring games," Guillen admitted to me. "That's gonna happen, because that's part of the season." The baseball season is longer and more relentless than that of any other sport, with few days off; six weeks of preliminary spring training only aggravates the condition. A local TV reporter, dropping in for the first time, noticed the scented candle on Guillen's desk and asked if it was a calming device or an indication that he had mellowed. "Fuck that, man," Guillen replied. "I never be calm. I be Ozzie Guillen."
Guillen sometimes likened the Marlins' new situation to that of a hobo who'd been living under a bridge for twenty years suddenly winning the lottery and using his windfall to build a gaudy mansion. He also said, "Can't wait till the fucking games start—at least we can talk about how horseshit they are." He meant the players.
The Marlins played their first game in the new ballpark, an exhibition against the University of Miami Hurricanes, a few days after FanFest. The outfield smelled of wet paint, and I soon realized that a large swath of the center-field backdrop had turned black. Several Marlins had complained that they wouldn't be able to pick up the ball coming out of a pitcher's hand against the brightness of Miró's green. Some left-handed batters had gone even further, and grumbled that the Red Grooms sculpture posed more of a potential distraction. What if they were to face a right-handed submarine-ball pitcher, in the Dan Quisenberry mold? They'd be forced to cast their eyes to the left of the mound, in the direction of the pink flamingos. "If it is an issue, it can no longer be there," the utility man Greg Dobbs told the Miami Herald's Clark Spencer. The sidearm reliever Ryan Webb dismissed such talk as a "hitter's problem," adding, "There's also a fishtank behind home plate. If I get caught looking at that, I'm not going to make a good pitch, am I?"
During batting practice, David Samson assured his special assistant Jeff Conine, the former Marlins first baseman, that the blacked-out patch—the so-called batter's eye—was currently bigger than Major League Baseball requires. "Why don't you put, like, these swirly things on the outside, like pinwheels, and have them move with the wind?" Conine replied, sarcastically. "All about the fan experience."
The sculpture cost two and a half million dollars to build and install, the equivalent of Ozzie Guillen's salary. It wasn't going anywhere—and, alas, it wasn't fully operative. A live inspection of the light show, with spinning marlins and flying doves, would have to wait until April. But its presence introduced some complications to the usual ground rules which required elaboration. "You'll see a yellow line underneath the waves to the right of the sculpture," Samson said. "There is a triangle of concrete there. If the ball hits that concrete, it's a home run. But if it hits the top of the circular padding of the home-run feature, and bounces back in play, that's in play." Two high-school teams had played here in a "soft launch" the night before, and the umpires had found these quirks sufficiently confusing that they were granted permission just to wing it, in the hope that teen-agers wouldn't hit the ball that far. "By the way, someone's going to have to crush it to bounce it off the feature," Samson said.
A series of what sounded like ringing gongs quickly proved that assertion wrong. The roof was open and the sliding window closed, creating an unanticipated wind effect, with the easterly breeze seeming to double back on itself. The balls were soaring, in some cases out into the concourse and in others into the Grooms. "Samson's pissed," the catcher John Buck said. "Ballpark isn't big enough." Buck and another catcher, Luke Montz, were trading moon shots, dinging the sculpture a few times each. "Like Buck said, it feels like you're going to get yelled at for hitting Grandpa's barn with a ball," Montz said, a little sheepishly.
Guillen arrived late, and missed the impromptu home-run derby. "The fucking roof is going to be closed every time," he said later, after learning of the wind pattern. "We come here to win games. We don't come here to look good." Half of the Marlins had stayed behind in Jupiter, to play an afternoon game against the Detroit Tigers. Guillen saw that game through—a loss—and then caught a ride to Miami. No cops this time. He speculated that his unsung predecessors would have been left to drive themselves, but "me, Ozzie Guillen? Had a limo."
The sky darkened, as a wall of clouds blew overhead. The roof began to close—it takes thirteen minutes—and narrowly beat the rain. Batter up! Mark Buehrle was on the mound, in his first appearance as a Marlin. He looked sharp, contradicting Guillen's disparaging jokes by making quick work of the Hurricane batters in the first two innings, but then he loaded the bases in the third, and yielded a double down the line, past a diving Hanley Ramirez. This resulted in the first standing ovation at Marlins Park, which was in support of the visiting team.
I slipped out of the press box in the fifth, in order to meet John Routh on the concourse level, behind home plate. Routh seemed as good an authority as anyone on the vagaries of local fandom. He was the original team mascot, Billy the Marlin, and served in that punishing role for ten seasons, eventually making eighty thousand dollars a year, until Loria and Samson arrived and decided that his younger understudy was ready for a promotion. "My motto back then was 'Sacrifice the body for the laugh,' and I'm paying for it now," he said. "I got two bad knees, a bad back." Now in his early fifties, he is the executive director of the University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame. He had attended the game with his friend Wes Lockard, the original Burnie, the mascot of the Miami Heat.
