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Audio Physic Avanti III loudspeaker Page 2
Ultimately, AP developed a material and an application methodology, Active Cone Damping (ACD), that SEAS now incorporates in its manufacturing process—but only for drivers destined for Audio Physic. The midrange driver used in the Avanti III is a heavily modified version of SEAS's original design.
The Avanti III uses two pairs of side-mounted, dual-ported, floor-firing 6½" Peerless woofers (for a total of four woofer per speaker) in push/push configuration, as originally introduced on the first Avanti. Side mounting allows for a narrow, graceful front baffle, and AP claims the driver placement helps equalize pressure on the cabinet walls for lower distortion and better dynamic performance.
The crossover points are 200Hz (6dB/octave), 500Hz (6dB/octave), and 2.2kHz (18dB/octave). Why three points? Because the amount of radiating surface required increases as the frequency decreases. The dual midrange drivers are not there to double the midrange energy. The design uses the lower-midrange driver only in the narrow band between 200 and 500Hz, while the more powerful upper-midrange unit, fitted with dual magnet assemblies, covers 200-2200Hz. The radiating area is thus increased in the lower midrange without encumbering the rest of the response range with unnecessary mass.
The compact, curvaceous cabinet, sourced from a Danish company that builds enclosures for many big-name speaker companies (some of which make their own drivers), is both aesthetically pleasing and technologically advanced. It's surprisingly light, yet extremely rigid and well-damped. The midrange drivers and tweeter occupy isolated chambers within the raked cabinet, which is extensively braced and rounded at the rear to avoid the parallel surfaces that can induce standing waves. A slanted (7 degrees), dual-layer baffle features a front panel of solid, laminated wood specially contoured to minimize diffraction and refraction. This panel's complex design is the result of the patented Hornflex process, which uses a computer program to transfer the three-dimensional shapes onto the two-dimensional patterns used in the actual manufacturing process. The speaker's rear is fitted with a single pair of gold-plated binding posts. A biamping option of dual pairs of posts is available at extra cost.
Contrary to a popular misconception, Audio Physic speakers are not specifically designed for nearfield placement and listening, though the setup procedure outlined on Immedia's website is recommended, and works well for other loudspeaker brands as well. Though I listen in the nearfield because of how my room is configured, I was unable to set up the Avanti IIIs using Audio Physic's methodology. Instead, I placed the Avantis where the Sonus Faber Amati Homages usually reside (9' apart, 8' from the listening position, 2½' from the sidewalls, and about 2½' from the front wall), then moved them slightly forward to account for the acoustic center of the side-mounted woofers. I ended up with the speakers toed-in so that the tweeter axes crossed just behind my head.
As with the Virgo or any other revealing speaker, setup of the Avanti IIIs proved critical in maximizing high-performance results. Tiny changes in placement yielded enormous sonic differences, especially when it came to locking in the incredible image focus and soundstaging precision these speakers were capable of delivering. Of course, you never know how well a pair of speakers can perform until you try to improve on what you've already achieved. Sometimes you've already reached the upper limit of a product's performance capabilities and are wasting your time. In the case of the Avanti IIIs, I thought I'd maxed them out only to find that I could take them a step further. I also found that the speakers were ruthlessly revealing of a cartridge's vertical tracking angle (VTA) and other minutiae of analog setup.
The narrow Avanti III sits on a pair of metal stabilizer cross-braces with circular feet at each end. Port clearance seemed insufficient on my Berber-carpeted floor using the short threaded points supplied, so I asked and quickly received a longer set. It's a cultural issue: Apparently, Europeans mostly have area rugs and set the speakers on hardwood floors, which is why AP also supplies tiny, cupped, felt-bottomed feet.
I ended up having the Avanti IIIs for two extended periods of time, before and after HE 2001. After three weeks of extensive listening, I had to ship them to New York City, where they were used in one of the Sound By Singer rooms at the Show, driven by Hovland electronics, an Accuphase CD player, and an Immedia RPM-1 turntable with RPM-2 tonearm and Helikon cartridge. Aside from the amplifier, turntable, CD player, and cables, Show attendees got to hear a reasonably close approximation of my review system, including electronics, tonearm, and cartridge. If you heard AP's system at HE2001, you got a taste of what I've been hearing for well over a month. Yummy.
I got to spend the first day after the Show at home with the new Hovland Sapphire tube amp. Even under lousy Show conditions, that system had sounded very musical to my ears. At home in my acoustically tweaked room, the Avanti IIIs, driven by all-Hovland electronics, sounded even more impressive. I spent the rest of the month with the Avanti IIIs driven by my reference Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 300 power amplifier.


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Artist description:
I drew this a long time ago just couldnt figure what was missing *LOL* oh well sending it out in the world anyway ref used on alley [Link]
Java Draw Created Jan 16, 2011 460 x 640px Unless noted Copyright 2011 Anniebee.
We encourage you to submit a comment and let the artist know what you think of this drawing. Please log in or join to post a comment.
Post a comment
Love, love, love this! nothing's missing. Anything else added, would change what it is...lovely! 5HF :)
great drawing! i like the effects on the walls and floor :)
This draw looks very nice! Lovely cat!!
Nice one, Annie! I like the perspective and lighting. Tell DSW to stop picking on your long-tailed kitty. I bet even cats can have body image issues. ;) 5 ♥s
Great drawing Annie...like the perspective, light and shade and cute little kitty too. 5♥s
Wonderful drawing,Love the alleyway, lighting,and the kitty.5♥s
Very good drawing and such a nice atmosphere you created, is excellent draw
i love it!!i amways play with every single cat i meet in streets!!!
love it!
Great textures u used here... looks mysterious!

subset: commoncrawl


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If you had time to browse the documentation for Synchronization Services for ADO.NET, you might have seen a class called SyncAnchor. You don't deal with it directly and none of the demos in my blog interact with it directly except the server command called GetNewAnchor which returns a new timestamp value. However, as you build up your sync knowledge you will appreciate what this type can do for you. Hmm, have you noticed that too? Truly powerful types appear low profile from far!
The anchor in sync services is that marker that the client stores after every successful session in order to use it next time to tell the server where it left off in the last sync session. The server provider generates a new one for the new sync session. The changes between the old and the new anchors are enumerated and sent to the client. In simple scenarios, sync anchor will be something like timestamp, datetime or any monotonically increasing number that your server store maintains. However, it could carry much more than a number. You could overload the anchor to hold the date and time of when the sync took place; this is useful for detecting rouge client who did not sync for very long time that the server has lost track of some old changes - tombstones for example - thus synchronizing with such client could result in data loss or non convergence. In addition, you could also store a token for changes that the server could not pass on to the client in the current sync and would like to try aging in the next sync. The possibilities are endless.
One thing you need to be aware of is that the anchor value is serialized by the server provider prior to sending them to the client and desterilized before they are used at the server. Your application needs to follow this protocol to plug smoothly into the sync runtime and leverage the power of the sync anchor.
Tip: I had very interesting discussions in the forum, make sure to check it out
Update: Just to let you know, I left Microsoft to start a new company, Raveable Hotel Reviews. See examples: Top 10 Hotels in Myrtle Beach, Best Hotels in New York City, Romantic Hotels in Seattle, Hotels with a kitchen or kitchenette and Top 10 Hotels in San Francisco. Your feedback is welcome on twitter.com/raveable, raveable blog.


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Flow-data analysis with geographical information systems: a visual approach
This paper takes a visual approach to flow-data analysis within geographical information systems, and uses spatial interaction data from the United Kingdom for illustrative purposes. As a subfield within GIS, flow mapping is something of a disciplinary laggard, despite significant advances elsewhere in the field. Therefore, the paper has three main aims. First, the intention is to show how complex spatial interaction data—frequently underutilised—can be converted into meaningful information using a GIS-based, visual approach. Second, it is hoped that the contribution will help popularise the subject and stimulate new research within spatial interaction studies and planning more broadly. The third aspect is to demonstrate that we can gain a better understanding, and knowledge of, complex spatial networks through a visual analytics approach to information generation. The paper begins by exploring some key developments in the presentation of flow data. The main body of the paper is comprised of five key geovisualisations which focus on identifying the various patterns of spatial interaction in the United Kingdom. Finally, some conclusions are drawn and direction for future development are highlighted.
