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Colt & Gray
Online Reservations
Colt & Gray's largest Private Dining Room feature beautiful stone walls and fine dining in a wine cellar type atmosphere. Whether celebrating a special occasion with family and friends or hosting a corporate event, Colt & Gray has numerous options to accommodate your next event.
This elegant dining room is perfect for small events. It features comfortable seating, brick walls and a beautiful fireplace.
Ste. Ellie, Colt & Gray's Cocktail Lounge, is available for "buy outs" and is perfectly suited for an upscale cocktail party or a more casual dining event.
The entire restaurant is available for "buy outs". Host an epic event and enjoy all of Colt & Gray's beautiful spaces, including our signature cocktail bar, Ste. Ellie.


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1/4 Photos of Crock Pot Enchiladas
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Do not limit your self to using hamburger this recipe is excellent for using left over roast/chicken etc. Make it as hot as you want or as mild. This recipe went over very well with my recent company and done in the crock pot kept the heat out of the kitchen. I served them with refried beans, & fresh salsa The end result of the recipe produces soft enchiladas where the flavors have blended and they practically melt in your mouth
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Make this season merry, bright and manageable with our easy ideas.

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Freddie Mac Agency Credit Insurance StructureSM (ACISSM)
Freddie Mac may periodically enter into insurance/reinsurance transactions to further transfer risk associated with a portion of its credit exposure in the residential mortgage market. This insurance-based risk sharing vehicle, Agency Credit Insurance StructureSM (ACISSM), represents a new source of private capital that will shoulder part of the credit risk associated with certain Freddie Mac loans. These transactions provide an innovative opportunity for global insurance and reinsurance companies to invest in the credit performance of select volumes of Freddie Mac's high quality Single-Family loan portfolio.
Freddie Mac purchased an insurance policy on November 12, 2013, that was underwritten by Arch Reinsurance Ltd. and covered up to a maximum of $77.4 million of credit losses.
Freddie Mac purchased two insurance policies effective April 1, 2014, that were underwritten by a panel of insurers/reinsurers and covered up to a combined maximum of approximately $269.5 million of credit losses.
Freddie Mac purchased four insurance policies effective June 30, 2014, that were underwritten by a panel of insurers/reinsurers and covered up to a combined maximum of approximately $285 million of credit losses.
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FORT MYERS, Fla.- "Last year I logged 700 hours of patrol time."
Auxiliary Trooper Phil Osborne finds a way to balance two different jobs.
"I'm third generation, operate a family owned boat dealership during the day."
But in his freetime you'll find him in a Florida Highway Patrol uniform.
"I work the road for the citizens of the state of Florida," said Osborne.
Osborne is just one of hundreds of Auxiliary Troopers and they're logging a lot of houses. Osborne said last year, Auxiliary Troopers logged 117,000 hours, that's equal to 55 full time positions. But these men and women don't get paid.
"It's volunteer based, it requires a rigorous amount of training, but we are very grateful and thankful for the men and women of the Auxiliary support us," said Lieutenant Greg Bueno.
Tom Snelling wears two uniforms. When he's not patrolling the streets, he's in the air as an American Airlines pilot.
"When I'm flying I'm working several days and then normally I have several days off."
Both Snelling and Osborne said even though they don't get paid for their time, it's their way of giving back.
"It's very rewarding," said Snelling.
"I think everyone has a little bit of a responsibility to give back to the community," said Osborne.
For more information on the FHP Auxiliary Program, check out http://fhpa.info/


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2011 Felsina Berardenga Chianti Classico
"The 2011 Chianti Classico is absolutely impressive and is one of the best base Chianti Classicos I have tasted from 2011. You feel the ripeness and heat of the vintage, but this wine also delivers surprising finesse and complexity. Black cherry and baking spice mingle on the bouquet. Soft tannins wrap around the palate."
Reviewed by: The Wine Advocate - 92pts
Limited Please Call - Check All Stores »
375ml Bottle
375ml Bottle
2009 Castello di Bossi Chianti Classico
"The 2009 Chianti Classico, 100% Sangiovese, is a gorgeous, deep wine endowed with serious richness. Dark plums, black cherries, licorice, new leather and menthol are some of the many notes that take shape in the glass. A firm, structured finish rounds things out in style."
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Albatron Technology has announced the KI780G mini-ITX motherboard featuring the AMD 780G chipset. The mini-ITX board's most distinguishing feature is the AM2+ socket and support of powerful quad-core and triple-core AMD Phenom processors.
The AMD 780G chipset features an integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics engine to handle image output and the KI780G motherboard also provides a PCI Express x16 slot for discrete graphics card.
- 2014 global high brightness LED market, trends and shipment forecast
For the global LED lighting market, the market size will reach US$25.82 billion in 2014 or a market penetration rate of 23.4%. This is attributable to exponential shipment growth for light bulbs, tubes, and directional lamps.
- Greater China touch panel shipment forecast through 2015
This Special Report provides forecasts through 2015 for Greater China touch panel shipments with breakdowns based on technology (glass, film, resistive), application (smartphone, NB and tablet) and by firm.
- 2014 global tablet demand forecast
This report analyzes the main players, their strategies and shipments forecasts for 2014, as well as other factors contributing to either growth or decline in various segments within the tablet market, with a particular focus on Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft, along with whitebox vendors.


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A 68-year-old man has been charged with molesting one of his relatives for the last three years.
Billy Joe Garrison has been charged with aggravated sexual battery and two counts of child molestation after he admitted to police he molested an 11-year-old girl 20 to 40 times in Catoosa County, a police report showed.
Garrison, of Crossville, Tenn., spoke with police after the girl admitted to her parents she had been molested, the report states and the parents went to police.
Garrison also admitted he molested the child several times at his home in Crossville. He was arrested Wednesday and remains in Catoosa County Jail.
Joy Lukachick Smith is the city government reporter for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Since 2009, she's covered crime and court systems in North Georgia and rural Tennessee, landed an exclusive in-prison interview with a former cop convicted of killing his wife, exposed impropriety in an FBI-led, child-sex online sting and exposed corruption in government agencies. Earlier this year, Smith won the Malcolm Law Memorial Award for Investigative Reporting. She also won first place in ...


text: Pelosi Presses for Pro-Illegal Immigration/Anti-Cop State Bill in California by Javier Manjarres 15 Aug 2013 Share This: California Governor Jerry Brown (D) is feeling some D.C. pressure from his fellow Democrats, Rep. Nancy Pelosi & Friends. The group of Democratic Representatives are pressing Brown to sign into law a immigration bill that would "bar police from detaining people based on immigration status unless they have been convicted of a serious crime." This is just another move by the liberal pro-Amnesty for illegal immigrants lobby further their agenda of legalizing 'all' illegal immigrants. What exactly is a serious crime? Now, call me naive all you want, but if you have been convicted of a "serious crime," chances are that you should already be in jail, not roaming free to possibly commit other crimes. Right? Wait a minute. If someone is here illegally, and convicted of a "serious crime," isn't it immigration protocol to deport that person to their native country, after he or she has served their prison term?