Lockard excused himself to take some pictures of the ballpark, and Routh reminisced about the time he'd wound up, inadvertently, in the pages of the Herald, photographed sitting in an unpeopled section of bleachers, in costume, with his feet up, reading the paper. "The club was like, 'O.K., stay out of the empty sections,' " he said. "And I remember one time Mike Lowell was batting, and he kept hearing a phone ring behind him. He literally stepped out and said, 'Will you answer that?' Because it was that quiet."
There was a loud ping—the college kids were using aluminum bats—and a rush of action on the field, as two more Hurricanes rounded the bases, reclaiming the lead for the visitors, in the sixth. "We could be seeing history here," Routh joked. "I think the last time the university beat a major-league team was back in '82 or '83. We beat the Orioles." The inning ended, and a voice over the loudspeaker said, "Hey, fans, look who's here. It's South Florida's favorite fish!" Routh's replacement appeared on the field near third base, wearing baggy rainbow-colored pants and a similarly colorful mask. "It looks kind of like pajamas," Routh said of the new costume. (A blogger for the Miami New Times has called this iteration of Billy "out and proud.") There was no sign of either the Mermaids or the Manatees, dance troupes who often performed on the tops of the dugouts, and Routh mentioned that he'd heard that the Manatees—overweight men who had jiggled their ample bellies—had been discontinued.
"Unfortunately, that's kind of what South Florida is," Routh went on. " 'Cause we don't have a long history, like St. Louis and Chicago, where people really love baseball. People want to be entertained here." He checked his watch: nine o'clock. "And, like, you'll see, people are already starting to leave." ♦


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Rock Star Guitars: The Stories Behind the Strings
On Sunday, July 12 at 5:55 p.m. PT/8:55 p.m. ET, Yahoo Live will live stream Peter Frampton's show from the DTE Energy Music Theater in Clarkson, MI. Tune in HERE to watch!
Last year, renowned photographer Lisa S. Johnson releases the coffeetable book '108 Rock Star Guitars,' featuring striking photography of the beloved axe of rock's most famous musicians. Check out exclusive photos of these beautiful instruments, along with Johnson's personal tales about what makes each guitar so special.


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Embroiled in a tax row that saw the Frenchman take Russian nationality and angrily vow to leave his native country, the 64-year-old star has already admitted driving his scooter in Paris while inebriated last month.
An alcohol test showed he was more than three times above the drink-driving limit.
If he had shown up this morning he would likely have escaped with a small fine and penalty points on his driving licence.
He now faces a criminal court hearing, which could lead to a fine of 4,500 euros (£3,670) and a maximum prison sentence of up to two years.
Speaking to a scrum of reporters outside the court, lawyer Eric de Caumont, said the star of Cyrano de Bergerac was unable to attend his "guilty plea" before a prosecutor and the court as he was "abroad for professional reasons".
FIFA President Sepp Blatter with actor Gerard Depardieu (Reuters)
After attending the Ballon d'Or football prize-giving ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland last night, he said Depardieu flew to Monténégro film festival this morning.
The lawyer insisted Depardieu had in no way "refused to present himself to the judges", did not wish to "escape" the hearing and had "not chosen not to come".
"He had professional obligations as he had to meet producers for a film shoot that will start mid-January," he said.
The prosecutor had refused a request to postpone the hearing for a second time, saying he saw no reason to afford the actor "preferential treatment".
The criminal court hearing would take place "in a few months time," said Mr de Caumont.
French actor Gerard Depardieu riding his motorbike in Paris Photo: AFP/Getty Images
On Monday night, Depardieu denied that he accepted a Russian passport to escape the taxman in France, insisting that while he may also seek Belgian nationality, he is still French.
"I have a Russian passport, but I remain French and I will probably have dual Belgian nationality," he said in the interview with the sports channel L'Equipe21. "But if I'd wanted to escape the taxman, as the French press says, I would have done it a long time ago."
Mr Depardieu has been at the centre of a heated debate over tax exiles as France's Socialist government looks to boost revenue with a "supertax" on the rich. His recent decision to move to neighbouring Belgium, where taxes are less steep for wealthy, drew fierce criticism from the government and many peers.
Then, over the weekend, Depardieu showed up in Russia to accept a passport delivered personally by President Vladimir Putin.
Elisabeth Depardieu, the actor's ex-wife, said in an interview on Monday with RTL radio that her former spouse is highly emotional and more fragile than he seems.
"When he feels refused, he becomes provocative," she said. "Should we throw stones? He is a monument. He is a poet."
Today, acclaimed French classical actor Denis Podalydes expressed concern than the French screen legend had "flipped completely into the world of fiction" and that the current controversy could "kill him".
He said he thought of the star as a "wayward son" who should be "forgiven all his mistakes the moment he makes them".
"Gérard Depardieu is not a part of the (French) film landscape, he is the landscape itself, like Victor Hugo was the landscape of French literature, or Proust," he said.


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Heroic workers and firefighters continued to cool the volatile reactors by pumping in hundreds of tons of water a day. Much-awaited electricity had reached the plant after a rush to extend new power lines, ready to hook up to vital cooling systems and guide the plant to a long-term "cold shutdown."
