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Is it just global warming, or has it gotten a tad steamy in the multiplex lately?
No sooner had viewers taken in the long, graphic lesbian sex scenes in the French coming-of-age drama "Blue Is the Warmest Color" last year than they were treated to "Stranger by the Lake," a homoerotic thriller (also French) set in a gay cruising site, at which men could be seen pleasuring each other and themselves with unsettling, frankness.
Upon emerging from that well-crafted - if borderline pornographic - tableau, they could go home and watch the on-demand movie "Nymphomaniac," Lars von Trier's two-part fictional biopic of a neurotically promiscuous young woman, played as an adult by the epitome of boho chic, Charlotte Gainsbourg.
For the past year or two, it seems, movies have become obsessed with sex, continually upping the ante on tone, subject matter and explicitness - and "50 Shades of Grey" hasn't even come out yet.
Or perhaps "exponentially more obsessed" is the better term. Sex has been a dependably attention-grabbing element of cinematic style virtually since the medium's inception - or at least since the 1920s, when silent films like "Sunrise" seethed with erotic innuendo underneath the moralistic melodrama. The decades that ensued found Hollywood both exploitatively embracing and phobically avoiding sexuality on screen, alternately pandering to and resisting the dictates of religious leaders, civic censors, hypocritical ratings boards and audiences occupying that singularly American psychic space between Puritan disapproval and prurient voyeurism.
The 1960s had "I Am Curious (Yellow)" (whose hype was helped by being seized by customs agents at the U.S. border); the 1970s had "Last Tango in Paris," starring Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider and an uncredited stick of butter; the 1980s had "91/2 Weeks," about a sadomasochistic affair between a Wall Street executive and SoHo gallery girl; and the 1990s had Stanley Kubrick's lugubriously fetishistic domestic drama "Eyes Wide Shut."
By the 2000s - memorable for Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton's volatile sex scenes in "Monster's Ball," director Michael Winterbottom's experimentation with non-simulated sex acts in the erotic omnibus "9 Songs," and actress Chloë Sevigny pleasuring director and co-star Vincent Gallo in "The Brown Bunny," it seemed as though filmmakers were engaged in an escalating arms race of shocking audiences, offering them sexual material as explicit as pornography, but burnished by art-house credibility.
Of course, since the days of Swedish imports featuring casual nudity and naughty bits, art films have existed in a mutually supportive pas de deux with porn, benefiting from the publicity that attends controversial X and NC-17 ratings while appealing to discerning audiences who wouldn't be caught dead in an adult theater. (Put simply, in a porn film, sex can be dirty, kinky or super-hot; in an art house film it's "transgressive.")
The challenge today is that, rather than being relegated to disreputable theaters or scruffy back sections of video stores, porn is on the home entertainment centers and portable devices of discerning connoisseurs everywhere. How do you shock mainstream audiences who can now have their most florid sexual fantasies acted out 24/7, at the click of a mouse? And how can audiences be anything but bored or faintly amused by efforts that increasingly look like the bids for attention of a petulant arrested adolescent?
Those anxious questions seems to have produced a rash of films predicated not on liberation and expression, but on creeping pessimism and dread, epitomized by a recent boomlet in movies about Internet porn addiction: Starting with Steve McQueen's 2011 film "Shame," starring Michael Fassbender, and continuing last year with "Thanks for Sharing" and "Don Jon," sex has been portrayed not as tantalizingly elusive, naughty or - heaven forfend! - fun, but the stuff of pathology, isolation and fatally distorted values.
Meanwhile, audiences have been treated to what amounts to an onslaught of images - on both big and small screens - that have taken realism to new heights (or, depending on your taste, new lows). While HBO puts out its usual steady stream of envelope-pushing images in shows like "Girls" and "Game of Thrones," basic cable has tried mightily to get into the act: The image of young teenager Paige walking in on her parents engaging in an acrobatic display of mutual gratification in "The Americans" is one that neither she or millions of fans will ever un-see.
Even Wes Anderson has seen fit to include an image of a man receiving oral sex in his new movie, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" - a moment all the more jarring for being so out of place within the director's fussy, steadfastly asexual house style.
Granted, it's the briefest of glimpses. The trick, Anderson knows, is striking the right balance between refreshing honesty and off-putting vulgarity.
"We found out that . . . people will leave the theater if you have full frontal nudity for an extended period of time, [but] if you make it five seconds they'll laugh and say it was great," producer Judd Apatow - who helped invent the raunch-com - recently told the Hollywood Reporter. "So basically that's the ratio of how much penis people can handle in a movie. Five seconds yes, 20 seconds no."
There's a whole lot more than 20 seconds of the full Monty in "Stranger by the Lake" and "Nymphomaniac," each of which portrays sexuality less as a function of desire than pathological impulses. Both films portray fleeting moments of ecstasy, but for the most part sex is depicted as a furtive, joyless endeavor. (By contrast, the opening scene of the new HBO show "Looking," set in a cruising area in a San Francisco park, is played for fumbling, even innocent laughs.)
For its part, "Blue Is the Warmest Color" wasn't as groundbreaking for the images it contained as for the length of time the camera spent on them: When the film made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival last year, the buzz immediately centered on an astonishing seven-minute love scene between characters played by Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. It's true that the sequence went on much longer than a conventional sex scene, but within the context of a three-hour movie, it was an organic part of the whole, one that only accentuated what felt like a raw, intimately observed chronicle of a pivotal chapter in a young woman's life.
Regardless of how they deployed sexuality, all three films traded on the curiosity of viewers who, with sex now available on their devices of choice, have fewer and fewer reasons to leave their homes to be provoked, titillated or carnally enlightened. It goes without saying that, despite their most strenuous efforts to go there, few of the most explicit movies could be called sexy: It's what is withheld, rather than what's shown, that creates those familiar delicious frissons, whether it's the sight of Mark Ruffalo feeding Julianne Moore a piece of his tender-hot homemade pie in "The Kids Are All Right" or Diane Lane recalling an afternoon of illicit lust while commuting back home in "Unfaithful."
In fact, in a newly pornified pop culture, the most shocking depictions of sex may not be the most painfully outlandish S&M scenarios of "Nymphomaniac" or the explicitness of "Stranger by the Lake," but the portrayal of sex as a part of daily life - and as such, a source of projection, frustration, vulnerability, disappointment and awkward, un-cosmeticized lust.
One of the most genuinely gobsmacking moments I've had in the cinema in recent years, sex-wise, was when Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones played a couple seeing a therapist in the 2012 comedy "Hope Springs" - not a masterpiece of a movie, but one that tackled AARP-generation sex with admirable honesty and surprising straightforwardness. In a similar vein, the recent romantic dramedy "Le Week-End" takes sometimes funny, often searing look at the ebb and flow of physical desire as it plays out in a 30-year marriage. ("May I touch you?" Jim Broadbent's Nick solicitously asks Meg, played by Lindsay Duncan. "What for?" she bites back testily.)
Whether it's Lena Dunham's zaftig Hannah uncomfortably adjusting her corset in "Girls," or Broadbent admitting to Duncan that he's "become a phobic object for you," these shows and movies restore sex to something of its rightful place - not as an impossibly aspirational ideal or coarse, nihilistic compulsion, but a vector for expression, playfulness, intimacy, and recognizably human foibles. It turns out that filmmakers can still elicit shocks - whether through outrage, recognition or vicarious desire: They need only explore all those shades of gray, that number far greater than a measly 50.
Community News Network
Sex, movies and the desperate attempt to shock audiences
Is it just global warming, or has it gotten a tad steamy in the multiplex lately?
- Community News Network
The Simpsons still going strong
The groundbreaking animation first hit the air Dec. 17, 1989, but the family first appeared on television in "The Tracey Ullman Show" short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987.
Police chief resigns over racial slur repost to Facebook
A repost on his personal Facebook page of a racially-charged comment by the original poster of a comedy video has forced the police chief of an Oklahoma city to resign his office.
Does Twitter need a censor?
Twitter decided last year to make images more prominent on its site. Now, the social network is finding itself caught between being an open forum and patrolling for inappropriate content.
America's sleep-deprived cities
Americans might run on sleep, but those living in the country's largest cities don't appear to run on much.
Who should pay for your kids ACT?
Thirteen states paid for 11th-grade students in all public high schools to take the ACT college admission test this year, with several more planning to join them in 2015.
Why do people look like their pets?
As much as we might quibble over the virtues and vices of Canis domesticus, however, and over whether human nature is any better or worse than dog nature, even dog fanciers don't usually want to look like a dog.
Ice bucket challenge trending up
Internet trends are a dime a dozen these days. Everything from Tebowing to planking to the cinnamon challenge can cause a wave of social media activity that can last for weeks before fizzling out.
Africa goes medieval in its fight against Ebola
As the Ebola epidemic claims new victims at an ever-increasing rate, African governments in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia have instituted a "cordon sanitaire," deploying troops to forcibly isolate the inhabitants in an area containing most of the cases.
Democrat? Republican? There's an app for that
If you're a Republican, you might want to think twice before buying Lipton Iced Tea, and forget about Starbucks coffee. If you're a Democrat, put down that Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and throw away the cylinder of Quaker Oats in your pantry.
Five myths about presidential vacations
In the nuclear age, presidents may have only minutes to make a decision that could affect the entire world. They don't so much leave the White House as they take a miniature version of it with them wherever they go.
- More Community News Network Headlines
- The Simpsons still going strong


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He's baaaa-aaaack.
That's right, ladies and sirs, one of the greatest mixed martial artists to ever grace the Earth will return to active competition for the first time in 19 months on Sat., Nov. 17, 2012, when he battles Carlos Condit in the main event of UFC 154 at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
It's been a long and difficult road to back to this point, too, as "Rush" has had to battle back from a torn ACL in his knee, a debilitating injury that has cost some athletes their career.
At first, St. Pierre feared the same.
"I was wrestling, trying to avoid a takedown. I hurt my knee. I found out it was my ACL that was torn. It's a devastating injury because if it's not taking care of well -- the right people, the right team -- you can never come back the same. You know, it's hard, because you lose hope and sometimes you see your trainer looking at you like, 'my god, he might never ever come back again.' I was convinced that the best Georges St. Pierre was behind me."
But those long days in the training room with all the advancements in modern medicine have apparently paid off, as the French-Canadian whoop ass machine has reportedly returned to form and is ready to show "The Natural Born Killer" what it's like to fight the best in the world.
If that is, indeed, still true today. We'll find out next week.

subset: commoncrawl


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KUSA - It's practically Valentine's Day, but one woman in Denver says she's still waiting to get the package her mom mailed her for Christmas.
Jen Belden's mom lives in New York and sent her a box of presents, along with a check, for her, her husband and their dog, Nathan.
That was Dec. 10. The package never came.
Since then, her mom has spent hours on the phone trying to track the box down. The tracking number online says the box was undeliverable and would be returned the sender, but the box has not turned up at her mom's house, either.
Belden works from home and says she never got a notice on her door the day the post office says they tried to deliver it.
9NEWS contacted the U.S. Postal Service Tuesday. The Postmaster in Denver as well as in New York are now looking into the lost box.
A spokesperson in Denver says they're working to reunite the family with their gifts and they've put in a claim for the package at their Mail Recovery Center in Georgia.