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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - View original article
|The Wallflowers
|Los Angeles, California, United States
|Alternative rock, roots rock[1]
|Years active
|Jakob Dylan
|Past members
|Fred Eltringham
Jack Irons
Rami Jaffee
Barrie Maguire
Stuart Mathis
Tobi Miller
Greg Richling
Michael Ward
Peter Yanowitz
Mario Calire
|The Wallflowers
|Los Angeles, California, United States
|Alternative rock, roots rock[1]
|Years active
|Jakob Dylan
|Past members
|Fred Eltringham
Jack Irons
Rami Jaffee
Barrie Maguire
Stuart Mathis
Tobi Miller
Greg Richling
Michael Ward
Peter Yanowitz
Mario Calire
The Wallflowers are a rock band from Los Angeles, California, fronted by Jakob Dylan. Formed in 1989[2] and originally known as The Apples, the ensemble has gone through numerous personnel changes but focuses on Dylan.
They have released six studio albums, one compilation album and have had various songs on television and movie soundtracks. They have won two Grammy awards for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and Best Rock Song for their song "One Headlight" in 1998.
The band started in 1989, playing in Los Angeles clubs. Their self-titled debut album was released in 1992 on the Virgin Records label. It sold 40,000 copies initially, and has sold an estimated 1,000,000 to date.
The original members of the Wallflowers include Jakob Dylan (vocals and guitar), Barrie Maguire (bass guitar and vocals), Peter "Pedro" Yanowitz (drums and percussion) and Rami Jaffee (keyboards and vocals). Peter Yanowitz left the band shortly after the album's release to join Natalie Merchant's band. In May 1993, an old friend and schoolmate of Dylan, Greg Richling joined the group, replacing Maguire on bass. Though Richling wasn't on the first record, he played on the first tour, making him a member of the original lineup.[3][4]
The band seemed quiet for a few years but stormed back on the scene with their 4× platinum 1996 release, Bringing Down the Horse, which comprised such hits as "6th Avenue Heartache" (with Adam Duritz of Counting Crows), "One Headlight", "The Difference," and "Three Marlenas." The band switched record labels, from Virgin to Interscope. For this album, Dylan was joined by Rami Jaffee and Greg Richling from the original lineup. Michael Ward (guitar), Mario Calire (drums and percussion) were called in to form the new band. Mike Campbell (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) played slide guitar on "6th Avenue Heartache". "One Headlight" peaked at No. 2 and "6th Avenue Heartache" peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard American Hot 100 Airplay charts. At the Grammy Awards of 1998, The Wallflowers walked away with two Grammys; one for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for "One Headlight," and Jakob Dylan was awarded Best Rock Song for writing "One Headlight." Bruce Springsteen joined the Wallflowers for a live performance of their song "One Headlight," at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. "One Headlight" was the No. 1 video of the year for 1997 on VH1 and No. 5 on MTV. They also recorded a cover of David Bowie's "Heroes" for the American Godzilla film in 1998.
After almost four years, the Wallflowers completed work on their next album, (Breach), released October 10, 2000; the first single was "Sleepwalker," the video of which poked fun at Dylan's "rock star" status following the success of Bringing Down the Horse. The band also played Saturday Night Live, featuring the songs "Sleepwalker" and "Hand Me Down".
Guests on (Breach) included Elvis Costello, who lent vocals on "Murder 101". (Breach) peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200. The album was certified gold on September 21, 2001.[5]
The band supported this album through tours with Tom Petty and John Mellencamp, as well as an extensive headlining tour.[citation needed] Guitarist Michael Ward left the band following the tour, citing creative differences.[citation needed]
On November 5, 2002, The Wallflowers released their fourth studio album, Red Letter Days. Red Letter Days peaked at No. 32 on the Billboard 200. This was the first Wallflowers record that featured Jakob Dylan playing a majority of the lead guitar parts. During their tour opening for John Mellencamp, the band began collaborating with Moe Z M.D., John Mellencamp's keyboardist at that time. Moe Z eventually joined them on tour in support of Red Letter Days. The album had a much more aggressive sound than any of their previous releases, especially the song "Everybody Out of the Water," which they performed on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. The first single and only music video shot was for "When You're On Top." The single was a smash hit on AAA radio stations, but received little mainstream attention. Subsequent singles from the album include "Closer to You," and "How Good It Can Get" which received radio airplay across multiple formats. Some versions of the album featured an in-studio cover of "(What's So Funny About) Peace Love and Understanding."
The band was a part of many exclusive performances during promotion of the record, including a Live at the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame concert for MTV, and a special televised concert for VH1, Live at Alcatraz, being the first band to ever play a concert on the infamous island. They also played "When You're on Top" on Last Call with Carson Daly, and "How Good It Can Get" on the Late Show with David Letterman.
The band's fifth studio release, Rebel, Sweetheart was released on May 24, 2005. This is the first Wallflowers record available as a DualDisc. The DVD, directed by American video director Jason B. Bergh, included interviews and exclusive performances and arrangements of many of the band's songs, including reworked versions of "One Headlight" and "6th Avenue Heartache" as well as an amusing band interview with comedian Jon Lovitz. Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Train) was called in to produce the record and played guitar as well. Fred Eltringham, the newest Wallflowers member, played drums. A video was filmed for their first single "The Beautiful Side of Somewhere" which hit No. 5 on AAA radio.
The second single released was "God Says Nothing Back."
In promoting the record, The Wallflowers performed special televised concerts for the Oxygen Custom Concert Series on the Oxygen channel and were also featured on the PBS series Soundstage. Singer/songwriter Carole King was the special guest performer for the Oxygen concert.
In conjunction with the release of Rebel, Sweetheart the band released an exclusive iTunes Originals album for the iTunes music store. The album featured exclusive performances and interviews with Jakob Dylan. The band also volunteered to perform for sailors on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis as the troops were returning to California.[6]
Much to the dismay of longtime fans, The Wallflowers did not tour in 2006, although keyboardist Rami Jaffee toured with the Foo Fighters for their acoustic tour, drummer Fred Eltringham worked with the Dixie Chicks, and bassist Greg Richling continued producing records in Los Angeles, including the platinum selling album Edendale by Norway's most popular rock band BIGBANG. Jakob Dylan toured with T-Bone Burnett during Burnett's first tour in 20 years. Dylan played 40-minute solo opening sets for the tour. The two share a long history that extends further than just Burnett's impactful production work on Bringing Down the Horse. Burnett played with Dylan's father in the mid-1970s.
The Wallflowers parted ways with record company Interscope in 2006. Jakob Dylan recorded a couple of solo songs in 2006, including "Here Comes Now," which was featured prominently in the television show Six Degrees.
Jakob Dylan performed John Lennon's song "Gimme Some Truth" with Dhani Harrison for the Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur CD.
On August 31, 2007, The Wallflowers announced that they would be touring for the first time in two years. The band played shows at clubs in the Northeast and Midwest United States in October and November 2007. In a late 2007 post on the band's website it was revealed that keyboardist Rami Jaffee left the band. Singer-songwriter Stuart Mathis joined the band as the lead guitarist for those shows.
Jakob Dylan released his first solo album Seeing Things on June 10, 2008.
On June 16, 2009, The Wallflowers released a greatest-hits album, Collected: 1996–2005, which included two unreleased tracks. They embarked on a nationwide tour in the summer of 2009 in support of the album. Bill Appleberry and Stuart Mathis accompanied the band on the tour, playing keyboards and lead guitar, respectively.
On November 1, 2011, Jakob Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine that The Wallflowers have ended their hiatus, stating: "I always wanted to. I never suggested we were breaking up. We all felt we were losing the plot a little bit and we needed a break. And that year break becomes two years, then becomes three years, and before you know it five or six years go by pretty quickly. I can't do what I do in the Wallflowers without them. I miss it. I'm happy to put the acoustic guitar down. That was something I wanted to do, but I never planned on hitting the road and just being the guy with a guitar out there. That never has been exciting to me. I came up loving bands and I want to be in one." He also revealed that a new album is in the works.[7]
In an interview with St. Joseph News Press, Jakob revealed the lineup for the reunion, "Rami Jaffee and Greg Richling and Fred Eltringham. It would be the same lineup as the last record, and two of those guys have been with me since '92."[8]
On January 31, 2012 the band posted on their official Facebook page that they were in the studio with the following line-up: Jakob Dylan, Rami Jaffee, Greg Richling, Stuart Mathis, and drummer Jack Irons.
On April 19, 2012, following a private performance in New York City, Jakob Dylan announced that The Wallflowers will be releasing their sixth studio album in September 2012.[9]
On July 12, 2012, The Wallflowers announced the title of their new studio album, Glad All Over, to be released October 9, 2012. The first single from Glad All Over, "Reboot the Mission" was released for free on July 24, 2012.[10] The single ended up reaching the number 2 position on the American Triple A charts, the band's biggest hit in a decade.
In 2013 The Wallflowers went through a number of personnel changes. On May 12, 2013 organ player Rami Jaffee performed his last show to date with The Wallflowers. Organ player Jimmy Wallace has since toured with the band playing keys. On September 3, 2013 former Wallflowers drummer Mario Calire announced that he would be touring with the Wallflowers in the fall. On September 8, 2013, bassist Greg Richling announced that after 20 years in The Wallflowers, he was leaving the band. Jack Irons also officially announced on September 15, 2013 that he would no longer be playing with The Wallflowers. No announcement has been made as to whether or not there are new, official members in the band. Irons and Richling, along with singer-songwriter Jon Greene and guitarist Alain Johannes, released their debut album with their band Arthur Channel on October 15, 2013.
In early 2014, "One Headlight" began appearing in Geico insurance television advertisements.
|This article needs additional citations for verification. (February 2008)