But less than a week later, a deluge of contaminated water, plutonium traces in the soil and an increasingly hazardous environment for workers at the plant have forced government officials to confront the reality that the emergency measures they have taken to keep nuclear fuel cool are producing increasingly dangerous side effects. And the prospect of restoring automatic cooling systems anytime soon is fading.
The recent flow of bad news from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station has undermined the drumbeat of optimistic statements by government and company officials who have at times tried to reassure a nervous public that significant progress is at hand — only to come up short.
"The earthquake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear accident may be Japan's largest-ever crisis," the Japanese prime minister,
The setbacks have raised questions about how long, and at what cost, Japan can keep up what experts call its "feed and bleed" strategy of cooling the reactor' fuel rods with emergency infusions of water from the ocean and now from freshwater sources.Continue reading the main story
That cooling strategy, while essential to prevent full meltdowns, has released harmful amounts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere and set off leaks of highly contaminated water, making it perilous for some of the hundreds of workers at the plant to further critical repair work.
Moreover, the discovery of radioactive elements that experts say could come only from the core of a reactor suggest that the government's strategy may not be working and that partial fuel melting has not been completely halted.
The continuing crisis also underscores the unprecedented scale and complexity of the problems facing Fukushima: a plant ravaged by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and 45-foot tsunami, and three reactors and four spent fuel pools with no proper cooling system yet and containing more long-lived radioactivity than the Chernobyl reactor, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, based in Takoma Park, Md.
This is why, despite the damage caused by the efforts so far, Japanese officials have little choice but to continue down the feed-and-bleed path. "The worst-case scenario is that a meltdown makes the plant's site a permanent grave," said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at
The events have been a quick turn for the worse for the Japanese government. Just last week, officials at Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Fukushima Daiichi plant's operator, repeatedly hailed the extension of electrical wires to the plant, spoke of resuming electrically operated cooling systems and offered assurances that the situation would not get worse.
But late last week, three workers in a building next to Reactor No. 3 were injured when they stepped in contaminated water. Radioactive water was later discovered at two other reactors, making some areas of the reactor buildings dangerous for workers to approach.
Some of that water in the reactor structures also appears to be leaking out through damaged pipes or vessels, forming highly contaminated pools at the bottom of the turbine buildings adjacent to the reactors. On Tuesday, workers were forced to divert their attention to readying sandbags and pumps after the contaminated water was discovered in a tunnel leading close to the sea.
Compounding the matter, the government said Tuesday that the recent discovery of plutonium in the soil at the plant provided new evidence that at least one reactor was experiencing melting of its nuclear fuel, as happened in the early days of the crisis.
While the source of the plutonium found at the plant was unclear, all three kinds of nuclear fuel at the complex could leak plutonium.
Fresh signs of radiation leaks have raised questions about the sustainability of the government's feed-and-bleed approach.
One major problem, said Murray E. Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University with 20 years of experience in examining nuclear containment structures, was that all the water the Japanese were spraying had soaked important machinery like generators and pumps, further hampering efforts to restore the reactors' electricity supply. The use of helicopters in the first week to drop water on the rectors from above was especially ineffective in hitting the target and may have done more harm than good, he said.
"They dumped water all over the place," he said. "They keep on generating more contamination. That's the consequence of doing it. They got water on things that shouldn't be wet."
Hiroto Sakashita, an associate professor in nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics at Hokkaido University, said that though the fuel rods in the nuclear reactors had already lost over 99 percent of their heat, they were still giving off enough heat to evaporate an estimated 200 tons of water a day.
And the remaining heat, from isotopes with long half-lives, will take years to cool. "They will just have to keep on pouring and pouring," Mr. Sakashita said, "but contaminated water will keep leaking out."
"Handling this situation is getting increasingly difficult," he said.
Another hurdle workers face, of course, is to keep pumping enough water to cool the fuel rods, while at the same time trying to minimize the overflow of contaminated water. Tokyo Electric is also struggling to replace workers at the crippled plant, who must be cycled out as they approach a cumulative radiation exposure limit set by the Japanese government.
The company is leaning on its contractors to provide more workers, sometimes offering many times normal wages for the increasing risks of working at Fukushima, according to local news reports.
The risks that Japan could export its nuclear problems by allowing radioactive contaminants to get into the air and sea are among the reasons why the government and Tokyo Electric have enlisted the help of experts from
On Tuesday, Peter B. Lyons, a senior United States
In an admission of how long the cooling process may take, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan's nuclear regulator, said late Tuesday: "We will have to continue cooling for quite a long period. We should be thinking years."
Kuni Yogo, a former atomic energy policy planner in the Japan Science and Technology Agency, said: "There is some trial and error, but this is the beginning of a three- to five-year effort."Continue reading the main story


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Why?:The Old Man and LV
My Dad resembles author Ernest Hemingway, and he plays it for all it's worth. He's shaped his beard and cut his hair to look more like the writer, who hardly anyone under thirty recalls or reads. He's been married four times, just like the worldly Hemingway, but that has to be coincidence. He even once ran with the bulls to prove to himself he was a man, unlike Hemingway, who had to prove he was a man each morning before pouring his first drink. And Dad hasn't had his share of electro-shock treatments and shot his head off. Yet.
