text:
Marjorie Montemayor-Quellenberg, MA
If you are undergoing radiation therapy to treat cancer, you and your doctor may have discussed the different problems that may occur due to treatment. For instance, problems in the oral area (teeth, gums, and throat) are common with radiation therapy to nearby areas. While your cancer care team will manage any oral health problems that may occur from treatment, there are also actions you can take.
Cancer occurs when cells in the body divide without control or order. Radiation treats cancer by killing these out-of-control cells. However, since normal cells also divide (but do so in a regulated manner), they too are killed. This can prevent tissues in the oral area from repairing themselves during normal wear and tear.
Cancer treatment can also disturb the balance of good and bad bacteria in the mouth, as well as affect the lining and saliva. This can eventually lead to infection, sores, and tooth decay. Other oral side effects that may occur are:
Some of these problems, like mouth sores, will go away once treatment stops, but others may last months or years.
Think about your overall health before treatment. The healthier you are, the better able your body will be to prevent problems and fight potential side effects. Being healthy includes following a well-balanced diet. Talk with your doctor or dietitian about a diet plan that is right for you.
Also, if you are having radiation therapy to your head or neck, see a dentist 2 weeks beforehand. The dentist will take care of any existing oral health problems you may have to ensure that you are as healthy as possible before treatment.
Once treatment begins, your doctor may prescribe medications to treat any problems that occur. In addition to medications, here are other ways to maintain a healthy mouth during treatment:
Your doctor or dietitian may suggest foods that are high in calories and protein so that you can maintain a healthy weight during treatment.
You may experience stiffness in your jaw. If so, your doctor may help relieve this with special devices and medications. There are also some exercises that you can do at home, such as the following:
If you experience pain, you and your doctor will work together to find ways to help relieve it. Your doctor may prescribe medications, as well as other therapies like:
Tell your doctor anytime you:
Undergoing cancer treatment can be stressful and tiring. But proper self-care and support from your cancer care team will help you to cope successfully as you battle the disease.
American Cancer Society
National Cancer Institute
BC Cancer Agency
Canadian Cancer Society
Oral complications of chemotherapy and head/neck radiation (PDQ). National Cancer Institute website. Available at: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/side-effects/mouth-throat/oral-complications-pdq. Updated December 16, 2016. Accessed June 29, 2017.
Radiation therapy side effects and ways to manage them. National Cancer Institute website. Available at: http://www.cancer.gov/publications/patient-education/radiation-therapy-and-you. Accessed June 29, 2017.
Radiation therapy to the head and neck. American Cancer Society website. Available at: http://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatmentsandsideeffects/treatmenttypes/radiation/understandingradiationtherapyaguideforpatientsandfamilies/understanding-radiation-therapy-radiation-to-head-and-neck. Updated February 10, 2017. Accessed June 29, 2017.
Last reviewed June 2017 by EBSCO Medical Review Board -
Michael Woods, MD, FAAP
Please be aware that this information is provided to supplement the care provided by your physician. It is neither intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. CALL YOUR HEALTHCARE PROVIDER IMMEDIATELY IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider prior to starting any new treatment or with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Copyright © EBSCO Publishing. All rights reserved.


text:
Reasonable people wonder how good a programmer can be if he spends all his time writing a book instead of writing programs. Free screencasts and Peepcode are making books look outdated and silly. The pace of change in technology is fast enough that publishing a book which is still up-to-date by the time it hits stores is virtually impossible. Some people think you shouldn't bother with technology-specific books at all. Maybe the time for books has passed. Maybe we should concentrate on beaming data directly into our brains.
I have at least 200 books listed under "save for later" in my shopping cart at Amazon. Admittedly, I have many interests, some of which are entirely nontechnical, but Amazon doesn't expose an easy way to grep the subsets. Anyway - I definitely think it's worthwhile to read a book from time to time. The advantages are depth and interactivity.
First the surprising one: a book is more interactive than a screencast. I find screencasts often go too slowly for me. I can double the video speed, turn down the audio, and put on some music instead - just watching the code go by instead of listening to the narration - but that deprives me of additional useful information, assuming the narrator provides some, and it still locks me into whichever path the screencast's chosen to take. Obviously when it comes to choosing your own path through the information, using blogs and Google absolutely clobbers books, but the advantage books have over screencasts is, paradoxically, the most modern advantage possible.
In terms of depth, books are simply much, much larger than most information sources you'll find on the internet, normally by orders of magnitude. If there's something that everybody skips over in a blog, you're probably going to be able to find it explained in a book. If all you want is enough information to do your job, you might not need books. But if you want to be really good at what you do, you need the information that everybody else skips over. There are always hidden advantages and hidden gotchas in the information everybody else skips learning. In fact the scary part in learning a technology inside-out is discovering how often perfectly intelligent programmers shoot themselves in the foot.
Last but not least there's one bonus advanage: portability. You can bring your iPod to the beach, put your headphones on, and watch a screencast, but it just isn't the same.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Why Technical Books Still Matter
Posted by Giles Bowkett at 9:26 AM
3 comments:
I use LibraryThing to track books I own, have read, and plan to read. LT uses tagging, so it's easy to tag 'toread' and a subject so I can find a new CS theory or origami or pulp sci-fi book whenever I'm in the mood. Maybe you'd dig it.ReplyDelete
I'm writing a book, so I'm biased, but I agree with you.ReplyDelete
(The book is the second edition of High Performance MySQL).
Reading technical books is by far one of my favorite things to do. As much as I enjoy blog posts and screencasts, they never approach the depth of a good tech book. Whenever I reread my favorite books, I find that I add a new thin layer of understanding, which I find very exciting.ReplyDelete
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text: The Investigators is an international Private Investigative firm providing a wide range of investigative services. Based in El Paso, Texas U.S.A., we offer a full staff of professional, highly trained and certified Investigators. For over 50 years we have served clients around the world, conducting every type of investigation imaginable. Prompt worldwide service, 24-hours a day, anywhere in the world. Call us today at (915) 532-5392 or email us at: firstname.lastname@example.com


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Small Fry is a firsthand account of Lisa Brennan Job's difficult relationship with her father—Apple founder Steve Jobs, who initially denied paternity of Lisa—and her life split between two parents moving in different worlds
A brilliant innovator known for his complicated personality, Small Fry offers the only account of the mogul by his eldest child, who was born one year before the creation and launch of the first Apple computer (named "Lisa"—though for most of her life Jobs denied that he named it after her). It is a deeply personal story that unveils another side of Jobs from one of the people who knew him best. Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography has sold almost 2 million copies
Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for the 2015 feature film Steve Jobs, told Business Insider "Lisa didn't speak to Walter Isaacson when Walter was writing the book [Steve Jobs] because her father was alive at the time. But she was willing to speak to me. She was able to tell stories about her father that weren't necessarily flattering stories, but she would tell the story and then show me how you could see he really did love her."
Not just an account of a difficult, distant father and his rocky relationship with his daughter, Small Fry also gives a vivid portrait of Palo Alto and the Bay Area during the first tech boom
Will appeal to fans of memoirs like The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson and Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Lisa Brennan-Jobs has been the focus of media attention and profiles already—from Jobs' denial of paternity, to her mother's exposing tell all of their early relationship, to the numerous films and accounts of Jobs' life. We expect a lot of attention for Small Fry
Lisa's aunt is bestselling author Mona Simpson, Steve's sister
She has written for Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine The Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Harvard Advocate
Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father's house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.
After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that this would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again like thirst.
