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The Brunch Dish: Smoked Bluefish Salad at Iris Cafe
Iris Cafe doesn't have an official brunch menu. The sandwiches and salads are available all day, but it's especially hopping inside the Brooklyn Heights nabe cafe during prime weekend brunching hours. Look on the framed chalkboard for the Smoked Bluefish Salad ($9.50). The glistening little pieces of fish from Acme Smokehouse in Greenpoint (it's their only local fish) are salty, smoky, and buttery atop a bed of lettuce leaves, hard-boiled egg slices, and roasted asparagus.
You'd think the bluefish might dry out a bit after being smoked, but all those fish oils are still there, glistening and melty in the mouth. "We're trying to convert non-bluefish eaters with this salad!" said Graville.
The salad used to come with pickled shallots but right now, they're substituting—yep you guessed it—ramps until the season runs out. Ramp enthusiasts: take note! They add a happy taste of spring, and it all comes together with a light lemon dijon dressing. The salad also includes a long baguette hunk—making salad sandwiches inside of it is encouraged.
Iris Cafe
20 Columbia Place, Brooklyn NY 11201 (map)
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text: Seller: kfuniquedecor (10,816) 99.9%, Location: Barberton, Ohio, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 401912255922 Hi there! Shipped to you Brand New and Direct from our manufacturer Graceful, open lotus capitals and colorful hieroglyphics contribute to the classic Egyptian styling of this nearly yard-tall piece of instant architecture ready for display in your own temple. Faithfully replicated in quality designer resin to capture every detail, it is hand-painted in the gold and muted royal tones of the Egyptian palette. See alternate views for details. 13"dia.x32"H. 30 lbs PAYMENT Please arrange for payment within 4 days of auctions end. OUR GUARANTEE Your satisfaction is guaranteed! If you are not satisfied for any reason all you need to do is email me the reason you would like to return item and I will email you back with return instructions!! All you need to do is simply send back your order in the same condition it was received to you in within 14 days of receipt and I will promptly refund your money as soon as I have a confirmed return! SHIPPING INFO Please Read Carefully! Please read product descriptions very thoroughly. If in doubt regarding a product detail, please ask a question. Please allow 7-14 business days for delivery (IN THE USA). Canada or any country outside the USA does take additional time to ship due to international customs as well as our warehouse. SHIPPING TO ALASKA, PUERTO RICO, OR HAWAII IS AN ADDITIONAL FEE. PLEASE EMAIL ME FOR PRICING! FYI Your purchase does help our local economy in this economic time of need Thank you for looking and be sure to check out my other auctions for more great deals. International Buyers – Please Note: Import duties, taxes, and charges are not included in the item price or shipping cost. These charges are the buyer's responsibility. Please check with your country's customs office to determine what these additional costs will be prior to bidding or buying. ATTENTION BUYERS OUTSIDE THE USA: HANDLING TIME ON SHIPPING ITEMS DOES TAKE AN ADDITIONAL 4-6 DAYS LONGER TO SHIP OUT THEN STATED IN SHIPPING TIME FRAME OR EBAY ESTIMATED DELIVERY DATE! SHIPPING TIME FRAME IS FOR USA BUYERS ONLY. PLEASE BE AWARE THAT INTERNATIONAL ITEMS WILL NOT SHIP OUT UNTIL 4-6 BUSINESS DAYS AFTER PAYMENT IS RECEIVED. THANK YOU :) PLEASE EMAIL ME WITH ANY QUESTIONS! Condition: New, Culture: Egyptian, Country/Region of Manufacture: Unknown

