text:
|Associated Press
|The perception of Chad Ochocinco has changed through the years, from his time in Cincy to New England to Miami.
The Miami Dolphins begin training camp July 26, with both veterans and rookies expected to show up at the team's facility. They will do so along with HBO and its cameras, as it begins the process of collecting footage for its annual behind-the-scenes show "Hard Knocks."
At that point, all eyes will be on Chad Ochocinco. The Dolphins signed the lightning rod receiver to a minimum salary for one season, provided he makes the team. He has already made headlines.
He married his reality show star bride Evelyn, live-tweeting down the aisle. He joined her in a reality show set to air on VH1. And he spoke to Dolphins media members for two minutes in camp, seeking "Brokeback Mountain chemistry" in the locker room.
Welcome to life with Ochocinco, where his own reality show does not equal reality. No player in the NFL requires a roadmap to cover him like the man formerly known as Chad Johnson. No other player makes fans read a How-To book before processing what he is delivering. No one else forces an observer to buy Rosetta Stone to understand his language.
I've been there. I spent last season covering Ochocinco in New England, a failed and futile stay that resulted in his release June 7. There were highs and lows. Confounding moments and successful breakthroughs. Moments where I delivered insight into his acclimation process and moments where I failed to see through the fireworks display to spot the dud.
With that in mind, allow me to offer some tips for how to judge Ochocinco's appearance at Dolphins training camp as he tries to earn the right to play his 12th season in the NFL.
Learn to compartmentalize
Ochocinco is one of the most likable and charismatic athletes in recent years. Talk to him for two minutes and you'll want to hang out with him. No shame in that. That's why advertisers pick players like him to represent their products. But don't view his bravado as gospel. Don't alter your view just because he tweets at Roger Goodell that he'll be back to celebrating scores.
Use your eyes and shut off your ears. Listen to former Miami Dolphins coach Nick Saban. He counts among his favorite sayings, "Ignore the noise."
Ochocinco can say what he wants, and people will eat it up. But separate that from the product he's putting on the field. When he dropped more balls than any other receiver in camp last year, I overlooked it. I believed it when he said, "I'm human. Balls are going to be dropped."
That's what he said Aug. 9. Who doesn't drop passes? The answer: Everyone else. Wes Welker didn't. Neither did Deion Branch. Randy Moss, whose practice habits can be criticized, never dropped anything in New England.
Ochocinco's concentration might improve in Miami. But if he's replicating his case of the dropsies, it supersedes his words.
Ochocinco The Brand is not Ochocinco The Person
No player has used Twitter better than Ochocinco. The former Cincinnati Bengals star will admit in a private moment that he went from a player known for trashing his team (as he did on radio row before Super Bowl XLII in Arizona) to a fan favorite. It's all because of Twitter. He laughs, he jokes, he uses profanity, and he engages fans in his quest for the best lunch spot. He has created an image. He seems easygoing and open to public scrutiny.
But know this: He reveals only what he wants in a carefully manipulated stream on Twitter. That's how savvy he is. He makes it seem like he is an open book, though he opens it merely to the first page. Do not expect him to do countless interviews, to be accessible, to provide substance. He's more comfortable tweeting snippets about his life than he is answering in-person questions about it. That's just not who he is. Get comfortable reading the table of contents knowing you won't reach Page 113.
Return to the old Chad Johnson? Hold that thought
There is a line of thinking that Ochocinco needs to return to the player he was before. He's added to that by talking about changing his name back to Chad Johnson. This is bolstered by the fact that he averaged 79.9 receptions a season with seven touchdowns as Johnson, but just 51.8 receptions per year and 4.5 TDs as Ochocinco.
The problem is he isn't the same player now. He's slower, less explosive, older. No shame in that. Players age. It happens.
A name change or any other superficial alteration won't put him in a DeLorean going 88 miles per hour. Last season, before the Super Bowl XLVI loss to the New York Giants, Ochocinco dawned gold shoes and put in his gold teeth. As if he could suddenly morph into his old, brash, celebrating, fine-drawing self.
It didn't happen. He had just one catch for 21 yards in the Super Bowl, his only playoff production. Gold teeth or not, he is who he is. If he suddenly looks fast again and is dominating defensive backs, that's more important than what you call him.
Words are mostly meaningless
Ochocinco wants criticism. Just ask him. He said so Aug. 31.
"I want you guys to critique the hell out of me, as I can also do to you," Ochocinco said back then. "I hold no grudges."
Actually, completely untrue. Not only did he not want criticism, he shrunk from it. When he dropped a sure touchdown pass in Buffalo -- becoming talk radio fodder for a week -- he disappeared in plain sight. He gave few or no interviews and barely tweeted. He didn't lash out on the field in a flurry of production. He merely did nothing. Instead of drawing fire from it, it continued his downward spiral.
Ochocinco was a good teammate. He just wasn't good. The chorus was loud and proud and full of praise. It will be that way with the Dolphins, including from young players who grew up idolizing him. In the end in New England, it all meant nothing. He wasn't a player who helped the team.
Hold Ochocinco to the same standard as everyone else
Ochocinco once gathered media around in Foxboro, promised an on-the-record dinner with local reporters, kissed a male TV anchor on the cheek and walked out without another word. Dinner never happened, by the way, and neither did the interview we were seeking.
He once took this reporter to lunch early in his time with the Patriots, offering insight into his mind as a football player and how he would fit in. It was a nice afternoon. He gave a $100 bill to the waitress as a tip, a generous touch. The insight stopped when he struggled.
He claimed in an interview that he'd like to live with a fan in Foxboro, perhaps holding a contest. That sparked a lovefest about how much fun he would bring to Foxboro. By the time the season started, there was no talk of the contest or anything else besides his woeful camp.
Back in 2009, he claimed he bought up all of the remaining tickets for a game against the Texans to avoid a blackout. The reality was, Motorola bought the tickets. By the time the truth came out, perceptions were shaped.
I say all this to point out that Ochocinco fooled us all. He has a reputation as a fun, refreshing character, full of promise and hijinks. That delayed what we all should have seen last August -- that he couldn't contribute on the field.
He might contribute in Miami. I hope he does. If he gets his legs back and shows up in shape, he could be a force. But when trying to figure out if Ochocinco will help the Dolphins, use your eyes and ignore the noise.
Follow Ian Rapoport on Twitter @rapsheet


text:
WINTER PARK, Fla. - The Georgia Southwestern women's basketball team suffered its first loss of the season, a 80-50 decision to unbeaten Rollins College, on Saturday afternoon in the third game of the Rollins Thanksgiving Classic.
After GSW had closed the margin to 13-10 with 9:20 remaining in the first half, Rollins went on an 18-4 run over the next five minutes and opened a 17-point advantage.
The Lady Hurricanes could get no closer than 11 points (40-29) the rest of the way.
GSW shot a season-low 31.3 percent from the floor for the game. Rollins finished at 45.3 percent after shooting 51.6 percent in the second half.
Rollins (7-0) held a large rebounding advantage, 53-32, and outscored GSW in the paint, 40-24.
Nadirah Gardner and Jessica Bivins led Southwestern scorers with 11 points apiece. Cierra Duhart led all players with four blocked shots.
Kristina Mingos finished with a game-high 23 points for Rollins.
Southwestern returns home on Wednesday for a 6:30 p.m. game against West Florida.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Building Your Dream Street Rod or Custom Just Got A Whole Lot Easier
If you're planning on building a 1932 Ford 5-Window Coupe, there is good news for you. The 1932 Ford 5-Window has become the biggest post-World War II symbol for hot rodding in America and it is definitely no stranger to Street Rodder and Rod & Custom Magazine. With its increasing popularity, Ford has announced that it will be officially licensing the body through Ford Component Sales.
Ford fans and builders alike will be able to buy an officially licensed product from Ford as well as selecting the parts they need from the Ford restoration parts program, which has over 9,000 listed parts available for early to late-model Fords.
"With the 1932 Ford 5-Window Coupe body shell, you can literally build a classic-looking hot rod, ordering Ford restoration parts right from your computer, and avoid visiting a wrecking yard," said Dennis Mondrach, restoration licensing manager, Ford Component Sales. "The coupe body shell joins our growing list of ready-to-build stamped steel body shells, including the classic 1965-70 Mustangs and 1940 Ford Coupe."
Having the Ford restoration parts program available limits the time spent hunting down specific components, parts and even unmolested reproduction bodys like the '32 5-window – we all know what a daunting task this can be. If you weren't aware, the reproduction was showcased at the 2013 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, Nevada last year. The '32 is stamped from new metal and when it's finished it receives preventative coating for a longer lasting life. All of the components are manufactured by United Pacific Industries and are officially licensed to ensure top notch quality of the Ford brand.
Ford has also made it quite simple, too. Head on over to www.fordrestorationparts.com and search for parts by vehicle make, model and even zip code. The completion of these simple search terms will put you in contact with the nearest Ford Restoration Parts Licensee. What's more, since the body is originally designed by Ford, Ford was able to use their original tooling, which allows for a seamless, factory fit.
Rest assured you can count on Ford to give you a quality product without compromising integrity. If you're thinking about starting a project 1932 Ford 5-Window Coupe, now may be the time.


text:
CLINTON, Miss.—Junior Robert Willett placed third and junior Jessica Thornton was seventh at the Choctaw Cross Country Open, hosted by Mississippi College on Saturday.
Willett finished third in the field of 105 runners with a season-best 8K time of 26:23.28, placing behind runners from Division I programs South Alabama and Mississippi State. In fact, Willett was the only non-Division I runner among the top 22 finishers.
Thornton finished seventh with a career personal record time of 19:19.89 in the women's 5K race. She competed in a field of 110 also mostly Division I competitors, and was the only non-Division I finisher in the top 10.
In the team standings, the women placed seventh and the men were ninth.
"This was the perfect meet and atmosphere for us to be in during our final regular season meet," Head Coach Kenneth Cox said. "We had some amazing performances from our captains, as well as from our freshmen that are really coming into their own as the season progresses. We had at least three individuals that had career bests today, and I am proud of them.
"We are very excited about the two weeks that we have to prepare for conference," Cox continued. "With some of our guys unable to run today, we will be looking for them to take care of themselves and ready to help us race to our team ability."