I tiptoed into my father's room, careful to step over the creaky floorboard at the entrance. This room had been his study, when he could still climb the stairs, but he slept here now. It was cluttered with books and mail and bottles of medicine; glass apples, wooden apples; awards and magazines and stacks of papers. There were framed prints by Hasui of twilight and sunset at temples. A patch of pink light stretched out on a wall beside him.
He was propped up in bed, wearing shorts. His legs were bare and thin as arms, bent up like a grasshopper's.
Hey, Lis, he said.
Segyu Rinpoche stood beside him. He'd been around recently when I came to visit. A short Brazilian man with sparkling brown eyes, the Rinpoche was a Buddhist monk with a scratchy voice who wore brown robes over a round belly. We called him by his title. Tibetan holy men were sometimes born in the west now, in places like Brazil. To me he didn't seem holy—he wasn't distant or inscrutable. Near us, a black canvas bag of nutrients hummed with a motor and a pump, the tube disappearing somewhere under my father's sheets.
It's a good idea to touch his feet, Rinpoche said, putting his hands around my father's foot on the bed.
Like this.
I didn't know if the foot touching was supposed to be for my father, or for me, or for both of us.
Okay, I said, and took his other foot in its thick sock, even though it was strange, watching my father's face, because when he winced in pain or anger it looked similar to when he started to smile.
That feels good, my father said, closing his eyes. I glanced at the chest of drawers beside him and at the shelves on the other side of the room for objects I wanted, even though I knew I wouldn't dare steal something right in front of him.
While he slept, I wandered through the house, looking for I didn't know what. A nurse sat on the couch in the living room, her hands on her lap, listening for my father to call out for help. The house was quiet, the sounds muffled, the white-painted brick walls were dimpled like cushions. The terracotta floor was cool on my feet except in the places where the sun had warmed it to the temperature of skin.
In the cabinet of the half bath near the kitchen, where there used to be a tattered copy of the Bhagavad Gita, I found a bottle of expensive rose facial mist. With the door closed, the light out, sitting on the toilet seat, I sprayed it up into the air and closed my eyes. The mist fell around me, cool and holy, as in a forest or an old stone church.
There was also a silver tube of lip gloss with a brush at one end and a twisting mechanism at the other that released liquid into the center of the brush. I had to have it. I stuffed the lip gloss into my pocket to take back to the one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village that I shared with my boyfriend, where I knew, as much as I have ever known anything, that this tube of lip gloss would complete my life. Between avoiding the housekeeper, my brother and sisters, and my stepmother around the house so I wouldn't be caught stealing things or hurt when they didn't acknowledge me or reply to my hellos, and spraying myself in the darkened bathroom to feel less like I was disappearing—because inside the falling mist I had a sense of having an outline again—making efforts to see my sick father in his room began to feel like a burden, a nuisance.
For the past year I'd visited for a weekend every other month or so.
I'd given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies, but I kept coming anyway.
In between visits, I saw my father all around New York. I saw him sitting in a movie theater, the exact curve of his neck to jaw to cheekbone. I saw him as I ran along the Hudson River in winter sitting on a bench looking at the docked boats; and on my subway ride to work, walking away on the platform through the crowd. Thin men, olive-skinned, fine-fingered, slim-wristed, stubble-bearded, who, at certain angles, looked just like him. Each time I had to get closer to check, my heart in my throat, even though I knew it could not possibly be him because he was sick in bed in California.
Before this, during years in which we hardly spoke, I'd seen his picture everywhere. Seeing the pictures gave me a strange zing. The feeling was similar to catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror across a room and thinking it was someone else, then realizing it was my own face: there he was, peering out from magazines and newspapers and screens in whatever city I was in. That is my father and no one knows it but it's true.
Before I said goodbye, I went to the bathroom to mist one more time. The spray was natural, which meant that over the course of a few minutes it no longer smelled sharp like roses, but fetid and stinky like a swamp, although I didn't realize it at the time.
As I came into his room, he was getting into a standing position. I watched him gather both his legs in one arm, twist himself ninety degrees by pushing against the headboard with the other arm, and then use both arms to hoist his own legs over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. When we hugged, I could feel his vertebrae, his ribs. He smelled musty, like medicine sweat.
I'll be back soon, I said.
We detached, and I started walking away.
You smell like a toilet.
By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved thirteen times.
We rented spaces informally, staying in a friend's furnished bedroom here, a temporary sublet there. The last place had become unsuitable when someone had sold the refrigerator without warning. The next day, my mother called my father, asked for more money, and he increased the child support payments by two hundred dollars per month. We moved again, to an apartment on the ground floor of a small building at the back of a house on Channing Avenue in Palo Alto—the first place my mother rented with her own name on the lease. Our new place was just for us.
The house in front of our apartment was a dark brown Craftsman with dust-covered ivy where a lawn might have been, and two bent-over scrub oaks that almost touched the ground. Cobwebs stretched between the trees and the ivy, collecting pollen that lit up bright white in the sunshine. From the street you couldn't tell there was an apartment complex behind the house.
Before this we'd lived in towns nearby—Menlo Park, Los Altos, Portola Valley—but Palo Alto is the place we would come to call home.
Here the soil was black and wet and fragrant; beneath rocks I discovered small red bugs, pink- and ash-colored worms, thin centipedes, and slate-colored woodlice that curled into armored spheres when I bothered them. The air smelled of eucalyptus and sunshine-warmed dirt, moisture, cut grass. Railroad tracks bisect the town; near them is Stanford University, with its great grassy oval and gold-rimmed chapel at the end of a palm tree–lined road.
The day we moved in, my mother parked and we carried in our things: kitchen supplies, a futon, a desk, a rocking chair, lamps, books.
This is why nomads don't get anything done, she said, hefting a box through the doorway, her hair disheveled, her hands flecked with white canvas primer.
They don't stay in one place long enough to build anything that lasts.
The living room had a sliding glass door that opened onto a small deck. Beyond the deck was a patch of dry grass and thistles, a scrub oak and a fig—both spindly—and a line of bamboo, which my mother said was difficult to get rid of once it took root.
After we finished unloading, she stood with her hands on her hips, and together we surveyed the room: with everything we owned, it still looked empty.
The next day, she called my father at his office to ask for help.
Elaine's coming over with the van—we're going to your father's house to pick up a couch, my mother said a few days later. My father lived near Saratoga in Monte Sereno, a suburb about half an hour away. I'd never been to this house or heard of the town where he lived—I'd met him only a couple of times.
My mother said my father offered his extra couch when she called him. But if we didn't get it soon, she knew, he'd throw it away or rescind the offer. And who knew when we'd have access to Elaine's van again?
I was in the same first-grade class as Elaine's twins, a boy and a girl. Elaine was older than my mother, with wavy black hair and loose strands that created a halo around her head in certain lights. My mother was young, sensitive, and luminous, without the husband, house, and family that Elaine had. Instead, she had me, and I had two jobs: first, to protect her so that she could protect me; second, to shape her and rough her up so that she could handle the world, the way you sandpaper a surface to make the paint stick.
Left or right? Elaine kept asking. She was in a hurry—she had a doctor's appointment to keep. My mother is dyslexic but insisted that wasn't the reason she eschewed maps. It was because the maps were inside her; she could find her way back to any place she'd ever been, she said, even if it took her a few turns to get her bearings. But we often got lost.
Left, she said.
No, right. Wait. Okay, left.
Elaine was mildly annoyed, but my mother did not apologize. She acted as if one is equal to the people who save them.
The sun made lace on my legs. The air was wet and thick and pricked my nose with the smell of spicy bay laurel and dirt.
The hills in the towns around Palo Alto had been created by shifting under the earth, by the grinding of the plates against each other.
We must be near the fault line, my mother said.
If there was an earthquake now, we'd be swallowed up.
