text:
|Birth Date:
|Solvang, Calif.
|High School:
|Santa Ynez Valley HS
|Outside Hitter
Played in 26 matches and started 21 (82 games)...Was third on the team with 234 kills...Second in kills per game with a 2.85 average...His 17 service aces were third on the Gaucho roster...Also third on the squad with 107 digs...One of four Gauchos that totaled over 100 digs for the season...Had a total of 44 blocks and was third on the team with nine solos...Finished the season with 277.5 points...Entering last season, had played in a total of 20 games over his freshman and sophomore years...Smashed his previous career-high of eight kills when he put away 21 balls against USC (4/5)...Dug a career-best 12 balls at UCLA in the MPSF Play-In match (4/19)...Posted his first career double-double in that contest by adding 17 kills...Set a new career-high with three service aces vs. UC Santa Cruz (2/4)...His six total blocks at Cal State Northridge (3/31) was also a new career-high...Broke his prior career-high points total of 10 on 12 occasions with his best effort a 24-point performance vs. USC (4/5)...Recorded 10 or more kills in 11 matches, including five of the final six contests he played in...Dropped in multiple service aces in five matches...Had five or more digs in 11 matches.
Played in 15 games for the Gauchos as a sophomore...Recorded career-highs with eight kills, nine digs, and ten points against UC San Diego...Finished the season with 59 total attacks...Ended the year with a 1.60 kills per game average, seventh on the squad, and the highest of any non-starter...Third on the team with a 1.27 digs per game average.
Played in nine games for the Gauchos as a freshman...Totaled seven digs and three kills on the season.
High School
A 2003 graduate of Santa Ynez Valley High School...Played outside hitter and was coached by Chip Fenenga...Set a personal record with 38 kills in a match...Led the Pirates to the 2003 Los Padres League Championship, earning league MVP accolades...Was a two-time All-CIF selection for the Pirates...Also played basketball, garnering team MVP and first team all-league honors in 2002...Graduated with honors.
Aaron Leonard Richman was born on July 23, 1985 in Santa Monica, California...A global and international studies major...Aspires to work in the finance and banking industry upon graduation...A member of the Business Economics Association and the Student-Athlete Advisory Board at UCSB...Hobbies include basketball, beach volleyball, and surfing...Favorite TV show is "Seinfeld"...Top movie is "The Big Lebowski"...A fan of the LA Lakers and beach volleyball player Todd Rogers...Listens to the band Thrice...Has one older brother (Josh), one twin brother (Joey), and two sisters (Molly and Rachel), both older...Son of Martha Richman.


text:
The Crimson started the year off right with a sweep at Stevens (Gil Talbot).
HOBOKEN, N.J. – DJ White recorded 19 kills and finished the night with a .552 hitting percentage as the Harvard men's volleyball team rolled to a 3-0 win at Stevens Friday night in the team's 2013 opener. Harvard won by set scores of 25-20, 25-16 and 25-20.
White dominated the match with his 19-kill performance, committing just three errors on 29 attack attempts. He also notched three digs and two block assists as the Crimson (1-0) held Stevens (1-2) to a combined .169 hitting percentage.
Nick Madden and Caleb Zimmick added six kills apiece with Madden's eight digs and Zimmick's three total blocks leading the way. Rob Lothman dished out 35 assists as Harvard turned in a .348 hitting percentage.
The Crimson and Ducks traded points early in the first set until a 5-1 run opened a 16-13 edge for Harvard. A block by Branden Clemens and Zimmick moved the score to 18-14 before a kill by Madden put the set away, 25-20.
Madden and Clemens scored a pair of kills to help the Crimson to an 11-6 lead in the second stanza. Four more kills from Zimmick and White pushed Harvard's advantage to nine, 16-7, before White added three kills down the stretch for the 25-16 victory.
Harvard trailed 5-3 in the third set but a 6-2 stretch put the Crimson on top, 9-7. A block by Madden and Clemens pushed the margin to 13-9 and a kill by Zimmick made it a 19-13 affair. Stevens matched Harvard in the waning moments but the Crimson prevailed as Zimmick scored two kills in the final moments for a 25-10 win.
Harvard returns to action tomorrow, Jan. 19 when it faces NYU at 4 p.m. in New York City.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The soundtrack I least expected to surprise me this summer has managed to do that to an extent. Hope to review the music to the upcoming film Rock On soon. With lyrics by Javed Akhtar and music by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, one of my favorite songs from the album and the subject of this post -- Phir Dekhiye -- has vocals by newcomer Caralisa Monteiro.
What a fine performance! This is not the easiest to sing, with acoustics emphasizing the vocals. The lyrics are as good as one would expect from a film structured around a rock group. In this song, I really like that the lyrics offer depth in simplicity. The song has a positive message (one we shall certainly understand better after seeing the film), and I like the way it ends (the words 'khwaab bun' remind me of Bum Bum Bole from Taare Zameen Par). It might even work as a response to another good song from a good movie!


text:
do you guys know how to unlock swim swim hungry!?
Log in to save your medals! Don't have an account? Create one for free!
do you guys know how to unlock swim swim hungry!?
A very good game but maybe a little too heavy because I met some lags on my way to the top..
Anyone know how to get the achievement Swim Swim Hungry?!!?!?! Thanks!
All in all, this isn't bad,it's just trying to hard to be what its trying to be. I know you were going for a Meat Boy-ish game but, its way too easy. The music and graphics are fine but,didn't fit together. On the other hand, the gameplay just felt odd.
Weird Wall-jump grips,sliding on the wall for too long,etc.
This game isn't bad but, other Meatboy-ish games were better like Skullface.


text:
Santa Clara approves plans for 49ers stadium
Santa Clara
(02-21) 13:43 PST Santa Clara -- Santa Clara leaders approved plans Tuesday night for a new 49ers stadium by the 2014 season, finalizing the team's exit from San Francisco sooner than expected.
The City Council, acting as the Stadium Authority, voted 5-1 to support an $878.6 million contract that calls for kicking off construction on the 68,500-seat stadium in July, about six months earlier than anticipated, and finishing by August 2014, in time for the exhibition season.
The 49ers, who have called San Francisco their home since their founding in 1946, could play just two more seasons in Candlestick Park before moving.
The authority members approved three resolutions - the other two involved insurance and construction oversight - with no discussion or public comment. Will Kennedy was the lone vote against the measures, saying he wanted to wait on a court decision on a challenge to the voter referendum approving the stadium project.
The state-of-the-art stadium, located next to the Great America theme park, will cost slightly more than $1 billion to build. An $850 million loan approved by the city in December will pay for most of it. Earlier this month, the National Football League agreed to give the team $200 million in loans and payments.
A joint venture of Turner Construction and Devcon Construction will design and build the 15-acre facility on what is currently a parking lot. If it doesn't wrap up by the 2014 season, it could pay penalties of as much as $20 million.
But if the contractor finishes at least a week before the first exhibition game of that season, it will get a $5 million bonus, paid for in extra rent from the 49ers.
A group against the stadium, Santa Clara Plays Fair, has collected signatures to call for a referendum on the $850 million loan, saying voters were not fully informed of the financial risks when they approved the project by nearly 60 percent in June 2010.
The city has rejected the group's petitions, and the battle is expected to be settled in court.
Stephanie M. Lee and Jill Tucker are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. email@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal officials reported flight delays at U.S. airports for a third consecutive day on Tuesday, fueling a political blame game as Republicans and Democrats accused each other of causing the furloughs of thousands of air-traffic controllers.
On Capitol Hill and at the White House, the rhetoric over across-the-board federal budget cuts known as "sequestration" became increasingly biting. Both sides tried to take political advantage - and avoid responsibility - for cuts by the Federal Aviation Administration that officials say could plague the country's aviation system during the summer travel season.
Republicans accused Democratic President Barack Obama of needlessly forcing the furloughs so he could blame Republicans for failed negotiations over the nation's debt. They said the FAA and Obama could adjust federal spending priorities to avoid affecting travelers so significantly.
"Stop punishing the American people," Republican Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina said in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives that was directed largely at Obama.
Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania accused Obama's administration of making a "willful choice" to "inflict as disruptive a process as possible on the American public and on our economy, all to further a political agenda."
White House spokesman Jay Carney fought back, blaming Republican-backed spending cuts for the furloughs and saying they could be stopped only by congressional approval of a new budget plan.
"Republicans made a choice," Carney said. "This is a result of the sequester being implemented. We made it clear that there would be these kinds of negative effects if Congress failed to take reasonable action to avert the sequester."
The furloughs of air-traffic controllers by the FAA, intended to reduce staffing by 10 percent across the nation, began on Sunday and led to delays in more than 10,000 flights and the cancellation of 600 over the first two days, the controllers' union said.
On Tuesday, the FAA indicated there were more delays at a number of Eastern airports that it tied to "staffing," including New York's LaGuardia and Washington's Reagan National.
The FAA's 47,000 employees, including 13,000 air-traffic controllers, will be furloughed for about one day every two weeks to cut costs under a budget-cutting program set to last through September, the end of the U.S. government's fiscal year.
Some analysts predict flight delays and congestion at airports could increase through the busy summer travel season - a scenario that would spread the impact of the sequestration cuts to millions of Americans, and likely ignite more anger at Washington and its political gridlock.
An aviation system in disarray, along with the fallout from a range of other prolonged budget cuts, could put both Obama and congressional Republicans at considerable political risk, analysts said.
Obama is entering a crucial round of negotiations on spending and on legislation to overhaul immigration. After falling short in his effort to get significant gun-control legislation through even the Democrat-controlled Senate, Obama's image as a leader could be damaged if the aviation system becomes unreliable to travelers, the analysts said.
"If this becomes a symbol of him as an ineffective leader and Republicans smell blood, they might be less inclined to enter into a deal now and it could impact other kinds of legislation," said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian.
But polls indicate more Americans blame Washington's problems on congressional Republicans, whose party is viewed as less flexible and more ideologically extreme. Analysts say that ongoing problems caused by sequestration could fuel a public opinion backlash against Republicans - and put Republican House Speaker John Boehner and his colleagues at a disadvantage in any confrontation with Democrats over budget issues.
"While everybody's image was hurt in the debt ceiling fight, Republicans' were hurt worse," said Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center.
Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said the public had soured on Washington's political gamesmanship to the point that any extended fight over furloughs and flight delays would hurt both sides.
"People are so sour about Washington right now," Bowman said. "Even though the numbers might suggest Republicans will get more blame than Obama - and institutions often get more blame than individuals - I would say the public will lay the blame on Washington as a whole."
In Washington, the finger-pointing heated up. Republican congressional leaders have fired off a coordinated series of tweets under the hash tag #Obamaflightdelays.
"Why is President Obama unnecessarily delaying your flight?" House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia asked on Twitter.
Democrats responded with their own Twitter hash tag: #GOPSequester, and suggested Republicans who were angry about the FAA cuts did not seem as upset when the budget cuts hit social initiatives such as the Meals on Wheels program for the elderly and the Head Start education program for children of low-income families.
Democrats cast the FAA furloughs as the result of a Republican drive to cut spending across the government.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said they had little flexibility under the sequester law to change spending levels for the aviation system.
"I only hope public outcry over long delays at airports will serve as a wake-up call to my Republican colleagues," Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said, urging Republicans to negotiate with Democrats on a new budget agreement.
Reid said Democrats had a new plan to turn off the sequester for five months by claiming savings from the drawdown of Afghanistan and Iraq war spending. Democrats hoped to bring the bill to the floor, but it would face a tough road to passage and is unlikely to come to a vote before early May.
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee leaders from both parties pressed the administration on Tuesday for more information on the furlough plan.
Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, and Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the panel's top Republican, said in a letter that the furloughs, along with a plan to close some air-traffic control towers, raised "serious safety and operational issues."
Additional reporting by David Lawder; Editing by David Lindsey and Peter Cooney