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Volume (Year): 38 (2011)
Issue (Month): 5 (September)
Pages: 776-794
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text: Tagged: CSS, page specific Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total) Author Posts November 27, 2013 at 1:18 pm #193858 matteoraParticipant Hello, I'd like to apply a css code only on a small set of web pages (not the total): is there a way to do this? More in particular I'd like to hide the page title only on few pages (for instance for pages like Contact or About) while showing the title of other pages. Is it possible? What should I do? Thank you! November 27, 2013 at 1:47 pm #193873 matteoraParticipant I've worked out this problem using the code .page-id-XXX .entry-title { display:none; } Author Posts Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total) The topic 'CSS code applied only for specific pages' is closed to new replies.


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Greg Ruth
Well this last week marked the debut of our long awaited graphic novel, INDEH, and with it the first leg of our book tour. Which doesn't begin to come close to capturing the insane level of what unfurled this week. From its appearance on The Tonight show, to nearly fifteen others, DJing an hour of Springsteen radio songs, appearances in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Chicago and Naperville and signings at Book Court and Barnes and Noble... it has been glorious and weird. By no reckoning what I would call a normal rollout... or maybe it was? What do I know? But the result has been powerful.
|The troublemakers at the Hachette offices
|Team INDEH: Jimmy, Greg, Ethan, Gretchen, and Katherine with a K
|Ethan and INDEH on The Tonight Show
|At Book Court
|One of the SO many back to back radio interviews at Sirius XM
|Calvin telling us we're wearing the wrong undies
|Doug Miles of Apache Skateboards
After NYC we deliriously hopped on a 5 am flight to Chicago where we were captained by our
|Poor stalwart Paul B protected us from much, but could not shield himself from the sleep deprived snark and ridiculousness of us.
driver/bodyman/sidekick/familiar, Paul Buchbinder, through the real Chicago starting off with breakfast at Lou Mitchell's and meeting up with our fellow panelists for the press conference, RL Stine and Terry McMillan... which was HILARIOUSLY absent of press. This then afforded us about three precious hours to collapse in ahotel room before taking off our suits for an early cocktail and snacks atop the John Hancock building overlooking Chicago and apparently all of the Midwest before heading to a hugely attended discussion and Q&A hosted by Michael Phillips for the Printer's Row Book Festival. Giant humongous gargantuan images from the book show behind us! We then raced to our final stop in Naperville, a wonderful black box theater discussion and signing sponsored by Anderson's Books.
|Bob Stine, Terry McMillan and me, photo by Ethan.
|At Printer's Row with Michael Philips
When we came back to Ethan's Late saturday night we were still dizzy from it all, the entire of Sunday. It was nearly too much to absorb- in fact I'm still processing. Pitching a book, negotiating the contract for that book, writing it, drawing it and then selling it is a monstrously huge undertaking. and we're hardly done yet. We have a number of coming interviews and events leading up to San Diego Comicon through the Fall and Texas bound for the Book Festival in Austin where we are to be keynote speakers following directly in the heels of Margaret Attwood and Gore Vidal among others. The end result is so far, something I have been working towards my entire professional life in comics: to push the medium outside of the dysfunctional minority of the direct market comics world into the broader book world where so many readers and publishers still see it as only a medium for children and superheroes. (which for the record are awesome genres and groups of readers, but simply not the only available to those us who are insane enough to make this field our own). My work with Scholastic is changing that and this is the next brick in this new foundation. Comics is coming into the American conscience in a way unprecedented and has only the vast skies above as limits to what it can do and will do in the years and decades to follow. Ethan and I are beyond honored to be a small step in that direction, and eager to see what follows. We're already at work on more INDEH stories and even a new original crime drama, so keep your eyes out for what's to come. We're not even near finished yet.
We could not have come to this place alone without the aid, guidance and support of so many of you over these last six years. No true work of art is created alone and in a vacuum by my reckoning and INDEH has been complete proof of that. I can never thank you enough for your support and encouragement, and especially for picking up our book and making it land so high upon the venerable NYTimes list. This will kick us forward in a way we absolutely needed it to do. Despite it all neither of us are sudden millionaires nor even a penny wealthier than we were a week ago. And by no means would I say this has been any kind of a normal opening for a book I've been involved in. In any case we all return back to our lives and this will roll into the past like everything does. It was super exhausting and ridiculously fun. We hope you pick up the book or get a chance just to read it, we like
it a lot. For all the crazy of the past week it was easy because we like this book so much. Never a better testament to following your instincts and passions has there been for me than this. I hope this weird time births more weird times. That we begin to see graphic novel storytelling really stitch itself into our culture more broadly than it ever has been before. There's too many stories to tell not to do this, and I can't wait to read them.
In the meantime, to pick up a copy of the book at your local independent bookshop which can be found with a simply entry of your zip code, HERE.
To get a hold of Douglas' AMAZING and extremely limited edition of INDEH X APACHE skate decks, please go HERE


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Butterfly Lezoline Groovy - Navy
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Red Rocks Amphitheatre has seen some of the biggest smoker friendly concerts on 4/20 — the natural setting and the open air makes a comfortable venue for the occasion. But this year's 4/20 lineup could cause the biggest cloud to form over the mountain venue. Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa, YG and Smoke DZA have announced a show on the weed-themed holiday that's been dubbed, Snoop's 4/20 Wellness Retreat Denver.
Last year, Slightly Stoopid and Cypress Hill headlined the first-ever legal 4/20 concert at the Rocks, a show that was held in conjunction with the Cannabis Cup at the Exdo Center. Meanwhile Snoop brought in the holiday on 4/20 eve at the Fillmore Auditorium, tossing joints to the crowd at midnight.
Slightly Stoopid and Mac Miller will throw a 4/20 eve party at the rocks on April 19 this year. Other 4/20-themed shows include Paper Diamond at the Ogden Theatre, a date that was moved to accommodate the weed holiday.
Tickets for Snoop's 4/20 Wellness Retreat go on sale Feb. 28 at 10 a.m. and cost $59.50-$100.
Follow our news and updates on Twitter, our relationship status on Facebook and our search history on Google +. Or send us a telegram.
Reverb Managing Editor Matt Miller has a really common name so please use these links to find his Twitter account and Google + page. Or just send him an email to firstname.lastname@example.com.


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WASHINGTON — The battle for the future of U.S. automakers arrives in Congress at noon Monday, when the Senate is to take up a rescue plan whose prospects and particulars remained clouded Friday.
While key Democrats vowed to push ahead, Senate Republicans questioned the use of taxpayer money to bail out Detroit, while the White House hardened its opposition to saving automakers with money from the $700-billion financial industry bailout.
Much of the bill was still in flux, including the amount. The automakers have said they need $25-billion to survive a crippling economic downturn. A smaller package will likely be designed to get them through to early next year, when an Obama administration and the new Congress would tackle a long-term fix.
President Bush said Congress should help automakers by passing legislation to let automakers quickly tap a $25-billion pool of low-interest loans intended to help them retool factories to meet new fuel-economy standards. Those loans, approved in 2007, were to be doled out over the next few years.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are seeking an emergency infusion of cash. GM is spending down its operating cash at a rate of $3.1-million an hour and has warned it might not survive through year's end without a government lifeline.
Defying Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he would hold a vote next week on a bailout. The vote could occur as early as Wednesday.
Bailout watchdog: President Bush nominated Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Barofsky to become the Treasury Department's special inspector general in charge of auditing and investigating how the federal government spends bailout money. The pick requires Senate confirmation. Barofsky, 38, most recently led the prosecution of top executives at Refco Inc., one of the world's largest commodities brokerages, which collapsed in an accounting scandal in 2005.
Foreclosure help: Publicly breaking with the Bush administration's official stance, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. proposed Friday to use $24-billion in government funding to help 1.5-million American households avoid foreclosure. But testifying on Capitol Hill, Neel Kashkari, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for financial stability, opposed the idea and said it went beyond the intentions of the $700-billion rescue plan.
Freddie Mac: After posting a massive $25.3-billion quarterly loss Friday, the struggling mortgage giant is asking for an initial injection of $13.8-billion from the $200-billion promised by the Treasury Department to keep it and sibling company Fannie Mae afloat after the two were seized by federal regulators in September. Freddie Mac said it expects to receive the money by Nov. 29.
Banks' requests: At least 110 banks have requested more than $170-billion from the Treasury Department's rescue fund, and many more were expected to have submitted applications before Friday's deadline. The requests would come from the $250-billion the Treasury set aside from the $700-billion fund to purchase stock in banks.