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There was this Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's in Houston. That morning we'd read about a school that still used corporal punishment. A white teacher had paddled a black student. People were up in arms about the obvious racial overtones, and my grandmother offered that she wouldn't want no niggers beatin' on her kids, neither. This occasioned lots of eye-rolling from the grandchildren and gentle rebukes from our parents. Then someone passed the gravy.
As a typical Southern white family, we didn't talk much about race. But whenever the older generation hauled it indelicately to the surface, it was an opportunity for us grandkids to see the ugliness our country would rather forget. For our parents it was a teachable moment. It was useful, instructive even, to have a racist grandma at the table.
Which brings us to Paula Deen. Polite society has tried to sweep her ugliness under the carpet where we can safely ignore it.
That's exactly the wrong thing to do. As perverse as it may seem, you cannot have a National Conversation About Race and not invite racists to be a part of that conversation. Deen represents a sizable constituency in this discussion. There's little use pretending that mentality doesn't exist. All we do is push it back into the shadows where it waits to spill out again.
Deen is America's racist grandma, and we should treat her as such. Racist Grandma may be racist, but she's also your grandma. You can't just disown her.
And, contrary to what some might think, having a racist grandma isn't entirely bad. Seeing that gene and knowing you're predisposed is a warning sign, a nagging reminder to take preventive measures for yourself. I say let's push racist Grandma back to center stage and let her keep talking.
The counterargument to keeping Deen on the air is that someone with her views shouldn't be rewarded with a lucrative TV contract, and that's fair as far as it goes. But Deen is already a millionaire. Shehas a platform. That has value. Eliminating that platform helps no one. Should she be punished? Of course. As a public figure, Deen has responsibilities. Which is precisely why she should be forced to remain on television.
Because here's the thing about white people: They hate dealing with race – are incapable of dealing with it, in large part. What better penance could there be than to have Deen stand in front of a camera and open her mouth and do her job? Because she's become far more than just a TV chef. She has set herself up as a voice for all that is good about the South. And one thing the South can rightly be proud of is its food – a big bucket of deep-fried awesome.
Southern food also perfectly captures the complexities and contradictions of how race is lived in that part of the country. When you find moments of genuine interracial community in the South, it's usually over red beans and rice or a huge slab of ribs; food may be what poor Southern whites and poor Southern blacks have most in common.
But Southern cuisine also gives fuel to some of our worst racial stereotypes. Fried chicken and watermelon. And the politics of food, of who serves what to whom, the very thing that got Deen in trouble with her antebellum dinner party, is ever present. Whether it's whites refusing to serve blacks at the lunch counter or blacks in dinner jackets serving the soup to whites, you could write a whole book on the power dynamics of putting a plate on a table below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Food and race and the South – it's a minefield. And I would love to see Deen walk through it on national television. She knows where she screwed up and why, and to have to face that with the whole country watching? Just imagine it: with no pause for reflection, with the eyes of a multiracial nation upon her and the N-word like a yoke around her neck, Deen standing in front of a big Sunday spread. Let her explain where all that good food came from and see if she can learn how to do it without putting her racist foot in her mouth. Then, when she screws up, make her go back and do it again. That would be a punishment that fits the crime. It would make her a better person. It would make our National Conversation About Race a conversation worth having. And it would also make fantastic television.


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After years of pimping for Wall Street in Congress, former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has landed a well-paying gig with a Wall Street bank.No surprise there, right?
You may recall me mentioning how we have four dogs in our household, which you'd think would be enough. But my wife, Theresa, is of the opinion that you can never have too many dogs around, and once you've got two dogs you might as well have 10.
The leader of the Somalia-based al-Shabab extremist group was the target of U.S. military airstrikes that struck an encampment and a vehicle there on Monday night, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday.
COLDWATER — Severe asthma can affect a person's quality of life. To help those suffering from this affliction, Dr. Tariq Karim is now performing Bronchial Thermoplasty (BT) treatments at the Community Health Center of Branch County.
Nearly all Americans understand that relaxation time is essential to good health, yet most of us don't spend nearly enough time unwinding during a typical day or week.
Comedienne Joan Rivers remains on life support in a Manhattan hospital, her daughter
An international rights group accused the extremist Islamic State group on Tuesday of systematic "ethnic cleansing" in northern Iraq targeting indigenous religious minorities, as well as conducting mass killings of men and abducting women.
Justin Bieber faces assault and dangerous driving charges after he was arrested in Canada last...
Rick Grimes & Co. continue to find themselves in a fight for survival on Season 5 of AMC's The...
1950 — 2014HILLSDALE — James Allen Childers, born Sept. 15, 1950, went home to be with our heavenly father on Aug. 25, 2014.
- Events Calendar


text:
Luxury Dog Feather Beds
|10/90 Grey Goose Feather Blend - Hypoallergenic100% Cotton For Comfort & BreathabilityCovered In A Cute Polka Dot White PatternVery Soft & SnugglyNo longer does our best friend have to claim the cold hard floor with a feather bed just as nice as yours! Made in the USA of hypoallergenic 10/90 Goose Down & Feathers - this super plush dog bed comes in two shapes and two sizes. You can purchase one of our decorative covers or make your own for your queen or king of the house.The pet feather bed comes in rounds which are knife edge compared to the squares which feature a 4 inch gusset sidewall. When puffed up they easily dwarves even the biggest dog beds sold in stores. We do suggest adding a waterproof liner - typically a crib size model works great and of course pet liners too.Deep inside these amazingly large dog beds is our hypoallergenic Grey Goose 10/90 feather blend filling. This soft feather filling might make you think twice about your own bed. You can return most new and unopened items within 35 days of delivery for a refund. Items must be returned in new or unused condition and contain all original materials included with the shipment. All returned items will be inspected and may be subject to a partial refund, if it has been used. If the return is a result of our error, the full cost of the merchandise and shipping charges will be refunded. Returns may be subject to you, the customer, paying for the return Shipping & Handling, as well as a restocking fee up to 25% for non-defective items. Please note if item is returned without a Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) additional charges may apply. To apply for a return, please email us and an associate will review your file right away. In order to help you properly we request that you be as descriptive as possible when using our contact us form. Please DO NOT SEND back items prior to receiving a special return approval issued by an associate. Expect to receive the refund within 2-3 weeks from Down Deals receiving your return. Please allow for shipping and handling time when completing a return or exchange.