text:
Pure Light CD
Pure Light CD
Let yourself be transported by this exquisite music to a place of serenity and peace. This beautiful music, heard in the background of the Meditation Oasis podcasts and CDs, easily induces a meditative state in the listener.
This music makes an ideal accompaniment for meditation, relaxation, massage, yoga and healing work. Enjoy it in the background as you work or anytime you want to relax.
Pure Light has the added benefit of transmitting a powerful energy to the listener, the Oneness Blessing (deeksha). When the music was composed and recorded, Richard brought his awareness to a universal level of consciousness which has the qualities of awakening and healing. As a result the music contains those same uplifting qualities.
1. Simply Being 10:06
2. At Home 4:00
3. Gentle Night 3:24
4. Longing 7:57
5. Surrender 3:04
6. Oneness 4:44
7. Ease of Being 3:06
8. Pure Light 8:03
9. Devotion 5:30
10. Earth Song 5:17
"The music...lulls you into a feeling of peace." Amazon.com customer
"The music is soft and ethereal, not rhythmic or intrusive." Amazon.com customer
"The music is so soothing and pleasurable..." Amazon.com customer
"The music is relaxing, calming, nurturing..." Kitty Alder, Energy Consultant
"The music... is wonderful and I've been using it for my morning yoga session regularly." Eric Kipp
"Beautiful, calming instrumental music..." Caren Parnes


text:
Why do some users move that everything not related to programming to Super User? This even happens to questions about networking concepts. The not-programming-related tag has been used around 1887 times. It seems that only a few of such tagged questions get moved to SU.
I'm talking about this question, which I asked with the not-programming-related tag. Someone said it's not programming-related, so it should be migrated to SU. Shouldn't we remove the tag, then?


text:
Mme. Terese Aromatic Taper
Availability: In Stock
Bring aroma into your home with these beautiful taper diffusers, a highly effective way to impart fragrance into any room. More constant than pot pourri and without the vigilance needed for a candle, diffusers are now a must have for the discerning individual.
Simply put the wooden tapers into the oil bottle and allow the fragrance oil to rise up the reeds by capillary action, and evaporate into the room. Turn the sticks every now and again for more fragrance.
Our taper diffusers last around twelve weeks in constant use.
Your diffuser will be despatched within 48 hours and take 2 - 3 days to arrive.
More urgent than that? Call us, we will always help if we can.
Remember, free delivery on orders over £35.
Write a reviewYour Name:
Your Review: Note: HTML is not translated!
Rating: Bad Good
Enter the code in the box below:


text:
You Can Help Yosemite
As a donor to Yosemite Conservancy, you help preserve the park for future generations.
Your gift today makes a lasting difference for Yosemite's trails, habitat, wildlife and much more. And by participating in our outdoor programs, art workshops, theater performances and volunteer opportunities, you are giving back to the park you love.


text:
B'nai B'rith hosts a conversation on energy security in Israel
FOR MORE INFORMATION EMAIL: email@example.com
Digital Jewish news daily for Australia and New Zealand
FOR MORE INFORMATION EMAIL: firstname.lastname@example.com
Oct-23 11:50pm SBS-TV: Movie – Fanny's Journey
Fanny, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, and a group of eight children attempt to escape Nazi-occupied France.
Oct-26 Sydney: החברים של כוורת- "HaChaverim Shel Kaveret
Earlier this year a group of talented musicians came together to form the band החברים של כוורת– "HaChaverim Shel Kaveret – Friends of Kaveret" and they will appear in Sydney next month. Read more
Nov-03 5:25pm SBS-TV: Inside the SS
Hitler created the SS in 1925 as a private army that would be loyal to him to the death. Read more
Nov-05 11:05pm SBS-TV: Episode 1 Israeli Crime series – Asylum City
Michal is a young idealist who works with African asylum seekers. Read more
Nov-06 00:40 World Movies: The Band's Visit
A band comprised of members of the Egyptian police force head to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab cultural centre, only to find themselves stranded, penniless and still wearing their sky blue uniforms in the middle of nowhere. Read more
Nov-10 Wellington: Kristallnacht concert
Over a single night in November 1938 over 200 synagogues were burned in an orchestrated anti-Jewish violence in Germany. Read more
Nov-10 Perth: Commemoration of Kristallnacht
A Council of Christians and Jews Western Australia Inc event Read more
Copyright © 2019 -- All Rights Reserved J-Wire -- Contact -- Privacy Policy


text:
General Contractors
1) What type of work can be done under the Facility Permit Program?
The program is limited to interior tenant improvements, and maintenance and repair work.
2) Does the Facility Program eliminate the need for project, or individual Trade Permits?
No. FPP is designed to streamline the permit process, not eliminate it. We've found that issuing a permit is the best way to inform builders that the project construction has been authorized.
3) Does my Facility Permit cover all the trade work on my project?
No. Each trade contractor should make application for permit by directly contacting their team inspector.
4) How do we begin with a new project?
Typically projects begin with a phone call to the Senior Building Inspector assigned to the owner's facility. He, or she, will provide direction specific to the project scope.
5) Where are plan submittals and project applications made?
Submittals can be given to your Building Inspector or routed to the 2nd floor of the Development Services Building located at 1900 SW 4th Ave.
6) How many sets of plans are required upon application for permit?
Project submittals should include the FPP application and three sets of plans.
7) How are fees assessed on permitted projects?
Traditional permit fees are not typically assessed. Facility Permit fees are based on an hourly rate for all program services, and are billed directly to the facility owner.
8) How do I schedule inspections?
Inspections are scheduled by calling the inspector's desk phone. If the inspector does not answer, simply leave the inspection information and a contact phone number on his/her voice mail. Often, if you call PRIOR to 8:00 a.m., you can receive your inspection the same day.
9) How long will my permit take to issue?
Permit issuance is directly related to the complexity of the project. On the average the time period ranges from 3 days to 2 weeks. The completeness of the submittal will also effect this time line.
10) How can I check the status of my permit application?
Inquiries regarding the status of your permit should be made directly to your inspector/ plan reviewer by phone or e-mail or contact one of our Permit Tech's.
11) How do I know if a building is registered under the Facility Permit Program, and who the inspector is?
The information is available on our web site under the heading of Customer and Building List, or you may contact the FPP Manager directly.
12) Who is responsible for calling for inspections on Facility Permit projects?
Each permittee is responsible for calling for the work on his/her own job.
13) Can I schedule a pre-application meeting, or a site job consultation meeting prior to permit application submittal?
Absolutely, job consultations and pre-application meetings are common place and have become a means of significantly reducing plan review time on complex project submittals.
14) If a project previously issued through the Standard Permit Process is re-issued as a Facility Permit, how do I get a refund of fees?
Requests for the cancellation and refund of fees should be made to the Development Service Center Manager.
15) Can an inspection be requested without a building permit sign off card on the job?
If complete documents are not on the site, contact your inspector. He, or she, will advise you as to whether the inspection may be made.
16) What information do I need to submit application for a Facility Permit?
Applicant Name, Contact Phone Number, Facility Name, Job Address, Job Description, Project Name, Valuation, CCB number, and Customer Project Reference Number/Billing Identification Number.
17) What is a Project Reference Number or "Billing Identification Number?"
It is a way for the OWNER to track fees that are associated with a specific project. (All billing statements are sent to the owner.)
18) Is there a different application form used for FPP permits?
Yes. Facility Program Application Forms and Instructions can be accessed from our main web page under Facility Program Forms and Documents.


