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|Posted By: Vulcan (#3087)
Date/Time: Sat Feb 6 23:23:22 2010
Subject: Odd Sighting
Downtown Denver (Sioux)
Citizens are abuzz with the recent sighting of 'Captain Stupendous'. Captain Stupendous appeared recently in downtown Denver, where he seems to 'patrol' looking for 'crime' to protect the local citizens from. Wearing spandex and a cape, no one seemed to take him seriously, until yesterday.
Yesterday, as seen in the attached video, Captain Stupendous rescued Juan Decolvez, a local laborer for FTL Matrix Systems, from this scaffold some 300 feet above Denver.
«<VIDEO: A man in white spandex, red boots, gloves and cape, streaks through the air and catches a man falling from a broken window-washing scaffold.»>
Requests for interviews with Captain Stupendous have been ignored, and at the scene of the action, he declined comment.
page revision: 1, last edited: 07 Feb 2010 22:07


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How is Freedom Church funded?
Freedom Church has a number of sources of income, although like almost all churches, the majority of our income is given by people who are part of the church.
A proportion of our income comes from partnership with NewSpring Church, South Carolina. NewSpring has been generously supporting Freedom Church financially and practically since 2011, in the areas of missions, church planting and organisational development. You can find information about NewSpring Church here.
We also gain income from the rental of our church venues, residential accommodation or from leasing buildings we own that are not currently used for Church ministry.

subset: commoncrawl


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The Shiv Sena has fired clearly its sharpest attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, and warned the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that it will be thrown out of power if it fails to build the temple, as promised.
The Shiv Sena, in an editorial published in their mouthpiece Saamana, opined that the temple issue has been reduced to a mere poll promise and therefore, has become a topic for ridiculing Hindutva. "Ram Mandir banao, nahi toh Ram naam satya hai," read the headline of the edit piece.
"When BJP came to power in both Centre and Uttar Pradesh, we believed that the Ram Temple will soon be constructed in Ayodhya but nothing happened. Now, Prime Minister Modi and other Hindutva people are not uttering a single word regarding the construction of Ram Temple. The temple issue has been reduced only to a poll promise and therefore, has become a topic for ridiculing Hindutva," the article read.
Citing the example of spiritual leader Swami Paramhans Das, the Mahant of Ayodhya's Tapaswi Chhawni, who sat on an indefinite hunger strike for seven continuous days demanding the construction of Ram Temple and was later detained by the police, the Shiv Sena said, "The government is causing trouble to those who are raising a demand for construction of Ram Temple, Shiv Sena, the BJP's carping ally in Maharashtra, has asked the Modi-led government to take up the matter of constructing Ram temple in Ayodhya seriously


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Second floor Master Suite and Attic Space are converted to a glamorous ensuite complete with walk-in closet and walk-in shower clad in shimmering glass and luxurious calacatta gold tile. The laundry is discreetly tucked behind doors that provide ventilation by way of decorative metal inserts in lieu of panels. The his & hers vanities are flanked by floor-to- ceiling cabinets on either side. Elegant tile backsplash, mirrors and light fixtures make this space truly remarkable. The closet is bedecked with custom cabinetry for wardrobe and shoe storage.
2451 Cumberland Parkway,
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Atlanta, Georgia 30339-6157
Office - 404-949-8115
Fax - 404-949-8116


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During this season, a lot of people are getting sick and suffering from a prolonged bout with cold and dry cough. I remember growing up and having my mom put Vicks VapoRub in my nostrils for sinus congestion relief and rubbing it to my chest for cough relief.
Vicks VapoRub? What is it? Vicks is an age-old mentholated topical cream intended to relieve head, throat, and chest stuffiness. It uses menthol to elicit a response from receptors in the nose and chest and work wonders on people with colds or chronic bronchitis. Vicks has been around for over one hundred years and is one of the most widely used over-the-counter decongestants.
Vicks also has a lot of other unique and unconventional uses. The ointment relieves sore, overworked muscles; gets rid of nasty nail fungus; cures dry, cracked heels, athletes feet, eczema; relieves headaches; heals paper cuts and splinters; dissolves bruises; and relieves itchiness from ticks, bugs and mosquitoes. It also can be used as pet deterrent, insect-repellent and stage tears (to earn you a best actress award).
But what are these stories I'm hearing that Vicks is more effective if applied on the feet. Really? I never heard of this before so the usual skeptical me started doing a research to verify this "supposed-to-be" proven method. And here's what I read…
To stop night time coughing, put Vicks VapoRub generously on the soles of your feet, cover with socks, and the heavy, deep coughing will stop and give many hours of relief. It's said to be more effective than prescription cough medicines. In addition, it is said to be extremely soothing and comforting which makes you to sleep soundly.
Although these claims have been neither scientifically tested nor proven, a lot of people who have tried it insist the treatment really works. Vincent Iannelli, MD, a board certified pediatrician, said menthol acts to dilate the blood vessels in the feet, which triggers a reflex that quiets the cough. I am not familiar with reflexology but this probably makes sense.
I still need to try this to believe this urban legend. Has anyone of you tried this before?


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Jenelle Evans' Sad Confession: I Just Want People To Be Happy For Me
On the April 1 episode of 'Teen Mom 2,' we witnessed the moment that Jenelle Evans gets to share her pregnancy joy with her boyfriend, Nathan Griffith. Now, Jenelle is opening up about everyone's reactions to the news, and has confessed that she just wants people to be happy for her — for once. Click inside for video!
Jenelle Evans, 22, has a pretty bad reputation because of sketchy past, which consists of drug use and arrests. But now that she's moved on with her life, she just wants everyone to be happy for her and her boyfriend, Nathan Griffith.
Jenelle Evans Wants People To Support Her
It's an exciting time for Jenelle and Nathan. The happy couple have made serious strides in their relationship, and now they are expecting their first child together!
However, Jenelle doesn't always have it easy. Because of her shady past which consists of dating some really sketchy guys, her scary heroin addiction, and losing custody of her first son, Jace, she receives a lot more flack than she does support. Sadly, Jenelle just wants people to be supportive of the changes she's made.
"I want everybody to be happy about this pregnancy," Jenelle explained. "I don't want everyone to be like, 'Oh my God, she's pregnant again, this is horrible!'"
"I just want everyone to be happy for me, congratulate me, and be excited for me. For once," Jenelle confessed in the video below.
Hopefully, once Jenelle and Nathan's son arrives, everyone will be very excited about the little guy's arrival.
WATCH: Jenelle & Nathan Discuss Their Exciting Baby News:
Tell us, HollywoodLifers — Do you think Jenelle deserves to be supported now that her life has turned around? Let us know your thoughts below!
— Lauren Cox
Follow @Iaurencox


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The School for Energy Efficiency (TSFEE) provides a broad depth of energy training including Building Performance Institute (BPI) courses, which is the leading credentialing organization for energy efficiency professionals.
- We are a BPI accredited training center.
- We provide the proctoring of the written BPI testing for all courses.
- We provide onsite field exams in our BPI approved test house.
- Our instructors have actual field experience.
- We limit our class size to 12 or less students.
- The school is conveniently located at the intersection of Routes 84 and 8.
The school has its own on-site test house!
This means that you will start to experience hands-on learning from day one! Also, your field exam -- is done within 5 days of taking your written exam easy as there is no homeowner to schedule around. We meet all requirements set forth in testing by BPI.
Our training courses are a cut above the rest. We meet the requirements for certificate training, and then we go further. We draw on extensive field experience to help our students grasp the practical applications of energy efficiency in the energy and building comfort industries. There is more to building efficiency than science: Professionals need to leverage energy auditing services into business opportunities, and we show them the way.
The School prides itself on having the utmost knowledgeable trainers, with a combined background in the HVAC industry, architecture, residential direct installations, insulation installations and teaching. The School taps into its deep bench of industry contacts to enhance the instructor line up, and provide students with first hand field knowledge on a variety of levels.


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More than three quarters of Canadians support the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling last week legalizing physician-assisted suicide, according to a new Forum Research poll.
The survey of 1,018 adult Canadians conducted Monday and Tuesday, after Friday's unanimous decision by the top court, found 78 per cent of respondents favour the ruling.
Of those in favour, 60 per cent approve "strongly'' of the court's decision.
Fifteen per cent of respondents said they disapproved of the ruling — 9 per cent "strongly'' — while 7 per cent had no opinion.
Sixty-one per cent of respondents said they would consider assisted suicide themselves if they were in seriously ill condition or intolerable pain.
The poll results are a change from the survey Forum conducted in December 2011, with 1,160 respondents. At that time 67 per cent favoured legalizing assisted suicide for terminally ill patients, 21 per cent were opposed, and 12 per cent didn't know how they felt.
The latest poll shows support for assisted suicide is strongest in Quebec at 71 per cent — where right-to-die legislation is currently in force — and weakest in Alberta at 50 per cent.
Last week the Supreme Court ruled that existing laws criminalizing assisted suicide have the effect of condemning some vulnerable people to a life of severe and intolerable suffering.
That infringes on their constitutional right to life, liberty and security, the court said.
"Canadians have been clear about their support for assistance in ending their lives since we began tracking it four years ago. The public was clear, but elected officials were loath to act. As in many cases of Canadian social advances, it required the Supreme Court to get the ball rolling," Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff said.
Randomly selected Canadian adults were polled using an interactive telephone voice response survey. The results are considered accurate plus or minus 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.


