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Algeria to capitalise on EU-Russia rift
August 15, 2014 Leave a comment
On July 19, Algeria's state energy company Sonatrach finalized a $100bn five year investment plan designed to considerably increase the country's capacity to produce and export energy.
The plans feature more than $22bn of investment in the country's natural gas industry, which will include the development of six new gas fields, along with another $20bn for the production of oil. The distribution of the rest of the total has yet to be decided.
The expansion plans comes as Sonatrach – the largest energy company in Africa – announces it has reshuffled its C-suite management. Previous CEO Abdelhamid Zerguine has been replaced by the company's former vice president for production Said Sahnoun. The change is believed to have come at the behest of energy minister Youcef Yousfi himself, according to This is Africa sources within international energy companies operating in Algeria.
Algeria has the fourth largest oil reserves in Africa, and the second-largest gas reserves. Hydrocarbons constitute about 60 percent of the country's budget revenues, and more than 95 percent of exports.
However, the sector has been struggling. Declining production has combined with rising domestic demand for energy to seriously hit the state's key source of revenue. Oil and gas output dropped by 7.5 percent in 2013, wiping out $5bn in value. Export revenues have also shrunk. Algeria earned just $63.8bn in hydrocarbon exports in 2013, down from $69.8bn in the previous year.
The government is now preparing to take bids next month from foreign companies for 31 new oil and gas fields in order to counter the decline. Some hydrocarbon industry deals are beginning to come to light.
At the US-Africa Summit on August 5, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt met with Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal to discuss the country's operations in Algeria. The pair also announced orders for eight gas generators, and a gas engine project.
GE has a well established presence in Algeria. Its technologies generate almost 70 percent of the country's electricity, according to Rania Rostom, the company's chief communications officer for the Middle East and North Africa.
"We are committed to being Algeria's growth partner by supporting the development of the country's energy infrastructure," said Lorraine Bolsinger, CEO of GE's distributed power division.
In March, GE signed a $400m deal with Sonelgaz, Algeria's state-owned electricity and natural gas distributor, to build a new gas complex in the eastern province of Batna. On June 25 Sonatrach also signed a major deal worth more than $600m with India's Dodsal for a gas facility near the eastern town of Hassi Messaoud.
The government also plans to start developing the country's less conventional energy sources, namely the country's vast untapped shale reserves. Algeria is believed to be home to the third largest shale gas reserves in the world, and Sonatrach will begin drilling at four shale gas wells this year.
The British company Clarke Energy, which operates in Algeria, told This is Africa that it signed two deals for efficient power plants in Algeria earlier this month – and that it was looking to do more.
"There is massive potential in the country for the use of flare gas for power generation – that is, gases that are normally, flared as waste products when companies are extracting crude oil," said Clarke's marketing and compliance manager, Alex Marshall.
"We would like to build upon our other successful flare gas projects in Africa such as the Waha plant in Tunisia," he said.
Renewing exports
With the retail price for natural gas fixed (now below cost price) since 2005, Algeria has the second cheapest domestic prices for natural gas in Africa, according to the IMF.
This means a large share of hydrocarbon production is satisfying Algerians' demand for energy. The government's plans to boost production and expand renewables is not targeting domestic markets, but geared towards attracting large export contracts.
"The programme aims to install a capacity of 12,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2030 with the installation of 20 new photovoltaic plants in Algeria by the end of 2014," says Professor Noureddine Yassaa, director of Algeria's state Renewable Energy Development Center (CDER).
"As the biggest country in Africa and in the Mediterranean basin, we have huge potential renewable energy resources, especially in solar energy, and all the conditions are met for Algeria to be leading on renewable energy in the region," Professor Yassaa says.
The government has also introduced a feed-in tariff scheme for photovoltaic solar power, which will last for the next 20 years. The tariff offers compensation to renewable energy producers – effectively subsidising renewable energy production.
Foreign investors have begun to take interest. On June 12, the German company Group Eurosol signed a preliminary agreement in Algiers with Algeria's Aurès Solaire for a stake in developing new photovoltaic plants.
Supplying Europe
In light of the current diplomatic crisis between Russia and the European Union over Ukraine, European Commission planners are considering alternative forms of supply to substitute for Russian imports. This is a window of opportunity for Algeria, which already supplies around 70 percent of its crude oil exports and 80 percent of its gas exports to Europe.
Algerian officials have met frequently with European representatives to discuss its energy supplies to Europe. On June 5, negotiations were held with Greece on importing Algerian gas to market in Romania and Bulgaria. On June 16, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, visited Algiers to promote British business interests in Algeria's energy industry.
And on June 25, the Italian industry minister Federica Guidi met with Prime Minister Sellal to discuss expanding Italy's energy relationship with Algeria. Italy derives around 40 percent of its energy from natural gas, and is increasingly concerned about the security of its Russian supply.
In Algiers, Ms Guidi said her visit – the first by an Italian minister since 2012 – was a chance "to confirm the strategic importance Italy attaches to Algeria, especially as regards oil and gas supplies".
According to CDER's Professor Yassaa, Europe's desire to diversify away from Russia "is extremely important given the proximity of Algeria to Europe,and the huge Algerian potential for a partnership which is sustainable and long lasting".
"The current crisis in Ukraine has propelled questions of Algerian supplies to the centre of EU–Russian tensions. With Russian supplies in question, EU member states are looking to Algeria as a possible substitute," writes Mansouria Mokhefi, special advisor for the Middle East and North Africa to the French Institute of International Relations.
Ms Mokhefi argues that though the ossification at the heart of Algeria's political system is problematic, there are prospects for a closer energy relationship between the EU and Algeria
"European leaders are looking to Algeria as the most reliable alternative source of energy for the EU, and have engaged in conversations with the Algerian leadership to increase their energy co-operation."
This article was originally published with Financial Times: This is Africa on August 12 2014.


text: Laos is investing billions of dollars in a high-speed rail line being built by a Chinese company. It will run from Yunnan province in southern China to Laos' capital, Vientiane, before eventually connecting with another line being built in Thailand. As part of Al Jazeera's series on global trade routes, Wayne Hay reports from Luang Prabang in Laos. Asia Pacific Laos Business & Economy

subset: commoncrawl


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Spotlight on the Louis Vuitton Speedy
Posted by Sarah Donnell on 21st Jun 2017
The Louis Vuitton Speedy holds a special place in our hearts at Keeks; when we opened our very first store in 2010, the first handbag we sold was a Speedy 30! And how perfectly symbolic—the Speedy epitomizes the concept we love most: luxury in the everyday.
The Speedy has certainly had plenty of practice at being effortlessly fabulous and functional. Born in 1930, this baby was originally named "The Express." As you probably know, Louis Vuitton's business originated in making trunks for travel in the late 1800s. Louis Vuitton says this "original city bag" was conceived as the reality of travel was evolving.
What's truly amazing about this classic accessory is that even though the world has changed several times over since that era, the Speedy remains perfectly relevant. As Luxury Launches recounts, legend has it that Audrey Hepburn called Louis Vuitton herself in the 1960s to ask that he make a special, smaller travel bag for her. So the even more petite Speedy staked its claim as a fashion icon—no longer just for the odd voyage, this bag was now meant for the grand journey through every day.
These days, you can find the classically curved shape of this "travel case" in its definitive monogram print or with a modern twist—with a splash of daring graffiti, donning the demure Damier Azur pattern, or in a solid epi leather statement color. How far do you travel in a day? Do you need the sturdy leather handles of the 30, 35, or 40 model on your arm? Or maybe the teeny Speedy Neo is enough as you zip around town.
A Speedy in hand tells people you're going places, and it's the spirit of the Speedy that never wants to slow you down—no matter how many quick changes you need to make or different scenes you breeze through in a day.
Just in time to equip you for your summer adventures, check out our special spotlight selection of Speedies online!


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Kelly Clarkson's New Found Confidence Since Becoming A Mother
Kelly Clarkson says she has "never been more confident as a woman" since she became a mother to River Rose, two, and Remington Alexander, seven months.
The 'Because of You' hitmaker – who has River Rose, two, and Remington Alexander, seven months, with her husband Brandon Blackstock – feels she is really "nailing it" as a mother.
She said: "I have never been more confident as a woman as I am as a mother. I feel like I am nailing it."
And the 34-year-old singer is also stepmother to Brandon's two children – Savannah and Seth – and is very proud of how she balances her family life, career and marriage.
She added: "We have a blended family that is another level of trying to make it work and everyone feeling as equally loved and important. And then also just having a marriage and having a career and having everything. It is a lot.
"I am more confident now because of all these things my life now entails. And when you are put in charge of someone not only as a business – I employ a lot of people – but also there are four lives I am a part of molding, and that is a big responsibility. And with that responsibility, I feel like it kind of brings this different level of like, 'I've got this. I might cry my way through this, this morning but I am going to make it and it is going to be good in the end.'"
And Kelly admits she is a lot more "selfless" now than she was in her 20s as her priorities have changed.
She told Entertainment Tonight: "The Kelly now and the Kelly of my 20s, that is the difference between selfish and selfless. Because when you are 20 you are supposed to be a little selfish and do all your drama. And then in your 30s you have to get [your life] a little more together … Priorities change.
"I used to [think] everything was so important with work. And it is still important, but I am not a brain surgeon so no one is dying on a table if I do not record a song. It is OK if I go to art class with my daughter instead."
*Sourced by Bang Showbiz


