text:
The trend of big name, middle-aged movie actresses migrating to cable television continues unabated. Earlier this month, Debra Winger was set to join HBO's "In Treatment," and Diane Keaton will headline the comedy "Tilda" over at the same network. Now comes word that USA has snapped up Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden for their own hit "Royal Pains." Harden comes to show after a similar stint over at "Damages," which stars yet another big name actress, Glenn Close. IT'S AN ACTRESS FACTORY, I TELL YOU. From Michael Ausiello at Entertainment Weekly, who always has the scoop on such affairs:
Oscar winning actress Marcia Gay Harden has landed a multi-episode arc on Royal Pains, sources confirm to me exclusively. She'll play Dr. Elizabeth Blair, a surgeon, board member of Hamptons Heritage Hospital, and an adversary-turned-mentor to Jill (Jill Flint). Harden, who last year added a Tony to her enviable awards chest for her tour de force performance in "God of Carnage," first appears in Pains' season 2 premiere on June 3.
Harden is the kind of actress who instantly improves the quality of any project she appears in. I'll always remember her, of course, as Verna in "Miller's Crossing," which was her first big screen role, a role she absolutely killed. "I suppose you think you raised hell." Oh sweet Ginger Brown, that's a great movie. Her presence on "Royal Pains" gives that show an extra shot of credibility, and suggests it won't be the last time the blossoming hit will attract quality guest stars.
Harden pops up on "Royal Pains" just over a month for now.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Efficient Power Saving and Home Theater PC Enjoyment! Intel LGA775 Platform Intel® G45/ ICH10R chipset ASUS EPU-4 Engine ASUS Express Gate Multi-VGA Output: HDMI/DVI/RGB Support High Definition Experience of Vision and Audio 100% Japan-made Solid Capacitor VRM 5000hrs lifespan @105°C, 500,000hrs @65°C Shop Modal header CPU, Chipset and Graphics features LGA775 Intel® Core™2 Processor Ready This motherboard supports the latest Intel® Core™2 processors in LGA775 package. It also can support Intel® 45nm Multi-Core CPU. With new Intel® Core™ microarchitecture technology and 1600/1333/1066/800MHz FSB, Intel® Core™2 processor is one of the most powerful and energy efficient CPU in the world. PCIe 2.0 Double Speed; Double Bandwidth This motherboard supports the latest PCIe 2.0 devices for double speed and bandwidth which enhances system performance. DVI Support DVI (Digital Visual Interface) provides high visual quality of digital display devices such as LCD monitor. 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You can now talk to your partners on the headphone while playing a multi-channel network games. All of these are done on one computer. Industry Standard IEEE 1394a interface IEEE 1394a interface provides high speed digital interface for audio/video appliances such as digital television, digital video camcorders, storage peripherals & other PC portable devices. S/PDIF-out on Back I/O Port This motherboard provides convenient connectivity to external home theater audio systems via coaxial and optical S/PDIF-out (SONY-PHILIPS Digital Interface) jacks. It allows to transfer digital audio without converting to analog format and keeps the best signal quality. Gigabit LAN The on-board LAN controller is a highly integrated GbLAN controller. It is enhanced with an ACPI management function to provide efficient power management for advanced operating systems. RoHS GreenASUS The motherboard and its packaging comply with the European Union´s Restriction on the use of Hazardous Substances (RoHS). This is in line with the ASUS vision of creating environment-friendly and recyclable products and packaging to safeguard consumers´ health while minimizing the impact on the environment Other Feature MyLogo2 Personalize your system with customizable boot logoYou can convert your favorite photo into a 256-color boot logo for a more colorful and vivid image on your screen.


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Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Blake Shelton, and Adam Levin apparently weren't star power enough.
Last Tuesday, "The Voice's" top-rated debut introduced the world to the concept of celebrity coaches, "blind auditions," and talent rosters. After Tuesday night's second round of auditions, the show moves into the "Battle" stage where the teams compete against one another.
In other words, it's a good time to call in some reinforcements.
Following the second round of "Blind Auditions" - singers perform for coaches Aguilera, Green, Shelton, and Levine sight unseen - and the selection of each coach's team members, "The Voice" will introduce high profile "coaches assistants" into the mix.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
Aguilera will collaborate with singer/songwriter Sia, Levine with Maroon 5 Music Director Adam Blackstone, Cee Lo with singer Monica, and Shelton with veteran singer Reba McEntire, NBC announced in a press release.
The teams will then be pared in half though a series of dueling duets.