text:
Launcher technology
The very best and most advanced technology is needed to build reliable cost-effective launchers. One good example of this is Ariane 4; thanks to the European expertise and high quality technology that went into its developnment this launcher made 113 successful launches between 1988 and 2003.
Space technology is an area that is constantly developing as engineers and scientists search for cheaper more efficient ways of placing satellites in orbit. Supporting these efforts is an important part of ESA's mandate and vital if Europe is to maintain its access to space.
Through the Launchers technology activities ESA aims to:
- support European research and development, maintain knowledge of the key technologies and industrial capabilities needed to develop new launchers and to treat anomalies during the exploitation of the current launchers
- reduce the cost of European access to space by supporting technological innovation
- assess advanced technologies and design solutions for reusable launchers, to ensure that Europe will be able to maintain a guaranteed and affordable access to space in the long term
- ensure that Europe can be a valuable partner in any future international cooperation
Launcher technology is not just about access to space. The research and technology that goes into developing a launcher also assists European industry, creates employment and often benefits daily life. Some examples of spin-offs from launcher technology are:
- improved braking systems for planes
- special materials to protect employees working in the metal and glass industry, and nuclear reactor plants
- safer gas burners in home heaters
- improved extractor hoods for kitchens


text:
UK IPTV set top box
At last..
Click to log into the forum or register an account.
Forum accounts are separate from other sign-ins for The Local.
UK IPTV set top box
At last..
22.Feb.2013, 09:23 AM
Post #1
Location: Stockholm
Joined: 7.Feb.2006
Hi all,
With all the satellite movements and more to come, I thought I'd google round and check other forums etc..
I've just received this IPTV set top box which I can send back if not happy.
It works very well. The subs are a bit pricey but I think it's worth it. ie, can cancel VPN fees as not required.
I'd say the quality is 90% of satellite TV so very watchable, much better than projecting filmon etc.. especially the HD channels. You get basically all the UK freeview channels. You get an iPad client for free too so you can watch on the move plus full catchup of the main channels through very simple menus. Full EPG etc...
I'm going to stick with it. Astra 1n didn't work for me and 2f is definitely not going to work and probably moving to a flat soon so IP TV will be my only option.
They can set up a free iPad demo for you in minutes. Very friendly guys. I expressed many times how skeptical I was and so far so good.
22.Feb.2013, 10:17 AM
Post #2
Joined: 19.Feb.2013
Hi Beef,
Thanks for the info it is much appreciated and the IPTV does look good.
However I may try a slingbox 500 at my brothers address in the UK as he will set up a sky multroom for me so no effect on his main box and connect it to a slingcatcher or boxee box to display on my TV in Sweden. The reason for this is that albeit Freeview is good it doesn't offer a lot of the channels i'd miss which are on sky such as Sky1, Sky Atalantic. FOX HD, sky sports etc etc. This was the main reason I was hoping the satellite set up would work as much easier and if working properly excellent quality? However you are right as it seems Astra 2F is going to ruin that for many of us going forward so streaming seems the only real option as long as bandwidth is good. This I am sure is not an issue in Sweden as broadband speed is on average much higher than UK?.
Thanks for yor help Beef and I wish you look for the future
22.Feb.2013, 03:30 PM
Post #3
Joined: 7.Jul.2006
I use StrongVPN today and in most cases it works perfectly fine in terms of quality and streaming...which I normally view wirelessly o my iPad or iPhone. Of course it won't solve your problem wth Sky channels, but you can swithc proxies to watch American TV as well.
Alan Sugar keeps promoting this http://www.uktveverywhere.com/ which seemslegit, but when I last looked it wasn't that cheap. So not being a UK TV addict, StrongVPN is good enough for my needs. I'm sure there are other VPNs that work just as well.
22.Feb.2013, 03:42 PM
Post #4
Location: Linköping
Joined: 30.Nov.2005
£35 a month seems a bit steep especially if you already have all the SAT equipment. A bigger dish will be much cheaper in the long run
22.Feb.2013, 05:44 PM
Post #5
Location: Stockholm
Joined: 7.Feb.2006
Agreed regarding the price but it's worth negotiating and think it's a good solution for those who live in flats with fibre broadband.. Had mine just a while so not tested extensively but so far so good!
22.Feb.2013, 06:52 PM
Post #6
Location: Linköping
Joined: 30.Nov.2005
I have a 100/100 fibre broadband so could have a good connection but compared to a dish when I live in a villa, it seems a bit OTT


text:
Cultural Activities for Children
In Morocco, cultural activities for children are sparse. Now the Goethe Institute has initiated a project which gives children in various cities the opportunity to watch films made especially for children audiences. Mary Fowles reports
The Ciné Rail project has been bringing artistic and socially conscious films to children from all walks of life around the country in a one-coach train. Ciné Rail, with its small engine and creative heart, has toured Morocco over the last two months, chugging and tooting its way from Tangiers, down to Meknes, Rabat, Kenitra, Fes and Marrakesh.
Inside the long train car is a magical and fantastical environment where the bustle of Arabic whispers from excited children fill the room before the lights dim to black and the cinema rolls. Outside, trains arriving and departing from around the country rumble deeply, rocking the Ciné Rail slightly, giving the impression that it, too, is going somewhere.
Fostering cultural activities for children
When Dieter Strauss, director of Rabat's Goethe Institute saw a train car painted with the words "ciné ma voiture" sitting idle at Rabat's station last year, his imagination was sparked. The train was originally used to show educational and safety videos to rail personnel. But Strauss saw an opportunity that would benefit Moroccan children.
The project, which was conceived in cooperation with Morocco's Centre Cinématographique and the country's railway network ONCF, but which is entirely funded by the Goethe Institute, has little to do with the diffusion of German language or culture. The initiative, which, apart from Strauss, is entirely run by Moroccans, focuses on the development of Moroccan culture, and what is seen as a sorely lacking in the society: cultural activities for children.
"We don't do much in this country for children," said Rachid Kasmi, the director of cinema for Morocco's Goethe Institute. "So we wanted to give them a new experience with an educational message."
Bouchra Alile, a teacher at a private secondary school in Casablanca, took her 9-year-old students to Cine Rail and said the films dealt with many of the same topics she tries to teach in her class.
"The children were well sensitised to the themes," she said. "It is a new idea and these kinds of activities benefit the students and us, the teachers, by giving us the chance to get out of the classroom and see new things and meet new people."
Selection from children's film festival in Munich
The films, which were chosen from countries as diverse as Canada, Mongolia, Iran, France, Holland, Belgium and Germany, were selected at a children's film festival in Munich last year by Kasmi and Strauss with a deliberate set of criteria.
"None of the films have dialogue," said Kasmi. "It would have been very hard to find films for children in Arabic and the children would find it nearly impossible to follow films in French or any other language, I chose films with interesting story lines and music. This really holds their attention," he said adding that the children, who range between 8 and 14 years old, are best suited to watch short films.
"Each film we chose is no more than 10 minutes long, and the whole spectacle runs for a little under one hour."
Conveying values via celluloid
The topics dealt with in the films are crucial to the project's goal.
"The protection of the environment, social values like sharing and caring for one another as well as non-violence, and anti-racism were what we looked for in choosing the films," said Kasmi.
The last film in the series, which was made in Mongolia, depicts a young village girl whom, in order to fill a big metal carafe with water for her family, has to first bypass a vicious-looking German shepherd.
Swallowing her fear, she closes her eyes tight and pushes the heavy carafe past the dog. She makes it past the animal safe, but when she turns back to look, the carafe tips over and the water spills out. So, the scenario repeats.
Lack of water may even cause war
"This film shows that all around the world small children have to fetch their own water. We want to teach the children that we have to economise because water is expensive and in short supply. Also, water is something sacred in our [Muslim] society and it is essential to our existence. It is a source of energy and if we don't have enough, it can also cause war. So even though the girl is afraid, she has to show courage and fetch the water. She doesn't have a choice."
The Moroccan children who have seen the films come from varying social classes. Some come from bidonvilles, the impoverished shantytowns that populate most large cities; other children were brought from orphanages, while some came from public and wealthier private schools in each city. The Goethe Institute pays all the costs of transporting students to and from their neighborhoods.
"Over half of the children who came on board the Cine Rail had never even been on a train before," said Strauss, delighted to have given the children the opportunity.
"The kids really enjoyed the experience, and most importantly, I got the feeling that they really understood the messages in the films," he added.
Ciné Rail hopes to repeat the project in the New Year and take the train to three more cities. "We want to go to Oujda in the Far East on the border of Algeria, and Khouribga, two regions which are extremely poor and marginalized and where most people have never seen cinema," said Kasmi.
"We also want to return to Casablanca where there are hundreds of schools and a huge demand for our project."
Mary Fowles
© Qantara.de 2004


text:
You don't have any saved vehicles!
Look for this link on your favorites:
Once you've saved some vehicles, you can view them here at any time.
3.6-Liter V6 24-Valve VVT Engine,8-Speed Automatic 845RE Transmission,Cloth 40 / 20 / 40 Bench Seat,Customer Preferred Package 22B,Granite Crystal Metallic Clear Coat Exterior Paint,Black/Diesel Gray Interior Colors,Tradesman SXT Package,3.55 Rear Axle Ratio,50 State Emissions,Flex Fuel Vehicle
Located in the heart of Waco, we have a great staff of committed experienced people that want to serve you and take care of each and every automotive need you have. We believe time is the most precious commodity we have and our goal is to take care of all of your transportation needs from the purchase of your next vehicle to servicing it throughout the ownership cycle. At Allen Samuels Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram we offer a searchable online inventory of new and used cars and trucks in our huge Waco, Temple, and Hillsboro area inventory.
New vehicle pricing includes all offers and incentives. Tax, Title and Tags not included in vehicle prices shown and must be paid by the purchaser. While great effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the information on this site, errors do occur so please verify information with a customer service rep. This is easily done by calling us at (888) 350-1851 or by visiting us at the dealership. Manufacturer's Rebate subject to residency restrictions.
**With approved credit. Terms may vary. Monthly payments are only estimates derived from the vehicle price with a 72 month term, 3.9% interest and 20% down payment.
*Number of views in last 30 days
† Based on 2019 EPA mileage ratings. Use for comparison purposes only. Your actual mileage will vary depending on how you drive and maintain your vehicle.
You don't have any saved vehicles!
Look for this link on your favorites:
Once you've saved some vehicles, you can view them here at any time.
(254) 772-1000Call Now
201 W. LOOP 340 • Waco, TX 76712Get Directions
Open Today! Sales: 8:30am-8pm
Open Today! Service: 7am-8pm
Open Today! Parts: 7am-8pm
Phone: (254) 772-8120http://maps.google.com/?q=201%20W%20LOOP%20340%2C%20WACO%2C%2C%20TX%2076712-6731


text:
In a thought-provoking answer to this MO question, Kevin Buzzard and several commentators have described a multitude of ways in which number theory is related to other parts of mathematics. It seems that, in practice, to know number theory you have to know all mathematics.
But what is "all mathematics"? The usual description is top-down -- that is, give a high-level theory, such as category theory, that includes nearly everything we currently consider to be important. Alas, there is no telling whether such a theory will continue to be a good description; category theory has only been around for a few decades.
Another way to describe "all mathematics" is from the bottom up -- give a basic form of mathematics that has always existed and which keeps growing and ramifying in all mathematical directions. Elementary number theory is very tempting bottom-up answer, because of the connections with other parts of mathematics already noted, and because it will satisfy our non-mathematical friends who think that mathematicians are people who are good with numbers.
So my basic questions are:
Is number theory a good bottom-up description of all mathematics? And if so, why?
Answers can be anything from general theories about the universality of number theory to examples of unexpected appearance of number theory in other branches of mathematics. And if you are not convinced that number theory rules:
Is there any good bottom-up description of all mathematics (one you can explain to a non-mathematical friend), and if so what?