text:
Speculative Fiction in Conversation Part 1
In November, I posted a blog entry about James Gunn's essay on protocols and ways of reading in science fiction, a concept he drew from the essay collection Starboard Wine by Samual R. Delany. While I was critical of Gunn's post, the concepts discussed made me realize that there might be a lot of SF criticism out there that I had never read and never even heard of. After a little Google searching, I discovered that the Delany book was out of print and difficult to find, however an earlier collection, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, had a forthcoming reissue with an introduction by my own friend Matt Cheney, who was trying to get the other book back into print as well. Matt is also the author of the blog Mumpsimus, a number of fine short stories, is the series editor of The Best American Fantasy, and is an English teacher who's known to sneak speculative fiction into the curriculum. It seemed natural that I would turn to him to fill in the gaps in my own SF education. What follows is part 1 of the email conversation that resulted, which moves from criticism to the history of SF and the ongoing debate about SF's place in the literary world, and whether protocols really exist at all.
Hey Matt,
I was thinking, one thing that the recent blog post I wrote about protocols and essentialism in sf is that there's probably a lot of sf criticism I haven't been exposed to. While I have come across occasional essays on the subject (Hal Duncan's recent Geek Show series, for instance), mostly it's been me stumbling around in a haphazard fashion. Being Mr. Sf teacher guy, I was wondering if you could recommend me some books/essays that would catch me up on the conversation that's been going on in the critical/scholarly/sf world universe on the subject. Really, any recommendations at all would be most appreciated.
Thanks, and good luck getting Starboard Wine released!
Hi Eric,
Oh, SF criticism is a ... minefield. There are a few problems with it, including that the sorts of people who will be attracted to it are generally not of the same sort of mind that is attracted to literary criticism, and there are only a handful of people who have a good grasp of real literary criticism who are also interested in practicing SF criticism. I mean, there's no profit in it, really. Academically, it's not respected in the same way, generally, that more recognized literary criticism is, and yet it pays just as badly, so what's the point if you can get neither prestige nor money? A few people have found ways to get one or the other, but there's no real path toward anything the way there is with more established litcrit, which at least can help you in your academic career. It's possible that some SF crit will be able to help in your academic career, but it will take some time and a lot more publications than it would were you writing about something else.
In any case, though, these links are worth glancing at:
There is, as the SF Studies link there shows, a history of SF criticism that goes back to the late '50s, and before that there was a sort of criticism that existed in the fan community, though I think most of it was, frankly, idiotic. There was also, though, a tradition of "utopian studies", which didn't use the words "science fiction" but instead looked at particularly the utopian writers of the 19th century.
Much of what passes for SF "criticism" is actually just historiography. James Gunn is a good example of that. Useful and often interesting to read, but not what most people are talking about when they're talking about "criticism". Which many people would say is a good thing, since academic litcrit doesn't exactly have the best rep outside the academy.
There are only a few writers of SF criticism worth paying much attention to in addition to Delany: Darko Suvin, Alexei Panshin, Damien Broderick, Frederick Jameson, and Adam Roberts (writers such as John Clute and Gary Wolfe are knowledgeable and thoughtful, but are primarily reviewers and taxonomists -- Clute, in fact, has inspired an entire taxonomical industry amongst mostly British SF reviewers, who are bizarrely fixated on defining and categorizing things. Clute's encyclopedias are invaluable and his reviews are often interesting, but the obsession with taxonomy [beyond its usefulness for creating an encyclopedia] is one I find mystifying). Certainly, there are articles here and there that are worth paying attention to, including some good recent work on SF and colonialism (an important topic, I think), but you'll get pretty much the full breadth (such as it is) of the critical discussion of SF from reading those writers.
Ultimately, the problem as I see it is that science fiction was an interesting publishing phenomenon of the mid-20th century, and most of the forces that created and nurtured that phenomenon have dissipated, metamorphosed, and disappeared, leaving most of the SF of today to be little more than a reiteration of what was done in the '50s. It's notable that the primary magazine for "hard" science fiction in this, the digital age, is called Analog.
These days I mostly believe that SF is not a style of writing, but a publishing community, and that nothing done new in the SF world must remain SF anymore -- anything that is new is going to be able to be presented under the guise of "fiction" or "literature" now because the forces that led to the creation of something called science fiction in the U.S. have changed. Readers' relationships to both technology and to texts have changed. This doesn't mean SF will disappear, but rather that it will do what it's been doing for a while now, which is reiterate the structures of the past and feel more and more quaint, while things that could, in fact, be termed science fictional will be bought, sold, and read as something else. The only people who have a problem with this are people who both want their lit to be new and different and who still want to attend science fiction conventions.
I've attached my thesis on Delany because it contains early versions of my intros for the reissues of Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, plus some other stuff -- it's not well written and it's very awkward in places because I was under a huge time crunch, but it will give you some sense of what I see as the importance of Delany's criticisms. The "reading protocols" idea is one that has been grabbed onto by the SF community because it makes them feel special, not because it's central to Delany's project. And even though Delany doesn't make much of it and wishes people would look at other elements of his ideas, he values it even more than I do.
Starboard Wine will be out in the fall of '09 from Wesleyan, and I'll be curious to see how it's received -- I think most people won't understand it, or will understand it in the same way they would if they didn't read it. Hardly anybody has read it, because it was barely distributed. This is unfortunate, because even though many of the ideas in it are present in the later books, they're never as thoroughly explored within an SF context as there, and so if people want only the SF ideas, they are left with the somewhat more available Jewel-Hinged Jaw, many of the ideas of which Delany has since moved far beyond.
I'll be curious to see how your explorations go!
Wow. This is all very helpful, and I'm going pore over your thesis this weekend. Thank you so much.
One thing about what you wrote:
I've come to believe that SF is not a style of writing, but a publishing community, and that nothing done new in the SF world must remain SF anymore -- anything that is new is going to be able to be presented under the guise of "fiction" or "literature" now because the forces that led to the creation of something called science fiction in the U.S. have changed. Readers' relationships to both technology and to texts have changed. This doesn't mean SF will disappear, but rather that it will do what it's been doing for a while now, which is reiterate the structures of the past and feel more and more quaint, while things that could, in fact, be termed science fictional will be bought, sold, and read as something else. The only people who have a problem with this are people who both want their lit to be new and different and who still want to attend science fiction conventions.
I hardly need to tell you that I'm very sympathetic with your viewpoint here. However, there are some problems. Take for example Nick Harkaway's book the Gone Away World, an excellent, post-apocalyptic type novel that was published, at least nominally, as a mainstream book, though consistently reviewed as "science fiction". Or take for example the anthology Logorrhea, which you yourself were part of. This anthology goes out of its way in all its copy to never utter words like science fiction, speculative fiction, fantastic fiction or any other permutations. However, right there on the spine is the publisher's own judgment, "Science Fiction/Fantasy", insuring that the book will be put in that section in the bookstore. Note also that, though the stories (which are excellent) are all (more or less) the kind that might appeal to mainstream readers, the writers themselves (with the notable exception of Michelle Richmond, and yourself with your admirably half-and-half bio) are all known as speculative fiction writers, published in speculative fiction magazines and/or have books in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section.
What I'm saying is that the wall seems to still exist between SF and not-SF, and if a writer like Nick Harkaway decides he doesn't want to be put in the SF section because the interesting work is going on outside of it, how does he avoid being put in it anyway? Margaret Atwood gets away with it because she's published numerous books that are not remotely speculative, and someone like David Foster Wallace does because he surrounds it with a postmodern veneer. However, interesting SF writers like, say, China Mieville or Brian Francis Slattery are still put into the SF section and may not get any exposure outside of that community.
Which is all to say, I would be the first one to champion the abolition of genre boundaries, but I'm not sure if the mainstream is really welcoming work with SF sorts of ideas, or how writers would go about becoming mainstream writers of the fantastic--in this country, anyway. (In many other countries things are substantially different.) Neil Gaiman still gets called by the press "the most famous writer you've never heard of", which is frankly baffling to me, considering how popular he's been for how long, but it's indicative of the wall that still exists between SF and the rest of the world, and in a practical sense, as both a fiction writer and a critic, I'm not sure how best to go about moving toward a more open future.
Thanks again for everything, and I look forward to reading Starboard Wine when it comes out. Oh, and happy Thanksgiving!
Hi Eric,
We're coming at the question slightly differently, and I didn't express myself well before -- I agree with everything you said! (I do try to be agreeable...) What I was trying to get at -- flailing toward, fumbling around -- was an idea of innovation -- that I think SF as an engine for innovation is dead, for reasons of culture and market -- that the SF community now desires reiteration and recursion -- the toolbox is no longer being expanded, and that adding tools would, in all likelihood, now destroy the box. This is not a good or bad thing, just a thing -- most writers willing to identify as SF writers now are happy enough to reiterate and recurse, and, in fact, it's a major attraction: they want to write like the writers who inspired them, to do what Asimov etc. did. And there's a market for that. That's fine with me, and I often enjoy reading such writing -- indeed, I, too, sometimes want nothing more than to read updated versions of the stories that made me fall in love with reading in the first place. Innovation doesn't generally take place at the level of story, which is one reason why SF is seldom innovative anymore -- it's too wedded to the need to tell certain types of stories. No big deal; innovation can come from elsewhere.
Where authors get placed and how they get labeled is a different sort of thing, and even more complex and contradictory and difficult to predict. I remember a writer talking about his experience of being labeled as different things over the years at a Readercon a few years ago -- he began within the SF field, writing fairly humanist sorts of stories that were a bit too slow and contemplative to pick up a big SF readership, so his publisher decided to market one of his books as mainstream and keep the label off, and it really tanked, so they went back to marketing him as an SF writer, though now I think his latest book was more ambiguously labeled. He said at least in the SF world he had a definite audience -- not big, but definite -- and that's one of the real benefits of the SF community -- a writer may not be able to sell much more than 5000 copies of a book, but they'll definitely sell 5000 copies. The more dispersed world of mainstream fiction is much more difficult to sell predictably in. (I don't know if this is necessarily true because I don't have access to publishing numbers. Regardless, there's a stronger sense of community within the SF world than in the lit world, I think.) The problem, though, that writers like the one I heard speak at Readercon face, regardless of their label, is the problem of being a midlist writer. Publishing's unpredictable, but when your publisher isn't willing or able to sink much money into publicity and marketing ... well, the odds are against you reaching a large audience.
And you're right, the publishers decide what you'll be, based on where they think the book will sell best and what their experiences are. Publisher Y publishes science fiction, and because Writer X happened to submit her first novel to Publisher Y (because they accept unsolicited mss., which few major publishers do) and because Editor Z, who likes the less categorizable stuff, happened to be the editor whose desk it landed on, Writer X ended up being published as a science fiction writer. It's a matter of circumstance and luck. Would Writer X's books sell better if they were published by, say, Soft Skull -- as Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown and Nick Mamatas's Under My Roof were? I don't know. I think the audience for things like Jamestown is growing outside the SF community and shrinking within it right now, and I don't mind that. SF is at its most ecumenical when the mainstream lit world is at its most narrow, and right now the mainstream lit world isn't very narrow, so there's no need for people to be stuck in the SF community unless they like it there. Sure, publishers will label things in certain ways, but most of the time that's because that's where people are coming from, where their roots lie -- Logorrhea is a good example, with John Klima, known within the SF world, selling it to Juliet Ulman, an SF editor at Bantam, and populating it with people they had access to, who are almost entirely within the SF world. No big conspiracy to doom the book or lie to the public or anything -- the people involved went with what they knew and what they were able to get done.
Neil Gaiman's an interesting case because his original constituency was within the comics community, which has a big overlap with the SF community, and so he made the switch pretty well, though I think the majority of his audience still first encountered him via comics. His stuff sells well because he's not only able to provide a particularly appealing sort of story in appealing ways, but also because he's good at seizing various opportunities, regardless of genre, and he's attentive to his fans. His limits are not limits of genre so much as limits between popular and literary fiction. The people who haven't heard of him are the people who can't believe somebody hasn't heard of Roberto Bolaño (hard as it is to believe, many people outside the world of litblogs have not heard of Bolaño but Gaiman is, for them, a household name!). The only reason Gaiman isn't more generally known is that he hasn't yet been on Oprah's show. (I wish they'd put him on; he's a better writer than many of the ones she promotes.)
The best approach for a critic to take who wants to keep an open and free discussion going is to not assume that a label is a value statement, which is one reason I've written a lot about that element of Delany -- he's the model critic for me in that sense. He's read widely enough to know that the stereotypes of "the other side" are just stereotypes, and that the worlds that seem so far apart are really within each other's orbit, and each world possesses quite a bit of diversity within it.
And now I have to go feed my cats...
Thanks for keeping up the good fight!
I actually agree with much of
I actually agree with much of what both of you said, including Matt's disparaging comments about certain types of sf criticism and some critics, but I literally spewed coffee at this one:
"Academically, it's not respected in the same way, generally, that more recognized literary criticism is, and yet it pays just as badly, so what's the point if you can get neither prestige nor money?"
Um, well, because you love science fiction, because you have solid academic training that you want to use, and because you enjoy writing criticism? Both inside and outside academe--academic jobs in English now being what they are--people are doing good criticism for not only SFStudies but also Extrapolation, JFA, and the NYRSF. Because we enjoy writing criticism and we are interested in the works we criticize. Overall, much sf criticism is bad, but frankly I haven't encountered any academic area in which that isn't true. Some types of bad work may be more characteristic of sf criticism, but others are almost or totally absent, too.
Also, some of the worries about science fiction being a ghetto genre seem outdated to me from my graduate school days, over 20 years ago! SF certainly has been a beneficiary of canon-busting, even if some might prefer that only other under-appreciated types of writing benefit. But you open the canon, you open the canon. For those teaching sf, this has been a good thing.
"I've come to believe that SF is not a style of writing, but a publishing community"
It makes more sense to me to define SF by the people who read it. The border between literary fiction and SF is a subcultural border. That's why Gaiman made the transition to writing novels so easily: He's writing for the same subculture.
Science fiction and literature
There are only a few writers of SF criticism worth paying much attention to in addition to Delany: Darko Suvin, Alexei Panshin, Damien Broderick, Frederick Jameson, and Adam Roberts
Although you might only be referring to relatively recent authors, Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds is also worth reading. Though it's no longer in print, Amazon has inexpensive copies.
Some of my (limited) experience in science fiction publishing inspired this post on subjects similar to yours, which led to this follow-up post. Both deal with similar issues, and I like the idea that whatever forces held science fiction in its own genre in the mid-20th century have been dissolving. Science fiction sprang from Romance anyway—if you read some early reviews of H.G. Wells' work, for example, you'll often find the term "Scientific Romance" or variants on it. So maybe the genre is returning to the place from whence it came, especially if genre by its nature is ceaselessly bulging and contracting from some central cultural sphere, as Derrida seems to argue in "The Law of Genre."
When I wrote a later post defending The joys of fantasy and Romance, I more or less lumped science fiction in. Perhaps they're all under the umbrella of "speculative fiction" these days, although I'm not a fan of the term speculative fiction because, to my mind, virtually all worthwhile fiction is speculative in some way.