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We finished moving the site to lostmediawiki.com back in mid 2015, the only reason this iteration of the site is still open is because Wikia refuse to close it. Please, if you care about this project, stop using this old version and let it die already. It's doing nothing but dividing the community and the fact that it has not been updated for literally close to 2 years is giving the LMW team a bad name. We've tried petitioning Craig L Palmer, the CEO of Wikia to no avail. Every SINGLE one of the admins is in favour of having the old site shut down but Wikia simply won't do it. So, please, support the LMW by discontinuing use of this Wikia version.
-dycaite (founder of the Lost Media Wiki)
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.


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Back in November (16th-18th), I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT) conference in Vienna. As detailed in my excitable post, written in advance of the event, my involvement was to represent the ADS at the session and subsequent round tables hosted by the ARIADNE project on the subject of Digital Preservation. One of the reasons I was so excited was that it was one of the few occasions on which the focus of such sessions was solely on the issues surrounding Digital Preservation: how it's undertaken, problems and the challenge of ensuring re-use. It was also the first time, in public at least, that individuals representing organisations undertaking Digital Preservation from across Europe came together to present as a united front and presented to the wider heritage community. In addition, the event also took place at the beautiful Vienna town hall in (see below), a fantastic venue.
It was incredibly heartening to hear from European colleagues on their experiences, successes and challenges. I also felt that all the papers in the session – no doubt due to the diligence of co-chairs from DANS , DAI IANUS and the Saxonian State Department for Archaeology – meshed together really well. Although there were common themes, each was unique and presented a different tale to tell. Although somewhat biased, at the end of the formal session I came away thinking that I had not only contributed, but had learnt in equal measure. For those interested, IANUS have agreed to host the abstracts and presentations from the session on their website. I'd recommend these to everyone interested in a European-wide approach to the issues of digital archiving.
The first round table followed the formal session, and was listed as an open invitation for delegates to query the archivists in the room about where/when/what/how to archive. Surprisingly, considering the high profile parallel sessions, the room was packed with an array of people from a variety of backgrounds and countries across Europe. As such, the conversation veered between the extreme poles of the subject matter – for example the basic need for metadata versus adherence to the CIDOC-CRM. Reading between the lines here, what I thought the attendance and diverse topics showed was that this type of event was not only useful, but actually essential for archivists and non-archivists alike. Not only to correct misconceptions and to genuinely try and help, but also to alert us to the issues as perceived from the virtual work-face.
After a well-earned rest, and a quick visit to the Christmas markets for a small apfelwein, the next day was a chance for all the archivists to get together for an informal round table on issues affecting their long term, and shorter term objectives. Issues ranged from the need for accreditation – one of the ADS' goals in this regard is to learn from DANS' experience of achieving NESTOR – to file identification and persistent identifiers. In this setting the ADS is perceived as very much the elder statesperson (!) in the room, having been in the business for 20 years now, and it's a good feeling to be able to pass onto colleagues advice and lessons from our own undertakings. I think it's important that we continue to do this, not only to be nice (and I like to think we've always been approachable!), but also to achieve a longer-term strategic strength. Although we (the ADS) are winning many of the challenges at home in terms of championing the need for consideration of digital archives, there's always more to be done. When we can also point to equivalents in continental Europe, I feel we only make our cause stronger.
However I'm also conscious that this isn't just a one-way street and that we've still a great deal to learn from our European colleagues. Not only in things like accreditation, but also shared experiences on tools, file formats, metadata standards and internal infrastructure. We often say that Digital Preservation never stands still, so in this regard it's good to look at what others are doing and reflect on what we could do better. Events such as this – and the international community of archaeologists doing Digital Preservation built in its wake – serve to make us richer in knowledge, and renewed of purpose. Looking forward to the next one!