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Cord Blood Banking
The long-term preservation
Significant progress has been made in umbilical cord blood banking, i.e., in the cryo-preservation and thawing techniques, to ensure the viability of hematopoietic stem cells issued from bone marrow, peripheral blood and Umbilical Cord Blood (UCB). The UCB is cry-preserved in liquid nitrogen, but we do not always know with certainty, the cord blood viability duration allowed by the use of actual cryo-preservation techniques.
Most published data available about umbilical cord blood banking, suggest that UCB can be kept frozen during 10 to 15 years, while allowing the recovery of highly efficient, viable and functional cells (which are necessary for the success of a transplant). Most units of UCB which have so far been used clinically, were cryo-preserved for a period of six years or less. However, the engraftment capacity of blood units preserved for long periods will be evaluated only when there will be clinical results demonstrating the long-term success of engraftment of such units.
Security issues surrounding umbilical cord blood banking
Once harvested, the umbilical cord blood units are labeled and shipped to the bank, where they will be subject to safety tests, HLA typing and cryo-preservation. In general, public banks adopt rules that are consistent with the established standards for cord blood banking (American Association of Blood Banks. Standards for hematopoietic progenitor cell services, 2e éd., Bethesda, MD : American Association of Blood Banks, 2000). On the other side, the transfer modalities (from the hospital or birth center to private banks) of the UCB are much less controlled and defined.
The testing of UCB and maternal blood in order to detect infectious agents (HIV, cytomegalovirus, human lymphotropic virus, hepatitis and syphilis) is required by public banks. The blood units are first placed in quarantine until the end of testing. When new units obtain negative results, they are placed in banks for the long-term conservation. For each of these units, public banks will also provide a detailed maternal and familial history regarding genetic diseases, details of possible travels made by the mother in countries with high rates of transmissible infections, and other information on maternal high risk behaviors involving the use of intravenous drugs and sexual activity.
The screening for infectious diseases implemented by private cord blood banks is variable and poorly defined.
Ethical Issues in Umbilical Cord Blood Banking
Many ethical questions remain unanswered regarding the clinical and experimental use of umbilical cord blood. Among these issues we find the development of ethical processes for donor recruitment, and obtaining a well informed consent regarding cord blood banking, or donating UCB to public banks, private banks as well as for research purposes.
The legal and ethical issues related to respect for privacy, confidentiality and ownership of cord blood units are complex and controversial. The question whether the information on the donor must be associated with individual units of cord blood, and whether donors should be informed of infections or genetic abnormalities detected remains also, controversial.
Finally, the ethical aspects of commercial cord blood banking, particularly with respect to the availability of this potentially valuable resource for clinical or experimental purposes, are the subject of considerable debate.
Donor recruitment
The parents of a child in gestation wish their best for him and are therefore sensitive to the promotional and advertising campaigns pumping potential benefits of umbilical cord blood banking. Private banks sell the collection of UCB as police biological insurance and argue the benefits (of UCB collection and storage ) that are not based on satisfactory scientific data.
Commercial banks have various methods of communication (including Internet, direct mail and video) that use a striking and passionate speech to describe the transplantation of umbilical cord blood as being "of vital importance" or even "miraculous". Public banks rather encourage pregnant women to think about donating for altruistic reasons.
To ensure fair recruitment, families and care providers must have accurate and impartial information about the benefits and the potential risks associated with umbilical cord blood banking. Messages seeking to create a sense of guilt among parents who choose not to bank the UCB should be denounced, and, so to preserve the decisional autonomy of parents. Moreover, the use among ethnic minorities, of coercive strategies for the recruitment of umbilical cord blood donors, should not be allowed.


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California Driver Audio HandbookActions
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California Driver Audio Handbook
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Section I
- New 2019 Laws
- DMV Information
- General Information
- The California Driver License
- Obtaining a Driver License
- Driver License Classes
Section II
- The Examination Process
- Special Section - Minors
- Miscellaneous Licensing Information
Section III
- Occupant Protection
- Traffic Controls
- Laws and Rules of the Road
Section IV
- Visual Search
- Lane Control
- Turns
- Parking
Section V
- Safe Driving Practices
- Vehicle Positioning
- Sharing the Road
Section VI
- Special Driving Situations
- Handling Emergencies
Section VII
- Driver Readiness
- Alcohol and Drugs
- Additional Driving Laws and Rules
Section VIII
- Administrative


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Eunice Foster, Ph.D.
Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences
Professor - Student recruitment and development; K-20 STEM Education; formerly research in Crop Physiology
Telephone: 517-353-0135
1066 Bogue St., Room 160B
East Lansing, MI 48824-1325
Dr. Foster has been a professor and crop physiologist in the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences at Michigan State University since 1982. She served as Associate Dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources for the Undergraduate Programs and Director of the Institute of Agriculture Technology from 2002-2010.
For more than 30 years, she has sought to recruit students into the food, agricultural and natural resource sciences (FANR) and to nurture, retain and encourage them to enter careers in their chosen disciplines upon graduation or continue for graduate degrees. Recruitment of underrepresented students has been a special emphasis because of the exceedingly low numbers of students, staff, faculty and other professionals of color in these disciplines. She has assisted domestic (minority and majority) and international faculty, staff and students (undergrad and graduate) in any way possible with progressing in their careers. She has served as the major advisor for undergraduate and graduate students and/or employed students from the U.S., Botswana, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, St. Croix U.S.V.I., Iran, and other countries. She is one of the founding members of the national society for Minorities in Agriculture Natural Resources, and Related Sciences (MANRRS) and was elected and served as the first MANRRS president in 1988-89. She delights in worked with students, faculty, and staff and in helping people strive to reach their full potential.
Please contact Dr. Eunice Foster for more information regarding the Multicultural Scholars Program.
Ph.D. University of Arkansas
Courses Taught:
CSS 054: Crop Production
CSS 101: Introduction to Crop Science
CSS 120: Agricultural Industry Issues
CSS 212: Advanced Crop Production
CSS 380: Crop Physiology


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Most golf course superintendents prepare for the possibility of winterkill turf damage. Even in warmer climates, it is part of the job. But there are misconceptions about winterkill, and those lead superintendents to make incorrect conclusions and wrong decisions in turf and disease management.
One popular notion concerns ice on putting surfaces and the idea that there is a point which it must always be removed, says United States Golf Association Director of Green Section Education Adam Moeller.
"Probably one of the more common misconceptions out there is, there is a set day — after 20 days, 30 days, whatever — that there has to be action taken," Moeller says. "The research is somewhat misleading that if you've got ice cover for a certain time period, that means there is going to be injury. I think that's how some people have interpreted that research."
Many factors affect a course's susceptibility to ice damage, Moeller says. In fact, some courses can experience turf injury when ice has been present for only a short time period. "In some cases, they can have ice for a long period of time and their greens can be fine," he says.
A superintendent must weigh numerous factors when dealing with an ice issue, Moeller says. For example, how long the ice has been present?
"The thickness of the ice is going to increase your risk," he says. "If you've got a really thick ice layer, especially one that is very clear. If you have ice that looks a little bit cloudy, most times it seems like there's a little bit more oxygen in that ice and it's maybe not as prone to causing (turf damage). But if you've got a really thick ice layer — two-, three-, four-inches thick — that's obviously a recipe for problems and certainly a cause for concern."
Other factors in the ice equation include how rapidly the ice formed and the strength of the turf heading into the winter.
"Every ice event is sort of unique, if you will," Moeller says. "There are a lot of factors involved beyond just 'Hey, I've had ice for X amount of days.'"
Removing ice from greens can do more harm than good, says Dr. Michelle DeCosta, associate professor of turfgrass physiology at the University of Massachusetts.
"It's not just about the presence of ice, it's about what the conditions of the turf was before the ice was present," she says. "People will pull the trigger and go out and try to remove the ice. And sometimes in exposing the grass underneath to whatever ambient or fluctuating temperature conditions, that can actually cause damage. So sometimes people are better off just kind of letting it go or keeping it there and using other information to help them determine what to do."
Snow is a different matter. A prolonged snow cover is a natural insulator for the turf beneath it, protecting the soil and the plant from potentially harsh winter temperatures and winds. DeCosta, though, notes a pattern featuring snow, followed by melting or perhaps rain because of fluctuating temperatures, can be problematic for turf.
"If you've got snow and then you've got rainfall or some other sort of precipitation and then you've got rain turning to ice and then you've got melting, that's when you start to run into some issues," she says.
This game of climate ping pong causes physiological shifts in the plants and their crowns about whether to come out or stay in dormancy. "There are these environmental signals going back in forth but then, on top of it, worse than the temperature fluctuations actually, are the fluctuations in moisture content due to the presence of free water," DeCosta says. "That's' a really bad situation that superintendents need to deal with as snow starts to melt."
Winterkill is particularly painful when it happens to your greens. The first thing is communicating to the facility's key decision maker — whether that's an owner, a general manager, a green committee member — that unfortunate winter injury has occurred
Next, put a plan together to repair the damage, and then, along the lines of planning for that repair, consider taking steps to prevent future recurrences.
"It's specifically about trying to get the greens back and recovered," Moeller says. "The biggest thing I think superintendents have success with is warming the greens, warming the soil as quickly as possible. That will promote the quickest recovery, through seeding, through sodding or whatever method they might choose.
Most turf varieties have been developed to withstand some occurrences of huge temperature fluctuations, especially if you've followed standard maintenance practices for your part of the country.
In the end, dealing with and minimizing winterkill is a year-round endeavor.
"(Winterkill) is an indication that you really had a lot of things going on that are really not associated with winter kill," BASF's Dr. Kathie Kalmowitz says. "You really had potentially much weaker turf; even if the top of the turf was fairly green going into the fall, you really didn't have a good robust root system to support the turf and the winterkill has brought that glaringly to light.
"If (your winterkill issues) really are somewhat more severe than your neighbor down the road, it really means that you were kind of camouflaging some chronic problems that may have been going on on your course," she adds.