So I'm not surprised when he has a rush of energy and, like Hemingway, makes a snap decision in the direction of adventure.
I remember the phone call like it was yesterday (it was last Friday, around noon). Dad called me at my gallery, Manilow's, and said "Manny, we're going to Vegas. Yes, right now. While the sun is still shining. I want to see the sun on lots of windows. To see it light them up, like little suns."
For years I've been trying to get Dad to Las Vegas for a father-son play date. I'd been several times, and I knew what fun it was and how much Dad would enjoy it. But he always had an excuse at the ready. He had a business meeting, or he and his buddies were going to the game, or he was dating yet another woman who was angling to be the "one for the thumb". His best excuse was that he had to sit back and watch the grass grow. I thought this was pretty lame, until I went by the old house and found that he had set up a grow room.
Dad had already gotten us plane tickets and booked us rooms, so I rushed home to pack a bag and ask the neighbor boy to pick up the Kansas City Star from my lawn (even though I live in Madison, Wisconsin, Dad insists I keep a subscription to the Star - "News from afar travels like smoke," he'd say, "printer's ink populated by thousand-yard stares."), then drove to Chicago to meet dad just about the time we were going to board. I hadn't seen him in several months, and he looked good, "like an owl lean on fast rodents" - one of Dad's favorite expressions. He looked me over too, like he does when we've been separated for awhile, nodded his approval, and gave me a bear hug. Then we were off.
Welcome to Las Vegas[edit]
The approach to Vegas is spectacular. Coming in low, the Sierra Madre mountains and their foothills splash orange, red, and purple onto the eyes' pallet in just the right combination to remember forever. The city then emerges unexpectedly from this geological plumage, as if only Vegas has the power to alter such a landscape. Dad looked out the window during most of the flight, as was his habit - "We're ground dwellers by nature," he'd say. "When I get into the air I like to know it." - but closed his eyes as we neared Vegas and kept them closed until we landed. "I want to take this one in in large gulps," was all he said. Knowing that he didn't like to watch movie previews, and liked to sit in the second row of a theater - "Near the action. Where the herd drops away." - I understood what he was doing.
We took a cab, and an hour later were dropped off at the Luxor Hotel, a five minute ride from the airport. I chalked it up to experience and paid the piper. The Luxor is in the shape of the Great Pyramid at Giza, and is probably two or three times the size of that pyramid. Dad had napped in the cab, so when we walked into the Luxor's lobby he got his first real look at Vegas.
He paused for only a moment, then hurried past the large Egyptian statues to the casino's entrance, a stone's throw from the door. Dad stood just outside the casino and took in a few deep breaths, as he had learned to do when he first fished the gulf. "Sodom and Gomorrah lit by modern lighting," he said. "Can you sense the edge? Madness here, a panic unleashed to run its course. Lead me on, son."
We picked up our bags and turned to check-in.
The hours run together[edit]
The next twelve hours are a blur. After unpacking, Dad and I met at the casino and he went to town. Wads of money that he must have been saving up for years flew out of his pockets and landed on the craps table, the roulette wheel, and the pristine felt of the blackjack table. Scantily clad women, but no scantily clad men, took our drink orders and brought us free booze, except for the courtesy tip to keep them jumping. We got drunk as otters, and matched each other drink for drink, a game we played since I was a kid.
Both Dad and I won some money, turned around and gave it back, won again, and we were pretty much even when Dad finally decided to leave the tables and work the slots. "Slot machines are solitary silos," Dad said. "All lights and noise, little else in way of sustenance." This time I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I was drunk enough to howl at the moon, and faintly remember stumbling outside and doing so. I don't like the slots, there's no challenge in them, but they got Dad's attention and he started to pump them with good money. First he played the penny slots, just to touch the hem. Then he moved up to the nickels, then he skipped the quarter machines altogether and went right to the dollars. He lost. Not a flashing light hit. Not one cherry mixed with cowboys with lassos amid layers of ducks ridden by witches twirling candy canes lined up on the screen. Nothing.
A half hour went by like slow freight. An hour. I brought Dad some food, and talked to him about Sammy Sosa and his home runs. Dad looked at me then, with a quizzical expression on his face, a far-away look of one who has seen perfection and it has yet to register. Crowds gathered tight around him, because going on such a magnificent losing streak attracts the same type of onlooker who stands and cheers a win streak or a guy threatening to jump off a roof. It's all in being there when "something different" occurs.