text:
Of Black Cats and thirteens: Velcro, the exclusive art curator says consider this the only holiday card you'll ever need.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
She curates and inspects all and any art work that comes into our casa.
Velcro is an artsy fartsy snob.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Labels: VELCRO
10 comments:
When your curator purrs at you, thinks of you as The Master and the provider of all sustenance, the art must be good. Great photos of cat inspections and reviews, meli.ReplyDeleteReplies
jra, you got it down :) why thank you, my pleasure.Delete
- AnonymousWednesday, January 16, 2013
toooooooo cute! I especially agree with Velcro's approval of the cat as a bike racer print!ReplyDeleteReplies
my fave is the milk shorts... <3Delete
Great stuff. Beautiful cat!ReplyDeleteReplies
thanks as always Donald.Delete
Clearly, a kitty of taste and culture.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousWednesday, January 23, 2013
Velcros affinity for cat-themed art is palpable. And I love the name Velcro by the way, clearly a discerning lover of art(snob).ReplyDeleteReplies
thanks Ezra, and welcome :) I've added your east coast adventures to my rssDelete
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
A few years ago, browsing in a dusty used-book store in Maine, I came across a curious volume. It was a fat, tattered paperback bearing the title "Rationale of the Dirty Joke." Its author, I saw from the sixties-style futuristic cover, was G. Legman. Taking it off the shelf and riffling though its badly oxidized pages, I found that it contained what looked like thousands of erotic and scatological jokes, arranged under such themes as "coital postures," "the big inch," and "zoöphily." These jokes were accompanied by Freudian-style commentary, along with random animadversions on aspects of sixties life, like Zip Codes, hippies, women who swear, and Marshall McLuhan. The most striking aspect of the volume was the author's esoteric scholarship, exemplified by this sentence from the introduction:
**{: .break one} ** Particular attention should be drawn to three rare works presenting Modern Greek, Arabic, and other Levantine erotic tales and foolstories: La Fleur Lascive Orientale ('Oxford' [Bruxelles: Gay & Mlle. Doucé], 1882), anonymously translated from the originals by J.-A. Decourdemanche, an even rarer English retranslation also existing ('Athens' [Sheffield: Leonard Smithers], 1893); Contes Licencieux de Constantinople et de l'Asie Mineure, collected before 1893 by Prof. Jean Nicolaidès, and published after his sudden and mysterious death as the opening volume of a series imitating Kryptádia: "Contributions au Folklore Erotique" (Kleinbronn & Paris: G. Ficker [!], 1906-09, 4 vols.); and especially two modern French chapbooks, one entitled Histoires Arabes (Paris: A. Quignon, 1927), ascribed to an admittedly pseudonymous 'Khati Cheghlou,' and its sequel or supplement, Les Meilleures Histoires Coloniales (about 1935). **
Noting the fanciful names (G. Ficker, Khati Cheghlou) and the cranky, erudite tone, I began to wonder whether this wasn't a wild Nabokovian put-on. No doubt "G. Legman" itself was a pseudonym; both the initial (G-spot?) and the surname (as opposed to tit-man?) were suspicious. But a few months later, in the late winter of 1999, I saw on the obituary page of the Times that Gershon Legman, a "self-taught scholar of dirty jokes," had died, at the age of eighty-one, in the South of France, where he lived in voluntary exile from his native United States.
A certain facetiousness might seem to attach to the phrase "scholar of dirty jokes." Is this really an area in which scholarship is appropriate or profitable? Well, jokes do fall into the category of folklore, along with myths, proverbs, legends, nursery rhymes, riddles, and superstitions. And a good proportion of the jokes in oral circulation involve sex or scatology. If the history of folklore aspires to be a history of the human mind, as some of its practitioners insist, somebody has to do the irksome job of collecting and recording obscene, disgusting, and blasphemous jokes, and ushering them into print.
Although we think of the joke as a cultural constant, it is a form of humor that comes and goes with the rise and fall of civilizations. What distinguishes the joke from the mere humorous tale is that it climaxes in a punch line—a little verbal explosion set off by a sudden switch in meaning. A joke, unlike a tale, wants to be brief. As Freud observed, it says what it has to say not just in few words but in too few words. The classic joke proceeds with arrowlike swiftness, resolving its matter in the form of a two-liner ("Hear about the bulimic stag party? The cake came out of the girl") or even a one-liner ("I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother"). Often, it is signalled by a formulaic setup, which might itself, in turn, become the subject of a meta-joke ("A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. Bartender says, 'What is this, a joke?' ").
Joking is sometimes said to have been invented by Palamedes, the hero of Greek legend who outwitted Odysseus on the eve of the Trojan War. But since this proverbially ingenious fellow is also credited with inventing numbers, the alphabet, lighthouses, dice, and the practice of eating meals at regular intervals, the claim should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. In the Athens of Demosthenes, there was a comedians' club called the Group of Sixty, which met in the temple of Heracles to trade wisecracks, and it is said that Philip of Macedon paid handsomely to have their jokes written down; but the volume, if it ever existed, has been lost. On the Roman side, Plautus refers to jestbooks in a couple of his plays, while Suetonius tells us that Melissus, a favorite professor of the Emperor Augustus, compiled no fewer than a hundred and fifty joke anthologies. Despite this, only a single jokebook survives from ancient times: the Philogelos, or "Laughter-Lover," a collection in Greek that was probably put together in the fourth or fifth century A.D. It contains two hundred and sixty-four items, several of which appear twice, in slightly different form. This suggests that the volume is not one jokebook but two combined, a hunch borne out by the fact that it is attributed to two authors, Hierocles and Philagrius, although joint authorship was rare at the time. Virtually nothing is known about either man; there is some scholarly speculation that the Hierocles in question was a fifth-century Alexandrian philosopher of that name who was once publicly flogged in Constantinople for paganism, which, as one classicist has observed, "might have given him a taste for mordant wit."
The jokes in the Philogelos are spare and pointed. (" 'How shall I cut your hair?' a talkative barber asked a wag. 'In silence!' ") They take on a gallery of stock characters: the drunk, the miser, the braggart, the sex-starved woman, and the man with bad breath, as well as a classic type known as the scholastikos, variously translated as "pedant," "absent-minded professor," or "egghead." ("An egghead was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. 'Don't cry,' he consoled them, 'I have freed you all in my will.' ") Some of the jokes are now more cryptic than funny, perhaps because of lost undertones. A couple of jokes about lettuce, for example, might have struck a Roman audience as hilarious, given their belief that lettuce leaves, variously, promoted or impeded sexual function. But others, like No. 263 (lifted from Plutarch), would not be out of place at a Friars Club meeting: " 'I had your wife for nothing,' someone sneered at a wag. 'More fool you. I'm her husband, I have to have the ugly bitch. You don't.' " The most haunting joke in the Philogelos, however, is No. 114, about a resident of Abdera, a Greek town whose citizens were renowned for their foolishness: "Seeing a eunuch, an Abderite asked him how many children he had. The eunuch replied that he had none, since he lacked the means of reproduction. Retorted the Abderite . . ." The rest is missing from the surviving text, which goes to show the strange potency of unheard punch lines.
The Philogelos was misplaced during the Dark Ages, and with it, seemingly, the art of the joke. Sophisticated humor was kept alive in the Arab world, where the more leisurely folktale was cultivated. During the centuries of Arab conquest, folktales from the Levant, many of them satirical or erotic, made their way through Spain and Italy. An Arab tale about a wife who is pleasured by her lover while her duped husband watches uncomprehendingly from a tree, for instance, is one of several that later show up in Boccaccio's "Decameron." Once in Europe, the folktale began to cleave in two. On the one hand, with the invention of printing and the rise of literacy, it grew longer, filling out into the chivalric romance and, ultimately, the novel. On the other hand, as the pace of urban life quickened, it got shorter in its oral form, shedding details and growing more formulaic as it condensed into the humorous anecdote. It was in the early Renaissance that the art of the joke was reborn, and the midwife was a man called Poggio.
Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) was one of the most colorful and versatile of the Italian humanists. A secretary to eight Popes over a half century, he fathered fourteen children with a mistress before taking, at the age of fifty-five, a beautiful eighteen-year-old bride, who bore him another six children. His career coincided with a turbulent era in Church history. During the Great Schism, there were two and sometimes three competing Popes, and councils had to be called to restore unity. Poggio was a passionate bibliophile, and he profited from the disorder, travelling throughout Europe in search of lost works of ancient literature. From the dungeons of remote medieval monasteries he rescued precious manuscripts that had been rotting into oblivion, and laboriously deciphered and copied them. It is thanks to him that we have Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, as well as many of the orations of Cicero, the architectural writings of Vitruvius, and Apicius' works on cooking. Not only was Poggio the greatest book-hunter of his era; he also wielded one of its wickedest pens, satirizing the vices of the clergy and lambasting rival scholars in his Ciceronian Latin. "In his invective he displayed such vehemence that the whole world was afraid of him," a contemporary observed. A skilled calligrapher, Poggio invented the prototype of the roman font. As chancellor of the Republic of Florence after his retirement from the Curia, he became that city's biographer. Yet, for all these accomplishments, Poggio ended up being best known for a book of jokes.
The Liber Facetiarum, usually called simply the Facetiae, was the first volume of its kind to be published in Europe. In this collection of two hundred and seventy-three items—jests, bons mots, puns, and humorous anecdotes—the expansive Arab-Italian novella can be seen turning into the swift facezia. Some of the material had been gathered by Poggio during his travels through Europe; several of the jests have been traced to tales told by Provençal bards in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But much of it came out of a sort of joke club in the Vatican called the Bugiale—the "fib factory." Here, papal scribes would gather at the end of a tedious day spent drafting bulls, dispensations, and encyclicals to shoot the breeze and tell scandalous stories. Poggio published his Facetiae in 1451, when he was seventy years old. Soon it was being read throughout Europe. Although many of the jokes were about sex and poked fun at the morals of churchmen, not a word of condemnation was heard from the Vatican. Presumably, since the Facetiae were written in Latin, they could be savored by the clerical class without corrupting the morals of the masses. Later commentators, however, were not so broad-minded. In 1802, the Reverend William Shepherd, the author of the only biography of Poggio in English, expressed his shock that "an apostolic secretary who enjoyed the friendship and esteem of the pontiff, should have published a number of stories which outrage the laws of decency, and put modesty to the blush."
Copies of the Facetiae are not easy to come by today. The only thing I could find in the library of New York University was a photocopied facsimile of an 1878 Paris edition that was the first unexpurgated translation of Poggio's book into French (even then, the really bawdy bits were left in Latin). Reading through it, I was struck by the familiarity of the themes. There are fat jokes, drunk jokes, erection jokes, and fart jokes. There is a joke about a guy tricked into drinking urine which would not have been out of place in "American Pie." In Facetia XLVII, a husband asks his wife why, if women and men get equal pleasure out of sex, it is the men who pursue the women rather than vice versa. "It's obvious," the wife says. "We women are always ready to make love, and you men aren't. What good would it do us to solicit you when you're not in the mood?" As jokes go, this is less than sidesplitting, and yet the precise reversal of it appears in the television show "Curb Your Enthusiasm," when Cheryl, lying in bed with her husband, Larry, asks him why she's the one who always has to initiate sex. It's because we men are always ready to go, he replies—just tap me on the shoulder when you want it!
By modern standards, Poggio's Facetiae are invariably too long, and he has a regrettable tendency to preëmpt the punch line with an explanation, as in Facetia XXVI: "The abbot of Septimo, an extremely corpulent man, was travelling toward Florence one evening. On the road he asked a peasant, 'Do you think I'll be able to make it through the city gate?' He was talking about whether he would be able to make it to the city before the gates were closed. The peasant, jesting on the abbot's fatness, said, 'Why, if a cart of hay can make it through, you can, too!' " Nor are the Facetiae often very funny, at least when abstracted from the presumably chucklesome atmosphere of the Bugiale and set down in cold print. Nonetheless, by collecting and publishing them, Poggio set the precedent for a slew of later jestbooks, most of which shamelessly plundered his.