text:
XOXO Glitter
By: Walmart
Express yourself or create special memories with the 4″×8″ Photo Greeting Card. Choose from single or multiple-photo 4″×8″ greeting cards in a number of styles that suit any occasion. Use the provided templates and your imagination to personalize these stationery cards with your favorite photographs. The designs include room to add a handwritten message.
4×8 Greeting Card (Set Of 20):


text:
Incident reports
Hillsboro police
April 20: Officers took a harassment complaint and investigated a gas skip.
April 21: Police assisted the city safety committee with safety inspections, took a reckless driving complaint, and a report of suspicious activity. Officers also took complaints of harassment, traffic, and a report of a possible case of fraud involving the theft of estate money. Police also responded to a report of an intoxicated disorderly person in which Robert McNabb, 51, of McPherson was arrested on several outstanding warrants.
April 22: Officers issued warning to several people riding bicycles at night without proper lighting. Police also took a noise complaint.
April 23: Officers destroyed a skunk in the 100 block of S. Date St.
Thursday: All police radars were recertified.
Friday: Police provided a funeral escort, recovered a stolen bicycle, and arrested Allan Cochran on warrants.
marion police
April 11: Officers responded to a skunk on Main St, a non-injury accident, an open fire in a backyard, and a vehicle fire that was put out by neighbors.
April 12: Police responded to an injury accident in the county and took a report of fireworks on S. Lincoln St. Police arrested Bryant Gutsch of Marion on charges of driving under the influence, after transporting him to jail where he reportedly acted disorderly.
April 13: Police took a call from a resident who was a victim of a recent theft and spoke with a resident about an altercation with another resident.
April 14: Officers took reports of a burglary, theft, and possible harassment.
April 15: Police arrested Jeff Miller of Marion on suspicion of domestic battery and rape; he was booked into the jail on a charge of domestic battery. Police arrested Derek Scheuerman and James Williams of Marion on suspicion of domestic battery. Officers responded to a subject parked in the middle of U.S. 56, the person was delusional and needed medical assistance.
April 16: Police returned stolen property back to a resident and removed debris from Main St. and Kellison St. because of gusty winds.
April 18: Officers took complaints of trash in a yard and noise at Eastmoor Church. Police took a report of people cutting though the parking lot of Marion Manufacturing.
April 19: Officers responded to a suspicious person on U.S. 56, took a report of a gas skip at Ampride, and took a call of juveniles trespassing.
April 21: During a traffic stop, Luis Perez was arrested for a Marion County Warrant. Officers responded to a domestic disturbance.
April 22: Police assisted Marion ambulance and responded to a non-injury accident.
April 24: Officers assisted Marion ambulance and responded to an out of control child at Oasis.
April 15: Officers took an information report from a routine traffic stop.
April 16: Police opened a civil assistance case that is ongoing.
April 22: Michael Strotkamp, Peabody, was arrested on a charge of failure to appear in Peabody Municipal Court. An information report was taken on a burglary and theft incident.
Thursday: Police opened a case of a child in need of care.
Friday: A trespassing report was taken.
Sunday: Officers assisted an elderly motorist who was stopped on the railroad tracks.


text:
It's past Memorial Day and not yet the 4th of July, but I'm of the opinion that stars & stripes are in style all summer long. ;-)
Star side: royal blue star-shaped silicone cup (be on the looksie for some of these to pop up in a giveaway soon!)full of raspberries, grapes on a star pick, a strawberry with a star mini-fork (sort of looks like a strawberry stem!), a mini cupcake and some animal crackers.
Stripes side: panini (italian cheese blend on sourdough with EVOO and lightly seasoned) and a slice of apple. A piece of green silicone barran separates the apple from the sandwich.
This bento just screams "It's Summertime!" to me. :)
Supplies used to make this bento lunch:
Sunday, June 6, 2010
stars & stripes bento lunch
Posted by Melissa at 1:26 PM
Labels: 4th of July, barran, checkered apple, happy apple, holiday, Independence Day, sassy box, Stars and Stripes, theme
8 comments:
- Jenn @ BentoForKidlet said... [Reply to comment]
That's awesome! I love the stars and stripes theme :D
- June 6, 2010 at 8:07 PM
- MommyToTwoBoys said... [Reply to comment]
Holy cow! You are so incredibly talented! I wish you could see what our lunches look like, gasp! You would probably faint. How do you have time??? You are my hero!
- June 6, 2010 at 8:51 PM
That is so beautiful! You truly have a talent for amazing lunch ideas!
- June 7, 2010 at 2:56 AM
I love your lunch ideas. You truly have an amazing talent. Everything looks so beautiful and yummy!!!
- June 7, 2010 at 3:43 AM
- JDaniel4's Mom said... [Reply to comment]
I love the stars and stripes. The sandwich is so cool. I will have to remember all the ideas for the fourth of July.
- June 7, 2010 at 5:03 AM
- Bar 7 Ranch said... [Reply to comment]
Love it!!
- June 7, 2010 at 10:16 AM
- Michelle, Muffin Tin Mom said... [Reply to comment]
so utterly inspiring!
- June 9, 2010 at 2:55 AM
- Chris said... [Reply to comment]
I love that you've turned lunch into art. My daughter saw it and thought it was too pretty to be real. I guess that lets you know how boring my children's lunches are~
- June 19, 2010 at 11:44 AM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
|Mark Media
|Image: Front Cover (High Res)
|Image: Back Cover (High Res)
Definitely Recommend
This commentary has truly been a blessing in my life. It's helped me to get to know Jesus better. I use it as part of my devotions. If you want to grow in your knowledge and love for Christ, this book would greatly help.