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The Virgin Suicides
Paperback, 243 pages, St Martins Pr, List Price: $14 |purchase
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Book Summary
A tale set in 1970s suburbia follows the experiences of a group of men whose lives have been irrevocably changed by their obsessions with five doomed sisters, a sibling group that committed a dramatic mass suicide. Reprint.
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Note: Book excerpts are provided by the publisher and may contain language some find offensive.
Excerpt: The Virgin Suicides
Chapter One
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, "This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go." He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized. But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.
That was in June, fish&-fly season, when each year our town is covered by the flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising in clouds from the algae in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat cars and streetlamps, plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging of sailboats, always in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum. Mrs. Scheer, who lives down the street, told us she saw Cecilia the day before she attempted suicide. She was standing by the curb, in the antique wedding dress with the shorn hem she always wore, looking at a Thunderbird encased in fish flies. "You better get a broom, honey," Mrs. Scheer advised. But Cecilia fixed her with her spiritualist's gaze. "They're dead," she said. "They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don't even get to eat." And with that she stuck her hand into the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials: C.L.
We've tried to arrange the photographs chronologically, though the passage of so many years has made it difficult. A few are fuzzy but revealing nonetheless. Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia's suicide attempt. It was taken by a real estate agent, Ms. Carmina D'Angelo, whom Mr. Lisbon had hired to sell the house his large family had long outgrown. As the snapshot shows, the slate roof had not yet begun to shed its shingles, the porch was still visible above the bushes, and the windows were not yet held together with strips of masking tape. A comfortable suburban home. The uppe-right second-story window contains a blur that Mrs. Lisbon identified as Mary Lisbon. "She used to tease her hair because she thought it was limp," she said years later, recalling how her daughter had looked for her brief time on earth. In the photograph Mary is caught in the act of blow-drying her hair. Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.
When the paramedics were satisfied they had reduced the bleeding to a trickle, they put Cecilia on a stretcher and carried her out of the house to the truck in the driveway. She looked like a tiny Cleopatra on an imperial litter. We saw the gangly paramedic with the Wyatt Earp mustache come out first—the one we'd call "Sheriff" when we got to know him better through these domestic tragedies—and then the fat one appeared, carrying the back end of the stretcher and stepping daintily across the lawn, peering at his police-issue shoes as though looking out for dog shit, though later, when we were better acquainted with the machinery, we knew he was checking the blood pressure gauge. Sweating and fumbling, they moved toward the shuddering, blinking truck. The fat one tripped on a lone croquet wicket. In revenge he kicked it; the wicket sprang loose, plucking up a spray of dirt, and fell with a ping on the driveway. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lisbon burst onto the porch, trailing Cecilia's flannel nightgown, and let out a long wail that stopped time. Under the molting trees and above the blazing, overexposed grass those four figures paused in tableau: the two slaves offering the victim to the altar (lifting the stretcher into the truck), the priestess brandishing the torch (waving the flannel nightgown), and the drugged virgin rising up on her elbows, with an otherworldly smile on her pale lips.
Mrs. Lisbon rode in the back of the EMS truck, but Mr. Lisbon followed in the station wagon, observing the speed limit. Two of the Lisbon daughters were away from home, Therese in Pittsburgh at a science convention, and Bonnie at music camp, trying to learn the flute after giving up the piano (her hands were too small), the violin (her chin hurt), the guitar (her fingertips bled), and the trumpet (her upper lip swelled). Mary and Lux, hearing the siren, had run home from their voice lesson across the street with Mr. Jessup. Barging into that crowded bathroom, they registered the same shock as their parents at the sight of Cecilia with her spattered forearms and pagan nudity. Outside, they hugged on a patch of uncut grass that Butch, the brawny boy who mowed it on Saturdays, had missed. Across the street, a truckful of men from the Parks Department attended to some of our dying elms. The EMS siren shrieked, going away, and the botanist and his crew withdrew their insecticide pumps to watch the truck. When it was gone, they began spraying again. The stately elm tree, also visible in the foreground of Exhibit #1, has since succumbed to the fungus spread by Dutch elm beetles, and has been cut down.
The paramedics took Cecilia to Bon Secours Hospital on Kercheval and Maumee. In the emergency room Cecilia watched the attempt to save her life with an eerie detachment. Her yellow eyes didn't blink, nor did she flinch when they stuck a needle in her arm. Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen&-year-old girl."
The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecilia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese). They were short, round-buttocked in denim, with roundish cheeks that recalled that same dorsal softness. Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. No one could understand how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had produced such beautiful children. Mr. Lisbon taught high-school math. He was thin, boyish, stunned by his own gray hair. He had a high voice, and when Joe Larson told us how Mr. Lisbon had cried when Lux was later rushed to the hospital during her own suicide scare, we could easily imagine the sound of his girlish weeping.
Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers. But the plump arms, the brutally cut steel-wool hair, and the librarian's glasses foiled us every time. We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn't come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons, or on Sundays when the family drove in their paneled station wagon to St. Paul's Catholic Church on the Lake. On those mornings Mrs. Lisbon assumed a queenly iciness. Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top. None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.
Only one boy had ever been allowed in the house. Peter Sissen had helped Mr. Lisbon install a working model of the solar system in his classroom at school, and in return Mr. Lisbon had invited him for dinner. He told us the girls had kicked him continually under the table, from every direction, so that he couldn't tell who was doing it. They gazed at him with their blue febrile eyes and smiled, showing their crowded teeth, the only feature of the Lisbon girls we could ever find fault with. Bonnie was the only one who didn't give Peter Sissen a secret look or kick. She only said grace and ate her food silently, lost in the piety of a fifteen-year-old. After the meal Peter Sissen asked to go to the bathroom, and because Therese and Mary were both in the downstairs one, giggling and whispering, he had to use the girls', upstairs. He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled pan ties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space. In the bathroom, running the faucet to cloak the sounds of his search, Peter Sissen found Mary Lisbon's secret cache of cosmetics tied up in a sock under the sink: tubes of red lipstick and the second skin of blush and base, and the depilatory wax that informed us she had a mustache we had never seen. In fact, we didn't know whose makeup Peter Sissen had found until we saw Mary Lisbon two weeks later on the pier with a crimson mouth that matched the shade of his descriptions.
He inventoried deodorants and perfumes and scouring pads for rubbing away dead skin, and we were surprised to learn that there were no douches anywhere because we had thought girls douched every night like brushing their teeth. But our disappointment was forgotten in the next second when Sissen told us of a discovery that went beyond our wildest imaginings. In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn't gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard. It was only then that Lux knocked on the door, asking if he had died in there, and he sprang to open it. Her hair, held up by a barrette at dinner, fell over her shoulders now. She didn't move into the bathroom but stared into his eyes. Then, laughing her hyena's laugh, she pushed past him, saying, "You done hogging the bathroom? I need something." She walked to the cupboard, then stopped and folded her hands behind her. "It's private. Do you mind?" she said, and Peter Sissen sped down the stairs, blushing, and after thanking Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, hurried off to tell us that Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on.
When Paul Baldino heard Peter Sissen's story, he swore that he would get inside the Lisbons' house and see things even more unthinkable than Sissen had. "I'm going to watch those girls taking their showers," he vowed. Already, at the age of fourteen, Paul Baldino had the gangster gut and hit-man face of his father, Sammy "the Shark" Baldino, and of all the men who entered and exited the big Baldino house with the two lions carved in stone beside the front steps. He moved with the sluggish swagger of urban predators who smelled of cologne and had manicured nails. We were frightened of him, and of his imposing doughy cousins, Rico Manollo and Vince Fusilli, and not only because his house appeared in the paper every so often, or because of the bulletproof black limousines that glided up the circular drive ringed with laurel trees imported from Italy, but because of the dark circles under his eyes and his mammoth hips and his brightly polished black shoes which he wore even playing baseball. He had also snuck into other forbidden places in the past, and though the information he brought back wasn't always reliable, we were still impressed with the bravery of his reconnaissance. In sixth grade, when the girls went into the auditorium to see a special film, it was Paul Baldino who had infiltrated the room, hiding in the old voting booth, to tell us what it was about. Out on the playground we kicked gravel and waited for him, and when he finally appeared, chewing a toothpick and playing with the gold ring on his finger, we were breathless with anticipation.
"I saw the movie," he said. "I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so"—he leaned toward us—"their tits bleed."
Despite the fact that we now knew better, Paul Baldino still commanded our fear and respect. His rhino's hips had gotten even larger and the circles under his eyes had deepened to a cigar-ash-and-mud color that made him look acquainted with death. This was about the time the rumors began about the escape tunnel. A few years earlier, behind the spiked Baldino fence patrolled by two identical white German shepherds, a group of workmen had appeared one morning. They hung tarpaulins over ladders to obscure what they did, and after three days, when they whisked the tarps away, there, in the middle of the lawn, stood an artificial tree trunk. It was made of cement, painted to look like bark, complete with fake knothole and two lopped limbs pointing at the sky with the fervor of amputee stubs. In the middle of the tree, a chainsawed wedge contained a metal grill.
Paul Baldino said it was a barbecue, and we believed him. But, as time passed, we noticed that no one ever used it. The papers said the barbecue had cost $50,000 to install, but not one hamburger or hot dog was ever grilled upon it. Soon the rumor began to circulate that the tree trunk was an escape tunnel, that it led to a hideaway along the river where Sammy the Shark kept a speedboat, and that the workers had hung tarps to conceal the digging. Then, a few months after the rumors began, Paul Baldino began emerging in people's basements, through the storm sewers. He came up in Chase Buell's house, covered with a gray dust that smelled like friendly shit; he squeezed up into Danny Zinn's cellar, this time with a flashlight, baseball bat, and a bag containing two dead rats; and finally he ended up on the other side of Tom Faheem's boiler, which he clanged three times.
He always explained to us that he had been exploring the storm sewer underneath his own house and had gotten lost, but we began to suspect he was playing in his father's escape tunnel. When he boasted that he would see the Lisbon girls taking their showers, we all believed he was going to enter the Lisbon house the same way he had entered the others. We never learned exactly what happened, though the police interrogated Paul Baldino for over an hour. He told them only what he told us. He said he had crawled into the sewer duct underneath his own basement and had started walking, a few feet at a time. He described the surprising size of the pipes, the coffee cups and cigarette butts left by workmen, and the charcoal drawings of naked women that resembled cave paintings. He told how he had chosen tunnels at random, and how as he passed under people's houses he could smell what they were cooking. Finally he had come up through the sewer grate in the Lisbons' basement. After brushing himself off, he went looking for someone on the first floor, but no one was home. He called out again and again, moving through the rooms. He climbed the stairs to the second floor. Down the hall, he heard water running. He approached the bathroom door. He insisted that he had knocked. And then Paul Baldino told how he had stepped into the bathroom and found Cecilia, naked, her wrists oozing blood, and how after overcoming his shock he had run downstairs to call the police first thing, because that was what his father had always taught him to do.
The paramedics found the laminated picture first, of course, and in the crisis the fat one put it in his pocket. Only at the hospital did he think to give it to Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. Cecilia was out of danger by that point, and her parents were sitting in the waiting room, relieved but confused. Mr. Lisbon thanked the paramedic for saving his daughter's life. Then he turned the picture over and saw the message printed on the back:
The Virgin Mary has been appearing in our city, bringing her message of peace to a crumbling world. As in Lourdes and Fatima, Our Lady has granted her presence to people just like you. For information call 555-MARY
Mr. Lisbon read the words three times. Then he said in a defeated voice, "We baptized her, we confirmed her, and now she believes this crap."
It was his only blasphemy during the entire ordeal. Mrs. Lisbon reacted by crumpling the picture in her fist (it survived; we have a photocopy here).
Our local newspaper neglected to run an article on the suicide attempt, because the editor, Mr. Baubee, felt such depressing information wouldn'tfit between the front-page article on the Junior League Flower Show and the back-page photographs of grinning brides. The only newsworthy article in that day's edition concerned the cemetery workers' strike (bodies piling up, no agreement in sight), but that was on page 4 beneath the Little League scores.
After they returned home, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon shut themselves and the girls in the house, and didn't say a word about what had happened. Only when pressed by Mrs. Scheer did Mrs. Lisbon refer to "Cecilia's accident," acting as though she had cut herself in a fall. With precision and objectivity, however, already bored by blood, Paul Baldino described to us what he had seen, and left no doubt that Cecilia had done violence to herself.
Mrs. Buck found it odd that the razor ended up in the toilet. "If you were cutting your wrists in the tub," she said, "wouldn't you just lay the razor on the side?" This led to the question as to whether Cecilia had cut her wrists while already in the bath water, or while standing on the bath mat, which was bloodstained. Paul Baldino had no doubts: "She did it on the john," he said. "Then she got into the tub. She sprayed the place, man."
Cecilia was kept under observation for a week. The hospital records show that the artery in her right wrist was completely severed, because she was left-handed, but the gash in her left wrist didn't go as deep, leaving the underside of the artery intact. She received twenty&-four stitches in each wrist.
She came back still wearing the wedding dress. Mrs. Patz, whose sister was a nurse at Bon Secours, said that Cecilia had refused to put on a hospital gown, demanding that her wedding dress be brought to her, and Dr. Hornicker, the staff psychiatrist, thought it best to humor her. She returned home during a thunderstorm. We were in Joe Larson's house, right across the street, when the first clap of thunder hit. Downstairs Joe's mother shouted to close all the windows, and we ran to ours. Outside a deep vacuum stilled the air. A gust of wind stirred a paper bag, which lifted, rolling, into the lower branches of the trees. Then the vacuum broke with the downpour, the sky grew black, and the Lisbons' station wagon tried to sneak by in the darkness.