A few minutes later, still without a win, not even a bite, Dad actually upped his loses by moving to the five dollar slots. By this time the gals were bringing us so many drinks that I spilled a few without knowing it. My pants were soaked and dripping olives, but I was so drunk I didn't care. Dad played, and played again. At the eighty minute mark, nothing. A few more minutes, the same. I spilled another drink, and may have tried to drink it from the floor. Then at what I later heard was the 84 minute mark, Dad quickly moved to the monster, the $100 slot. He played there for a minute, lost another three hundred, and tried again. This time, as the lights and whistles and floating ghosts flipped around on the machine, suddenly all hell broke loose. For two whole minutes the slot gave off rainbows and sounds like "an ocean racing hard against the shore," Dad later recalled. The slot machine seemed to shake in his hand - "To touch me well," he told me, "to draw blood" - but he held on until it subsided.
We have a winner![edit]
He'd won. Dad had won big. A pit boss elbowed his way through the crowd, looked at the machine, and told Dad he'd just won $15 million dollars, one of the largest slot wins in Vegas history. The Luxor president was called to the floor, security guards quickly surrounded us, and technicians arrived to examine the gaming device to confirm that the payoff was legit. Only then, after what seemed like an hour but must have been closer to 15 minutes, did the hotel administrator and Carrot Top shake Dad's hand, pat him on the back, and hand him his check. But Dad then did something so unexpected that he even surprised me, and I've seen him wrestle women with his hands behind his back. He wanted the money in cash. $15 million, in $20 and $50 bills. With a dozen tens and fives in there for easy spending.
The hotel's managers and casino bosses had a brief sit-down, and then called Dad over to ascertain if he was serious. They told him that they'd have to report his winnings to the IRS and the Nevada Gaming Commission, but, from what I could tell from 20 feet away, aside from that, there was no reason he couldn't have his money as he wanted it. And so it came. Stacks and stacks of twenties and fifties, piled high on a craps table, the cash finally filling four large dufflebags. Dad lashed the dufflebags together so he could carry them. They were really huge and deep-sea green - I think they were old army dufflebags that someone at the hotel must have been keeping in their office - and they moved a little with each step as the stacks of money shifted inside. I, of course, offered to help, but Dad just looked at me and said "Few know the weight of their life. I now feel my worth here, in my spine, and on my shoulder. A man blessed with this knowledge carries it alone."
OK Dad, jeez, now he may have been taking the drama too far. What was I supposed to do, play the dutiful son and follow him to his room like he was a mangod on his way to Calvary, back weighed down with his victory and his new lot in life? But then, instead of heading for the elevators, Dad started to walk out the door!
Dad walks down the strip[edit]
By the time we turned left onto the Vegas strip the crowd that had been watching Dad's loss streak, and then his extraordinary win, had stirred from their glassy-eyed observation and were following us. One after the other, and then together, they told Dad why they wanted some of his money. "My girlfriend, she wants jewelry and a nice car - I can't afford that!" "I'm going to lose my house mister, twenty years I've worked like a dog." "My Mom's gotta eat something other than my table scraps, c'mon buddy." "I invented a perpetual motion machine, see, I've got it right here, but the funding dried-up." The problems and desires and moronic babblings poured out of these people, and then as more strangers on the strip heard what was going on they joined the crowd. A few of the larger ones pushed against Dad, grabbing at the canvas of the duffle bags to test their give.
As we crossed a bridge we passed a homeless man with a sign saying he wanted money for beer, and Dad gave him a thumbs up and invited him to join us. Three drunken college boys tried to heckle Dad, and called him a jellyfish wrangler. I had no idea what they meant, but I knew what to do next. "Dad, let's go inside," I said as we neared the MGM Grand, "I'm guessing we need a drink." His eyes lit up, as did those of the homeless mans, and we all went in.
The lions lounging in the massive cage in the Grand's sprawling lobby spotted Dad and his heavy duffel bags, arose quickly, and hurried to hide inside their enclosure. Dad saw this, and I think it bothered him. When we and his crowd of followers had finished our refreshments, and then had another, I tried to talk Dad into stopping, "Let's grab a cab back to the Luxor, or to a bank or something." But he just smiled. "No. I walk to review my life. To redeem it. In the open, among the people. Alone with my uncertainties within a wave of humanity." And with his third glass of Sazerac nestled comfortably in his hand, he made his way to the door and towards the heart of the strip.
We walked like this for over a mile, and somewhere along the way the wave of humanity began to be a dick and really started pushing in. Even Dad began to fend them off. He swung his free hand and pushed some of them away, and actually may have wounded a few as they fell into passing traffic. Then one of the bags tore, and as the rip got bigger the people started grabbing stacks of twenties and fifties, grabbing them and running off. Dad swung harder and hit a few of them on their snouts, but when I tried to help him protect his money that was now leaking away faster and faster from the torn dufflebag, he waved me off. "Step away, this is my fight, my timeless stand."
Fight? Timeless stand?? Reviewing his life??? I started to worry about Dad's emotional state as I saw that the money in the first dufflebag was just about gone and the bag itself hung there among the three others like empty skin. We continued walking, and walked this way for a long time, but while it became easier with practice to beat back a single scavenger or hanger-on, when the greedy crowd started to surge again I got behind Dad and pushed him, pushed him hard, into the next door we passed. It happened to be the Paris Hotel.