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IAVA | February 29, 2016
IAVA Daily News Brief – February 29, 2016
A Multi-Purpose Canine handler with Army Special Forces prepares for Zodiac boat training inserts with his canine, Blondie, on Camp Pendleton, Calif. Sgt. Tabitha Markovich/Marine Corps | Military Times >>
VA shifts management of crisis line The Veterans Affairs Department has shifted management of its suicide hotline to a director who successfully fixed the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans, VA officials said Friday. Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson said as of last week, the Veterans Crisis Line reports to Matt Eitutis, the Veterans Health Administration's acting director for member services. | Military Times >>
'I'm A Female And I'm A Veteran … Those 2 Things Are Not Mutually Exclusive' When the military opens front-line combat roles to women soldiers – across all branches – in April, it will mark the culmination of a years-long process, which was often subject both to consternation and controversy. It will also mark a historic first for a female service members, many of whom enlisted decades ago in a very different kind of military. | NPR >>
Enlisted chiefs tell Congress pay fears are hurting morale
The military services' top enlisted leaders pointed out retirement confusion, housing deterioration and slow growth in overall compensation among top quality-of-life concerns for troops and families at a congressional hearing Friday, where a California Democrat on the panel of lawmakers described his own expected $60,000 federal retirement as "not a lot" and said it's "unfair for people to say" military compensation is "just not enough."|Military Times >>
Two separate terrorist attacks killed at least 27 people and wounded dozens Saturday in Afghanistan, and created a powerful explosion that ended a three-week lull in major violence here in the capital. | Washington Post >>
The U.S. military is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to wounded survivors and relatives of the 42 Afghans killed when an American AC-130 gunship attacked a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, which says the "sorry money" doesn't compensate for the loss of life. | Associated Press >>
Senior Chief Special Warfare Operator Edward Byers is just looking forward to getting back to work. On Monday, the 36-year-old SEAL will receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award, for his role in the daring 2012 hostage rescue of an American aid worker, Dr. Dilip Joseph, in Afghanistan. But don't expect him to rest on those laurels. | Military.com >>
Militants attacked an outdoor market on Sunday in eastern Baghdad, killing at least 59 people and wounding nearly 100, officials said. A bomb ripped through the crowded Mredi market in the Shiite district of Sadr City, a police officer said. Minutes later, a suicide bomber blew himself up amid the crowd that had gathered at the site of the first bombing, he added. | Associated Press >>
Kurdish authorities said on Friday they were investigating another suspected chemical attack by Islamic State militants against peshmerga fighters in northwestern Iraq this week. | Reuters >>
The United States and its allies targeted Islamic State in Iraq with 14 strikes on Friday and also hit the militant group with eight strikes in Syria on the same day, the U.S. military said on Saturday. Seven of the strikes in Iraq were near Mosul in the north, hitting two Islamic State tactical units and five fighting positions, the military said. |Reuters >>
It was supposed to be a U.S.-led naval training maneuver off the coast of West Africa when real-life drama intervened, with pirates taking over an oil tanker and turning the exercise into a rescue mission. | Associated Press >>
As the Marine Corps closes in on the end of a years-long drawdown that involved shedding thousands of troops annually, there aren't as many leathernecks to fill some of the most vital roles in the service. That means leaders will have to take a more active role in helping the Corps retain the best and brightest Marines. | Marine Corps Times >>
It's an image that is being picked apart by military aviation experts around the world. The first official drawing of the U.S. Air Force's B-21 bomber. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James unveiled the artist rendering Fridaybased on the initial design concept. | CNN >>
You can see "An Iliad" at the Black Box Theatre, but don't expect to see the typical Rep's high production pizazz. This is the first show to be performed off campus for The Rep, and it will be stripped down, intimate and strays from the traditional war tale. | KTHV >>
Duluth holds a special place in her memories of eight years in the U.S. Army, and it was important to her that she join the Nearly Naked Ruck March in Duluth on Saturday to raise awareness for veterans – the 4.5-mile march ended near where she and her husband were married on Canal Park's Lakewalk in a quick wedding in April 2006 after Bandelin received a letter recalling her into the Army to serve in Iraq. | Duluth News Tribune >>
The wounds of war go beyond physical pain and injury: They can lurk deep in the minds and souls of veterans who have seen and felt too much. Healing those wounds often means traveling a long, hard road. And for some veterans, that's best done on a bike. | The Coloradoan >>
U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., on Thursday announced she and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, jointly wrote the federal Department of Veterans Affairs urging the department to establish a procedure to make sure veterans who seek medical assistance or information have adequate nutritional food. | The Post Star >>
The Veterans Affairs Department has a plan to finally get rid of more than two dozen long-standing cybersecurity weaknesses throughout the next 18 months. LaVerne Council, the assistant secretary of the Office of Information and Technology and chief information officer at VA, said the new enterprise cybersecurity team has a strategy to fix all 30 material weaknesses highlighted annually by auditors for much of the last 17 years. | Federal News Radio >>
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' inspector general failed to properly investigate a whistleblower's claims that a west suburban Chicago VA hospital had covered up delays in veterans' access to care, federal investigators said Thursday. | Chicago Tribune >>