We called Joe's mother to come see. In a few seconds we heard her quick feet on the carpeted stairs and she joined us by the window. It was Tuesday and she smelled of furniture polish. Together we watched Mrs. Lisbon push open her car door with one foot, then climb out, holding her purse over her head to keep dry. Crouching and frowning, she opened the rear door. Rain fell. Mrs. Lisbon's hair fell into her face. At last Cecilia's small head came into view, hazy in the rain, swimming up with odd thrusting movements because of the double slings that impeded her arms. It took her a while to get up enough steam to roll to her feet. When she finally tumbled out she lifted both slings like canvas wings and Mrs. Lisbon took hold of her left elbow and led her into the house. By that time the rain had found total release and we couldn't see across the street.
In the following days we saw Cecilia a lot. She would sit on her front steps, picking red berries off the bushes and eating them, or staining her palms with the juice. She always wore the wedding dress and her bare feet were dirty. In the afternoons, when sun lit the front yard, she would watch ants swarming in sidewalk cracks or lie on her back in fertilized grass staring up at clouds. One of her sisters always accompanied her. Therese brought science books onto the front steps, studying photographs of deep space and looking up whenever Cecilia strayed to the edge of the yard. Lux spread out beach towels and lay suntanning while Cecilia scratched Arabic designs on her own leg with a stick. At other times Cecilia would accost her guard, hugging her neck and whispering in her ear.
Everyone had a theory as to why she had tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. "That girl didn't want to die," she told us. "She just wanted out of that house." Mrs. Scheer added, "She wanted out of that decorating scheme." On the day Cecilia returned from the hospital, those two women brought over a Bundt cake in sympathy, but Mrs. Lisbon refused to acknowledge any calamity. We found Mrs. Buell much aged and hugely fat, still sleeping in a separate bedroom from her husband, the Christian Scientist. Propped up in bed, she still wore pearled cat'-eye sunglasses during the daytime, and still rattled ice cubes in the tall glass she claimed contained only water; but there was a new odor of afternoon indolence to her, a soap-opera smell. "As soon as Lily and I took over that Bundt cake, that woman told the girls to go upstairs. We said, 'It's still warm, let's all have a piece,' but she took the cake and put it in the refrigerator. Right in front of us." Mrs. Scheer remembered it differently. "I hate to say it, but Joan's been potted for years. The truth is, Mrs. Lisbon thanked us quite graciously. Nothing seemed wrong at all. I started to wonder if maybe it was true that the girl had only fallen and cut herself. Mrs. Lisbon invited us out to the sun room and we each had a piece of cake. Joan disappeared at one point. Maybe she went back home to have another belt. It wouldn't surprise me."
We found Mr. Buell just down the hall from his wife, in a bedroom with a sporting theme. On the shelf stood a photograph of his first wife, whom he had loved ever since divorcing her, and when he rose from his desk to greet us, he was still stooped from the shoulder injury faith had never quite healed. "It was like anything else in this sad society," he told us. "They didn't have a relationship with God." When we reminded him about the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary, he said, "Jesus is the one she should have had a picture of." Through the wrinkles and unruly white eyebrows we could discern the handsome face of the man who had taught us to pass a football so many years ago. Mr. Buell had been a pi lot in the Second World War. Shot down over Burma, he led his men on a hundred-mile hike through the jungle to safety. He never accepted any kind of medicine after that, not even aspirin. One winter he broke his shoulder skiing, and could only be convinced to get an X-ray, nothing more. From that time on he winced when we tried to tackle him, and raked leaves one-handed, and no longer flipped daredevil pancakes on Sunday mornings. Otherwise he persevered, and always gently corrected us when we took the Lord's name in vain. In his bedroom, the shoulder had fused into a graceful humpback. "It's sad to think about those girls," he said. "What a waste of life."
The most popular theory at the time held Dominic Palazzolo to blame. Dominic was the immigrant kid staying with relatives until his family got settled in New Mexico. He was the first boy in our neighborhood to wear sunglasses, and within a week of arriving, he had fallen in love. The object of his desire wasn't Cecilia but Diana Porter, a girl with chestnut hair and a horsey though pretty face who lived in an ivy-covered house on the lake. Unfortunately, she didn't notice Dominic peering through the fence as she played fierce tennis on the clay court, nor as she lay, sweating nectar, on the poolside recliner. On our corner, in our group, Dominic Palazzolo didn't join in conversations about baseball or busing, because he could speak only a few words of English, but every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, "I love her." Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl. At the beginning of June, when Diana Porter left on vacation to Switzerland, Dominic was stricken. "Fuck the Holy Mother," he said, despondent. "Fuck God." And to show his desperation and the validity of his love, he climbed onto the roof of his relatives' house and jumped off.
We watched him. We watched Cecilia Lisbon watching from her front yard. Dominic Palazzolo, with his tight pants, his Dingo boots, his pompadour, went into the house, we saw him passing the plate-glass picture windows downstairs; and then he appeared at an upstairs window, with a silk handkerchief around his neck. Climbing onto the ledge, he swung himself up to the flat roof. Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a Europe an to look. He toed the roof's edge like a high diver, and whispered, "I love her," to himself as he dropped past the windows and into the yard's calculated shrubbery.
He didn't hurt himself. He stood up after the fall, having proved his love, and down the block, some maintained, Cecilia Lisbon developed her own. Amy Schraff, who knew Cecilia in school, said that Dominic had been all she could talk about for the final week before commencement. Instead of studying for exams, she spent study halls looking up ITALY in the encyclopedia. She started saying "Ciao," and began slipping into St. Paul's Catholic Church on the Lake to sprinkle her forehead with holy water. In the cafeteria, even on hot days when the place was thick with the fumes of institutional food, Cecilia always chose the spaghetti and meatballs, as though by eating the same food as Dominic Palazzolo she could be closer to him. At the height of her crush she purchased the crucifix Peter Sissen had seen decorated with the brassiere.
The supporters of this theory always pointed to one central fact: the week before Cecilia's suicide attempt, Dominic Palazzolo's family had called him to New Mexico. He went telling God to fuck Himself all over again because New Mexico was even farther from Switzerland, where, right that minute, Diana Porter strolled under summer trees, moving unstoppably away from the world he was going to inherit as the owner of a carpet cleaning service. Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.
The psychiatrist's report takes up most of the hospital record. After talking with Cecilia, Dr. Hornicker made the diagnosis that her suicide was an act of aggression inspired by the repression of adolescent libidinal urges. To each of three wildly different ink blots, she had responded, "A banana." She also saw "prison bars," "a swamp," "an Afro," and "the earth after an atomic bomb." When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, "It was a mistake," and clammed up when Dr. Hornicker persisted. "Despite the severity of her wounds," he wrote, "I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help." He met with Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon and recommended that they relax their rules. He thought Cecilia would benefit by "having a social outlet, outside the codification of school, where she can interact with males her own age. At thirteen, Cecilia should be allowed to wear the sort of makeup popular among girls her age, in order to bond with them. The aping of shared customs is an indispensable step in the process of individuation."
From that time on, the Lisbon house began to change. Almost every day, and even when she wasn't keeping an eye on Cecilia, Lux would suntan on her towel, wearing the swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener to give her a fifteen-minute demonstration for nothing. The front door was always left open, because one of the girls was always running in or out. Once, outside Jeff Maldrum's house, playing catch, we saw a group of girls dancing to rock and roll in his living room. They were very serious about learning the right ways to move, and we were amazed to learn that girls danced together for fun, while Jeff Maldrum only rapped the glass and made kissing noises until they pulled down the shade. Before they disappeared we saw Mary Lisbon in the back near the bookcase, wearing bell&-bottomed blue jeans with a heart embroidered on the seat.
There were other miraculous changes. Butch, who cut the Lisbon grass, was now allowed inside for a glass of water, no longer having to drink from the outside faucet. Sweaty, shirtless, and tattooed, he walked right into the kitchen where the Lisbon girls lived and breathed, but we never asked him what he saw because we were scared of his muscles and his poverty.
We assumed Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon were in agreement about the new leniency, but when we met with Mr. Lisbon years later, he told us his wife had never agreed with the psychiatrist. "She just gave in for a while," he said. Divorced by that time, he lived alone in an efficiency apartment, the floor of which was covered with shavings from his wood carvings. Whittled birds and frogs crowded the shelves. According to Mr. Lisbon, he had long harbored doubts about his wife's strictness, knowing in his heart that girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. Also, the odor of all those cooped-up girls had begun to annoy him. He felt at times as though he were living in the bird house at the zoo. Everywhere he looked he found hairpins and fuzzy combs, and because so many females roamed the house they forgot he was a male and discussed their menstruation openly in front of him. Cecilia had just gotten her period, on the same day of the month as the other girls, who were all synchronized in their lunar rhythms. Those five days of each month were the worst for Mr. Lisbon, who had to dispense aspirin as though feeding the ducks and comfort crying jags that arose because a dog was killed on TV. He said the girls also displayed a dramatic womanliness during their "monthly time." They were more languorous, descended the stairs in an actressy way, and kept saying with a wink, "Cousin Herbie's come for a visit." On some nights they sent him out to buy more Tampax, not just one box but four or five, and the young store clerks with their thin mustaches would smirk. He loved his daughters, they were precious to him, but he longed for the presence of a few boys.
That was why, two weeks after Cecilia returned home, Mr. Lisbon persuaded his wife to allow the girls to throw the first and only party of their short lives. We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another's invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees.
As the night of the party approached, we watched the house for signs of decorating or other preparations, but saw none. The yellow bricks retained their look of a church- run orphanage and the silence of the lawn was absolute. The curtains didn't rustle, nor did a van deliver six-foot submarine sandwiches or drums of potato chips.
Then the night arrived. In blue blazers, with khaki trousers and clip— on neckties, we walked along the sidewalk in front of the Lisbon house as we had so many times before, but this time we turned up the walk, and climbed the front steps between the pots of red geraniums, and rang the doorbell. Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, "Wait'll you see this." The door opened. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen's descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of stale popcorn. A piece of needlepoint saying "Bless This Home" was framed over the arch, and to the right, on a shelf above the radiator, five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls' infancy. The dining room was full of stark colonial furniture. One wall had a painting of Pilgrims plucking a turkey. The living room revealed orange carpeting and a brown vinyl sofa. Mr. Lisbon's La-Z-Boy flanked a small table on which sat the partially completed model of a sailing ship, without rigging and with the busty mermaid on the prow painted over.
We were directed downstairs to the rec room. The steps were metal-tipped and steep, and as we descended, the light at the bottom grew brighter and brighter, as though we were approaching the molten core of the earth. By the time we reached the last step it was blinding. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead; table lamps burned on every surface. The green and red linoleum checkerboard flamed beneath our buckled shoes. On a card table, the punch bowl erupted lava. The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions. We saw at once that Bonnie, who introduced herself now as Bonaventure, had the sallow complexion and sharp nose of a nun. Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope. Therese Lisbon had a heavier face, the cheeks and eyes of a cow, and she came forward to greet us on two left feet. Mary Lisbon's hair was darker; she had a widow's peak and fuzz above her upper lip that suggested her mother had found her depilatory wax. Lux Lisbon was the only one who accorded with our image of the Lisbon girls. She radiated health and mischief. Her dress fit tightly, and when she came forward to shake our hands, she secretly moved one finger to tickle our palms, giving off at the same time a strange gruff laugh. Cecilia was wearing, as usual, the wedding dress with the shorn hem. The dress was vintage 1920s. It had sequins on the bust she didn't fill out, and someone, either Cecilia herself or the owner of the used clothing store, had cut off the bottom of the dress with a jagged stroke so that it ended above Cecilia's chafed knees. She sat on a barstool, staring into her punch glass, and the shapeless bag of a dress fell over her. She had colored her lips with red crayon, which gave her face a deranged harlot look, but she acted as though no one were there.
We knew to stay away from her. The bandages had been removed, but she was wearing a collection of bracelets to hide the scars. None of the other girls had any bracelets on, and we assumed they'd given Cecilia all they had. Scotch tape held the undersides of the bracelets to Cecilia's skin, so they wouldn't slide. The wedding dress bore spots of hospital food, stewed carrots and beets. We got our punch and stood on one side of the room while the Lisbon girls stood on the other.
We had never been to a chaperoned party. We were used to the parties our older brothers threw with our parents out of town, to dark rooms vibrating with heaps of bodies, musical vomiting, beer kegs beached on ice in the bathtub, riots in the hallways, and the destruction of living room sculpture. This was all different. Mrs. Lisbon ladled out more glasses of punch while we watched Therese and Mary play dominoes, and across the room Mr. Lisbon opened his tool kit. He showed us his ratchets, spinning them in his hand so that they whirred, and a long sharp tube he called his router, and another covered with putty he called his scraper, and one more with a pronged end he said was his gouger. His voice was hushed as he spoke about these implements, but he never looked at us, only at the tools themselves, running his fingers over their lengths or testing their sharpness with the tender bulb of his thumb. A single vertical crease deepened in his forehead, and in the middle of his dry face his lips grew moist.
Through all this Cecilia remained on her stool.
We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother's arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid. He had his invitation tied with a red ribbon around his wrist, which meant that the Lisbon girls had spelled out his name as well as our own, and he came murmuring with his oversize jaw and loose lips, his tiny Japanese eyes, his smooth cheeks shaved by his brothers. Nobody knew exactly how old Joe the Retard was, but for as long as we could remember he had had whiskers. His brothers used to take him onto the porch with a bucket to shave him, yelling for him to keep still, saying if they slit his throat it wouldn't be their fault, while Joe turned white and became as motionless as a lizard. We also knew that retards didn't live long and aged faster than other people, which explained the gray hairs peeking out from under Joe's baseball cap. As children we had expected that Joe the Retard would be dead by the time we became adolescents, but now we were adolescents and Joe was still a child.
Excerpted from THE VIRGIN SUICIDES by JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Copyright © May 1993 by Jeffrey Eugenides
Published in May 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.