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Some Professionals Opt to Rent Their Ties and Designer Dresses
Posted Mar 9, 2012 6:30 AM CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
If you like to look bad in plaid, but don't want to spend too much money for it, the Tie Society has a solution for you.
The company is one of several capitalizing on a rental trend, the Washington Post reports. "Businesses such as Netflix, Zipcar and Capital Bikeshare have fueled this culture of borrowers and lenders," the story says. "Experts have coined a term for the phenomenon: collaborative consumption. The sharing economy."
Washington, D.C., lawyer Masai McDougall of Bingham McCutchen tells the Post he's been renting his trendy tartan plaid ties. "It's nice to try out styles without having to spend 100 bucks on a tie," he says.
Some women also rent ties, the story says. Others use Rent the Runway for designer dresses.
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Childhood friend saw 'no change' in murder accused (From Times Series)
Get involved: send your pictures, video, news & views by texting TIMES NEWS to 80360, or upload here
Childhood friend saw 'no change' in murder accused Laszlo Gyarmati
Updated 5:07pm Thursday 16th January 2014 in News By Natalie O'Neill
A childhood friend said he saw "no change" in a man just hours after he killed his lover, a court heard today.
Laszlo Gyarmati, 29, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but denies murdering 25-year-old Hungarian national, Alexandra Kovacs, at her home in Lee Road Mill Hill.
Today, the jury at Central Criminal Court heard a statement from Andras Harangi, who has known the defendant since he was seven-years-old.
The pair lived together in Station Road, Finchley, at the time when Miss Kovacs was killed last July.
In a statement, Mr Harangi, described seeing Mr Gyarmati when he returned home on Thursday, July 19, hours after Miss Laszlo was killed.
He said: "I smiled at him, he smiled back. I assumed he was smiling because he had been with a girl that night.
"I saw no change in him on Thursday. There was no indication that anything out of the ordinary had happened that night."
Mr Gyarmati told his friend that he had called in sick at work, but Mr Harangi said: "In my opinion, he wasn't sick at all."
The trial continues.


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Actor Billy Zane stars in the independent film, Electrick Children.' Zane plays the Mormon father of a teenage girl who becomes pregnant claiming it was an immaculate conception.
The movie opens at the IFC Center on March 8.
KTBC FOX 7119 East 10th StreetAustin, TX 78701Phone: (512) 476-7777Fax: (512) 495-7001


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Hey everyone! I decided to create this post fairly early to get more responses. I am looking forward to our Week 7 matchup. Please feel free to leave any questions about the Bengals below.
I'll also write a few of my questions about the Lions here that you can answer below for me:
Calvin's status for Sunday's game is somewhat in doubt, though it's probably more likely than not he'll play. Who are some of the other prominent offensive weapons and what do they bring to the table? I know there are a mix of mainstays as well as newcomers to that group.
How would you rate the offensive line? I've read good things about rookie Larry Warford. I'm interested in this because our game will probably be won at the line of scrimmage regardless of who has the ball. I know the Lions defensive line is very good.
Of all the units on the team, what's the weakest (or least good)? My guess is the secondary, but I don't know too much about them currently. That's based on the last few years more than this year.
Is Shaun Hill the best backup QB in the NFL? I can't think of a better one in terms of production and experience. Not at all that I want to see Stafford knocked out or anything like that, just asking.
What were your thoughts on the Kickalicious vs. Akers preseason battle? I'll be the first to admit that I wanted to see Rugland make an NFL team, though it looks like Akers has done well so far.


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Fargo Police say two people could be facing charges after a hit and run turned into a fight.
Police say around 12:30 Friday morning two people crashed at 13th avenue south and I-29 in Fargo.
When the driver who allegedly caused the crash sped off, the victim tried to take matters into his own hands.
He chased the other car to Mapleton where both men got out of their vehicles and started fighting.
Police say both men could now be facing charges and that it's a good reminder to let officers handle a situation instead of doing it yourself.


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The last guests have gone. Empty bottles litter the house and the yard is a wonderland of crisp white toilet paper dancing in the wind. My head is pounding and my stomach has left the building – more than once. The cat is missing and I have no idea how many days have passed since I was last conscious.
I have never had such a hangover.
I'm just so glad it's over.
I grab the bottle of ibuprofen, pop a few like candy and chase them with a scalding hot cup of coffee sugared beyond recognition. I schlep to the loo, reluctantly turn to the mirror to look myself in the eye and make yet another empty promise to myself and my body that I will never abuse myself like this again.
It wasn't the worst event ever – just insanely over the top. Too much going on at once, kids running wild and the grown ups could barely hear each other over the noise of general confusion.
There were a few fist fights that broke out during the course of the party, but nothing serious and as far as I can recall – no one had to be hospitalized. Thank God.
I don't think the cops ever showed up, but then again I wouldn't likely remember if they did unless I was using my one phone call from jail to have more ibuprofen delivered to my cell. Do they do that?
Anyways, it looks like today will be a gorgeous day outside so I had better pull myself back together and lose this hangover. The first full spring day that our little family can spend together enjoying the outdoors and some sunshine.
Don't worry if you missed this party – you're invited to the one next year. It's called Autism Awareness Month and it's one hell of a time.
[Ed note: I wrote this last year, 2011, after one hell of a party. This year was even more over-the-top. Our little family participated in lighting the USS Intrepid, The Empire State Building and ringing The Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange in honor of World Autism Awareness Day. I also schlepped up to the state capitol with my rugrats to spread some awareness there, too. I contacted the House Armed Service Committee Members no less than a dozen times each, using facebook, Twitter and by phone, sending more than one thousand tweets in the month of April to spread the word. I created a video and a petition to reach out for more support for our military families living with autism. Oh, and we did actually call the cops twice - once for a trip to the ER with RM (she's fine) and another to catch a hit-and-run suspect (for reals). And now, I will take a few ibuprofen and a nap. Hooah. Thank you to everyone who participated and continues to support CMKAA.]


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My first A330-200 flight and Swiss International Airlines experience just moments from ending, as we near completion of our 7 hour overnight flight from JFK. [Canon 10D]
The first A330 aircraft I have ever been on seen with a beautiful mountain background. This plane was about to land after a flight from JFK as Swiss 23 heavy, the flight I was on just 24 hours bef... (more)
This one goes out to Josh May, it was nice having you here, coming in with this flight on the day before
My first spotting visit to the New York area - Swiss International A332 on approach to 22R at KJFK
Taking-off on runway 16.


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UCSF Fresno offers a well balanced curriculum. Residents are trained at a wide variety of clinical sites, encompassing inpatient and ambulatory training in both urban and rural settings. UCSF Fresno maintains over 40 affiliation agreements to tailor our residents' experiences to their educational needs. A full-time curriculum coordinator works hand-in-hand with our full-time scheduling coordinator to maximize learning opportunities and minimize scheduling conflicts.
UCSF Fresno provides intensive, structured inpatient learning opportunities. Family medicine residents are assigned to teaching services at three hospitals: Community Regional Medical Center (CRMC), which has undergone a quarter billion dollar renovation; Children's Hospital of Central California, the only pediatric hospital in the San Joaquin Valley; and Selma Community Hospital, a rural family medicine-dominated institution adjacent to the Selma Family Health Center.
The bulk of inpatient training is provided at Community Regional Medical Center (CRMC). Residents are supervised by family physicians skilled in inpatient care on the family medicine inpatient service. At CRMC, family medicine residents are also trained by a variety of outstanding specialists. All of the attending physicians at CRMC are part of the UCSF volunteer clinical faculty, are dedicated to meeting the training needs of all residents, and are committed to caring for the underserved populations served by our residents.
In addition to outstanding training in urban inpatient settings, all family medicine residents have the opportunity to work in the rural community of Selma. Each first year resident rotates on the Selma family medicine inpatient service. Residents in Selma work directly with family physicians providing full scope family medicine with a special emphasis on obstetrics. Selma family medicine faculty physicians perform C-sections and are eager to train interested residents in this skill. Second and third year residents have the opportunity to do additional months on the Selma inpatient service, take call at Selma, and work in the Selma Family Health Center located next to the hospital.
UCSF Fresno pays careful attention to its curricular offerings. A curriculum committee meets monthly to critically appraise our curricula. Each curricular area is reviewed every six months and an in-depth analysis is done on an annual basis. Resident evaluations of rotations are reviewed so that each curricular area can be modified and updated as necessary. Residents are involved on all curricular committees.