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Archive for the 'collapse' Category
the next five minutes
It's another one of those times when things actually start to look like Ballard's "next five minutes." In some cases, exactly like it. They're putting up riot fences around the giant Westfield shopping mall today in West London….(via here). Elsewhere, the other night, there was this:
into the seine with all of us, malcolm gladwell first
From Anne Applebaum's review of Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell in the NYRB. In this passage, she's coming to the end of a redescription of a rather riotous evening that Koestler, his girlfriend, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and Camus' wife spent together in Paris:
Scammell, whose fine-tuned sense of irony serves him well here, describes that evening's conclusion:
"They broke up at dawn. Alone with Sartre, Beauvoir sobbed "over the tragedy of the human condition," then leaned on the parapet of a bridge over the Seine and said: "I don't see why we don't throw ourselves in the river." "All right," agreed Sartre, "let's throw ourselves in," and began to cry himself. In another part of the city, Koestler too burst into tears as he stared into the Seine. Then he disappeared into a pissoir and shouted to Mamaine, "Don't leave me, I love you, I'll always love you." They got home at about eight o'clock and slept all day, except for Sartre, who stuffed himself with pep pills and dragged himself off to the Sorbonne to give his lecture. It wasn't possible even for an existentialist to address the students "sans moi.""
Leaving aside its entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting questions. We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of things. Yet much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable public behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one, let alone weeping over the human condition and threatening to throw themselves into the Seine at the end of it. Hollywood starlets and pseudo-celebrities behave that way in our culture, not serious people.
Oooof. Now I'm weeping and thinking about throwing myself into the East River, next time I'm there. If that's a representative roster of NYC intellectuals aujourd'hui, and christ maybe it is, then yes, the human condition is truly fucking not well.
There's something else that's funny to say about this, but I'm not going to say it. Perhaps I just came to the party late. Right! Back to work then!
ballardianism on the gulf coast
A third of the houses in Cape Coral, Florida, just up the interstate from where I'm currently typing this, are under foreclosure. The NYT has pieces on this town at the front of both the main and business sections of today's paper – the first a depressing story about the great numbers of people living in the US with zero income save for food stamps and the second an eerie piece on the rows and rows of foreclosed and now abandoned houses. Here's an extended snip from the latter:
Dave Robison has lived in northwest Cape Coral since 2002, when he moved down from Cincinnati, paying $160,000 for his house. He figured that he would stay until his house fetched enough to allow him to retire full time in Mexico. Now, he bitterly regrets that he didn't cash in back in 2005, when the house was worth perhaps $400,000.
He walks his two greyhounds past a tan stucco house on the corner, where the grass on the lawn reaches three feet high, possibly sheltering possums and snakes. An official abatement notice is tacked to the front door, ordering the owner — someone in Reseda, Calif. — to cut the grass. A house across the street is similarly forlorn.
"You think you've got something and you don't," says Mr. Robison. "There's nothing you can do but just ride it out."
Farther down the block, another house sits cloaked in overgrown shrubbery with yet another abatement notice tacked to the door. Two years ago at this very house, I met the two women who were then living there — Elaine and Charlene Pellegrino — a mother and daughter. They were sifting through the belongings of Elaine's husband, Charlene's father, who had recently died, leaving them with two troubled businesses to run and debts they couldn't manage.
Elaine Pellegrino, then 53, was disabled, living on Social Security. Her daughter was jobless. They had resigned themselves to losing their home and had stopped making the mortgage payments. Yet they were cognizant that they could stay for many months as their case worked its way through a local court system already overwhelmed by foreclosures.
Now their days there have ended. Tax documents sit in a rain-matted stack in front of the garage. A "for sale" sign lies warped and discarded in the weeds.
Inside the house, bills are scattered across the floor with playing cards, a March 2008 TV Guide and the innards of a VCR. A plastic trash bag brimmed with foreclosure documents. Behind the house, green slime chokes the swimming pool — the same green slime that now colonizes countless pools left to the elements in South Florida.
The Pellegrinos moved out in July 2008, Charlene explains. A bathroom pipe had burst, and mold had grown on the walls. She and her mother couldn't afford repairs.
The strangest thing was how the bank implored them to stay, she says. Even after it became clear that they were not going to pay their mortgage, the bank figured that it would be better having them there to deter scavengers who would strip out the cabinets, the wiring, the toilets.
"They wanted us to stay on indefinitely," Charlene says. "It was weird."
You probably won't be surprised to hear that the super-ultra-lux mall a few blocks from where I'm staying and which serves as my lifeline to the better papers and suitable workspace (via Barnes and Noble) and nightly drinks (via a series of faceless though upscale restaurants) doesn't seem to be suffering much from the downturn.
More to come. Sorry to have been away. Headed back to London tomorrow on an overnight flight…
gas station microtragedy / possession, repossession, dispossession
When I'm around my father, I end up landing in sicker and stupider regions of the television map than I'm used to. He has poor taste, and flips channels quite a lot. Network drama to NHL hockey to, yes, pro wrestling and "ultimate fighting" and the like. There's now a show – a fake reality show – that deals exclusively with the repossession of peoples' vehicles. Cars, SUVs, construction equipment, motor cycles, boats, the whole gamut.
I'm not sure whether it matters or not that the show isn't really a reality show. It's purportedly a series of "recreations" of actual repossessions, according to a disclaimer that runs at the front of the show. I'm sure that most viewers distractedly take it as real. If that is the case, I'm further sure that this show is as sick and sad but also complex as other programs in the genre. What is the appeal? Schadenfreude, sure, but more than that perhaps. The crime-and-punishment based reality shows have always been a complicated compost of affectual registers. This is for another post.
But one of the interesting things about this show that I was watching is the fact that almost every time the repossession company pulls up (of course, in this case, with cameramen in tow) and the actor playing the owner of the vehicle to be towed away suddenly realizes what is happening and confronts the repossessors, the owner makes a great show of not believing that this is happening. There must be some mistake, I've paid my bills, I could show you, yes, but the cancelled checks are at my work, I'm calling the cops – you're stealing my car! Now, half the time it is meant to be clear that the deliquent owners are lying – these are the less interesting cases. The more interesting cases are those where the scene is written and acted as though, despite the fact that they said to be four, six, twelve months behind on their payments, the actors in question play the scene as if they really do believe that they aren't. Despite the fact that they obviously on some level know that they are broke, that this day was soon to arrive, at the moment when the tow-truck is pulling their car away, they are clearly one-hundred percent convinced that the note is paid in full, that a huge mistake has been made, and that everything is as it should be – save for the fact that a heavily tattooed thug is driving away with their vehicle. It's hard to describe how we know this as we watch the show – some particular mixture of anger and confusion, some reality effect that can't be faked in the grain of the voice – but know it we do. This arc is the primary dramatic arrangement of the show – the rational if swarthy agents of collection are confronted time and again by deluded, nearly hallucinatory, exemplars of the American consumer, absolutely baffled by the fact that the other shoe has just dropped, the bill has finally come due, that it's too late to ask for an extension and that they now will have to find another way of getting to the office park in the exurbs tomorrow for work.
Operation Repo is a realist show. It's presuppositions about the way people are and how they act are meant to be our presuppositions about the way people are and how they act….
Today I stopped at a gas station next door to my hotel for water and cigs, and overheard something fascinating while waiting to pay for my stuff. A middle-aged white guy was standing at the counter, taking quite a long time with his transaction. The customer in question looked middle-class, maybe verging on upper middle-class. Decently attired, probably out of the, um, Kohls collection but still. The way that it works at gas stations in the US (almost all self-serve by now) is that you either dip your credit card at the pump or you pay cash in advance inside the station itself. But this guy was inside, having the clerk run and rerun his credit card. It hadn't worked at the pump, and wasn't working inside either. He had the clerk run it again to preauthorize only $5 this time instead of $20 as before – still refused. But it became clear, from the conversation, that this is something that he had done yesterday, the day before – something that he's been doing everyday at the same gas station. He said, "Yeah I can't understand what it is – this credit card is good. It's just convenient for me to get gas here. I live around the block. I can't understand why it isn't working. Do you have a number for the company to call or something? Man, I just don't get it." The exchange with the clerk was polite, perhaps exceedingly so if the story was what he wanted it to be. He had the clerk run the card again, for $5 again. Refused. He took the number of the credit card company and promised to go home and call and get it all sorted out. He did not, as might be expected, present another card so that he could at least get some gas while he was here. Neither did he pay in cash. He left without filling his car. An unfinished sentence streamed through my mind: but if he's back here, three days in a row, obviously he's not getting gas elsewhere, it is not the case that the card is working at other gas stations, so… All polite, all everyday and normal. But it's clear that this is a life that's quietly come unstrung. He is not stealing, he was not playing a confidence game on anyone other than himself.
One wonders how much gas he has left in his tank, how much longer he will be able to make it to the station for his daily his of self-deceiving self-distraction. I'll have to call the company, just as soon as I get home. I wonder why….
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama committed Saturday to the largest public works construction program since the creation of the interstate highway system a half-century ago as he seeks to put together a plan to resuscitate the reeling economy.
Although he put no price tag on it, he said he would invest record amounts of money in the vast infrastructure program, which also includes work on schools, sewer systems, mass transit, electric grids, dams and other public utilities. He vowed to upgrade computers in schools, expand broadband Internet access, make government buildings more energy efficient and improve information technology at hospitals and doctors' offices.
The post-election performance has been mixed tending toward depressing-per-expectations, but this I'll take. Others are very unhappy and for just the right reasons.
Alan D. Viard, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told Congress recently that public works spending should not be authorized out of "the illusory hope of job gains or economic stabilization."
"If more money is spent on infrastructure, more workers will be employed in that sector," Mr. Viard told the House Ways and Means Committee. "In the long run, however, an increase in infrastructure spending requires a reduction in public or private spending for other goods and services. As a result, fewer workers are employed in other sectors of the economy."
Yep! We'll take it!
"this blind world"
From the NYT review of the new movie of Saramago's Blindness:
In the movie, as in the book, every character but one — an ophthalmologist's wife played by Julianne Moore — comes down with the title affliction, which is, bafflingly, contagious. (And which, just as mysteriously, manifests itself not as darkness but as total, blank-page whiteness.) "In most films everything is based on the eyes," Mr. Meirelles said. "You cut to show where the character is looking, that's how you tell stories. It's all about point of view, and I wasn't going to do this film showing only Julianne's character's point of view. So how do you get people involved with the characters when you can't put them in the same position visually?"
His solution, he said, was to "put the audience in this blind world, to try to deconstruct the image, if I can say that." (Just this once, but don't let it happen again.) "Sometimes the image is washed out, sometimes it's out of focus, sometimes the framing is totally wrong, deliberately," he continued, "and toward the end of the film I even tried separating the sound from the image — showing a character with his mouth shut, but you're hearing his voice."
"It was all very experimental," he said. "Very scary."
We live in interesting times. One spends their weekend moving around as one is accustomed to moving around on weekends. Let's see… Saturday went over to Highgate to spend time in a park, noticed that Andrew Marvell used to live where this park is now, ate lunch, returned to same establishment to drink a bit more once the kiddo was asleep in her stroller, watched the US debate on tv. Sunday: walked from Archway past Highgate Cemetery and through Parliament Hill to Hampstead where I ate a crêpe avec jambon et frômage from that cart there, saw Russell Brand eating lunch (didn't realize he was anything other than a Guardian sports columnist till, like, yesterday – I'm still new to the UK), and almost bought Mary Beard's new book on Pompeii. While doing all this, found time to purchase snacks and groceries and beer, watched Arsenal lose, watched the Mets lose, made headway on the novel that I'm reading and enjoying, and read some but not all of the newspapers I'd purchased.
So very bourgieboho and parental, no? Everyday life as it's been lived in the age of the rising tides, the rising boats. It was a sunny weekend in London, so the parks were full, the outdoor spots at the eateries were packed.
But of course all this normalcy is playing out against the backdrop of some very very dire analysis that I don't need to link to – I'm sure you've read it all already. Let's not even talk about the bailout – even its authors don't seem at all convinced that it will be effective in any palpable way. And really, it's been clear from the start that that's not the point. But the general consensus seems to have turned toward the inevitability of something very depression like, and perhaps deeper even than the depression with which we're all familiar. So… the destruction of the last vestiges of the better bits of the state, soaring unemployment, insane inflation, the end of consumer credit, the evisceration of retirement accounts, mass repossessions of homes, bank failures beyond the means of the authorities to insure, and did I mention soaring unemployment? It was, apparently, ten minutes to midnight seven minutes ago – this is the takeaway from the papers and internet today.
Ordinary weekend days in London. I'll go to work tomorrow and put the finishing touches on my lectures for the week. Reports of the imminent collapse of the world financial order. Collapse. Rubble. I'll try to make it to the shop on campus, for once, before they sell out of the sandwiches I like. I'll order that Beard book from Amazon; I'll check CNBC.com thirty or forty times especially once the US markets open.
Listen: not everyone has the luxury of this disjunction. I know that very very well, and it's true a hundred times over. Titannic numbers worldwide never got lifted on the upswing, or were directly punished by it. More locally, lots have already lots their shirts. I know this. I know it very very well.
But that said, this disjunction is something else. I suspect just about everyone who is in a position to is feeling it by now. And there are a bunch of things to say about it. The temptation is simply to keep detailing the uncanniness of the whole affair, where life goes on as an LCD mushroom cloud rises over the affluent corners of the earth. It is so easy to aesthetize it, to keep typing it out – especially since it feels like we've been in training to paint in just the tones we have on hand now for a decade or more.
But there's something more profitable to do than painting for painting's sake at the moment. Something is showing itself through the very failure of lived experience and financial news to line up properly. It is, perhaps, a promising pedagogical situation – or even a perfect political entry point. It goes something like this: the difficulty that we have reconciling our day to day lives with the problems in the market, the trouble that we might have actually believing that everything might be about to change, and change for the worse, and change as if overnight, is an appropriate difficulty to have. The fact that our lives are running along as they are, but might be ruined in a blink of an eye by a spreading virus of speculatory paper gone bad, is irrational, insane. I work, I am paid by my employer, I spend my money on the things that I need and sometimes just want – what should that have to do with credit default options or short sold stocks or baroquely structured derivatives?
It actually doesn't make sense, not any sense at all. Our blindness before this thing, our inability to see (or see and then believe) what is about to happen, makes all the sense in the world. We are the realists; the world has conspired against realism.
If there is a "we," we would do well to make much of the mysteries of abstraction, the violence that it has but should not be permitted to bring down upon ordinary life. We should cast this as a problem of a simplicity whose rights are being infringed upon by an unnecessary and illicit complexity. We should encourage those who would to wonder about the reasons why the normal circuits of life are being interrupted by factors that can't even be understood by their administrators, their authors. For there is no reason why this must be – there is no reason that whatever these people in the financial districts of the world get up to, legally or illegally, normal life need be interrupted in any way. It will be, it is almost sure to be, but this is the tragedy. This is not, whatever the metaphors distributed by the news media and politicians, a meteorological event, an unforeseen occurrence. This, we should say, is not at all the case. It is not a sudden storm, a "black swan" – the difficulty of seeing this is part and parcel of the problem at hand…