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The cover of VW 126 (pictured left) can be seen on a newsstand visited by Rosario Dawson at the 103:49 mark in the new, expanded DVD of Quentin Tarantino's GRINDHOUSE offering "DEATH PROOF." It's arranged in the uppermost tier of a gas station newsrack, wedged between copies of JET and EBONY, which, come to think of it, is usually where I see it. I made one of my increasingly rare or decreasingly often treks out to a theater to see GRINDHOUSE and didn't notice this, so it may be one of the newly added scenes.
Unless he does so under an assumed name, we have no record of Quentin ever ordering anything from us, but we did notice one of our order blanks on an enticingly cluttered table in his living room, in a full page photo published in ROLLING STONE at the time of KILL BILL 1's release. So we suspect he's a fan, and of course it's mutual.
FILM FREAK CENTRAL editor Bill Chambers was kind enough to send in the screen grab above. As Bill says, "You gotta love that Lebanon, Tennessee gas stations stock VW."


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The [Re]verse Pitch Competition, through a series of events and an innovation prize, inspires social entrepreneurs in Austin, Texas to help solve local zero waste challenges.
Entrepreneurs are used to pitching their business idea to investors, partners, and anyone they might share an elevator ride with. In this competition, the tables will turn. The [Re]Verse Pitch Competition is a social innovation program to help turn valuable raw materials that are currently leaving local businesses, non-profits, and institutions as waste into the foundation of new social enterprises. Materials leaving these organizations and entering the waste stream is the problem we're trying to solve and we're pitching to you, the social entrepreneurs of Austin, to help create a solution!
Competitors work with mentors & advisors to develop repurposing business ideas and compete for Innovation Prizes to help start this new venture.