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What's making Jean-Louis Gassee's nipples hard isn't Apple, it's his ultimate boy toy, the BeBox.
Most people don't start getting interesting until you've spent eight hours with them in a car. With Jean-Louis Gassée, it happens 92 minutes into our trip to check out the natural mud baths in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. It's somewhere near Sacramento, just before dawn, when Gassée, the former president of Apple Computer Inc.'s products division, begins reminiscing about what he refers to as his "psychosocial moratorium." That's the time between his mathematics studies and when he "reentered society."
He's doing 85 mph in his wife's white Mercedes SEL and he drifts back to the early 1960s: His father's financial misfortunes had forced him to drop out of graduate school at Paris's Faculté d'Orsay, so Gassée took a series of temporary jobs. He was a maître d' at a Montparnasse strip joint, now a pizza place. "One day a beautiful black woman was doing a sadomasochistic strip act to nice music, 'I Put a Spell on You,' by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. We all had white coats with napkins on our arms. I hear a commotion. I turn around. Right behind me a drunk is leaning over on the bar. He whipped his thing out and was peeing on the head maître d'."
Another, more relevant job involved selling royal jelly door-to-door. For the uninitiated, royal jelly is the hormone-rich secretion that worker bees feed to larvae to make them into queens. "I would sell it to spouses, telling them it would reinvigorate their husbands," he says, lifting his hand from the steering wheel long enough to adjust his glasses and laugh in advance of the punch line. "And I would sell it to the husbands and say, 'It will reinvigorate you.'"
I use the word relevant because these days Gassée is peddling what some might view as the technical equivalent of royal jelly - a new computer and operating system designed, in the Frenchman's own words, "for people who like to lift up the hood." The BeBox, which made its début in October, is a high-performance machine designed, according to the bright phrasing of a Be Inc. press release, "to meet the demands of sophisticated computer users and developers who are frustrated by the limitations of current architectures." At a stripped-down price of US$1,600 (no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard), it is "the first true real-time, object-oriented system that features multiple Power PC processors, true preemptive multitasking, an integrated database, fast I/O," and a host of other features that promise to reinvigorate wimps on Windows.
It sounds promising, like a new beginning. There had been reports of a standing ovation when Gassée first demo'd the computer last fall at the Agenda industry conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, and polite endorsements began trickling in from the likes of Marc Andreessen, who was quoted as saying that both the Windows 95 and Mac operating systems were showing signs of age. Stewart Alsop wrote that the BeBox was "a machine that represents what [Apple] should be selling today" and that it "will probably end up being the ultimate World Wide Web client." Gassée's first round of backers includes folks and companies that any ambitious Silicon Valley upstart would die to have on speed-dial: Seymour Cray, execs at Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Groupe Bull.
To celebrate this new beginning, I proposed to travel with Gassée to a place that somehow held for me the promise of spiritual renewal: Death Valley at dawn. He wanted something a bit closer to his Palo Alto home. A friend suggested the Black Rock Desert, where 3,000 attendees of The Burning Man Festival had weeks earlier frolicked nude in the natural hot springs and mud baths. It's near the site in the northwestern Nevada salt flats where the land speed record had been set in 1983. J.-L. emailed back that Black Rock, a 12-hour round-trip, sounded "intriguing" - provided we returned by 6 p.m., time enough for him to make an art show benefit for his kids' school that featured paintings by his wife, Brigitte.
When he pulls his wife's car into the agreed-upon San Mateo parking garage at precisely 4:30 a.m. on a crisp Friday morning, Gassée, who typically rises at 5:30, is full of cheer and enthusiasm, calling us "Silicon Valley's Merry Pranksters." I am coming off two hours of sleep and feel like shit. I throw a couple of towels and spare underwear into the trunk and settle into the passenger seat. (We don't take his car, a convertible Mercedes 500SL, because it won't accommodate the photographer accompanying us.)
Within moments, we are zipping out of San Francisco through the Bay Bridge maze and Gassée is telling me that he sees himself as "a mathematician and a peddler" and that "after being a corporate asshole for so many years, I thought it would be a good idea to see the other side of the world" - the sort of banter I would find charming at a reasonable hour and with a sufficient blood-caffeine level. Fifty-two-year-old Gassée wears jeans and a black T-shirt with the word Be in Times Roman type, which is eerily reminiscent of ITC Garamond, made famous by Apple. He gets a tad defensive at the veiled suggestion that perhaps he is imitating his former employer.
The Man Behind the BeBox had been described to me with words like "flamboyant" and "outspoken," and I have been forewarned that one of his favorite - if not most quotable - sayings is "That makes my nipples hard!" But in the predawn darkness, as he leaps into a description of the nuts and bolts of his five-year-old company, the monolog seems painfully scripted. Gassée talks about how BeBox is designed to accommodate the growing requirements for digitized audio and video, how the company uses the Web to attract developers who will write applications for the operating system, how his dual Power PC processors are more effective at a lower price than Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations. And how he is counting on another round of financing of $7 million to $8 million on top of the $9 million initial round. (He invested $1 million of his own; after the second round, he expects to have 20 to 22 percent interest.) Why reduce your stake? I ask. "Even if I have 51 percent of the Titanic, it's still a sinking ship," he says, using a Frenchman's gestures. And he talks about how, when a venture capital backer asked what he'll do after he saturates the "geek" market, which Gassée estimates at 4.5 million units, the Frenchman told him, "We'll sell them a second computer."
"If you ask people in the mainstream what they want, they'll say faster and smaller and cheaper," he says, as a gentle snore drifts from the lips of the photographer in the leather backseat. "But with that you don't get innovation. If you align yourself with the ball-breaker, high-testosterone crowd, that leads to innovation."
Gassée sees his company as part of a tradition of putting out a device and then letting the market emerge. "Jobs and Raskin brought out Apple II without any vision of VisiCalc, the application that would take their product out of the hobbyist ghetto and into the business market. The IBM PC: Don Esteridge developed it in Boca Raton and had no idea that transcendental meditation teacher and disc jockey Mitch Kapor would create Lotus and make IBM big time in the business market. Jobs and Raskin, when they started Mac, had no idea that Canon, Adobe, and Aldus would create the desktop publishing revolution, which brought Mac into the big time. The guys who developed Amigas had no idea the Video Toaster would bring them into video editing, multimedia, and the music market.
"Many things we've done in our company we are doing by studying Amiga," he adds. "That company sold 4 1/2 million units and at one point had $800 million in annual revenues." Gassée goes so far as to say his product is a "spiritual descendant" of Amiga. Waiting for the killer app? I ask. He prefers another metaphor - the tractor app, which is not only more peaceful but more applicable, in that it "pulls your application into the big time."
Then the man who is credited with bringing the Macintosh to Europe spots the fuzz parked along the shoulder up ahead, near the sign indicating Interstate 80. "Monsieur, je pensais que quatre-vingt c'était la limite de vitesse!" he jokes as we plot a strategy in case we get stopped for speeding. Our little conspiracy: Gassée will play the part of the French speaking tourist who thinks the Interstate 80 sign means the speed limit is, in fact, quatre-vingt. I will be a not-too-bright, hearing-impaired passenger.
It is something about his lapsing into French that seems to jump-start Gassée out of PR-speak and into saying outrageous things. Like: "The Japanese, they are a lot more trustworthy than people say. People say they are inscrutable - that is bullshit! The Japanese have a sense of style and aesthetics that I envy." Or: "When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95." Or, regarding Neo-Luddite Clifford (Silicon Snake Oil) Stoll: "It's good. By saying computers are bad he gets people talking about computers, which sells computers." Then, when he discovers a new way of describing his company - as "the Pete's Wicked Ale of computer companies" - he shares his delight: "My nipples harden!"
The guy's a salesman. He's less a creative technical genius than the requisite personality-behind-the-project. The son of an accountant, he got his start in the 16th arrondissement. He attended a Roman Catholic boarding school in Brittany, where he hated soccer but loved building clandestine radios and hiding the antennae in baseboards. He saw his first OC71 transistor in 1955; this was the kind of adolescent you could imagine getting caught reading Électronique Populaire hidden inside Playboy, although he makes it clear that he wasn't your typical undersexed nerd. "I don't understand the demonization of sex in this country!" he exclaims. "I don't understand how we can show on TV people blowing each other's brains out but we can't show them blowing each other'sŠ." (Only two things from our trip are off the record: the end of the preceding sentence and the speed at which he drove the car on a Nevada back road.)
Gassée wanted to be a mathematician and was studying for his advanced degree when finances forced him to become a bartender and a maître d'. Then he advanced up the selling hierarchy from insurance to royal jelly to calculators to pharmaceuticals to computers. "I was a young adult and didn't know what I was about," he recalls. But having tended bar in Deauville and having sold royal jelly door-to-door, it was hard to imagine life as a mathematics researcher. Gassée never did return to his studies. In 1968, Hewlett-Packard hired the 24-year-old to peddle the company's first desktop model, the 9100A, thus putting an official end to Gassée's psychosocial moratorium.
"To me, it was my business school," says Gassée of his six years at Hewlett-Packard. The young man was given increasing responsibilities. He wrote press releases, he held press conferences. "I got lucky, because how many companies would give a 24-year-old without experience that opportunity." Eventually, he was promoted to sales manager for the company's European head quarters, and he still has warm feelings for H-P and its founders. "Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are models of virtue who have aged well and continue to do well."
From H-P, Gassée moved to Data General, where he started out as president of the French affiliate and was responsible for Europe and the Middle East when he left five years later. "Data General was rough," he says. "At H-P, everyone was nice and trustworthy. At Data General, it was dog eat dog, but a nice balance after H-P." Next he went to Exxon Office Systems ("or Orifice Systems"), where he was president of the French division. "I got taken in by business writers who were writing about Exxon's diversity, the vision, the infinite money. It was horrible. It was fucked up. I got burned." Eighteen months later, his friend, analyst Aharon Orlansky of Warburg Paribas Becker Inc. - for whom he would critique press releases - turned Gassée on to the fact that Apple was looking for someone to start its division in France. In those days, Apple was selling the Apple II and III, the Lisa, and, eventually, the Mac; under Gassée's direction, France became the company's most successful market outside the United States. Gassée was rewarded for that success in 1985, when John Sculley imported him to Cupertino, less than a month before the messy ouster of Steve Jobs. Gassée was being touted in the press as Sculley's heir apparent, and for a while there, he was a god - in some circles.