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There are things that astronomers and astrophysicists do very, very well. Naming things is not one of them. Specifically, naming exoplanets. It's like the field has gone out of its way to make space and the discovery of new alien worlds banal.
With names like Kepler-16b, EPIC 201367065d, and GJ 667C e∗ it's woefully obvious that NASA could use some branding help. I mean, there is a star system with the official name 1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5. These exoplanet names don't really roll off the tongue nor do they do anything to inspire the imagination.
There was an attempt earlier this year by the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to jazz up the exoplanet discovery. I think it was the step in the right direction.
But this still doesn't address the fundamental problem. These names are clunky and dismal. A fables that shows up again and again throughout all cultures in all of human history is the naming of the world. We need to name our heavens or else it is not real.
An exoplanets in the habitable zone around their star deserve our special attention. There is a myriad of worlds out there.
The IAU (International Astronomical Union) have attempted naming the exoplanets. Yet its decision to open up naming to popular vote was less than ideal. A populist approach to anything is sloppy at best and most often produces asinine results. It is a good start. Hopefully, the voting will lead to a higher profile for all exoplanets.
The Habitable Exoplanet Catalog is constantly updating the list of potentially habitable exoplanets using the Earth Similarity Index. Rather than focus on all of these, I would rather narrow my view to twelve planets discovered by the Kepler satellite. These are relatively Earth-sized worlds in the habitable zone of their systems.
My intention is to name each of these planets. My hope is that perhaps the name will catch-on or, at least, inspire a different or better name. For the most part, I will be following the IAU's naming guidelines. What I hope to do is base the name on what we know about the particular exoplanet and how that dovetails with our own planet's histories and languages.


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Things You Should Not Tell Your Man
While it is good and to be open and honest in your relationship when communicating with your partner, to have a long-lasting and beautiful union. Sometimes it is better to keep certain issues to yourself. It doesn't mean you should be dishonest, but only talk about it when it is extremely important. Men may seem tough and hard but they are also sensitive beings who can pretend not to care when they really do.
So, here are a few things you shouldn't say to him no matter how much you love him: note that the only time you are actually allowed to tell him any of these is when he actually insists and press very hard to know. Even at that, be sure you don't say it in a way that will hurt him.
1. The real reason you broke up with your ex: He really doesn't need to know why you broke up with your ex-boyfriend. I know ladies have a bad habit of telling too much when it comes to our past relationships (even when no one asks). Your man does not need to know your last boyfriend cheated on you or that you cheated on him. Just say it didn't work it out.
2. Your friends' personal life: Ladies, I can't tell you how many times we fall into this trap of getting so close to our man that we start to share the juicy gossip stories about our friends. This is never a good idea. Men are hardwired to only hear the facts so they are not going to understand that your girlfriend is painting the town red with every eligible bachelor because she is trying to take her mind off her broken heart. He is only going to conclude that your friend is 'loose'. Plus men often times have a bad memory and forget that what you told him was a secret and may ask your friend about something he should never have uttered.
3. You hated the gift he gave you: Like I mentioned before, men are very sensitive especially when they are trying to please you. If he buys you a gift that you absolutely hate – just take it! Tell him that you love it and you appreciate his thoughtfulness. I know this may be hard to do with a smile but trust me it will be worth it in the long run.
4. Confess that you lied: I know this sounds contradicting, but under no circumstances should you confess that you lied about something. It will only make you look bad and the situation worse. Men want to believe that everything that comes out of their woman's mouth is the sweet honest truth. Let's please keep it that way. Well, unless the confession will save a life or something close.
5. How you really feel about his mother: I should have made this point number one. Never, ever, ever tell your man what you really think about his mother. His mother just may be conniving, manipulative, sneaky or whatever but his mother is second to God (maybe before) in his life. So no matter how real you want to keep it, never keep that part real. Well, except its something positive.
6. Who you had personal affairs with during a breakup: Sometimes couples break up and then get back together a few months later with this notion of putting everything on the table to start fresh. While this is great news there are something's that should be kept in your back pocket like who you had a few rendezvous with while you were living the single life. All your man needs to know is that you spent your time reflecting on what went wrong in the relationship and getting to know yourself.
While there are many other things not to tell him, these are the most important things you need to keep to yourself to actually avoid unnecessary drama in your relationship.


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Bombardier(redirected from ADantz Trans)
Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus.
any of various small carabid beetles of the genus Brachinus, esp B. crepitans of Europe, which defend themselves by ejecting a jet of volatile fluid
™ Canadian a snow tractor, typically having caterpillar tracks at the rear and skis at the front
a military rank introduced in the 1680's for artillerists among Peter the Great's "boy-soldiers" (poteshnye). Since the late eighteenth century the term "bombardier" has designated a rank-and-file artillerist operating and servicing bombardment weapons (mortars, howitzers, and edinorogs [cannons cast in a form resembling a unicorn's horn]); later, the term denoted a soldier's rank (also bombardiergunner, bombardier-technician, bombardier-observer) in the artillery units of the Russian Army, corresponding to the rank of private first class in the infantry.


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Chocolate Pineapple Upside-down Cake
What the Forks for Dinner?
Trish says
interesting! never thought of upside down pineapple cake in this way! Thanks for sharing!
Stopping by from GYB hop!
Trish @ Tales from …
Marlys Folly says
Stopping by from GYB hop and following through bloglovin. Was surprised to see Cindy here as we are foodie friends friday hosts.
Thanks so much for stopping by! Cindy's great ~ she & I are in the #SundaySupper group together!
Lenetta Carnes says
Hi, I found you through the blog hop. Now following you.Please stop by and say hi when you get a chance.
Be sure and check out my new Blog Hop that we just started, It's Weekly Goals Link Up. It's a great way to stay on track. Have a great day. 🙂 Here's the link in case you want to check it out. Thanks again.http://lenettacarnes.blogspot.com/2013/01/weekly-goals-linkup-1.html
Also,My daughter, Kisha, also is taking over Fill In the Blank Fridays. The person doing it has decided she can't do it anymore so Kisha is now doing it. Her first one is today. Would love for you to join us there also. It's a fun one. Her blog ishttp://www.kjaggers.com/2013…
You can also go to her page and at the to sign up for a reminder on both of these each week
. Again, Welcome, have a wonderful evening. 🙂
Thanks so much for stopping by Lenetta! I'm going to head over & check out all of the fun parties!!