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Petersberg Agreement
The Petersberg Agreement is an international treaty that extended the rights of the Federal Government of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) vis-a-vis the occupying forces of Britain, France, and the United States, and is viewed as the first major step of the Bonn Republic towards sovereignty. It was signed by Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer and the Allied High Commissioners Brian Hubert Robertson (Britain), André François-Poncet (France), and John J. McCloy (United States of America) on 22 November 1949. The Hotel Petersberg, near Bonn, was at that time the seat of the High Commissioners and the place of signature. It was the first modification of the Occupation statute.
Main topics of the agreement[edit]
- West Germany was permitted to join the Council of Europe as an associate member.
- West Germany agreed to sign a bilateral agreement with the U.S. regarding Marshall plan aid. (see next section)
- West Germany agreed to send delegates to the International Authority for the Ruhr, effectively accepting some international control of the Ruhr district. (see next section)
- West Germany agreed to remain demilitarised, without armed forces of any kind, and to support the work of the occupation authorities in this respect.
- West Germany was permitted to engage in international trade, as well as to establish consular relations. (The creation of a Foreign office was still prohibited)
- West Germany agreed to follow the principles of liberty, tolerance and humanity and to prevent any reviving of totalitarian efforts.
- West Germany agreed to implement legislation for the sake of decartelisation in accordance with the occupation statute.
- West Germany was permitted to construct ocean-going ships with restricted capabilities.
- The industrial dismantling programme was modified by the removal of a select number of industrial plants from the dismantling list.
- The West German request for an end to the state of war was noted, but not granted.
Adenauer was heavily criticized in parliament for his signing of the agreement, particularly due to the Ruhr issue.
The International Authority for the Ruhr was established on 28 April 1949. Of the 15 votes, 3 were assigned to the German state, although voted as a block by a representative of the occupation authority. By agreeing to join the control council of the authority, West Germany gained control of those three votes, but also accepted the control of the authority over West Germany's main industrial center. In the following debate in parliament, Adenauer stated:
The Allies have told me that dismantling would be stopped only if I satisfy the Allied desire for security, Does the Socialist Party want dismantling to go on to the bitter end?[1]
The opposition leader Kurt Schumacher responded by labeling Adenauer "Chancellor of the Allies".[2]
The first treaty with a foreign power that West Germany was allowed to sign was the unpopular Marshall plan agreement specified in the treaty. Under U.S. pressure, the agreement was also made into federal law. Although it gave the Germans greater freedom in how to spend the funds, it also gave the U.S. greater powers to interfere in German economic matters, as well as requiring West Germany to subsidize West Berlin which was under occupation and not part of West Germany. The treaty also mandated deliveries from Germany to the U.S. of goods in short supply in the U.S.[3]
The treaty stated that for practical reasons the state of war with Germany could not be ended as requested by the Germans. According to the press, the state of war was maintained because "the U.S. wants to retain a legal basis for keeping a U.S. force in Western Germany".[4]
In 1952, members of the German parliament went to court to challenge the legality of the agreement.
See also[edit]
- Bonn–Paris conventions were signed in 1952 and came into force after the 1955 ratification. The conventions put an end to the Allied occupation of West Germany.
- Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
External links[edit]
- Court Judgement The legality of the signing of the agreement was challenged.
- Text of Agreement
- Petersberg Agreement (in German)
- Message for Monsieur Schuman from Mr Bevin (30 October 1949) In this message to his French counterpart, Robert Schuman, the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin, proposes reconsidering the Allies' dismantling policy in the occupied zones.
- ^ A Good European Time Magazine 5 December 1949
- ^ Hans-Peter Schwarz, "Konrad Adenauer", p.450 (Google books)
- ^ Armin Grünbacher, "Reconstruction and Cold War in Germany", pp.54-55 (Google books)
- ^ A Step Forward Time Magazine Monday, Nov. 28, 1949


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The winner, selected at random, is peaches1003. I'm sending you an email now to get your contact information so Robert Kaufman can send you a prize.
It was fun readings about your favorite colors. Some that came up several times were Sangria, Watermelon, and Pomegranate. Many of you refused to choose (and why should you have to!?) and named groups of colors like the grays and the blues as your favorites. I agree!
If you are a KCMQG member, come to Thursday's meeting for a chance at a local giveaway from me.


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- 12
- 10
- Joined Feb 20, 2014
So first time doing bacon i have smoked lots of other stuff and cheeses but totally new to bacon and cured meats i have 8.9 lbs of pork belly dry curing now. My question is are there any tips or tricks to smoking it, also do i cold smoke it or hot smoke it kinda confused on that, another question is how long dose it sit in the cure before smoking it. Any help or advice would be awesome and much appreciated.


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Houndstooth & floral lace french knicker [Pantry Pink]
Panache's award winning lingerie is crafted for fit and styled for comfort, a design concept epitomised by these Envy briefs. The stretch lace features a bold mix of houndstooth pattern and floral motifs for a modern, feminine aesthetic. The sheer finish and full coverage provides a flattering mid rise shape with light support.


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The 200+ members of the University's marching band perform on Coleman Common at the center of campus.
The Akron Guarantee Scholarship for transfer students
Transfer to Akron and you may be eligible for an initial scholarship award of up to $2,000. It grows from there as you earn credits!
If you are an entering, domestic transfer student, and you are pursuing a bachelor's degree, you may receive the Akron Guarantee Scholarship for up to six consecutive fall and spring semesters — OR — until a bachelor's degree is conferred — whichever comes first.
Who is eligible?
- You are eligible if you wish to transfer to The University of Akron with at least 12 semester credit hours, but not more than 90 semester credit hours, from another regionally accredited college or university and if you have achieved a minimum cumulative college grade point average of 3.0 or higher.
- You are eligible if you previously attended UA, you are returning as a transfer student, and you otherwise meet the eligibility criteria.
- You must be enrolled full-time in a bachelor's program on our Main Campus, or be enrolled at a location charging the Main Campus rate, and continue in good academic standing.
For fall 2019, your initial award will be determined by your college GPA:
- A GPA of 3.5 or higher earns an award of $2,000
- A GPA of 3.25 to 3.49 earns an award of $1,500
- A GPA of 3.0 to 3.249 earns an award of $1,000
Your scholarship increases as you earn credits
At the end of the academic year, your progress will be evaluated to determine an increase in your scholarship.
Increases will occur once a year at the end of the spring semester, based on the number of credit hours earned, including transfer credits.
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|Spring semester (January)
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How to apply
There is no application. We use information provided on admissions applications to determine awards. All applicants are carefully considered.
Questions about the Akron Guarantee Scholarship for transfer students? Call our Transfer and Adult Enrollment Center at 330-972-7009, toll-free at 1-855-828-7267, or email@example.com.


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Lync with Polycom RMX Integration
This Blog describes the integration between Microsoft Lync and Polycom RMX 2000
Create the Polycom RMX pools
Using the configuration in in the below figure, The application Pool video.sipdomain.com can be used as the Match URI for dialing.
The two "Device" RMX SIP signaling (FQDN) domains are rmx.corp.local and rmx2.corp.local are used as destination routes.
Add the Polycom RMX FQDN (SIP signaling IP address) in DNS
To register with Lync Server 2010, the POLYCOM RMX SIP signaling domain must be accessible via a DNS server for Lync Server 2010.
The POLYCOM RMX system and the Lync Server both need to resolve the POLYCOM RMX host record identically, regardless of the domain selected to store the DNS Host record.
Set the Routing for the Polycom RMX System
Use Lync Powershell to set the Polycom RMX system as a trusted host with a static route
1 Navigate to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Lync Server 2010 > Lync Server Management Shell to open the Lync Powershell terminal.
2 Use the New-CsStaticRoute command to set up a static route for the RMX system.
$route = New-CsStaticRoute -TLSRoute -destination " rmx.sipdomain.com " -port 5061 -matchuri " video.sipdomain.com " -usedefaultcertificate $true
where rmx.sipdomain.com is the FQDN of the RMX SIP signaling domain and video.sipdomain.com is the name of the Trusted Application Pool you created.
3 Set the routing configuration. By configuring the static route, matched URI dialing is enabled.
The following example sets the route to be global:
Set-CsStaticRoutingConfiguration -identity global -route @{Add=$route}
4 Optional. To check that the commands were entered correctly in the Powershell, enter:
Use Lync Powershell to create the trusted application
1 Navigate to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Lync Server 2010> Lync Server Management Shell to open the Lync Powershell terminal.
2 Use the New-CsTrustedApplication command to set up a trusted application for the RMX system.
New-CsTrustedApplication -applicationId VideoProxy -TrustedApplicationPoolFqdn video.sipdomain.com -port 5061
Use Lync Powershell to update the topology
1 Navigate to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Lync Server 2010> Lync Server Management Shell to open the Lync Powershell terminal.
2 Use the Enable-CsTopology command to update the Lync topology.
The Polycom RMX system is now set as a trusted host, and calls from an Lync client to a SIP address in the Polycom RMX system's domain will be routed through that system.
Create a Security Certificate for the Polycom RMX
You must install a security certificate on the POLYCOM RMX system so that Lync Server trusts it. This can be accomplished in two ways:
•Purchase and install a certificate from a commercial Trusted Root Certificate Authority (CA) such as VeriSign or Thawte. Use the procedures in the POLYCOM RMX system's documentation for Certificate Management to create a Certificate Signing Request and to install the certificate(s) received from the CA.
•Request and obtain a certificate from your enterprise CA. You can do this in two ways:
—If certificate requests must be submitted through the enterprise's CA team or group, use the procedures in the POLYCOM RMX system's help for Certificate Management to create a Certificate Signing Request and to install the certificate(s) received from the CA team or group.
To request a security certificate for the POLYCOM RMX system using IIS Manager 7
- On the Lync Server, select Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (7.0) to open IIS 7.
- Under Connections, double-click the server name.
- In the Features View, double-click Server Certificates under IIS.
- In the Actions pane (far right), select the Create Domain Certificate action. (The Create Certificate wizard displays.)
- In the Distinguished Name Properties panel, complete all fields. Do not leave any fields blank.
— In the Common Name field, enter the FQDN of POLYCOM RMX SIP signaling interface.
— Do not leave any fields blank.
6. Click Next.
7. In the Online Certification Authority panel, select a Certificate Authority from the list and enter a friendly name.
8. Click Finish.
Your certificate is created.
To use the Microsoft Management Console to export the created certificate
- Open Microsoft Management Console and add the Certificates snap-in, if it has not been added already.
- Choose File > Add/Remove Snap-in.
- Select Certificates from the Available Snap-ins area and click Add.
- On the Certificates snap-in page, select Computer Account and click Next.
- On the Select Computer page, select Manage Local Computer.
- Click Finish.
- Click OK.
- Browse to Certificates (Local Computer) > Personal > Certificates.
4. Right-click the created certificate and select All Tasks > Export… to view the Certificate Export wizard.
5. In the Certificate Export wizard, do the following:
- In the Export Private Key panel, select Yes, export the private key.
- Click Next.
- In the Export File Format panel, select Include all certificates in the certification path if possible.
- Click Next.
- In the Password panel, enter a simple password, e.g., password.
- Click Next.
6. In the File to Export panel, enter a path where you want to save the new file, e.g., c:\temp\pbxcert.pfx.
Import the certificate
Create a flat text file and enter the password you chose for the certificate
Once the *.pfx file is on your PC, you can upload it to the Polycom RMX system and install it, you need to Upload the certificate and the password text file at the same time.
Creating Lync Entries for Polycom RMX
1- Create New Contact Object on AD Server "DC.sipdomain.com"
Make sure that the Display Name matches what you'd like your users to see in the lync 2010 client.
2- Locate your contact object; Open its properties and Select Attribute Editor.
3- Set the msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress to sip:<MeetingRoomID>@<RMXRoutingAddress>. For example: sip:firstname.lastname@example.com
4- Synchronize the Lync Address book with AD by running the command "Update-CsAddressBook –Verbose" using lync Management shell on lync server "se.sipdomain.com"
5- Once the address book has synchronized & your client has downloaded the updated address book file, you will be able to find the room by name in Lync 2010 Client.
- You can force the Address book download by deleting the cached one "\Users\%ALIAS%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Communicator"
- Since the RMX is not registering to Lync the presence will show as unknown.