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Cloudy and mild today with a high of 74. The rain
chance today about 60%, increasing to 80% later tonight as temperatures fall
towards the mid 50's. That will probably be our daytime for Friday just in time
for musicfest weekend. It will cold and rainy into the weekend.
WHBQ-TV | Fox 13 485 S. Highland St.Memphis, TN 38111Main Station: (901) 320-1313Newsroom: (901) 320-1340


text: I know that he has been hurt the past few seasons, but it might not take much more than a prospect or two to get him. Hopefully a change of scenery can bring him back to his playing days during the 06-08 seasons when he had a lot of pop in his bat and a .840 OPS. If we do trade for him then we can trade Mark Reynolds for relievers and maybe sign Pedro Feliz with an .698 OPS to a cheaper contract too take his spot. Im new to this whole FanPost thing so dont make me look like to big of an idiot haha.


text: Bone Detectives Series 1 - 7. Blood Rite Share: About this programme 7/13. Scotty Moore visits the northern coast of Peru, where an archaeological excavation revealed the grave of a teenage girl - at the entrance to an empty tomb. Cast and crew Cast Presenter Scotty Moore Categories Documentary Share:


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Pianists from Wellington School visit Steinway Hall (From This is The West Country)
Get involved! Send your photos, video, news & views by texting COUNTY GAZETTE to 80360 or email us
Pianists from Wellington School visit Steinway Hall
12:00pm Saturday 12th July 2014 in News
PIANISTS from Wellington School had the experience of a lifetime performing at the famous Steinway Hall in London.
Four lucky students spent a day at the hall to celebrate the achievements of talented young pianists from across the South-West.
The budding musicians looked around the workshops, spoke to staff and played the exquisite pianos with all the winners of a competition coming from Wellington.
Sixth former Cindy Ma won the advanced class in the piano competition and Thea Phillips, aged 14, won the intermediate class.
Also performing were Lydia Mitchell, 13, who won the foundation class, and 13-year-old Nathaniel Jenkins.
Comments are closed on this article.


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Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, today disclosed the existence of a second classified National Intelligence Estimate "that gives a grim assessment of the situation in Iraq, and called for it to be shared with the American public — before the November elections." TPM Muckraker has details.
Another secret Iraq report.
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In the third quarter last Saturday against Bethune-Cookman, Miami Hurricanes running back Duke Johnson caught a screen pass at midfield and appeared to be headed for a 15-yard gain. Eight seconds later, Johnson was in the end zone, having completed a 50-yard touchdown.
It was a well-designed play that gave Johnson plenty of space to run, but the primary reason Johnson scored was a block by left guard Jon Feliciano.
Nine yards up the field two yards ahead of Johnson Feliciano had made a diving block and took out two defenders, tripping another in the process. Johnson cut right and was off, untouched.
Like every offensive lineman, Feliciano doles out blocks immediately after the snap. But where Feliciano really thrives is down the field.
And Johnson has noticed.
I just love running behind Feliciano, Johnson said. A lot of my big runs are behind Feliciano. Hes a big guy that can move and block great in space.
Feliciano said he was flattered to be singled out by the new Hurricanes star, but said that both Johnsons and his own success can be attributed to the play of the offensive line as a whole.
Its nice to hear that but its the whole offensive line doing their job at one time, Feliciano said. Its not really just me, its everyone out there.
Last season Feliciano was listed at 330 pounds. Now, the 6-foot-5 redshirt sophomore from Davie Western High is down to 314.
Perhaps more important than the weight he has dropped is the strength he has gained.
Feliciano said he could bench-press 225 pounds 17 times last season. This year Feliciano is up to 25 reps.
The biggest difference with Feliciano is his weight is down, his conditioning is up and hes finishing better than anyone on the offensive line right now, UM coach Al Golden said. Hes playing with a lot of energy down the field, pushing piles and finishing blocks.
Golden said Felicianos improvements have set an example for his teammates, who he said need to display the same energy Feliciano has shown recently.
Part of what motivates Feliciano to go faster in games is the knowledge that Johnson has the ball and is sprinting right behind him.
When youre pulling and I feel [Johnson] tugging on my back Im like Oh, gotta move faster! Feliciano said.
After their first three games last year, the Hurricanes had scored only three rushing touchdowns. This year that total is six, with only two coming off short-yardage carries.
Despite the loss of star running back Lamar Miller to the NFL, Hurricanes players said they expected the team to excel on the ground this season.
We were expecting our backs to have a great year because we saw in practice the things that our offensive linemen were doing, defensive lineman Corey King said. Once our linemen execute their plays, our backs get free.
Against Georgia Tech on Saturday, the UM line will face the challenge of a defensive formation they have not seen this season: the 3-4.
Theyre a really good defense, Feliciano said of the Yellow Jackets. Up front they run the 3-4 and not a lot of teams run that. Its a little confusing but were going to be watching film and getting ready for them.
If the Hurricanes find rushing success in Atlanta, look for Feliciano to be involved but any touchdown celebrations likely will be subdued.
Last year, Feliciano sprained his ankle during a touchdown celebration against the Yellow Jackets and missed two games.


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How many elite players on the Giants' team that won the Superbowl?
You don't need ELITE players to win. What you need is SOLID players all around.
We NEED Justin Blackmon ?
Giants did pretty well with Cruz (undrafted), Hakeem Nicks (1-29) and Manningham (3rd rounder).
We NEED Richardson ?
Giants got by with Bradshaw (7th) and Jacobs (4th round).
We NEED Clayborne ?
What about Corey Webster (2nd round) and Aaron Ross (1st-20).
We NEED Kalil (even if we won't get him) ?
Giants LT David Diehl was a 5th round choice!
We have JL55 (who wasn't a blue chip prospect) at MLB when the Giants won the Superbowl with an undrafted LB playing the position (Chase Blackburn).
I didn't check the all roster, but the Giants probably have VERY FEW (Manning is the only one that comes to mind and he is often criticized for not being a Top QB).
What we need is to eliminate the weak links from our roster.


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Everything about our cruise was great - easy embarkation - in cabins by 1:30. Beautiful & clean ship - good food - great shows. Cozumel was good (Mr. Sanchos Beach) beautiful turquoise water & great beach. good snorkeling right next to the shore.
Progreso was very nice-free bus shuttle to town - walked 3 blocks thru town to Malecon & Beach - free beach chairs, tables & umbrellas - very friendly people - taken care of by waiters from Los Cocos across the street from the beach- $3 beers - $20 massages right on the beach - beach right next to the long Progreso Pier - clean & beautiful beach and nice shallow calm water w/soft sandy bottom. We all loved it - much more relaxed & friendly than Cozumel - not so commercialized.
We did almost EVERYTHING on the ship - shows were all fantastic. Tony from our group won the Master Mixology Contest:Frozen blue Drink "Plastered Castaway" very fun & entertaining on Lido Deck. Tony was also 1 of 4 contestants in the Superstar Live show - sang "Georgia" - got a ship on a stick & bottle of champagne. Did a lot of Trivia - Kareoke - bingo - won a beautiful Pandora Bead Bracelet in the raffle. David (nephew 23) was a finalist in the Slot Tourney - won a T-shirt. We hit the trifecta & won 3 Ships on a Stick. Tea Time is great - specialty cakes/pastries & tea sandwiches. Loved the sushi Bar, 24 hour pizza & soft serve ice cream. Mexican buffet was good & kids loved the Lido dancing & 230+ congo line (which they led!). Stayed on Lido Deck - 5 interior cabins; great large "private" deck at end of our hall - quiet & relaxing & caught a few sunsets there. cabin steward was good - unobtrusive - kept us supplied in ice & towel animals. "Tex" Cruise Director was great & really funny. We had priority VIP disembarkation - off ship and driving home by 8:30 AM Would highly recommend Carnival Triumph - only downside - I think I gained 10 lbs.
Fingers 4 from St. Louis, Missouri


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Fighting to keep their bowl eligibility hopes alive, the Connecticut Huskies took a 24-10 halftime lead over Rutgers at Rentschler Field on Saturday afternoon. The Huskies took a quick 7-0 lead just two minutes into the game after recovering a Rutgers fumble. Lyle McCombs took it in from ten yards out for the 7-0 lead.
After another quick Rutgers turnover, the Huskies added another touchdown for the 14-0 lead. Taking over inside Rutgers territory on a Chas Dodd interception, UConn freshman quarterback Scott McCummings would punch it in from five yards out for their second score in as many possessions.
UConn would take a commanding 21-3 lead on Rutgers third turnover of the game, this time scooping up a Chas Dodd fumble on the nine yard line. Kendall Reyes pounced on the loose ball and scampered in for the defensive touchdown.
In the second quarter, the Scarlet Knights would finally put together a touchdown drive to cut the Huskies lead to 11. Rutgers capitalized on UConn penalties and pounded the rock on the ground five straight times. Jawan Jamison finished the drive with a one yard touchdown.
Rutgers is trying to keep its Big East title an BCS hopes alive but the Huskies' 21 points off turnovers has certainly put them behind the eight ball heading to the second half.
For more on UConn, check out the aptly-named The UConn Blog. For more on Rutgers, check out On The Banks.