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A mailer being sent to some Fort Wayne residents, encouraging them to vote and detailing whether they and their neighbors voted in 2008 and 2010 is, well, honking off a lot of the recipients.
The mailer, which is labeled a vote history audit, was sent by an organization called Americans for Limited Government, which calls itself nonpartisan, though its website seems to take conservative or even libertarian positions on political issues.
The letter encourages the recipients to vote and says it will update its records and send out a new letter after next week's election indicating whether the recipients and their neighbors had voted.
How many people have gotten them in Fort Wayne is not known, but similar letters have been sent to people all over the country.
Beth Dlug, director of elections at the Allen County Board of Elections, says she has received about 10 calls from people who she described as fairly upset that the organization is sharing their voting records with their neighbors. Their reactions, Dlug said, are that whether they voted is none of their neighbors' business.
In news stories in other states, some people complained that the letters were an invasion of privacy, and a story in the Indianapolis Star quoted Secretary of State Connie Lawson as saying her office does not treat lightly its role to strictly limit access to voting records.
The fact is, though, that in Indiana, at least, all kinds of information on voters and their voting habits is readily available.
Voting history is a matter of public record, Dlug said, and when she has told callers that, they have calmed down.
Savvy politicians can get reports detailing who has and who hasn't voted, whether a voter voted in the Republican or Democratic primary, and so on. The information, available at the county level, can be used to create walking lists so people campaigning for a specific candidate know which doors to knock on and which to ignore.
The actual ballot, though, is secret, so no one knows who any particular individual voted for – unless they tell you.
I called Americans for Limited Government, and they responded with an email saying their only goal is to increase participation in the electoral process. The organization said that while some find it worrisome that campaigns or organizations can access voting histories, such information is a fundamental tool that has been used since Abraham Lincoln, they said.
The organization said it has sent out 2.75 million mailers in 19 states, but that it could not say exactly how many were sent out in this area.
The idea isn't new. According to Abstract Politics, a political science website, some university researchers did pretty much the same thing a few years ago.
Four different groups each got a different mailer: one reminding people to vote; one reminding them to vote that also said they were watching turnout; one reminding them to vote then adding that voter behavior is public record along with their voting record; and the fourth option asking what if their neighbors knew whether they voted along with their and their neighbors' turnout history, sort of shaming people into voting.
All the letters increased voter turnout, but the one with neighbors' voting records worked the best by far.
Though some people call the strategy an invasion of privacy, I have a hard time getting worked up about it. People put campaign signs in their yards, they put bumper stickers on their cars and they frequently make no secret of their political leanings. The fact that my neighbor knows that I did or didn't vote doesn't bother me.
It's just politics.


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Faculty and Staff Parking Lot 1 Closes May 27-July 30
From Tuesday, May 27 to July 30, 2014, Faculty and Staff Parking Lot 1 will be closed for construction related to The Crossing - South at Holden. Some Accessibility Parking spaces at the east end of Lot 1 will remain available during construction. Anyone who has questions should contact Sgt. Dan Othic, UCM Parking Services, at 543-4098.
For more information:
Contact Jeff Murphy at email@example.com or call 4640


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Mike Tyson returns to ring in 'WWE 13'
June, 19, 2012
By Jon Robinson | ESPN.com
Courtesy of THQBoxing legend Mike Tyson will help bring back the Attitude Era to wrestling in "WWE 13."THQ's "WWE 13" is all about re-living and re-imagining the Attitude Era, and wrestling historians can argue that there was no bigger landscape shifting event in the Monday Night Wars than the addition of "Iron" Mike Tyson to Raw.
But thanks to the WWE video game, you can finally do more than just make Tyson a special referee or enforcer; you can actually put him in the ring and have the classic boxer vs. wrestler bout you always dreamed of, even pitting "the baddest man on the planet" against the brawler who flipped him the bird during his first Raw, Stone Cold Steve Austin.
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Courtesy of THQMike Tyson is a playable character on "WWE 13."
It's been a big week of announcements for Tyson, who announced on Monday he'll be starring in one-man Broadway show.
The Tyson character will be made available for anybody who pre-orders "WWE 13" in the United States or Canada for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or Nintendo Wii.
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- Return Man 2
- The sequel to our most popular game is here. How's your return?
- Wide Out
- Run timed routes, beat DB's to the end zone and score.
- Electric QB
- Hit your receivers, dodge defenders and rack up TDs.


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Louis Menand's New Yorker review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era, a history of the rise of university writing programs and workshops, is subtitled, "Should creative writing be taught?" Despite itself, the review does not encourage a positive answer. Menand tells us that "by 1975, there were fiftee ... More >>
A company honors established comets, dancing stars, and talented novas
A stellar company wraps up a vibrant season
Theatre Askew plays the same-name game
Like its set, Grendel's big and rocky, with an empty core


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November 22, 2014
The Vilas County Sheriff's Department says no one was injured after a mobile home fire Wednesday morning near Sayner.
According to a press release, dispatch received a call around 11 a.m. Reporting a garage fire at 8616 Camp Highland Road in the Township of Plum Lake.
The garage fire eventually spread to a joining mobile home. The home and garage are a total loss.
A vehicle was in the garage at the time of the fire.
A cause has yet to be determined.
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Named after B.C.'s hop growers of old, Howe Sound's Hopraiser has had an interesting (albeit short) history of its own. Earlier in the year, the Squamish brewery released different test batches of its latest IPA, dubbed simply West Coast … Continue reading
Howe Sound beer reviews RSS
Loose Cannon Dark Lager (Howe Sound Brewing, 5.5%)
Great to see another dark lager on the market, and particularly one with such flavour firepower. Loose Cannon, a gold medal winner at the recent North American Brewers Association awards, is deep brown in colour with garnet highlights. The … Continue reading
Super Jupiter Grapefruit IPA (Howe Sound Brewing, 6.8%)
Does Commander Chris Hadfield get to drink beer in the International Space Station? I hope so. But then, consuming recycled urine and pouches of baby food must be the ultimate endurance test that sorts out the astronauts from the mere … Continue reading
Total Eclipse of the Hop Imperial IPA (Howe Sound Brewing, 8%)
Every now and then I fall apart when I realize how much beer I have to review for this blog. It's a tough gig alright. But sometimes I find it helps to look back at what I've been through and … Continue reading
Gathering Storm Cascadian Dark Ale (Howe Sound Brewing, 6.8%)
This review has been a long time coming. Ever since December 2010, in fact, when I made first contact with Howe Sound's Cascadian dark ale at the beer's very source in Squamish. It was love at first sip. Maybe … Continue reading
Wee Beastie Oak Aged Scotch Ale (Howe Sound Brewing, 7%)
Released just in time for Burns Night, Wee Beastie recalls one of the Bard's most famous odes, To A Mouse – although here, Howe Sound has used some artistic labeling licence to turn the mouse from a fleeing rodent into … Continue reading
4 Way Fruit Ale (Howe Sound Brewing, 4.4%)
The latest release from Howe Sound is a marked change from its usual high-gravity offerings. And, like the Squamish-based brewery's lager released last summer, this unique fruit ale shows brewmaster Franco Corno and his team can keep things deliciously light … Continue reading
Pothole Filler Imperial Stout (Howe Sound Brewing, 9%)
Despite being one of those select beers that somehow seems to define B.C.'s craft brew scene, Howe Sound's imperial stout is pretty hard to find in my experience. Certainly, stock of this limited-release beer is dwindling this year, so … Continue reading
Woolly Bugger Limited Release Barley Wine (Howe Sound Brewing, 11%)
While a great deal of attention was directed toward Driftwood's Old Cellar Dweller barley wine a couple of weeks ago, it's worth bearing in mind that there are other delicious examples of this most extreme of classic beer … Continue reading
Rail Ale Nut Brown (Howe Sound Brewing, 5%)
Time to start giving more love to some B.C. craft beer mainstays. It's all too easy to get wrapped up in the latest seasonal or limited releases that seem to be currently landing on shelves every week, and forget the … Continue reading


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The amount of building in South Dakota's largest city is on a record pace
The city has permitted $200 million worth of construction so far this year. It is the earliest the city has ever reached that benchmark. The previous record was the end of May in 2007.
City officials say the next-highest construction valuation on record at the end of April was $138 million in 2005.
Chief Building Official Ron Bell says some large commercial projects and construction of hotels, apartments and condominiums is behind this year's high number.
Planning and Building Services Director Mike Cooper says it's a response to increases in population and employment and an expanding economy.Jill Johnson will have more tonight on KDLT News.