We found the right road and then the wooded driveway with a lawn at the end. A circle of bright grass with thin shoots that looked like they'd be soft on my feet. The house was two stories tall, with a gabled roof, dark shingles on white stucco. Long windows rippled the light. This was the kind of house I drew on blank pages.
We rang the bell and waited, but no one came. My mother tried the door.
Locked, she said.
Damn. I bet he's not going to show.
She walked around the house, checking the windows, trying the back door.
Locked! she kept calling out. I wasn't convinced it was really his.
She came back to the front and looked up at the sash windows, too high to reach.
I'm going to try those, she said. She stepped on a sprinkler head and then a drainpipe, grabbed a lip of windowsill, and flattened herself against the wall. She found a new place for her hands and feet, looked up, pulled herself higher.
Elaine and I watched. I was terrified she would fall.
My father was supposed to come to the door and invite us in. Maybe he would show us other furniture he didn't want and invite us to come back.
Instead, my mother was climbing the house like a thief.
Let's go, I called out.
I don't think we're supposed to be here.
I hope there's no alarm, she said.
She reached the ledge. I held my breath, waiting for a siren to blare, but the day was as still as before. She unlatched the window, which scraped up and open, and disappeared, leg by leg, and emerged a few seconds later through the front door into the sunshine.
We're in! she said. I looked through the door: light reflected on wood floors, high ceilings. Cool, vacant spaces. I associated him that day—and later—with pools of reflected light from big windows, shade in the depths of rooms, the musty, sweet smells of mold and incense.
My mother and Elaine held the couch between them, maneuvered it through the door and down the steps.
It doesn't weigh much, my mother said. She asked me to step aside. A thick woven raffia frame held wide-weave linen upholstery. The cushions were a cream color spattered with bright chintz flowers in red, orange, and blue, and for years I would pick at the edges of the petals, trying to dig my fingernails under their painted tips.
Elaine and my mother moved fast and seriously, as if they might be angry, a loop of my mother's hair falling out of its band. After they'd shoved the couch into the back of the van, they went back inside and brought out a matching chair and ottoman.
Okay, let's go, my mother said.
The back was full, so I sat in the front, on her lap.
My mother and Elaine were giddy. They had their furniture and Elaine wouldn't be late for her appointment. This was the reason for my vigilance and worry: to arrive at this moment, see my mother joyful and content.
Elaine turned out of the driveway and onto a two-lane road. A moment later two cop cars sped past us, going in the opposite direction.
They might be coming for us! Elaine said.
"We might have gone to jail!" my mother said, laughing.
I didn't understand her jaunty tone. If we went to jail, we'd be separated. As far as I understood, they didn't keep children and adults in the same cells.
The next day, my father called.
Hey, did you break in and take the couch? he asked. He laughed. He had a silent alarm, he said. It had rung in the local police station, and four cop cars had sped to the house, arriving just after we left.
Yes, we did, she said, a flaunt in her voice.
For years, I was haunted by the idea of a silent alarm and how close we'd been to danger without knowing it.
My parents met at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, in the spring of 1972, when he was a senior and she was a junior.
On Wednesdays, through the night, she animated a student film in the high school quad with a group of friends. One of those nights, my father approached her in the spotlight where she stood waiting to move the Claymation characters and handed her a page of Bob Dylan lyrics he'd typed out:
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
I want it back when you're done, he said.
He came the nights she was there and held candles for her to see by while she drew in between takes.
That summer they lived together in a cabin at the end of Stevens Canyon Road, my father paying the rent by selling what they called blue boxes that he made with his friend Woz. Woz was an engineer who was a few years older than my father, shy and intense, with dark hair. They'd met at a technology club and become friends and collaborators and would later start Apple together. The blue boxes emitted tones that made phone calls go through for free, illegally. They'd found a book by the phone company in the library that explained the system and the exact series of tones. You'd hold the box to the receiver, the box would make the tones, and the phone company would connect the call to wherever in the world you wanted. At that house the neighbors owned aggressive goats, and when my parents arrived home in the car, my father would divert the goats as my mother ran to the door, or he would run to her side of the car and carry her.
By this time, my mother's parents had divorced; her mother was mentally ill and increasingly cruel. My mother went back and forth between her parents' homes; her father was often gone, traveling for work. Her father didn't approve of my parents living together, but he didn't try to stop them. My father's father, Paul, was outraged at the plan, but his mother, Clara, was kind, the only one of the parents to come over one night for dinner. They made her Campbell's soup, spaghetti, and salad.
In the fall, my father left for Reed College, in Oregon, which he attended for about six months before dropping out. They broke up; they didn't really talk about things, she said, not the relationship or the breakup, and she'd started dating someone else. When he understood she was leaving him, he was so upset he could hardly walk, she said, but sort of slouched forward. It surprised me to discover that she was the one who broke it off with him, and I wondered, later, if this breakup was part of the reason he was vindictive toward her after I was born. He was aimless then, she said, a college dropout, longing for her even when she was beside him.
Both my parents went to India separately. He traveled for six months, she for the year after he returned. He told me later that he'd gone to India specifically to meet the guru Neem Karoli Baba, but when he arrived, the guru had just died. The ashram where the guru lived had let my father stay for a few days, putting him up in a white room with nothing in it but a bed on the floor and a copy of a book called Autobiography of a Yogi.
Two years later, when the company my father started with Woz, Apple, was just beginning, my parents were a couple again, living in a dark brown ranch-style house in Cupertino together with a man named Daniel who, along with my parents, also worked at Apple. My mother worked in the packing department. She had recently decided to save up to leave suburbia and leave my father, who was moody, and to get a job at the Good Earth in Palo Alto, a health food restaurant on the corner of University Avenue and Emerson Street. She had an IUD inserted, but it was expelled without her knowledge, as they are in rare cases soon after insertion, and she discovered she was pregnant.
She told my father the next day, when they were standing in the middle of a room off the kitchen. There was no furniture, just a rug. When she told him, he looked furious, clenched his jaw, and then ran out the front door and slammed it behind him. He drove off; she thought he must have gone to talk with an attorney who told him not to talk to her, because after that, he wouldn't say a word.
She quit her job in the packing department at Apple, too embarrassed to be pregnant with my father's child and also working at his company, and went to stay at different friends' houses. She went on welfare; she had no car, no income. She thought of having an abortion but decided not to after a recurring dream of a blowtorch between her legs. She considered adoption, but the one woman she trusted to help her at Planned Parenthood was transferred to another county. She got jobs cleaning houses and lived in a trailer for a while. She went to silent meditation retreats four times during her pregnancy, in part because the food was plentiful. My father continued living in the house in Cupertino until he bought the house in Monte Sereno, where we would later get the couch.
In the spring of 1978, when my parents were twenty-three, my mother gave birth to me on their friend Robert's farm in Oregon, with the help of two midwives. The labor and delivery took three hours, start to finish. Robert took photos. My father arrived a few days later.
It's not my kid, he kept telling everyone at the farm, but he'd flown there to meet me anyway. I had black hair and a big nose, and Robert said,
She sure looks like you.
My parents took me out into a field, laid me on a blanket, and looked through the pages of a baby-name book. He wanted to name me Claire. They went through several names but couldn't agree. They didn't want something derivative, a shorter version of a longer name.
What about Lisa? my mother finally said.
Yes. That one, he said happily.
He left the next day.
Isn't Lisa short for Elizabeth? I asked my mother.
No. We looked it up. It's a separate name.
And why did you let him help name me when he was pretending he wasn't the father?
Because he was your father, she said.
On my birth certificate, my mother listed both of their names, but my last name was only hers: Brennan. She drew stars on the document around the margins, the kind that are only outlines with hollow centers.