subset: commoncrawl


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Last week, I wrote about how the Greeks unlocked the key to music theory when Pythagoras discovered the Golden Mean. The Greeks elevated the study of music to an intellectual pursuit on par with geometry, science and philosophy, and this new attitude and knowledge about music spurred the development of precision crafted musical instruments, which, in turn, inspired the precision machines that powered the industrial revolution. Besides demanding better instruments and inspiring precision craftsmanship, this new, highly intellectual attitude towards music yielded many technological applications as well as well as producing a lot of mind-blowingly beautiful music.
The Romans also embraced the classical approach to education, and when a decadent Roman Empire turned Christian, in the 4th Century, the Catholic Church put the power of music to work for the Holy Roman Empire to maintain, and even expand the extent of their power by spreading this new religion all over the world. The Roman Catholic Church used music as a sort of psy-ops propaganda tool to win over hearts and minds, and to break down resistance to Roman rule.
Rome started sending missionaries armed with hymnals instead of Centurions with swords to their colonies abroad, but the Catholic Church burned folk instruments all over Europe in the Middle Ages, calling them tools of "the Devil's music." The church denounced folk music as profane and blasphemous and banned it from "The House of God," but the Catholics built classical music into the architecture of the stone cathedrals they built for European peasants to pray in.
The Catholics built huge cisterns into the foundations of their cathedrals to power the enormous pipe organs they installed inside them, and then built soaring stone bell towers to house huge bell carillons high overhead. The bells woke everyone up, got them out of bed and brought them to church, where they heard choirs, accompanied by a pipe organ with banks of deep bass pipes resonating in optimally designed halls. This was the first time most Europeans ever heard a musical bass note so low and full that they could feel it in their chest. While Catholic Mass mesmerized the peasants, nuns busily taught their kids catchy little songs about Jesus. The Catholics put classical music to work as a tool of empire, and used it to subjugate people with other cultural traditions.
Of course, the Catholics used this music to reaffirm their own faith as well. I'm sure that hearing music with tight harmonies, pure tones and rhythmic discipline must have seemed absolutely heavenly, and miraculous. Honestly, it still seems that way to me. There's just something about how music makes you feel, that encourages you to continue doing whatever it was that made you feel that way. That's how musicians learn to play, but when someone presents music to you, in a way you do not understand, and in a form you can not replicate, music becomes a kind of magic that inspires awe.
Awe can be a powerful tool for an empire that seeks to express power abroad. You'll recall that inspiring awe was an essential component of the US military's recent offensive in Iraq, code named "Operation Shock and…" Despite the violence, clerical sexual depredation, and economic pillage, somehow, music always restored people's faith in God, by inspiring awe.
The Roman Catholic Church demonstrated the true power of music, and it's ability to inspire awe, as a tool for empire, and it serves them well to this day, but subsequent empires have not failed to learn from the Romans. Music had been weaponized. Music became political because music has power and anyone who wants power, needs music. That is the "gospel truth" as taught by the Holy Roman Empire.
By about 1600, medieval craftsmen had made great strides in the field of instrument building. They called their crowning achievement, the "piano-forte." "Piano," in musical parlance, meaning played quietly, and "forte" meaning played loudly. This room filling instrument had an elegant ivory keyboard, and employed a complex system of hammers and dampers to sound an enormous iron rack of tuned strings. It was the first keyboard instrument that allowed players to vary the volume of the note sounded by how forcefully they played. Today, we simply call it a "piano."
It takes an empire to build a piano. While the instruments of our indigenous ancestors were likely built and played by the same hands, from materials on hand, no one could ever build a piano from materials on hand. One lifetime is not long enough to learn all of the skills necessary to build a piano from scratch. It takes skilled machinists, cabinetmakers, wood-workers, felt-makers, blacksmiths, iron workers and more to build a piano, not to mention ivory, exotic woods, metal and materials from all over the world. Today, most piano players have never even tuned a piano, let alone built one. The piano is a product of hierarchy and empire and you would be hard pressed to find a better ambassador for either.
The piano became the king of precision crafted classical musical instruments, but of course, only kings, and popes, could afford them. Most kings and popes really didn't play the piano very well, so they hired people to play it for them, and to teach them and their kids to play. Johan Sebastian Bach got one of those jobs, and elegantly mapped out the complete melodic and harmonic potential of the twelve tone chromatic scale, on the piano. He's been teaching the whole world how to make music ever since.
People recognize J S Bach as the "Father of Classical Music" but his music represents the culmination of hundreds of years of technology, mindset and discipline, that includes the piano. With more than a seven-octave range, the piano became the principle instrument of composers, who wrote arrangements for entire symphony orchestras, while sitting in front of it. We should not underestimate how much the piano shaped the golden age of classical music that followed.
The piano, despite it's amazing ingenuity, has limits, like any instrument in the real world. The piano offers an impressive seven-octave range, but it cannot change pitch continuously, the way a guitar player can bend a note note up, or the way a violin player can add vibrato, for example. The piano can play loudly or quietly, and you can let the sound ring, or damp it off, but the piano only makes one sound. If you play violin, you can pluck the string, or you can bow it, to create two distinctly different sounds. Horn players use mutes to change the tone of their instruments, and organ players can often choose from a multitude of voices. Also, a piano cannot start a note quietly, and then make it louder, as a horn player might do, nor can the piano articulate words and syllables into a pitch the way a human singer can. Those are just a few musical limitations of the piano.
The piano makes many musical compromises in order to give the player the maximum flexibility for melody and harmony. Classical music is all about melody and harmony. Add in rhythm and dynamics, and you've described the complete palette of classical music. I bring this up to point out that in order to delve deeply into these four elements, the classical music tradition completely overlooked not only sounds and techniques, but whole ways of looking at and appreciating music. For example, overtone music, such as Tuvan throat singing sounds alien to us, because our classical tradition choked that whole approach to music out of western civilization.
Everything but melody, harmony, rhythm and dynamics got squeezed out of classical music, as it ascended to it's pinnacle with composers like Mozart and Beethoven, who composed their masterpieces at the piano. It was an age of empire, and these composers produced music for kings, emperors, and even God himself. Our classical music tradition strongly reflects this. That's why classical music sounds so grand, reverent, and orderly, and why it is so very careful not to offend the ear.
Flash forward to the turn of the 20th Century at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Several new inventions greatly increase the reach and the power of classical music, but they also would eventually change the way we relate to music. Radio, the phonograph, and eventually the tape recorder revolutionized music even more than the piano.
Before long, even people who never learned to play an instrument, could experience the sound of a full orchestra in the comfort of their own home, thanks to the magic of radio. By the 1970s, electronic sound reproduction technology reached it's zenith. If you had a decent stereo, most bands' records probably sounded better in your living room than the same band did playing live at a concert hall. It no longer made sense, if you wanted music in your life, to learn to play an instrument. For the price of a single musical instrument, you could buy a whole sound reproduction system that would allow you to listen to studio polished performances by the world's most renowned artists, right in your own living room, right out of the box, and with no practice.
By this time governments, churches, and corporations all started using music to express power and influence people's behavior, and our modern technological media helped them do it. Where once, the only way you would hear music was if you made an instrument yourself, and learned to play it, by the 1970's when the FM band opened up, anyone with a radio had their choice of music, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Suddenly, music was just there, everywhere, all the time, everywhere you went. Classical music had become an institution. Kids still learn to play an instrument and read music in school as part of their classical education, and charitable foundations continue to keep symphony orchestras playing in most major metropolitan areas, so long as they keep playing the old classics, but the playing field has changed. Disciplined performers and precision machines no longer impress us. We take them for granted. Not only that, we've heard it all before, and we no longer feel any connection to it.
We don't know how any of it works anymore. We don't know where it comes from, how it is made or why it works, just like all of the high-tech gadgets we surround ourselves with these days. The proliferation of artificially flawless, studio produced music has the same effect on our self esteem as seeing images of people with artificially flawless complexions and perfect smiles in the media. We no longer believe we are capable or worthy of a direct relationship with music, so mostly, we leave it to the professionals, and consume music passively, second-hand.
Meanwhile, the whole classical music game got stale. Composers got tired of grand, reverent, orderly and inoffensive and started looking for ways to make classical music more aggressive and challenging. Some sought to subvert the classical system of tonality, while others looked for ways to add new sounds to the repertoire, and still others looked for entirely new ways to approach music.
Some of these composers embraced this new sound reproduction and sound production technology and incorporated it in creative ways into their music. I'll never forget the first time I heard Iannis Xenakis's Diamorphosis, and saw the written score to it in an elementary school music class. Xenakis composed this piece on magnetic tape, from a variety of recorded and electronically generated sounds.
Karlheinz Stockhausen composed pieces full of weird electronic sounds that came at the audience from all directions with discreet multi-channel sound systems,
and John Cage used microphones and electronic transducers to amplify ordinary household vibrations into bizarre sounding compositions.
I love all of that weird music, by the way, and it still turns me on. That music is rebellious in a very intellectual kind of way. These composers all recognized just how finite the tradition of classical music really was, and they understood the oppressive nature of classical music, as only a classically trained musician would, so they went exploring, to see what else they could do with music. I still love that music because of that rebelliousness, and how earnestly revolutionary it all sounds, in that deeply intellectual, symbolic and inconsequential way that privileged people embrace radical ideas. Still, it spoke to me at an impressionable age and I still love it because of the nostalgia I have for it, and for what it was in it's time.
Today, empires of all shapes and size compete for your attention with music, but music no longer wows the peasants as much as it once did. Marketers continue to use music to ambush us and invade our space, because they know how powerfully music can convey their message. As a result, we've become music resistant. Music has become a pervasive noise that we learn to tune out, and we resent catchy jingles that stick in our head. We get subjected to so much weaponized music these days, that we no longer trust music, and we no longer respect music. We assume that anyone who makes music these days, has an agenda, and serves an empire, or wants to build one.
That's too bad, because we need music to build culture. Our culture has disconnected us from the musical process, in order to subject us more completely to its power to inspire awe and manipulate behavior. At the same time, music has died in our culture. Classical music has long since exhausted itself and folk music has succumbed to the lure of capitalism. When the music of your culture dies, your culture dies too. You might not notice it for a while, especially when there are so many great recordings of it to replay, but there's no real future in our culture anymore.
Stockhausen, Cage and others saw it clearly decades ago. They saw that it was over, and because they knew it was over, they had no enthusiasm for musical convention. Instead, they cast aside everything they had been so painstakingly taught about music, since they were school-children and they went looking for whole different approach, starting from scratch. They weren't afraid to offend the ear, they showed no reverence for tradition, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been able to use any of their music to sell anything. That's what makes them some of the most important composers of the 20th Century.
This has been a very brief and very broad overview of the last 40,000 years of music in our culture. From this perspective, anything that's happened since then is still today's news, so I think this is a good place to end. I'll tell you what I still find compelling about music next week.


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LA School District Vote Shows Further Cracks in Education's Berlin Wall
America's large urban school districts are often the lowest performing, least efficient, and most resistant to change. The poster children for this reality are perhaps Detroit and Washington, DC, but the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has long been in the running as well.
Yesterday, there was a sign that LAUSD would like to get out of that race for the bottom: the district's school board voted 6 to 1 in favor of a plan that would hand up to a third of its public schools over to private management. Ignoring for a moment the question of how well this policy will work, it is categorically, undeniably, a sign of change. In the past, such private contracting arrangements in large districts have usually been the result of state or mayoral takeovers. This is the first case that comes to mind in which the plan was the product of an elected school board that has just had enough with its own administrators' unsatisfactory performance.
Keep in mind that school board elections suffer low-turnout, and that support for candidates is dominated by public school employee unions looking out for their own members' salaries and job security. If THAT process can produce such a clarion call for parental choice, competition, and diversity in educational provision, times ARE changing.
Now let's stop ignoring the question of whether or not it will work. There's not a whole lot of research on the subject. The most recent and detailed review of a similar contracting-out arrangement in Philadelphia, by Harvard's Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingos, finds that non-profit management organizations in the city underperformed the district somewhat in reading and math, though the reading difference was statistically insignificant. The same study found that for-profit management organizations outperformed the district in both subjects, though the reading difference was again statistically insignificant.
Honestly, though, I don't think anyone believes that the LAUSD plan was the result of a painstaking comparison of all the policy options and the choice of the one most supported by the empirical research. It is a cry of frustration with the status quo, and an implicit recognition of what most people already know: monopolies are bad at giving consumers what they want at a reasonable cost; choice and competition drive up quality and drive down costs in every other field, so why not bring them to bear in education? And finally, the LA school board's action represents a desire to get something done NOW, that is actually within the board's power to accomplish.
My sympathies are with the board members who are trying to make a positive difference within the system we have, but the question for voters and legislators is: why stick with the status quo at all? Why not open up the field of education to all the freedoms and incentives of the free enterprise system, rather than trying to cobble together a pale, ad hoc immitation of it? Because what the massive body of international scientific evidence shows is that the freest, most market-like education systems are the ones that outshine public school systems by the greatest margins.


text: Accessorize your home office or professional work space with our drafting & art store. We offer storage/organization solutions with light tables & boxes, and also help illuminate with drafting & easel lamps. Our art projectors, sets, and outdoor show set ups put professional touch (even on amateur productions). Paint like the masters with our artist easels, or draw up your plans with drafting tables and machines or drawing & painting tools. Stay precise with measuring & ruling accessories. Craft-inclined items include scrapbooking stuff and stick, cut, punch & bind products.


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Chennai Dosas: Midday buffet bonanza
Chennai Dosas announces its presence with only a makeshift banner draped in its window, underneath the sign of its predecessor, Dosa Diner in Hicksville. Bear this in mind when seeking out this Southern Indian vegetarian restaurant, which looks as though it might be a genuine dining destination.
A recent afternoon buffet lunch, at $8.95 a person, was more than just a bargain; it was a standout. Iddly, or steamed lentil doughnuts, were lighter than any I'd had in a long time. Dip one in a bowl of spicy sambar soup, and you're living large. Also on the buffet table was a version of palak paneer — spinach with house-made cheese — rich and wickedly spicy. Also, a dish you won't find on the regular menu — beetroot and carrots — which had me going back for seconds.
With all this you get a dosa or uttapam that's made to order. My lunch companion went for the Mysore masala dosa, a light lentil crepe filled with a spicy mashed potato and onion mixture. I opted for the pancake version known as an uttapam, this one made with onions, chilies and peas. It turned out to be a stellar combination of flavors and textures, the creamy potatoes mixed into the foamy-light batter, the sprightly pop of peas followed by a one-two punch from the chilies.
Sometimes, a buffet can be a tired affair. Not the case here.
Chennai Dosas is at 128 Broadway, Hicksville, 516-681-5151.