I called over a few of the hotel's security guards and filled them in on the situation. They formed a ring around Dad, comped us two suites and a lunch buffet, and handled the crowd. We sat down in the casino - all entrances to Paris lead to the casino - to rest our bones and size up the climate. Dad played craps for an hour or so and won a few grand, then lost it at roulette. "Roulette reminds one of freezing rain," Dad said, "A bad turn of the wheel and the wires fail, and you have to keep the freezer closed lest cold air seeps out." I told him to shut the fuck up, but he didn't hear me, and kept on talking to himself and to the girl who was taking our drink orders.
"Come here daughter"[edit]
Then, inevitably, came the women. There were hookers and barmaids and women who drove over from Utah. The Asians, and English, and black goddesses from Jamaica. All the scent from the hotel gathered around Dad, who was now holding court in Paris, as of old. "Paris, a lifetime of memories before the sun rises, our local star preparing to heat what has stirred in the eve" Dad whispered into the ear of a sultry redhead, who looked at him like he was batty, then shrugged and smiled. One thirty-something spotted me there, and asked me who I was. "His son," I answered. She glanced at Dad then, a wink in her voice, and in a tone as smooth as velvet draped over satin backed with silk covered in cream she asked him "Can I call you Papa?" "Of course, daughter." And the evening took a turn.
Papa, as they now all called him, showered his women with champagne, bought them jewels from one of Vegas's many traveling precious stones salesmen, and when other women sauntered by in designer dresses and two thousand dollar shoes he bought these treasures right off their bodies and gave them to the girls. Did Alice want a Lexus? Here are the keys. Keira, a well-known actress who knew how to talk to men, snuggled up to Papa and called him "Reindeer". A few other women joined the scrum before Dad's inner nature fully emerged and he took them all to his suite.
I didn't see him for the next five hours. I wandered the Hotel and took a trip to the top of its Eiffel Tower, where the guards had their hands full trying to subdue a goth girl who kept pointing to the sky and shrieking about Santa. Sometimes I'd play the tables, but the lighting in Paris' casino is dark, the tables spaced oddly, and the atmosphere not quite right. So mostly I watched, waited, and drank. I saw Barry Manilow, the sugary singer I was named after who was headlining the entertainment at the hotel, come out of an elevator. I later heard that he tried for at least an hour to get into Dad's room, but to no avail. Then, as I felt my head clearing of the alcohol and hurried to refresh my glass, Dad appeared, alone. "To blend touch with sinew," he said through his smile, "I dreamt of Cuba when I dozed, which was momentarily at best." Handing him a drink, I noticed that another duffle bag was limp, and a third held only half of its former bulk.
The running wild[edit]
We ate breakfast, to renew our strength. Dad enjoyed a stack of hotcakes with his rum, and I, eggs, sunny side up, with a shot and a beer to lubricate their departure. As Dad shifted his duffles he dribbled just the tiniest spot of syrup onto his shirt, there to rest amongst the other debris of the quest.
We finished eating, downed our second round, and Dad, without a word, hoisted his duffels and again walked out the door. I understood later that Dad was on what can only be called a journey of the wise king, or stupid chimneysweep, depending on your point of view, understanding of mythology, and gullibility level. I picked up the check and followed, and we made our way over to Caesar's and then into the depths of the Forum.
Whatever the time of day, the Forum, like Paris' casino or Pan's boudoir, presents perpetual dusk. Its ceiling is painted robin-shell blue to resemble the sky, clouds portrayed by lighter paint. "What the mind beholds, the temperament puts on as clothing," Dad told a passing group of Scotsmen who, to a man, pretended they didn't hear him.
We meandered deeper into the seemingly never-ending array of high-end shops, stopping once in awhile for Dad to unload some cash. A Mont Blanc pen here, ten Judith Ripka bracelets there, twenty-five pairs of Italian shoes, some to be delivered to our suites at the Luxor, others to our suites at the Paris. The third dufflebag was nearly empty as we skirted the fountain holding giant statues of Olympian Gods, possessed symbols of power who move and talk and perform amidst an accompanying laser show. There, lights flashing and Gods grumbling around us, Dad stopped in his tracks and stared in the other direction like a madman confronted with his illness. He was actually speechless, for maybe the first time in his life. I unconsciously trembled at what had befallen my father. "Dad, are you okay?" I asked, concerned. A second passed, then another, before he lifted his hand and pointed his finger towards the shops. And there, big as life, scratching his head and looking bored, sat Pete Rose.
My dad loves Pete Rose as much as a man can love a man, outside of the community of course. They were about the same age, and just about the time Dad was wounded while driving an ambulance in Nam - only to be kicked deeper in his stomach and broken-heart when the nurse's aide he fell in love with in-country sent him a Dear John letter, postage due - Pete Rose was starting to show his greatness with the Cincinnati Reds baseball club. Dad followed Rose in the sports pages every day during the last ten seasons of his career, and as Rose climbed to the top of the all-time hit list Dad took pleasure in every record-setting single, each record breaking run scored. Then, when Rose was later charged with betting on baseball during his tenure as Reds manager, Dad would scoff and say "He did nothing but know the guts of his team." Dad never took any position but at Rose's back, a same-generation hero to the boy and to the man. Now here was Pete Rose, right in front of us.