A few weeks later my mother and I went to live with her older sister, Kathy, in a town called Idyllwild in Southern California. My mother was still on welfare; my father didn't visit or help with child support. We left after five months, beginning our series of moves.
During the time my mother was pregnant, my father started work on a computer that would later be called the Lisa. It was the precursor to the Macintosh, the first mass-market computer with an external mouse—the mouse as large as a block of cheese—and included software, floppy discs labeled LisaCalc and LisaWrite. But it was too expensive for the market, a commercial failure; my father began on the team working for it, but then started working against it, competing against it, on the Mac team. The Lisa computer was discontinued, the three thousand unsold computers later buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah.
Until I was two, my mother supplemented the welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn't help; my mother's father and her sisters helped when they could—not much. She found babysitting at a church daycare center run by the minister's wife. For a few months, we lived in a room in a house my mother found listed on a noticeboard meant for pregnant women considering adoption.
You would cry, and I would cry with you; I was so young and I didn't know what to do and your sadness made me sad, my mother said about those years. This seemed like the wrong thing. Too much fusion. But nonetheless I felt it had shaped me, how I felt powerfully for others sometimes, as if they were me. My father's absence makes her choices seem more dramatic, like they happened in front of a black backdrop.
I blamed her, later, for how hard it was to fall asleep in a room with any noise at all.
You should have made sure I slept in noisy places, too, I said.
But there was no one else around, she said.
What was I supposed to do—bang pots and pans?
When I turned one, she got a waitressing job at the Varsity Theatre, a restaurant and art house cinema in Palo Alto. She found good, inexpensive daycare nearby at the Downtown Children's Center.
In 1980, when I was two, the district attorney of San Mateo County, California, sued my father for child-support payments. The state wanted him to pay child support and also to reimburse the state for the welfare payments already made. The lawsuit, initiated by the State of California, was made on my mother's behalf. My father responded by denying paternity, swearing in a deposition that he was sterile and naming another man he said was my father. After this man's dental and medical records were subpoenaed and didn't match, his lawyers claimed that
between August, 1977, and the beginning of January, 1978, plaintiff engaged in acts of sexual intercourse with a certain person or persons, the names of whom the defendant is ignorant, but plaintiff well knows.
I was required to take a DNA test. The tests were new, done with blood instead of buccal cells, and my mother said that the nurse could not find a vein and instead kept jabbing at my arm as I wailed. My father was there too because the court had ordered us all to arrive at the hospital at the same time. She and my father were polite to each other in the waiting room. The results came back: the chance we were related came to the highest the instruments could measure then, 94.4 percent. The court required my father to cover welfare back payments of about $6,000, child-support payments of $385 per month, which he increased to $500, and medical insurance until I was eighteen.
It is case 239948, filed on microfiche at the Superior Court, County of San Mateo, plaintiff vs. my father, defendant. My father signed it in lowercase, a less-practiced version of the way he signed later. My mother's signature is pinched and wobbly; she signed twice, once below and once on the line. A third start is crossed out—had she finished that signature, too, it would have hovered above the others.
The case was finalized on December 8, 1980, with my father's lawyers insistent to close, and my mother unaware of why the case that had dragged on for months was now being rushed to a conclusion. Four days later Apple went public and overnight my father was worth more than two hundred million dollars.
But before that, just after the court case was finalized, my father came to visit me once at our house on Oak Grove Avenue in Menlo Park, where we rented a detached studio. I don't remember the visit, but it was the first time I'd seen him since I'd been a newborn in Oregon.
You know who I am? he asked. He flipped his hair out of his eyes.
I was two and a half. I didn't.
"I'm your father.
(Like he was Darth Vader," my mother said later, when she told me the story.)
I'm one of the most important people you will ever know, he said.
On our street, pepper tree seeds in pink casings dangled down from tree limbs low enough to touch, crackling apart when I rubbed them between my fingers. The leaves, shaped like fish bones, swayed in breezes. Mourning doves made calls like out-of-tune woodwinds. The sidewalk around some tree trunks was cracked and warped.
It's the tree roots, my mother said.
They're strong enough to push up the cement.
In the shower with my mother, the droplets made their way down the wall. Droplets were like animals: they jerked and took winding paths, slower and faster, leaving a trail. The shower was dark and closed, tiled and curtained. When my mother turned the water to hot, we yelled,
Open pores! and when it was cold, we yelled,
Closed … pores! She explained that pores were holes in the skin that opened with heat and closed with cold.
She held me in the shower and I nestled against her and it wasn't clear to me where she ended and I began.
My mother's goal was to be a good mother and a successful artist, and every time we moved, she brought two large books with us: an album of photographs of my birth and a book of art she called her portfolio. The first I wished she'd throw away because it contained nudity, and the second I worried she might lose.
Her portfolio contained a series of her drawings encased in plastic. That it was called a portfolio gave it dignity. I would flip through the pages, enjoying the weight of them in my hand. In one pencil drawing, a woman sat behind a desk in a windowed office, a gust of wind lifting her hair up into the shape of a fan and scattering sheets of white paper all around her, like a storm of moths.
I like her hair, I said.
I like her skirt. I couldn't get enough of this woman; I wanted to be her, or for my mother to be her.
She'd made this drawing sitting at a table, using a mechanical pencil, an eraser, and the heel of her hand, blowing graphite and eraser leavings off the page. I loved the low murmur the pencil made on paper, and how her breath got even and slow when she worked. She seemed to consider her art with curiosity, not ownership, as if she weren't really the one making the marks.
It was the drawing's realism that impressed me. Every detail was precise like a photograph. But the scene was also fantastical. I loved how the woman sat in her pencil skirt and buttoned blouse, poised and dignified amid the chaos of the flying papers.
It's just an illustration, not art, she said dismissively, when I asked her why she didn't make more like it. (It was a commercial piece, and less impressive than her paintings; I didn't know the difference between the two.) She'd been commissioned to illustrate a book called Taipan, and this was one of the pieces.
We didn't have a car, so I rode in a plastic seat on the back of her bicycle over sidewalks under the trees. Once, another rider came toward us on the sidewalk on his bicycle; my mother steered away, the other rider did the same, and they collided. We flew onto the sidewalk, skinning our hands and knees. We recovered on a lawn nearby. My mother sat and sobbed, her knees up and her shorts hanging down, one of her knees scraped and bloody. The man tried to help. She sobbed for too long in a way that I knew must be about more than the fall.
One evening soon after, I wanted to take a walk. She was depressed and didn't want to go, but I begged and pulled at her arm until she relented. Down the street, we saw a leaf-green VW hatchback with a sign:
For Sale by Owner, $700. She walked around it, looking in the windows.
What do you think, Lisa? This might be just what we need.
She wrote down the name of the owner and his telephone number. Later, her father brought her to his company's loan department and cosigned a loan. My mother talked about my dragging her out for a walk that night as if I'd performed a heroic feat.
As we drove, she sang. Depending on her mood she would sing Joni Mitchell's
Blue or
The Teddy Bears' Picnic or
Tom Dooley. She sang one about asking God for a car and a television. She sang
Rocky Raccoon when she was feeling happy, feisty; it had a part where she went up and down the scales without real words, like scat, making me laugh, making me embarrassed. I was sure she'd invented it—it was too strange to be a real song—and I was shocked years later when I heard the Beatles' version playing on the radio.
These were the Reagan years, and Reagan had denigrated single mothers and welfare mothers—calling single mothers welfare queens taking government handouts so they could drive Cadillacs—and later she talked about how Reagan was an idiot and a crook and had designated ketchup a vegetable in school lunches.