William Caxton, England's first printer of books, padded his own translation of Aesop, in 1484, with a sampling of Poggio's jokes, thus creating the earliest jestbook in English. By Shakespeare's time, jestbooks had become extremely popular. "I had my good wit out of the 'Hundred Merry Tales,' " Beatrice declares in "Much Ado About Nothing," referring to a popular collection of the day. Many of the items in these Tudor and Elizabethan jestbooks are artlessly scatological; for example, "What is the most cleanliest leaf among all other leaves? It is holly leaves, for nobody will wipe his arse with them." Many more are scarcely jokes at all. Instead of racing toward a punch line, they simply describe some prank, typically played by a wife on her husband, or illustrate a moral. (Preachers frequently inserted jests into sermons to keep their congregations from falling asleep.) Another nudge was needed to finish what Poggio had started: the making of the humorous tale into the joke. It came at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when—possibly because of a confusion with another classical writer called Hierocles—twenty-eight of the Philogelos jokes were appended to an edition of his "Commentary on the Golden Words of Pythagoras." The jokes were soon circulating in print throughout Europe.
Thanks to the popularity of the rediscovered Philogelos jokes, English humor got shorter and punchier—that is to say, jokier. The change shows up in "Joe Miller's Jests," the most enduringly popular of the new generation of jokebooks that began to flourish in the Georgian era. The book was named after a famous London comic actor, although he was not responsible for its publication and had died the year before. First published in 1739, it went through so many editions that a "Joe Miller" came to mean a stale joke.
The original edition contained everything from jokes about the fractured logic of Irishmen and bad breath ("A Lady being asked how she liked a Gentleman's Singing, who had a very stinking Breath, the Words are good, said she, but the Air is intolerable") to bawdy plays on the word "cock" and ribaldry at the expense of loose women ("A Gentleman said of a young Wench who constantly ply'd about the Temple, that if she had as much Law in her Head, as she had in her Tail, she would be one of the ablest Counsel in England"). The bluer material, however, did not survive the subsequent wave of prudery in Anglo-Saxon culture. In the early nineteenth century, around the time that Thomas Bowdler removed the indelicate bits from Shakespeare, jokebooks also got cleaned up. Little of Poggio could have made it into the expurgated columns of humor magazines like Punch. But the dirty joke lived on in oral culture until it was restored to print, in all its repulsive splendor, by Gershon Legman, in the nineteen-sixties.
Legman, I noticed in my decrepit copy of "Rationale of the Dirty Joke," had dedicated the volume "To the Manes"—shade—"of Poggio Bracciolini, Lover of Books, Folk-Humor, and Women." Did he feel some deep affinity with the mischievous Italian humanist? People who knew of Legman—he seems to have left behind a cult following—tell the most outlandish stories: that he created the sixties slogan "Make Love, Not War"; that he had an affair with Anaïs Nin and enlisted her help to write dollar-a-page pornography to order for a rich Oklahoma "collector"; that he was behind the invention of the vibrating dildo; that he introduced origami to the West; that he left the United States to escape government persecution, taking refuge in a hill town on the French Riviera, where he lived a hand-to-mouth existence in a dilapidated castle that had once belonged to the Knights Templar.
On investigation, most of this turned out to be at least partly true. (We have to take Legman's own word on the dildo and the slogan.) Legman was born in 1917 into a Jewish family in the coal country of Pennsylvania. He started collecting jokes early, clipping them from magazines and filing them by theme. After high school, he went to New York, where he educated himself in several languages; his university, he said, was the New York Public Library. At the age of twenty-three, he published his first book, "Oragenitalism," under the pseudonym Roger-Maxe de la Glannège (an anagram of his given name, George Alexander Legman). It bore the subtitle "An Encyclopaedic Outline of Oral Technique in Genital Excitation, Part I, Cunnilinctus." (Legman later explained that he lacked the courage to do the research for fellatio.) At the time, writing a treatise on oral sex was deemed as dangerous as political sedition. When his publisher's office was raided, Legman briefly fled the state. On his return to New York, he worked as an erotic-book hunter for the sexologist Alfred Kinsey and inhabited the disreputable fringes of the city's literary world, where smut-peddlers were sometimes indistinguishable from avant-garde publishers of Joyce, Lawrence, and Henry Miller.
Legman, however, was more of a moralist than a pornographer. In the late nineteen-forties, he wrote "Love and Death," a fierce polemic, which argued that violence was the true pornography. Why, he asked, should children be exposed to relentless depictions of violence but shielded from those of lovemaking? "At least sex is normal," he wrote. "Is murder?" Legman published the book himself, shipping copies to customers by post from his three-room cottage in the Bronx. Although "Love and Death" was a tirade against censorship, not a piece of erotica, the United States Postal Service authorities accused its author-publisher of sending "indecent, vulgar and obscene materials" through the mail, and cut off his deliveries. Disgusted, Legman left the country, with his wife, for France. They bought a small piece of land on the Riviera with an olive grove and an old building (which was indeed on the site of a Knights Templar castle) that became a repository for his vast collection of rare volumes and his crates of index cards covered with limericks, jokes, and what he called "pissoir epigraphs."
Legman was a handsome man, with thick dark hair, blue eyes, and a strong nose; because of chronic poverty, he was typically dressed in threadbare clothes with a length of rope for a belt. Friends describe him as tetchy and difficult, but exhilarating to be around. Academics were put off by this autodidact from the murky demimonde, whose rambling prose was full of marginal jeremiads. Legman, in turn, was disdainful of folklorists with Ph.D.s, whom he called "Phudniks" and "cacademics." Yet, by freely making available to them materials that academic journals were afraid to publish, he helped establish erotic folklore as a respectable subject for scholarly study.
Reading through Legman's vast compilation of dirty jokes is a punishing experience, like being trapped in the men's room of a Greyhound bus station of the nineteen-fifties. And the jokes in "Rationale of the Dirty Joke" are what Legman deemed the "clean" dirty jokes, arranged by such relatively innocent themes as "the nervous bride," "phallic brag," and "water wit." In 1975 he published a second fat volume, "No Laughing Matter," which contained the "dirty" dirty jokes—nearly a thousand pages of jokes about anal sadism, venereal disease, and worse. Legman's avowed purpose was not to amuse the reader or furnish him with material for the locker room; he saw his work as a serious psychoanalytic study, one that would disclose the "infinite aggressions" behind jokes, mainly of men against women.
Legman spent three and a half decades collecting the jokes in these volumes—transcribing some sixty thousand variants on index cards, arranging them by type and motif, and tracing them from country to country and culture to culture, back to the time of Poggio and beyond. They were culled not only from written sources but also from the field: parlor, beer joint, bedroom, and public lavatory. (Many of the jokes are tagged by year and place of discovery: "Idaho 1932," "Penna. 1949.") The result was, by his own account, a vast "decorative showcase" of anxiety, repression, and neurosis, a magnum opus written "almost as often in tears as in laughter." What drove him to this singular labor? According to one friend, he saw himself "as the keeper of the deepest subcellar in the burning Alexandria Library of the age; the subcellar of our secret desires, which no one else was raising so much as a finger to preserve."
But Legman must have suspected that he also had a subconscious stake in his massive dirty-joke project. As a lay analyst, he believed that "jokes are essentially an unveiling of the joke-teller's own neuroses and compulsions, and his guilts about these." An enthusiasm for a certain species of joke can be revealing in ways the enthusiast might not fully appreciate. Take the dead-baby jokes that were popular in the United States a few decades ago ("What's red and swings? A baby on a meat hook," and so on). If you were one of the teen-agers who used to tell such jokes, it might conceivably have had something to do with murderous impulses arising from sibling rivalry. Even parents could see the humor; after all, babies are such a lot of bother. Although "sick jokes" of this sort lay outside Gershon Legman's purview, he did make slightly puzzled reference to them, mentioning a "Dr. Dundes" as an authority.
Alan Dundes is a folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, reverentially known there as the "Joke Professor." Dundes is the academy's most assiduous collector of jokes, the heir to Poggio and Legman. In the past five decades, he has produced several analytical collections of humor, notably "Cracking Jokes" (1987). He has also written or co-authored many articles in folklore journals on specific joke themes, with titles like "Here I Sit: A Study of American Latrinalia" (toilet jokes); "Arse Longa, Vita Brevis" (aids jokes); "First Prize: Fifteen Years" (dissident jokes from Eastern Europe—the title is the punch line to the setup "Did you hear about the joke contest in Bucharest?"); and even a study of jokes about Gary Hart, "Six Inches from the Presidency"—which, he told me with some amusement when I reached him by phone in Berkeley, has just been translated into Russian.
Dundes was fascinated with jokes as a boy growing up in the suburbs of New York City. His father, an attorney, would return home from the city each evening with a few jokes he had picked up while playing bridge on the commuter train out of Grand Central, and tell them over dinner. As a graduate student at Yale, Dundes took a course in poetry with Cleanth Brooks and became interested in Yeats's use of Celtic mythology. This led him to the study of folklore, then an academically marginal field. In 1962, he obtained his Ph.D. from Indiana University, where, as a course requirement, candidates had to submit a hundred items of folklore that they had collected and analyzed. Dundes turned in a lot of jokes.
"Before then, it had never occurred to me to analyze the jokes I collected," he told me. "But Vladimir Propp's 'Morphology of the Folktale' had just come out in English"—he was referring to the 1928 work that identified thirty-one narrative elements which constitute the underlying structure of Russian fairy tales—"and I thought, Hey, this is a great methodology for jokes. So I was early to hop on the structuralist bandwagon." But Dundes was also a Freudian, and remains one, "even in these days of Freud-bashing." Freud himself was an industrious collector of Jewish jokes and considered them deeply significant. Although his collection was most likely destroyed in one of his periodic manuscript-burning sessions, some two hundred jokes, tales, puns, and riddles appear in his 1905 book "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious." Dundes was greatly influenced by this seminal work, which likens jokes to dreams. (Both involve the condensation and displacement of meanings, the representation of things by their opposites, the triumph of fallacy over logic—all to outwit the inner censor.) "Some people believe jokes and nursery rhymes and fairy tales are just harmless little stories that don't mean anything," Dundes told me. "But they're not meaningless. And they're not necessarily harmless, either."
I could not resist posing the tiresome but still mysterious question: Where do jokes come from? "There are two classic theories about the origin of jokes," Dundes said. "One is that they come from stockbrokers, who have time on their hands between sales and a communications network to send jokes around. The other theory is that they are made up by prisoners, who have a lot of spare time and a captive audience." He added, "Lately, these two theories have merged."
But the romantic ideal of individual creation seems inadequate when it comes to jokes. "The classic ones get told over and over again in updated dress," Dundes noted. "A good example is one that I first heard about Richard Nixon. So Nixon's taking a walk around the White House grounds one winter day when he comes across the words 'I hate Tricky Dick' written in urine in the snow. He tells the Secret Service to investigate. A week later, they come back to him and say, 'Well, Mr. President, we've analyzed the urine, and it turns out to be Secretary Kissinger's. But we've also analyzed the handwriting, and it's the First Lady's.' " Dundes heard the same joke during the Clinton years, with Kissinger and Pat Nixon replaced by Al Gore and Hillary, or even Chelsea. Indeed, versions of it go back to the Ozark mountain culture of the eighteen-nineties. "People on the Internet today have no idea that the jokes they're trading are hundreds of years old," he said.
Folklorists are fond of the idea that jokes don't get invented; they evolve. As Legman put it, "Nobody ever tells jokes for the first time." Consider the following joke, current in mid-twentieth-century America, about an impecunious couple who marry for love. Since there is nothing for breakfast in the morning, the husband instead has sex with his wife on the kitchen table before going off to work and also when he returns home for lunch. Coming back famished in the evening, the husband finds his wife sitting in the kitchen with her panties down and her feet up on the oven door. "Just warming up your supper, darling," she says. This jest can be traced back to a late-eighteenth-century Scottish rhyme titled "The Supper Is Na Ready," and from there almost two centuries earlier to a 1618 French collection of libertine poetry ("Mais le souper n'est pas encore cuit"), and ultimately to the Philogelos: "Said a young man to his randy wife, 'Wife, what shall we do, eat or make love?' 'Whichever you like; there's no bread.' " This may be the longest joke lineage ever established, reaching back some fifteen centuries. It is the labor of the great joke collectors—a few brilliant, polymathic, and sometimes eccentric men—that has made us aware of such continuities in the nether regions of civilization. Some have piggybacked on the work of earlier collectors; others have added analyses or rhetorical flourishes. But Poggio remains the most important of them, the man who reintroduced the lost classical art of the joke to Western culture.
After Poggio's death, the people of Florence entombed him with much pomp in the Church of Santa Croce. Donatello was commissioned to make a statue of him, which was installed in the façade of the Duomo. A century later, in 1569, some alterations were undertaken in the cathedral, and Poggio's statue was removed from its original position and placed in a grouping of the Twelve Apostles. There the first modern joke collector can be found, timelessly keeping company with martyrs and evangelists. ♦