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Jan Love
Annual gifts to the Theology School Fund for Excellence support Candler's long-standing mission to educate faithful and creative leaders for the church's ministries in the world. They also nurture the financial health of Candler graduates by reducing their education debt, a heavy burden too many seminary graduates take with them into ministry.
Your gifts provide Candler students with the support they need. In fact, 83 percent of eligible students enrolled last year received scholarship assistance, and the average award per student covered 66 percent of Candler's $18,800 tuition. Despite this significant scholarship support, last year 57 percent of students borrowed substantial sums to cover living expenses, books, and health insurance. Starting salaries for clergy and other ministry professionals make repaying this debt a challenge.
Candler remains committed to helping students graduate and effectively minister in their communities without the worry of excessive debt. My pledge is that all gifts to the Theology School Fund for Excellence will be dedicated to student scholarships.
I hope you will consider a gift to the Theology School Fund for Excellence this year. Your investment will help Candler continue to prepare real people to make a real difference in the real world.
Jan Love
Dean and Professor of Christianity and World Politics
Candler School of Theology
Click on the images below to discover how you can help educate faithful and creative leaders.
Visit www.candler.emory.edu to learn more about Candler School of Theology.


text:
Still Time To Make Health Improvements
January 3, 2012 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.
BOSTON, Jan. 3 (UPI) — Many people break, or forget, their resolutions just days into a new year but a U.S. physician says they can still take steps to improve their health.
Dr. Wendy Chen, a breast cancer expert at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, says limiting alcohol consumption can save money and may lower the risk of developing some cancers.
Dana-Farber researchers found women who consume one alcoholic drink a day may increase their risk for breast cancer, Chen said.
"Women need to consider the possible effects of alcohol on breast cancer risk when weighing the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption," Chen said in a statement. "Our findings indicate that in some women, even modest levels of alcohol consumption may elevate their risk of breast cancer."
Chen also says sunscreen shouldn't be packed away after summer ends. Skin can be exposed to harmful rays all year long. Snow, ice and water can all reflect the ultraviolet radiation that causes sunburn, which, in turn increases the risk of developing skin cancer, skin experts at Dana-Farber said.
Winter sports enthusiasts can face just as much risk as summer sunbathers of getting sunburn, and Dana-Farber reminds skin protection needs to year round. They suggest:
– Wear sunscreen, lip balm and makeup with an SPF of 15 or higher.
– Use UV-blocking eye protection, especially for skiing.
– Avoid excessive exposure to the sun, especially between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. when the sun is at its strongest.


text: Summer served here We love fresh strawberries so much, we've bought a field of them in Hampshire. Perfect for our delicious puddings and a fruity Pimms. Enjoy the taste of summer, only at Fuller's. find out more Delightful dozen Offering stylish accommodation in St Aldates, our 12 beautiful rooms are the perfect base from which to explore. Each combines original features with modern luxuries. Award-winning ales Awarded Master Cellarman status, we are known for keeping our beer extremely fresh. Enjoy the perfect pint of our famous London Pride, or sample a seasonal ale.


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Too many people living under one roof?
That's the complaint many Austin homeowners are having with their neighbors. So they've brought the issue to the City Council.
They're called "Stealth Dorms." Or at least that's what those against them are calling them.
It's a term that basically means something that looks like a house but it's actually more like a mini apartment complex.
According to the website "Stop Stealth Dorms," it's particularly a problem in Central and North Central Austin -- a developer will rent a big house or duplex out to around six unrelated people.
Students are the ones that usually take advantage of this.
And six unrelated people is the legal limit in Austin.
Those that are bringing the fight to city council tonight are hoping to reduce the number to four.
Nuria Zaragoza lives near UT. She realizes many of the complaints about stealth dorms are about the trash piling up and loud parties. But she is more concerned about homes being torn down to make way for these multi-resident structures.
"In my neighborhood at least, a bedroom rents out for $1,000 a month. So when you know you can bring in at least $6,000 a month in rent, it gives an incentive to tear down structures that would otherwise provide affordable housing for both buyers and for tenants," Zaragoza said.
We also talked to a guy named Eric Goff. He's one of five working adults in a house. He's hoping he and his house mates will be grandfathered in.
"If there are students or bad neighbors that are violating the law or violating code they should either talk to them or if that doesn't work call the police. We don't need to fix that with a zoning issue. And you can have four bad neighbors or two bad neighbors just as easily as you can have six bad neighbors," Goff said.
Goff says he's ok with them reducing the limit to four temporarily while the city comes up with a long term plan.
As of news time tonight, the City Council hasn't even gotten to the item yet on the agenda.
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On Wednesday, my son Henry was home from school for the second day in a row after the pipe-bomb explosion on Tuesday which left a young man dead and the whole town wondering, "What happened?"
Henry and I went to breakfast after his two younger siblings dragged themselves to school, yelling, "It's so not fair! Why does he get to stay home AGAIN?"
We stopped at Gamestop and Blick Art to get a few things for a care package for my nephew who just had surgery.
We even hung out on the front porch, talking about everything...and nothing. It was an extension of yesterday's surreal day. The dog was driving us crazy, so Henry and I walked him to Larimer Park to play fetch.
At one point, I chucked the ball across the field and it landed in a cluster of bushes. As Henry disappeared into the foliage, I stopped in my tracks.
What if there's another pipe bomb in there? Have the police checked all the parks?
Henry emerged with the orange and blue ball, and I began breathing.
Damn him, I thought of the headless man, for scaring me in my own neighborhood.
But then, we started to get some glimpses of Colin Dalebroux. First, a photo. Clean cut, smiling. One of my kids saw it on the computer last night and said, "THAT'S the guy?"
The tone conveyed exactly what we were all thinking. This guy doesn't look like a jerk. He looks fresh and decent and young.
According to a statement Colin Dalebroux's family just released, they believe he committed suicide after a 15-year battle with depression.
I thought I'd feel relieved with a confirmation that the "bomber" at my son's middle school wasn't out to get anyone else, just himself.
But now, I'm feeling hollow. Not for myself or for our community as we try to get back to "normal", but for the family that sent their son out into the world, knowing he's not coming back.


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When we first launched The Border House just over a week ago, I posted to the wow_ladies LiveJournal community about its existence. Being that the wow_ladies group is all female WoW gamers, some of whom identify as feminist – I figured this blog would be a great fit for them. One of the very first comments to the post was something along the lines of "Why does this even have to exist? We might be females, but we're gamers first and foremost. Shouldn't we be able to get our gaming news from any old regular gaming site?"
This post is why. In the past week, just reading through Kotaku and Joystiq alone – I have seen massive amounts of sexism. Let's look at two posts from Kotaku, from just TODAY.
They reported that Melissa Joan Hart (of Clarissa Explains It All and Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame) was seen at a Ubisoft event for the game Your Shape by Jenny McCarthy. Why did they feel the need to post this? To say:
Looks like Hart could use some Frag Doll fashion tips.
Let's see here. So the sole purpose of posting this was just to comment on her fashion sense? I mean, I may be wrong – but as far as I've seen the Frag Dolls always wear black t-shirts and jeans. Is it because their bellies show that makes them dress better? And since when did Kotaku become a fashion site? Females can't attend video game conferences without being ridiculed for what they wear?
Even worse, another post from today serves no purpose other than to compare the boobs and the butts of two characters from the recently released Bayonetta game. Seriously? This is gaming news? Of course, the comment thread is to be avoided but contains such gems as "Bayonetta is very close to converting me from a boob man to an ass man" and "It doesn't matter who is bigger or smaller, I think the most important part here is that we're all winners."
And we wonder why female characters in video games are so objectified and overly sexual. It's because gaming journalism like Kotaku continues to create press over it. Of course they're going to report on this, because the men who read Kotaku are just as tuned to objectify female characters in games as the developers who create the games. Why should women gamers have to read this kind of crap just to find out about latest releases and news about their favorite games? This isn't even the first time this week that they have written an entire article about female rear ends.
I didn't even go into the horrible way they referenced our very own Sera Brennan in this article. "Seraphina Brennan is in fact the transgendered identity of the writer and is the byline she now uses for all of her work. Our commentary on this excerpt has been changed to reflect this." Why they felt the need to point out that she is transgender as a sort of disclaimer for her opinion on female objectification in games was beyond me. Not to mention how they referred to her name as being a "transgendered identity" and a "byline" rather than just her name. Not to mention they had to change their commentary because of it. Sigh.
Homophobia, sexism, racism, classism, objectification, prejudice, and discrimination occurs everywhere. Even in video gaming news, which is why The Border House exists. We want to make sure someone out there isn't just commenting in approval, but is drawing attention to the negative effects this causes.
Readers, what do you think?


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Marc Morial, president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans, will be a special guest of Old Dominion University on Thursday, April 21.
The Urban League of Hampton Roads will hold its annual Whitney M. Young Dinner that night at the Renaissance Hotel in Portsmouth and Morial will be the guest speaker, discussing empowering communities and changing lives nationwide.
From 9-9:45 a.m. in the Webb University Center Board of Visitors Conference Room, Morial will discuss "A Big City's Struggle with Unfunded Federal Mandates" and field questions from faculty and students. The general public is invited.
From 10-10:45 a.m., ODU faculty members Joshua Behr and David Earnest will make a presentation and lead an interdisciplinary discussion on segregation modeling simulation. Morial will be present, along with representatives from ODU's academic colleges.
The Urban League is is working to close the equality gaps income, equity and opportunity for African Americans and other people of color. The five critical areas to close the equality gaps are: education, economic development, health and quality of life, civic engagement and social justice.
Prior to being selected to lead this venerable organization, Morial briefly practiced law after leaving office, having served two distinguished 4-year terms as Mayor of New Orleans from 1994-2002. During that time, he also served as President of the United States Conference of Mayors in 2001 and 2002.
As New Orleans' chief executive, he was one of the most popular and effective Mayors in the City's history, leaving office with a 70% approval rating. After being elected as one of the youngest mayors in the city's history, crime plummeted by 60%, a corrupt Police Department was reformed, new programs for youth were started, and a stagnant economy was re-energized. Under his watch, 7,000 new hotel rooms were added, and 15,000 new homeowners resulted from his progressive and innovative programs. In his final months in office, he orchestrated the return of the NBA to New Orleans, with the relocation of the Hornets from Charlotte to New Orleans.
Since assuming the helm of the National Urban League, Morial has worked to re-energize the movements' diverse constituencies by building on the strength's of the nearly one hundred year old organization. He has done so, while working hard to increase the organization's profile both locally and nationally. As President, Morial has worked to streamline the structure and organization of the movement's corporate headquarters, permanently establishing six departments within the organization, identifying and securing millions of dollars in new funding to support the League's various initiatives and dramatically increasing public awareness of the good work and name of the National Urban League through regular media appearances with various media outlets, a weekly newspaper column entitled "To Be Equal," as well as a widely distributed radio commentary by the same name.
For more information, call 683-3935.
This article was posted on: April 13, 2005
Old Dominion University
Office of University Relations
Room 100 Koch Hall Norfolk, Virginia 23529-0018
Telephone: 757-683-3114
Old Dominion University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution.