text:
Has your iron stopped steaming or is it leaking brown water or white particles?
It might need descaling.
Click now to learn how to descale your iron and steam generator.
Search within this product
Frequently Asked Questions
Search results forResults:
We are sorry, your search for "" returned no results.
Please try:
See the following document for more detailed information on the Philips warranty. Please contact the local contact centre if you have additional questions.


text:
IMRT for squamous cell carcinoma of the tonsil
Dear OncoLink "Ask The Experts,"
My son had a squamous cell carcinoma removed from his tonsil. Radiation has been recommended. New IMRT equipment has come into the equation but it is not yet available within the facility where my son is being treated. Given the advice that salivary glands may well be impacted by "regular" equipment, is IMRT equipment at a stage where it should be vigorously perused as a treatment of choice? Many thanks for any thoughts you can share with us.
Mitchell Machtay, MD, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Deputy Chairman of Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, responds:
IMRT has been the catchphrase of the 21st century in the field of radiation oncology. To some radiation oncologists, IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) represents technology at its best and a revolution in cancer therapy; to others, IMRT is just a four-letter word.
IMRT is difficult to define, but its differences from conventional radiotherapy are glaringly obvious. In conventional radiation therapy, patients receive a combination of 2 to 6 radiation beams (also called "portals" or "fields") per day. These beams are aimed - with a variable degree of precision - at the patient's tumor, and efforts are made at shielding surrounding normal healthy tissues. However, because of the laws of physics, the amount of radiation that hits most nearby tissues is fairly similar to that received by the tumor.
IMRT is a very high-technology way of delivering radiation such that the amount of radiation given to the tumor can be maintained or even increased while actually decreasing (sometimes astonishingly so) the radiation dose received by normal tissues. This is done by combining a huge number (up to hundreds) of mini-beams (also called "segments") of varying radiation intensity, but all focused on part or all of the tumor (or an area suspected of containing tumor). IMRT has only been possible in recent years, the result of enormous advances in computer technology and in the mechanical hardware that administers radiation.
The case that is asked about is not uncommon. People with cancer of the tonsil and/or other sites within the head and neck often need extensive radiation therapy, which has many side effects, especially permanent and uncomfortable dry mouth. Dry mouth (xerostomia) is not just an annoying by-product of radiotherapy; it can lead to serious nutritional problems, dental, infectious, and psychosocial problems. In the worst case, dry mouth can lead to osteoradionecrosis of the mandible, a rare but life-threatening condition where the jawbone becomes destroyed. Can IMRT prevent - or at least minimize - this and other risks of radiation to the head and neck?
Some leaders in the field of head and neck radiation oncology assert that IMRT can indeed dramatically decrease the problem of dry mouth. Arguably, the most important organs for saliva production are the two parotid glands, which are embedded in the cheeks. These glands are devastated by conventional radiation therapy. With IMRT, the radiation dose received by the parotid glands can be reduced by 50 to 75%. At the same time, the radiation dose to the tumor and lymph nodes is the same or higher than with conventional radiation. On paper, at least, this should result in preservation of some or most of the function of at least one parotid gland, enough to keep the mouth moist. Small studies from centers of excellence have been encouraging. In one study from the University of California San Francisco, IMRT for cancer of the nasopharynx appeared to significantly improve the tumor control rate while significantly decreasing long-term side effects of radiation. However, there have not been large-scale studies to prove this. The Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), a consortium of elite radiation oncology centers, is running a prospective clinical trial of IMRT for oropharynx (including tonsil) cancer. A similar RTOG study for nasopharynx cancer is expected to open this year as well.
Since there are such exciting preliminary data with IMRT, and since it is becoming available at many community radiation oncology centers, is there anything to lose? Perhaps not, but there are some practical and theoretical downsides to IMRT and other forms of super-high-technology radiotherapy.
The first is that IMRT requires a large increase in time and resources, on both the health care provider and the patient. A single daily IMRT treatment may take as much time to deliver as 3 or 4 regular radiation treatments. It may take 10 to 20 times the amount of physician and radiation physicist effort to plan a case of IMRT compared with conventional radiation. From the patient's point of view, this may result in lengthy, uncomfortable daily sessions in the radiation departments and/or delays before or during treatment. IMRT is covered by most health insurance plans, but as always, there is still the potential for added out-of-pocket costs.
The second concern about IMRT is the hypothetical risk that its increased complexity could paradoxically increase the risk of cancer recurrence at the edges of a tumor. IMRT requires extraordinary precision in planning and delivery, with very little margin for error. If there is an unanticipated problem - such as a patient or tumor that moves a lot, or difficulty in interpreting the patient's CT scan - there could be under dosing of tissues where tumor cells lurk. Reports from very experienced IMRT centers suggest that this is unlikely to be a problem, but these studies are based on simulated IMRT on "dummy" patients plus short-term follow-up of actual treated patients. Long-term clinical data proving that IMRT is better than (or at least equal to) conventional radiation at curing tumors is not available yet.
A third concern is the possibility that IMRT may cause significant "hot spots" of high-dose radiation. This results from overlap of multiple small beams of radiation in an effort to spare a normal structure like the parotid glands. Usually these "hot spots" are not relevant, but if these are in a sensitive area, such as the skin, a very severe reaction can result.
A final concern about IMRT is that it exposes large portions of the entire body to low-moderate doses of radiation. This is partly the result of the need for very prolonged radiation "beam-on" treatment time to deliver IMRT. These radiation doses won't cause early and noticeable radiation damage, but may increase the risk of a new cancer forming 10 to 20 years later. Radiation-induced cancers are quite uncommon after conventional radiotherapy, but will IMRT change this?
In my view, these worries about IMRT are more theoretical than real, particularly when IMRT is administered by a treatment team with expertise and a rigorous quality assurance program. While it would be preferable for patients to receive IMRT as part of a clinical research study, I think it is perfectly acceptable to use it for selected cases of head and neck cancer (and many other types of cancer). However, there are few situations where IMRT should be considered mandatory. Oropharynx or tonsil cancer is not one of these situations. For a typical cancer of the tonsil, I would not recommend seeking out a radiation oncology center specifically for IMRT. There are too many other ingredients that are important to the overall outcome, most notably the overall experience of the entire treatment team - physicians, physicists, nurses, therapy technologists, nutritionists and other cancer care providers.


text:
- Home
- News
- Sports
- Opinion
- Obituaries
- Features
- Special Sections
- Classifieds
- Public Notices
HEATH SPRINGS – Heath Springs officials will wait to see how the county's new anti-smoking ordinance is received before they take any action on the measure.
Last month, Lancaster County Council adopted an ordinance to ban smoking inside all public-access places, including bars and restaurants.
The measure, though, only applies to unincorporated areas, as Lancaster County's three municipalities will have to approve their own ordinances for the ban to truly be countywide.
If you currently subscribe or have subscribed in the past to the The Lancaster News, then simply find your account number on your mailing label and enter it below.
Click the question mark below to see where your account ID appears on your mailing label.
|ZIP Code:


text:
Space and What to Do
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Special Reports
The paper is a contribution to a volume on the future of space. Portions of
it were used in my talk to the Directed Energy Professional Society in
Albuquerque NM on 31 October, 2000
Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D.
Whose Job Is It?
We have institutions for nearly everything now, but we have lost the institutional means of long range planning. Who looks after our grandchildren? Surely not the politicians, who can hardly think past the next election, and are generally content to put problems off to be solved when the politician is safely out of office.
We no longer have great families planning for the future because we don't have continuity of wealth: for good or ill, there is no entailment of property, and while there is talk of abolishing death taxes, they have pretty well done their egalitarian work; and perhaps this is a good thing. Good or ill, few think about the next generation and fewer try to do anything about it, because they have little confidence of continuity of their positions and fortunes.
The corporations are useless. The discounted value of a dollar in thirty years is effectively zero. A corporation that invested significantly in research with a thirty-year payoff would be involved in a hostile takeover not long afterwards.
That leaves government.
But Government Always Mucks Things Up
It isn't strictly true that government always mucks things up, but it's often enough so. A, if not the, major purpose of government is to extract money from non-government and use it to hire and pay government employees. This guarantees that government will always expand; and there inevitably comes a point at which the addition of people to a project has a negative impact. Almost all long-standing government agencies and projects have people who are worse than merely useless, they are in the way; and the more conscientious they are about earning their pay the more they tend to get in the gears and bring progress to a halt.
It has certainly been that way in space R&;D and space operations. I needn't give the history here. It can be summed up as early enthusiasm and success, expansion of the team, and then makework to keep the standing army busy or appearing to be busy. [1] New centers are then started in hopes of having a new cycle of enthusiasm and success, and that works for a while, but eventually the system is clogged with memoranda, policy directives, reviews, reviews of reviews, and the rest. Everyone is familiar with the process. Nothing can be done because nothing can be approved, and nothing can be approved because the only way to justify one's importance is to ponder approvals, rewrite requirements statements, and require rewrites. And always to add complexities and more mission requirements.
Arsenals and research labs have accomplished miracles, but generally only in a crisis, and generally not for long. Soon they become part of the problem set rather than the solution set. Then they block anything not invented there, only they never invent anything. [2]
If government is the only long range institution and it tends to do more harm than good, where are we?
X Programs: An Exception to the Rule
One of the most spectacularly successful government projects in technological history was the X-program. Beginning with the X-1 and going on through the X-15 and beyond, X programs were instrumental – indeed essential – in making the United States far and away the technological leader in aviation and space technology. One example should suffice: the X-3 Stiletto, the first airplane to take off from the ground, go supersonic, and land to be flown again. This airplane was useless for operations. It could hardly maneuver. However, the Stiletto led directly to the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, and that airplane dominated military airspace for a very long time.
There were other such successes for the X programs; indeed, the program was cancelled not because of its failure, but due to its success. It generated so much new military technology that the arms control strategists were afraid of it. Whether or not arms control was a good strategy, one thing was clear, the X programs were not compatible with it; they had to go and they did. [3]
What Are X Programs?
The X programs were so successful that they have generated a kind of mystique, and recently there have been attempts to capture that residual good will. Unfortunately, the two most spectacular, X-33 and X-34, are not, never were, and never were intended to be actual X programs; they took the name but nothing else.
Real X programs have certain characteristics, and while they are hardly all identical, we can tease out some common factors.
First, they are relatively small. They don't have huge budgets. They don't attract big attention and they are not good bait for large bureaucratic sharks or big companies. They are not profitable in the usual sense of the word. The payoff to a big company from participation in an X project is nearly all intangible: prestige at least within the profession, and some early technological advantages from having employed people who built and understood the new technologies identified or acquired by the project. Actual monetary gains are small and often negative.
Indeed, the payoff to everyone: sponsoring institution, contractors, the United States, and sometimes all mankind, is technology and experience and not much else. X-programs do not result in operational vehicles, and X-craft do not fly missions. Most of them can't. The X-airplanes had no payloads unless you call a stick of Beeman's chewing gum a payload. [4]
Next, X-programs have limited goals, and are over and done with in a relatively short time. They are not intended for career building, and ideally there should not be any career opportunities in X-program management. One does the project and gets out. It's over. There's no empire to be built because the project doesn't last long enough to allow that. This is key to X-success.
Finally, the best X-projects are based in out of the way places, generally unpleasant places. It is no coincidence that some of the best X projects were done at Edwards. No one wants to build empires in the Mojave Desert. Edwards is far enough from Washington, or even Los Angeles, that there is some autonomy. It is also dull enough to encourage work, if only in the hopes of getting the project over with so you can return to civilization. I note that making life in Palmdale somewhat more pleasant than the Spartan existence of Edwards in the days of the X programs is probably a step backward.
The typical X project focused on a needed technology. Although the technique is applicable to many areas of technology, I'll stay with aerospace for the moment. One designs the best ship possible given existing technology. There are to be few to no stretches or reaches: we are not looking for new technology, we are looking to see what the best we have can do – and thereby identify what's needed next.
The ship is built. Typically there will be three vehicles (tail numbers in the jargon). The first is flown to find out its capabilities. Then those limits are tested, and tested again. Frequently tail number One is destroyed in the test process, although that's not inevitable. Using what was learned from One, Two is modified and flown to its limits, and kept flying until there is no more to learn. Number Three makes a few token flights and goes to the Smithsonian.
From that process we learn what we can do, and what more we need to know.
Can't Computers Do That?
The usual objection to X projects is that they are costly. "It's silly in this day and age to design ships and fly them until the wings come off. Do it right in the first place. Do your tests with computer simulations."
The simplest answer to that is the X-33 fiasco. This was supposed to give us a great leap forward to reusable spaceships. There would be a series of expensive ground tests to provide input for computer simulations, simulated tests of designs, and the smooth design and flight of a new ship.
It hasn't worked out that way, and it won't, and when it is done we will not have learned much. [5]
The truth is that computers are great for some functions, but not very good for testing experimental design concepts. How could they be? Extrapolation is never as accurate as interpolation, and we all know it.
Let me give a simple example. A rocket must be about 90% fuel or it won't get to orbit. This is obvious from the rocket equation. [6] Multi-stage rockets have even more extreme mass ratios.
Of the 10% that's left, some will be structure – tankage and aeroshell, control surfaces, heat shielding, etc. – and necessary avionics and power. Indeed, this will be about 90% of what's left: meaning that the payload, if any, will be no more than 1% of the Gross LiftOff Weight (GLOW). For a 600,000 pound ship this translates as 6,000 or fewer pounds of payload. How much? It makes a difference whether 6 pounds or 6,000 pounds gets to orbit. But of course we don't know, and our computers can't tell us. The true payload of that ship is lost in the noise around the third decimal place, and no computer model I know of will find it.
We don't have inputs accurate to the second decimal point; how can we have any confidence in computer generated three decimal answers? And clearly we cannot.
There comes a time when you must fly something if you hope to learn more. We need data for those simulations. We are at that stage now in a critical area of space technology.
What Do We Need?
I've done this in reverse order. Having told you how to get there, I'm going to talk about where we need to go.
First and most obvious, the real cost of space is access. We over-build satellites because they have to last a long time, and they have to last a long time because it costs too much to replace them. Technology outstrips us every time: by the time a satellite or other spacecraft is launched it is generally obsolete, sometimes hopelessly so, as Moore's Law takes another run along the exponential curve.
Ideally we would build satellites to last for a few years, then replace them with smaller, more powerful, and cheaper spacecraft; but we don't do that. Instead we lock in electronics that are outdated before the design is completed, and design those systems to last a long time. This only makes sense if the launch costs are enormous. But of course they are.
The real key to space exploration is developing cheap and reliable ways of getting there. It's pointless to speculate on whether we need humans in space when the costs are so high. My own view is that if access to the Moon cost anything like what access to the South Pole costs, we'd be there like a shot: we certainly have not been content to explore Antarctica with robots. But until the costs come a long way down, we have to be content with robots, and getting them to orbit and beyond is all but prohibitively expensive.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke said that if the human race is to survive, then for all but a very brief period of our history the word ship will mean space ship. This generation is the first to have the capability of developing true space ships. This is the time to do it, and we know how.
If we want to learn more about using space and the resources beyond our planet, we must build more space ships and fly more space ships.
What's a Space Ship?
A ship isn't a missile. It's not ammunition. A ship is a vehicle. It goes places, gets there, comes back, is refueled, and goes again. We don't throw the ship away when it has reached its destination.
The obvious way to go to space is the way Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon did it: fly to space, bop around for a while, then land and refuel. Everyone knows this, the trick is how to do it, but let's look at why.
Airline operations cost a small multiple (typically 3 to 5) of fuel costs. It costs about the same in fuel costs to fly a pound to Sydney, Australia from the United States as it does to put that pound in orbit. It shouldn't cost more in dollars, either. Of course the airline doesn't roll the airplane into the sea after it gets to Sydney.
Although fuel cost drives airline operations costs, there's another driver for space ops. A typical airline will have about 110 employees per airplane, but half of those sell tickets. Sixty in operations and maintenance is more likely. Now divide the number of NASA civil servants and contractor employees working on Shuttle by the number of Shuttles, and you will get some idea of why Shuttle flights are about a billion dollars a flight instead of the hundred million or so an airliner would charge. [7] Understand I am not accusing NASA of featherbedding Shuttle: all those people are needed, but that's just the problem. Shuttle was in some respects designed to need them. When your goal is to employ a standing army, you will reach that goal one way or another.
Shuttle is rebuildable, not reusable, and that's not what we need. A properly designed space ship will seek to minimize operations costs, not maximize performance. We have yet to build rockets whose design was driven by operations, and it's time to do it.
Operations driven designs are the key to our future in space.
A Development Plan
There are probably a dozen paths to success, but let me lay out one of them.
Begin with a concept: we want a simple, reusable, spaceship design. We're far more concerned with keeping total mission costs down than with optimizing performance. We're looking to build a ship, not ammunition, and we want to keep things as simple as possible.
We also want a program to develop that ship that ensures we learn something at each step of the way: we don't want an all-or-none concept. We want incremental testing, so that we can feel our way to the edge of the envelope. We also want multiple tail numbers so that if we get past the edge of the envelope we have a ship ready to take advantage of what we learned when we pranged the first one.
That brings us to what I call the SSX. We sold this concept to the National Space Council in 1989, but alas it was only partially implemented before X-33 came to dominate space development.
SSX is a Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing Single Stage to Orbit rocket with multiple rocket engines. I used to think the right way to go was hydrogen-LOX and expander engines, but I'm now inclined to agree with Max Hunter that methane or propane with LOX presents far fewer operational problems at affordable decrements in performance.
The important thing about SSX is that it can be flown incrementally: don't put much fuel in it and fly it a little way, then land it, see what happened, and do it again. This feature alone should dictate SSTO and VTVL for the first experimental reusable spaceship. Those may not be the configurations of operational spaceships, but they are the proper ones for today's X projects. Get SSX accomplished and we'll know a very great deal about reusable spaceship operations.
We started the SSX program with DC-X which flew at White Sands so long as the Air Force was in charge, but oddly enough, this potential rival to Shuttle toppled and burned the first time NASA was in charge. Pure coincidence, of course. But note that even the last flight was successful, and the only reason the ship burned was that a human mechanic hadn't connected up a hydraulic line, so the landing gear didn't deploy properly.
DC-X was a small scale model of the SSX we had proposed to the National Space Council in 1989. DC-X demonstrated the feasibility of vertical landings. It showed that contrary to computer simulations, there was sufficient control authority at low speeds. It also showed that you can trick an F-15 flight control program into believing it is in charge of the weirdest airplane it ever conceived of…
The next step is a full SSX-1: around 600,000 pounds GLOW, meaning an empty weight of 60,000 pounds, well within the capabilities of off the shelf ground handling equipment.
SSX-1 will probably have a negative payload to orbit: that is, it won't get there. We will and should overbuild it. Flight safety and recoverability are more important than shaving the mass fraction.
Remember. X programs have no payloads, nor do they have mission requirements. The purpose of an X program is to learn how to build ships that do have payloads and can fulfill mission requirements.
There will be many payoffs from an SSX-1. First, when it's done we'll have numbers to input: we'll have a much better idea of what the mass fraction, and thus the payload, of an SSTO VTOL ship will be. We will know what size the ship must be to make orbit. Perhaps we need much better engines, or to go to some kind of Two Stage to Orbit (with recoverable first or zero stage). But we will know these things, not merely guess at them.
More likely we will find the stress points, bore holes in the structure to remove needless strength and weight, and come close to orbit with this ship. My guess is that we may never make orbit but we can scare it to death.
We'll learn a lot about routine spacecraft operations, and that's important: space ships are not wet navy ships, nor are they airplanes. They're more like airplanes than ammunition, though, and we need ground crews used to that concept. We'll learn a lot about flying to different azimuths. We'll learn a lot about engine performance and altitude compensation and the real truth about engine layout. Because we don't have to make orbit or come close to fly the ship and bring it home we can experiment with different arrangements and tricks: extensible bells, dynamic aerospike geometries, and so forth.
And finally, we'll relearn what X projects are all about, and that will be the best payoff of all.
[1] It is my understanding that NASA Headquarters recently lost hundreds of positions, and after those halls were emptied no one could remember what in the world all those people did.
[2] Redstone Arsenal is a splendid example.
[3] The point of arms control is to avoid arms races: to the arms controller the ideal situation is simple and static, and weapons never improve. X projects by generating new technologies are almost the antithesis of this.
[4] Beeman's was very popular with the test pilots at Edwards in the early days of the X projects. No one remembers why. Yeager was said to be chewing Beeman's when the X-1 broke the sound barrier.
[5] X-33 cost money, time, hope, confidence in the industry, and some professional reputations. Fiasco may be too mild a word for it.
[6] While engineering and implementations can be extremely difficult, rocket science itself isn't beyond anyone capable of understanding calculus. The fact that "rocket science" is thought to be the epitome of higher technological learning should be depressing.
[7] Assume Shuttle uses 5 million pounds of fuel and oxidant per flight. At $2 a pound and a multiple of ten times fuel costs that is $100 million a flight.
For other material on space and particularly on the SSX concept, click here. For my discourse on prizes, written in response to the Columbia disaster, click here.