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Clementine & prosecco jellies
James Martin's glamorous and refreshingly light dessert will be right at home at a festive dinner party
Nutrition and extra info
Nutrition: per serving
- kcal115
- fat0g
- saturates0g
- carbs13g
- sugars13g
- fibre0g
- protein7g
- salt0.07g
- 7 leaves gelatine
A colourless, tasteless and odourless setting agent made from the boiled bones, skins and…
- 600ml clementine juice (from about 14 clementines)
- 300ml prosecco
Bubbling Prosecco is now one of the UK's most popular alcoholic drinks. Not all varieties…
- 1 sheet edible gold leaf (available from squires-shop.com)
Put the gelatine sheets into a bowl of cold water to soften for a few mins. Put 100ml clementine juice into a small pan and gently heat. When the gelatine feels soft and the juice is just simmering, remove the juice from the heat and squeeze out any excess water from the gelatine sheets. Drop the sheets into the hot juice and swirl to melt. Make sure there are no visible lumps of gelatine before you move onto the next stage.
Stir the hot juice into the rest of the juice with the prosecco, then transfer to a jug. Pour between 6 small glasses. Sit the jellies in a small tray or dish, cover with a sheet of cling film and chill for at least 4 hrs (or up to 48 hrs) until set.
When ready to serve, use a pair of tweezers to carefully put a piece of gold leaf on the surface of each jelly.


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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Group meetings and preventive home visits helped octogenarians maintain their health, independence and a positive outlook, according to a first-of-its-kind study in Sweden.
Gerontologist Gwen Yeo told Reuters Health she was "amazed" that researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg successfully documented what she has long suspected - health-promotion programs can postpone disease progression in older adults and keep them in relatively good shape.
Yeo, director emeritus of the Stanford School of Medicine Geriatric Education Center, was not involved in the new study published in the Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics.
It found that the health of people 80 years and older who attended group meetings or were visited at home by healthcare workers was only half as likely to deteriorate over two years as the health of older adults without the meetings or the visits.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects the population of Americans 65 years and older to double over the next 25 years. The elderly also represent a rapidly growing share of Sweden's population.
Public health nurse Lina Behm, the study's lead author and a Sahlgrenska Academy doctoral student, told Reuters Health she hopes to convince the Swedish government to offer people entering old age health-promotion programs similar to the ones used in her study.
"We want to offer these interventions to older persons, 80 plus, so the quality of their remaining years can be as good as possible," she said.
Sweden funds groups to prepare and educate new parents, and Behm said she would like to use the current study to convince the government to adopt a similar program to educate the elderly to prepare themselves for aging.
"It's not so complicated to do either of these interventions, and there are really positive results," she said.
The two-year study included 459 residents of the industrial port city of Gothenburg, Sweden's second largest city, who were at least 80 years old, living on their own and not overtly cognitively impaired.
The researchers randomly assigned participants to receive a home visit, to participate in a senior-meeting group or to be in a control group.
One-third of participants received a visit of up to two hours from a healthcare worker who offered advice about activities, meeting places, physical training, walking groups, housing adaptations and fall-prevention methods. The healthcare worker also gave the seniors contacts to help with a range of potential problems.
Meeting group participants attended four weekly two-hour sessions with five other seniors. The meetings focused on the consequences of aging and offered tools and strategies to cope with challenges.
"The participants' experiences formed the basis of the meetings," the authors write. "In contrast to traditional education, the professionals' role was to be enablers, while the participants were the experts."
Two to three weeks after the conclusion of the group meetings, a healthcare worker visited group members individually in their homes.
The control group had the same access as everyone else to Sweden's services for the elderly, including meals on wheels, help cleaning and shopping, personal-care assistance, transportation and home healthcare. But they got no special attention or visits and did not attend meetings.
The researchers used a method of rating the severity of chronic illness to look at the study participants in one-year and two-year follow-up periods. They found members of the control group were significantly more likely than the other two groups to experience disease progression.
Moreover, those who had home visits or attended group meetings reported being significantly more satisfied with their physical health after one and two years, researchers found.
Participants who attended the senior group meetings were also significantly less likely to rate their health as having deteriorated after a year.
Previous research has found that elderly people who see themselves as healthy are less likely to become depressed and more likely to live longer, Behm said.
She said group members told her that "they had learned from one another, and it affected their self esteem."
"They are getting role models and someone to share and social contacts," she said. "If they see other persons aging gracefully, I think it's motivating to be active."
Stanford gerontologist Yeo said preventive home visits are becoming more commonplace in the United States in an effort to keep people out of emergency rooms and because hospitals can be penalized for readmissions.
She has seen group meetings for specific diseases, like diabetes, but does not expect to see general health-promotion groups for seniors in the United States.
"To me, there's a real value in the group-based meetings," she said. "People have a chance to learn from each other, and sometimes elders, and I consider myself one, discount younger people's knowledge. We might say to a nurse in her 20s, 'what do you know; you've never had this arthritis.'
"But I don't see our healthcare system providing this."
Behm said she hopes that Sweden will soon offer octogenarians a choice between home-prevention visits and senior group meetings.
"I am hoping that we could offer both because some people don't like to be in a group, while some people need the social," she said. "I hope that it is possible to choose."
SOURCE: bit.ly/1fneLBo Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, online January 27, 2104.


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McManus: Attack-dog days of summer
The dog days of July were once a slow time in our presidential campaigns, a time when candidates could take vacations and voters could take a break. The party conventions were still a month or more away; aside from fundraising and backroom strategizing, there wasn't much to see.
But that quaint old calendar is gone now; no lazing by Lake Winnipesaukee allowed. This month, the presidential campaign has rampaged along at full force, fueled by millions of dollars in donations and polls that seem locked in a virtual tie.
That's how we find ourselves in midsummer arguing not over the best way to revive the economy or to fix the healthcare system but over exactly when Mitt Romney left his job at Bain Capital — was it 1999 or 2002? — and whether President Obama is dishonoring his office by playing so rough.
COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012
Those aren't the issues that will decide this election. This month's controversies are a preliminary bout, a push by each candidate to drive up the other's "negatives." But such battles have turned July into an unexpectedly important test for both sides.
What the Obama campaign is doing to Romney this month comes straight out of the textbook: If voters don't know much about your opponent — and polls show most voters know little about Romney — jump into the vacuum and define him yourself.
If your opponent is running on his record as a businessman, talk about the employees he laid off. If your opponent won't release old income tax returns, charge that he must be hiding something.
Best and worst political ads from the presidential election season
"Romney is more vulnerable than Obama because he is less known," the president's chief strategist, David Axelrod, told me in an email. "It's all new information" — to most voters, anyway.
That's why the Obama campaign has been spending millions of dollars on television advertising in swing states like Ohio and Florida at this unusually early stage of the campaign — to try to turn voters against Romney before the Republican has a chance to introduce himself properly. There's evidence that the gambit is working; in the swing states, voters are more likely to say Romney's business background is a negative, not a positive.
Initially, the Romney campaign dismissed Obama's attacks as ineffective. "They're not sticking," a Romney advisor told me in June. Besides, the last thing the GOP candidate wanted was to be drawn into an argument about his personal finances; he preferred to keep the conversation on Obama's disappointing economic record.
"If you're responding, you're losing," Romney told a Fox News interviewer. But by the end of last week, the GOP candidate decided that he needed to answer the charges and changed course, issuing a flurry of angry rejoinders and a television commercial charging that Obama wasn't telling the truth.
Who won the exchange? Obama, for now. His campaign succeeded in getting the media to pay attention to the question of whether Romney still controlled Bain Capital in 2000, when at least one of its companies moved some U.S. jobs to Mexico. And as long as Romney resists releasing his income tax returns for the years before 2010, he'll remain vulnerable to the charge that he's hiding something, even if it's only a string of years in which he made dizzyingly high amounts of money and paid impressively low tax rates.
But the Romney campaign also survived an important test — a test of self-restraint. During the primary campaign, Romney occasionally got rattled and uttered a memorable gaffe when he was questioned about his personal wealth. One of the Obama campaign's not-very-secret goals was to see if they could bait him into doing it again.
"He's gone two months without saying anything stupid," noted Eddie Mahe Jr., a former deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. "He hasn't screwed up, and that's important."
Some Republicans may want more fire from Romney, but one advisor told me less is more. "Romney's campaign is risk-averse because a challenger to a weak incumbent needs to be acceptable" to as many voters as possible, he said. "That, with a weak economy, is his best chance of winning."
Still, Romney needs to change the subject. He could do that by naming his choice for vice president early. (Betting has swung toward Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, a conservative with an appealing blue-collar life story.) He could unveil a slimmed-down version of his unwieldy 59-point economic plan, as some advisors have proposed. Or maybe just take a trip to Israel, Poland and the London Olympics, as he plans to do at the end of the month.
Obama needs to turn a corner as well — to convince voters that he has a plan for his second term that will work better than his first. He has plenty of proposals, of course, laid out in budgets and State of the Union speeches. But at the moment, his campaign is mostly about castigating Romney and Republicans in Congress. "He needs to move from the past to the future," advises Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who helped run John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004.
In other words, enough with the negatives. Can we stipulate that neither one of these guys is Abraham Lincoln, and move on?
Patience, their strategists say. The main events and the serious content are still to come: the conventions, the debates, the frenzied home stretch in the fall.
In the meantime, driving up the other guy's negatives with a flurry of punches is what it's all about.
Election day is less than four months away, but it's going to feel like a long time.