Around this time, my aunt Linda—my mother's younger sister—came to visit. Linda worked at Supercuts and was saving for a condo. We were out of money, and Linda said she drove an hour to give my mother twenty dollars for food and diapers; my mother used it to buy food and diapers, and also a bouquet of daisies and a small pack of patterned origami paper. Money, when we had it, was quick-burning, bright, like kindling. We had just a little or not enough. My mother was not good at saving or making money, but she loved beauty.
Linda remembers walking in as my mother was sitting on the futon and sobbing on the phone, saying,
Look, Steve, we just need money. Please send us some money. I was three, which seems too young, but Linda remembers that I'd grabbed the phone out of my mother's hand.
She just needs some money. Okay? I'd said into the receiver, and hung up.
"How much money does


text:
Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum
Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum
Unit 1.6 The Mole
This section deals with the concept of the mole. Interviews
with students reveal their uncertainty about the concept.
An activity is presented to help students visualize what
a mole is by combining a familiar game with chemical calculations.
Video program cues: 33:40-42:40
What is a mole?
Students ideas
"I think this is the 6.02x1023
"Something that hunches underground-an animal-and it digs
"It's used for calculating lots of chemistry equations
About the mole
"The primary unit for the amount of substance
in a chemical element is the mole, and if you are talking
about the stoichiometry of a reaction, the mole is the basis
for that."
Dr. Willie May
National Institute of Standards, Maryland
Rohrig, B. (2000) 'Fizzy Drinks: Stoichiometry You Can Taste,
'Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 77, No. 12, pp: 1608A-1608B.
Periodic Table hopscotch laboratory
Leslie Pierce helps her students visualize the mole through
a fun activity based on calculations.
Wakeley, D.M. (2000) 'Developing an Intuitive Approach to
Moles, 'Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 77, No. 8, pp:
© Annenberg Foundation 2017. All rights reserved. Legal Policy


text:
Officially Licensed
Made By NikeRepresent your favorite team and player anytime in the NFL® Game jersey from Nike®. Inspired by what he's wearing on the field, Buy your favorite player jersey from the official shop of the NFL®. Features: 1. 100% recycled polyester 2. NFL® jersey 3. Screenprinted player name and number 4. Tailored fit designed for movement 5. No-tag neck label offers clean comfort 6. Strategic ventilation for breathability 7. Woven jock tag at front lower left 8. TPU shield at V-neck 9. Machine wash cold. 10. Made in El Salvador!
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26 If anyone 5among you thinks he is religious, and cdoes not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one's religion is useless.
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NU omits among you
Ps 34:13


text:
Mark Anthony Jackson (born July 23, 1963 in Chicago, Illinois) is a former professional American football player who was selected by the Denver Broncos in the sixth round of the 1986 NFL Draft. A 5'9", 174 lb (79 kg). wide receiver from Purdue University, Jackson played in nine NFL seasons from 1986 to 1994 for the Broncos, the New York Giants, and the Indianapolis Colts. Jackson played in Super Bowls XXI, XXII, and XXIV with the Broncos. Jackson caught the touchdown pass that sent the game into overtime on "The Drive" in the Broncos' January 11, 1987 AFC Championship Game victory over the Cleveland Browns. Along with Vance Johnson and Ricky Nattiel, Jackson comprised the "Three Amigos" receiving combination in the late 1980s.
He lived in Terre Haute, Indiana, during his youth and played for South Vigo High School. Jackson currently resides in Denver, Colorado.


text:
petit teapot
Regular price $24.00
Make tea-for-one a festive experience with our gorgeous new Petit Teapot. Enjoy a tranquil cup of tea in the warm glow of this teapot's durable glass exterior. The interior infuser is made of stainless steel, giving tea leaves ample room to unfurl and infuse completely, placing more flavor in each cup of tea. Not made for stove-top use. Made in China. 17 oz. (0.5L) 4.5" Diameter.


text:
Saturday, July 14, 2012
By Shekhar Gupta
The late Edward S. Behr (Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? besides much else), a delightfully versatile journalist-writer, used to tell us, fellow travellers in conflict zones, a story from his days as a captain in the Indian Army's Garhwal regiment. Apparently, a jawan of his battalion fired and killed two men leading a peaceful anti-Partition procession in Peshawar in 1947. The jawan had fired apparently without provocation, and he had fired to kill, rather than shoot at the legs as the instructions in those angry days were.
At the court martial, the jawan's defence was very simple. These two guys were leading the procession. The moment they saw us, they unbuttoned their shirts, turned their bare chests at us, and started shouting, chhaati mein goli maaro (shoot me in the chest), chhaati mein goli maaro. So, the earnest Garhwali shot them in the chest.
We do not know what view the court martial took of this defence. But we do know for sure that the two protesters with bared chests died on the spot. Why, then, are we in the Indian media now walking around like those two unfortunate Pathans? For several months now, we are ourselves holding discussions, debates, seminars, even inviting politicians, high officials, eminent regulators and the sort, to discuss the idea of media regulation. At all these, we acknowledge that we have a problem. We also, naam ke vaaste, keep on repeating that a state-mandated or -controlled regulator is not what we want. Yet, we call politicians and retired judges to seek their views. They hold forth on how much they respect and value the freedom of the press, but how they also share "our" view that the time has come for some kind of regulation, some institutional mechanism to ensure "accountability". Of course, at a time when everybody, from politicians to the judiciary, is being confronted with new instruments of accountability, how can the media, now so powerful, be left out? And the permanent footnote: but, of course, we (the political-bureaucratic class) should do nothing about it. Irrespective of who is speaking, the Congress or the BJP, this is always spoken with that Gotcha! smirk.
So why are we Indian journalists, among the most independent and powerful in the world, walking around with chests bared, asking the political class to shoot?
THE argument is, baba, we must do this, we must engage the politicians, the state, the judiciary. If we don't do anything ourselves, they will move in and we will have nowhere to hide. Truth is, we flatter the establishment. This is undoubtedly the weakest full-term government in our history ever. This is also our most non-functional parliament. It cannot pass the simplest of populist legislation. This establishment has made two attempts to challenge the media, and in each case the retreat has been immediate. The group of ministers on the media, of which nobody has fully understood the purpose, was constituted with some enthusiasm, but has hardly ever met. Then we saw that meticulously drafted private member's bill to regulate the media, from the Congress party's once-rising young star Meenakshi Natarajan, and it was dumped at once. In fact, the only damage it should end up causing is to her own political career, unless, indeed, it was some kind of a command performance. In short, this is not an establishment that can challenge our freedoms, or even threaten to "regulate" the news media in any manner whatsoever. If their idea of striking terror in our hearts was the appointment of Justice Markandey Katju as the new chairman of the Press Council, it has only underlined the utter toothlessness of the Press Council of India, and just as well.
We will never submit to a regulatory body mandated, financed and run by the government. Justice Katju mostly just talks, and for heaven's sake, he is not a bore, or a pinko revolutionary, or both. We have seen some like that at the head of the PCI as well, including — and notably — Justice P.B. Sawant whose main bugbear was not our indiscretions, but who owned our newspapers. He wasted most of his tenure promoting hare-brained ideas like newspapers run by journalist cooperatives. I did try to ask him at the odd seminar if he had seen us journalists run even a housing cooperative, as I was a member of one, and it was such a bloody mess. It still is.
Then what is it that we want? And do we really need something to regulate ourselves, to hold us accountable? Why are we journalists — having come out in the open, and discovered the unprecedented, unchallenged expanse of our freedoms — behaving as if we are suddenly struck with stage-fright? Or, could it just be that we are carrying a bad conscience, which is making us talk of regulation of some sort, as if to seek anticipatory bail, if not a full plea bargain.