text:
My name is Ingrid Galadriel and this is a blog about my adventures in history, crafting, farm life, film production, music and nature. When I'm not doing farm life activities I'm a documentary producer at UpNorth Film and a project manager in Hands on History.
I hope you have a nice stay!
All in Farmlife & Nature


text:
SIMI VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 25 (UPI) -- Eight Republican presidential candidates say they've agreed to take part in the upcoming Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation debate in California.
Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum will appear at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley Sept. 7, Politico reported Thursday.
The debate will be Perry's first since he announced his candidacy Aug. 13.
To be eligible to participate in the debate, candidates had to have formally announced their candidacy and captured at least 4 percent in one of eight national polls.
The debate will be carried live on MSNBC and Politico said it would stream the event live on its Web site.


text:
After yesterday's media coverage of YouTube's failure to seal several high-profile video deals, the company and its corporate owner now claim that they are on the verge of making content owners happy by offering tools to keep copyrighted material off of the site. In recent weeks, a major criticism of firms like Viacom was that YouTube had video filtering technology in place, but was only offering it to partners.
In a statement sent to Reuters, the company disputed the claims that it has done nothing to prevent piracy. "From the start, we?ve led the industry in developing a content verification tool to help copyright owners locate their content on our site and send us DMCA notices with the click of a mouse," says the statement. "We also take a unique 'hash' of every video removed for copyright infringement and block re-upload of that exact video file prospectively. And we impose a 10-minute limit on videos to prevent the upload of full-length commercial programming in all standard accounts (which comprise more than 99% of our accounts)."
YouTube admits that it does have a certain tools available only to its partners, including audio fingerprinting technology that record labels have access to. But filtering is complicated business; YouTube can't simply fingerprint every song in existence and then filter that music from the site, for instance, because "we will necessarily block videos containing music content licensed to us by our music label partners as well as videos containing 'fair uses' of that music."
The same thing is true for video. Even if YouTube can develop a reliable way to detect copyrighted material, it has no way of knowing whether that material was uploaded with the owner's permission. Many copyright holders upload clips and even longer works in the hope of building buzz, and fair use is again a concern. By contrast, filtering out pornography, which YouTube already does, is easy to do, as "anyone can spot it just by looking at it."
Despite the problems, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has promised that filtering technology is coming, but he won't say exactly when. "We just reviewed that about an hour ago," Schmidt said when reached by Reuters. "It is going to roll out very soon... It is not far away."
Cynics might wonder whether YouTube actually wants its tools to be effective. While the site is filled with plenty of engaging and fully-legal material, clips of copyrighted works still remain one of YouTube's biggest draws. If the filtering becomes good enough that this material can basically be kept off of the site, YouTube would certainly lose traffic. This threat should provide even more impetus for the company to get deals in place with the major media companies.


text:
This week, classical musician Edwin Culver shares how he went into a town where he didn't have a following, sold out a show, and got the audience to give him wrapped presents afterward.
The five best social media lessons we keep coming back to again and again.
Real life examples from our clients in the performing arts of how hiring a social media consultant will help you stop reacting and start proacting. (Sidenote: why isn't proacting an actual word?)
After years handling social media for artists, here is the very basic nitty gritty in order to have a social media presence. Follow these simple steps and you'll have a feed that you can be proud of.
Instagram Lives fall under the category of "ethereal content - a term that marketers throw around to mean stuff that disappears in 24 hours. Learn how you can turn your Instagram Live videos into content that reaches farther than your Instagram followers - and lasts longer than 24 hours.
Writing a blog post can seem like an overwhelming proposition. Is it like writing an essay in high school? Happy to say that, no, it's not. It can go very quickly if you have a clear framework to start from and actually turn your readers into customers.