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Catherine Alexander donated 2019-12-03 08:39:26 -0500
The North Caorlinians Against Gun Violence Education Fund works daily to prevent death and injury due to needless gun violence and preventable accidents. We are the only state based organization dedicated to passing sensible gun violence prevention measures and fighting back against those who attempt to strip our state of safe and sensible gun legislation. Our work makes a difference because of passionate people like you. NCGV is a supporter run organization. Your support ensures that NCGV continues to work for the safety of North Carolina citizens.
Donations to NCGV are 100% tax-deductible. To make a donation via mail: PO Box 51565 Durham, NC 27717.
You can join the Lisa Price Gun Violence Prevention Circle by contributing the following amount over a year.
- Sustainer: $2500 and above
- Advocate: $1500-$2499
- Patron: $1000-$1499
- Protector: $750-$999
- Benefactor: $250-$749
If you want to support the new 501(c)(4) gun violence prevention organization that is making a difference in this election, please donate to the NCGV Action Fund.
Catherine Alexander signed Ban Military-Style Assault Weapons 2018-02-19 21:18:23 -0500
Ban Military-Style Assault Weapons
As you likely know by now, the Florida high school shooter, the Las Vegas shooter, the Orlando shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter and many others, used military-style assault weapon. These weapons are designed to kill as many people as possible as efficiently as possible. They should not be available to civilians.
It is well past time for the Congress the United States to act.
Please tell our Senators to ban military-style assault weapons now. Add your name to the petition today.702 signatures
Dear Senators Burr and Tillis:
Yet again the nation faces a tragic massacre helped along by easy and inappropriate access to military-style assault weapons. This time it is 17 dead at a Parkland, Florida high school. Before that it was 58 victims in Las Vegas, 26 killed in Sutherland Springs.
Military-style semi-automatic assault weapons are designed to efficiently kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time available. There is absolutely no reason for assault rifles, assault pistols, and assault shotguns to be sold on the civilian market.
Congress did not act after Aurora, Sandy Hook, Orlando, Las Vegas, Southerland Springs and many other devastating mass shootings. It's high time Congress stopped sacrificing lives and work to address this crisis before even more lives are lost.
We ask that you act now to prevent more carnage by supporting an effective ban on the civilian use of these weapons. Military-style assault weapons, high capacity magazines and bump stocks do not belong in our homes, our streets, our schools, our malls, our movie theaters, our places of worship, or in any of our other gathering places. It is well past time to act but it's not too late to spare more Americans from death at the hands of killers using these weapons of mass destruction.
Thank you.
Catherine Alexander signed up on Action Alert Sign-Up 2016-11-13 19:50:03 -0500
Action Alert Sign-Up
Sign-up here for action alerts, current events, and other ways to support the work of North Carolinians Against Gun Violence. Together we can end gun violence and make North Carolina safe for everyone!
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"Spiel 'n Spiel" New Member Bonspiel (open)Saturday, October 19, 2019
Chair: Carol Jones
Registration: contact Carol Jones by Oct. 14th
Participant release form
This is the perfect first event for new members to stretch their curling legs and get to know league chairs and fellow members. It's a great warm-up for current members. New members are assigned to teams with current members. Open to new and current members 18 and older. Dress code is casual.
- 3:00 PM: A "spiel" on the club (slang for telling everyone about the wonderful things the club has to offer, Q&A on bar, food, pets, children, hours of operation, practice and lots more).
- 4:00 PM: A "spiel" on the ice (curling slang for curling games). A four-end game, just long enough to get people their ice legs back aer a long hot summer.
- 5:30 PM: Prizes and Awards. There is no charge for this event.
- 6:00 PM: Welcome Reception. New people have a chance to meet members, league chairs, various committee members, board members. And members get a chance to put faces with names they have heard. Appetizers and cash bar.
No charge. RSVP to Carol Jones by Sunday, October 13.


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Welcome to the Mix96 What's On Guide
The Mix96 What's On Guide is one of the most comprehensive list of events and gigs in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire and the surrounding area.
Charity and non-profit events can submit a listing totally free, and commercial events can also post an event for a small fee.
Remember, if it's on our website, our presenters will be telling the whole of the county about your event!
No items found.


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The chairman of the Republican Party in Maricopa County rejected a call for him to resign Thursday for comparing Gov. Jan Brewer to Judas because she wants to expand the state's Medicaid plan, but he said he didn't mean to disrespect the governor or her office.
A.J. LaFaro said in an email to The Associated Press that he didn't intend to offend anyone at a House hearing on the expansion plan Wednesday evening. He called the reaction to his remark about Jesus' betrayer a "classic example of things getting blown out of proportion," and said his comments reflected his passion on the subject.
House speaker Andy Tobin said LaFaro stepped over the line from impassioned debate and should apologize and step down. Tobin and Brewer are both Republicans.
LaFaro gave lengthy testimony during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Brewer's proposed expansion of the state's Medicaid program, laying out his opposition and that of fellow GOP committee leaders. He said the governor's decision to embrace a signature component of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law was a mistake, and that states should reject Medicaid expansion because it eventually will consume a huge chunk of the federal budget.
He ended his testimony by saying "Jesus had Judas, Republicans have Governor Brewer."
Tobin said Thursday there's no place for those kinds of comments in the state Capitol.
"I think we all should be treating each other with respect," Tobin said. "The governor has a different viewpoint. It's unfair for someone who's not in her place to insult, and this is not a place to do that, and I won't have it in our building, and I think he owes the governor a great apology."
Brewer surprised many when she embraced the expansion during January's state of the state address, coming after years of battling against the health care law. She has since gone on a statewide effort to drum up support, holding news conferences and enlisting business leaders and members of the medical community.
Still, she faces a tough road in the Legislature to enactment.
The governor's plan calls for an assessment on hospitals to bring in about $250 million a year to pay for the state's share of an expanded Medicaid program. The state can expect $1.6 billion a year in new federal funding, freeing health care providers of hundreds of millions of dollars in uncompensated care. The expansion would add at least 300,000 poor Arizonans to the nearly 1.3 million already on the plan, called the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS.
On Thursday, LaFaro issued a long statement, then responded to a follow-up email by saying he wasn't resigning and neither should Brewer.
"Being passionate and having the conviction to stand up for what you believe in doesn't merit resignation," LaFaro wrote. "I think this is a classic example of things getting blown out of proportion. We are all human and sometimes mistakes happen."
Brewer spokesman Matthew Benson said the governor has been around long enough to know people will sometimes call her names and act irrationally.
"She's not concerned about it," Benson said. "She's concerned about getting her Medicaid plan over the finish line, and she's not wasting any time over a party functionary nobody had heard of before Wednesday evening."


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Americans Underestimate Government School Spending
In addition to showing that American parents favor educational choice and are skeptical of Common Core, the new national survey on education policy from the Friedman Foundation demonstrates that Americans still vastly underestimate how much is spent per pupil at government‐run schools.
According to the latest National Center for Education Statistics data, the average total per pupil expenditure in U.S. public schools was $12,136 in the 2009-10 school year. However, 63 percent of respondents thought that government schools spend less than $12,000 per pupil, including 49 percent who estimated that they spend less than $8,000 per pupil. Those findings are consistent with the 2013 Education Next survey, in which the average guess was $6,680 per pupil, barely more than half of what is actually spent.
Like the Education Next survey, the Friedman survey asked respondents whether they thought public school spending was too high, about right, or too low, after first randomly assigning the respondents into two groups: one that first heard a prompt explaining that the average U.S. public school spends $10,658 per pupil (this is average operating expenditure per pupil), while the other group was not given any prompt. Whereas 56 percent of the uninformed group thought spending was too low, only 47 percent of the informed group agreed. (It's likely that the shift would have been even more pronounced had the Friedman Foundation cited the higher total per pupil expenditures in the prompt rather than the partial figure. Indeed, a previous Friedman survey found that the public prefers to know the total figure.) Those findings are consistent with the 2013 Education Next survey, which found that 63 percent of uninformed respondents wanted to increase public school spending but only 43 percent of informed respondents agreed.
At an American Enterprise Institute event discussing the findings, AEI's Ramesh Ponnuru observed that politicians could loudly promise to spend $9,000 per pupil and most voters would think that they were calling for an increase in school funding rather than a significant cut.