THE fact is, we do have a problem. While there is a lot of praise for the great work the media has done in busting corruption, fighting social evils and improving transparency and accountability, our arrogance has grown into hubris. No medium can claim to be holier than the other. Paid news is the greatest crime in the history of the Indian media, it still goes on, is mostly monopolised by print. Sponsored pages, advertorials and product placements are published by many without even a hint of disclosure. People are not stupid. They notice and they are angry. There is no point then saying that, oh, this is a terrible thing, I know, but what can I do, at least I never do this. But people do not make such distinctions between good and bad guys. They think that we, by and large, have become dishonest and greedy. People also know the growing new phenomenon in Indian media, where several owners have acquired interests in businesses much more lucrative than the media, but where their newspapers and channels can be force-multipliers. Think of mining, property, power plants, all kinds of new money-printing areas where governments retain great discretionary powers. Fourth estate to real estate (and also vice versa) is the new ticket to riches in the media. You travel around the country, particularly the Hindi heartland, and ordinary people will let you know they are not missing any of this.
On the electronic side, many TV anchors and reporters have now graduated from being mere inquisitors to judge-executioners. They wag their fingers at their powerful quarry, and the question is always some variation on the same theme: why aren't you admitting on this channel, now, that you are corrupt? Corrupt they might be, but aren't they entitled to some usual journalistic courtesies? Like the right to reply? God knows, Suresh Kalmadi may have given you — and the CBI — a hundred reasons to suspect that he is corrupt. But who has given us the right to call him "congenitally corrupt"? People watch this too and, while they are angry with the political classes, they are getting fed up with our arrogance too.
In India, we do not have any specific laws guaranteeing media freedoms. Our freedoms, essentially, are drawn from a post-Emergency social contract between us and the people of India who decided they will never let their press be gagged. These freedoms have been reinforced and expanded by the Supreme Court. Today both are irritated with us. The Supreme Court is examining guidelines for us to cover judicial proceedings. People, by and large, are taking note of our corruption — mainly paid news — and our arrogance.
Our lifeline, that social contract with the people of India, is, therefore, under strain. It's not just a contract, it's the foundation of our democracy, the guarantor of the people's right to know. Regulation will have the chilling power of prior restraint, often considered the worst form of censorship, where you gag yourself, where you don't publish because you don't know how the regulator — government, judicial, expert, call it whatever — will react. Any regulator will, by its very existence, need to define who a journalist is — for him or her to be regulated. In other words, not just the newsroom's freedoms but everyone's freedom of expression will be put to test. The answers lie with us. We have to introspect, clean up our act, bring back the old-fashioned editorial intermediation to our newsrooms. Of course, we will only be held accountable to our own audiences, and we have to go back to them with some humility. At the same time, we have to keep the establishment out of this debate. They may never like our message but we cannot invite them to shoot us, the messenger.
7 comments:
- Life Unordinary said...
guest writer?
- July 14, 2012 at 9:26 PM
- Pratap said...
Interesting views by our age old sages and of by our scriptures.
ABout women from scriptures
- July 16, 2012 at 12:10 PM
- Rakhi Anand said...
Doesn't matter what you gift, the emotions attached with them always makes the gift a priceless one, for this Rakshabandhan eve. Visit www.rakhiworldwide.com/rakhigifts/send_rakhi_to_Anand.aspfor more detailed info.
- July 16, 2012 at 1:07 PM
- July 16, 2012 at 4:36 PM
- Anil Kumar said...
surprisingly - no one commented on nice article, written by you.
This also tells how ignorant are people in this country that they can't distinguish what is good , bad and ugly with our pillars of democray.
I get to know the UGLY side of TV media from www.mediacrooks.com which you mentioned last month. You deserve praise for that.
- July 18, 2012 at 3:58 AM
- Aditya said...
Get Tech Updates at TechTantrik
Enjoy Funnier Side of Life at TheRoyalPoke
- December 16, 2013 at 5:51 PM
- Siva Cool said...
A truly motivational and life changing book
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- July 2, 2014 at 4:28 PM


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According to the CHP arrest report obtained by TMZ, the former "Young and the Restless" star was pulled over after officers noticed the actor speeding near Santa Monica Blvd. at 1:30 AM. After he was stopped, cops reported that Moore "displayed signs of alcohol impairment and a DUI investigation was conducted." Moore was then arrested and transported to a nearby station, where he took a breath test and was later booked.
Moore, who currently stars in "Criminal Minds," was released a few hours later on $5000 bail.
Calls to Moore's rep were not immediately returned.


text:
Monday, 30 April 2012
Making Spring - despite the weather!
I just haven't been very creative lately as I have been far more interested in my running than anything else - a major shock to the system I can tell you! I can now run for 3.5 miles without stopping which is truly incredible.
But I got something in the post recently that not only needs to be shared with you all but also helped inspire me to be a bit creative again.......
I was out in the greenhouse sowing seeds when the parcel arrived which was very appropriate..........
and I knew I was in for a treat when I spotted this little lady on the outside of the box...........
and this beautifully wrapped parcel inside...........
which contained all sorts of garden-y treats and treasures from lovely Julie!
sorry for the awful photo, I've lost my camera and had to use my phone - but can you see all the super packets of seeds, the copper labels and wooden labels, the notebook and scissors, the seeds from Julie's own garden and most excitingly of all my very own LCR hedgehog and special seedling-covered phone case!
There were a lot of excited squeals as I discovered each treasure and Fred and Dot were lurking, hoping to snaffle the hedgehog and phone case but I fended them off! They are MINE!
Every time I use my phone case it makes me smile and my hedgehog is sitting on the kitchen work top with a collection of toadstool houses, looking very much at home.
Thank you so much Julie - the parcel was simply delightful and greatly brightened a very soggy day!
And the seedlings on the phone case have helped me push a creative idea that has been slowly germinating into fruition..........
I have my winter quilt (designed by Syko) on my kitchen wall, but I decided I needed to be able to change it with the seasons. Therefore a Spring quilt was urgently needed but I couldn't quite get the design to work in my head. Then a very simple plan came to me and I finally got myself sorted to put it into practice yesterday afternoon.
It is inspired by my seedlings in the greenhouse, by Julie's phone cover, by simple raindrop quilts that I think I have seen on Syko's blog (with an umbrella, if I'm remembering correctly) and by this gorgeous book that we gave Dot for her second birthday...........
I currently have the quilt in progress pinned to my winter quilt so I can see it. I've had to fold it up a bit in the middle as it was out of proportion but I am just going to have a seam there and hope it looks artistic! I plan to add about a 2 inch border of patchwork in various fabrics that I have pulled out of my "green" box. So it will be a very simple quilt - but already it is making me happy :-)
I just wish some of the seedlings in the greenhouse were as healthy looking - most are growing very well but some are shrivelling up and dying and I don't know why. Hopefully enough will survive so I can start to plant these rather bare beds..........
15 comments:
- Ali said...
Lucky girl! That's a gorgeous parcel of goodies to put a spring in your step.
And your quilt is looking great already.
- 30 April 2012 at 13:54
- Catherine said...
How exciting! That is a lovely selection of goodies :)
I'm looking forward to seeing the finished quilt. I have failed miserably with planting our own veggies this year. Haven't got anything in and last night the (plastic) greenhouse blew over. Oh well.
- 30 April 2012 at 14:19
- Gina said...
That's a lovely selection of garden goodies... lets hope for some sunshine as well as rain. Quilt is looking good!
- 30 April 2012 at 17:00
- Thimbleanna said...