text:
Alessandra Colombo is quite possibly the coolest young lady I have met all year. The key to this look is the perfect, perfect fit of her shirt, of course it's custom-made.
Friday, October 2, 2009
On the Street…Camera Crush, Paris
CommentsClose comment
95 comments
A*dor*able and incredibly chic. Bravo!! :)
Maybe you might be looking too hard Scott. I loved your recents shots from the shows, and found myself wondering what those outside of the shows were up to.
Sometimes the basics are new and interesting in their own right.
I really love the almost-androgyny of this. From the waist up, completely andro. With the belt… tilting towards feminine. And then the ballet flats… just perfect.
At first glance, I thought she was a boy ..
Her androgyny is astounding! I love how the wide belt makes her outfit a bit more femme.
wow, what a crisp look; she definitely understands the proportions of her body and the importance of ideal fit. unfortunately, she and i have complete opposite body types; i would love to be able to emulate this look!
Oh dear. I am in the process of getting dressed for the morning, already in tights, and now I want to wear my vintage slim jeans and be chic :( Oh well, tomorrow maybe :)
Updated preppy~I'll take one of every item she is wearing please!
cute belt :)
I'm not sure about the belt, but I love the collar and neckline of the sweater. Also love that her hair is tied back, gives me hope!
Ahhh… nice combination.
I like her shirt and glasses, but I do not like the belt. Way too big and colour wise.. Mwah.
finally, no slim jeans :)
i thought that was a dude. but then again, i also thought today was monday.
That tears it — I have to invest in a couple o custom shirts.
I loove her jeans but I don't really think she's that cool!
So chic, so simple.
I think off-site is WAY more interesting anyway. This young lady is so cool and crisp and oh so stylish in her simplicity. Love the belt…..that is what takes it from plain to smashing in my opinion
Wow great post.
I also came across a site dealing with denim styles.
definitely androgynous!
Looks very very good to me :)
She is truly adorable.
Androgyny done well always makes for a great fashion element.
I am having a problem layering collared shirts under sweaters (the shirt underneath always looks "bunched up" rather than smooth. I don't know what exactly I am doing wrong. I am gonna study this picture and try to figure out how it works.
le chic ! cherchez le femme !
completely masculine look down to the hair and no make-up, then the girliest satin ballet pumps! very cleverly put together – would love to see what she wears everyday. someone make her a stylist!
Ha, Scott, I love how you say, "…of course, it's custom-made." Not really achievable for me, but I'm glad for her.
Come to México City, ¡shoot us!
I LOVE the wide belt and the loose jeans. Perfect!
Thank you!!! for showing not-trendy pieces in a very stylish way. I want to meet her!
Agree on the shirt comment above–how does that work?!
you' ll be happy to know that I look for and get the same effect when I wear the same type of shirt (borrowed from my dad's or boyfriend's closet)..I like also the length and breadth of the jeans which evoke sweet summer styles..
…the belt is not not ideal, but I can see what she was trying to do…
i believe off site pictures are best!!
xoxo- F
Inspiring! Thanks for posting. You're right, the shirt is perfect and and a convincing demonstration as to why custom is worth it.
Those ballet slippers are like a raised eyebrow. Very cute.
I am shooting in Paris next year, God willing. Hope we find chic extras like her for my film.
I love how comfortable she looks.
I love the simple sexiness of this outfit. But I just don't get the belt at all.
I love it, perfect from her shoes to her hair. She looks extremely cool and chic. Just one photo so far that I have seen, but perhaps she should be a regular if possible.
I don't think the custom shirt makes a difference in this shot. We can't really see it.
Great androgynous look. Do you see a trend? Your recent shots seem to have that trend.
Really, really stunning! The best style since ages! Very simple and understated!! :)
I think that she looks too sexness with her hair, jeans and shirt…
The belt and the ballerinas are pretty but other hairstyle or a hells are that she needs.
Love her relaxed jeans and flat shoes….for a change!!!
wow, she really is the coolest. she's so interesting looking and fashionable without looking like a douchebag…which is pretty hard to do I think
lovely lovely lovely
Scooter – I spotted you next to Italian fashion writer Anna P on page D8 of my Oct 1 Wall Street Journal. Fun to discover your blog! I may even glean some fashion tips from now on. Bonjour d'EAGAN daily photo blog
I love the juxtoposition of the classic, understated look of the navy sweater with jeans mixed with that belt. what a fabulous belt! And just a touch of femininity with the ballet flats. It's all just beautiful. The color combo. The mix of garments. The sun glasses. Just Perfect!!
simple and chic, think the character is very important to make the outfit stands out.
One doesn't have to get custom made shirts. Most top quality men's shirt purveyors like Pink, Harvie & Hudson or Hilditch & Key (all have web sites) offer extra long sleeve and slim fit versions of their shirts. Interesting the comments about this young lady's androgyny because this is basically a classic guy's look with a more modest belt and loafers. I wear it all the time in the spring and fall. She carries it off brilliantly I must say because of her slim figure. She'd probably look good in a lot of guy stuff as people like Marlene Dietrich did.
For us "common folk" who follow you, we love off-site!!! More More More!!
Nah sorry, looks too contrived to be truly cool…also belt too wide so shortening her legs which means she should have worn some skinny heels – even low ones – not flats.
Taste is so interesting and subjective, I think everything about her look is intensely unflattering, but you love it – and so do lots of other people!
I'm sure she's a nice lady and all, but that outfit is horrible and that belt is the worst thing on that outfit. It's so out of scale!
I've been looking for that.EXACT.color jeans for months now. Can anyone share any ideas on where can I get a pair that looks like that?
Love this look – such a clean, simple, and personal style!
Cool indeed!!! Thanks Scott.
Wish I knew who made that great belt.
She does take the Tom-Boy look to a new level…
oohh i love her glasses!!
Great jeans and flats.
love that you can't tell if she's a man or woman at first glance. love the played down yet still stylish look. as far as finding people – maybe you are looking in the same places and not venturing out more. ciao.
i like the off-site picture, i think its the sartorialist's "heritage."
as much as i love to see the big fashion editors and stylists, it's easy for them to look amazing w/ all the access they have to runways. let's see how people not neccessarily such a part of the industry do it!
i. am. in. love. i have a weakness for thin brunettes with short hair though.
alessandra looks playful and beautiful.
the flats and the belt are fantastic. the rolled up jeans are super cute.
love it from the belt up. i also like the jeans with the flats, but not for that look.
i have to admit that it is something different from everyone we see at the shows though.
Off site: Isn't is that the Raison d'ĂŞtre of your work?
"Off site" means reality.
I love your shots of person-on-the-street with an interesting sense of style.
I think she's great. A classic preppy boy look, even to the hair and shades, but she adds the belt and ballet flats to show that she's really a girl. I think it comes off more well though out than contrived.
And, yes, it looks good in part because she's not very curvy. But for good personal style you need to dress the body you have, not dress for the body you wish you had.
I love your blog and images, but I'd like to believe that great style doesn't require great wealth. Just as the financial crisis shouldn't have affected the number of stylish people around. Or maybe I missed your point. :-)
Oh I love this look, quite boyish, she reminds me very much of a certain Coco Chanel Beautifully proportioned belt, excellent fitting shirt and sweater, and a beautiful roll to her jeans, very Milanese. Minor tweaks and adjustments which really make this outfit. She has such beautiful posture and elegance to carry off such an androgynous look. Stunningly simple.
why do women wear mens clothes and get praised for it, but when men wear womens clothes they don't?
Thank god for the shoes. I was stumped til I saw them.
I have recently been thinking that a lot of comments on the men's picture were more about the physic than the clothes….mea culpa, mea culpa…she is hot!
I will second =MARIA's sentiment.
Of site is what your blog is really all about. Isn't it?
Lovely cool person here.
I've been looking at Los Angeles street fashion differently since following this site. L.A. isn't all Kim Kardashian stupid. There's lots of cool forays into the cutting edge. It just might take more work to tease it out. Or you might need to know the lay of the land intimately.
I'd like to see you take the time to do that and blow away the stereotypes.
so beautifully chic. love her and you.
Androgonously Chic!
Ok does anyone know how these people stay so thin? In Paris????
one of the most beutiful girls on this post I have seen.Incredibly feminine.This will still looks good a hundred years from now.
Maybe try again in Melbourne?
She is into an YSL ideal of turning women in men, but she is into RLauren style. lol
MAISON CHAPLIN at Paris Fashion Week
I absolutely love her look! Seeing only the upper part of her look first, it made me wonder if that is a boy or a girl (man/woman). But she looks really feminine and gentle, especially if you notice her shoes. It really sets a nice contrast to the whole style of her clothes, but very much integrated. Great great look and shot!!
I am pretty darn sure this is the most adorable/perfect outfit I have seen all year!
Love is an understatement.
the belt is hideous, i would have loved to see a dark brown leather belt. with the ballet flats balancing the outfit, together with the fit of the jean- i don´t think it would be too "manly". otherwise, she´s perfect!
Women into men?
Can't agree with either of those at all.
Honed to pure femininity in my eyes.
If you need new people just come to art school campuses! I'm an art student and the sidewalks may as well be catwalks here.
Scott, I highly doubt that it's the dynamics of the economy that are driving crowds and variety away from the shows. I think the proletariat is losing interest in watching overpaid models strut their awkward stuff clad in overpriced garments realising that the real interesting people are found walking the streets – people that are not necessarily embroiled in the fashion industry and don't necessarily have trust funds to support their clothing habits.
I highly doubt there is a future for catwalks, fashion magazines, barometers of style and the incestuous little circle of fashionistas. No offence intended, of course. This however means that the future is bright for someone like you who takes an interest in what the common person is wearing.
She looks wonderful. I'm a bit confused by the belt but on her it looks great. Love those flats, her feet are so feminine. Very cool.
Very short hair on a woman – I love it.
I much prefer your street shots to the the regulars at the shows. With the exception of Giovanna, I find their taste too contrived and not very stylish.
i hate everything minus her jeans. the sunglasses and belt are especially hideous.
if you want interesting people to shoot – come back to Australia. The recession never hit here, so we still spend money on clothes!!
That is PERFECT
"The economy continues to affect the size and variety of the crowds at the shows"
Then why do you continue to only photograph people that are, for the most part, wearing expensive clothes? I mean, most of us don't have custom-made sweaters. And it doesn't even look that good anyways.
It would be nice to see someone making something amazing out of almost nothing rather than someone making something amazing out of the mounds of expensive clothes in their closet. That kind of thing happens everywhere in NYC, you just have to look beyond Soho.
extremely appeasing.
i totally love this look. Especially the rolled up jeans and that belt.
Interesting how far reaching this recession is…
audrey hepburn would commend you
I do love her!a part the belt actually;-)
Really boring, irregardless of the androgyny.