Dad regained his composure and his voice, patted me on the back, and said "The day, son, the wondrous day indeed." He then walked up to Rose, who I later found out works the weekends signing jerseys and posing for pictures at the Sporting Goods store in the Forum. "Mr. Baseball, the smell of the diamond perfumes this air," Dad said, bear hugging the surprised ex-ballplayer. "Yeah, alright, good to meet you too friend. What's with the duffles?" "An attempt to boundry money, the fuel, the scourge, what we seek and what we throw at pleasure and trouble the same." At the mention of money Rose's eyes lit up, and only then did I catch sight of the small television on his table tuned to a horseracing station I never knew existed. "Sit down, Mister, sit down. Call me Pete." "Honored. You can call me Santiago, or better yet, Papa," and Dad sat.
Well, you can guess the rest. Within an hour or two, and maybe a few bottles later, the fourth duffle was empty except for the leavings, and Pete Rose was drunkenly cursing his luck and his handicapper. "Son of a bitch, what a fucking streak of bad luck. A five-to-one sure thing he says, 'Bet the boat on this filly's nose, Pete, right on the tippy-tip of her nose. She can't lose,' the dickhead tells me, and goddammit. Goddammit is all I have to say. Just wasn't in the cards, buddy." Dad took it in stride even as I looked crestfallen. "Dad?" "Son, a slice of life. Pete Rose and I almost bested the odds, we shaved those horses close, didn't we now? Pete, you've made my day."
Rose stood up, gave Dad a signed jersey, and abruptly left to get a steak at the Flamingo. Dad's four dufflebags were still strapped on his back, but they were now deflated, picked clean inside, hanging there not by gravity to their self-appointed sun-king but by ropes and knots alone. Dad had a smile on his face as big as all indoors. "Can you believe it, Manny! Pete Rose. Let's go back to Paris and talk of our blind luck at meeting the most magnificent man in sports."
I slapped my palm to my head so quickly that I actually hurt myself.
All things culminate in bells[edit]
Dad later told me that when he met LuLu on the strip on our way back to Paris he fell instantly in love. "Thunderstruck," he said, "The love, as a wise man said, that is instantaneous and irreversible. Follow my joy, which leads to you, my heart - mere muscle transformed to magnificent magnet, a vessel no longer seeking shadowed winding turns, only straight illumined lines."
What probably happened is alcohol poisoning. We'd been hitting the bottle nonstop for about 30 hours, and at the same moment that LuLu staggered up and asked Dad for a light his brain finally short-circuited from the "fire within", and he mistook it for affection. Timing is everything, that same wise man said, and LuLu's timing was apparently the result of last night's fix.
"Ask not for whom the wedding bell tolls," Dad said while playing the spoons, "They toll for me. And LuLu here."
With the last of his folding money dug from the bottom of the four duffel bags, Dad hired some goons just because he could, bought LuLu and himself a real Vegas wedding complete with an Elvis impersonator and what may have been the real Wayne Newton, and bought me a long-legged long-necked hooker named Wildflower. Dad and his bride crossed the street from Paris, walked along the ponds left-bank for a minute, and then climbed in. They had the famed Bellagio fountain all to themselves, and skinny-dipped, yodeled, and made love in the dancing waters. No one paid them the least bit of attention, except the guy portraying Captain Jack Sparrow, one of the locals who tourists pay to pose with them for pictures. "Let Sparrow stay," Dad told his goons, "Deep mysteries abide in him. Come, we will pose with you, Sparrow. Let you be witness to more of life."
"Shiver me timbers" Sparrow giggled as LuLu felt him up. I saw it, but Dad didn't, and I'd never tell. The Captain soon got a far-away look in his eye, and then relaxed, and I saw LuLu pick some loose paper out of the Cap's donation jar. Then we all headed back into Paris to sit at coffee, gin, and absinthe in an open air cafe, to lightly reminisce under the painted evening sky, to talk about our long day.
I wrote most of that down just after getting back to my studio. Dad, LuLu, and I had flown into O'Hare, and dad drove back to his home in Oak Park, the old family home where gramps ate his gun. LuLu told me that when they got home papa put his empty duffel bags on the porch, and the neighbors stood on the sidewalk and gawked. One village idiot commented to her peers that the pile of bags looked like a Vegas casino dweller. LuLu said that Dad layed down on his cot and slept for two days, awakening only once to whisper something about dreaming of the ones who got away, the lions who hid from him at the MGM Grand.