What a lovely parcel of goodies, you lucky girl! Your garden beds look gorgeous so far -- mine is full of weeds. And your new little quilt is brilliant. I love how you've combined inspiration from several different places!
- 30 April 2012 at 17:27
- Sew Create It - Jane said...
What a lovely package! You lucky duck!
- 30 April 2012 at 20:00
- Julie said...
gorgeous goodies and very gorgeous quilt - it will be fantastic...and i'm sure it will be inspiring to have hanging on your wall. Juliex p.s. very well done with the running!
- 30 April 2012 at 20:03
- julie said...
Ooooh what a sweet little quilt Lucy - perfect for this time of year! Some of my seedlings have been dying back too and I think my problem might be 'damping off' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping_off
I think I've been a bit too attentive and overwatered them - mine have died off from the bottom leaves upwards. Luckily some are still ok - hope this helps.
I'm so glad you liked the package - I was so impressed with your garden makeover and the chance to send some gardeny goodies was too tempting to resist - sadly the hedgie won't be much use in keeping your slugs at bay but I'm glad he's found a lovely home amongst the toadstool houses! Happy gardening and running xxx
- 30 April 2012 at 20:56
- dottycookie said...
Wow, that's serious running - I am really, really impressed.
And lucky you with Julie's goodies - gorgeous!
- 30 April 2012 at 22:13
- quinn said...
Such a lovely surprise package! Take that inspiration and..well...run with it! :)
- 1 May 2012 at 01:07
- dragonfly said...
What a fab parcel of loveliness! I have a brother or sister to your little hedgehog in my kitchen : )
Your garden looks amazing - good luck with your sowing!
- 1 May 2012 at 07:38
- ladydi said...
Wow - I'm so impressed with your running! Nicely done. Such fun gardening treasures, and a very thoughtful present.
- 1 May 2012 at 09:49
- Helen said...
Oh your garden looks lovely Lucy, I hope it stops raining soon though don't you?
Helen x
- 1 May 2012 at 10:14
- Moogsmum said...
Hello Locket!! Trashy told me you'd posted and I had to come and look. What a beautiful parcel of treasures from Julie :o)
Your garden is looking gorgeous, even with bare beds and I bet things will grow like mad in that lovely soil.
Your quilt is fabulous! What a wonderful idea to have seasonal quilts - I love it!
Not even going to mention the running.....you know how scary I find that ;o)
- 1 May 2012 at 10:37
- French Knots said...
What a perfect parcel of lovliness from Julie, very inspiring.
Your garden looks amazing even before you've got the veg planted out!
- 1 May 2012 at 15:14
- wonderwoman said...
i haven't blogged for ages but will be doing so soon! What lovely gifts from Julie and such a cute hedgehog! Your quilt is just gorgeous! xxxx
- 7 May 2012 at 18:08


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text:
The Feed
Her rendition last week of James Brown's It's A Man's Man's Man's World nearly brought the house down on NBC's The Voice, becoming a landmark performance in a season studded with memorable displays.
But Clearwater-raised singer Juliet Simms confesses a tiny detail few probably noticed during her showstopping delivery last Monday.
She couldn't hear herself during the whole song.
"Funnily enough, on Monday night, my (in-ear monitors) went out. I couldn't hear myself the entire performance," said Simms, 26.
"Because I have much experience singing on crappy stages where you can't hear yourself, I could do it," she added. "I grew up on stages like that, so that experience came in handy Monday night for me."
And when Simms says she grew up onstage, she's not kidding.
Graduating high school at age 16 — her father, Jeffrey Simms, said she was homeschooled, earning a diploma through Dennison Academy in California — she drove with her mother, Natalie, to Los Angeles, performing in coffeehouses and bars they booked along the way.
Now, she's on the verge of winning NBC's hit singing competition, a seeming favorite who often closes the show with spectacular takes on popular tunes.
Before dropping jaws with James Brown, she took on Aerosmith's Cryin' (a slight jab, perhaps, at rival American Idol judge Steven Tyler?) clad in a glittering dress with a huge feathers sprouting from the back.
Tonight, she might be the favorite among four finalists vying for a grand prize of $100,000 and a record contract, an amazing turn for a singer who once saw a succession of disappointing deals with Epic, Sony, RCA and other labels nearly push her to stop trying for success in the music business.
"For a while I was like, 'This is too hard … too many deals, albums and touring and just getting dragged through the dirt,' " said Simms, best-known before The Voice as the lead singer of glam-rock band Automatic Loveletter, a regular on the Warped Tour rock festival. "This show has reinstated my faith in me. I've learned to hold my own as an individual; go with my gut."
Jeffrey Simms said his daughter met with a succession of record company executives in New York just a year after her trip to Los Angeles. But often contracts didn't pan out — including a promising deal with Sony in Japan derailed by the earthquake and tsunami which rocked the country last year.
Juliet Simms says she and Cee Lo Green, the celebrity mentor she chose at the contest's start, plan her song choices together. They picked Cryin'; he suggested she cover The Police's Roxanne and the James Brown song.
"It is a language you have to pick up," she said, when told that Green's sometimes-inscrutable phrases can be tough for viewers to understand. "To the naked eye, people could be looking at us and be like 'What the f--- are they talking about?' But we get each other spiritually."
And though faith has played a role in several singers' journeys on TV contests — American Idol contestant Colton Dixon often talked of his Christian faith — Simms hesitated to speak on how growing up in the Church of Scientology might have helped her journey on The Voice, beyond saying members are likely proud of her success.
"I'm sure she's known as a Scientologist by many in the Church," said Jeffrey Simms, noting he and wife, Natalie, who are also Scientologists, moved to Clearwater when Juliet was about 8 years old (the city is the church's spiritual headquarters). "But (the support) isn't an organized thing. She probably has more fans from the Warped Tour."
It's all an amazing feat for a singer who admits she first responded with a profanity when her manager first suggested auditioning for the show.
But she now insists The Voice is a perfect showcase for artists who struggle with the industry's narrow views of what pop stars should look and sound like.
"It's for the outcasts...a chance for people who have been working their entire lives to make it," she said. "The biggest (challenge)is harnessing those nerves. Because you know it's the most important show of your life."
The Voice airs at 8 tonight and 9 p.m. Tuesday on WFLA-Ch. 8.


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We reviewed the Bryston BDA-1 Outboard DAC in June, 2011. It demonstrated excellent sound quality and bench test results. Now comes the latest iteration in their DAC line, the BDA-2. The DAC is still balanced (through the use of two DAC chipsets), has lower distortion, and best of all (as you will see), they have added an asynchronous USB input (the type that you would connect to your computer via a USB port).
- Design: Stereo DAC
- DACs: Two 32 Bit AKM
- Codecs: WAV, FLAC, AIFF, WMA, MP3
- MFR: 20 Hz – 20 kHz, – 0.1 dB
- Sampling: Up to 24 Bit / 192 kHz
- Inputs: USB Class 2, 4x SPDIF (2 BNC, 2 RCA), 2x Optical (TOSLINK), AES/EBU, RS-232
- Outputs: RCA Single Ended, XLR Balanced, SPDIF Bypass (RCA)
- Dimensions: 1.75″ H x 17″ W x 11.25″ D
- Weight: 39.5 pounds
- MSRP: $2,395 (Remote Control Optional)
- Bryston
- SECRETS Tags: Bryston, DACs, Asychronous USB, Audio
The Design
Compared to the BDA-1, the BDA-2 uses 32 bit DACs (AKM). Over the past couple of years, I have seen manufacturers who produce digital components moving towards the 32 bit arena. Of course, there are no 32 bit music or movie sound tracks, but 32 bits gives the DAC some headroom so that no bits are truncated during processing. In other words, you get the full benefit of the current 24 bit sound, and 16 bit music is a breeze.