Gassée recalls that there was a major cultural conflict with which to contend. "I came from France - I spoke my mind. It's a more abrasive culture. I saw the Apple IIGS and said, 'This is fucked!' and it did not amuse some people. In France that's an opening statement. In retrospect, I blush when I think of all the stupid things I said."
Companies will accommodate cultural diversity as long as the profits roll in, but then Apple - and the Macintosh Portable, Gassée's baby - started foundering. By the time he left in 1990, his responsibilities had been cut in half. They had even taken to calling him Jean-Louis Passé. Gassée recounts, "I had the 'seminal' dinner conversation at Maddalena's when John Sculley asked me what I thought of him, and I answered honestly. After the dinner, the vice president of human resources at Apple, Kevin Sullivan, put his arm around my shoulder and told me he was proud of me. Right there and then, I understood I'd done something irreparable - luckily so." Shortly before resigning, Gassée says he told Sculley to cancel the going-nowhere joint project with IBM, Taligent (the "Pink" operating system), and blame it on him. "He didn't cancel it - he probably thought I had some ulterior motive," says Gassée. Sculley? "I owe him a lot."
It is sunrise in the Sierras and the morning fog creates a magnificent cotton-candy effect over Donner Lake. The photographer wakes up as we pull into Truckee for breakfast. Gassée talks cameras and movies and how the BeBox won't need "positioning," which is phony, and how the Marlboro Man is a pure example of product positioning. "It is a metonymical link between subject and object. The Marlboro Man connects our desires for the outdoors to the cigarette, because cigarettes themselves are undifferentiated. "
"The important thing is that they started with a clean slate," says developer John Worthington, whom I phoned after the Black Rock trip to get an outsider's inside opinion on the BeBox. Worthington is the co founder of San Jose, California-based MojoSoft Ltd., which is developing digital video and audio applications that will run on the BeBox - in addition to Mac and Windows versions. The result of BeBox's clean slate is an operating system that, Worthington says, "is much easier to program" than Mac or Windows.
Worthington feels there is a "silliness" to those older operating systems. "On the Mac, you are limited as far as file size. You can't have a file greater than two gigabytes, which is ridiculous because today you can buy a nine-gigabyte drive for $4,000. And with Windows, you still have a lot of DOS stuff beneath it. Even though they tried to spruce things up for Windows 95, they had to have compatibility with the old applications." He is parroting Gassée, who seems to be able to pull the metaphors out of his cul.
"I worked 22 years in the industry, and I noticed that operating systems get cancer with age," says Gassée. "With the incremental approach, they grow old and complicated and Byzantine with age. In 1980, Microsoft bought QDOS, which became DOS and is now Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT. When you have six levels of silt in the architecture, it's hard to move the foundation."
Gassée, who gave up "truly programming" in the early 1970s, boasts that "we wrote the operating system from the ground up," pointing out that when you have no baggage, you also have no legacy and "no applications to speak of."
The green of California gives way to the brown of Nevada. Reno passes us by - a city that knows all about product positioning, having staked its fate on a new reputation as the bowling capital of America.
The inevitable comparison is made to NeXT and to Steve Jobs's computer of-the-future that wound up being loved - much loved, in fact - only for its object-oriented software. "NeXT wanted to grow fast. They took a kernel from Carnegie Mellon and bolted it together with display PostScript. It was a slow machine, there was no floppy, and it was targeted at an insolvent market, the education market, which doesn't have any money," explains Gassée. "What remains from NeXT is wonderful programming tools. They are considered by many as having the best environment in the industry for corporations doing their own custom development for mission-critical applications." There is a pause during which he looks out at a stunning display of Fremont cottonwoods nestled in a dusty valley reflecting at least 17 shades of brown. "We make our own brand of mistakes."
One way to distinguish him from Jobs, Gassée says, is that "I don't know the fuck if I'm going to hit or when." It is a jab at Jobs's bloated proclamations. Gassée, who tends to put a more comic spin on his pronouncements, is asked if he is friendly with Jobs. "It all depends on what you mean by 'friendly,'" he responds. Then, a moment later: "If we're on the record, he's a friend."
The coffee from Truckee must have started kicking in, because this is when Gassée's tense/cynical/delightful mind (described by John Dvorak as "the mind of a Frenchman which is unfortunately trapped inside the body of a Frenchman," a quote Gassée appends to his email) kicks into high gear. His strongest talent, it seems, is coming up with exquisite little barbs about other personalities-behind-the-project in Silicon Valley, a place that, despite a bull-run in technology stocks and a general mania over the Internet and multimedia, has become jaded and humorless - a point which Gassée disputes. "On occasion, Steve Jobs can be funny. Andy Grove has a great Central European humorŠ."
As we stop to refuel at a sun-bleached truck stop and transfer to a secondary road, Gassée's talent goes on parade. Scott McNealy: "He's got balls. He's got brains. They work nicely together." Larry Ellison: "I'd say the same of Larry Ellison, although they have different lifestyles. Scott is more private than Larry." Steve Wozniak: "He's teaching now. If he's making other people happy, that's fine."
Talk turns to cars, and Gassée reports that he recently ran into Wozniak in Los Gatos. The two drive the same model of Mercedes, although Woz's is beige and Gassée's is anthracite gray. Gassée mentions something about how he - unlike Ellison - never harbored a long-range desire to own a Testarossa. The picture he paints is one in which these guys cruise around Palo Alto and Los Gatos, where they all know the make, model, and color of each other's cars, and possibly the license plates, and they are aware of each other's every move and go around dissing one another - sort of like jealous Hollywood types. There was the time Steve Jobs drove the three or so blocks over from his house one Sunday morning at 9:30, unannounced, rang the Gassée doorbell, and invited J.-L. to a product announcement. He was lucky Gassée had his pants on.
The white Mercedes rolls down 67 miles of back road leading to the rusted near ghost town of Gerlach, home of two or three weathered saloon casinos. Gassée keeps looking at his watch as we follow my friend's vague instructions: on the other side of town, after the road becomes unpaved, keep going for about a mile and a half. Half an hour later, we haven't found the mud baths, although we can see the vapor rising from occasional hot springs dotting the open desert landscape. Oh, there is a weird art project of some sort, a faux cemetery with headposts bearing political sentiments that are presumably somebody's idea of a statement: "Attention all preachers: Have your fireproof suits ready at all times Š David Koresh wake-up call." We make our way back to town and an almost-sober old-timer in one of the saloons indicates that the mud baths we're looking for were made inaccessible. He says we can sneak into the hot springs just outside of town, which are on private property, until somebody comes along and asks us to leave.
We drive through a gate, step out of the car, and come face-to-face with a garbage can overflowing with empty Bud bottles. The hot springs consist of a nasty-looking watering hole that has steam drifting skyward and a few beer bottles floating like rubber ducks in a bathtub. There is a shed adjacent to the springs. On the outside are the spray-painted words "Please help us keep this area CLEAN," the last word underlined three times. Inside, the shed is full of trash. Nearby, a rusted diesel tank lies on its side.
Gassée hasn't made a move to take a dip, so I lean down, touch the water, and tell him that it isn't too hot for swimming. "That is not the issue," he replies. "I don't trust the water." I don't press the point. The place is disappointingly gross, and if J.-L. isn't going skinny-dipping, I really can't blame him. Instead, he opens the trunk of the Mercedes, removes his Nikon N90s, and photographs the overflowing garbage can, the rusted diesel tank, the inside of the shed, and an empty bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies floating on the water.
We hang out for maybe half an hour, get back in the car, and then Gassée discusses the future of computing. He predicts that one day we will have computerized eyeglasses in which information will be superimposed onto the lenses themselves. "A lot of information can be in the field of view without disturbing too much. It just came to me," he says. Also, computers will be able to start "reading our nerve impulses. They'll read the flow of electricity in the nervous system and do something about it." He discusses how Internet security is going to be messy because "people in the government are so illiterate. The FBI wants more authority and technology to spy on us." He explains how mathematics has reached a point where anyone can make a message that is unbreakable. And he says that it is possible to hide messages in pixels in Photoshop or to hide digital documents as noise in audio transmissions. He also thinks that at some point this year, we'll all be able to "efficiently buy things safely" on the Web, which will have "more refined content and presentation."
At this point, I'm in the backseat while the photographer sits up front, asking all sorts of questions about Libération, the French publication to which Gassée still contributes a weekly column, and about Paris, where Gassée still maintains a house that he visits twice a year with his family and friends, spending a lot of the time seated around a big table eating large meals. As we drive into a desert crossroads, somebody points out a sign that reads "Congested area - discharging of firearms prohibited."
Gassée is in a hurry to get back. While we ingest take-out sandwiches in Truckee, he refuels and makes a few calls on his cell phone. What does he think of Bill Gates? "Bill is very successful. Bill is Bill. The company is well managed. They are also wonderful intellectual terrorists."
By five in the afternoon, we have reached the 13-hour point and are all pretty wiped when a major freeway backup makes it obvious that no matter how fast he pushes those eight cylinders, Gassée will never make it back in time for his exhibit opening. Oh, he gets a little tense at first; the photographer is shooting photos through the rearview mirror and playing with the electronic headrest adjuster. But after a while, there is nothing left to do but make the most of the situation and stare out at the sun as it sinks slowly into the Pacific, creating a palette of soft, hypnotic colors that haven't yet been discovered, at least not by Photoshop. It's the kind of scene that would bring out the romantic in the most technocentric capitalist. It somehow brings me back to words Gassée had uttered in a less tranquil moment: "The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Such frank talk doesn't go over well in a region that runs as much on optimism and delusion as it does on tiny chips, and part of this Frenchman's appeal is his cultural inclination to be playfully honest - even if it makes him as iconoclastic as his new machine. I suppose that makes Jean-Louis Gassée the metonymical link between the latest box and the geeks who like to distinguish themselves as hood-lifters. It is something I think about as we pull into the garage in which we met 14 hours earlier, transferring towels and unused spare underwear from one car trunk to another. No, it doesn't make my nipples hard, but it gives me something to ponder on the way home.