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link rel="canonical" href=" http://www.filtersfast.com/P-Clean-Clear-Plus-320-4-Pack-Pool-Spa-Filter.asp"/>
The Filbur FC-6465 is a compatible replacement for the following pool and spa filters:
The Clean & Clear Plus 320 4 Pack Pool & Spa Filter is a pool filter made of 80 square feet of Reemay spunbound polyester media. This Clean & Clear Plus 320 filter contains end caps that are made from durable polyurethane material. The center core of this four pack of FC-6465 pool filters is made of punched PVC pipe for consistent flow.
The Filbur FC-6465 specifications:


text:
Downloads: Setup Sheet (PDF)
Other 500:
565 Filter Bank
505-DI Direct Input
512c Mic Pre
525 Compressor
527 Compressor/Limiter
550A Discrete 3 Band EQ
550b 4 Band EQ
560 Graphic EQ
5B1 Blank Panel
Rack Frame Options: Classic Consoles
8-slot lunchbox
6-slot lunchbox (500-6B)
500VPR 10 Slot Rack w/PS
Rack Ears for the lunchbox
Also available in 1.25" version to fit Legacy and Vision consoles
Originally conceived for use in API consoles of the '60s and '70s, the 560 is a unique device designed to accomplish tasks
that no other EQ can. Extremely fast to set and reset using accurate zero detents, the curve shaping potential of the 560 remains
unmatched. With a wide range of 500 mounting options, from racks to consoles, the 560 proves an invaluable asset to all critical
performance applications. Based on API's original 560 EQ, the current production 560 has improved resolution in the ±4 dB
area and possesses our exclusive circuitry and proprietary components, including the API 2520 Op Amp.
The extraordinary headroom made possible with the 2520 offers consistent analog performance even when using radical EQ curves.
Of course, the 2520's ability to drive low impedance loads is key when it is paired with API's custom output transformers. The
results are quite audible with better low frequency reproduction and tighter imaging, which gives you that legendary API
"punch in your gut" sound.
The 10 precision EQ bands make the 560 ideal for signal sweetening and room tuning. A great companion to a parametric EQ, the
560 utilizes API's unique "Proportional Q" design introduced during the '60s. This design intuitively widens the filter
bandwidth at lower boost/cut levels and narrows it at higher settings. Additionally, boost and cut characteristics are identical,
allowing previous actions to be undone if desired.
Reliable, durable and uniform, the API 560 EQ delivers that "one-of-a-kind API sound" with precision easy set
filtering and high headroom in a compact package. If you want the sound of classic American music in an easy-to-set graphic EQ
package, you want the API 560.


text:
DECATUR- A 16 year old is seriously injured after he lost control of his car and hit a tree and utility pole on Sunday night.
Police say he was driving at a high rate of speed when he lost control at Dennis St. and Forest Ave.
The 16 year old is still recovering at Carle Hospital in Urbana.
Evangelist Franklin Graham prayed on a sidewalk outside the Pentagon Thursday after his invitation to a prayer service inside was withdrawn because of comments that insulted people of other religions. More>>
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text: Glad to see the young players get playing time. I like the looks of Gee, Harris & Eyenga. They look to have a lot of talent, speed, athletism & can play good Defense. I so like to see Parker gone. He's streaky & is sooo slow on D. Next is JJ on my list. Sure he's young & has ability, but he only hustles on offense. He has 2 speeds, offense & defense. Doesnt block out, puts no effort in rebounds & always wanting the ball. What, so can drive into 3 defenders to only lose the ball or take outside shots he cant make. Also he doesnt have good hands. He's always dropping passes or knocked away easily. Moon , even tho plays good D most the time, his shooting has been bad of late, but cant get much for him. Trade talk of Jamison is likely cuz of the age & big salary, but has played very well. Talk of trading Andy is just crazy. He 's been the most consistant player on the team, a fan favorite & the Big energy guy. Without him who wud rebound? JJ LOL Sessions has played a few games but doesnt pass the ball enough most of the time. So he cud have some value in a trade for a backup #2 guard. What do you all think of it ? GO CAVS !


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LOS ANGELES – For one night, the Angels' faithful — those who populate talk radio and message boards, anyway — didn't have reason to call for Mickey Hatcher's head.
As if that ever stops them.
Hatcher, the Angels' hitting coach, has spent a decade fending off the critics every time the offense sputters. With the Angels under .500, seventh in the American League in batting average and 10th in runs scored, he and General Manager Tony Reagins have been the most convenient scapegoats in 2011.
After all, they're the ones who swing the bats via remote control, right?
"It's not an easy game, but it definitely looks easy when you're sitting in the stands or watching on TV," Howie Kendrick said before Friday night's 8-3 win over the Dodgers. "Even I'll sit back and watch another game and go, 'Man, how'd that guy not swing at that pitch?'
" … A lot of things he does go unnoticed. He's just the guy who takes the fall when we're not swinging well, but when we're swinging good they don't say anything about him."
The hitting coach position might be the most misunderstood spot on a major league staff. Contrary to popular belief, it's not about whispering the formula that magically unlocks the secret to solving 96 mph fastballs, curves, cutters, sliders and the rest.
Most of the time it's about reminding a big league hitter what got him here in the first place. Or boosting the confidence of a young player who has the talent but maybe is overwhelmed by his surroundings.
And what the hitting coach does usually takes place well out of the glare of the spotlight, on the field hours before the gates open or in the batting cage under the stands.
"He works his butt off for us," rookie catcher Hank Conger said. "He's always available. When we show up early he's right there. If we want to swing 2,000 times in a day, he'll (be there) for us.
"He is patient, and he has our backs."
Hatcher's style is not one-size-fits-all. Some guys prefer to hit off the tee, others off the machine or soft toss. Some hitters watch a lot of video, others operate more by feel. Hatcher works with those individual idiosyncrasies.
And he's no front runner.
"You have to be there not only when they're going good but when they're going bad," Hatcher said. "Let 'em vent. Or don't let them leave the ballpark if something's bothering them.
"If they made a bad play and they lost the game for the team, you can't let them go home thinking about that. If you can get them to laugh a little bit, or get them to loosen up a little bit before they leave, when they come to the park the next day they're ready to go."
For a guy who was considered the class clown as a player, Hatcher is awfully perceptive. Especially when the critics are mentioned
"This is my 10th year, and I hear it 10 times a year," he said. "I love this game too much to worry about the critics. My day when I get fired might come. It's part of the game, so why talk about it? Why worry about it?"
Friday night, in the ballpark where Hatcher had so many memorable moments as a Dodgers player, his Angels weren't as productive as they could or should have been, even while reaching double figures in hits for the fifth straight game.
But getting themselves thrown out on the bases six times — including being thrown out for the cycle by the end of the second inning — tends to get in the way.
Hey, who's the baserunning coach around here, anyway?


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Fort Sill, Ok_Fort sill has confirmed the presence of the West Nile Virus in mosquitoes on post, but there have not been any cases of human infection at this point.
Officials say they were discovered in 4 of the 6 traps placed around the post. Fort sill is working closely with a Lawton pest control company and City of Lawton's department of Public Works to combat the mosquito problem.
The company has put larvicide blocks in storm drains and in low or standing water sources around post to stop mosquitoes from breeding. That will continue until no more mosquitoes show up in the traps. In the meantime, follow your normal precautions to protect against mosquito bites.
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text:
Comment: And then there's fracking (Score 1) 377
If water demand weren't bad enough, the profitable quest to squeeze the last possible drop of oil/gas from the ground via hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wrecks the whole underground structure that configure the acquifer, not to mention making it totally unfit to drink or use due to contamination. So now the natural underground currents that replentished the groundwater supplies are gone and whatever is left is ruined. Bravo for Capitalism, hope that cheap gas you got in return tastes good, cause it's the only liquid you're gonna get.


text: The Illawarra Veterans Entitlement Service was formed in 2001 to assist free of charge ALL veterans who are ex-service or who are still serving in the Australian Defence Force. This also extends to widows and immediate family. Our volunteer Pension Officers and Advocates help veterans and their Next of Kin with their claims for service related disability compensation. We are 'Incorporated' in NSW and we hold charity status with the Australian Tax Office. IVES is funded solely through grants and donations.Our volunteer Pension Officers and Advocates have undertaken specific training, and hold accreditation with the Department of Veteran Affairs TIP Scheme. We are locally based in the Illawarra District from Helensburgh to Gerringong. We have extended our Advocacy Outreach Service to Batemans Bay and Queanbeyan on an alternate monthly basis. On 'Advocacy Outreach' our efforts focused on assisting the remote stand alone Pension officer or advocate in any Ex Service Organisation.Thank you for logging onto our Home Page. If you think we can assist please contact us on:02 4256 1945 (ring twice) LEAVE A MESSAGE AND WE WILL RING YOU BACKPOSTAL ADDRESS:I.V.E.S.PO BOX 123ALBION PARK 2527We hope this web site will be of initial assistance to you.


text:
Tropical Thunder Boardshort
The Element Tropical Thunder boardshort features an all over print, a drawstring waist, custom logo details, and a 19" outseam.
We can all pretty much rank the top male surfers. But what about the gals?...
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text:
Cissell-Jackman Ladies Auxiliary Veterans of Foreign Wars No. 3321 met Oct. 9 at the post home for its regular meeting.
The meeting was opened by President Pam Cook presiding over seven members. Roll call of officers found two absent. Pro tem officer was Diana Smith.
One new petition for membership was accepted. Tina Wittenmeyer was then initiated. Two petitions for reinstatement were also accepted.
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved and the treasurer's report was accepted subject to audit. One bill was presented. Official communications were read and committee reports were given.
It was decided to earmark the money made on the previous Friday night dinner to the nursing home bingo fund. The drawing for the outdoor grill will be on Oct. 26 during the membership drive.
Trustee Diana Smith gave the audit report and it was accepted.
It was announced that the annual post Thanksgiving dinner would be Nov. 21. The date was set for the children's Christmas party, 2 p.m. Dec. 7. A sign-up sheet will be made for the club room and members who have paid their 2013 dues may sign up their children and grandchildren up to age 8. The deadline for signing up is Nov. 30.
It was decided the Auxiliary will contribute $200 towards the children's party.
The meeting was then closed according to ritual. The next meeting will be at 6 p.m. Nov. 13.


text:
Trivia: Which class coined the Wildcats nickname for Plymouth High School's athletic programs?
Yesterday's trivia answer: The Detroit Lions have played two Monday Night Football contests in the past decade, both against the Chicago Bears.
5. Plymouth Historic District Commission meets tonight
The Plymouth Historic District Commission meets at 7 p.m. tonight at Plymouth City Hall.
4. Plymouth-Canton school board meets tonight
The Plymouth-Canton Community Schools Board of Education meets at 5 p.m. today with its superintendent search firm, Ray & Associates, before its regular 7 p.m. meeting. You can view the regular meeting agenda here.
3. Show off your Halloween costume, win $5,000
It doesn't matter if you're Lady Gaga or Lady Liberty for Halloween—if you have an awesome costume, showcase your creation in our Best Halloween Costume in America Contest.
Last year, the , won. This year, it could be you. Enter our contest for a chance to win the $5,000 grand prize!
2. Canton Board of Trustees meets tonight
The Canton Township Board of Trustees meets at 7 p.m. tonight at the Canton Administration Building, 1500 S. Canton Center Road. You can view the meeting agenda here.
Tonight's Plymouth Township Board of Trustees meeting has been canceled.
1. Show Off Your Pumpkin Palooza Photos on Patch
Did you bring a camera to Pumpkin Palooza on Sunday? We want to see your photos! Be sure to add your photos to our photo gallery from the event!