text:
This brief with stretch cotton fabrication provides you comfort and lets your skin breathe. There is thick elastic on waist and thin elastic on legs that gives you a smooth finish. The brief is label-free to provide you maximum comfort.
Fabric composition: 95% cotton, 5% elastane
Wash care: Handwash only. Do not tumble dry.
Product added to your shopping cart!Continue shoppingView cart & checkout


text:
Everyone needs good dental health for his or her family. If proper dental care is what you want, you should contact an experienced family dentist. Family dentistry is a dental field that has grown extensively, and thus, you can always find a good family dentist who will take care of all dental needs of your entire family. Dental diseases are common ailments that can occur on any member of a family. A family dentists Anchorage is the best specialist that will help you achieve good dental health.
Whether a child of an adult member of your family has a dental problem, a family dentist will provide the right remedy since family dentists can treat dental disorders of people of all ages.
You can consult family dentists whenever the need arises: Family dentists are available to provide timely dental advice whenever they are approached. This means that family dentists provide emergency dental care to patients who need to relief pains instantly. They can diagnose your problem and recommend the best treatment for you. They are also able to treat a variety of dental problems without any hassles. Therefore, you can consult with your family dentist whenever you are faced with a dental problem.
They handle different dental conditions. Family dentists can handle plenty of dental problems. This field of dentistry deals with a wide range of common dental problems that affect many people. One common condition that a family dentist can treat is dental cavities. Cavities are dental diseases causing wearing or the teeth because of bacteria and harmful germs.
They also treat teeth sensitivity, which is a common dental condition that is covered under family dentistry. A family dentist is able to tell various causes of tooth sensitivity. Since they have the knowledge, they can provide custom treatment that suit individual problems. If a member of your family has teeth sensitivity, a family dentist will treat it.
It is common to experience injuries that may lead to teeth problems. Family dentists have the skills needed to handle emergency accidents that may lead to toot loss, cracked teeth and so on. Therefore, in case your kid accidentally knocks his or her teeth on a hard object, a family dentist will be the best person.
An experienced family dentist in Anchorage can also educate you and the rest of your family members on the best ways of developing good hygiene practices that can better your oral health.


text:
Need better results
December 03, 2013
The recent Avalere report, commissioned mainly by affiliated business groups, predictably disputes some savings that will be realized by Vermont's Act 48 single payer health care plan. However, before opponents of single payer start victory laps, some questionable aspects of the report should addressed.
The report overlooks that today hospitals and doctors in private practice write off over a $100 million a year in care when patients can't pay their medical bills which means that everyone else pays more. Added on to this are collection fees. Single payer eliminates such losses.
Every Vermonter will be a paying patient and charged the same based on an upgrade of Medicare reimbursement rates. This leveling of the medical paying field should lower non-medical administrative costs such as billing departments. Even today, many hospitals flourish on mostly Medicare patients.
The sponsors of the Avalere report include those who have vested interests directly or indirectly in the current health insurance system such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, the Vermont Business Roundtable, the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, Fletcher Allen, Vermont Association of Hospitals that lobbies for Fletcher Allen, and the Vermont Medical Society. Incidentally, another sponsor of Avalere, Vermont Partners for Health Care Reform, testified that they question the accuracy of the report and want an independent study.
Five other reports, Lewin in 2001, Thorpe in 2006, Hsiao in 2011, BISHCA and UMASS in 2012 all contradict the Avalere report concerning savings from single payer. Dr. Hsiao, meanwhile, has actually designed a single payer health care system for Taiwan.
Finally, reports supporting single payer should be redundant by now as the evidence of savings in the last 50-plus years are visible world wide from developed countries, all of whom have universal health care, including single payer, with better results at less cost than our fragmented and inefficient system.
Jerry Kilcourse


text:
Facebook Connect
Quick Links
Sign-up to get the latest news updates for Riverside and Brookfield.
|Contact us
|Submit Letter To The Editor
|Place a Classified Ad
Classified Ad
Latest Comments
Great job reporting and writing, Anthony. Way to go!
By Darcy Lewis
Posted: July 19th, 2019 11:23 AM
@ Jane, Donna, Why don't you read the article...
By Fred Mertz
Posted: July 18th, 2019 7:09 PM
Does the Swim Club add to our Riverside property...
By Jane Skelly Fiedler
Posted: July 18th, 2019 11:23 AM
Living in N. Riverside and included in some of the...
By Donna Juzkiw
Posted: July 18th, 2019 10:55 AM
The guy with the boxcutter sounds to me like he is...
By Dave Smith
Posted: July 16th, 2019 8:14 PM
Maybe if they stop overpaying the department heads, it...
By Jeffrey Evans
Posted: July 16th, 2019 8:03 PM
Mary will do a great job as a Head Coach! She was a...
By Larry Rocco
Posted: July 16th, 2019 7:44 PM
Say what 10k raise now at 175k a year no wonder...
By Tim Malas
Posted: July 16th, 2019 6:45 PM
Amazing work, Ladies! Riverside is proud of the...
By Bridget Doherty
Posted: July 14th, 2019 8:50 AM
On of my friends lived a couple blocks away, and we...
By Mike Edwards
Posted: July 12th, 2019 2:43 PM


text:
Green Bay Press-Gazette archives
Back row (left to right): John Brennan (37); Frank Balazs (35); Harry Jacunski (48); Warren Kilbourne (58); Frank Steen (36); Tom Greenfield (56); Buford "Baby" Ray (44); Carl "Moose" Mulleneaux (19); Larry Buhler (52); Allen Moore (55); Don Hutson (14); Charles Schultz (60); Clarence Thompson (10); Assistant Coach Richard (Red) Smith.This simple and elegant, with green numbers on a solid white jersey, formed the basis of the Packers' 2001 Thanksgiving throwbacks.
Middle row: Coach Curly Lambeau; Larry Craig (54); Paul Kell (41); Clarke Hinkle (30); Milt Gantenbein (22); Arnie Herber (38); Earl Svendsen (53); Bill Lee (40); Cecil Isbell (17); Charles "Buckets" Goldenberg (43); Hank Bruder (5); Lee Mulleneaux (18); Russ Letlow (46); Paul (Tiny) Engebretsen (34).
Front row: Andy Uram (42); Charley Brock (29); Don Wilson (49); Herm Schneidman (51); Joe Laws (24); Clarence Thompson (50); Dick Zoll (57); Francis Twedell (62); Chester "Swede" Johnson (15); Dick Weisgerber (33); Pete Tinsley (21); John Biolo (32); Ed Jankowski (7).
The Packers didn't get those throwbacks quite right, though. They used their standard block numbers, as seen here on Brett Favre as he munches down on postgame turducken:
Getty Images
The original uniform, as worn by Don Hutson, utilized a simpler number style.
Maple Leaf Productions, on the other hand, got the numbers right on their Packers uniform history plaque:
The Packers didn't have a #27 on the roster that year, but artist Tino Paolini borrowed Larry Buhler's 52 and Cecil Isbell's 17.
One more note on 1939; it wasn't only a white-and-green season. The Packers wore the whites in rotation with the era-defining gold-yoked blue jerseys. And on the biggest stage, the world championship game against the Giants, Curly's boys took the field at Wisconsin State Fair Park in their blues.
Although they were short-lived, I've always liked these white jerseys, certainly much more than the mismatched, overly-striped 1980s road jerseys they wear now. And in this age of disappearing sleeves, perhaps a simple design like this could make a comeback. Paired with the Packers' classic gold pants and helmets, I don't think even Emily Post would mind seeing these whites after Labor Day.