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Lutz Bacher
It is with great sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Lutz Bacher. At least right now, it's impossible for me to write anything else.
If you'd like to learn more about her work, an archive documenting projects from throughout Bacher's career is available here on Contemporary Art Quarterly.


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Experimental Plane Simulation
XPSVR > General > Concept art of enemy base
August 14, 2017
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Here's an artist rendition of an enemy base.
Large ships are an improved version of an enemy boss from Fractal Combat X.
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STAR WARS: EMPIRE AT WAR is Set loosely between REVENGE OF THE SITH and A NEW HOPE, while the Empire is still constructing the Death Star. The Campaign goes through the events before this, on both the Rebel and the Imperial side…
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10 years earlier 10 years later 80s 90s action Adaptation adventure aliens Animated Animation Based on Animated Series based on book based on comic based on comic book based on tv series Based on video game batman biopic Book christmas comedy comic adaptation comic book crime Crossover DC DC Comics Disney drama epic family fantasy Game History horror Idea-for-TV kids Live Action live-action martial arts Marvel Marvel Comics Music Musical mystery reboot remake romance Sci Fi sci-fi science fiction scifi Sequel Spy Superhero supervillain suspense teens thriller videogame adaptation war western


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By Sulayman Bah
Norwegian top tier outfit Valerenga are sweating over the injury of yet-to-be-capped Gambian player Muhamed Keita.
Keita, sustained what looked like an injury and lasted barely thirty minutes in the club's slender 1-0 win over Kristiansund in a domestic league game last week evening.
The 26-year-old started the game but got replaced by teammate Henrik Johansen as Valerenga held on to their fragile advantage till game's end.
It was the Gambian-born's sixth appearance since joining on a free transfer after seeing a proposed deal to move to Azerbaijan's giants Qarabag hit the brick walls.
The extent of Keita's injury hasn't been publicly declared but the player remains out on the peripheries.
Muhamed missed out in his club's 2-0 defeat to Sarpsborg last Sunday.


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Jul 13 to Jul 18
Girls, ages 12 - 13
Mountain Girls camp offers the same excitement and similar activities that campers have come to expect from camps held at the Lake site, but occur at the Mt. Site and is for girls only. One distinctive is that there are no outtrips. It is a relaxed and close knit setting, with a maximum of 20 campers. Campers get involved in any number of the following activities; hiking, playing games in a meadow, survival skills, nature study, crafts, sauna building, star gazing, etc.
Limit: 20 - 30 campers
Volunteer needs
60%positions filled
|# needed
|Cabin Leaders (Female)
|Position # needed


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I guess if you live on 50 acres and have room to put something like that, in a field next to a wood pile along a road that only 3 people a day drive on seems as logical a place as any...? What I really want to know is if anyone has ever watched Glenn Beck because of seeing this sign, because if this stuff really works I've got some scrap wood in my garage and I'll get crackin' on my "Hugh Jackman For PTO President" billboard. I would totally volunteer at my kid's school then.
This van was covered with hopeful and uplifiting messages:


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The Annenberg-Robert Wood Johnson Coding of Health and Media Project (CHAMP) is a large multi-year content analysis of health risk behaviors, contained in popular U.S. movies, television, music, music videos, and the internet. The project examines trends in the use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs, as well as sexual, violent and suicidal behaviors. The study also assesses content relevant to portrayal of mental health conditions, such as depression, as well as positive social actions, such as suicide intervention and designated driving.
The purpose of the project is to track trends in risk-related behaviors as portrayed in the media over time so the potential positive or negative impact on adults and youth can be evaluated. There are now datasets containing long-term trends in these behaviors as well as demographic and socioeconomic indicators that might be related to the trends. One of the aims of this project is to provide researchers, the public, and policy makers with evidence of potential influences from popular culture as transmitted through mass media.
What differentiates CHAMP from other content analyses is the time span covered (in some cases dating as far back as 1950), the breadth of content evaluated, and the standardization of coding categories. Also, CHAMP meets a strong reliability standard, tracks pro-social behavior so potentially positive results from media can also be measured, and is representative because it codes media systematically over time.
It is our hope that this website YouthMediaRisk.org (YMR) can make CHAMPS' methods and findings accessible to the academic and policymaking communities. The coding of top-selling movies has been completed. The project continues to code popular television dramas since the 1950s. The project is also planning for its coding of music in top-selling songs since the 1950s and music videos starting in the 1980s.
We use a method called "content analysis" to analyze and summarize media content, a methodology established in the communications field that, as a requisite of the scientific method, is able to be replicated by others. (See Neuendorf, 2002 and Krippendorff, 2004). Content analysis enables the coding of media content using a reliable system of coding. It by definition requires more than one coder and methods for determining reliability and validity. The field is relatively new and growing.
Both Neuendorf's* and Krippendorff's† books are excellent resources for anyone interested in conducting or understanding content analyses, especially what is known about reliability (the measure of coders' consistent use of shared definitions that allow them to code media content in a similar fashion) and validity standards. (There are many types of validity including face, construct etc.) This site features a link to a paper by Dr. Neuendorf on reliability as well as her reliability program PRAM. We also post a paper on understanding validity by Dr. W. James Potter, a veteran of the National Television Violence Study. A more detailed explanation of the purpose and need for the project can be found in a paper by Bruce Hardy, et al. We also provide chapter summaries and data from a recent book that features data collected from the movie sample of this project. We hope you find these resources useful; the links are below.
*Neuendorf, K. (2002). The Content Analysis Guidebook. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Press.
†Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Press.
†Krippendorff, K. & Bock, M. (2008). The Content Analysis Reader. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications, Inc.


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Manchester United have partnered with Google to launch an initiative that will see live fan reactions from around the world broadcast pitchside during matches.
Powered by Google+ Hangouts, the Front Row scheme will kick off on March 16 when the club's North West rivals Liverpool visit Old Trafford.
To be considered for inclusion, United fans must upload a photograph to their Google+ account demonstrating their "love, passion and commitment" to the team, and mark it with the #MUFrontRow hashtag.
"For the first time in football, supporters will be streamed live onto the pitchside hoardings, thanks to Google+ Hangouts - the free multi-person video call feature," said United in a statement.
"They will be able to show their backing directly to their beloved team, roaring David Moyes's men on in a massive fixture.
"We can't wait to meet the global Reds who will make history as one of the very first Front Row fans in world football."
Those chosen for Front Row will receive a professional photograph of their video appearance at Old Trafford, as well as a mention on the United Google+ account.
Watch a video introducing Front Row below:


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I love the trend towards creating elaborate Halloween Galas for us adults to have fun outside of trick or treating! I don't know about you, but I am pretty darn stoked on events like Tooth & Nail's Halloween Harvest Costume Ball happening at the castle here in Paso Robles next month. I love that it is an excuse to go all-out with dressing up and making it a night (and it's pretty darn cool that it benefits MUST Charity). I guess there is part of me that just doesn't want to grow up!
I am sure that we will be comin' at you with loads of ideas for costumes, but I wanted to share a little inspiration for creating a little Halloween Glam at home. I am thinking a mystery dinner set at home with 10-15 friends who want to go all out. Instead of garish orange and black decor laden with skeletons and spiders, I am thinking a bit more sophisticated with just a hint of goth.
A Dark & Moody Tablescape
World Market | Anthropologie | Zest it Up | Restoration Hardware | Anthropoligie
I am now truly inspired by this beauty to start hunting for the perfect Murder Mystery Dinner Kit! With 5 weeks left to plan, there is plenty of time to create an amazing night! Oooo, I think some French inspired frog's legs should be on the menu! Oh, and garlicky escargots! Time to class up the joint….maybe even a bubbly, blood-red Kir Royale as an aperitif. SOOO inspired!
"Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat!"