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Argentina will be looking to maintain or expand their four-point lead over Ecuador at the top of the CONMEBOL qualifying table as they welcome third-place Colombia to the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires on Friday.
Lionel Messi's hamstring is the biggest story surrounding Argentina at the moment, with his status for Friday's match still being more closely guarded that the most important state secrets. It's not as if Alejandro Sabella doesn't have a plethora of other options to choose from should Messi not be fit, but you'd always rather have the world's best player on the pitch whenever possible.
Jose Pekerman will likely make some changes to his lineup after a defeat against Venezuela their last time out. Teofilo Gutierrez is expected to partner up top with Radamel Falcao, while Carlos Sanchez could replace Edwin Valencia in the midfield.
For the casual viewer, this should be a fantastically entertaining match featuring two teams with a ton of goal-scoring potential and somewhat leaky defenses. You can check out a full tactical preview of the match here.
Argentina injuries and suspensions
Out: Fernando Gago (knee). In doubt: Lionel Messi (hamstring).
Colombia injuries and suspensions
Out: None
The big question surrounding Argentina is the health of Lionel Messi. Reports claim he could be ready to go this match, but the Argentinian camp is staying quiet. If Messi isn't ready, look for Erik Lamela or Ezequiel Lavezzi to take his place. Colombia have no reported injuries.
Match Date/Time: Friday, June 7, 7:05 p.m. local, 6:05 p.m. ET
Venue: Estadio Monumental Antonio Vespucio Liberti, Buenos Aires, Argentina
TV: beIN Sport, beIN Sport en Español (U.S.), Premier Sports (U.K.)
Follow @SBNationSoccer on Twitter | Like SB Nation Soccer on Facebook
More in Soccer:
• Manchester City's transfers betray a lack of vision
• USMNT flawed, but on the right track
• Japan qualify for 2014 World Cup
• Transfer rumours from SB Nation and our team blogs