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Splendor in the Glass
by Eye Poetry
Phone Skins
Skins are thin, easy-to-remove, vinyl decals for customizing your device. Skins are made from a patented material that eliminates air bubbles and wrinkles for easy application.
The gorgeous art nouveau stained class ceiling of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.
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Vacation Bible School
Date(s): 6/16/2014, 6/17/2014, 6/18/2014, 6/19/2014, 6/20/2014
Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church
Where: Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church
105 Lankford Avenue
Charlottesville, Virginia
When: Monday, June 16th to Friday, June 20th
Time: 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Church Doors open at 5:30 pm for light Refreshments
Pre-K to Senior Citizens
Church Bus Services Available
*Parent or legal guardian MUST be with their child on the first day for information Requirement
Bus Pick-up is 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm or call the church office to arrange a pick-up in your area ----- (434) 293 - 3212 (before 2 pm daily)
Westhaven (Center), Garrett Street (Center), Orange Dale (Buford Middle School), Tonsler Park (Center), Ridge Street, Washington Park (pool area), Rose Hill Drive (Burley Middle School), Belmont (Clark Elem.)
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Silverado is proven tried and true with more than 13 million miles of testing.
Combine 2 years/24,000 miles of scheduled maintenance†, a 5-Year/100,000-Mile Powertrain Limited Warranty†, a 3-Year/36,000-Mile Bumper-to-Bumper Limited Warranty† and 5-Years/100,000-Miles of 24-Hour Roadside Assistance and Courtesy Transportation† and you have Silverado's coverage plan — the best pickup coverage in America.
* The Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price excludes destination freight charge, tax, title, license, dealer fees and optional equipment. Click here to see all Chevrolet vehicles' destination freight charges. Click here to see the 2015 City Express destination freight charge. Click here to see the 2015 Colorado destination freight charge.
***The Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price excludes tax, title, license, dealer fees and optional equipment. Includes destination freight charge and gas guzzler tax.
1. Based on EPA estimates.
2. Requires 2WD Double Cab with available 5.3L V8 engine and Max Trailering
3. Government 5-Star Safety Ratings are part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA's) New Car Assessment Program (www.SaferCar.gov).
4. Whichever comes first. See dealer for details.
5. Covers only scheduled oil changes with filter, tire rotations and 27-point inspections, according to your new vehicle's recommended maintenance schedule for up to 2 years or 24,000 miles, whichever comes first. Does not include air filters. Maximum of four service events. See participating dealer for other restrictions and complete details.
6. Dependability based on longevity: 1987–April 2013 full-size pickup registrations.
7. EPA-estimated 16 city/23 hwy mpg (2WD), 16 city/22 hwy mpg (4WD) with the available Silverado 5.3L.
8. EPA-estimated 16 city/22 hwy mpg (2WD), 15 city/21 hwy mpg (4WD) F-150 3.5L V6.
9. Requires 2WD Double or Crew Cab with available 6.2L engine and Max Trailering Package. Class is half-ton full-size pickups. Maximum trailer weight ratings are calculated assuming a properly equipped base vehicle, plus driver. See dealer for details.
10. Vehicle's projected resale value is specific to the 2014 model year. For more information, visit Kelley Blue Book's KBB.com. Kelley Blue Book is a registered trademark of Kelley Blue Book Co., Inc.
To allow you to do an accurate price comparison with prices featured on other Internet sites, GM provides Internet pricing both with and without the Destination Freight Charge (see prices including Destination Freight Charge below). To get full pricing details, go to our Build Your Own section.


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SSAB Americas,
ArcelorMittal USA,
price increase,
plate prices,
steel prices
NEW YORK SSAB Americas has increased plate prices by $30 to $50 per ton ($1.50 to $2.50 per hundredweight), depending on the product.
A minimum $30-per-ton increase will be applied to noncontract as-rolled mill plate, cut-to-length plate and hot-rolled coils, while a minimum $50-per-ton increase will apply to noncontract normalized and quenched and tempered plate, the Lisle, Ill.-based steelmaker said in a letter to customers June 17.
While the increase is effective immediately with new orders, it also applies to existing orders scheduled to ship on or after the week of Aug. 31, SSAB said.
SSABs increase comes after similar price moves by Chicago-based ArcelorMittal USA LLC and Charlotte, N.C.-based Nucor Corp. (amm.com, June 12).
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We actually don't know who his investors are. At the point when we are ready, we will investigate further. There are just so many things to handle and there are a lot of items to be considered with the project."
-- Charles C. Mitchell, Barstow city manager


text: Sikhs and others who wanted to show support gathered Wednesday night for a vigil in Manhattan. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption itoggle caption Mario Tama/Getty Images The Two-Way After Tragedy For Sikhs, A Glimpse Into 'The Sunshine of Their Minds' August 9, 2012 We're seeing their "capacity to look ahead, to heal, to be tolerant, to be understanding and to be calm and composed in the face of terrible grief or tragedy," India's ambassador to the U.S. tells NPR. Listen Loading… Download Playlist


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Find records of C. C. Shook
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A secular Muslim alternative in an increasingly Islamist region.
Azerbaijan Gets Islam and Politics Right
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN's Stealth Assault on America's Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.
Muslim Axe-Murderer Freed After Killing Armenian Officer
Azerbaijan: Israel's Back Door To Iran
Obama Leaks Israel's Attack Plan?
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva and author of the book Choosing Life in Israel.