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And Luceria. Also Lucetius and Lucetia, that is, the giver of light, occur as surnames of Jupiter and Juno. According to Servius (ad Aen. ix. 570) the name was used especially among the Oscans. (Macrob. Sat. i. 15; Gellius, v. 12; Paul. Diac. p. 114, ed. Miller; comp. LUCINA.)
Myth Index copyright © 2007 - 2008


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a project by Lebanon Support About daleel-madani.org | About Lebanon Support | Contact us
Project: Improvement of Development Process and Local Governance in the Municipality of Tripoli
Project: Improvement of Development Process and Local Governance in the Municipality of Tripoli
Employer: Municipality of Tripoli
Deadline for applications: Saturday, January 28, 2017
- Full time position
Location: Tripoli
Working area:
Job Description
Project funded by the European Union
Terms of Reference
R_ 3B Drafting of Civic Education Program
Professional Local Expert (Independent/Body)
Project: Improvement of Development Process and Local Governance in the Municipality of Tripoli
The Municipality of Tripoli received on the 15th of January 2016 a grant from the European Union (EU) to realize the project" Improvement of Development Process and Local Governance in the Municipality of Tripoli" over a period extending to 36 months. The overall objective of the project is to improve the institutional and operational contribution to governance and development process in the Municipality of Tripoli. The Specific objectives of the project are to improve access in Bab El Tabbane, Jabal Mohsen and El Ghouraba to basic and adequate social services on a sustainable basis. All three communities will benefit from a positive impact on different levels especially on Health, Education, Job Creation and awareness levels. Five Expected results derive from the project.
The project
The project derives from four basic facts advanced by the Municipality of Tripoli:
The local authority and civil society are in need for capacity building.
Health is a fundamental human right and should be available to all people regardless of gender, social class, ethnicity and age.
Job opportunities are very limited due to the deficiency of educational skills.
Recreational activities allowing the cohesion of the dissimilar zones allow a better synergy.
The civil war witnessed throughout many years from 80s and renewed with the Syrian crises had severe repercussions on the social fibre and the spatial structure of the town. It weakened the social cohesion and shaped the city into neighborhoods demarcated and ruled by conflicting sectarian groups.
To tackle the hard social division, the Municipality of Tripoli rehabilitated a community center where workshops and roundtables will be organized to enhance citizenship and promote dialogue among different constituents of the local community. The subjects to be addressed could include reconciliation, trust building, negotiation, dialogue principles, social inclusion, mutual assistance and social solidarity. Many sessions, roundtables, workshops to capitalize on the theatre drama, volunteering and best practices conducted in these fields through NGOs and Civil Society organizations in the targeted neighbors will be presented, discussed and enhanced to disseminate a new culture of change and cohabitation and declaration of intent.
The Expected Result (3) consists of implementing civic education program to enhance citizenship and promote dialogue among different constituents of the society.
For this purpose, the Municipality of Tripoli is seeking to contract a short-term local expert to perform the following tasks:
Conduct a SWOT and stakeholders analysis in cooperation with the "Partnership forum" to identify target groups to be targeted by the civic education program aiming at enhancing citizenship and promoting dialogue among different constituents of the society.
Identify the topics of the civic education program to be discussed in the sessions and roundtables such as reconciliation, trust building, negotiation, dialogue principals, social inclusion, mutual assistance and social solidarity.
Elaborate the TORs, including the identification of the background and technical requirements of the moderators needed for the sessions and roundtables regarding the civic education program.
Elaborate a relevant action plan for the civic education program.
Elaborate a draft declaration of intent aiming at disseminating of a new culture of change and cohabitation
Assist in the organization of the seminar to launch the civic education program
Start of the contract
- The contract duration is three months and will start on the day of its signature with the Municipality of Tripoli.
- The maximum number of working days that the expert is expected to spend during the duration of his/her contract is: 8 Working Days
- The ceiling of the contract is: 2000 Euros
Evaluation of proposals and award of the contract
Proposals will be evaluated by the concerned committee. Methodology and CV will have a grade over 80 and the financial offer will have a grade over 20. The total evaluation grade of the expert will be the sum of the two grades and over 100.
The professional local expert will report to the Project Coordinator and will coordinate his/her work with the Mayor, the activity-based committee, the steering committee and the Partnership Forum
The following deliverables are requested from the local expert:
Report on the consultation with the Partnership Forum and the concerned committees
Report on the result of the SWOT and stakeholders analysis, and the identification of target groups, and the topics of the civic education program.
Report on the professional experience and skills for the choice of moderators for the sessions and roundtables regarding the civic education program.
The action plan of the civic education program.
Elaborate a draft declaration of intent aiming at disseminating of a new culture of change and cohabitation
Report on the launching seminar of the civic education program.
All above deliverables should be presented in English. A synthesis (summary) in Arabic of the deliverables should be presented as well to the Municipality.
Education/Professional experience and skills
The candidate should have an academic formation, preferably in social sciences, in addition to a minimum of 5 years of experience in the fields of needs assessment and stakeholder analysis, and in the development of community related civic education programs. S/he should be well knowledgeable of Tripoli context and highly experienced in communication and reporting skills.
Fluency in both Arabic and English languages are a must (fluency in French is an additional asset).
Submission of proposals
Interested experts are invited to submit their proposals in two components, a technical part and a financial part. Each of the two components should be placed inside a separate sealed envelope showing on the outside the title of the component (Technical or Financial). The two envelopes containing the technical and financial parts should be placed inside one main envelope. The main envelope should be submitted sealed and should show on the outside just the project name as follows:
Project: Improvement of Development Process and Local Governance in the Municipality of Tripoli
Any other sentence, mark, sign or logo shown on the outside of the main envelope that may refer to the identity of the expert presenting the proposal will lead to discarding the proposal.
The technical proposal should contain:
- Name and Coordinates of the expert presenting the proposal.
- Copy of the registration of the expert at the Lebanese Ministry of Finance.
- The Expert CV that highlights the expertise needed in the TORs.
- An elaborated methodology of work (maximum 5 pages) where the expert explains the approach s/he will undertake to implement the proposed tasks.
- A Gantt chart of the proposed schedule of activities.
- In case the applicant is a CSO , a complete file showing that the CSO is working in the targeted area, together with a detailed proposal, report of its activities in the same field of activity proposed in the action and a financial report for the past three years should be attached also to the proposal.
The financial proposal should contain:
- A financial offer including the expert expected dues for the whole intervention in Euros
All proposals should reach the Municipality of Tripoli, Tall Square, Tripoli-Lebanon not later than
12:00 noon of day …28./1./2017
All requests for clarifications, should be addressed in writing by e-mail to the following mail address: email@example.com
Proposals sent by e-mail will be discarded.
Settlement of the expert dues
The expert's dues will be settled, after receipt and acceptance of his/her deliverables and against an invoice submitted to the Municipality of Tripoli at the end of his/her contract.
Experience required:
- 5 to 10 years
Arabic: English: French:
Submission guidelines:
Cover letter required?
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Email: email@example.com
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Yard sale to benefit Relay for Life
YAKIMA, Wash. -- If you'd like to contribute to the fight against cancer, you can do it by taking part in a yard sale to benefit Relay for Life.
The sale will be held from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Apr. 26, in the upper parking lot at Shields Bag and Printing in Yakima.
You're welcome to donate items for the sale. Large items should be taken to the upper parking lot Friday, Apr. 25, any time after noon. You can bring smaller items to Shields and give them to Fred Warren, or you can call Dianne Warren to pick them up.
You can reach Fred Warren at (509) 834-0191 and Dianne Warren at (509) 834-3813.
To get all the information on the sale, see the official flyer here.


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Discussion in 'Other Equipment' started by casa nova, Apr 22, 2006.
what is the best shock?
Size 64 rubberbands. Never fly off, work great and cheap...
This all depends on what you want out of your shock absorber. If you want a little bit of pop and vibe dampening a button style vibe might work for your. If you want heavy dampening and deadening of the string bed then you may like thick worm vibes. If you like a small amount of dampening and sound dampening a small rubber band may work for you. Also vibes with a little bit of weight like the Babolat RVS. etc...