text:
Archive for the 'Reporting Services' Category
Caching The Rows Returned By An MDX Query
Here's another tip for those of you struggling with the performance of SSRS reports that run on top of an Analysis Services Multidimensional cube. Quite often, SSRS reports require quite complex set expressions to be used on the rows axis of an MDX query, and one of the weaknesses of SSAS is that while it can (usually) cache the values of cells returned by a query it can't cache the structure of the cellset returned by the query. What does this mean exactly? Well, consider the following query:
{[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]} ON 0,
[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount],
[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount])
FROM [Adventure Works]
Here I'm taking every month on the Calendar hierarchy of the Date dimension and finding the top two customers by Internet Sales Amount for each Month; notice also that I'm slicing the query by a Product Category. The results look like this:
On my laptop this query takes just over three seconds to run however many times you run it (and yes, I know there are other ways this query can be optimised, but let's imagine this is a query that can't be optimised). The reason it is consistently slow is because the vast majority of the time taken for the query is to evaluate the set used on rows – even when the Storage Engine has cached the values for Internet Sales Amount for all combinations of month and customer, it still takes the Formula Engine a long time to find the top two customers for each month. Unfortunately, once the set of rows has been found it is discarded, and the next time the query is run it has to be re-evaluated.
How can we improve this? SSAS can't cache the results of a set used on an axis in a query, but SSAS can cache the result of a calculated measure and calculated measures can return strings, and these strings can contain representations of sets. Therefore, if you go into Visual Studio and add the following calculated measure onto the MDX Script of the cube on the Calculations tab of the Cube Editor:
[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount],
[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount])
You can then use this calculated measure in your query as follows:
{[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]} ON 0,
FROM [Adventure Works]
Having done this, on my laptop the query is just as slow as before the first time it is run but on subsequent executions it returns almost instantly. This is because the first time the query is run the set expression used on rows is evaluated inside the calculated measure ReportRows and it is then turned into a string using the SetToStr() function; this string is then returned on the rows axis of the query and converted back to a set using the StrToSet() function. The second time the query is run the string returned by the ReportRows measure has already been cached by the Formula Engine, which explains why it is so fast.
Couldn't I have used a static named set declared on the cube to do this instead? I could, if I knew that the Where clause of the query would never change, but if I wanted to change the slice and look at a different Product Category I would expect to see a different set of rows displayed. While in theory I could create one gigantic named set containing every set of rows that ever might need to be displayed and then display the appropriate subset based on what's present in the Where clause, this set could take a very long time to evaluate and thus cause performance problems elsewhere. The beauty of the calculated measure approach is that if you change the Where clause the calculated measure will cache a new result for the new context.
There are some things to watch out for if you use this technique, however:
- It relies on Formula Engine caching to work. That's why I declared the calculated measure on the cube – it won't work if the calculated measure is declared in the WITH clause. There are a lot of other things that you can do that will prevent the Formula Engine cache from working too, such as declaring any other calculated members in the WITH clause, using subselects in your query (unless you have SSAS 2012 SP1 CU4), using non-deterministic functions and so on.
- Remember also that users who are members of different roles can't share formula engine caches, so if you have a lot of roles then the effectiveness of this technique will be reduced.
- There is a limit to the size of strings that SSAS calculated measures can return, and you may hit that limit if your set is large. In my opinion an SSRS report should never return more than a few hundred rows at most for the sake of usability, but I know that in the real world customers do love to run gigantic reports…
- There is also a limit to the size of the Formula Engine flat cache (the cache that is being used here), which is 10% of the TotalMemoryLimit. I guess it is possible that if you run a lot of different queries you could hit this limit, and if you do then the flat cache is completely emptied.
Tuning Queries with the WITH CACHE Statement
One of the side-effects of the irritating limitations that SSRS places on the MDX you can use in your reports is the widespread use of calculated measures to get the columns you want. For example, a query like this (note, this query isn't on the Adventure Works cube but on a simpler cube built on the Adventure Works DW database):
{[Measures].[Sales Amount]}
[Date].[Day Number Of Week].[Day Number Of Week].MEMBERS
[Product].[Product].[Product].MEMBERS ON 1
FROM [Adventure Works DW]
…which wouldn't be allowed in SSRS, could be rewritten like so:
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[1])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[2])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[3])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[4])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[5])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[6])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[7])
[Product].[Product].[Product].MEMBERS ON 1
FROM [Adventure Works DW]
…to get it in an SSRS-friendly format with only measures on columns.
For the last few days I've had the pleasure of working with Bob Duffy (a man so frighteningly intelligent he's not only an SSAS Maestro but a SQL Server MCM as well) on tuning a SSRS report like this on a fairly large cube. As Bob found, the problem with this style of query is that it isn't all that efficient: if you look in Profiler at what happens on a cold cache, you can see there are seven separate Query Subcube events and seven separate partition scans (indicated by the Progress Report Begin/End events) for each calculated measure on columns.
The first thing that Bob tried to tune this was to rewrite the query something like this:
{[Measures].[Sales Amount]}
[Date].[Day Number Of Week].[Day Number Of Week].MEMBERS
FROM [Adventure Works DW]
…and pivot the data in the SSRS tablix to get the desired layout with the Day Numbers on columns. The interesting thing, though, is that for this particular report while rewriting the query in this way made it run faster (there is only one Query Subcube event and partition scan now) it actually made the SSRS report run slower overall, simply because SSRS was taking a long time to pivot the values.
Instead, together we came up with a way to tune the original query using the WITH CACHE statement like so:
'([Measures].[Sales Amount]
, [Product].[Product].[Product].MEMBERS
, [Date].[Day Number Of Week].[Day Number Of Week].MEMBERS)'
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[1])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[2])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[3])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[4])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[5])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[6])
([Measures].[Sales Amount], [Date].[Day Number Of Week].&[7])
[Product].[Product].[Product].MEMBERS ON 1
FROM [Adventure Works DW]
What WITH CACHE statement does here is load all the data needed for the query into the Storage Engine cache before anything else happens. So even though there are still seven different Query Subcube events for each column, there's now only one partition scan and each of the seven Query Subcube events now hits cache:
There's no guarantee that this approach will result in the best performance even when you have a query in this form, but it's worth testing if you have. It's certainly the first time in a long while that I've used the WITH CACHE statement in the real world – so it's interesting from an MDX point of view too.
Prompts for Reporting Services
I got an email earlier this week from Eric Nelson telling me about a new Silverlight parameter prompting application for Reporting Services called "Prompts for Reporting Services" that he's developed and open-sourced, and since it's got some features that look useful for anyone building SSRS reports on SSAS I thought I'd share it here.
Some of the features Eric highlighted in his mail are:
Internal/Global Prompts: An internal prompt is just a regular parameter. A Global prompt is a report that's parameters are used as a report (you can create the prompt once and reference it from multiple reports).
Tree Prompt: This prompt uses cascading parameters for fetching its data which makes it perform really well compared to an indented hierarchy parameter.
Cascading Search Prompt: This prompt fetches no data to begin with and only queries the cube when a search is executed. I have found this really useful when I parameter is required that has 1,000+ members that tend to lock up the web browser when rendering and are really hard for the user to navigate.
A few screenshots:
It's available for download here:
PASS Summit 2010 Day 1
So day one of the PASS Summit is drawing to a close, and what a day it's been. I did a session myself today, which went well (I think), but the real news is all the cool new stuff that was announced at the keynote and at sessions throughout the day and that's what I'd like to reflect on here. A lot of questions about what we've seen today remain unanswered (more will be revealed tomorrow, I'm told) but I thought I'd blog about what interested me and was relevant to BI.
All in all, I'm very excited. Let's face it – over the last five years, in SSAS and in the wider BI stack, there's been a distinct lack of anything really radical and new. But today saw several announcements that will completely change the Microsoft BI stack:
- There will be column-store indexes, provided by the Vertipaq engine, inside the SQL Server relational database. Simon Sabin has a link to more details here.
- There's a new, corporate BI version of PowerPivot, BISM
- Project Crescent is a new ad hoc query tool coming from the Reporting Services team
Let's consider what each of these means in turn. Based on the limited information we've got so far, column-store indexes in SQL Server massively increase the performance of reporting/OLAP style queries inside the relational engine; if we get column-store indexes in Parallel Data Warehouse, well, I can imagine we'll get astounding performance over huge data volumes. The pdf linked to in Simon Sabin's blog says:
Users who were using OLAP systems only to get fast query performance, but who prefer to use the T-
SQL language to write queries, may find they can have one less moving part in their environment,
reducing cost and complexity. Users who like the sophisticated reporting tools, dimensional modeling
capability, forecasting facilities, and decision-support specific query languages that OLAP tools offer can
continue to benefit from them. Moreover, they may now be able to use ROLAP against a columnstore-
indexed SQL Server data warehouse, and meet or exceed the performance they were used to in the past
with OLAP, but save time by eliminating the cube building process.
To paraphrase, if your data's in SQL Server that's where it should stay for querying and reporting – MOLAP no longer provides any performance benefit, so the concept of 'processing' a cube to get data into a different, OLAP database is gone. If you still want to do OLAP on SQL Server it will be a form of ROLAP, and to me this makes a lot of sense.
Very few details about BISM, the 'corporate' version of Powerpivot/Vertipaq, were released but we saw that we could develop BISM models in Visual Studio and the end result was exactly what PowerPivot creates when you deploy a PowerPivot mode to Sharepoint – I guess it's basically a different type of Analysis Services database. BISM can either hold the data itself in its own Vertipaq store (useful when the data comes from anywhere other than SQL Server, eg Excel, Oracle, text files and so on) or it can act purely as a semantic layer and allow querying data in SQL Server in a ROLAP, multidimensional way. So we'll be able to create an Excel pivot table, connect to BISM and use that as a thin layer to query data that's directly in SQL Server. This is clearly what the future of Analysis Services is going to be – while the Analysis Services we know and love today might hang around for a few versions, it's not got a long-term future in my opinion.
There was a full session on Project Crescent later on today, which I went to, so I have more details on this. It's essentially a new ad hoc query tool being built by the SSRS team – interestingly it seems to have nothing to do with the rest of Reporting Services, and it doesn't create rdl files that can be edited in Report Builder or Report Designer. It's all about flashy visualisation and interactivity and reminds me a lot of Tableau and other fashionable BI tools; I can also see how it can be a replacement for PerformancePoint for creating dashboards. It is only surfaced in Sharepoint (boo! yet another Sharepoint dependency!) and is built in Silverlight; also, it can only work with data sourced from BISM/PowerPivot models. Once you get past the flashy stuff it does much the same that every other ad hoc query tool has been doing since the year dot (Marco, sitting next to me, commented that it was doing much the same thing that Data Analyzer was doing 10 years ago) but the flashy stuff is very flashy indeed, and very impressive – for instance the ability to export views out to PowerPoint slides looks cool; but I do wonder whether it will be as practically useful as something like Tableau so we'll have to wait and see. I'm pleased to see that someone at MS has finally woken up to the fact that end users might want to use something other than Excel for ad hoc querying.
OK, time for a few drinks and to have some fun! There'll be another post with more news tomorrow…
SQL Azure Reporting: Reporting Services in the Cloud
So SSRS in the cloud has just been announced! See this post on the SQL Azure team blog:
…and also this 20 minute video from PDC giving a lot more detail:
Basically it's the SSRS you know and love with only a few limitations: for example it only supports SQL Azure as a data source and there's none of the developer extensibility options (like custom data extensions) available yet.
I can't wait for SSAS in the cloud…
Tuning SSRS-Generated MDX Parameter Queries
Sometimes you'll find yourself in the position of building SSRS reports where you have parameters with a large number of available values. Using the Adventure Works cube as an example, if you were to drag the Customer attribute from the Customer dimension onto the filter area of the Query Designer for a simple query and check the Parameters box like so:
…you'd end up with a parameter where you can choose any customer to filter on – and there are 18485 customers on that hierarchy.
If you right-click on your data source in the Report Data pane (in BIDS in SSAS 2008) and check the Show Hidden Datasets option, you can see the MDX query that BIDS generates to return the list of available values for the parameter query:
Here's what the query will look like for the Customers hierarchy for the Customer dimension:
MEMBER [Measures].[ParameterCaption]
AS [Customer].[Customer].CURRENTMEMBER.MEMBER_CAPTION
MEMBER [Measures].[ParameterValue]
AS [Customer].[Customer].CURRENTMEMBER.UNIQUENAME
MEMBER [Measures].[ParameterLevel]
AS [Customer].[Customer].CURRENTMEMBER.LEVEL.ORDINAL
, [Measures].[ParameterValue]
, [Measures].[ParameterLevel]}
, [Customer].[Customer].ALLMEMBERS
FROM [Adventure Works]
On my laptop this query executes in just over 1.5 seconds. Not bad, you might think, for a query that returns a fairly large number of rows. But we can do better!
This query returns all customers on rows and three columns: the caption of each member, the unique name, and the ordinal of the level (which is used for indenting the caption of each member in the dropdown list for the parameter, so you can easily distinguish between members on different levels). These values are returned as calculated members, but they can also be obtained as member properties and this is the key to tuning the query. So, if you create a new OLEDB connection to the cube (ie you don't use the built-in Analysis Services connection type but you create a data source that connects to the cube using the OLEDB connection type)…
…and then create a new dataset with the following query:
, [Customer].[Customer].ALLMEMBERS
FROM [Adventure Works]