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I love your poem, I love how the words flow and fit together, like a puzzle piece, yet still giving you an insight of her pain.
I think that Shay will run away after does it to her again, she will run far far far far away, then she gets a new life fresh start
@ursmexystalker i'll get the potato pillar you get the shovel and the big plastic bag!
so...THIS IS AMAZING!!!! i love readinf stories like this!!! i love hearing their thoughts and feelings...!
Amazing, I really like this :) Its like Super Junior's Andante, SNSD's Mistake and SHINee's Quasimodo Al those three songs in one, reminds me of this story ^ ^
its just downright depressing that she got treated that way and no one even suspects a thing.
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Property for sale near Fraserburgh
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5 bed detached house for salePitsligo Street, Rosehearty, Fraserburgh AB43
An attractive, traditional two storey detached dwellinghouse dating back to 1896 with extensive garden ground . More details
Note: Distances are straight line measurements
- Inverurie (29.8 miles)
- Huntly (29.9 miles)
Marketed by Church of Scotland Law Department, EH2. Call 0131 268 0571Fixed price £135,000
3 bed detached bungalow for saleRosehearty, Fraserburgh AB43
This superb family home is located in Rosehearty, Aberdeenshire and is situated only three and a half miles from town and the new asda supermarket. The beautiful three bedroom country home comes with lovely countryside outlooks to the front and sea ... More details
Note: Distances are straight line measurements
- Inverurie (29.2 miles)
- Huntly (29.8 miles)
Marketed by turtlehomes.co.uk online estate agents, GL2. Call 01452 458106Offers over £325,000
Land for saleCairnbulg, Fraserburgh AB43
A poultry unit set within approximately 19.15Ha (47.3 acres) of grade 4(1) land with farmhouse and range of traditional farm buildings in a coastal location. For sale in two lots with vacant possession. EPC - Band F More details
Marketed by Aberdeen and Northern Estates Ltd, AB51. Call 01467 437000Offers over £2,000,000
8 bed detached house for saleCairness, Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire AB43
One of the great houses of Scotland - A magnificent Georgian country house of international renown, a neoclassical masterpiece. Cairness House is a comfortable family home with 7 reception rooms and 8 principal bedrooms. Situated in a quiet rural ... More details
Note: Distances are straight line measurements
- Inverurie (29.4 miles)
Marketed by Knight Frank - Edinburgh, EH2. Call 0131 344 0919
Latest Fraserburgh property for sale
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Food and Beverage
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Added Feb 17, 2013
by Julia Morley
Pittsburgh, Penn...
Every once in a while I find myself at a clearance rack in a store and end up talking myself into buying a dress that is gossip-girl-short because it's so cheap I have nothing to lose, right? Then I get it home and remember that I'm 5'9" (which Wolfram Alpha tells me is in the 98th percentile for women) and that a short dress is always a really short dress on me. Really I have no idea how Serena Van Der Woodson ever sits down. Then it sits in my closet for years while I wait for an event where I might find it acceptable to wear it.
10 years after buying this one (H&M in 2003!), I've given up on it. So I cut it down, turned it into a skirt, and voila! This actually might be my favorite skirt in my wardrobe now.
Feb 18, 2013, 11.46 AMby kelerabeus
I am totally with you on that! Being a tall girl myself I always struggle when it comes to hemming the skirts – part of me wants to take another inch up, but part of me knows that I would probably regret it later. Every time I watch New Girl I think how unfair is that I can pull out something that short :) Congrats on your new skirt! And I really like your shoes as well.
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Wiki Headlines
18th Nov: We've switched servers and will be updating the old code over the next couple months, meaning that several things might break. Please report issues here.
main index
Film watched: The Girl in Gold BootsThe episode is notable both for being Mike Nelson's favorite episode of the series and also for introducing a storyline in Season 10 that featured Pearl becoming a fully accredited mad scientist. This storyline was dropped within a few episodes as the show was cancelled.
Host Segments
TeaserCrow shows off his WWBSMNDnote bracelet. Servo gives him a hypothetical situation and asks what Crow would do. Crow's solution? Write a folk song!Pearl does the throw to commercial.
Segment 1More fun with WWJD-like bracelets. Down in Castle Forrester, Pearl is acting madder than usual. Turns out she has to get board-certified with the Institute of Mad Scientists in order to take over the world legally.
Segment 2Crow forces Mike to pour beer over his most prized possession: a personalized heirloom beer stein. Then Mike says that Crow is also most dear to him, so Crow demands the beer be poured over him as well.
Segment 3Crow does a go-go dance while Servo watches. Mike is disgusted at Crow taking off the gold bikini, despite the fact that Crow normally wears nothing at all.
Segment 4Mike sings a sad song, parodying a song from the film. Crow tries to attract Mike's attention to a fire that just broke out.
Segment 5Mike and the Bots dress as Armenian mobsters. The inspector originally tells Pearl that she failed, but he quickly changes his mind when he sees Brain Guy go-go dancing.
The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode of this movie contains examples of:
"Oh, God... I wish I had that pretty mind back."


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Project Details
Client: Louise Keenan
Location: Rotorua, New Zealand
Services: Design, Hosting, Single page
Launched: October, 2009
Thank you so much for the website that you have done for me. You made the daunting process very easy.
I found your service professional, affordable and your communication very clear.
The design you came up with so quickly was perfect, if I new it would be this easy to do a web page I would have done it earlier.
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Silverfern Spa Studio
Louise from the Silverfern Spa Studio contacted us wanting a basic single page with just a little bit about her, her menu prices and contact details just to help market her business to locals and travelers who weren't staying at the motel where her business is based.
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Louise was extremely pleased with the concept and signed off on the design immediately. Within 48 hours her new website was live.
If you need a web presence, even just a single page like this one, contact us today and we too can create a stylish, modern, functional website to help you promote yourself or your business.