I don't know about the best, but my favorite one to use are these:
Can anyone give me a site with pictures that show me how to do this? I am very curious about learning how to use the Rubber Band.
babolat's custom dampeners are the best. i used to think rubber bands were the way to go, but they lose their tightness after a while, so it gets annoying to have to change them. so why not use one of these that lasts a really long time?
for reference, i used the #64 rubberbands from staples (the ones that theace mentioned)
I had a better link somewhere else but I couldn't find it...I will hunt the other computer for it in the morning...
sampras o's and gamma no-shocks. if you want even less shock, and are willing to sacrifice some power, go the gamma shockbuster 2. cant comment on the rubber band, thou many people on this forum recommend it.
In general it all works - you have to test which shock work best for you
I have found some works well than others... depending on the type/ stiffness and string pattern of the raquet.
I use the O on Dunlop Mfil200, Rubber band on FischerProTour Extreme FT and Gamma Shock Buster on Wilson Ntour.
I second that, I like them much more than rubber bands because they do not fall off. I prefer them to the Unique Sampras ones because they are much softer.
i got wilson shocktraps on my pro staffs and TF vibraclips on my TF325s
What are so good about the babolat custom dampeners? and what does it mean when it says that you can customize it?
I found a dampener on the ground the other day. Its one of those breast cancer awareness ones or something like that. It has a pink ribbon and it says hope on it. I guess its something when I am down in a match I can look at my racquet and tell myself theres still hope on my racquet.
I use the same
babolat custom damps, eliminate the annoying noise without sacrificing ball "feel"
and also make the sweetest sound ever
Separate names with a comma.


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Wrestling: JCC begins state title defense today
ST. PAUL — The Jackson County Central Huskies seem to prefer taking things one step at a time, and today they'll take part in the team portion of the Class A State wrestling tournament at the Xcel Energy Center in search of their fifth straight state crown.
The first hurdle for the Huskies to clear will be Minneota/Lincoln-HI, a team that defeated Adrian in the Section 3A final to reach the state tournament. JCC — currently ranked fifth in its class — enter the tournament as the fifth seed and is Section 2A's champion.
Minneota is the fourth seed but is ranked third in Class A. The Vikings have seven entrants for Friday and Saturday's individual tournament and so do the Huskies. The two squads will square off at 9 a.m. today.
The winner of the Minneota/Lincoln HI and JCC match will wrestle at 1 p.m. in the Class A championship semifinals against either top-seeded Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City or unseeded Sibley East. The first-round losers wrestle at 11 a.m. in the consolation semifinals.
JCC head coach Randy Baker has repeatedly expressed his satisfaction with how his team has performed recently. JCC has won 16 of its last 18 outings. Included in that run are victories over quality teams such as Omaha's Skutt Catholic, Totino-Grace and Windom/Mountain Lake.
"We've been coming on toward the end here. We've had some individuals step up and we certainly had a good individual section last week," Baker said. "Most of the kids wrestled to their seed, so that was good.
"We've got some pretty seasoned guys that have certainly helped us and we have some other guys who have been working hard, too," he added. "I also have some really good assistant coaches who help with strategy and with helping our kids improve and get to the next level."
Winning a wrestling dual all boils down to matchups. Minneota and JCC each have ranked wrestlers at 106 pounds and 160. Those weights, and a few others, are weights Baker will be keeping his eyes on.
"One-hundred twenty-six pounds is an important matchup, and they have state entrants at 152 and 160, and so do we," Baker said. "They also have a young heavyweight that has been doing well for them.
"They're a tough team, and from what I've heard they're not easy to get big points on. They're a well-coached team and it's certainly not an easy match," he continued. "They're fairly young too. They're young and hungry."
"Class A is pretty wide open and there are some really good teams in there," Baker said. "It just comes down to matchups and how well your kids are wrestling."
State individual tournament begins Friday morning
The individual portion of the state wrestling tournament begins at 9 a.m. Friday. Along with the Huskies seven entrants to the event, several other area teams also have qualified a few. Worthington enters five, Windom/Mountain Lake has four, Adrian has four, Wabasso/Red Rock Central has four, Pipestone Area has three and Fulda/Murray County Central and Luverne each have one.
The individual state finals are scheduled for 7 p.m. Saturday evening.


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Inspired by jazz violinist Joe Venuti as well as his own family full of musicians, Emilio Caceres did much more than just fiddle about. He led an influential swing orchestra of his own out of San Antonio, Texas, in the '30s and '40s. He recorded with much less frequency than his brother Ernie Caceres, an in-demand saxophonist who toured and recorded with many top names in jazz. Yet the violinist Caceres did leave something of a legacy, as did yet another brother who was a professional musician, pianist and trumpeter Pinero Caceres. In the '30s the Emilio Caceres Trio was an active unit, the group featuring the violinist and saxophonist siblings in tandem with the fine guitarist Johnny Gomez. A highlight of the trio's career was a performance on the national Camel Caravan radio show hosted by Benny Goodman.
The instrumental blend between the brothers was highly praised at the time, including the provocative texture of violin combined with baritone sax. Musically some of these influences owed as much to norteño and Tex-Mex combo styles as they did jazz. A lively series of sides this group cut for Bluebird in the late '30s includes the titles "The Last Roundup," "Humoreske in Swing," and "Amor Y Misterios." This is music that appeals greatly to fans of jazz violin and hip instrumental music along the lines of Slim & Slam. "Under-recorded" is the most frequent adjective used in conjunction with the violinist's discography. The contrast with his brother can be easily displayed simply through numbers: while Emilio Caceres is only credited with performing on a pair of recording sessions between 1937 and 1969, Ernie Caceres shows up on nearly 500! The violinist's grandson David Caceres is an active saxophonist, based out of Houston.


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Author Profiles 2008:
Don Worster is one of America's most accomplished historians of nature, ecologists, and environmental practices. In the mid-'90s, he turned to biography -- giving us the whole life of John Wesley Powell (released 2001) and the in-progress John Muir. For a concise display of all Worster's books and monographs, click here. Since 1989, he has taught full-time at the University of Kansas -- they call it "KU," not "UK" -- in Lawrence, midway between Topeka and Kansas City. Worster is former president of the American Society for Environmental History and a member of the Western History Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association. Over the past two decades he has lectured extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as throughout North America. Contact him at the University using (785) 864-9474 or email@example.com.
"KU," Nature's Economy, and the Slow-Motion Lure of the Plains
FRANK GREGORSKY: How long have you been teaching here [at the University of Kansas]?
DONALD WORSTER: I came here in 1989, after 25 years of "living in exile." I had lived in New England, Hawaii and California. But this is my home state. My wife [Beverly] is from southeastern Kansas, and we met here on this campus as undergraduate students. We were married and then, in '64, moved to Maine. I was away from this state [for most of the next] 25 years -- and I was really quite homesick.
They offered me an endowed chair in American history if I would come back, and [Bev and I] didn't hesitate very long. They wanted someone who had a background in the American West, and the chair of the committee was interested in this new field of environmental history. Also interesting to them was the fact that I had been an undergraduate here -- it probably indicated I might stay longer than some other people they could recruit.
GREGORSKY: What's the toughest class you are teaching these days?
WORSTER: The toughest class? Actually, the one I just finished -- a course on agriculture from a global and world historical perspective. Not a common topic anymore; and when it's taught it's usually taught as "American Agriculture" on an "Aggie" campus. We're a very urban campus here, even though we're in Kansas -- we're mainly a Kansas City general-area campus. Hardly any of our students have seen farms up close. But they're interested in agriculture and food issues.
It's a very challenging topic to take on 10,000 years of agriculture: How it originated, and why and where; the evolution it has gone through. And then the current issues -- in world trade, environmental issues, and the conflict between traditional and modern styles of farming. The mix of students is also challenging. Some have grown up in a big agribusiness establishment and are deeply defensive about that enterprise's virtue as well as its rationality. Other students [believe] that everything they [find in] the supermarket and eat is going to poison them [his emphasis there is done with wryness].
GREGORSKY: Are you familiar with [Grassland author] Richard Manning?
WORSTER: Yes. He "rants" against modern agriculture, which I generally share [mild laughter].
GREGORSKY: But we don't have -- to the extent they were here 20, 30, 40 years ago -- the alarms and famine forecasts and predictions of [food] shortages. One book I remember is Famine 1975. [That was a 1968 offering by William and Paul Paddock. For other extreme predictions from that idealistic era, see www.catholiceducation.org/articles/population/pc0020.html]
WORSTER: Yeah, some of those predictions were premature and overblown. The worst crises didn't come about. Malnutrition, though, is certainly rampant in this world. People are dying from malnutrition, in ways we can't always pin down. People are fighting over places with limited soil and food shortages. But yes, we "missed the bullet" that some people like Paul Ehrlich were predicting we would take.