You'll find you get almost exactly the same data back, although this time the query returns in around 0.2 seconds.
A few things need to be noted here. First of all, although MDX allows you to put an empty set on columns, in the query above I had to create a dummy calculated measure that returned null because otherwise the query didn't return any rows from the OLEDB data source. Secondly, in the new query the All Member unique name and caption come out as nulls – that's normal behaviour for flattened rowsets (which is what you get when you run queries through an OLEDB connection), unfortunately, and again something we're going to have to work around ourselves. Thirdly, we also need to create a column with indented member names – the original parameter dataset did this using a SSRS expression in a calculated field – although in this case, where there's only one level underneath the all member, we could probably skip this and not hurt usability.
To trap the nulls and make sure the All Customers member appears as a parameter option, you can use a calculated field on the new dataset with an expression like this:
Fields!Customer_Customer_Customer_UNIQUE_NAME.Value is Nothing
, "[Customer].[Customer].[All Customers]"
, Fields!Customer_Customer_Customer_UNIQUE_NAME.Value)
And to generate the indented captions you can use an expression like this:
Fields!Customer_Customer_Customer_UNIQUE_NAME.Value is Nothing
, "All Customers"
, " " + Fields!Customer_Customer_Customer.Value)
You then need to delete the original parameter dataset, point the report parameter to the new dataset and bind these two columns to it value and label fields. And lo and behold, you have a report that runs just over a second faster than it did before. This might seem like a lot of hassle to go through for such a small gain, but if you have more than one large parameter the time savings will add up and your users will notice the difference.
SSRS and SSAS-Sourced Parameter Dataset Performance Issues
Ahhh, Reporting Services and Analysis Services integration – a never ending source of pain and frustration! Although I shouldn't complain because it's been quite lucrative for me in terms of consultancy work…
Anyway, recently I was tuning a SSRS report based on a SSAS cube for a customer. Looking at Profiler I could see a number of slow queries being executed, which was strange given that it was a fairly simple report. It turned out that during the design phase this report had had a number of parameters created in the SSAS query designer that had later been deleted; however, when you delete a parameter in the SSAS query designer BIDS does not delete the hidden dataset that it is bound to. What's worse is that when an SSRS report is executed all dataset queries are also executed, even if the datasets aren't used anywhere in the report, which means you get the overhead of running extra queries. It's an easy mistake to make and in this case the execution of unused datasets was adding several seconds to the execution time of the report.
You can reproduce this problem very easily by creating a simple report based on the Adventure Works cube. Once you've created the data source, open the query designer, drag the Internet Sales Amount measure onto the grid, drag the Customer hierarchy from the Customer dimension onto the filter pane and check the Parameters box:
Now close the query designer and reopen it, then remove the Customer hierarchy from the filter pane, close the query designer again and delete the report parameter. When you Preview the report you'll see the following in Profiler:
The highlighted row shows the hidden dataset is being executed. What you need to do to fix this is to right-click on your data source and check the Show Hidden Datasets option:
You'll then see the offending, automatically-generated, hidden dataset and you can delete it:
Luckily, BIDS Helper has functionality to find unused datasets in your reports for you:
And there's more! What I found really interesting about this parameter dataset query was how long it was taking to execute. In this example 2.5 seconds, even on a warm cache, seems like a very long time to me even though there are a lot of members on the Customer hierarchy. Once the report is deployed that goes down to a consistent 2.1 seconds, and when I run the same query through SQL Management Studio it goes down to 1.5 seconds. Why the difference in execution times? I'm not sure, but I suspect it's a combination of the connection string properties used and the use of a flattened rowset. In any case, 1.5 seconds is still slow and it's certainly not good if you actually do want to use a query like this in a dataset bound to a parameter.
Luckily, if our parameter datasets are causing performance problems, we can usually rewrite the queries involved to make them faster. Here's the original query from the parameter in the example:
MEMBER [Measures].[ParameterCaption] AS
MEMBER [Measures].[ParameterValue] AS
MEMBER [Measures].[ParameterLevel] AS
FROM [Adventure Works]
If we decide that we can make do without the All Member and the level-based indenting that goes on in the parameter dataset (this is an attribute hierarchy, after all, so there's just one level), we can use the following query in the dataset instead:
FROM [Adventure Works]
Once the first query above has been replaced with the second, and the report parameter has been hooked up to use the new fields, Profiler shows that the time taken to execute the parameter dataset has gone down to around 0.7 seconds:
That is, of course, almost 2 seconds faster than the original query in Preview mode and almost 1.5 seconds faster than the original query in the deployed report. Not a lot on its own but certainly noticeable, and if you have more than one large parameter the cumulative gain could be quite significant. If you create a separate OLEDB connection to the cube and use the second query in a dataset, the execution time is even faster, going down to around 0.45 seconds:
Incidentally, some of the more astute may be asking why I need to include MEASURES.DUMMY in the query above when I can use an empty set on the columns axis instead. Two reasons: one, if you use an empty set on columns in the OLEDB connection you get no rows returned; two, I noticed when the query was being executed in SSRS a Query Subcube event was raised suggesting measure data was being requested from the cube – this didn't happen when I ran the query in SQL Management Studio. I suspect both problems are something to with SSRS using a flattened rowset, so I'll investigate and post back here when I get an answer.
Building an Ad-Hoc SSAS Cube Browser in SSRS
The post I did on implementing SSAS drilldown in SSRS back in February has been one of the most popular I've written this year. Its success immediately made me think of taking the idea one step further and building a full, ad-hoc cube browser in SSRS – something I've had a crack at doing several times in the past, but which has proved to be pretty much impossible with SSRS out of the box. However I knew that with the extra flexibility that Intelligencia Query (full disclosure – I have a financial stake in this product; see here for some background on my involvement with it) gives it was going to be feasible… the next problem was that I didn't have the time to do the work.
Luckily, my friend Andrew Wiles (who owns the company that develops and sells Intelligencia Query) did have the time to do this and blogged about it here:
He also uploaded a video demo of it to YouTube:
It's now available as a sample app for the SQL 2008 version of IQ (it relies on DMVs, so it won't work with 2005), and he's made several improvements to it since. I thought I'd mention it here because it's not only a fun demo, it shows just how flexible the combination of SSRS and IQ is: we traditionally think of SSRS as being suitable only for static or semi-static reports, but here it is working as a basic ad-hoc query tool. OK it's not exactly elegant the way you have to rerun a report every time you click something, and of course the only form of interaction possible is clicking on links, but hopefully you get the point!
Implementing IE8 Web Slices in an SSRS Report
One of the new features that caught my eye in Internet Explorer 8 when it came out was Web Slices – the ability for a web developer to carve up a page into snippets that a user can then subscribe to. There's a brief overview of what they are here:
and a really good guide to implementing them from Nick Belhomme here:
Being the BI geek that I am, my first thought was to see whether they could be used with Reporting Services reports. After all, wouldn't it be cool if you could subscribe to a table in an SSRS report, or even better a cell within a table, and get notified when that value changed rather than have to keep pinging the report yourself? Of course it would! Here's how to do it…
The challenge with implementing web slices is to get SSRS to generate the necessary html when it renders your report. I first looked at using the new rich formatting functionality that's available in SSRS 2008 that Teo Lachev describes here, but it turns out that you can't use this to create Web Slices because SSRS doesn't support the necessary attributes (see here for details – at least I assume this is why, because I couldn't get it to work). The only way I could get it to work was to render the report as XML and then use an XSLT file to give me complete control over the HTML that SSRS generates. I won't go into too much detail about how this works; once again, Teo has an excellent explanation in his book "Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services" (reviewed here – it's an excellent book) on pages 263-265. To be honest this isn't a satisfying approach for me because it involves a lot more effort to get the report looking the way you want, and of course you have to have control over how the report is rendered. However, it still makes for a fun proof-of-concept :-)
The first thing I did was create a simple SSRS report in BIDS that brought back values for Internet Sales broken down by country:
I then rendered the report to XML, took a look at the XML generated, and created a simple XSLT file that would generate a HTML report from that XML. I then added the XSLT file to my project and associated my report with it using the report object's DataTransform property, so that it was always used when the report was rendered to XML. I was then able to deploy the project and, by using URL access to the report get it to render to XML and get the result treated as html, was able to see the following in IE8:
Here's an example SSRS URL that does this:
Then I went back to BIDS and altered the XSLT file to add the necessary tags for a Web Slice around the main table. When I went back to IE and reopened the report after deployment I could see two new things. First, the Web Slice button appeared in the IE toolbar:
And when I moved the mouse over the table in the report, it was highlighted with a green box as a Web Slice:
I could then click on either to subscribe to the Web Slice and have it added to my favourites. This then meant I could see the contents of the table in my Favourites bar whenever I wanted:
And whenever the data changes (you can control how often IE polls the original web page in the Web Slice's properties, and also in the definition of the Web Slice itself) the text in the Favourites bar turns bold:
So there you are. Even with the limitations that having to render to XML imposes I can think of a few useful applications of this approach… maybe I'll test them out in a future blog entry. Let me know if you have any ideas!
One last thing: I think it would great (and involve relatively little dev work) if SSRS supported the creation of Web Slices out of the box. If you agree, please vote:
You can download my proof-of-concept SSRS project here:
Consuming SSRS data in Excel 2007
In a recent post I sketched out an idea I had about consuming data from SSRS data within Excel: rather than have SSRS push data to a new Excel spreadsheet by rendering a report to Excel, what I wanted to do was have an Excel spreadsheet that pulled data from an SSRS report. Why do this? Well, we all know that users always want their data in Excel rather than in any other format. If we take an SSRS report and render it to Excel, though, we have two problems:
- Getting an SSRS report to render to Excel in exactly the way you want, at best, involves a lot of trial-and-error. Even then when you render to Excel there's a whole load of Excel functionality that SSRS doesn't support – for example, you can't get native SSRS to render a workbook containing a macro.
- Ever time we run the report, we are creating a new workbook. So once we've got the workbook there isn't much point in doing any extra work in it, for example adding new formulas or charts, because it's going to be superseded by a newer workbook the next time the report is run.
A tool like Softartisans Officewriter (which MS licensed a long time ago and possibly will appear with SSRS 2008 R2) will solve the first problem, because it allows you to upload an Excel workbook to SSRS which has data injected into it when the report is rendered, but not the second.
However, it is possible to pull data into Excel from SSRS and avoid these problems. Excel allows you to import data from an XML document into a worksheet; since you can get an SSRS report to render to an XML document, all you need to do is hook Excel directly up to the XML file generated by SSRS. Here's how:
- The key to getting this to work is URL access to SSRS reports. Excel needs to know where the XML file it's importing is – and you can give it the URL of an SSRS report, and in that URL specify that the report should be rendered to XML. Let's take the Sales Order Detail report from the Adventure Works sample reports as an example:
On my machine, the URL for rendering this report into XML is as follows:
Paste this into your browser and you'll automatically get an XML file downloaded; you can find more details on URL addressability of SSRS reports here.
- Now, open Excel 2007, click on the big round Office button in the top left corner, click the Excel Options button and on the Popular tab check the box "Show Developer tab in the Ribbon". This will ensure you can see the functionality within Excel we're going to be working with.
- Open the Developer tab and click on the Source button to open up the Source pane, then the XML Maps button in the Source pane, then Add on the XML Maps dialog, and then enter the URL of the SSRS report in the File Name box on the Select XML Source dialog and click Open.
- The XML Source dialog will now be populated. Click on a cell in the worksheet, and then right-click on a node in the XML Source pane and choose Map Element to map an element into a cell; click the Refresh Data button in the ribbon to actually bring the data into the worksheet. Here's what the data from the report above looks like when mapped into Excel:
The point is that every time you hit the Refresh Data button in Excel the report is rendered, so you're able to build your worksheet around live data from SSRS. You can of course pull data directly from data sources like SQL Server in Excel, but the benefit of doing it this way is that you can take advantage of SSRS features like caching and snapshots, and of course as an end user you may not have direct access to the source database anyway.
There are some obvious drawbacks to this approach:
- It's a bit too technical to set up for end users, except perhaps for the most technical of Excel power-users.
- There isn't an easy way to pass parameters to reports. You can of course pass parameters through the URL, but it would be great if it could be done from a dropdown box in the worksheet. I think with a little bit of coding you could create an Excel addin that would do this though.
UPDATE: actually, I think some of the techniques discussed in this post on the Excel blog could be useful here
- Rendering to XML isn't the ideal format for this task – although I'm not sure there is an ideal format (the RPL format used by Report Viewer might be a good candidate but it's not documented). Books Online has details of how reports behave when rendered to XML; one obvious drawback is that there's no pagination of data, so if you have a lot of data in your report spread across multiple pages, you'll get all the data from every page in Excel.
That said, I think this this approach might be useful when you have a large number of existing Excel reports that currently have data copied-and-pasted into them manually and which can't (for whatever reason) be turned into full SSRS reports.


text:
|Lions officers
The Three Lakes Lions Club recently installed its 2013-'14 officers, who include, front row from left, Collette Sorgel, third vice president; Dave Sorgel, director; Miriam Bredesen, membership co-chairwoman and club ambassador to Wisconsin Eyeglass Missions; Dave Hintz, director; Ken Moak, secretary; and Bob Borek, treasurer; back row, Bill Schertzl, tail twister; Kevin Dehaan, director; Tom Bredesen, membership co-chairman and club ambassador to Wisconsin Eyeglass Missions; and Don Sidlowski, first vice president and acting president. Missing from the photo were Dave Cyrtmus, second vice president and lion tamer; Don Meeder, director; and Jason Sanderfoot, director. —Photo By Jan Hintz
|Tuesday, July 02, 2013 2:44 PM