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So….last time, I posted about arriving at the Festival and seeing the first panel discussion. Sometime during the panel, my sister had texted Dad and me, saying she was at the Festival. We told her we would hook up with her after the panel and when it ended, and since there were a few hours before the next panel I wanted to see, we wandered over to the student union to meet her.
I chatted with her and my niece and nephews for a few moments before she introduced me to her friend. Her friend – a nice woman named Kathryn – told me that she had a friend over in the Horror Writer's Association tent, who had self-published a book and Kickstarter'd another. She said I should go over and say hello, so I did.
Turned out to be a great move. The author in question – John Mulhall – sat and talked to me for about twenty minutes about how he had launched his book and marketed it. It was great information and I was happy that he was so willing to share. In fact, the two ladies flanking him at the Horror Writers Association tent both joined in the conversation and offered tips and helpful advice. They were both just as pleasant and friendly as could be, and I curse myself that I cannot remember their names. I picked up John's latest book, Dark and Broken Things. I haven't gotten too far into it but it's pretty good.
I talked to John for a few moments before moving around the table and speaking to R.J. Cavender for a bit. He's the Editor-in-Chief over at Cutting Block Books and has been editing and promoting on the horror writing scene for some time. Like the others at HWA, he was pleasant and helpful. I came away from the discussions feeling pretty positive about having made some network connections. While writing horror is not my favorite thing, I seem to sell more of it than anything else. I wasn't so dense, I guess I'd take the hint.
The second panel I sat on was called How to Score an Agent, which featured two literary agents (Arielle Ekstut and Michael Larsen), who, for 45 minutes, were peppered with questions from the audience. Well, it was less than that; the moderator (who I think missed his calling as a prison warden, given his disposition) had a list of common questions that had been submitted in advance, which took up about 30 minutes. Many questions were pretty standard, such as asking what caught an agent's eye, was it all right to deviate from the requested submission format (Arielle and Michael disagreed on that one a little), etc. A lot of the information confirmed what I already knew. Michael noted that agents often had two slush piles: one for the the correct submissions and one for those that were not formatted correctly, did not give the right information, or those that did not research their agents (such as sending sci-fi to an agent seeking non-fiction). Obviously, agents were only pulling from the former while the latter were automatic discards. Both Michael and Arielle agreed that strong writing would always grab the attention of an agent, pretty much regardless of anything else.
I absorbed that one and leaned back in my chair. I've been over some of my submissions with a fine-tooth comb. I do everything "right." I give the agents that which they ask for, I format properly and research my agents quite a bit. So why am I not getting any response? Must be the writing. Maybe I am just not good enough.
Well, that last thought cast a slight pall over my mood but I can't complain. The festival was a lot of fun and I learned a ton. I am glad I went and plan on spending two full days there next year.
Maybe I'll even remember to get some good pictures next time….


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Jason Lytle, the chief creative force behind space-rockers Grandaddy, is a sonic painter of landscapes, a vivid creator of fully realized vistas and carefully crafted scenery.
But instead of evoking lush green fields or ice-capped mountains, Lytle's words and music trigger images of barren, windswept trees, dessicated arroyos, and overgrown, unkempt meadows. He is the indie rock Renoir for unsightly, inland panoramas, an artistic penchant that he fostered while growing up in Modesto. An industrial city in the Central Valley surrounded by vast, bucolic farmlands, Modesto is an oft-overlooked metropolis that lacks the glitz, glamour, and culture associated with most of California's coastal communities.
"I have spent many years trying to explain Modesto to people all over the world," Lytle says. "There is something kind of twisted and dark and broken [about Modesto], but in many ways, there is something beautiful and romantic about it. That has rubbed off on my music in a big way."
Grandaddy's latest album, Last Place, brims with snapshots of Modesto's beguiling environs. Lytle says when he's writing music, he's not focused on emulating a particular genre or musical era, but instead seeks to create places. These craggy locales, brought to life through song by Lytle, have roads with dead ends ("Brush with the Wild"), trees wasting away on the freeway ("Evermore"), and dried-out creeks ("A Lost Machine").
Much of Grandaddy's music is populated with Lytle's other favorite obsession: obsolete technology. Since forming in 1992, Grandaddy's songs have touched upon the dissociative and isolating effects of society's obsession with and dependence on the latest high-tech gadgets and how casually people discard them once they've outlived their usefulness.
It's not revelatory subject matter — bands like Unknown Mortal Orchestra have explored our debilitating dependence on technology — but it is an interesting message coming from Grandaddy, a band famous for using electronic equipment to create synthetic, otherworldly sounds.
"I'm certainly not a Luddite, and I really try and stay up-to-date in terms of technology, especially in the music recording industry," Lytle says. "I think technology can be a beautiful thing when it uplifts mankind. I just don't like it when people only use it as a path of least resistance — like, 'How will this allow me to be lazier, and more dim-witted?' "
Lytle seems to be constantly wrestling with the juxtaposing impacts of technology, and that's reflected in the band's sound. Sparse numbers built with traditional, acoustic instruments intermingle with soaring synthesizers and robotic manipulations.
"I have always been fascinated with that contrast," he says. "I want to see how you can combine these natural and synthetic-sounding elements in a setting that seems organic."
During their heyday in the late '90s and early '00s, the five-member group never quite received the recognition — or monetary windfall — it deserved. (And earlier this week, they dealt with the unexpected loss of bass player and founding member Kevin Garcia, who died of a stroke on Tuesday at the age of 41. As a result, Grandaddy has cancelled the rest of its tour, including its Thursday, May 11 show at the Regency Ballroom.)
Albums like Under the Western Freeway, The Sophtware Slump, and Sumday drew rave reviews from publications and rank among some of the most beloved indie rock albums of that era. But Lytle walked away from Grandaddy in 2006, citing the economic strains of the band. (As its primary songwriter and leader, he was essentially responsible for the financial wellbeing of all the group's members.)
He moved to Montana and then Portland, but returned to his hometown to finish the recording of Last Place, a move he says felt both symbolic and meaningful.
The fact that the album was finished at all came as a bit of a surprise. When the group went on hiatus following the release of Just Like the Fambly Cat, many assumed Lytle would pursue a solo career or spend more time doing production (he recently produced Band of Horses' album, Why Are You OK.) But Lytle returned to both Grandaddy and Modesto in the past year, because of an "itch."
"I felt like I had more songs left in me," says Lytle, who is under contract with 30th Century Records to record one more album with Grandaddy. "But really, it was this insistent encouragement of Grandaddy fans. There was just this critical mass of people who wanted us to make more music."
It is likely that those fans saw a champion in Lytle — someone to provide a voice for individuals living in the margins. The Strokes of the world might sing about gritty urban street life and Fleet Foxes might wax nostalgic about beautiful prairie fields, but Grandaddy has another calling, one that involves representing the vast, neglected lands in between.
has cancelled its show at 8 p.m., Thursday, May 11, at Regency Ballroom.


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The loudspeaker maker ESS (no relation to the DAC chip maker that uses the same initials) is known as the firm through which Dr. Oskar Heil first introduced to the world his legendary Heil Air Motion Transformer-type driver. In the modern era, ESS, now under new management, has been working to develop and release not only a new series of Heil driver-equipped loudspeakers but also a hybrid Heil/dynamic-driver-type headphone, called the ESS-RLM-713 ($299).
I head a rough prototype of this headphone at last year's CES event, where it showed promise but plainly needed a lot more work in the area of driver integration. Ah, but what a difference a year can make. In the intervening year ESS has plainly burned barrels full of 'midnight oil' in refining and revising the headphone's design, with the result that the ESS-RLM-713 now offers excellent driver integration, superb transient speeds and dynamic agility, and much more accurate overall tonal balance, all in a package that also reflects careful attention to user ergonomics and overall industrial design. Only time will tell, but I think this ESS headphone will likely come to be regarded as one of the strongest performers in its price class—and quite possibly will earn a reputation as an outright bargain, to boot.
If you have ever wondered what a cost-no-object HiFiMAN headphone/amp package might be like, then the HE-1000/EF-1000 pair demonstrated at CES provides your answer. Both new components are spectacular in their own rights, but to our thinking the HE-1000 must stand as 'first among equals' for its groundbreaking design.
Company founder Dr. Fang Bian earned his doctorate in nano-chemistry and he brought his expertise in this field to bear in the development of the HE-1000 by creating for this headphone a true nano-material diaphragm (this in contrast to some other designs that apply nano-material coatings to much thicker diaphragm materials). The result is diaphragm that is extraordinarily light, low in mass, and incredibly responsive. Not surprisingly, then, the HE-1000 seems to offer traditional planar magnetic virtues aplenty (including powerful and nuanced bass, wide range frequency response, and vivid dynamics), plus staggering levels of resolution and detail. For the listener, the net effect is not unlike having one's ears and brain 'hard-wired' to the original recording console, which affords an exceptionally intimate view of the music.
Supporting the HE-1000 is the also very impressive two-chassis EF-1000 amplifier. The amp can be used either to power headphones or full-size speaker systems, with output, in class A mode, of 50Wpc or, in class A/B mode, 150wpc. As you can imagine, the EF-1000 offers superabundant power for purposes of driving most any dynamic headphone you might care to name.
Pricing for the HE-1000 and EF-1000 has not yet been determined. Dr. Bian advises, too, that good though the HE-1000 prototypes shown at CES are, he has a few more performance tricks up his sleeve that he expects to implement before the headphones are released at some point in mid-2015. Judging by the sound of the system, expect pricing to be very high, but arguably worth it.
The primary thrust of Meridian's marketing efforts at CES centred, not surprisingly, around the firm's radical new MQA music encoding/decoding/protocol package, for which the British firm is rapidly lining up supporters such as the heavyweight high-res music streaming service Tidal and high res equipment manufacturers such as AURALiC and others.
For headphonistas, though, Meridian is busily rolling out second-generation, MQA-compatible versions of it present, highly regarded headphone amplification/DAC components. Thus there is a new MQA-qualified Explorer II amp/DAC ($299) and at the start of Q2 of 2015 there will be an MQA-certified version of the two chassis Prime desktop headphone amp/DAC ($2,000). In a similar vein, Meridian's Sooloos music server already features TIDAL integration and support of MQA files.
Moon by Simaudio
Although not strictly-speaking a new-for-CES product, Moon by Simaudio was showing its superb new Neo-series 430HA headphone amplifier, which can be ordered with or without an onboard high-resolution DAC section ($3,500 for the amp alone, or $4,300 for the amp/DAC combo).
I have had a sample of the 430HA on loan from the manufacturer for several months and will likely offer a first listen blog on the unit in the not too distant future. For now, suffice it to say that the amp section of this unit offers power and sophistication aplenty, with a precise, clean, very pure sound that is accurate without being cold or stiff-sounding and that has more than enough oomph to power difficult-to-drive headphones. The DAC, too, is very good and offers a lot of performance for the money, though we suspect that in an absolute sense the amp section is hands down the stronger performer of the two onboard elements. Listeners seeking to go from zero to what is essentially top-tier high-end headphone sound would do well to give this unit a very careful listen. And did we mention that, in keeping with Moon by Simaudio tradition, build quality is superb?