GREGORSKY: The first book of yours that I read [holding up the paperback] was Dust Bowl -- 1979. Was this the first one you did?
WORSTER: No, it was my second book. The first was Nature's Economy. That was first, then Dust Bowl, then Rivers of Empire -- on water and the West -- and several books of essays. After a hiatus, this doorstop came out [laughter] -- on John Wesley Powell; to be followed by another doorstop, a biography of John Muir, the California naturalist.
Many people think that Nature's Economy was one of my best books -- it certainly was one of my best-written books. It has conceptual problems, but it was my dissertation. As a dissertation, it was a huge, amorphous, overweening kind of book to write. The advisors at Yale said no way, don't do that. I disregarded them. They were right [smiling]. I had trouble getting a standard academic publisher at first. Cambridge eventually took it on. But it's been translated into seven languages, and is still in print.
GREGORSKY: So the lesson is -- ?
WORSTER: Disregard what your mentors tell you [chuckling]. They're right, but in some ways they can also be quite wrong.
We begin to talk about Dust Bowl, but this is the place to put what actually was a later part of that exchange...
GREGORSKY: Beyond that desire to be on the Plains again, where did the genesis for writing this book come from?
WORSTER: In 1972, I was a Mellon Fellow at the Aspen Institute, studying world food and hunger issues. There was a workshop assembled -- all of us living in splendor at the Aspen Institute thinking about poor people in Africa [more wryness!]. That was the time people were worried about desertification, and the creeping of the Saharan Desert southward, into the Sahel. And, that same summer, I passed through western Kansas and saw a lot of grain elevators that had been blasted by dirt -- they were still caked by blowing dust storms -- and that's how I came to write, as part of Nature's Economy, a section on the dust bowl. It was a short treatment -- but I got very interested in the dust bowl.
When it came time to do Dust Bowl, I was living in Honolulu. People couldn't understand why anybody would get a grant -- a fellowship -- and go off to live in Kansas. But I was homesick for it. I never took to palm trees that much; or, for that matter, to the New England landscape. I liked them both, but they were just not my place.
GREGORSKY: What was it about the Plains?
WORSTER: [Pause] "What is it about the Plains" [he repeats the question, but without the question mark]. It's perverse, I think -- to like a landscape that is so featureless, so dry, so disorienting. Sometimes I quote to myself Thoreau's statement -- I'll have to look that quotation up. He loves swamps and other places that most people would stay away from...
When...I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog -- a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village.
-- www.ecotopia.org/ehof/thoreau/walking.html
I like the sense of solitude here. You can go to the New England woods and go for a walk and nobody's there, but you don't really feel alone; you don't feel the solitude that you feel on the Great Plains -- the space, the openness. To me it just seemed the way the world oughta be. I grew up driving my old automobile back and forth across the Great Plains, going down in the sand-dune country. I knew how lovely this landscape could be, and how full of life it could be, away from some of the big agribusiness operations.
Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
Worster's Dust Bowl is dedicated to his parents Delbert and Bonnie, who grew up on farms and married in the late '30s. Though not living "at the very dead center of the dust bowl, they were part of the whole 1930s economic collapse -- the drought, poverty. So they went over to Colorado, picking fruit near Pueblo -- basically Okie kind of work -- and drifted down into Arizona and California." Delbert then found work with "the Rock Island Railroad, which along with the Santa Fe runs through Needles, California, right on the Arizona-California border." Needles is named for a spire-like rock formation, right on the Colorado River; it's also where Donald was born, the month before Pearl Harbor. His father "answered the call, right away, as a volunteer," and shipped out to the Pacific as a Marine. Don's memories of him begin at age four. After the war, Delbert and Bonnie relocated to Hutchison, Kansas, where young Donald went through all 12 years of school; and where, in junior high, he had his own battle with a dust storm...
WORSTER: The mid-1950s were a time of very severe drought -- some big dust storms came rolling across. One spring morning at school, the teacher told us all to go home. The temperature was falling dramatically. In the process of getting home, I was engulfed in dust. I was severely asthmatic, so this was really a traumatic experience -- I practically choked to death. Then I spent the next day or two trying to breathe through that dust.
GREGORSKY: How many years did it take you complete the manuscript for Dust Bowl?
WORSTER: That was the fastest book of all. Some preliminary work had been done, as I noted, for Nature's Economy. But I arrived in Kansas with a 12-month leave of absence from [the University of Hawaii] and an $11,000 grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, two babies and a wife, and I had to get this thing together quickly. Within 12 months, I had done the research and written the book. You could say "12 months plus," but it's basically a 12-month book.
GREGORSKY: The photography is fabulous. The clarity of the writing and the depth of the research all come together -- I thought you were gonna tell me this took three years to do.
WORSTER: It should have! Now I can see the flaws in it. I don't back away from my conclusions or argument, but -- had I the leisure, as a professor, and the financial means, I would've spent a lot more time on this book. It needed more careful research, particularly on the natural-history side. It also needed a lot more work on the economic conditions of the 1920s -- the land-use decisions and so forth that were being made.
But I didn't intend for Dust Bowl to be a long-term project. This book I thought of as "a year off from teaching" -- a chance to think about where I'd been and what I had been through.
GREGORSKY: But then it wins the award -- the Bancroft Prize.
WORSTER: Which surprised the hell out of me -- I mean, it completely floored me. That's the whole --
GREGORSKY: You knew it was in the running.
WORSTER: I had no idea it was even in the running.
GREGORSKY: As a self-employed person, I have to ask: What was the prize worth?
WORSTER: At that time? Four thousand. It wasn't a huge amount of money. It's probably gone up since then. Most of the prizes have been given for books on race -- race relations, slavery, the South. We've been in kind of a rut. But this last year I think they broke out of it again: They gave the prize to Jack Kirby for his book Mockingbird's Song, on the environmental history of the South. Environmental topics have generally not been given a lot of space "in the room" -- by the prize committees, that is.
GREGORSKY: Do you know why that is?
WORSTER: I don't know who was on that particular committee, but they tend to be historians who are in the mainstream -- and the mainstream of American history, since I got out of graduate school, has tended to focus on the new social history: Race above all; and to some extent class; and gender. That's our mantra these days: Race, class, gender. I have no complaint to make about that, except it has tended to squeeze other topics out.
Environmental history was just getting started -- we didn't exist when I was in graduate school. I taught one of the very first courses on an American campus on the subject of environmental history. But it has had trouble because of this great huge monstrous tree of social history in the backyard [he's chuckling] that is "shading out" everything else. It has marginalized a lot of fields, among them environmental history, which doesn't fit into the mainstream concerns.
GREGORSKY: What are the total lifetime sales for Dust Bowl?
WORSTER: Maybe 75,000.
GREGORSKY: Is that the best [tally among] your books?
WORSTER: Nature's Economy has sold that much, or more. I can't tell exactly, because I don't get sales reports from Japan, Korea and China.
GREGORSKY: You couldn't read them if they came out anyway.
WORSTER: [Laughter] And this book -- The Dust Bowl -- has just been translated into Chinese.
John Wesley Powell and Learning how to Approach Biography
One of the greatest difficulties under which Worster must have labored...is that two biographies of Powell -- one competent and one brilliant -- are already a part of the literature. William Culp Darrah's Powell of the Colorado (Princeton, 1950) was a workman-like treatment of the geologist-as-hero written by a practicing geologist. Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (Boston, 1954) is, on the other hand, a transcendent work that Worster himself acknowledges as "one of the most influential books ever written about the West" (p. xii). Why, then, another biography of Powell, as important a figure as he was? The simple answer is that Worster has the advantage of 50 years of scholarship on Powell and access to documentary information -- particularly about Powell's early life -- that were available to neither Stegner nor Darrah. He has used that additional material wisely and, as marvelous a book as Stegner's is, one comes away from a reading of Worster's biography with a better feeling for Powell as a human being.
-- The Western Historical Quarterly, Summer 2002
WORSTER: Our figures from the past are always a lot more complicated than we ever remember. Even when I'm done writing about John Wesley Powell, and when I'm finished writing about John Muir, I'll have to go away and say: You know, I don't understand these people completely. There are huge gaps of knowledge. I try not to speculate but, nonetheless, I can't tell you definitely -- even when it comes to subjects that I have discussed -- I can't tell you definitively always what I think he felt.