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Xavier High School
It is best to see my work as a tale of the rise and fall of rock and roll in the 20th century, expressed through vague mythology and esoteric rock imagery derived from a range of genres. There is a particular reference to groups who strove against or were overcome by the eventual industrialisation of the music industry. It is for those who remember the joy of that first dusty vinyl they bought at a garage sale. It is an attempt to capture that feeling and it is a tribute to the loss of that feeling through industrialisation.


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HARRISBURG, PA — The Pennsylvania House passed a bill in mid-June that won't increase or expand the state's sales and use tax, which would have added a 6 percent sales tax on health and athletic club services.
A second bill had proposed a sales tax on health and athletic club services. However, as part of a campaign to defeat the proposed sales tax, more than 700 constituents and small business owners from across the state wrote to their representatives asking them to defeat the tax.
The International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA) opposed the proposed sales tax, likening it to a penalty on healthy behavior.
"We encouraged state legislators to send the right message to their constituents — to encourage them to make physical activity a part of their lives," said Helen Durkin, IHRSA's director of public policy.
The bill that passed the House does not impose taxes on club services. It had previously passed the Senate and awaits the governor's signature to become law.


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Game at 2:05 CT. Free webcast at whitesox.com: White Sox left-hander John Danks steps to the hill for his second turn through the rotation today against the Colorado Rockies on a free exclusive webcast. Watch | Gameday
March 8, 2011
White Sox vs. Rockies on 2:05 pm CT; free webcast
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While many TRON fans are still waiting (possibly in vain) for a sequel to TRON: Legacy, Disney XD is bringing fresh TRON goodness right into the comfort of your own living room. The animated TRON: Uprising series doesn't debut until June 7th, the first episode has been put online for those that are eager to get a peek at what's in store. I'm not exactly the biggest TRON fan, but I've heard really great things about Uprising. From the bit of this episode that I watched, the animation looks pretty nifty and I'm sure fans of the films will enjoy visiting the TRON world through a weekly series. The story takes place between the events of TRON and TRON: Legacy.
Hit the jump to watch the full episode. The voice cast includes Elijah Wood, Lance Henriksen, Mandy Moore, Nate Corddry, Paul Reubens, and Bruce Boxleitner.
Here's a synopsis for TRON: Uprising:
Beck is a young mechanic living in Argon City, a growing metropolis in a far off corner of the grid that has just been occupied by General Tesler, a henchman of the notorious Clu. After his best friend Bodhi is ruthlessly derezzed by Clu's army, Beck seeks justice for his lost friend and launches a crusade against the regime. His rebellion captures the attention of Tron, the greatest warrior The Grid has ever known, who sees the potential in Beck and trains him to be his successor. Labeled with the moniker of The Renegade, Beck sparks a revolution to fight for the freedom of The Grid.


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This site is the archived OWASP Foundation Wiki and is no longer accepting Account Requests.
To view the new OWASP Foundation website, please visit https://owasp.org
Top 10 2010-What's Next For Developers
NOTE: THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION. Please visit the OWASP Top 10 project page to find the latest edition.
|← A10-Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
Top 10 Risks
|What's Next For Verifiers →
Whether you are new to web application security or are already very familiar with these risks, the task of producing a secure web application or fixing an existing one can be difficult. If you have to manage a large application portfolio, this can be daunting.
Many Free and Open OWASP Resources Are Available
To help organizations and developers reduce their application security risks in a cost effective manner, OWASP has produced numerous free and open resources that you can use to address application security in your organization. The following are some of the many resources OWASP has produced to help organizations produce secure web applications. On the next page, we present additional OWASP resources that can assist organizations in verifying the security of their applications.
|To produce a secure web application, you must define what secure means for that application. OWASP recommends you use the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS), as a guide for setting the security requirements for your application(s). If you're outsourcing, consider the OWASP Secure Software Contract Annex.
|Rather than retrofitting security into your applications, it is far more cost effective to design the security in from the start. OWASP recommends the OWASP Developer's Guide, as a good starting point for guidance on how to design security in from the beginning.
|Building strong and usable security controls is exceptionally difficult. Providing developers with a set of standard security controls radically simplifies the development of secure applications. OWASP recommends the OWASP Enterprise Security API (ESAPI) project as a model for the security APIs needed to produce secure web applications. ESAPI provides reference implementations in Java, .NET, PHP, Classic ASP, Python, and Cold Fusion.
|To improve the process your organization follows when building such applications, OWASP recommends the OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM). This model helps organizations formulate and implement a strategy for software security that is tailored to the specific risks facing their organization.
|The OWASP Education Project provides training materials to help educate developers on web application security and has compiled a large list of OWASP Educational Presentations. For hands-on learning about vulnerabilities, try OWASP WebGoat. To stay current, come to an OWASP AppSec Conference, OWASP Conference Training, or local OWASP Chapter meetings.
There are numerous additional OWASP resources available for your use. Please visit the OWASP Projects page, which lists all of the OWASP projects, organized by the release quality of the projects in question (Release Quality, Beta, or Alpha). Most OWASP resources are available on our wiki, and many OWASP documents can be ordered in hardcopy.
|← A10-Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
Top 10 Risks
|What's Next For Verifiers →


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Medal of Honor Multiplayer E3 2010 Preview
The multiplayer portion of Electronic Arts' Medal of Honor reboot is veing handled by Battlefield series creator DICE and use the Frostbite engine used in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. At first glance, the MoH multiplayer seems like a mod or re-skinning of
The two beta maps exhibit this duality. The first, Helmand Valley, feels very much like a Battlefield map. When played in the "Combat Mission" gametype, which has attacking players destroying objectives to open up new areas of the map to strike, it feels like BF:BC2. Teamwork is required to break the defense and respawns keep people on the frontlines.
The other map, Kabul City Ruins, is straight out of MW2 with infantry combat taking place in a bombed out city. Snipers hide in buildings, while other forces flank around the sides. There are no bases and the spawns rotate around the map as one team makes a push and succeeds. Regenerating health and ammo boxes replace the class system from BF:BC2.
Weapons can be customized to some degree and players will earn defensive or offensive abilities as they rack up kills, though rewards are granted upon hitting different points thresholds. This is a subtle change from straight killstreaks, but ultimately feels the same. Players must choose between one or the other. One of the offensive abilities, the Tomahawk missile, is a carbon copy of MW2's Predator missile.
My concern with MoH multiplayer is that it is too set directly between BF:BC2 and MW2. That is, it isn't as featured or deep as either of those games, instead sacrificing depth and creativity for a mixture of the two. Missing features from BF:BC2 include enemy spotting, vehicles, and classes. From MW2, perks are nowhere to be found and the game doesn't feel as crisp.
The game is still in development and this is just the beta, but it would appear that having DICE contribute the multiplayer game could be an attempt to quickly get the game to market before Call of Duty: Black Ops. In its current state, it feels like a step back from BF:BC2, sadly simplified.
Medal of Honor is due out on October 12 for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. The multiplayer beta is currently running on the PC and PlayStation 3. The Xbox 360 beta has been delayed, but should kick off soon.
[Watch the Shacknews E3 2010 page to follow all our coverage of this year's show. You can also subscribe to it with your favorite RSS reader.]
Not too sure that the world needs another modern warfare shooter already. We already have two pretty solid franchises going right now. Basically asking consumers to spend $50-60 again for something they probably already have. I don't think that something like this, that is more of the same, can really succeed in the marketplace right now. We need something fresh. It is a shame.