text:
TTar necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 133 diseños de 33 diseñadores freelance.
We are a two-person technology consulting startup, expecting to grow rapidly. The name NetBrains is intentionally vague, not limiting us to any specific part of the technology world. That being said, we are experienced software engineers, so that's likely where we'll start.
We also have our own products and services that we'd like to develop, so the name works for a company that's not strictly in the consulting business, but also a product/service provider. The logo should do the same.
Our image should be that of a young tech-savvy, new-age ("web 2.0") company.
Small and medium sized business who need technology consulting services, and specifically, custom software development. Most of our customers will be looking to have a custom web-based application developed either for their in-house use, or in a lot of cases, as a public facing application.
We do not do simple "websites". When it comes to our software development practice, we focus on web-based *applications*. For example, we could develop the online bill pay service for a bank, or the self service portal for an insurance company.
We are looking for a logo to represent our company.
The logo does not have to have a "brain" in it, but it could, as long as it was done tastefully and without coming across like we're a medical practice (or zombies). We suggest a brain that is not anatomically correct.
The files we will require are:
Print file format - .ai (CMYK)
Web file format - .png, .jpg and layered .psd (RGB)
Please do not use any stock images or clip art in the logo.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


text:
Social Media Boot Camp for Small Businesses
The calls kept rolling in to Harper College's Small Business Development Center: Entrepreneurs were well aware they needed to jump on the social media bandwagon to boost their business, but had no idea how to start. The answer, a first-time social media boot camp tailored to new and existing Northwest suburban small businesses, will launch in June at Harper's SBDC.
"Our role is to respond to the needs of our local entrepreneurs, and this program was based entirely on input from them," Small Business Development Manager Tom Cassell says. "The challenge was to create something simple enough for busy small business owners to grasp, but also robust enough to really affect their bottom line. I think we accomplished that."
The four-session workshop will teach small business owners and marketing professionals to capitalize on social media - from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn, Google Local and more.
The boot camp runs from 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesdays, June 5 to June 25. Sessions are: June 5 - Social Media Marketing (an introduction to the fundamentals); June 12 - Social Media Engagement (creating a social brand and managing customer service using social media analytics); June 19 - Social Media Platforms (determining the best platform for a specific business); and June 26 - Social Media Local (putting a business on the map). The cost is $50 a session or $175 for all four.
The series is the latest boot camp offering from Harper's SBDC, which regularly provides training for small business owners and free one-on-one business counseling. To register for the class or for more information on SBDC offerings, visit www.harpercollege.biz or call 847.925.6070.
Media contact: Erin Brooks, Media Relations Manager, 847.925.6159


text:
Mod Mom on Nate Berkus Today!
Posted by
Becky |
View all posts by Becky
Leave a comment!
Wow am I proud and jealous of one of our furniture designers today! Kiersten, a.k.a. Mod Mom, gets to meet Nate Berkus on his show today! I can't wait to see her; check your local listings so you don't miss it!


text:
Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Consider supporting us by disable your adblocker or Try ConvertXtoDVD and convert all your movies to DVD. Free trial ! :)
How To's
Sub-Forums Last Post
Post your own guides, how to's, F.A.Qs or articles here (including images and html code). Your guide will be added to our guides list and to the front page latest guides list.
Forum Actions:
Forum Statistics:
- Threads: 665
- Posts: 24,398
Last Post:by23rd Oct 2019 11:33
Forum Actions:
Forum Statistics:
- Threads: 334
- Posts: 469
Last Post:
Post your Glossary Additions...by16th May 2017 05:40


text:
Q&A with Senior Third Baseman Josh Tanner
Related Links
The UC San Diego baseball team recently swept the No. 1 ranked team in the country and has climbed to first-place in the California Collegiate Athletic Association. Josh Tanner, one of five, four-year letterwinners contributing this season, has been a big part of the success. So far, the third baseman from El Dorado Hills is one of four Tritons hitting over .300 and is part of a UCSD defense that sports a .982 fielding percentage, an increase over last season's .975 percentage that ranked No. 1 in the nation. Tanner recently took time to discuss the 2009 season and life as a student-athlete on the Triton baseball team.
Q: How is the 2009 Triton Baseball team the same and/or different than past UCSD teams you have played on?
TANNER: This year, we have a very unique chemistry because we have so many veteran guys. A lot of us have been playing together for three or four years. I think the newer guys feel very comfortable too because of the environment this creates.
Q: With about half of the conference season complete, how would you describe the season up to date?
TANNER: We struggled out of the gate a little bit, but I think it was good for us. Dealing with struggles early in the season is only going to make us a better team towards the end. I also feel as though we are beginning to hit our stride at just the right time.
Q: You have seen an increased roll this season. Did you work on anything specific during the summer and fall?
TANNER: I always prepare the same way. I have done everything in four years here whether it be starting, being a role player or whatever. I just do what I can to help the team win.
Q: Which pitcher on the Triton staff are you glad you do not have to face in a game?
TANNER: It has to be (Tim) Shibuya. He is so solid and he locates his pitches so well. You are lucky if you get something good to hit in an at-bat.
Q: What have been some of your favorite memories as a Triton?
TANNER: Going to the playoffs each year has been awesome. The progression we have made in the past four years from CCAAs to the regionals has been so great. Hopefully we can take it to the next level this year and go to the College World Series. Also, the friends I have made and the guys I have got to play with in the four years I have been here.
Q: On March 14, teammate Trevor Decker threw a no-hitter. At what point did you begin to realize he had a no-hit bid going? Was there any chatter about it in the dugout when UCSD was batting? What were your reactions after the final out was made?
TANNER: I actually have to say that there was not a lot of chatter, not as much as usual when a guy is throwing so well. I like to think that is why it actually happened! I knew in about the fourth inning that he was throwing well and we could feel it. It was so exciting to see things come together for him because we have been through a lot together (he has been my roommate for three years!).
Q: You have seen action at third base, shortstop and second base in your career as a Triton. Do you have a favorite position? Are there any differences in playing those positions?
TANNER: Shortstop has always been my favorite. There is a lot of responsibility and it requires leadership and being vocal and I love that. I have worked a lot at third and I feel more comfortable there now. It is different because of the quicker reaction time and the longer throws.
Q: When not playing baseball, what do you like to do in your spare time?
TANNER: Spare time? I don't get much! But when we do, I like to hang out with friends, watch baseball, play Rock Band with my roommates...normal stuff.
Q: What are some of your favorite places in
TANNER: I really like
Q: What is your major and do you have any after graduation plans?
TANNER: My major is Management Science, but I don't really know what I want to do. I have always wanted to work at ESPN or for a Major League team somehow. We will see how that works out, but for now I just want a job and maybe I will go to grad school in a few years.
Q: Being born in El Dorado Hills, what do you like and not like about northern and southern
TANNER: I love being able to play baseball almost year round in
Q: In what ways has head coach Dan O'Brien helped you develop throughout your Triton career?
TANNER: Coach O'Brien has been a big influence on me through my four years because he has helped me through some tough times. He is very motivational and is such a good person that I am privileged to have gotten the opportunity to play for him. I truly appreciate how he has prepared me for life after baseball.
Previous Q & A Articles
Anju Shimura (Women's Swimming) March 7, 2009
Stephanie Bocian (Women's Water Polo) February 20, 2009
Lauren Chastain (Softball) February 5, 2009
A.J. Maulhardt (Men's Basketball) January 28, 2009
Annette Ilg (Women's Basketball) January 22, 2009
Steven Hardy (Men's Swimming) January 13, 2009
Frank Fritsch (Men's Volleyball) January 5, 2009
Kendall Bohn (Women's Swimming) December 22, 2008
Kelvin Kim (Men's Basketball) December 15, 2008
Michelle Osier (Women's Basketball) December 5, 2008
Sylvia Schmidt (Women's Volleyball) November 7, 2008
Denny Harper (Men's Water Polo Head Coach) October 17, 2008Ron Larsen (USA Volleyball Assistant Coach) October 13, 2008Jessica McGovern (Women's Soccer) October 6, 2008Bre Schofield (Cross Country) September 26, 2008Tony Fernandez (Men's Soccer) September 18,2008Kimberly Carpenter (Women's Volleyball) September 12, 2008A.J. Kotanjian (Men's Water Polo) September 2, 2008Peter Akman (Men's Soccer) August 21, 2008Natasha Belak-Berger (Women's Soccer) August 15, 2008Jake LaVieux (Men's Cross Country) August 8, 2008Dr. Penny Rue (Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs) July 30, 2008Michelle Torres (Women's Volleyball) July 15, 2008Jon Pascale (Men's Soccer Head Coach) July 1, 2008Julie Ertel (Athletics) June 16, 2008Clint Allard (Men's Basketball) June 9, 2008Jen Myers (Women's Crew) May 27, 2008Casey Ryan (Men's Track and Field and Men's Basketball) May 21, 2008


text:
How to Use FaceTime on iPad
FaceTime on iPad allows you to make video calls to other FaceTime users. FaceTime is wonderful for anyone who wants to keep up with distant family members and friends and see as well as hear the latest-and-greatest news.
You can chat with anyone who also has FaceTime — iPhone 4, iPad 2, and compatible Mac users (iOS 4.3 or later). During a FaceTime session, you'll be able to see and hear the person you call. However, you can't adjust audio volume from within FaceTime or record a call.
People make and receive calls with FaceTime using a phone number (iPhone 4) or an e-mail account (iPad 2 or Mac) and Apple ID. Since you had to create an Apple ID in order to register your iPad 2, you should be all set.
Before using FaceTime for the first time, you should make sure the feature is turned on. Tap Settings on the Home screen and then tap FaceTime. Tap the On/Off button to turn it on, if necessary. You can also select the e-mail account that can be used to make phone calls to you on this Settings page.
At this time, you can use FaceTime only over a Wi-Fi network, not over 3G, which limits the places from which you can make or receive video calls to your home wireless network or a public hotspot.


text:
Iraq veteran Benjamin Lesley Gillman knows he was following big footsteps when he marched alongside Sydney's diggers on Anzac Day.
"What I just did then is one of the best things I've ever done in my life," the 29-year-old told AAP.
"I had a sense of honour."
The Cronulla local served in Iraq in 2007, in a unit that concentrated on rebuilding the war-torn country.
Now he's home and marching as one of the young veterans sustaining the Anzac legacy.
But as he strode along Sydney's Hyde Park, his thoughts were with the 40 fallen Australian soldiers who made "the ultimate sacrifice" in Afghanistan.
The RSL allowed young vets from recent conflicts and peacekeeping missions to take the prime position in the Sydney march behind the NSW Governor-General Marie Bashir and the RSL executive.
Thousands lined the streets in the Sydney city centre to pay respects to the veterans, young and old.
Among them were Rex Bayley and his wife, Fay, who took an early train from Gymea Bay so they could reserve their favourite vantage point along George Street.
Watching on as more than 15,000 NSW RSL serving and former defence force members paraded past, 75-year-old Rex said he wasn't deterred by the soggy Sydney weather.
A little further down the street, Dellane and Rodrick Stewart seized the opportunity to teach their nine-year-old grandson Mackenzie some family, as well as national, history.
Mr Stewart, 78, followed his own father into the armed services, with stints in Borneo, Malaysia, New Guinea and Vietnam during a 19-year career.
With his great-grandfather's medals pinned to his chest, young Mackenzie is just starting to grasp what that means.
It's a feeling Gwenda Ick, 62, knows well.
Her father served in New Guinea in World War II, and while she was born after he came home, his trauma meant as a young girl she felt her dad was "always sick".
"He used to get angry quite a lot," she said.
But kept dry in the Legacy Widows stalls and wrapped up in a plastic poncho, her mother, Patricia Smith, said despite the horrors war had wrought on so many families, the Anzac Day march was still a special occasion.
"My husband passed away, but we still like to come in and watch," she said.