GREGORSKY: That surprises me. Some of the presidential biographers [especially Remini on Andrew Jackson or Caro on LBJ] come across sounding like most of their principal's doings, and the reasoning too, were dictated to them personally.
WORSTER: Well, the thing about writing biography is that I have discovered [pause] humility [laughter]. I was a pretty arrogant author in early books, I know -- taking on huge topics. That was appropriate for someone in his thirties -- to think you can explain this, or explain that. I still think that's what we should be trying to do; and sometimes our explanations will be controversial. Nonetheless, at a certain point, I have come back to biography -- having vowed never to write one.
GREGORSKY: Why did you hold off for as long as you did?
WORSTER: For one thing, I had been taught that "biography is not history." I still believe there's a distinction to be made between the two. History deals with broader social forces and tries to explain those social forces -- those broader changes over time.
GREGORSKY: Seems to me that [in A River Running West] you did everything you could to include Darwin, Lyell, Wilberforce [and even Frederick Jackson Turner] -- many of the 19th-century greats somehow get pulled into this story of the Powells.
WORSTER: And that's probably because I am an historian writing a biography rather than, say, a literary professor, or someone interested in exploration only. So the distinction [between history and biography] is an important one.
But I have come around to think of the differences more as differences of scale; and I think we have to learn how to write at all "scales" about the past -- from the global scale, right down to the scale of the individual. And in some ways, the hardest of all scales to learn -- to master -- is the biographical, the individual. Not so much in the Powell case, but in the Muir case, you are overwhelmed with volumes and volumes of letters that were saved. I have 55 reels of microfilm of John Muir's writings, letters and so on.
GREGORSKY: We'll get to him shortly. Did Powell have an inner life?
WORSTER: An inner life?
GREGORSKY: Based on your portrait, if he were to show up here, and we asked him a bunch of questions, I could sort of predict how he would answer -- because I think you've done justice to him. But some dimension of him is still missing.
WORSTER: [Pause] Well, you're right. I didn't give much of an "inner" life to him, because he didn't give me any material to work with -- and I don't believe in trying to invent or imagine. Many friends over a glass of wine tried to help me invent episodes with this one-armed man and some fictional sweetheart. I put a little bit of sex in there, about these womanizing rumors at the end of his life. But can you really imagine this guy -- who in the pictures looks pretty beaten up, scraggly beard, cigar ash all over his vest, with one arm -- romancing women around the punch bowl at Washington events?
GREGORSKY: Maybe not [with] charm, but he had power.
WORSTER: He had power. That's one way you could go with this.
GREGORSKY: Stick with inner life, though. His relationship with his daughter -- do you have any clue as to what that was like?
WORSTER: Very little. Nothing. Nothing.
GREGORSKY: And it turns out that [his wife] Emma was some sort of a shrew?
WORSTER: People said this but -- you know, I just put it in. I didn't draw my conclusion very firmly, because I don't know anything about her. So there are some [historical figures where] you cannot get into their inner minds.
Wallace Stegner on Powell, and Donald Worster on Stegner
GREGORSKY: Wallace Stegner tried to hedge [at the start of his biography of Powell] by saying: "This is the biography of a career, not a man." That allowed Stegner to not do a lot of things that you had to do, in order to piece together a whole picture.
WORSTER: Well, I wanted to give him at least a boyhood -- the growing up that Stegner felt was irrelevant. Part of the reason Stegner did not deal with the earlier Powell, though, was not because the materials were lacking; it was because he really wasn't interested until Powell got to the Grand Canyon -- until he got to "Stegner Country," Utah and the Grand Canyon. And the reason for [the emphasis on] career is because Stegner was interested in the political issues of conservation, in the West, and where they were in the late '40s and 1950s among various Senators and Congressman in the West. He was looking for a hero to put against these people.
GREGORSKY: You say [in your own biography of him] that Powell "was elevated to sainthood" by Stegner's book.
WORSTER: Well, when you read his book, you come away feeling that this guy was pretty close to a saint. Of course, Stegner himself was to me was a saint.
GREGORSKY: Really?
WORSTER: Well, what does "a saint" mean? I have enormous admiration for Wallace Stegner. Great respect.
GREGORSKY: Did you ever work with him?
WORSTER: No, I did not even actually meet him. After he read Rivers of Empire, he wrote a very nice letter to me, about the book, and how good he thought it was, and so on; and he said that he was going to use it for an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times that week. And he did; he sent me a copy of the piece. A few years later, we corresponded again, when we were to do a documentary film together -- on water and the west. It was to be filmed at his house near the Stanford campus up in the hills. About a week before [this was to take place] he was killed, in the automobile accident in Santa Fe.
GREGORSKY: Late in 1993.
WORSTER: So [subdued] -- that was my chance to meet him. A year earlier, there'd been another chance. I was in San Francisco. I was to go down the coast to meet with him, in his house. And the earthquake hit the Bay Area that year -- it left his house in complete disarray. He called to beg off. So -- foiled twice. It would have been a great moment for me. I continue to respect Wallace Stegner today, and dedicated one of my books to him, right after his death.
GREGORSKY: Which one?
WORSTER: It's the book I did with the University of New Mexico -- An Unsettled Country. [An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West -- 156 pages, University of New Mexico Press, 1994, 156 pages]
GREGORSKY: I learned to appreciate Stegner from our friend Dick Etulain. But let's go back to John Wesley Powell. Near half-a-century after this man Stegner offered his biography of Powell, along comes yours. You went a lot further than adding a boyhood.
WORSTER: A lot had happened in the writing of American history since Stegner wrote. Moreover, I thought: There must be more material out there that Powell himself had generated, or that one could find out. There was a whole life here. Even if I couldn't know his inner life, it would tell us a lot more about this guy if we went back and looked at who his parents were; where they had come from; what they had been through; where they had lived [once emigrating to the U.S.].
GREGORSKY: The research you did on that is just amazing.
WORSTER: Well, thank you. I had a lot of fun doing A River Running West.
One of the great things about doing a book of that sort is exactly one of the pleasures I'm having [with the John Muir research] -- it's to go to the places. Go to the actual places and spend a lot of time there. You see things and learn things you would never otherwise know about. I can't always put my finger on it, but it gives you insights into these people's lives that you can't get by just archival work. That might sound like a platitude, but I've felt it truer and truer as I go along.
GREGORSKY: How about a story along those lines about John Muir?
Was Muir "in a Set of Contradictions He Didn't try to Work Through"?
WORSTER: [Pause] I had to go to his boyhood home of Dunbar, on the coast of Scotland. A lot of books have been written on John Muir. But virtually nobody has ever been to Dunbar -- where he lived for 11 years! Or really talked to people there. Or looked into the records of the town to see why his parents left -- etc. etc. All his life, Muir identified with Scotland; and he went back to Dunbar himself.
GREGORSKY: You didn't repudiate your own boyhood [and geography] the way some Midwesterners do --
WORSTER: [Laughter]
GREGORSKY: So maybe that "equips" you to want to fill in that gap for these other people.
WORSTER: [Pause] Well, you know Wallace Stegner said something very wise: "I may not know who I am, but I know where I'm from." And in a way, that's the kind of biography I've tried to write. I might not know who [Powell and Muir] are, but I know where they're from.
GREGORSKY: And what shaped them -- or what seemed to shape them.
WORSTER: Right. And it works in other ways as well. In working on John Muir, for example, everybody goes to Yosemite and spends time there; and maybe even to Alaska, where he spent a lot of time.
Late in his life, when he was having trouble writing his autobiography, he was invited by the great railroad titan, E.H. Harriman, to his summer place at Pelican Bay at Klamath Lake in southwestern Oregon. So Muir goes up there and spends several months, with a stenographer following him around, taking down these bits of memory. I went up there to see this place, to find where they'd lived and so on -- and the building had become a hotel. It had been a two-story log house; not a very impressive place, in the pictures, for a Harriman estate. Harriman would go up there to fish, shoot bears, and live the outdoor life.
GREGORSKY: And he just wanted John to come up and sort of hang out?
WORSTER: Harriman liked John Muir a lot, and John Muir came to respect him a lot -- he wrote a eulogy for Harriman, the robber baron of his day, along with Jay P. Morgan. Teddy Roosevelt was on the case of both of them. But Muir developed a very close friendship with Harriman, and his family. So I got there and started looking around.