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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new case report from U.S doctors suggests that men who use home oxygen therapy should consider a clean-shaven look to reduce their risk of serious facial burns.
"If you've ever tried to start a campfire, you always start with some dry little twigs and once that starts - and that's kind of the mustache - then that oxygen tubing lights on fire, it's like a blow torch shooting up their nose," said Dr. Andrew Greenlund of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "So, if we can prevent it, it would be good."
People with lung conditions that impair their ability to get enough oxygen from normal air may use home oxygen therapy, which delivers a steady stream of oxygen-rich air from a portable metal tank through tubing that fits into the nostrils.
After noticing that three of his patients, all with mustaches, had suffered facial burns while using their home oxygen therapy, Greenlund and his team decided to investigate.
"We looked through all the literature out there in the last 20 years and no one had noted that more people with facial hair and home oxygen were having burns than people without facial hair," he told Reuters Health.
Narrowing their search to their own institution, the doctors identified nine patients who had suffered home oxygen therapy-related burns and eight of those men had mustaches.
Greenlund said that NASA has demonstrated how flammable human hair is under normal conditions and how it ignites much more readily in the presence of higher oxygen concentrations. But no one had looked at the issue in the context of home oxygen therapy.
To test their theory that facial hair places oxygen therapy users at a higher risk for burns, the researchers set up mannequins with and without human hair mustaches, outfitted them with the nasal tubing and exposed them to a spark.
The tubing on the mustached models ignited while those without mustaches did not, suggesting that concentrated oxygen together with kindling in the form of facial hair is a dangerously flammable combination.
According to the report published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 1.5 million people in the United States use home-oxygen therapy, and worldwide the numbers are growing as smoking rates increase, leading to lung disease.
"Since you can modify that risk by getting rid of the facial hair it seemed like a reasonable thing to look into to decrease the risk of the burns," Greenlund said.
The American Thoracic Society advises persons using home oxygen therapy to keep the tubing as well as the oxygen tank at least six feet away from an open flame, and to never smoke while using the device.
The poly-vinyl tubing that patients use is extremely flammable, said Greenlund, so avoiding sparks is key. He noted that most of the patients who suffered burns were grinding metal at the time, which could have been a source of sparks.
"The best thing to do if your tubing catches on fire is to get it off quickly," he added.
He thinks that another solution might be to change the material that the tubing is made of so that it doesn't burn as easily.
If culture and religion allow, then shaving facial hair would be the number one preventive measure to take, Greenlund advises. But if a man decides to keep his facial hair, then using water-based hair products and avoiding those that are alcohol- or oil-based could also help reduce the risk.
He pointed out that while the degree of the burns varies, they can be very serious and a few of the individuals who suffered facial burns had to be put on a ventilator as their burns healed.
"One of my patients said it was like looking hell in the face, so it can be pretty traumatic and it's life-threatening," he said.
SOURCE: bit.ly/1kdZCWs Mayo Clinic Proceedings, online June 22, 2014.


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One of the tools that Red Gate Software makes is SQL Source Control. It's a plug in to SSMS that allows you to hook your database up to version control. I've used it a few times in the past in conjunction with Subversion to demo the product. However I hadn't really used it for my own scripts since it's primarily a single server system and not distributed. My own demos were on VMs with limited connectivity to the world.
A few weeks back, I was flipping through the https://www.simple-talk.com/Simple Talk newsletter, and saw an article on Continuous Integration for SQL Server using Red Gate Tools, Atlassian Bamboo, and Github. I've had many people over the last few years ask me about Git support for SQL Source Control and I was curious to see how well we supported things. I read the article and started downloading things.
The first thing I downloaded was GitHub for Windows. I installed it and wasn't thrilled to see it not working. However what was unclear in the article and the installation was that this is just a GUI for your Git installation. Since I hadn't installed Git, I needed to do that. Once I had done that, and set up a Github account, things worked fine.
I have numerous databases that I use for talks, but I usually create and destroy them with scripts during the talks. Not quite the way that SQL Source Control is designed to work. It works with objects, not scripts. However I wanted to test things, so I decided to build a database with the objects in it already. I wasn't sure this would work for demos, but it would be a good test.
As you can see above, there are a few objects in my database.
My next step was to pick a place on my local drive where I could store my Git data. Since I do a lot from Management Studio, and use quite a few VMs, I wanted a standard location I could use easily and chose a folder under my SSMS installation.
Once this was setup, I created a new repository on my drive.
This was the place I'd keep all my code. With a free GitHub account, you can't keep your code private, but that's OK for this project since I give all my code away after talks.
Once I'd created this, Git put the folder on my drive.
Inside the folder was nothing, just a few Git files.
And in my Github interface, there was nothing to commit.
The next step was to link this with Git. After selecting my database in the Object Explorer, I switched over to the SQL Source Control tab to link my database to source control. I entered the path of my Git folder (from above) and selected Git as my VCS.
I chose a dedicated database, meaning this is just my database. The Shared database model can work, but I don't like it for teams, or even solo.
Once this was done, I could see my database linked in SSMS.
I clicked the "Commit Changes" tab, and could see my three objects listed there as new items to commit.
If you have an existing database, this is the situation you'll find yourself in most of the time. You link it, and commit all the changes. Once you enter a comment (please enter real comments you'll understand), and press Commit, the objects are added to your folder. If I look at the folder, I see more stuff:
Only a few folders have objects, and those contain the .sql files for those objects.
If I look at Github, I see my comment and the changes are committed, but unsynced. If I press the "publish" button at the top, these are sent to Github.
That's it. Any changes I make to objects, which I'll show in another post, will commit to Git, and I can sync them to GitHub.
Come learn more about these topics on the SQL in the City 2013 tour.


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THE SQL Server Blog Spot on the Web
30 months after the LINQ book based on .NET 3.5, it is now available the Programming Microsoft LINQ in Microsoft .NET Framework 4!
I wrote this book with Paolo Pialorsi and we updated existing content adding several chapters.
This is the list of chapters:
Programming Microsoft LINQ in .NET 4
If you look at the previous edition, you will find a few chapters are missing. The content of most of them have been simply moved into other chapters (in particular, the LINQ Data Binding includes information about LINQ usage with ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Forms). We had to remove the two appendixes about the new language features introduced in C# 3 and Visual Basic 2008 such as Lambda Expressions and Anonymous Types. We hadn't space (there are a lot of new pages about LINQ and Entity Framework) and in general we thought that these concepts should be now well known by .NET programmers. Or, at least, there are now many C# and Visual Basic books that cover these new syntaxes.
I see that your book is already available on Safari. Yet I have already read the following book:
LINQ in Action
By: Fabrice Marguerie; Steve Eichert; Jim Wooley
What shall I learn from your book if I am quite familiar with the contents of "LINQ in Action"?
LINQ in Action doesn't cover all the content that are new in .NET 4 (it was on .NET 3.5, like our previous book).
Looking at the previous list, these chapters are surely not covered there: 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18 and 19
Hot it helps!
The link seems to go to a Excel power pivot book for me ;-)
JL: I just fixed the link, thanks!
Began reading. Thanks!


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This is the second in series of posts on the work I'm doing to bring the Google Ajax APIs and Dojo Ajax Toolkit together. The first post was Google And Dojo, Sitting in a Tree, which you can read for some background.
I have submitted a new data store to the DojoX project, dojox.data.GoogleFeedStore, which makes it possible to access any RSS or Atom feed, anywhere, directly from your own web page. Simply pass the URL of the feed to the GoogleFeedStore, and it will return it to you using the dojo.data.Read API.
var store = new dojox.data.GoogleFeedStore();
onComplete: function(items) {
dojo.forEach(items, "alert('Got feed entry with title ' + this.getValue(item, 'title'))", store);
count: 10
This will retrieve the first 10 entries in my blogs feed, and alert the title of each.
The huge advantage of this is that you no longer need any server side redirects to access RSS and Atom feeds from your own website. This Google service is the basis for Google Reader and iGoogle.
If you want to access an Atom feed from your own web server, you can also use the dojox.data.AtomReadStore that I wrote earlier. However, this is only useful if you have direct access to the Atom XML document using Ajax, and due to browser security issues, you can only load these documents from the web server hosting the web page. This new GoogleFeedStore removes that restriction, and has the added advantage that it also works with RSS.
Check out the demo page to get a feel for it (available in the May 6th nightlies), and there should be an example up on the Dojo Feature Explorer quite soon too.
As before, a big thanks to Google for providing such a cool service.


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Creamy curried carrot & butter bean soup
Nutrition and extra info
- Vegetarian
Nutrition: per serving
- kcal254
- fat6g
- saturates2g
- carbs36g
- sugars18g
- fibre12g
- protein13g
- salt1.8g
- 2 tbsp sunflower oil
Sunflower oil
Sunflower oil is made from pressing sunflower seeds and extracting the oil. It's usually…
- 2 onions, chopped
Onions are endlessly versatile and an essential ingredient in countless recipes. Native to Asia…
- 1 tsp turmeric
Turmeric is a fragrant, bright golden-yellow root that is most commonly seen and used dried and…
- 1 tsp ground ginger
- 1 tbsp ground coriander
- 1 tbsp medium curry powder
- 1¼kg carrot, 1kg/2lb 4oz roughly sliced, rest coarsely grated
The carrot, with its distinctive bright orange colour, is one of the most versatile root…
- 3 x 400g cans butter beans, drained and rinsed
- 1.2l vegetable stock
- 400ml whole milk
- snipped chives, if you like, to serve, plus 2 crusty loaves
Put the oil and onions in the biggest saucepan or casserole you have and soften for 10 mins. Stir in the spices and cook for 2 mins, then add the sliced carrots with half the beans and the vegetable stock. Bring to a simmer, then cover and cook for 15-20 mins until the carrots are tender.
Whizz the soup to a purée with a hand blender, or purée in batches in a blender or food processor. Tip it back into the pan (pour it through a sieve or a colander if you like), and stir in the remaining beans and grated carrot with 500ml hot water. Bring back to a simmer, then cover and cook gently for 10 mins.
Stir in the milk and season to taste, then keep on a very gentle heat until needed. If you like, snip a few chives over and serve with crusty bread.