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Premier® Match
Ever hear the phrase, "you could drive tacks with 'em?" Well they're probably talking about Remington® Premier® Match ammunition. Using only match-grade bullets, Premier Match ammunition employs special loading practices to ensure world-class performance and accuracy with every shot.
Offerings within the Premier Match line include 223 Remington, 308 Win, 300 Remington SA Ultra Mag, 300 Win Mag and the new 6.8mm Remington SPC. Maybe some day there will be a stronger word than accurate to describe Premier Match, until then we'll continue to prove it on paper.


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Each month the booksellers at the Barnes & Noble at Peninsula Town Center in Hampton gather their Top 5 reader requests in fiction and nonfiction. Here is this month's list:
Top 5 Fiction:
"Mockingjay" by Suzanne Collins
"Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck" by Jeff Kinney
"Allegiant" by Veronica Roth
"Game of Thrones" by George R. R. Martin
"The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak
Top 5 Nonfiction
"The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism" by Doris Kearns Goodwin
"Lone Survivor" by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
"Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" by Robert Gates
"Killing Jesus: A History" by Bill O'Reilly
"Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg
The Barnes & Noble staff also make monthly book recommendations. Here in their own words are this month's suggestions:
"The Shogun's Daughter" by Laura Joh Rowland: "This book beautifully depicts an enticing view of feudal Japan for the history buff while still offering the reader a page-turning mystery with characters you really become passionate about."
"Another" by Yukito Ayatsuji, Hiro Kiyohara (Artist): "A new student transfers to a high school in Yomiyama and soon becomes embroiled in a deadly mystery. The author translates and recaptures the tone of classic detective fiction in manga format."
"There's More to Life than This 'New Jersey Psychic'" by Theresa Caputo: "The star of TLC's 'Long Island Medium' reveals how she helps people who have lost loved ones find peace, closure and healing. The book is full of positive and helpful hints on development and coping."
"Steelheart" by Brandon Sanderson: "Acclaimed fantasy author turns his attention to the young adult superhero genre. Except there are no heroes, and villains have taken over the world. Sanderson takes the classic revenge trope of 'you killed my father' and turns it into a journey of self-discovery and coping with a gritty reality."
"Kiss the Girls" by James Patterson: "A deadly mystery forces detective Alex Cross into the decision of his life. Does he choose his career which he loves so much or the family waiting at home for him to return safely?"
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" by Mark Haddon: "Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic 15-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother. Mark Haddon shows a great insight into the autistic mind, and has some of the strangest and most convincing characters in fiction."
"These Broken Stars" by Meagan Spooner and Amie Kaufman: "This is a fantastic out-of-this-world teen read! Spooner and Kaufman weave a detailed story with outer space battles, a fight for survival and lots of romance. This is a suspenseful, page-turning read that you won't be able to put down!"
Readers and writers connect via #hrbooks
The Writers' Block website was recently redesigned with updated content, including a live, interactive chat section. To post news about a book or upcoming event, use #hrbooks in your tweets, then join the conversation on dailypress.com/entertainment/books. Questions? Contact Leah at firstname.lastname@example.com or 247-4745.


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City of TorranceHome Menu
Calendar Month View
Bona-fide Torrance-based, non-profit groups may submit events to be included in the Torrance citywide calendar pending approval. The City of Torrance Citywide Calendar System Administrator (Office of Cable and Community Relations) is responsible for determining which events are appropriate for posting and then approving a calendar entry. The administrator also has the capability to submit the event to other calendars so that your event may be posted on more than one calendar if appropriate. Events must occur within Torrance city limits to be considered for inclusion and submitted within the categories already identified within the calendar. Upon submission, the following information should be included: How To Submit
Friends of the Library Book Sale!
- Date: 07/27/2019 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
- Location: Katy Geissert Civic Center Library
3301 Torrance Blvd.
Torrance, California 90503
The Friends of the Torrance Library offer a great selection of books on a vast array of topics, all at bargain prices.
Friday, July 26- 2 p.m. -6 p.m. Friends Members only - Join at the door for just $5!
Saturday, July 27 - 9 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. Public Sale
Saturday, July 27- 3 p.m. - 5 p.m. - Bag Sale, fill up a grocery bag for just $5
For more information visit the Friends of the Torrance Library at www.friendsofthetorrancelibrary.org


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What is ADR?
What are some advantages of ADR?
How can I use ADR to resolve my dispute?
Definitions of ADR Processes
What is Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)?
Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) refers to a variety of processes that help parties resolve disputes without a trial. Typical ADR processes include mediation, arbitration,
neutral evaluation, and collaborative law. These processes are generally confidential, less formal, and less stressful than traditional court proceedings.
What are some other advantages of ADR?
ADR often saves money and speeds settlement. In ADR processes such as mediation, parties play an important role in resolving their own disputes. This often results in creative solutions, longer-lasting outcomes, greater satisfaction, and improved relationships.
How can I use ADR to resolve my dispute?
The New York State Unified Court System offers parties access to free or reduced-fee mediation and other ADR services in family law, general civil and commercial law disputes. These services are available in many courthouses and in the Community Dispute Resolution Centers located in almost all of New York State's 62 counties.
Reduced-fee collaborative divorce and mediation services may also be available to eligible couples in the New York City area through the court-sponsored Collaborative Family Law Center.
Definitions of ADR Processes
Arbitration: a neutral person called an "arbitrator" hears arguments and evidence from each side and then decides the outcome. Arbitration is less formal than a trial and the rules of evidence are often relaxed. In binding arbitration, parties agree to accept the arbitrator's decision as final, and there is generally no right to appeal. In nonbinding arbitration, the parties may request a trial if they do not accept the arbitrator's decision.
Case Conferencing: in case conferencing, a judge or the judge's representative meets with the parties and their attorneys to try to settle some or all of the issues in dispute before going to trial. Parties' participation is limited, and the focus is on narrowing the issues in dispute.
Collaborative Family Law: Collaborative Family Law gives divorcing couples a way to end their marriage respectfully, without going to court, while offering them the support, guidance and protection of their own, specially-trained lawyers. If either spouse decides to go to court, both spouses must hire new lawyers. This motivates everyone involved to continue working toward a mutually agreeable resolution. Collaborative Family Law may also involve other professionals. Collaborative Family Law may not be appropriate for couples with a history or fear of domestic violence, or where one spouse cannot locate the other. Learn more about Collaborative Family Law.
Mediation: a neutral person called a "mediator" helps the parties try to reach a mutually acceptable resolution of the dispute. The mediator does not decide the case, but helps the parties communicate so they can try to settle the dispute themselves. Mediation may be particularly useful when family members, neighbors, or business partners have a dispute. Mediation may be inappropriate if a party has a significant advantage in power or control over the other.
Neutral Evaluation: a neutral person with subject-matter expertise hears abbreviated arguments, reviews the strengths and weaknesses of each side's case, and offers an evaluation of likely court outcomes in an effort to promote settlement. The neutral evaluator may also provide case planning guidance and settlement assistance with the parties' consent.
Parenting Coordination (PC): a child-focused process in which a trained and experienced mental health or legal professional called a "parenting coordinator" assists high-conflict parents to carry out their parenting plan. With prior approval of the parties and the court, the parenting coordinator may make decisions within the scope of the court order or appointment contract. The purpose of Parent Coordination is to help parents resolve conflicts regarding their children in a timely manner and try to promote safe, healthy, and meaningful parent-child relationships.
Summary Jury Trials (SJT): In this adversarial dispute resolution process, each side presents its case in a shortened form to a jury. The jury then makes a decision, which is advisory only, unless parties request that it be a binding decision. A summary jury trial gives parties a preview of a potential verdict should the case go to trial. SJTs are available in limited jurisdictions.


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Next Episode of Dark Shadows (1966) is
not planed. TV Show was canceled.
Dark Shadows was a soap opera which aired on ABC in the United States. The series was created by Dan Curtis and premiered on June 27, 1966.
The show had a dark and gothic feel to it and featured vampires and werewolves. Many actors played several characters on the show and the show was set in the past, present and the future.
Looks like something went completely wrong!
But don't worry - it can happen to the best of us,
- and it just happened to you.
Please try again later or contact us.