text:
Poste Mistress
Dahila High Heel Sandal
Snake Print Leather
Heels By Poste Mistress
The Dahlia High Heel Sandal is a delicate strappy heel in snake effect leather with a thick black leather mid strap, buckle fastening and mini stiletto heel.
- - Leather upper
- - Leather lining
- - Leather sock with gold branding
- - Leather sole
About Poste Mistress
A unique and feminine luxury label the represents directional and timeless quality. Poste Mistress is a women's footwear boutique exclusive to OFFICE that delivers expertly crafted, elegant silhouettes. Using luxurious materials, subtle texture clashes, delicate embellishment and glossy finishes, the label embodies pretty polished perfection.
Style number 1663592667
- UK Standard Delivery: £3.50 or FREE on full price items. Delivery within 3-5 working days.
- Next Day UK Delivery: £5.00. Order up to 9pm* Mon - Thurs
- Same Day: £7.00. Order by 1pm Mon - Fri*
- Saturday Delivery: £6.00. Order by 5pm Friday*
- Sunday Delivery: £7.00. Order by 5pm Friday*
- Click & Collect: FREE and available within 3 working days to any of our UK and Irish OFFICE / OFFSPRING stores
- CollectPlus£3.50 or FREE on full price items delivery in 2-3 working days to any CollectPlus location
- International Delivery: Cost dependant on country. International Standard Delivery within 2-10 working days. International Express Delivery within 2-5 working days.
* Click here for full delivery details
Not happy with a purchase? No problem. You can return to our warehouse, via Collect+ or to one of our UK stores within 28 days of purchase.
Footwear should be unworn and in its original packaging. Your refund will then be processed back to your original method of payment.Click here for more information on returns.
Click here for full delivery times and cost
|Delivery Options
|Cut off time
|Delivery Times
|Delivery Options, Cost, Cut Off Time & Delivery Times
|Standard Delivery UK & NI YODEL
|£3.50 or FREE on full price products**
|Delivery between 8am-8pm, Mon-Fri
|Standard Delivery UK & NI
Delivery between 8am-8pm, Mon-Fri £3.50
|Next Working Day UK & NI PARCELFORCE
|Order up to 9PM*
|Delivery between 8am-8pm, Mon-Fri
|Next Working Day UK & NI
Order up to 5pm*
Delivery between 8am-8pm, Mon-Fri £5.00
|Same Day (E-Courier)
|Order by 1pm Monday to Friday
|Delivery between 6pm - 10pm, Mon-Fri
|Same Day (E-Courier)
Order by 1pm Monday to Friday
Delivery between 6pm-10pm, Mon-Fri £7.00
|Saturday & Sunday UK & NI PARCELFORCE
|Order by 5PM Friday*
|Delivery between 8am-8pm, Sat & Sun
|Saturday & Sunday UK & NI
Order up to 5pm*
Delivery between 8am-8pm, Sat & Sun £6.00, £7.00
|Click & Collect Delivery to store
|Available within 3 Working Days*
|Click & Collect
Delivery to store
Available within 3 Working Days*
|International Standard & International Express DPD
|Delivery costs depend on country
|Delivery between 2-10 Working Days*
International Standard & International Express DPD
Delivery cost is dependant on country
Delivery between 2-10 Working Days*
*Click here for full delivery details
**FREE delivery not applicable on sale items and excludes selected shoe laces & shoe care


text:
Ex-British Airways CIO and current John Lewis CIO, Paul Coby, has said that retail could take a few lessons from the airline industry when it comes to online services, but he also believes retail has the upper hand when understanding customers through big data analytics.
Coby told Computerworld UK at SITA's Air Traffic IT Summit this week in Brussels that although John Lewis is experiencing strong growth in online sales, this is growth that airlines embraced a decade ago.
"Retail can learn a lot from the air transport world. In air transport [whilst he was CIO at BA], we went through the digital web revolution between 2002 and 2004. I remember when BA went from five percent to 40 percent in sales volume online in just two years," said Coby.
He added: "Retail in the UK is now going through that. At John Lewis our sales are at 25 percent online, and it is growing at about 25 percent year on year. Having been through that explosive growth already, I think airlines understand a lot about the fast transition."
However, Coby was quick to highlight that airlines haven't harnessed the benefits of big data and don't understand their customers as well as retailers do.
"That being said, I think it's noticeable in the air transport world how much everybody is talking about retail and about how a retail approach to customers can operate. I think they have quite a lot to learn," he said.
"[The industry needs to learn how to] really understand customers, using the data that they have got, by using it more effectively to allow personalisation and customisation."
This is something that has also resonated with Virgin Atlantic's CIO, David Bulman, who explained to Computerworld UK that he is currently in talks with vendors, including Amazon, about how he can harness the benefits of big data in the cloud, and is currently running some proof of concept trials.
"Big data is very much key for us. People often say big data and don't mean it, or they say big data and just think social media. Airlines are incredibly data rich, but it's really diverse datasets," said Bulman.
"How can I take information out of our engineering system? Out of our frequent flyer system? Airport systems? We need to mash it all together to give us some unique customer insights. I think it's going to be critical for us going forward," he added.
Bulman explained that he is unlikely to tackle big data by 'buying his own tin', but would rather experiment at a low cost point in the cloud.
"I have done some experiments, but now we are talking to vendors about what else we can do. Amazon is a great example, they are doing some great work in this space. If some of these early proof of concepts work out it will be very easy to turn the key and instantly get some insight," he said.
"That's the joy of the cloud – you can do a very cheap proof of concept and if it works you can turn it right up. I hope within a year we will see some really interesting stuff coming out of it."


text:
- home
- news
- blogs
- calendar
- enewsletters
- podcasts
Quaeris to add jobs portal Resume bank welcoming events
A consortium of West Michigan companies is aiming to add new features in 2011 to a website that supports their efforts to recruit talent to the area.
Quaeris, which developed the website www.hellowestmichigan.com to introduce the area to prospective new employees, plans to add a jobs portal, a section for college students and meet-ups for newcomers, Director Kevin Stotts said.
"We did a member survey. It came back saying there is quite a bit of satisfaction of the resources and utility of the website, and anecdotal feedback of talent using that resource."
The website offers basic information about the communities of Battle Creek, Grand Haven, Grand Rapids, Holland, Kalamazoo and Muskegon, and also parses it by topic, such as arts, culture and entertainment, multicultural resources and K-12 education.
There's also a section for member companies to share best recruiting practices as well as to review résumés of trailing spouses who are looking for local jobs after moving here for a spouse's job. Stotts said he knows of one hire that has resulted from the trailing spouses résumé bank so far.
Members of Quaeris include: Amway, Austin Relocation, Bissell, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Davenport University, Grand Valley State University, Haworth, Herman Miller, Kellogg, Meijer, Michigan State University, Perrigo, Priority Health, Powell Relocation Group, Progressive AE, Rehmann, Spectrum Health, Spectrum Health Medical Group, Steelcase, Trinity Health West Michigan, Van Andel Institute, Varnum, Warner Norcross & Judd, West Michigan Relocation Specialists and Wolverine World Wide.
They have partnered on the site with an array of regional chambers of commerce, economic development and professional organizations.
"We are a global company, but we are a company that is in the heart of West Michigan," said Marc Branca, manager for global executive search and talent acquisition.
"We hire about 400, 500 people a year. Of those, about one-third come from outside the state. When candidates are relocating, we send them the link to hellowestmichigan. It helps them become more educated about the area, the schools, what's possible for trailing spouses. We've posted résumés to the résumé board. We've interviewed candidates from other hiring entities that have provided trailing spouses, and actually hired one."
In December, Quaeris began sponsoring quarterly discussions for member human resources specialists to focus on recruiting, retention and cultural competency issues.
"We continue to do education and training for our members," Stolls added — for example, orientation for new members, recruiting and retention best practices and the key message Quaeris uses in promoting West Michigan.
Quaeris plans to update its home page to reach out to college students, working in partnership with www.interninmichigan.com, Stotts said. Plus, members will get a new section for best practices for internships.
Stotts said a welcoming event for professionals new to West Michigan was recently conducted in Holland and one is being planned for Grand Rapids.
"Once we have those as sort of models or templates, we'll be able to replicate those around the region," he said. "We've had terrific feedback so far in talking about those with our member employers."
The jobs portal and résumé bank are expected to be ready in the second quarter of 2011, Stotts said. It may be a way to encourage additional companies to become Quaeris members, he added.
"We envision it becoming a hub for conversation and sort of promoting all that's great about West Michigan," Stotts said. "We need to be more boastful of the things that West Michigan offers. We've got great companies here and great things going on."
In the meantime, Quaeris member companies are using the site regularly.
"We were looking for an effective way to get out information about trailing spouses that were looking for work," said Jim D'Amico, strategic staffing manager for Bissell Inc., who relocated to Grand Rapids from Cleveland last spring.
He said outside job candidates tend to assume Grand Rapids is either like Detroit or is a sleepy, conservative town, and the breadth of information at hellowestmichigan dispels those notions.
"They love having that one-stop shop," D'Amico said.
"It gives them an opportunity to see what we have to offer, from sports to arts to community festivals," added Cassandra Volkers, supervisor of staffing and diversity at Haworth. "They get a snapshot of what living in West Michigan is like. It's a wonderful resource."