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I see them now. You sure you got your math right? 19.5/16 is 1.21875, but the ratios you're using come out to 1.1768, which is 20/17.
Here's where I'm at:
I think I'm pretty happy with this for portrait:
Your design is nice! I never needed the volume adjustment, so I didn't bother including it in portrait. But if it becomes handy for you, then your repositioning is well done.


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Beach and Summer Shoes
$84 – neimanmarcus.com
$98 – sperrytopsider.com
£135 – houseoffraser.co.uk
June 19, 2012 Posted by michaelclogs | Uncategorized | Dune, fashion, high heel sandals, MICHAEL Michael Kors, polyvore, sexy shoes, Sperry Top-Sider, style | Leave a comment
Would You Wear It: Cut-Out One Piece
June 19, 2012 Posted by michaelclogs | Uncategorized | Agent Provocateur, Alejandro Ingelmo, ANNIE, ASOS, Atlantis, Banana Republic, bathing suit, bathing suits, BCBG Max Azria, bikini, bikinis, black, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, boticca, Brahmin, Bric's, Burberry, Calla, Carven, Chan Luu, Christian Dior, Christian Louboutin, clothing, Clube Bossa, CZ by Kenneth Jay Lane, Dannijo, Destined, Diane von Furstenberg, Dolce Vita, Dorothy Perkins, Effy Collection, Elemis, Elise Ryan, Emilio Pucci, Eugenia Kim, fashion, Gemma Redux, Giuseppe Zanotti, Gucci, H&M, Hat Attack, Havaianas, Hedi Slimane, House of Harlow 1960, Illamasqua, IRO, Jaeger, jimmy choo, Juicy Couture, jungle, Kenneth Jay Lane, Kiehl's, Ksubi, L'Agence, Lauren Ralph Lauren, Mango, Mara Hoffman, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Marc Jacobs, Matthew Williamson, mayo, Melissa Odabash, MIA, Michael Kors, Miss Selfridge, Monsoon, Mulberry, Nancy Gonzalez, Narciso Rodriguez, NARS Cosmetics, Nexus, nina ricci, Pachacuti, Pamela Love, polyvore, Ralph Lauren Collection, Ray-Ban, Reverie, Sephora Collection, Seychelles, Stella & Dot, style, summer, swim, swim suits, swimsuit, swimsuits, swimwear, The Row, tops, tropical, Undrest, Une, Velvet, Victoria's Secret, www.allyouneedisstyle.com, Yves Saint Laurent, Zac Posen, Zadig & Voltaire, ZEKI | Leave a comment
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- Lovely Red Shoes in Fashion November 17, 2013If we're sure of anything, it's that Claire Danes knows the power of bold color. Not only did the star arrive to The Late Show with David Letterman yesterday sporting new red locks, but she also debuted a head-to-toe red ensemble. Before we get into all the different ways you can wear red, let's talk about the psychology of this color, […]
- Sanita Styles August 25, 2013The anatomically contoured footbed supports the foot atop the flexible bass wood heel and platform. The Sanita Ibi sandal is finished with an inclined forefoot to enhance forward momentum and a rubber sole for shock absorption and traction you can rely on.
- shoes galleries for this fall 2013 July 21, 2013This is a list of shoes galleries for this fall 2013. From Glamour Magazine's Web site 41 of the Best Shoes From Fall 2013 Fashion Week From Harper's Bazaar Web site Fall 2013 Accessories – Fall Shoes and Bags 2013 From W Magazine Web site We Love: The Ten Hottest Shoes of Fall 2013 ChineseLaundry.com According to Neiman Marcus Shoes – Fall 2013 – […]
- 16 Sexy High Heel Pumps by Pleaser July 14, 2013Heel Height: Approx. 5" Tall. This classic pump features a pointed toe. Slip On Dress Pump. Single Sole Mid Heel. T-Strap D'Orsay Style Pump. This classic pump features a T-strap. Single Sole Pointed Toe. Adjustable Buckle Closure Ankle Strap. Devilishly fun. Seductively sexy. Mischievously playful. This high heel platform shoe has a patent leather upper […] […]
- Summer Sandals for Target July 5, 2013Great Style can be found inexpensively and Target is one of those places with there Mossimo Supply Co. There size seem to be a bit large. I wear a size 10 and I am actually wearing a 9.5 in these shoes. Women's Mossimo Supply Co. Wandy Wood Heeled Strappy Sandal – White Women's Mossimo Supply […]
- Sexy Michael Kor Sandals July 2, 2013Michael Kors Ivana Sandal Platforms Sandals Shoes Ivory MICHAEL Michael Kors Women's Tracey Open-Toe Pump KORS Michael Kors Women's Sondra Ankle-Strap Sandal KORS Michael Kors Women's Rhonda Ankle-Strap Sandal KORS Michael Kors Women's Jove Sandal MICHAEL Michael Kors Women's Heidi Platform Sandal Michael Michael Kors Women's Berkley T-Strap Sandal KORS Mic […]
- Sexy Michael Antonio Shoes June 30, 2013Bare your feet in Michael Antonio sexy sandals. Michael Antonio Women's Katniss Open-Toe Pump. Easy to wear for most occasions. Michael Antonio Women's Garrick Wedge Sandal. Sexy strappy and casual Michael Antonio Women's Tamaya Platform Sandal. Michael Antonio Women's Torio-Pat Platform Sandal. Platform to help your sexy strut Michael Antonio Women's Lovi […]
- The Great Shoe Sale In Cloverdale BC Canada June 5, 2013I found these to ladies who are passionate about fashion shopping and saving money. You can get saving of up to 80% off normal prices with them. Leslie and Alyson are the Designer Discount Divas. They shop to find real designer product at prices that even wholesalers wish they could. The best part is they […]
- Not Rated Shoes May 4, 2013I love my Not Rated shoes. They are stylish and make my feet and outfit look the absolute best. If you wear a pair of shoes the add to you walk Not Rated are those shoes. I have had people stop me to ask if could teach the to walk in heels. What great brand […]
- Artistic Boot March 24, 2013I found this boot in the Toronto Star. I think it is fanastic even thought I would never actually wear. It is a great artisic design. Look closely to see the art work that Dolce Gabanna has put into this boot. This is what the Star had to say: This is a boot that […]
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text: Just Eat It: Summer Bean Salad By Stiff My inspiration for cooking can come from a variety of things. Sometimes I get inspired by having a dish from a restaurant that I've never had before and try to replicate it at home. Sometimes inspiration comes from recipes I may see on television. I mostly get inspired by the certain items I see in the grocery store or farmer's market. Sometimes I fail at the outcome of what I'm making and sometimes I succeed. I just like to try new things and expand my horizons when it comes to testing new ingredients or cooking methods. James, my fiancé is a great guinea pig. He will generally eat whatever I make and is honest about how the food tastes. Unlike James, I myself am much more critical about how my food turns out. Summer Bean Salad 1 Can of garbanzo beans 1/2 English cucumber 1 M. Tomato 1 Stalk of celery 1/2 c. Crumbled Feta 1 Lemon 1 Handful of dill weed 1/3 c. Olive oil 3 T. Red wine vinegar 1 t. Garlic powder 1 t. Onion powder Salt and Pepper Serving size: 4 Wash all veggies. Drain and rinse beans and add to large mixing bowl. Chop celery into small bite size pieces and add to mixing bowl. Halve the cucumber length wise and then again so now they're in quarters. Chop the long quartered pieces into smaller bite size pieces and add to mixing bowl. Core the stem off of the tomato and cut in half from the top of the tomato, down. Then slice orange like slices of the tomatoes. Remove the seeds and discard. Cut tomato into smaller bite size pieces and add to mixing bowl. Finely chop the dill weed and add to mixing bowl. Add juice of one lemon, olive oil and vinegar to the bowl and mix until well combined. Add garlic powder, onion powder, salt and pepper and combine thoroughly. Taste and add more olive oil if it is too citrusy or vinegary. Once you've reached desired taste for salad, add feta and mix into salad. Plate and serve. (Stiff is an amateur home cook and food blogger. Stiff can be found at a grocery store, Instagram @stifferoni and Tumblr: http://stiffers.tumblr.com/.) Related TAM Blog Articles: Just Eat It: Chicken Salad Just Eat It: Beef Stroganoff With Orecchiette Just Eat It: Laotian Chicken Noodle Soup Just Eat It: Salsa Verde (Mild) Just Eat It: Asian Meatball Skewers Appetizer With Cilantro Lime Dressing Just Eat It: Sausage Gravy on Toast


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7,500 residents, an abundance of nature and one of the world's leading development centres: welcome to Weissach, the birthplace of all
Motorsports history isn't written in a couple of hours, days or even weeks. Motorsports history has to develop. Or be developed – by our engineers, for example. With enthusiasm and many years of experience. Concentrated in one place: the Motorsport Centre Flacht.Read more
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text: All Oregon Tech degree programs, regardless of specialty, prepare students for roles as employees, citizens and humanists through required and elective general-education courses. These courses, integrated with the major's technical courses, ensure that graduates have made progress toward becoming educated persons and provide a foundation for lifelong learning. General education courses are organized within the curriculum in such a manner that students will acquire knowledge, abilities and appreciation as integrated elements of the education experience.