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Ornamental grass: high visibility, low maintenance
Try them-you'll like them," I argued six years ago.
"Well maybe we could work in a few," replied Dr. Bruce Branham, who was then director of the Hancock Turfgrass Research Center at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Actually, persuading Branham to go with ornamental grasses wasn't such a hard sell. He knew about their outstanding visual impact. However, there was little budget for maintenance, and once we established the beds, the garden would have to get by on minimal care.
Fortunately, ornamental grasses tend to be low-budget plants to maintain. Plus, many are big, bold and beautiful-maybe just the ticket to attract attention from the buildings and parking area-almost a mile away. The beds might need mulch and a little cleanup each spring but relatively little maintenance the rest of the year. So, I thought we might be able to pull this off.
Six years later, the garden is going great. It's easy to see from the buildings and has attracted quite a bit of attention. In fact, the grasses were so well received that we were asked to add a few thousand square feet of beds around the main research facility. The new gardens have won praise from golf course superintendents, landscape managers and others who visit the facility.
Ornamental grasses sell themselves when given a chance.
Ornamental grasses--a "new wave" in landscaping Ornamental grasses have caught the public's eye the past few years, and with good reason. They are bold, full of texture and movement, and give a new, exciting look to gardens and landscapes. Grasses love light, and full sun is the key to success. Not only do most ornamental grasses perform better in light; they look better with light-in the morning, at noon or at sunset.
You will also find that superior ornamental grass selections are relatively trouble-free and require minimal maintenance-certainly compared with many herbaceous perennials.
For the beginner, all tall grasses seem to look alike. Some look no better than a clump of Kentucky bluegrass in the spring. I'm often asked how to tell the good guys from the bad guys. This can be a problem, but not with the grasses I suggest below.
I suggest that you start simply. Plant a few of the following grasses where you will have ample opportunity to see them grow and develop the first year. You'll be rewarded when they start to show off.
High visibility and low maintenance The ornamental grasses in the table below give high visibility and have low maintenance requirements-a perfect combination. These bold grasses compete well with weeds, yet never become weeds themselves. These are all clumping grasses that spread slowly from a central crown. With a couple of exceptions, these selections should perform well in most of the United States.
Many landscape managers have been slow to adopt ornamental grasses because they did not know which grasses to plant, or perhaps they feared that the grasses would become maintenance nightmares. This is not the case for the grasses discussed in this article. All have great ornamental value. Planted together, these grasses should provide outstanding flowers from June to October in most parts of the United States-even longer in the mildest areas.
Using grasses in the landscape These grasses are big and bold-equally useful for large mass plantings or for the special touch as individual specimens. Pennisetum spp. are a bit smaller than the rest but still lend themselves to massing and are interesting specimens. Tall purple moor grass makes a fantastic see-through screen. Solid leaves rise to about 3 feet with tall, with airy flower heads 6 to 8 feet high that sway in the wind, making a great view along a pathway. Most Miscanthus species will form impenetrable screens, useful for defining spaces in a landscape.
All of the grasses combine well with perennials for added color and contrast. Choose perennials that match the cultural requirements of grasses-low-maintenance, dependable types (see table, page Contractor 14).
Maintaining grasses * Pruning. Once you establish grasses, the only required yearly maintenance is to cut them down in the spring. The actual timing depends on your location. Cutting too early will limit the ornamental value in the winter. However, if your site is little used in the winter, you can remove the foliage in the fall with no harm to the plants. In spring, if the foliage has begun to grow you are pruning too late. In Michigan, the perfect time is usually in April. Farther south and west, February and March may be better times to prune.
Using hand shears, a spin trimmer or even a chain saw, cut the grasses as close to the ground as possible. Leave less than an inch of the old shoots showing above the soil line. Removal of last year's growth makes good sense. It allows more light to reach the center of the plant where the new shoots are freshly emerging. The increased available light increases the number of developing shoots and accelerates plant growth.
Severe pruning will reduce the occurrence of the "doughnut" effect, where the center of the grass dies out and new growth occurs only from the outer ring of the living plant. I have been able to maintain healthy clumps for years without division, in part because I prune the clumps as closely as possible. This goes for all the grasses suggested above.
* Water and fertilizer. Compared with turfgrasses, ornamental grasses require relatively little water or nutrients. In the first year or two, apply some balanced slow-release fertilizer in the spring and some timely irrigation if drought conditions prevail. However, once ornamental grasses are established, fertilize and irrigate sparingly, if at all. The grasses suggested here can tolerate extensive drought, at least under northern conditions. In hotter, more arid regions, some supplemental water may be necessary for grasses to look their best.
* Diseases and pests. We have had few pest problems with our ornamental grass plantings at Michigan State University. In the winter, we sometimes have troubles with voles, which eat the roots and crowns during the winter months. If plants pull right out of the ground in the spring when you are cutting them back, voles are probably the culprit. We have found that traps can reduce vole activity. Plus, if individual grass clumps have suffered from voles in the past, we often cut them back in fall rather than waiting until spring. This removes winter cover (though an inch or two of snow is all voles seem to require).
Mealy bugs are reportedly becoming a pest on Miscanthus in the South and East. Also, I recently have been hearing reports that scale has been found on certain Miscanthus species. When you cut your grasses back in the spring, look under the soil line for any evidence of scale. We have not yet had trouble with mealy bug or scale at Michigan State University, but it pays to check.
On occasion, we have observed Japanese beetles swarming in mass on the taller grasses. However, these chafers do not seem to harm the ornamental grasses the way they do turfgrasses and other types of ornamentals. Any feeding on the leaves is not likely to be detrimental to the plant.
Most ornamental grasses have tough leaves and are not particularly palatable to deer. Plants readily recover in those instances when nibbling occurs. Miscanthus leaves are sharp enough to cut skin and tongues and are essentially deer-proof.
Ordering grasses Ornamental grasses are usually easy to obtain locally. If you are beginning, I advise you to purchase the cultivars I've listed here. Do not accept unnamed cultivars-they are often produced from seed and in some cases make unacceptable landscape plants. For instance, seed-propagated Panicum virgatum is essentially a weed, while the suggested cultivars are well-behaved garden plants.
Wholesale and mail-order nurseries are easy to find on the web by performing a search using the genus and species of your desired grass. Depending on your budget, you can start with plugs, 1 gallon or even larger sizes. We generally start with plugs, even in landscape situations. Plugs are inexpensive and grow relatively quickly to size, though the larger grasses may take two or three seasons before attaining full size. Whatever the starting size, try some ornamental grasses this season-you will like them.
Dr. Art Cameron has researched and taught about ornamental grasses and herbaceous perennials for the past 18 years at Michigan State University (E. Lansing, Mich.). Special thanks are due to Dr. Jim Baird, Mark Collins, Erin Nausieda and others in the Michigan State University turfgrass program who have helped make the ornamental grass display garden possible.
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Zynga and the death of Draw Somehing
As a gamer and more specifically a lover of indie games, my default stance with Zynga is pure revulsion. The company has blatantly and shamelessly cannibalized so many indie hits at this point that I simply will not support any product they produce. The latest title to join my blacklist is Draw Something, the smash hit from OMGPOP. Zynga recently purchased the company for nearly $200 million, a purchase that drew a lot of raised eyebrows, including my own.
Don't get me wrong, Draw Something is fun. It's a perfect recreation of a game I know as Telestrations. In the physical world, Telestrations requires players to sketch a word using a fat-tip, dry-erase marker. The drawings are expectedly bad, but that's part of the fun. The same is true of Draw Something – human fingers just aren't precise enough to draw an accurate representation of Kanye West on a smartphone, but they can damn sure mock up some window-shade sunglasses and draw a bar of gold next to a shovel.
But Draw Something doesn't quite have the magic that makes players stick around after the initial week-long excitement is gone. For me, interactions over Draw Something didn't create enough of a story. With Telestrations, players pass their drawings around a room. The next person writes the phrase the original artist was trying to sketch. The person of that draws – it's a game of sketch telephone. The real fun of the game, though, is in the retelling of the drawings. You get to see where players missed the mark. Draw Something is just too easy after a few plays with a new player. You know how they think, how they communicate an idea, and because Draw Something presents a hangman-style letter bank from which to guess, getting the word right is a simple process of elimination.
I could see why Zynga might have initially been interested in Draw Something; the game was pulling 15 million users a day through Facebook alone. It was at the top of the app charts, one of the highest grossing apps around. But just a couple weeks later Facebook traffic fell by half. Despite the company's recent announcement of a partnership with Dreamworks for ads inside the game, it's hard to see the Draw Something deal paying out. Even with a nice ad deal, there won't be enough players in a couple months to make the math work.
I can't say I'm sad to see Zynga's stock continue to tumble, but I hope the company's fall only leaves room for more games to fill its void. For a couple weeks, Draw Something had me connected to friends spread all over the country. If a company that respects IP can swoop in to deliver a lasting version of that experience, I'll be a happy man.
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Posted in: Entertainment, Lifestyle
Tags: draw something, draw something users, drawing games, mobile games, omgpop, Zynga, zynga acquisition, zynga buys omgpop, zynga stock