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The senior on the blog today–Miss Macie Davidson!!–is a fireball. I mean, this girl is smart, athletic, gorgeous, + full of life + energy. She stepped out of the car for her session with a huge smile on her face + frankly, made my job SO easy!! It really kind of felt like I was just hanging out with one of my friends : ) We were able to catch some of fall's beautiful colors + despite a dreary forecast, not a drop of rain fell from the sky!! Thank goodness!!
As we chatted (+ took pictures, of course), I learned that Macie is an athlete through + through (+ she gets it from her mom, who was also at the session with us!!). Let's just say, Macie was .6 seconds away from breaking the school record last year in track for the 400 meter dash which is currently held by …. yep, her mom ; ) Sorry, Dena, but I think I'm pulling for Macie on this one!! hehe : ) Like we said at the session, if it's going to be broken by anyone, best to be by her daughter!! More than an athlete, though, Macie is down-to-earth, mature, + composed. She is currently planning to study kinesiology wherever college takes her, + the career seems absolutely fitting for this active young woman!! Until then, however, she will be spending time with her family + friends, as well as hunting, fishing, + running a few laps around the track ; )
Enjoy some of my favorites from her session, + have an absolutely lovely Monday!! You got this!! xoxo : ) -M
Absolutely, positively STUNNING, Macie!!
A favorite!!!


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Wire Heart Pendant Necklace
I have hand curled this beautiful heart and added another handcrafted loop as the connector for the chain for this piece. A red glass bead and 2 clear glass beads have been aded to the center of the heart to illustrate the beating heart. This is truly a lovely piece that you will cherish and wear for years to come.
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Price: USD 18.00
In Stock: 1
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Episode two of Sailor Moon Crystal debuted to an excited and worried crowd on Saturday. On the one hand, longtime Sailor Moon fans are still extremely optimistic about this new series and its faithfulness to the manga. On the other hand though, the new character designs and the new series' animation style has yet to win over a portion of the viewer base. Episode two was Sailor Moon Crystal's chance to prove itself again to both sets of fans. And did it?
Well… kind of. On the one hand, we got another extremely faithful-to-the-manga episode this week. The focus of the episode is Ami Mizuno, AKA Sailor Mercury, a super-genius loner who finds herself in the midst of an evil scheme. Again, we get some good and creepy shots of the "Evil" this week. There's a lot less "la-di-da summon another youma!" in Crystal than the old series, and for good reason. The pace is a lot faster, so the stakes are a lot higher for our Dark Moon generals. Jadeite looks a lot more stressed out as he summons our next minor villain.
Anyway, back to Ami. She develops a bond with Usagi that becomes much more of a focal point to the plot than it was even in the original series (though I haven't seen it in years, so please let me know if you disagree). The Scouts' loyalty to Usagi has always been a major part of the show and the manga, and so having this be a strong part of the story just feels right. Usagi quickly befriends her and is quick to rush to Ami's aid near the end of the episode (with the help of the transformation pen in its first appearance!), and Ami is only able to break the enemy's hold on her mind through her bond with Usagi. The episode felt more character-centric than plot-centric, which was nice.
One of the best parts of this episode was Mamoru and Usagi's second meeting. Again Mamoru is treated to a ball of paper to the face, and again Usagi is surprised and flustered… but this time, Mamoru is sure he heard Luna talking. Look below. That's the face of someone who is not fooled. (Though for such a sharp guy, you think he'd think twice before running around town in a tuxedo. It's like Superman running errands with his cape on.)
Storywise so far, I have no complaints. It's continuing to the faithful to the manga, which introduces a scout a chapter or so until we have the full inner senshi lineup. And that's great! But on the other hand, the quality of the animation in this episode was so incredibly spotty. The character's expressions did feel more organic and flexible (Usagi had some cute faces in particular), and some scenes were just downright gorgeous to look at. But there were so many instances where the characters appear rubbery, their eyes uneven, and their movement very wooden.
To be fair, the 90's series had plenty of all of the above. Most modern anime series have this problem as well due to the limitations of their budget. It's normal, and maybe many of us are just holding Sailor Moon Crystal up to an unfair standard because of the force of our nostalgia. But for a series that had so much hype, and was in production for so long, this sort of sloppiness just feels so incredibly disappointing.
The main reason for that disappointment, I think, is because when this series looks good, it looks really good. Ami's transformation is short and sweet and is a great nod to her original 90's one. One very exciting thing was that Sailor Mercury's and Sailor Moon's attacks weren't their own standalone animated scene- they happen in the middle of the action. No recycled movement with a generic background. It looked and felt more immediate and exciting that way.
I continue to be impressed with Crystal as a whole despite the flaws, and you can count me among the many fans who can't wait for the introduction of Sailor Mars in two weeks.
Crunchyroll members can watch the episode now here!


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The 3D Virtual Star Trek™ Convention?
I remember that I couldn't participate because my computer wasn't up to specs back in the day. I remember intentionally getting a new computer just so I could participate in stuff like that. I thought the idea of attending a convention without really being there was kinda cool. They could have not only used avatars, they could have incorporated webcams and other geeky gadgets. Of course there is no more Vir-Cons. I guess the died with the whole "dot-com" rush. I miss the good old "dot-com" days. Everyone was willing to be innovative and take risks. *sigh* I've been in a really idealistic mood lately. Looking around, no one's interested in anything but talking about fashion, people's problems or celebrities without make- up. I think I'm depressed.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Remember Vir-Con?
Posted by scifirantergirl at 3/01/2005 03:10:00 AM
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Last week, I pointed out how silver had been outshining gold for the last few weeks and even months. And now silver prices today (Monday) are up another 1.4% to roughly $17.05 in morning trading.
The strength in silver prices has carried over from last week.
In fact, if you compare the two metals over multiple time periods, like one week, one month, three months, and even six months, silver's behavior looks even more impressive.
What's going on? Well I think there are two reasons. First, after peaking in early 2011, silver prices suffered much greater losses than gold when they bottomed a year ago. So silver had become extremely oversold.
Second, silver's multiple applications (other than a store of wealth) mean there are a number of sources of demand that go beyond what is the case for gold.
Remember, the price of silver is a whole lot more volatile than gold. But that's precisely what can make it so attractive. With reasonably good timing and some patience, silver investing can offer returns that are difficult to match almost anywhere.
Urgent: Rare gold anomaly – an event so rare, it's only happened twice in 20 years. And it's about to happen again. Find out more.
Before we look at what's next for silver prices today, here's a look at how the price of silver has been trending…
Silver Prices Today Climb Again
Silver prices had a surprising performance last week…
Early in the week brought your garden-variety volatility. On Monday, the silver price opened down at $16.63, then saw buying pressure through the day, taking it to $16.71 by the close.
Tuesday was the reverse, with silver opening at $16.81, then succumbing to midday pressure. It traded down to $16.69 by the close that afternoon.
Wednesday was the big surprise. It was pretty run of the mill overnight trading that took silver prices to $16.75 by the open. But from there it exploded higher to reach $17.15 within the first two hours of trading. It peaked at $17.18 by 1:00 p.m., then weakened a little to close at $17.09. Interestingly, the U.S. dollar didn't fluctuate all that much, trending slowly downward on the day.
Thursday actually saw silver prices give up some of those gains. After opening at $17.04, the precious metal kept heading downward to close sub-$17 at $16.99.
Friday brought a weaker open to silver at $16.88. It quickly spiked to $17.08 at 8:30 a.m., then took its cue from gold and gave back nearly $0.28 to trade down to $16.80 by midafternoon.
Silver prices today are back over $17 as traders now switch their focus to the FOMC meeting this week. Here's where I see the price of silver heading now…
Where Silver Prices Head from Here
About the Author
Peter Krauth is the Resource Specialist for Money Map Press and has contributed some of the most popular and highly regarded investing articles on Money Morning. Peter is headquartered in resource-rich Canada, but he travels around the world to dig up the very best profit opportunity, whether it's in gold, silver, oil, coal, or even potash.