GREGORSKY: Something good is coming here.
WORSTER: Went over to the local historical society, and began poking around. I asked myself: Why were they there at all? Why did Harriman pick this place, out of all the West? (It wasn't near any of his railroad tracks.) Well, he was there because he was plotting a railroad line from the Southern Pacific railroad -- which he then owned and controlled -- all the way up to the Pacific Northwest, to connect up with the other railroad lines coming into Seattle.
Now, why was Harriman interested in that particular route? Well, right across Klamath Lake is a whole series of lakes and wetlands that had been authorized as one of the very first reclamation projects [entitled to] federal dollars in the West. They were starting to drain wetlands and create agricultural fields there. This went on for decades until, finally, they ended up creating a lot of alfalfa hay -- and destroying one of the greatest waterfowl habitats on the west coast. Over time, three-fourths of the bird populations have disappeared -- through the loss of those breeding areas and wetlands.
This area has been in the news as a highly controversial area in recent decades. People have been insisting that the farmers put more water back into some of those wetlands areas; and former Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton was very much at the heart of some of those controversies. I went over there and looked at all of that. Saw the signs saying "we're an endangered species" -- we farmers and so on.
But the interesting thing to me is that John Muir was right there on the edge of this. He was a smart guy. It wouldn't have taken him very long to figure out why Harriman was there, what he was doing. Yet he doesn't say one blessed word about it. Muir doesn't criticize Harriman. And, you know, they're friends -- but he criticized him for his hunting. He criticized him for his killing of bears -- Muir thought that was barbaric.
GREGORSKY: But you don't know that Muir knew why -- what was going on --
WORSTER: Well, he should have known [laughter]. I mean, how could you not know the effects of reclamation [and] the draining of wetlands? He had to know this. Whether he paid any attention to it or not is not my point. If he didn't, why didn't he? Why didn't he ask [pause] -- well, he tolerated government reclamation projects all over the place; he tolerated the whole transformation of the central valley of California. He bemoaned it to some extent, but -- he had made his peace with American empire, American technology, and American wealth.
GREGORSKY: Which is not the common idealistic portrait of Muir today.
WORSTER: No.
GREGORSKY: So -- certainly when it comes to crafting a biography -- you're saying: "Look at these people for what they did, or didn't do, in the context of their times."
WORSTER: Yeah. And in doing that here, I'm not condemning John Muir. Had I been Harriman's guest, I might have done the same thing. I have some friends of considerable wealth. And generally we share the same views and outlook on the world. But you have to, as you get older, learn a little tolerance and openness. You realize that the world is not black and white -- [and neither was Harriman]. At times, Harriman was doing a lot of good for the environment.
But I think Muir was caught in a set of contradictions that he didn't try to work through. And I wouldn't have known any of this if I hadn't gone up there and poked around and spent some time -- and just started making historical connections. I didn't know where Pelican Bay was -- and nobody who has ever written on John Muir has ever written about Pelican Bay, and Klamath, and this lakes thing. Okay, it's a tiny episode -- but it shows why going to places is important. The places [were] important to the people themselves; they reveal things that otherwise would escape us -- if we stick our nose only in the archives.
GREGORSKY: That's a great story, and a fabulous example. It's the kind of thing that other non-fiction writers need to appreciate. Got another one?
WORSTER: [Laughter] I think that will do, for the moment. I haven't been to every place John Muir walked -- but I have been to a lot, as far away as New Zealand and Finland, and Africa.
Seeking "the Intellectual Origins of the Modern Conservation Movement"
GREGORSKY: Did you somehow replicate Powell's trip down the Colorado?
WORSTER: I didn't go down the Colorado in a raft, no. My bones are pretty fragile [laughter] and my wife wouldn't let me go down the river. But I spent a lot of time in that area. I've been down to the bottom of the canyon, of course. I've been to Lee's Ferry. Camped along the river, and been at Echo Park -- all these places, repeatedly, in a little pickup truck, with a sleeping bag in the back. I took a mule down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon -- just to see what it felt like being on an animal all day long; and to try to figure out what kind of pain this man must've been in with a severed arm that was still giving him grief. The amount of hours these people spent forked on a horse or a mule was phenomenal. We don't even think about it today, except in a recreational way.
GREGORSKY: And you found it to be -- ?
WORSTER: Agony. Maybe after a while you get used to it, with your legs all bowed out. But it's absolute agony to be on an animal for that number of hours, day after day.
GREGORSKY: On or near his grave, in 1902, these are the three words that John Wesley Powell got: SOLDIER, EXPLORER, SCIENTIST. Are those the three best words? Would you add one or two others?
WORSTER: Well, the "soldier" is not a particularly great word, although he kept the honorific title ("the Major") all the way through his life.
GREGORSKY: And he went back [into the Civil War] after losing the arm. The guy has incredible courage and/or commitment.
WORSTER: He did that. I'm just saying [the military service] was a relatively short period of his life. And so many Civil War veterans wanted to walk around with those titles.
GREGORSKY: It certainly helped when he needed a favor from President Grant [laughter].
WORSTER: Well, I wrote that book because Powell is one of the two great figureheads, or sources, of the conservation movement in the United States. I picked Muir and Powell because I really wanted to understand the intellectual origins of the modern conservation movement. Now, you could write many different lives to get at that. But these two, it seemed to me --
GREGORSKY: They're like the Washington and Jefferson.
WORSTER: In many ways, they are -- they're the bookends. Powell had been much more forgotten, eclipsed by Gifford Pinchot [and] the Forest Service. But, as far as a kind of utilitarian, economic-oriented, resource-oriented conservationist, Powell is an extremely important figure that had been neglected (despite Stegner's biography). And Muir clearly is the founding figure of the spiritual, the aesthetic -- the "deep ecology" attitude, if you want.
I was fascinated by the fact that both of them had such similar backgrounds. The children of emigrants from the U.K. Strong evangelical parents who settle in the Midwest, and have agricultural work as their background. Both of them leave that and go west in almost the identical year. John Muir arrived in California in 1868, while Powell is out in western Colorado planning his trip down the Grand Canyon [for 1869].
GREGORSKY: Hmmph [impressed].
WORSTER: For a while, I was calling this "two Johns looking for a good time in the West" [laughter]. And yet -- they end with very different experiences; very different outlooks, in some respects. Both contribute to a common movement, in a way -- but they are very different men. It brings us back to the fact that what we call conservation or environmentalism in this country is a very diverse movement. Even when you hold so many things steady, there are still important diversities here. People give different emphases.
GREGORSKY: When did Muir die?
WORSTER: Nineteen-fourteen.
GREGORSKY: So he made it through the entire Teddy Roosevelt adventure. Had "Wes" Powell been in better shape, and gotten to be 75 or 80, and been able to "do something" in and around the Roosevelt years, do you have a sense of how he would've navigated that scene?
WORSTER: [Pause] I've never speculated on that. I probably should've. He had already been marginalized [at the start of TR's Administration] particular by Gifford Pinchot and the forest people. Powell's approach to issues of national conservation was so different from Pinchot and his group that he wouldn't have had any kind of role in the Progressive programs of Teddy Roosevelt. By that point, Powell had gone off the deep end philosophizing. He was reliving stuff that should have died [laughter].
GREGORSKY: And renaming a lot of stuff, too [in that surreal 1898 book Truth and Error].
WORSTER: Yeah. So maybe he died at the right time.
GREGORSKY: But you spent 10 or more pages trying to wade through that book, trying to look for any nugget that might be there.
WORSTER: Well -- I was obliged to. There's a lot of stuff I waded through and put into the book that I expect other people to wade through. All those hearings, and Powell's life in Washington -- people have said to me "I loved your book until it got up to that point."
GREGORSKY: The Washington political part is the part I understood the best!
WORSTER: Well [laughter] -- you understood it; you might not have enjoyed it the most.
GREGORSKY: Okay, it doesn't have the drama of the first trip down the Colorado. But no one should study Powell and ignore the 20+ years of politicking in D.C. If you're going to be a visionary or a social pioneer, you face the question of implementation.
WORSTER: Uh-hmm [agreeing].
GREGORSKY: "Can I change the law? Can I change the behavior [of the average citizen]? Can I leave a legacy that is more than the idea?"
WORSTER: Um-hmm.
GREGORSKY: And we have to give Powell enormous credit for going in there and plowing away at it [as a matter of federal policy].