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The fraud scheme — hiring homeless people to steal rent checks and deposit them in fake bank accounts — made a million dollars for Tavon Davis before one of his associates was caught on the job. Panicked at the notion that his man might flip, he ordered Isiah Callaway killed.
Davis thought he might go to jail for decades for fraud, according to court records, and Callaway, 19, was dead before Davis realized the penalty for operating the scheme would have been much less.
Davis, who now faces a likely 35 years in prison after pleading guilty to murder-conspiracy charges, told a friend that his decision to order the killing made him the "schmuck of the year," according to court filings.
The exchange surfaced in court records last week as a federal judge refused to throw out the conviction of another Davis accomplice, in a case that involved gangs of homeless people whom the conspirators called "fiends," an alleged tipoff from a Pikesville lawyer and a tough-guy triggerman.
Davis, 25, Frank Marfo, 28, and Callaway operated a scheme that involved stealing rent checks and depositing them in fraudulent bank accounts, according to filings in the case. A fourth man was granted immunity in the case because he assisted in the murder investigation.
A federal judge threw out a final attempt by Marfo's attorneys last week to have his conviction overturned on the grounds that prosecutors had insufficient evidence to tie him to Callaway's murder. He was convicted on murder-conspiracy and bank-fraud charges in August.
"I can't second-guess the jury," Judge Marvin J. Garbis said Tuesday.
Things began to spiral out of control in December 2010, when Callaway was arrested as he tried to open fraudulent bank accounts. Davis was worried that Callaway would cooperate with police and, court records say, his lawyer told him he could face two decades in prison. By April 2011, Davis figured there was only one way to save himself: have the 19-year-old murdered.
He hired Bruce Byrd, 27, for the job because, according to Byrd's plea agreement, Byrd followed the "gangster code," refusing to tell police who shot him in the face during a 2006 robbery.
On April 11, 2011, Byrd shot Callaway at close range while the teenager was sitting in a Toyota Camry in the 1700 block of Crystal Ave., according to the plea deal.
It was only after the killing that Davis consulted another lawyer, who told him the more likely penalty for the fraud was three or four years behind bars.
Davis pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire and witness-murder conspiracy charges in June.
"Killing that kid was the stupidest thing in the world," Davis told his associate Michael Copeland, according to court documents. Copeland recorded the conversation as part of his cooperation with the investigation. Davis' attorneys in the case declined to comment.
Byrd pleaded guilty to using a gun in the murder in July and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
"He was genuinely remorseful and expressed his remorse to the court at the time of sentencing and has accepted responsibility," said Charles Curlett, Byrd's attorney.
Callaway's role in the scheme was to set up corporations and recruit the "fiends." Callaway would give them identification documents so they could open fraudulent bank accounts in which Davis could deposit the stolen checks, according to the filings.
Callaway was arrested by Baltimore County police on Dec. 29, 2010, at an Essex branch of TDBank. Davis became convinced, according to court filings, that "should Callaway cooperate, [Davis'] life was over."
Davis arranged for Callaway to be represented by attorney Larry Feldman. Court documents say Feldman called Davis just minutes after he was contacted by an assistant U.S. attorney to tell him investigators were interested in talking with Callaway.
Feldman has not been charged with a crime. In a recent filing, prosecutors wrote that "the evidence did not support prosecution of Feldman."
Feldman declined to comment, referring questions to his lawyer, David Irwin, who also offered no comment.
In December 2011, Feldman told The Baltimore Sun that "in a million years, I never thought anything would lead to Isiah's death."
The investigators got a break in the case when Copeland, 33, came forward to tell them about the fraud scheme. Copeland and Davis had a long history together, running one scheme that involved using the same sort of "fiends" to rent high-end cars at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and ship them out of the country, according to court filings.
Copeland's attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Copeland was not implicated in the killing, but Davis had told him enough about it to help prosecutors build their case.


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Mike Huckabee's exit from the 2012 presidential race continues the inevitable winnowing process among likely and talked about challengers to President Obama's billion-dollar reelection effort.
So who among the field of possible GOP White House prospects is helped by Mr. Huckabee's decision not to run?
Some already have announced their decision not to jump into the race – Haley Barbour, Mike Pence, and John Thune. Others who once (or briefly) enjoyed high expectations – Sarah Palin and Donald Trump – are down in the polls, marked by image problems and seen by most observers as without much of a chance of winning the nomination.
Huckabee's decision could tempt the fence-sitting Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels or perhaps former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. Or it may cause them to take a harder look at the reasons not to run – especially the cost to family of a year spent on the road and under constant personal scrutiny.
As moderates, Governor Daniels and Mr. Huntsman might expect to have a tough fight in Iowa and South Carolina – early nominating states where Huckabee did very well in 2008, and where social conservatives will have much to say about who succeeds in the race's first days.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been playing up his social conservative chops; Rep. Michele Bachmann already has them. Former Sen. Rick Santorum does, too, although his connection to the John Ensign sex scandal – however tenuous – won't help. Newt Gingrich is dogged by past marital infidelities.
What about the tea party? Does Huckabee's exit have any bearing on that movement's influence in 2012?
There's always Ron Paul, of course. But Michele Bachmann could benefit there as well.
"Bachmann is the darling of the Tea Party crowd as well as a strong social conservative," writes Jonathan Tobin, senior online editor of Commentary magazine.
"While most pundits and party insiders consider her politics too extreme and her personality too over the top to be nominated, let alone elected, her outsider status as well as her religious frame of reference is the closest match to Huckabee's 2008 profile," writes Tobin. "With evangelicals having a disproportionate impact on the Iowa caucuses, Bachmann is the potential candidate best positioned to benefit from Huckabee's absence."
Mitt Romney – the closest thing to a Republican establishment candidate today – could see his prospects improving with Huckabee out of the race. Except Huckabee gives no sign that he'll cease the sharp criticism of Mr. Romney he's voiced over the former Massachusetts governor's record on government-mandated health care insurance.
"If our goal in health-care reform is better care at lower cost, then we should take a lesson from RomneyCare, which shows that socialized medicine does not work. Period," Huckabee wrote in his latest book, "A Simple Government."
In announcing his decision not run on his Fox News show Saturday night, Huckabee took another jab at Romney on the subject. And unlike Huntsman, Gingrich, Pawlenty, and Santorum, Romney did not rush to say nice things about Huckabee.
Huckabee had many reasons to run: widespread public support reflected in the popularity of his broadcast endeavors and the sales of his books, which have made him a millionaire; a strong showing in regional and national polls; demonstrated ability to raise political funds and attract veteran campaign advisers; encouragement from his wife and children.
But in the end, the Southern Baptist minister says he went into the closet of prayer to find his answer.
"For me, the decision is ultimately not a political one, a financial one, or even a practical one – it's a spiritual one," he explained in a statement Saturday night.
"When I am with people encouraging me to run, it's easy to feel the strength of their partnership and commitment to help me to the finish line," he said. "Only when I was alone, in quiet and reflective moments did I have not only clarity, but an inexplicable inner peace – a peace that exceeds human understanding. All the factors say GO, but my heart says NO."
Then too, the financial risks would have been considerable.
Huckabee would have been required to give up his lucrative Fox News gig, as did Santorum and Gingrich. (There are rumors that Huckabee might replace the departing Glenn Beck.) After an early life of financial struggle, he's been able to relocate from Arkansas to Florida, where he's building a $2.2 million home.


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"The most complete training I have ever done!"
"It's so much fun and very challenging. The switch between power and control is amazing. I love the high intensity parts and eventhough I wasn't a big fan of yoga before, I really like the yoga flows in athleticflow."
"It is simply the best class I have ever been to. I hope they will come to London soon."
"They developed some really cool moves in athelticflow. I am a big fan of the surfer burpees and the playground."


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Tampa Bay receiver Mike Evans says he's "not big on politics." He is disheartened by the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States.
The third-year pro said he sat during the national anthem before Sunday's game between the Buccaneers and Chicago Bears because he feels electing a reality television star to the highest office in the nation is "not a good look for America."
"I don't want to disrespect the veterans or anything. The men and women that serve this country, I'm forever indebted to them. But the things that have been going on in America lately, I'm not going to stand for that," Evans said. [[247269581, C]]
U.S. & World
"I told myself, 'If this character' -- I'm not big on politics or things like that -- but I told myself, 'If this happens, then America is not right right now,'" Tampa Bay's leading receiver added. "I said it a long time ago. When he ran I thought it was a joke. The joke continues."
The Buccaneers did not have an immediate comment on the protest.
Evans had four catches for 66 yards against the Bears. He entered Sunday leading the league in touchdown receptions with eight.
Evans said he'll continue to sit for the anthem as long as Trump is President-elect.
"I'm not a political person that much, but I have common sense," he said. "And I know when something is not right."
Evans reiterated that his protest was because of who Trump is, not the Republican or Democratic parties.
"It's well documented what he's done," Evans said. "I'm not going to stand for something I don't believe in. That's the end of that."
Evans' protest is the latest in a string of demonstrations by NFL players, sparked in August by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sat, then kneeled, for the playing of the anthem to call attention to the oppression of minorities across the United States.
Since then, Kaepernick has been joined by several other NFL players, including four members of the Miami Dolphins, Kansas City Chiefs cornerback Marcus Peters, and Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall.
While some have expressed support for the message of the demonstrations, the protests have sparked outrage among others, including local police unions in Miami and San Francisco, both of which have threatened some form of boycott.
This is the second time a protest has occurred before a Bears game. In September, several members of the Philadelphia Eagles raised their fists in the air during the anthem ahead of their game against the Bears at Soldier Field.