I picked up the phone about a month later and spoke to Dad, talking to him about my hope that he wasn't feeling too bad about what might have been. "What do you mean, Manny?" "Come on, dad," sorry now that I had broached the subject, "the money. You could have used that money." I'd have heard his laugh across the street, and the phone wasn't on speaker. "What do you take me for, a putz? Yeah, I blew about three mil, and had the time of my life. Still got about twelve million left that those Luxor boys wired to a Cayman Islands account they set up for me. Gave them about half-a-mil for their trouble, so they wouldn't be too honest with the gentlemen at the IRS."
The last thing I heard on that call was LuLu, laughing like a hyena in the background, mixing the ice for some kind of exotic tropical drink. The clinking of the ice, for some reason, reminded me of my youth in Africa and of Jack Sparrow, both posing forever in absurd proximity under our local star, the sun.
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Marson writes "President Viktor Yushchenko has expended much energy drawing attention to Soviet crimes in Ukraine, most notably the Holodomor, or "death by hunger" of 1932-3.... For decades a wall of silence surrounded the Holodomor – one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century, in which several million Ukrainian peasants died."
This wall of silence wasn't confined to nations behind the Iron Curtain. In two posts below, I demonstrate how Nye Bevan, the sainted hero of the left, praised Stalin's Russia in the Commons even after the facts of the Holodomor were known.
When Bevan was praising Stalin's Russia in April 1933 Gareth Jones, Lloyd-George's aide and a man of impeccable credentials, had already (in 1932) published a number of articles in nespapers including the Times following his visits to Russia describing the state of things; In October 1932, before Bevan's 'parasites' comments, he had also publicised the growing famine in two articles entitled 'Will there be Soup?'.
In March 1933, in the same month that Muggeridge had three unsigned pieces on the Holodomor published in the Manchester Guardian, Jones' famine stories broke world wide with convincing and unambiguous evidence of Stalin's brutality. Both of these were before Bevan stood up in the Commons to defend Russia in April 1933.
Whilst Stalin was starving millions of Ukrainians to death, and the whole world knew, Bevan described Russia as 'the one nation, which, despite all the difficulties, is still showing that it is possible to have a world order in which people can live with more security than we have here'.
Marson concludes his piece;
It is a bitter pill for some on the left to swallow that what Stalin did in the name of apparently laudable goals was horrific. Maybe some politicians are using the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and comparisons between Stalin and Hitler to smear the left and Russia. But to my mind, if the left, along with the Russian leadership, is still unwilling to face the horrors of Stalinism and the devastation it wrought across central and Eastern Europe, it is smearing itself.Footnote: To read a prime example of one of the gulag-defenders that Marson refers to, see Jonathan Steele's piece in the Grauniad.


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i think the answer is to just get some weights.FWIW, I do put the dryhops in when I get to about 1.014-1.018 or so, as per Matt Brynildson's advice - seems like a good idea.
Quote from: blatz on December 02, 2012, 08:14:24 PMYeah been dryhopping in the keg for years - great but can get grassy/vegetal.Either I don't get that from dry hopping in the keg, or I don't notice it, or I must like it. At any rate, I've never found it to be a problem.
Yeah been dryhopping in the keg for years - great but can get grassy/vegetal.
Heh Blatz. I was looking for some panty hose the other day and though about you.


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Nanny accused in death of 1-year-old Cambridge girl has history of charges
Dorchester District Court records detail restraining orders, arrest
The Quincy nanny accused in the violent death of a 1-year-old Cambridge girl has a history of violence, according to allegations made in court records.
There were two restraining orders issued against Aisling McCarthy Brady in Dorchester District Court and she faced criminal charges in a third case.
The first restraining order against Brady was issued in August 2005. David Furey, who may have dated Brady, accused her of threatening a female friend and throwing an empty beer bottle at her at a bar in March of that year.
In June 2005, Furey said Brady attacked him in a bar.
He claimed, "She attacked (me) in a bar room for talking to a lady friend. This time hitting and scraping me in the face with closed fists and her fingernails repeatedly. I'm afraid of the day that it's going to be a beer bottle she hits me with or worse," he wrote in his affidavit obtained by Team 5 Investigates.
Dorchester District court records show that Brady was arrested at 23 Sudan Street in Dorchester on Feb. 11, 2007, accused of assaulting and beating another woman described as her roommate. Brady, who was arrested along with the roommate, claimed the two were in a fight and that charge was later dismissed.
The second restraining order, which is still active, was filed on Mar. 21, 2012, by Olive Scanlon of Dorchester. Scanlon claimed that Brady had made a post on a "mommy" website in Boston falsely claiming that Scanlon was abusing children.
Federal immigration officials told NewsCenter 5 that Brady was not in the country legally.
Brady was ordered held on $500,000 bail at her arraignment in Cambridge District Court Tuesday on the charges related to the death of 1-year-old Rehma Sabir. Since the baby died, charges are expected to be upgraded to homicide.


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This Sunday many Christians will commemorate the resurrection of their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
A television network in the U.S. is once again trying its hand at reconstructing historical accounts recorded in the Bible.
For many people, the Rhea County Courthouse is just another interesting stop on their way through Tennessee.
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Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.