The DAC is balanced circuitry, having a stereo DAC for each of the outputs, with one channel of the stereo DAC being used for the + side of the signal, and the other channel for the – side. This is for the XLR analog balanced output. If you use the RCA analog output, only one channel of the DAC is used for each of the two RCA output jacks. In general, balanced circuitry is a good thing to have, since you get common mode rejection of any electrical interference that gets into the circuit, and also because there is twice the voltage output, which means lower overall noise, since the voltage is higher than the noise floor.
The front panel has indicators for the bitstream word depth and sampling frequency, e.g., 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, and 192 kHz. The input is selected by pressing one of the eight buttons on the right hand side, with the power on/off button to the far right. The eight inputs include two Toslink optical, two S/PDIF BNC, two S/PDIF RCA, one XLR, and USB. Lastly, there is a button to turn on upsampling, which allows for a more shallow slope in the cutoff filter.
Bryston explains the technology behind the BDA-2:
"The main motivation for the BDA-2 was to improve the USB input to allow for asynchronous USB and up to 192/24 bit high resolution playback. Asynchronous decoding uses the high quality high precision digital clock in the BDA-2 rather than utilizing the clock in the source computer. Timing is critical in a DAC to reduce jitter (timing) errors in the digital bitstream.
"We evaluated a number of DAC's and chose the AKM 4399 due to its sonic qualities, excellent measured performance and potential for DSD decoding (software required).
"Most quality DAC chips perform well so what makes the BDA-2 unique in the market is the serious attention paid to many other parameters such as independent power supplies for the digital and analog sections, fully discrete Bryston proprietary analog circuitry, transformer coupled digital inputs, circuit board trace routing, independent circuit board traces for the analog and digital sections, grounding optimization for improved noise floors, proprietary part selection, multiple digital inputs (8 total) etc.
"The result is a DAC that in our opinion measures and performs at a state of the art level at a very reasonable price."
The rear panel is shown below.
From the left are two XLR analog outputs, two RCA unbalanced analog outputs, a S/PDIF output (if you want to have the digital signal pass through to another component), a USB-2 input, one XLR balanced input, two BNC S/PDIF inputs, and two RCA S/PDIF inputs. There is also a trigger connector for automatically turning on the DAC when you turn on your transport (if the transport has a trigger output). The RS-232 port is for updating firmware. There is a grounded AC receptacle at the far right.
In Use
I tested the BDA-2 with an OPPO BDP-105 (as a transport, with the RCA digital coax output going to the RCA coax input on the Bryston BDA-2), Pass Labs XP-20 preamplifier, Classé CA-M600 power amplifiers, and Carver Mark IV ribbon speakers. Cables were Wireworld. Much of my music these days is in the SACD format, but I used the CD layer as the digital output to the BDA-2 in those cases.
Piano is a difficult instrument to reproduce, not only because its lowest note is 28 Hz, but the attack has intense transients. No better way to test this than with Rachmaninov, in this case, his 24 Preludes (London 443 841-2).
Vladimir Ashkenazy knows how to play Rachmaninov, and his dexterity as well as his interpretation are flawless. The sound was flawless as well. The Bryston delivered clarity to the attack transients, and they sounded unrestrained, testimony not only to the DAC chipset, but also to the output stage.
Ah Mozart! Violin Concertos, produced by the rapidly-becoming-famous Norwegian recording company 2L (SACD 2L38). The violinist soloing amongst the other strings and brass can get lost if there is significant IM distortion. As you will see in the bench test results, IM in the BDA-2 was almost non-existent. Thus, not only was the soloist Marianne Thorsen quite separate, she was still delicately integrated into the overall music. The SACD's high resolution capability was a gift to her playing in a note so high in the register, it must have been near the highest note playable on a violin. And it was clean, clean, clean . . . astonishingly so. Again, the 32 bit DAC and fine output stage of the BDA-2 really make a huge difference when listening to music like this.
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms make up the "Three B's" of classical fare, but if one tried to create the "Three H's" using Haydn as a member, who would the other two be? Certainly, he is of the same genius as the B's, and this SACD recording of some of his string quartets (Praga Digitals 16136) demonstrates his prowess as a composer, rather than simply that he was prolific in output.
The four stringed instruments were placed across the soundstage, and easily identified in their position. Again, if there were significant IM distortion, the soundstage placement would have been much more of a blend, and the strings would have sounded harsh.
In summary, I would classify the Bryston BDA-2 as detailed and neutral, with nary an audible hint of distortion.
On the Bench
All distortion measurements were within an 80 kHz bandwidth, and I used the XLR balanced outputs of the BDA-2 DAC. All digital test signals were at -5 dB unless otherwise stated.
At 16/44.1, 1 kHz sine wave, and 0 dB, the output was 3.9 volts, which is the maximum voltage the unit can produce. Distortion was 0.002%.
With the same signal at -5 dB, which is a more realistic level, the output was 2.2 volts, and distortion was 0.004%. If you compare these results with the BDA-1, you can see that the BDA-2 has a small, but measurable improvement. (Note however, that the "transport" for the BDA-1 tests was the BDP-1 music server.)
Using 19 kHz and 20 kHz sine waves, at 16/44.1, there were only two small side bands near the fundamentals, and there was no visible B-A peak at 1 kHz.
IM distortion came in at 0.005%, using a 16/44.1 test signal.
The measured frequency response for 16/44.1 was 10 Hz – 19 kHz, ± 0.1 dB, with a 0.8 dB roll-off between 19 kHz and 20 kHz.
The results for 24/96 and 24/192 were the same, so I will illustrate just the 24/192 graphs.
At 1 kHz, THD+N was 0.009%. This is truly excellent!
With 19 kHz and 20 kHz, there were no visible side bands, and there was a visible B-A peak 104 dB below the fundamentals.
IMD at 24/192 was 0.002%.
The measured frequency response at 24/192 was flat to about 25 kHz, followed by a decline of 7 dB out to 90 kHz.
Now, here is a 1 kHz sine wave digital signal played from my computer connected to the BDA-2 through the USB input. The distortion is the same as with the coax input, but notice the improved noise floor, which is significantly lower than with the coax input.
I also measured the jitter reduction of the DAC by inducing a specified amount of jitter in a 10 kHz sine wave and measuring the jitter in the signal from the S/PDIF output jack on the BDA-2. With the signal jittered at 531 picoseconds, the output had a measured jitter of 448 picoseconds, which is a 16% reduction. In other words, the DAC could reduce the jitter with its asynchronous design, by 16%. This is a new measurement for consumer A/V reviews, so we have to wait and see how this compares with other DACs tested down the road.
The Bryston BDA-2 is a very fine outboard DAC. It improves upon the BDA-1 in distortion, and adds an asynchronous USB input to be used for playing music with a digital output to the DAC. A few years ago, you could not get this performance at $5,000, so at $2,395, this DAC is a no brainer for consideration.


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In the paper Safe Prime Generation with a Combined Sieve by Michael J. Wiener, the author states:
For any small odd prime $r$, we can eliminate candidates for $q$ that are congruent to $(r − 1)/2\mod r$ because they lead to $p$ being divisible by $r$.
(where $p = 2q + 1$)
But he did not explain why for the uninitiated. As such I would like to know why $(p-1)/2 \equiv (r-1)/2 \mod r$ means that $p \equiv 0 \mod r$.
Or to put it another way, why does $q \equiv (r-1)/2 \mod r$ mean that $2q \equiv -1 \mod r$?