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Division of Health Sciences staff feature regularly in University publications He Kitenga, and the University of Otago Magazine.
He Kitenga: research highlights
He Kitenga is a prestigious University of Otago publication highlighting research excellence of the highest calibre. Researchers from the Division of Health Sciences feature prominently in each issue.
The University of Otago Magazine
This award-winning magazine includes research, alumni profiles, University news, alumni news, and upcoming events. Health Sciences staff, students, alumni, and emerging researchers regularly feature.


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Senator Jesse Helms, no-longer-living evidence that the good die young...
The caustic sensation of hatred and bile inching up the back of my throat: It's the same feeling I used to get as a teenager in North Carolina, as I watched Republican Senator Jesse Helms play the race card over and over again, to effectively divide and conquer my home state, and win reelection, often by the narrowest of margins. Now, as I read the obits for the 86-year-old Senator, who croaked early this a.m., my disgust with this man and everything he represents comes back to me, like some long-distance mental boomerang that I thought I'd discarded eons ago.
Helms was an ardent white supremacist, practically a Klan member minus the robes. Race-baiting was a constant throughout Helms' career, a tactic he used to get himself and others elected, one that he leavened heavily with cheap, brazen McCarthyism. From the 1950 U.S. Senate primary contest between Democrats Willis Smith and Frank Porter Graham, where Jesse (a Dem himself at the time) helped smear Graham with the then deadly charge of being in favor of the "mingling of the races," to his bigoted anti-Civil Rights rants as a commentator for WRAL-TV, and on to his filibustering of a federal holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Helms never wavered in his opposition to equal rights for African-Americans. He appealed to the worst of what was in most North Carolinians. His 30 years representing the Old North State in the Senate will forever be a stain on North Carolina's history.
Of course, Helms' evil extended beyond the expansive boundaries of racial politics. Helms hated gays, openly referred to homosexuals as "disgusting," famously telling the New York Times concerning AIDS that, "We've got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts." Later in his career, he supported assistance to Africa to help combat AIDS, but he remained resolute in his bigoted beliefs that homosexuality was immoral and that gays were responsible for spreading the disease in the United States.
I know absolutely nothing about this album cover, save that it's hilarious...
Abroad, Helms supported every murderous, right-wing dictator and politician he could find. He was a great admirer of Chile's General Augusto Pinochet, and one of the primary sponsors of El Salvador's Roberto D'Aubuisson, founder of the ARENA party and organizer of the country's rightist death squads. Helms was, of course, a tireless anti-Communist crusader. But he only saw human rights abuses in Communist dictatorships. Those in right-wing dictatorships were either overlooked or forgiven.
Still, it was Jesse's anti-black sentiments that dominated his political history and that disturb any honest memory of him. (Helms once referred to the relatively progressive University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, as "The University of Negroes and Communists.") In high-school, I was a part of a trip to DC by a student group called Close Up. Those of us from North Carolina visited the Senate to meet with our Senators, Helms and Helms' wing-nut puppet John East. We sat assembled in a meeting room as first East, then Helms addressed us, and took questions. I will never forget a young black girl who rose to ask Helms why he opposed a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. She patiently stood there, while Helms explained that he had been privy to government documents which forced him to conclude that King was a Communist.
I was stung by the enormity of the lie and the gall of the man to so undiplomatically run-down a person who was a hero to so many, including this young lady, and myself. This greasy, wall-eyed pol with his wet gob full of marbles, forever threatening to hurl spittle at all those in harms way, this supremacist skunk from Monroe, North Carolina, was not worthy of carrying King's dry-cleaning, much less casting judgment on his legacy.
Make no mistake of the lie, by the way. According to William A Link's recent, critical biography of Helms, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, "an exhaustive study of the 200,000 pages of King's FBI files done by a Justice Department task force in 1976 found no evidence that he ever belonged to the Communist Party or sympathized with its objectives."
In any case, that moment is forever fixed in my brain, and it helped motivate me to work as a volunteer for NC Governor Jim Hunt, who challenged Helms' reelection in 1984, and ultimately lost 52 to 48 percent, in a bitter, hard-fought campaign. Helms' people were adept at dirty politics and smearing political opponents. Hunt's campaign, less so. And this deficit in skulduggery cost Hunt a 20-point advantage leading up to the election.
Later, after I left North Carolina, I remember watching Jesse on the Larry King Live show, when a caller told Jesse hat he wanted to thank him "for everything you've done to help keep down the niggers." Helms was surprised, amused even, replying, "Whoops, well, thank you, I think." He later admitted to being punished as a kid for using the N-word, but he never disputed the caller's sentiment, that he'd spent his career helping to "keep down the niggers." Folks in NC would always say of Jesse that, "You know where he stands." It was not the "knowing," but the "where" that always pissed me off.
The cover to Elvis Costello's 1989 album Spike, which inspired my dreams of post-mortem vengeance.
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I've often fantasized about celebrating Helms' demise. There's a song on Elvis Costello's 1989 Spike album called "Tramp the Dirt Down," where Costello daydreams of doing just that to the dirt atop Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's grave. I sympathize with those lyrics, and have in the past run them through my mind, applying them to Helms.
Well I hope I don't die too soon I pray the Lord my soul to save Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave Because there's one thing I know, I'd like to live long enough to savour That's when they finally put you in the ground I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down
Though I too would like to tramp the earth down, I now realize, with the wisdom of a few more years, that I owe ol' Jesse a strange debt of gratitude. There are those raised in more enlightened climes that have never been exposed to such base, political villainy. I didn't enjoy that luxury. As a result, my antennae are acutely tuned to the malevolence, lies and smear-tactics of those who would use race, nationality and/or ethnicity as their bugbears. These individuals are common enough in Arizona, of course, save that here they're more concerned with brown instead of black skin.
I also learned from Helms' that the good fight is the one you win, and only the one you win. Metaphorically speaking, you need not become a snake in order to overcome the reptile. But you must overcome it, or suffer the consequences. Half-measures do not work against water moccasins like Helms. For teaching me that, I owe him one. And the next time I pay a visit to my old Tar Heel home, I plan to tell offer up to Jesse my thanks, all while, circumstances permitting, I jump up and down on his grave.


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SWAPPING oven gloves for hiking boots is Elliot Robinson who is set to take on the three highest peaks in Scotland, England and Wales to raise money for charity.
The 33-year-old has operated the Solihull franchise of oven valeting specialist, Ovenu, since 2007 and has cleaned over 1,000 ovens.
This weekend Elliot and friend Scott will attempt to scale Snowdon (1085m), Scafell Pike (978m) and Ben Nevis (1344m) in 24 hours.
The pair are hoping to raise £500 for the Alzheimer's Society and Elliot is donating £1 from every oven cleaned to the fund.
The Olton resident said: "Climbing the highest peaks in Scotland, England and Wales all in 24 hours is a real challenge but raising money for the Alzheimer's Society will make all the pain and exhaustion worth it.
"I have been working with a private trainer once a week to build up my fitness and cleaning as many ovens as I can to raise funds."
For more information about the Ovenu service or to book a professional oven valet call 0800 140 9800 or log onto www.ovenu.co.uk.