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Wearable technology isn't fashionable, and that's a problem that can't be solved with better design.
I don't think the first half of that statement is controversial. Wearable tech may be somewhat cool among a certain narrow demographic, but even then it's not exactly a fashion statement.
But why can't design help? Because the problem isn't what these devices look like, it's what they do. The reasons people wear them — productivity, health, fitness, even connectivity — are just not compatible with the aesthetics of fashion.
I'm the furthest thing from a fashion expert, but I think this is obvious enough that it doesn't take an expert to see it. Most of these goals are a form of self-improvement, and self-improvement is almost the opposite of fashion. The essence of fashion is to project confidence, self-assurance and natural beauty — to look like you don't need to exercise, be more productive, monitor your standing/sitting time or posture or UV exposure, be notified of every like on your Facebook page, or anything else with even a whiff of ambition or insecurity.
Don't believe me? How many designer clothing ads have you seen that feature models wearing a Bluetooth headset, or a Blackberry belt clip, or even a Fitbit wristband? If the technology isn't part of what's being promoted, it's not an accessory that any photographer wants to add.
Even if it works with a certain outfit, no one who's really fashion-conscious is going to wear the same accessory day after day with different outfits. It's as simple as that. Dressing it up with different watch straps or colors just makes it even more obvious. And if you only wear your device on certain days, or only to the gym, it defeats the purpose of much of the long-term monitoring that was the reason you bought it in the first place, and makes it harder to justify the high cost.
If you really want people to wear your gadget all day, every day, your design focus should be to make it less visible and easier to hide. For the manufacturers, hope never dies that people will want to display their devices and provide free advertising, but somehow it never seems to work out that way. Take a look at one of the newest ones, the Lumo Lift posture tracker, which can either be clipped to a bra strap/undershirt, or secured magnetically with a visible metal square that comes in different colors. Any guesses which option more people will choose?
Actually, I predict one of the first popular third party accessories for the Apple Watch will be a clip or case that replaces the strap entirely and makes it easier to carry the device somewhere other than your wrist.
Fashion can embrace certain forms of technology, but it takes a long time, generally long enough for it to be charmingly obsolete. Watches are one example: mechanical watches are still classier than (far more accurate) quartz watches, almost a century after the quartz technology was invented. And they're covered with marine pressure gauges and other extras that most wearers wouldn't know how to read even if they needed to. Technology is stylish in inverse proportion to its utility.
Of course, there's still a market for unfashionable wearable tech. There are millions of Bluetooth headsets sold every year. But they'll never be as widespread as iPhones, and I think the adoption of the Apple Watch — along with Google Glass and every other visible wearable device — will hit the same ceiling. The first breakthrough wearable that becomes ubiquitous will be one that can be concealed.
Related articles
- Is it Time for the Apple Watch? (Magnificent Bastard)
- Why Would Anybody Buy an Apple Watch? (Atlantic Monthly)
When I talk to Nick, our occasional London correspondent, we often kick around ideas for movies — and I realized recently that most of them have a rough theme in common: a group of twenty-something friends who embark on a half-baked criminal plot that winds up changing their lives. It's been a while since we've had a good movie like this (Office Space?), and it seems like the perfect fit for the current apathetic zeitgeist among Millenials.
You may have heard about the guy who got a studio deal from a movie idea he described on Reddit. Frankly, that still sounds like an awful lot of work. I'm not sure even the prospect of Hollywood riches could entice the two of us off our asses to actually write a screenplay. So instead I'll outline three of our best ideas here in the hope that some more industrious person will take them:
#1. A young aspiring filmmaker gets her first big break, striking a deal to have her own script produced with a sizable budget. She can direct herself and have almost total creative control — the one condition is that she has to accept a particular mid-list young star to play a lead role. And this star turns out to be a holy terror to work with, a caricature of a spoiled actor, verbally abusive to everyone on the set and full of terrible ideas for changing the script.
At some point, the protagonist and her crew get the idea that if this star died in some dramatic way during filming, like Heath Ledger or Brandon Lee, it would generate massive publicity for the movie, give them an excuse to write the character down to a more minor role, and make life on the set much easier in general. So they start plotting (in a clumsily amateur way) to bump the star off by inducing a drug overdose, drunken car crash or some other "accidental" death. Whether they eventually succeed depends on just how dark you want to make it, but a lot of the humor would be in the failed attempts (somewhat like Harold & Maude).
#2. A similar group of aimless twenty-something friends come up with a plan to "kidnap" a rich businessman for ransom, without using any force; instead, a female member of the group will seduce him and convince him to leave town with her for an impulsive weekend affair. Maybe he's her boss who's been inappropriately hitting on her at work, or there's some other revenge element, but maybe he's just a random target.
Anyway, through a combination of "accidents" (she spills her drink on his cell phone) and clever hacking (intercepting the excuses he emails to his secretary and wife) they contrive to make it look like he's vanished without a trace. Her job is to keep him busy and out of contact for a few days, while the others contact the family or employer and demand their ransom. Their plan is that by the time he gets home unharmed and realizes what happened, he'll be too compromised by his own attempted infidelity to report anything to the police. (This part works even better if he's some kind of public figure.)
From there you could go in any direction — obviously the plan has to go wrong somehow, but that could happen in a variety of ways. Maybe the rich guy actually wanted to disappear (shades of Bulworth) and turns the tables on them somehow, or his wife wants him dead (like in Ruthless People), or he and his "kidnapper" unexpectedly fall in love…
This one literally came to me in a dream, and it may have been partly influenced by a German movie called Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei, which has some similar elements. Here's Nick's UK-centric take on it:
Jeff Bridges, a banking tycoon who routes a lot of money through the isle of Guernsey (a tax haven), travels there to take care of some paperwork. Our three protagonists, parochial high street bank clerks from the island — flashy suits, fancy themselves young Gordon Geckos, pretend to read the FT every day, totally clueless — know that he's a big hitter (they've seen his name again and again on legal documents), and conspire to kidnap him.
Enter [charming up-and-coming British actress], the most beautiful girl in the village. She's roped in by our heroes and seduces Jeff into extending his stay. He gets stuck in Guernsey, having a quirky romance with the girl, while the kidnappers are in London trying incompetently to extort money from the bank for his "safe return." Cue comical boardroom meetings in balaclavas, confusion, absurdity.
The whole thing gets tied into increasingly absurd knots: Jeff refuses to cooperate, wants to become a fisherman, etc. But despite their continuing failure to even get the bank's attention, our three stooges manage to trigger some kind of international market crisis, and the whole thing, once backed into a seemingly inescapable corner, is resolved by a farcical government intervention (we get punctuating scenes of absurd Fed guys, like the CIA characters in Burn After Reading, who prove equally clueless). In the end everyone wins, everyone loses, and the message is that no one has a fucking clue what's going on.
#3. So the basic premise is that a one letter typo in a common email address connects you to the inner sanctum of someone's online life. The protagonists are two cousins or siblings who share a common last name, like Smith or Jones. They both have gmail or yahoo addresses with their first initial and surname, so they frequently get wayward messages for a particular set of strangers with the same last name and similar email addresses.
And they're both young Americans in Europe, where they're sharing a messy apartment, half-assing their way through graduate degrees or dead end jobs in between long nights of clubs, drugs and partying, and generally living a stereotypical bohemian expat lifestyle.
But these misaddressed emails they get are all middle-America banalities from the world they've left behind. Ironic snobbery ensues: at first they scoff at these idiosyncratic bobs of exactly what they profess to loathe about America, re basketball hoop zoning, Christmas light bills, Mini Cooper promotional offers, etc.
So they decide to start impersonating these suburban strangers, replying to emails on their behalf. It starts with one of them writing back to a mailing list of soccer moms debating that basketball hoop and whether it's allowed in their homeowner's association rules — an angry rant mocking them for living shallow, empty lives. After getting a rise out of their targets with a few emails like this, our two "heroes" get hooked and keep pushing the envelope, eventually contriving to get their targets' passwords and infiltrate their real email accounts as well as just replying to misaddressed messages.
The movie will cut back and forth throughout between the victims of these email pranks and the perpetrators, comparing and contrasting their day-to-day lives and showing how they're both affected by these online exchanges.
To our protagonists it still seems like harmless fun, but one of them has a real mean streak and keeps coming up with nastier plans. The other, the sensitive one, is starting to worry that they're going too far, and also developing an online crush on the similarly-aged son/daughter of one of these families, maybe even a correspondence with them under some other false pretense.
It all comes to a head when the mean one sends a nasty prank email that inadvertently results in a tragedy; for example, he might pretend to be the dad in this same family having an affair and "accidentally" send some incriminating email to his wife, thinking it will shake up their boring lives — but instead it leads to a violent altercation in which someone is killed.
This throws our two leads into a panic, with the good one wanting to come forward and admit their involvement, and the bad one insisting they should cover it up. And then the final twist: before they can agree on what to do, they're found out anyway by another misaddressed email, sent by one of them to the other but accidentally going to one of their victims. After all, since all the main characters, in Europe and America, are connected by a one-letter email typo, it's just as easy for the smug protagonists to mess up as it is for their targets. As with the first two ideas, how you resolve it from there depends on how just how dark you want the movie to be.
I'm reading an interesting book from the '80s that profiles various private detective characters and the authors who created them. It begins with a survey of writers and critics, who are asked to rank each character they're familiar with in five categories: literary value, entertainment value, character development, plot, and writing style. The voting is in two timeframes: 1920-70, and 1970-82.