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The Cider Press: Farnum Hill Ciders in Lebanon, New Hampshire
Call it an "epiphany" cider: a single sip that washes away all existing notions and opens us up to what cider could be. For me, that sip came from Farnum Hill.
Since the 1980s, Farnum Hill Ciders has been at the forefront of the American cider revival. Their commitment to revitalizing the growth of heirloom apples in the United States is unsurpassed, and the nuanced beverages they produce are a reflection of that commitment. We recently had a chance to chat with Louisa Spencer, the self proclaimed 'mom' in this mom and pop outfit.
How did Farnum Hill get started making cider?
Way back in the 70's we began to see that growing the world's best McIntosh apples and hand-packing them for wholesale was becoming unprofitable. Shipments of Granny Smith and other excellent dessert apples from southern hemisphere countries began to push New England storage Macs aside on grocery shelves.
In the 80's we started grafting and testing unusual "heirloom" varieties. During that period Steve (Wood, Louisa's husband and co-proprietor of Farnum Hill Ciders) also started visiting cider growers in England...Cider seemed economically viable and, to a wine fan, also fascinating for both its horticulture and production methods. But to make the best possible fermented ciders it looked necessary to get away from eating apples and grow some varieties that taste truly terrible fresh.
The crucial bad-tasting element seemed to be the tannic content in bittersweet and bittersharp apple varieties grown commercially in Britain and France. These apples give the body and structure that made big British brands more satisfying than the 'six-pack ciders' beginning to appear in the States.
What's New On Serious Eats
So how did you transition from an edible apple orchard to a cider one?
We began growing heirloom specialty varieties and then cider apples in hopes of remaining a wholesale orchard, which is naturally much larger than the retail-and-pick-your-own operations that many New England orchard businesses have become. After testing many cider varieties for hardiness and quality by grafting scions to existing trees at our place, Steve planted ten acres of inedible fruit in the 80's, then found a partner willing to help buy more ground on the same ridge along the Connecticut in order to plant many more acres. The idea was that we would learn to make excellent fermented ciders and that at the same time others might become interested in cidermaking, and would discover that they'd need our apples to do their best work! And that's how it has turned out, though not as fast as we once dreamed.
What makes Farnum Hill Ciders different from other ciders on the market today?
We not only grow the tannic, complex cider varieties needed for satisfying fermentations, but we also found that a few of the heirloom eating apples that we planted for wholesale can 'cross over' into cider. Esopus Spitzenberg, Ashmead's Kernel, Golden Russet, Wickson and a few others have brought extraordinary fruit, floral, and earthy notes into our blends, as well as keen acid that's critically important to balance the tannic elements and ensure clean fermentation. Nobody else has access to the variety mix that we happen to grow.
The second thing is that we decided early on to stop trying to emulate English and French ciders, and treat the American cider scene as a blank slate where we could find our own style. Even the European apples we grow here develop differently in our tough climate than they did back home; often the flavors are more concentrated. It's important to understand that any orchard-based cider is inclined to be unique, just because the land and conditions of each site are unique, and will give individual character to the fruit grown there.
While most American cider producers are developing sparking ciders, Farnum Hill Ciders is also committed to producing still cider. How do still ciders differ from sparkling ones?
Still ciders offer the fullest flavor and nuance just because there are no bubbles in the way. Still ciders are perfectly normal in other countries, and still wines are of course preponderant everywhere. Our hope is that enough people here will explore cider that there will be market interest in the many many variations that spring from terrain, fruit variety, climate and technique, all the local realities that mysteriously end up in the bottle. We'd love to see distinctive ciders all over the landscape, and some of the remaining great apple regions in the States be recognized as cider 'Napas' and 'Sonomas.'
Tell us a little about Farnum Hill Cider's experimental cider line, Dooryard.
The experiment is really a test of public taste, to see whether Americans can enjoy the kind of stronger bittersweet blends that are common abroad. Most of the Dooryard blends are more tannic and more funky than the fruity profile of our regular labels. Over the years we've often had to let go certain blend batches that we found just delightful but that would not wear any of our usual labels. We were nervous about releasing them so early in the development of American cider taste.
Then came 2010, a severe year when early spring heat pushed the tiny apples so far ahead that when regular temperatures returned in May, most of the crop was destroyed by frost. Hardest-hit were the high-acid varieties needed to achieve the flavor profiles behind our regular labels. Many cider varieties, perhaps because of their crazy sugar content, came through better. So we stopped thinking about trying out bittersweet-heavy blends on the market, and decided to just do it.
The 'Dooryard' name comes from our recent history of selling small-batch blends from the barn to growler customers who come back with their bottles, taste through whatever we're offering, and refill with their favorites. Dooryard is an expanded version of that 'small-batch' approach.
You have also started to experiment with Perry. Can we expect to see a Farnum Hill perry on the market anytime soon?
We are growing perry pears because Steve is a fruit fanatic who wants to grow whatever will reach its highest quality on this land. The grafted perry varieties that we started years ago have taken forever to give us much to work with, partly because it turns out that New World rodents such as squirrels became addicted to these brutally bitter tannic Old World fruits and literally devoured them from the trees.
So at last we've made a little batch of in-house perry and, frankly, I think it's not quite up to the Farnum Hill ciders. It's very aromatic and pleasant, but there's less going on in it than we look for in the ciders. So that part needs work. Meanwhile Steve just put two hundred little pear trees in the ground so I imagine that something will come of those, years from now.
What's in your glass when you are not drinking Farnum Hill?
Red wines, usually French.
Are there any American cider makers that you are excited about right now?
We went to Virginia last month, to a conference of cidermakers and would-be cidermakers, and we were blown away by a lot of what we tasted. Albemarle Cider Works and Foggy Ridge Cider have orchards going and have established vigorous retail and local wholesale trade. We've been impressed by them for years.
A couple of other well-equipped cider operations are just beginning to produce, waiting for licenses, etc. But the thing we found so amazing is how clean, drinkable and also individual those new VA ciders were. Believe me we have tasted a lot of beginners' fermentations over the years, and of course we remember our own blunders from the '90s. Early samples sent us by cider-makers were usually a test of good manners, just not pleasing, full of flaws. But these people's samples were enjoyable, made from local apple varieties mostly, and showed real skill. So we're excited about Virginia.
How are this year's ciders turning out?
We are maturing 2010 juices and trying to make the most interesting and delicious use of the assortment of fermentations we were able to put together out of a very strange harvest. Now that they are pushed to make complex, balanced and delicious blends from far fewer options, they find the results of their blending decisions to be excitingly good.
Tasting Farnum Hill Ciders
We already discussed our fondness for Farnum Hill's sparking, Semi-Dry Cider back in our Thanksgiving cider round-up and it still the go-to table cider in my household. But some of the most interesting ciders coming out of Farnum Hill are their still ciders, rather than their sparkling ones.
Farnum Hill Extra Dry Still (7.5% ABV, 750ml, $13) is a bone-dry cider with more body than most still ciders on the market. While the palate is laden with strong mineral and tannic components, the is an underlying notion of tropical fruits and a unique, floral quality to the aroma. This is an austere cider that can replace dry white wine as a pairing for seafood, poultry or aged sheep's milk cheeses
A bit more earthy, Farnum Hill Kingston Black Reserve (8.5% ABV, 750ml, $20) is a single varietal cider made entirely from bittersharp Kingston Black apples. A testament to one of the more balanced heirloom apples, the Kingston Black Reserve mingles citrus peel and and floral notes with a slight, musky character. The cider is aggressively tannic and sour but hides some of its assertiveness behind a healthy amount of body.
Currently only available on tap in select markets, it looks as if Farnum Hill's Dooryard series will finally see its way to bottles sometime in 2011. We had a chance to try Dooryard 1108C, one of the most intricate ciders to pass through Serious Eats HQ. The warm, fruity scent bursts with banana, honey and peach. But the palate is almost a complete contrast, with peppery mineral flavors and a quinine-like astringency. Dooryard 1108C's complexity leaves little room for pairing but can be enjoyed with raw oysters or as an amuse before any celebration.
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