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Tehrsfahan is my contribution for Francisco Lopez and Barbara Ellison's Project Audio DH.
Kom je mee?
A piece commissioned by Ghost Ensemble, premiered in December 2014 in New York City.
Haagse Markt
This sound collage is made from field recordings which I made during various times and days at the Haagse Markt. I cut my recordings into small pieces and reassembled those into four chapters. The Haagse Markt is the biggest outdoor market in Europe, and a vibrant meeting place of many cultures.
Je vis, je meurs
Three Scenes – A Sound-Collage
The first movement consists entirely of piano samples which I recorded and then edited. The second movement explores the human voice and the sound of the recorder. I read passages from a scientific magazine, which explain how the brain and human evolution work with music. The third movement is made up of sounds of my daily life. I recorded objects like the spokes of my bicycle, playing cards, and my aluminum mug when struck with a pencil to create a soundscape.


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- madmin on An Observation About Nail Polish (Yes.)
- MARIA on A Quote About Seeking
- Sharon on Signs of HSPness, IV
- admin on An Observation About Automatic Reactions, II
- Tushar on An Observation About Automatic Reactions, II
You know how some people like to encourage others by putting them down and telling them they're useless and being all drill sergeant-y? And I really mean that it's their idea of encouragement: they're fully expecting you to go "Eff it! I'll show YOU." and turn all ardent and goal-achieving. Man I hate those people. [...]
In my experience, people who can't stand people who cry think that saying "What does crying help?" is a very astute and indisputable observation. Apparently they expect the crier to go ah, you're right, physical reality is unchanged, hence I shall stop crying. You know, much in the same way that laughing doesn't help either. [...]
Who knows who wrote that song of Summer That blackbirds sing at dusk This is a song of colour Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
So. It turns out we moved into a neighbourhood consisting mostly of youngish families. Lots of kids. All of them have a trampoline in their garden. I will need to wait until they turn into sulky teenagers before I can give our house a good airing.
It occurs to me that because I empathise so much and feel others' big feelings, I effectively live vicariously through them in those particular moments. Living little snippets of their lives.


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In the story of the prodigal son (Luke15), the younger son demanded to receive his inheritance although his father is still alive. According to Jewish law, a father who had two sons was to leave 2/3 of his estate to his older son and 1/3 to his younger son. This younger son came to his dad and said, "I know you're gonna' drop dead someday, but I don't want to wait–give it to me now." The Father was wounded by this harsh demand, but he granted it. He probably had to take some time to sell some of his land or livestock or liquidate other assets, but he eventually comes up with 1/3 of his net worth and hands it to his younger son.
Immediately the son takes the money and runs. He walks out of his father's life and heads for the "far country." Here is a perfect example of a rebellious, disrespectful child. We can tell from the way he welcomed him back that the Father's heart was broken when his son left home. I think the father shed many tears over his son's foolish behaviour.
The Father in this parable (Luke 15) represents God. He is our Father and we are His children. There's a very important principle you must understand. You cannot sever your relationship with God–but you can certainly break fellowship with Him. The whole time the prodigal son was away, he was still a son, but He had left the presence and favour of his Father. We can do that, too. When we become a Christian, God establishes a love relationship with us. He is our Father and nothing will ever change that. But we can certainly harm our relationship with Him and hurt Him.
God didn't stop Adam and Eve from eating the fruit. God didn't stop it for the same reason He didn't stop King David from having sex with Bathsheba. God didn't stop it for the same reason the father in this parable didn't fling himself across the door and say, "Stop it son, I won't let you leave!" That's not the nature of God. He loves you so much He allows you to make you own choices, even though He knows what the consequences will be. Just as the father grieved because his son walked out, even so, God the Father grieves when one of His children walk out of fellowship with Him.
Our heavenly Father loves us so much and has so much for us. Let's not live lives which cause him hurt through our rebellion, but let us stop living selfish lives and enjoy being in his house. (Psalm 27:4).
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Today, Prof. Marcel Salathé and 7 other Penn State faculty members will launch Epidemics – the dynamics of infectious diseases. As flu season is getting off the ground, this course is a timely learning experience about how epidemics unfold, and what we can do to get them under control.
Along the way, students will learn a whole lot about biology, medicine, public health, ecology & evolution, social science, and other topics relevant for infectious disease dynamics.
On the same day, the course will be launching www.moocdemic.com, a massive open online multiplayer game that simulates an unfolding, virtual epidemic with the help of participant's mobile devices.


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Autobiographical Essay
1. The First Tip. Be Sincere
while Writing an Autobiographical essay!
To write a good autobiographical essay, you have to be on your own accord. If you write your real thoughts and emotions, you will kill two birds with one stone.
1. The first stone is that it will be much easier for you to write about your own real feelings.
2. The second stone is that it will be much more interesting and pleasant for your potential readers to read your sincere story.
2. The Second Tip. Attract Your Potential Reader's Attention with an Unusual Introduction, as You Write an Autobiographical Essay!
Avoid banal phrases of starting an autobiographical essay, such as "My name is …', "I was born in …', "My parents are …' and so on.
1. The First Variant of Starting Your Autobiographical Essay
For example, you may start your autobiographical essay from this: "Everyone knows me as the best and the first guy in everything what I do, but inwardly I feel myself as an unprotected little boy…'.
2. The Second Variant of Starting Your Autobiographical Essay
If your situation is diametrically opposed to the previous one, you may write the following: "Nobody knows me as a leader. However, there were several situations in my life where I proved to be a leader. Let me share my story with you…'.
3. The Third Tip. Make a Creative Body of Your Autobiographical Essay!
It is not obligatory to write a autobiographical essay in the chronological order. You may start from the mid (or from the end) of your story. Create unexpected transitions in your autobiographical essay.
1. The First Variant of the Transition from the Introduction Paragraph to the Body Paragraphs
Suppose you have started your autobiographical essay with the words that there are some moments in your life when you feel yourself like a little boy. After that, you may tell a story how the elder boys put the hedgehog in your schoolbag by stealth. Describe your own feelings at that moment:
"I was confused and embarrassed. On the one hand, I knew that my parents would punish me for the bringing this hedgehog at home. On the other hand, it was cruel to throw this unprotected little creature away. I felt myself like this unfortunate hedgehog…'
2. The Second Variant of the Transition from the Introduction Paragraph to the Body Paragraphs
In the case if you have started your autobiographical essay with the words that "Nobody knows me as a leader. However, there were several situations in my life where I proved to be a leader. Let me share my story with you…', you may also tell the same story about a hedgehog.
However, you have to demonstrate that you had other emotions at that moment:
"It was without saying, that I brought the little hedgehog at home. Of course, I was often afraid of being punished by my strict parents, but not at that moment. When I saw this unprotected little creature which hid the nose under its prickles, I understood that I stronger than this hedgehog and it was my must to save its life…'
4. The Fourth Tip. Don't Disappoint Your Imaginary Readers with a Boring Conclusion!
Try to make a surprising (the word "surprising' doesn't mean "not logical') conclusion for your potential readers.
For instance, you can make the didactic conclusion of your autobiographical essay. Say that when your younger brother was born, you were already a well-experienced nurse, as you had treated and fed your little hedgehog.
You may write the following "From time to time I am angry with my brother, but then I associate him with the unprotected little hedgehog. Thus, I relent to him'.
P.S. Good luck in writing an autobiographical essay!


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This is what happens to your face when you forsake Brooklyn
Because it's important to know which blog luminaries you'll run into at the next Market Hotel show, we're here to tell you that High Places, thee of elementary-school performances and "winsome exotic-onica," are no longer a Brooklyn band, though they are playing a "Get Weird" show tonight at the New Museum with Grouper. Mary Pearson went to LA first, now compatriot Rob Barber is officially joining her there–and gloating about it to the Boston Phoenix:
"We're in shorts right now," he notes with an audible grin.
Their label Thrill Jockey confirms that Rob's a goner too. Does this mean that we get the Mae Shi instead?
More:Music News


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So, I guess we're buying a house! Sadly after all this excitement we can't even move in! Just for the main, obvious reasons....we have to wait for the bank appraisal, lock in a loan (and hopefully getting approved for a loan!) do a home inspection, then close. And anything else in between. We are thinking about setting a closing date the end of March. That should give us enough time to complete some projects before actually moving. I think Elden and I will be spending a lot of time in this house while the kids are at school.
I will be posting pictures sometime...maybe after the loan is approved. There is a still a chance they will turn us down. Hopefully not though.
Though pictures are more exciting, here are a few things we'd like to do right away:
*Refinish the wood floors (which are covered with brand-new carpet. But carpet under a dining room table is not going to work!)
*Install a dishwasher and disposal...the house lacks both (no fridge either)
*Paint lots of walls
*Possibly replace this beast....okay, so here is one picture for you....I am not sure if I want to keep it. And I have no clue if it even works! But hey, it has double ovens! I bet this was a splurge back in the day...
I keep looking at the for sale sign across the street, waiting for them to put up some sign stating that it's under contract. I just checked online and it reads that it's under contract on there--yay! Not that that changes anything...it's just fun to see. Watch for lots of before and after photos in the coming months. We are excited to start fixing it up right away. Hopefully we're better at reno's than negotiating!