text:
Laguna Beach resident and director Rob Hedden traded his seaside town for the tropical island of Hawaii for his latest film, "You May Not Kiss the Bride."
The independent film may have only had a $7-million budget but that didn't keep big names from participating in the film, such as Katharine McPhee of "Smash," Rob Schneider, "Brothers and Sisters" star Dave Annable, Mena Suvari of "American Beauty" fame, Kathy Bates, "Borat" star Ken Davitian and Hawaii native Tia Carrere.
It played at South Coast Cinema on Thursday, the first showing in Orange County. The film had its premiere in Honolulu this summer and has been released in nine other cities such as Chicago and Seattle.
Hedden described the film as part action movie, part romantic comedy. Annable, who plays a photographer who shoots comically costumed pets for a living, gets caught up with a Croatian mobster after an encounter at work. The mobster agrees to let bygones be bygones if the photographer marries his Croatian daughter, played by McPhee, so she can get American citizenship.
The couple is transported to their "honeymoon" in Tahiti, but the fun weekend's tone changes when the mobster's daughter is kidnapped and Annable's character is blamed. With the help of Schneider as a helicopter pilot with an indiscernible foreign accent, Annable hopes to locate his faux wife, for whom he begins to have real feelings.
Davitian, who was Sacha Baron Cohen's sidekick in "Borat," said it wasn't hard to say "yes" to the film.
"I was attracted to the role because I absolutely think Katherine McPhee is awesome. Then I heard we were supposed to shoot in some god forsaken place called Hawaii," Davitian said with a laugh.
Although he plays a mobster, he said the film really shows his soft side because he wants to protect his daughter.
"I wanted to do a film where I would be menacing and sweet at the same time," he said.
Hedden said the film was incredibly lucky to get its cast. At the time, McPhee's film credits included "House Bunny," and Annable was on hiatus from "Brothers and Sisters," a hit ABC drama.
The moment he met them, he said he knew they'd be the perfect leads and could tell they would have successful careers in show business.
Kathy Bates plays Annable's mother in the film. Originally a character that was never going to be seen on film, Hedden decided to cast the part.
"She was maybe the first name that came up. 'Wouldn't it be great if Kathy Bates did it?'" he said. "What a dream for me to be able to stand behind the camera to see someone like that act."
Hedden said they plan to show in 10 U.S. markets. The film is already achieving acclaim internationally in Latin America, Canada and is showing in 200 theaters in Russia, he noted.
Czech Republic has just bought the film. He's heard that Japan is interested and may even want a Hollywood-style premiere. Japanese media interviewed Hedden at the Honolulu premiere.
They're doing a modern and somewhat experimental release — the film is available on Video On Demand, iTunes and Amazon concurrent with its domestic release. Hedden said it's a way for independent films that don't have a lot of publicity to get more exposure.
Hedden is currently working a on a new project: a film based on local Augie Nieto's true story. Nieto, founder of Life Fitness and a Corona del Mar resident, has ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, and the film looks at how it changed the life of the fitness icon. Nieto is known for raising tens of millions of dollars to find a cure for the disease and Hedden believes the film could give ALS and Nieto's unique story the exposure it deserves.
"We met and I described how I see the movie in my head, at the end of it we were all really emotional because it's an amazing, powerful story," he said of his first meeting with Nieto. "I said you don't need to make it with me. It's so inspirational, and someone needs to make this movie. It moved me and it's going to move a lot of people."
Hedden is in the process of raising funds for the film and hopes to shoot this spring.
All the proceeds from Thursday's showing of "You May Not Kiss the Bride" benefit Augie's Quest, Nieto's foundation, as well as the Laguna Beach Film Society and Laguna Art Museum.
The film is at 7 p.m. at the South Coast Cinema, 162 S. Coast Hwy. Tickets are $10 at the door and include post-film director question and answer session. For a prescreening wine and appetizer reception at 6 p.m. at the Laguna Art Museum, it's $30.
Visit itunes.apple.com or click here for the film online.
Twitter: @joannaclay


text:
Mint and Chocolate Filled Rose Thumbprint Cookies
Thumbprint cookies are similar to sablé cookies. They both have the texture of shortbread. The characteristic thumbprint shape is created by pressing down on the cookie with a spoon half-way through the baking process. A sweet filling is placed in the resulting cavity. The cookie itself has a mild sweetness that goes very well with the sweeter filling. The filling can be jam, preserves, caramel or even chocolate.
I chose a pink mint filling because of my little five-year-old sister-in-law. She came to me with the cutest request. She adores Cookie Monster, and often shares her cookies with the Cookie Monster doll we got her. Today, she came to me, hid her face with the stuffed animal and said in her best Cookie Monster impersonation, "Cookie Monster is hungry, I want pink cookies." My heart melted; I can't say no to my little munchkin.
All the girls gathered in the kitchen and pink cookies it was. I looked in the pantry and found several choices for a pink-colored cookie. Some pink-colored mint chocolate chips from Guittard, raspberry and strawberry extracts or rose paste. The girls voted and we went for a rose-flavored cookie dough with pink mint chocolate filling. Sunny, my 13-year-old eldest sister-in-law wanted to create some fun design in the filling, so we melted some bittersweet chocolate and vanilla chips as well. This has to be some fun designs.
We were all very happy with our unique cookies and needless to say, Cookie Monster also enjoyed our creation.
Yields: 20 cookies1 egg yolk, optional (see tips for egg allergy)
3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
12 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
7 tablespoons powdered sugar
1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon rose paste, as needed (depending on how pink you want the cookies)
2 ounces pink-colored mint chocolate chips
1 ounce bittersweet chocolate chips
1 ounce vanilla chips, (or white chocolate chips)
2 teaspoons light corn syrup
2 tablespoons heavy cream
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
Using a handheld mixer, whisk the egg yolk with 1/4 cup of powdered sugar until you get a pale, yellow foam. Add the vanilla extract.
In a bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking soda. Sift all the dry ingredients.
Cream 8 tablespoons of butter with the remaining powdered sugar (whisk using the handheld mixer to get as much air as possible into the butter). Add the egg mixture and the dry ingredients. Mix with your fingers until the cookie dough is formed. Add the rose paste. Do NOT overmix. Transfer the dough into a bowl. Plastic wrap it and place it in the refrigerator for at least 20 minutes.
For the pink mint, bittersweet chocolate and vanilla ganache, use or make a double boiler. Place a pot filled with hot water, topped with a piece of cloth so the bowl does not move and place a stainless-steel bowl filled with the pink mint chocolate chips on top. Melt the chocolate chips with 2 tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon of heavy cream and a teaspoon of corn syrup. Repeat the same procedure with the bittersweet chocolate and the vanilla chips with only 1 tablespoon of butter, 1/2 tablespoon of heavy cream and 1/2 teaspoon of corn syrup for each remaining filling. Set aside. (See tips if the filling hardens)
Shape the cookie dough into 20 1-inch diameter balls. Place them on a baking tray lined with a silicone mat or a sheet of parchment paper.
Bake the cookies for 10 minutes at 350°F. Open the oven. Press the center of the cookie using a melon baller or any small spoon. Bake for another 8 minutes.
Remove from the oven and let them cool down completely to room temperature before taking them off the cookie sheets. They will harden and get firm as they cool down. Spoon about 1/4 teaspoon of pink mint chocolate filling in each thumbprint. Using a chopstick, drop a little bittersweet chocolate filling and a drop of vanilla filling using another chopstick and immediately swirl the filling using a toothpick. Let the filling set until firm.
Enjoy with a tall glass of sharbat (Indian milk drink, scroll down for the picture).
Bon appétit!
Make sure to press the cookies half-way through the cooking time to get nice fault lines on the edge of the cookies.
My 9-year-old sister-in-law is allergic to eggs, so we tried the same recipe without the egg yolk. Just mix all the powdered sugar into the butter. The verdict is that it's feasible but the cookie is more crumbly and far less cohesive. The egg yolk is a powerful binding agent.
For other allergy reasons, I did not decorate the thumbprint cookies with nuts. You can coat the cookies in milk, then garnish the outside ring of the cookies with 1/2 cup finely chopped pistachios or any other nuts if you want, right before placing in the oven.
I used Guittard peels for the ganache. I used pink mint peels, bittersweet chocolate and vanilla chips. I bought them at a local store, called the Milk Pail Market. The address is 2585 California Street, Mountain View, CA 94040, but you can order through eBay if you can't find them. Make crème brulées or chocolate pot de crèmes with the rest of the chocolate chips.
For the double boiler, I always like to add a little kitchen towel underneath the chocolate filled bowl. The bowl won't jiggle and there won't be any splatter of water in your chocolate. If the chocolate hardens, place the bowl back in the double boiler.
I added some heavy cream to the chocolate to make the mixture smoother and more glossy. You can add any other dairy liquid, such as regular milk, or even omit this part if you want a thicker texture.
I buy Koepoe-Koepoe pastes. There are rose, mocha and pandan flavors. You can find them in any Asian stores or at VeryAsia.com.
You can store the cookies in an airtight metallic tin for up to a week to keep them fresh. If you prefer them harder, just let them cool out or place them in a regular cookie jar or simply eat them all, like Cookie Monster did .
Published By: on August 15, 2009.


text:
Nnamdi Asomugha is headed back to the Bay Area. After starring in college at California and earning two All-Pro nods with the Oakland Raiders, Asomugha is taking his talents to the other side of the bay.
The cornerback has agreed to terms on a one-year contract with the San Francisco 49ers, sources told NFL.com's Ian Rapoport on Tuesday. Per Rapoport, Asomugha will earn $1.35 million in base salary with a chance to earn an additional $1.65 million in incentives. Asomugha already pocketed $4 million from the Philadelphia Eagles.
|Take a look at the best photos of Nnamdi Asomugha.
Asomugha chose the stacked 49ers over a reunion with former Raiders defensive coordinator Rob Ryan on the New Orleans Saints after being courted by both teams.
Asomugha was an unqualified bust with the Eagles after signing as the top free agent on the market in 2011. His press-man coverage skill set never was suited to the "Wide Nine" scheme prevalent on the Eagles over the past two seasons. The 31-year-old bottomed out by allowing an eye-popping 120.6 passer rating on throws in his territory last season, according to Pro Football Focus.
The 49ers were in the market for a cornerback with size after quarterbacks Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco carved up their secondary in the NFC Championship Game and Super Bowl XLVII, respectively. The hope is that Asomugha will bounce back from being one of the NFL's most-burned cornerbacks in 2012 now that he's joining a defense more suited to his strengths.
There's little question that Asomugha gradually lost his confidence and make-up speed on the Eagles. While he might regain the former on the title-contending 49ers, the latter might have evaporated for good.
Follow Chris Wesseling on Twitter @ChrisWesseling.