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By Rusty Miller | Associated Press
COLUMBUS -- It seems whenever anyone who knows him is asked about Marc Loving, they eventually get around to saying some form of the phrase, "He's such a good kid."
He's also a pretty good basketball player.
That's the main reason why Loving, a 6-foot-8 gentle giant for Toledo St. John's Jesuit who is headed to Ohio State, is the 26th annual winner of the Associated Press Mr. Basketball award, emblematic of the top player in the state.
Loving averaged 21.3 points and 8.2 rebounds a game while shooting 60 percent from the field, 30 percent behind the arc and 70 percent on free throws. A two-time Player of the Year in Division I, he led his team to a 20-4 record.
Buckeyes coach Thad Matta, for instance, was asked what he saw in Loving.
"Size, athleticism and his ability," he said. "He's very, very skilled for his size. He's from a great high school program and he won a ton of games up there. And he's a great kid, from a great family. That's what sold us from the get-go."
Loving's coach, Ed Heintschel, talks about Loving's versatility, his court IQ and his shooting range, then veers to where every conversation about the big kid seems to go.
"He is a low- to no-maintenance guy with a very, very high return," he said. "He's been a pleasure to have on the team. This kid is a can't-miss as a human being."
Lots of other people do the talking for Loving and his game. He's more of a soft-spoken type, quick to laugh but more prone to short answers than elaborate soliloquies about how good he is.
When the subject turns to games he influenced this past season, he didn't mention his school-record 42 points at Lima Senior when St. John's was without one of its key starters. Instead, he said words that have to sound sweet to Matta, who extols the virtues of gritty defense at every opportunity.
"We were down by a couple of points and I had a big blocked shot, a good stop," Loving said. "We went down and scored and I got another rebound and it changed the whole game."
He's unlike many elite high school players in that he doesn't really like to talk about himself. Asked what separates him from other great prep stars, he replies, tongue in cheek, "Being 6-8."
Loving lives in Toledo with his parents -- his mother works for Owens-Corning and his father for Chrysler -- and a 12-year-old sister. (No, he doesn't pick on her, he says.)
He's a humble, clear-headed, smart (B average) kid, unlike a lot of others. He doesn't have a posse. He doesn't have an attitude. He does not have a sense of entitlement.
"He's just a real solid, solid kid," Heintschel said. "Comes from a great family. Never in trouble, kind of a low-key kid. Pretty quiet. He got more verbal this year as a senior, which was very helpful. He lets the game come to him a little bit, but if necessary he'll impose his will on the game."
A prime example of who Loving is was on display in back-to-back games. He carried the Titans against Lima Senior, then showed his other side.
"The next game was kind of a blow-out situation and he had 11 points and facilitated (the others)," Heintschel said.
When Loving is asked about the 42-point game, he almost swats it aside like an opposing layup.
"It was all in the flow of the game. I try not to force anything," he said. "Then once the double-teams start collapsing, I looked for the open man and we got good shots."
That doesn't sound like a prima donna. It does sound like the 2013 Mr. Basketball.
Among those he beat out for the award are St. Clairsville's Dan Monteroso, Luke Kennard of Franklin, Ironton's Zac Carter and Isaac McGlone of Carroll Bloom-Carroll.
Loving joins a list of past winners that includes three-time winner and NBA MVP LeBron James, Big Ten player of the year Trey Burke, two-time All-American Jared Sullinger now with the Boston Celtics, current pro O.J. Mayo and former Ohio State and NBA star Jim Jackson.


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SUNY Canton International Student Activist Organization Launches 'Human Wrong Campaign' in AprilTuesday, April 1st, 2014
Students from SUNY Canton have orchestrated a series of speakers in April to increase knowledge and understanding for Human Trafficking Awareness Month.
The "Human Wrong Campaign" was the brainstorm of the International Student Activist Organization (ISAO), according to Sabel Bong, an Educational Opportunity Program counselor and the club's advisor.
"Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery," Bong said. "It does not discriminate against race, religion or socioeconomic background. We are holding an awareness campaign to help people learn about the dangers of human trafficking, the role of human trafficking in funding organized criminal enterprises and what can be done to address this global epidemic."
Speakers for the event will be presenting at 5:30 p.m. each Monday from April 7 to April 28, in the Richard W. Miller Campus Center's Kingston Theater. Presentations will include, in order of appearance:
- David Bugg, Ph.D., SUNY Potsdam, and Bong will discuss the study abroad experience in Cambodia.
- Peter Ladd, Ph.D., St. Lawrence University, will be speaking about trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in victims and soldiers.
- Harinda Vidanage, Ph.D., St. Lawrence University, will be talking about cyber security and the rise of cyber crime.
- Geraldine Forbes, Ph.D., Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY Oswego, will be presenting the history of slavery and human trafficking in India.
Maleek C. McKenzie, ISAO president and an Electrical Engineering Technology student said he hopes to encourage open discussion about human trafficking and how it has been plaguing the world for centuries.
"Human Trafficking is a topic not normally talked about," McKenzie said. "It affects all of us in our daily lives, down to the clothes we wear and the food we eat."
This is the second year that the ISAO has held events at SUNY Canton coinciding with Human Trafficking Awareness Month.
About SUNY Canton
SUNY Canton is Northern New York's premier College for career-driven bachelor's degrees, associate degrees and certificate programs. The College delivers quality hands-on programs in engineering technology, health, management, and public service to students in the North Country, New York State, and beyond. Faculty members are noted for their professional real-world experience in addition to their academic credentials. SUNY Canton OnLine offers hundreds of flexible and convenient courses as well as eight exclusively online bachelor's degrees. The College's 14 athletic teams compete in state-of-the-art facilities as provisional members of the NCAA Division III and the USCAA.


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Senior Manager
Washington, DC
Alex Dewar is responsible for business development and for managing the growth of additional topic expertise within the BCG Center for Energy Impact.
Prior to joining the CEI team, Alex spent seven years with BCG's Energy practice as a principal in both the Washington, DC, and London offices. He has advised clients around the world on oil and gas, power generation and transmission, and renewable energy topics.


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The Story of IDENTITY ISSUES
Hi! My name is Claudia Whitsitt! I'd like to tell you about my latest mystery, Identity Issues. Thanks for reading!
It wasn't until the threatening letter arrived (from Botswana) that I became a bit concerned about the theft of my husband's passport some years previous. The letter, clearly meant for someone else, was disturbing. But in all his business travels, Don had never been to Botswana, nor did he have associates there. We blew it off. Then came the late night wrong numbers (also from Botswana) demanding my husband's contact information. My interest peaked, but there weren't enough dots to connect. The caller sought a man by the same name, a man not my husband. I never succeeded in convincing the persistent caller of his mistake and merely tolerated in his bi-annual calls. They became nothing more than an irritating interruption of my much-needed sleep.
After the calls faded, a parent who shared my surname visited me at Parent-Teacher conferences. Who's named Whitsitt? C'mon, really! She claimed her husband shared the same first and middle name as my husband, along with a matching birth date and countless other similarities. This identity theft had come back to haunt us. FOR REAL. Right in our own backyard. That short twenty minute conference with the other Mrs. Whitsitt, who wound up making startling accusations, marked the conception of Identity Issues.
That disquieting meeting would have been enough to spark my writing of the book, but more puzzle pieces fell into my lap. Too many questions with too few answers and a simple schoolteacher from Michigan re-invents herself as an author of suspense.
I've always loved writing and even attempted to write an entire book when at the age of ten. But I found myself compelled to write this story in a way I'd never experienced before. It wouldn't leave me alone. So, in September of 2006, I fired up my laptop and put fingers to the keyboard. To my surprise, the book poured out of me. Since the initial parts of the story were true, it seemed easy to recount the details. And I LOVED WRITING! In the process, I researched. Both the true elements of the story, to verify the facts, and the fiction portion, to add credibility. I wonder how many readers will be able to tell when the true story drifts into fiction. Can you?
Identity Issues is available exclusively at Amazon.com. Click here!