WORSTER: Um-hmm. Well, you know, my view of writing a story like this is: You don't have to put everything in, but you have to put in everything that was important -- whether or not it was enjoyable to research or read, or for readers to go through. [Those Washington activities constituted] a crucial part of his life.
GREGORSKY: Did the publisher [Oxford University Press] try to get you to shrink the book?
WORSTER: No, they did not. Not once did they say "this is too long a book." But when I sat down to write the John Muir book and asked for advice, they said: "Well, you might consider making it a little shorter."
Who Best Helps Us Grasp America's Permanent Value System?
GREGORSKY: In both Dust Bowl and A River Running West, you talk about capitalism, almost always critically, and you refer to Karl Marx here and there. But you don't quite come out and say "we need to replace the economic system." Let's not get into that, because it's too complicated --
WORSTER: [Laughter]
GREGORSKY: -- but what is your take on American individualism? And isn't that really, at least in your and my lifetimes, more so than any economic philosophy, our sort of "secular religion" in America?
WORSTER: "Individualism"?
GREGORSKY: Right. Whether it's freedom to do business, or make lifestyle choices, or Gen Xers showing their "attitude" -- as in: my right to dress the way I do at a job and you can't fire me -- it seems to me that individualism ties together all these harsh forces and trends rather than any economic theory.
WORSTER: Well, they're not separable. Most of our individualism in this country is economic individualism. In other ways we're a very conformist society, when it comes to other kinds of behavior. It's the individualism of private property, of fences, of economic self-reliance, of anti-government or anti-state. But it's not necessarily the individualism of unlimited free speech.
GREGORSKY: Have you listened to Howard Stern? I mean, stuff is broadcast now that people would've been shot for when you were a kid.
WORSTER: [Laughter] I agree. And, in a broad sense, these are forms of classic "liberalism."
GREGORSKY: There ya go.
WORSTER: "The freedom of the individual."
GREGORSKY: Your writings make this look like a boon for pro-business conservatives. A lot of people on the left side of the spectrum are taking advantage of this so-called freedom trend, in addition to those [groups and agendas] you just listed.
WORSTER: Um-hmm. Oh yeah. The problem -- or, not "problem," but I think you'd have to say that, even though we [as a people] say we believe in individualism, or "freedom," or "liberty," it means very different things to different people. On the left, they want to control the economic individualism; and on the other side, they want to control the social behavior of people, get into the bedroom and so forth. But politically, this is still a deeply liberal society.
Younger readers need to know that by "liberal" Worster means the limited-government doctrines of Frederick Bastiat or Herbert Spencer or, more recently, Milton Friedman -- who spent 30 years advocating total legalization of drugs while some of my fellow conservatives treated him as a demigod. Friedman was no conservative; he was one of the most reckless and narrow-minded policy advocates out there. Actually, many of the ecological authors I have met come closer to the essence of conservatism, in the sense that they -- like Edmund Burke -- are skeptical of rapid change.
WORSTER: But I still want to talk about the word "capitalism" because I think it can be misunderstood. I'm not a Marxist. I can't imagine how anybody could [think that]. I quoted Karl Marx once, as a kind of smart-ass way to put it in the face of my fellow Kansans [laughter].
GREGORSKY: But Dust Bowl had me wondering: What is the author not saying here?
WORSTER: But, if you read the book, it's not a Marxist book.
GREGORSKY: No.
WORSTER: I mean, the person that actually influenced me a lot more than Marx was Max Weber [1864-1920]. His view of capitalism was really much more a view of the culture of capitalism -- the economic culture, the mindset.
GREGORSKY: Is there a good biography of Weber? I've never been able to study him.
WORSTER: I don't know of any. But he seems to me to be one of the most profound thinkers -- and critics. And nobody who wants to understand the modern world can afford to miss reading Karl Marx. Karl Marx knew how the market economy worked, whether you agree with his conclusions or not.
GREGORSKY: I don't agree that he knew much of anything. His theory did not allow for change -- for movement between classes, and for feedback and flux. Those forces are basic to capitalism. Marx simply assumed people got things [typically by a sinister method] and kept them. His theory had major, major -- as in fatal -- weakness due to its determinism.
WORSTER: Well, who hasn't had major or fatal [problems when they think on that big of a scale]? But he's not where we would go today to understand [the capitalistic economy], particularly from an environmental point of view --
GREGORSKY: Where would we go? Besides Weber, who do you really like?
WORSTER: I would go back to people like [Robert Henry] Tawney, Joseph Schumpeter, and a whole series of people in the 20th century. I also think Heilbroner understood very well, in The Worldly Philosophers, precisely what kind of world this is.
GREGORSKY: I liked Heilbroner. [That's Robert Heilbroner, 1919-2005, the longtime socialist who wrote in The New Yorker the same year the Berlin Wall came down: "Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over. Capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism." For an account of his best-known, and marvelous, book, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worldly_Philosophers. For a profile of the Britisher R.H. Tawney, who lived 1880-1962, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Tawney]
WORSTER: And none of them -- Weber, Heilbroner, Tawney, Schumpeter -- were simply anti-capitalist. They understood the material benefits, the innovative benefits, that capitalism had brought. As I think I do.
GREGORSKY: Yes. The great thing about [this Powell biography] is that, even when I know where you're going politically, and I'm having trouble with it as a conservative, there's always something that was said -- some statistic, some acknowledgment -- a few pages ago that would back up a more conservative view. So there's the scholarly aspect of "telling a whole story" -- while you get to put your spin on it, which is fine, because it's your book.
WORSTER: Um-hmm.
GREGORSKY: I think that balance is maintained pretty well. Do you consciously do that?
WORSTER: No [smiling] -- I think it's because I'm a confused individual.
GREGORSKY: [Sympathetic laughter]
WORSTER: I grew up in a family that probably represents the classic American triad of God, Money, Flag -- and I don't repudiate all of that.
GREGORSKY: Did your kids turn out to be Democrats or Republicans?
WORSTER: Oh, they're pretty staunch liberal Democrats and environmentalists. My son works for the National War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and my daughter is a high-school biology and environmental-studies teacher in Oregon. So [chuckling] I'm proud of them. They're different from me. My son believes more strongly than I do in free markets. He has me reading The Economist pretty regularly.
GREGORSKY: Most conservatives no longer view The Economist as a conservative publication. They're wrong about the thugs who control Gaza, homosexual marriage, capital punishment -- and geez, they endorsed Kerry.
WORSTER: [Laughter] Well, it's British.
GREGORSKY: Twenty years ago it was my favorite magazine, but I can't stand it any more.
WORSTER: Well, I'm not going to renew my subscription, probably because I get tired about reading about what the hell's going on in Ghana.
[Mutual laughter]
GREGORSKY: Well, thank you, this has been wonderful. I will need your permission to insert extracts [from the Powell biography] -- backing up points in the discussion.
WORSTER: Sure, okay.
GREGORSKY: Plus, I'll insert helpful links in the appropriate places. And that's it.
WORSTER: All right, Frank, I'm glad we did this.
© 2008, Donald Worster
with Frank Gregorsky
From A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell
[E]verywhere they go [in Colorado, Utah and Arizona] the tourist hordes encounter the name and image of John Wesley Powell. He has been canonized by the National Park Service and by the Bureau of Reclamation, by outdoor writers and boatmen, as one of the greatest pathfinders in American history and as a prophet of what the West might still become. Celebrity and fame, to be sure, often obscure a more complicated reality. Powell's views of nature and technology, of economic progress, and even of railroads, were more tangled than we usually remember. He did not hesitate, for example, to use the railroad to join his exploring party. He called for building dams, for transforming the arid lands into an agriculture empire, although at the same time he extolled the wilderness and criticized ruthless corporations. To discover the man behind the celebrity, with all his ambivalence and contradictions, is to discover a more complicated America...
Powell's story is finally one of Americans confronting and learning to live with the land they came to possess. He knew as well as anyone the Colorado Plateau and its great chasm, as he knew the arid West, but he also knew much of eastern America -- together, a land as impressive as any on earth. He became a founder of the national movement to conserve the land, to adjust settlement and economic use to its limitations, and (more muted) to preserve its beauty and diversity for future generations... Even today, travelers pass on their way without knowing what kind of man this was -- his faults and weaknesses as well as his strengths and achievements. This book seeks to explore that intrepid pathfinder and his place in the canyons of America's past.
-- Donald Worster, reprinted with permission