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The oil and gas industry is employing thousands of workers in the Niobrara shale play in Weld County and northeastern Colorado.
That's the good news.
The better news is 30 percent of the industry's workforce will retire in the next 10 years and thousands more workers will be needed to replace those retirees and to handle scores of technical jobs that haven't been created yet.
So how are the oil and gas companies addressing this need?
Quickly, say representatives of the industry and various employment agency officials.
"Our challenge is to recruit and retain skilled workers and blue-collar workers," said Melissa Sisneros, human relations business partner with Noble Energy. Sisneros commented on the need for more workers during a panel discussion March 20 at the third annual Niobrara Infrastructure Development Summit in Denver.
"We have a shortage (of employees) across the board in our industry," Sisneros said. "We're hiring folks every week."
Shannon Ross, the director of human resources for PDC Energy Inc., and another summit panelist, said the industry is aware of the need for more workers and is taking steps to guarantee there will always be enough help.
"We're working on how to get in front of this and not be reactive," Ross said. "Horizontal drilling (and hydraulic fracturing) is the here and now. It's still a relatively new technology.
"But, how do we train a workforce to keep up with the (coming) technology? That's the challenge. Another (challenge) is the competition for local talent. How do you get them to come to your company and keep them? What do you offer?"
Ross suggested one answer might be to start recruiting at an earlier age.
"We need to attract diverse generations and to do that, we need to get into the high schools and middle schools and have them look at (the oil and gas industry) now."
Sisneros added Noble Energy does a lot of college recruiting.
"We tap into every university or technical college that deals with our industry," Sisneros said. "It's been a good resource for us."
Emily Lesh, the assistant director of Policy and Industry Partnerships with the Colorado Workforce Development Council, agreed and said some area technical and community colleges are already taking it one step farther.
"Aims Community College in Fort Lupton has a program that specifically focuses on the oil and gas industry," Lesh said.
Aims Community College officials say its oil and gas program really got jump-started in 2012 when they received a $2 million Department of Labor grant to further develop the college's Applied Environmental Technology department. AET includes programs in Construction Management, Computer Aided Drafting, Industrial Technology/High Technology Manufacturing and Energy/Oil & Gas.
Nearly half of the grant, which was designed to support growth in the Energy/Oil & Gas program, was used to purchase equipment, including a mobile education station that can be moved to various Weld County businesses, drilling sites, schools or other locations for on-site training.
The grant also was used to establish an Associate of Applied Science degree in Energy/Oil & Gas, adding to the existing AAS degree that is available in Industrial Technology. Additionally, the college now offers short-term certificate programs that can build students' skills quickly to meet industry needs.
To provide space for these programs, Aims is building a $9 million oil and gas building on its Fort Lupton campus. It is scheduled to open Aug. 14.
Front Range Community College, with campuses in Fort Collins, Longmont, Westminster and Brighton, doesn't have oil and gas-specific programs but offers programs with transferable skills. Those include geology, GIS, CAD, welding and automotive technology.
Earth science degrees (geology) can be obtained at all of the state's larger universities: the University of Colorado, Colorado State University, and the University of Northern Colorado.
Another employee resource being looked into is the military.
Jackie Brown, the director of client solutions with SOS Employment Group, said using people who served in the military is smart because many of their training skills transfer easily to the oil and gas industry.
Ross added the state's new Boots to Suits program is doing exactly that, focusing on getting business jobs for ex-military personnel.
Aside from meeting their need for more people, industry experts say they are also concerned about keeping good employees.
"Retention is so key," said Jane Stetson, the managing partner of Nexus Staffing Solutions LLC. "That starts with hiring the right people to begin with.
"Sometimes it is better to leave a position open rather than hire the wrong person."
While good salaries – the average industry salary is $80,000-plus a year – are very attractive, they often aren't the most motivating reason to get an oil and gas job and keep it, experts say.
Stetson said one of the key recruiting strategies that should be pursued by oil and gas companies is the opportunity to advance.
"What keeps employees employed is growth potential," Stetson said. "They need programs to enhance their qualifications, to keep them engaged and loyal. Companies should always look to promote from within.
"That starts with hiring the right managers, training the right managers and weeding out the bad managers."
Brown, who said her company placed more than 900 employees in the oil and gas industry last year, agreed and added companies should retain employees based on performance, not seniority.


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Snuggled amid towers and trees on the downward side of downtown is a stately redbrick manor, with grand veranda and rooftop turret.
The big, old place, nestled below street grade, is only visible from the sidewalk. Heck, I've driven that slope a million times. Didn't see it.
Mind you, it's located midway down the slope, at the point where cyclists reach terminal velocity and walkers going uphill establish a base camp.
Jodie McKague was half-joking when she challenged me to do a feature on her place. Half-joking because her flat in the manor isn't posh or polished.
Yet I was intrigued by her choice. Downtown isn't exactly overrun with single mothers.
Jodie lives in her small apartment with Franka, her lovely five-year-old. Franka is a delight, though I'm told she's not so delightful when walking up that hill toward kindergarten.
Jodie is a freelance writer, completing a degree in communications. After her marriage ended, she started looking for a place of her own.
She wanted to live downtown, but ran into a housing barrier. The apartments were either too expensive or on sketchy streets. Or worse, they were in adults-only buildings.
As I mentioned, Jodie is a writer. A writer is someone who endures endless psychic torment to chisel and craft diamond-bright turns of phrase that she, like all writers, is compensated for with crumbs and coins. It's a tragedy. Someone should really do something for writers.
At any rate, it's not like a single mother living on freelance writing jobs can move into one of 104th Street's Icon towers, though Jodie eyes them with a look that says: Just one bestseller and you're mine.
I climb 20 metres of steep sidewalk, then the stairs to the manor's first-floor veranda. Catch my breath ... and push the doorbell marked for Jodie's suite.
Inside, the manor's entryway is all Gothic-haunted-chic and features a long, steep staircase up to Jodie's second-floor suite.
She estimates her flat is 800 square feet. Methinks her estimate is generous.
The living room and bedroom are ample, but the kitchen is maybe four phone booths; the bathroom, with its no-shower tub, about the same.
Jodie always dreamed of living in Paris. She's now getting a feel for it, what with her Parisian-apartment-sized kitchen and bathroom. Mind you, the kitchen opens up to that second-floor veranda.
The manor was built in 1903 by a wealthy family. The man's sudden death left the woman of the house with five daughters and no income. So she turned it into a boarding house for single women.
"The second I walked in I felt this really beautiful energy," Jodie says, pausing. "I know, that sounds kind of flaky."
She describes it as a feminine energy: Nurturing; welcoming; safe and secure; friendly.
Edmonton, says Jodie, was built with masculine energy - practical, workmanlike, utilitarian structures to clearly mark property and ownership.
Good point, actually. Much of Edmonton's architecture is bunker-like, with a stay-the-hell-out vibe to it.
No such ambience at the manor. A couple of dogs and a cat wander the halls and into suites. From her flat, Jodie can hear neighbours playing piano and strains of music from nearby stereos.
Jodie adds to the communal score, practising guitar, bass and voice. Franka is learning the violin.
The sounds, Jodie says, offer comfort. Friends are close at hand. The toil and play of the manor's residents keep a divorcee's loneliness at bay.
So do the occasional gatherings. Some are planned, like the recent Guy Fawkes night bonfire. Most often, they are spontaneous and in the hallway.
Jodie says the sense of community she so cherishes extends to the neighbourhood. Living downtown almost forces you to rub up against your fellow citizens.
A shopkeeper, bartender, server or barista becomes a familiar face, then a name. Soon enough, they're asking about Franka, or your latest writing job.
Jodie's flat is within walking distance of schools, restaurants, clubs, grocery stores, drug stores, cafes, galleries and theatres.
Franka calls the legislature grounds her backyard.
"And I like that I'm close to my school," says Franka.
Yes you are, Franka. It's just up that hill.
Scott can be reached at Scott@ ScottMcKeen.ca for comments or suggestions for future features on unique or beautiful homes in the Edmonton region.
Manor space a good fit for single mom
Snuggled amid towers and trees on the downward side of downtown is a stately redbrick manor, with grand veranda and rooftop turret.


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New York City's Times Square is now known as Super Bowl Boulevard.
The 13-block street fair features a giant toboggan run, a merchandise shop and a place for fans to try kicking field goals, among other activities.
It also features a concert venue called the "NFL Experience."
Wednesday afternoon, the Vince Lombardi trophy made its debut along the "boulevard." The trophy will be awarded to the winner of Sunday's big game.
New York Giants defensive end Justin Tuck carried the prestigious award from a truck to a trophy display area. The crowd will be serenaded by a marching band.
Organizers expect more than a million people to visit the boulevard during the coming days.
Times Square is now Super Bowl Boulevard
New York City's Times Square is now known as Super Bowl Boulevard.