They're presented in order of fame/familiarity, but I thought sorting them by those average rankings would be more interesting. Here are the top ten in each time period:
- Philip Marlowe
- Sam Spade
- Lew Archer
- The Continental Op
- Ed & Am Hunter
- Travis McGee
- Nero Wolfe
- Nick & Nora Charles
- Paul Pine
- Mac Robinson
- C.W. Sughrue
- Murray Kirk
- Jacob Asch
- Mitch Tobin
- Thomas Kyd (not the playwright)
- Matt Scudder
- Albert Samson
- The "Nameless Detective" (Bill Pronzini)
- Dan Kearney
- Harry Stoner
There are a few on there that I've never read, which I plan to remedy soon. But a few notes on these lists:
- Nearly all of these detectives work in one of four cities: LA, San Francisco, New York or Chicago. The exceptions are Travis McGee (Miami), Harry Stoner (Cincinnati), Albert Samson (Indianapolis) and C.W. Sughrue (Montana).
- In terms of fame and influence, the most striking absence is Mickey Spillane's detective, Mike Hammer, who may have sold more copies than all twenty combined. It's no surprise though, as Spillane was always seen as a hack by his fellow writers, a role he partially embraced. He famously said "I don't have readers, I have customers," and "Those big-shot writers … could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar." I've only read a few of his books and while they definitely have less literary value than the ones above, they were pretty fun. I'd say they suffer more from being dated than from a lack of quality.
- Murray Kirk seems to be on the wrong list; as far as I know he only appeared in one book, Stanley Ellin's The Eighth Circle, in 1958. It's a great book, though also slightly dated.
- Mitch Tobin too, maybe, since his five novels came out from 1966 to 1972. I'm halfway through these books and they're incredible. Among other things, it's the only detective series I've read that has a true narrative arc from one book to the next. They were written by the estimable Donald Westlake, who's much better known for his "Parker" novels that were made into numerous films. Those are great books but I think the Mitch Tobin ones may be even better. (There's an upcoming anthology of Westlake's non-fiction writing that I'm looking forward to.)
- C.W. Sughrue is the creation of James Crumley, who also had another detective character, Milo Milodragovitch. I'm not given to gushing but I can honestly say that I find the C.W. and Milo novels better than anything on the second list, or any other post-1970 crime fiction I've read, period — and that's not taking anything away from the others. Crumley was just operating on a different level.
- At least two of the most promising writers here — Timothy Harris (Thomas Kyd) and Howard Browne (Paul Pine) were lured away by Hollywood to be screenwriters after just a few private eye novels. Raymond Chandler, of course, wrote or co-wrote three classic movies, Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia and Strangers on a Train, but apparently he hated every minute of it and fought with the directors, and it wasn't the end of his Marlowe novels.
- The absence of women on both lists is striking, especially the second one. There weren't many female private eyes before 1970, except for Nora in The Thin Man at #8 (and I'm not even sure that book should really count as a private eye novel) and Bertha Cool, who came in at #19. On the post-1970 list, Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warschawski came in at #16 and Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone was #25. I haven't read either series, so I can't really comment. I have read a couple of the more recent Lydia Chin books, which are pretty good, and some of Sue Grafton's popular Kinsey Millhone series which began a little too late for this survey. It's an interesting question why there haven't been more female private eye type characters, especially given that a number of amateur/"gentlemen" detectives in more formal or "cozy" type mysteries, as well as the officers in police procedurals, have been women, going back quite a long time. I don't think there are inherently male elements to the private eye archetype, or if there are I don't think they're the important ones.
If you've ever driven north to New York City, there's a good chance you've stopped for gas at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area:
I've probably been there a hundred times. As a kid, I assumed Joyce Kilmer was a woman. When I was tall enough to read the plaques, I learned the two main facts about Kilmer that most Americans know, if they know his gender — that he died in World War I, and that he wrote this stupid poem:
This time I decided to find out a little more about him:
Kilmer was considered the leading American Roman Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, whom critics often compared to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc…
With the publication of "Trees" in the magazine Poetry in August 1913, Kilmer gained immense popularity as a poet across the United States…. Over the next few years, Kilmer was prolific in his output—managing an intense schedule of lectures, publishing a large number of essays and literary criticism, and writing poetry. In 1915, he became poetry editor of Current Literature and contributing editor of Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature. In 1916 and 1917, before the American entry into World War I, Kilmer would publish four books…
I found a lot of his other poems online too. Some are better than the tree poem, but none are very good. Most have the same sappy Sunday School tone. And I'm not alone in that opinion; at Columbia University, Kilmer's alma mater, they even have an annual Bad Poetry Contest in his honor.
Kilmer's fans might argue that he just had bad timing; as one of the last prominent writers of formal, sentimental lyric poems at the advent of Modernism (J. Alfred Prufrock was written in 1915) his work was bound to seem out of place.
It's instructive, though, to compare him with Britain's young poets who died in the war — Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Wilfred Owen and various others — who are held in somewhat higher regard by modern readers. Their war poems are often considered in two groups: the "early war" poets like Brooke and Grenfell, both killed in 1915, were notably more patriotic, but also more sentimental and lyrical, than those who saw the war drag on. They mixed pastoral and other natural motifs, common in Georgian poetry, with celebrations of soldiers' valor and glory. 1915 was also the year of In Flanders Fields, penned by the Canadian John McCrae, which is possibly the best-known poem of the war and exemplifies this style:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The poets who died later in the war struck a very different tone — as in Owen's famous Dulce et Decorum Est, whose structure (a rhyming double sonnet) is a bitter mockery of those sing-songy fields-of-glory poems from just a couple years earlier:
…If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
…or Arthur West:
God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men,
Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves
As soon as you are in them, nurtured up
By the salt of your corruption, and the tears
Of mothers, local vicars, college deans,
And flanked by prefaces and photographs
From all your minor poet friends — the fools —
Who paint their sentimental elegies
Where sure, no angel treads; and, living, share
The dead's brief immortality…
Kilmer outlived them both; he was killed in 1918, just a few months before the Armistice. But his last poem, Rouge Bouquet, was the same sort of pious elegy that Owen and West derided — it could just as easily have been written at the beginning of the war as at the end, given its complete lack of cynicism:
…There is on earth no worthier grave
To hold the bodies of the brave
Than this place of pain and pride
Where they nobly fought and nobly died.
Never fear but in the skies
Saints and angels stand
Smiling with their holy eyes
On this new-come band…
It's odd to think of something like that being written after those classic anti-war poems, but I'm sure it wasn't the only example. I wonder how much of it reflects a different American experience of the war as opposed to the European one — we obviously had a shorter war and many fewer casualties — and how much it's just a matter of Kilmer's own sentimentality and faith. It's also a reminder that the whole early war / late war distinction may be partly a matter of cherry-picking the poems that fit it, something imposed by anthologists and critics to fit the later "Lost Generation" narrative of postwar disillusionment.
In any case, Kilmer was a brave soldier, but was he really the best American poet we lost in the war? Another candidate is Alan Seeger (uncle of Pete Seeger), a New Yorker who joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914 and was killed in 1916, before the US even entered the conflict. His best-known poem is A Rendezvous with Death:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair…
It definitely fits in that early-war category — natural beauty, battlefield glory and a quick trip to heaven — but considered on those terms, I like it better than Kilmer's treacle. The first line evokes Dickinson's Because I could not stop for Death, maybe deliberately, and it's an interesting parallel to that poem. Admittedly I found some of his other war poems to be a little overwrought or preachy … well, in any case, as a New Yorker, Seeger is presumably not up for a rest area on the New Jersey turnpike.
In fact, as New Jersey poets go, Kilmer's chief virtue seems to be that he came from an area (New Brunswick) that made a good place for a rest stop. Robert Pinsky is from Long Beach, too far away from the turnpike. William Carlos Williams was from Rutherford, which you'd think would be close enough, but the two nearest rest stops are named for New Yorkers Vince Lombardi and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton's fatal duel was fought on the nearby Palisades cliffs, and Lombardi …well, he started as an assistant coach with the Giants, who now play in East Rutherford, so I'm assuming that's the connection — but when he was with the team, they were still playing in New York, so it seems a little tenuous. Maybe Seeger has a shot after all…
Couchsurfing, the troubled nonprofit-turned-startup that I wrote about earlier this year, has now shed almost half of its employees, including the CEO:
The startup, backed by General Catalyst, Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Point Nine and Omidyar Network, is now going to focus on mobile — and we have heard that this is where all new hires will happen. The company up to now had raised some $22.6 million, with the last $15 million in August 2012.
As for the layoffs … a spokesperson tells us that the full number is about 40% of staff, with now no more than 20 people working at the company…
A little more unconfirmed detail: part of the layoffs, apparently, have resulted in deep cuts to its engineering team, with the entire engineering team let go "except for a 3 person skeleton support crew," according to a tipster.
Our tipster — again, this is unconfirmed — says that the reason for the layoffs and other changes is because the company has seen an $800,000 monthly burn rate. But we understand the company has a long cash runway at the moment to figure out ways to turn that around (staff cuts help, too).
This is sad news, and I don't take any pleasure in having predicted it. I still hope there's a going concern to be salvaged here. But it's very difficult to imagine a business model that will provide a material return on that much investment, or even enough cash flow to keep the lights on when the existing money runs out.
Early on, in an attempt to quell user anger at the for-profit conversion, the company seems to have ruled out advertising, selling member data in any form, or charging any kind of fee for existing site functionality. That didn't leave many options. One that they floated was to solicit donations to charity every time a "surfer" was hosted, and take a small cut of these donations. Cute but a little pushy, and it likely wouldn't amount to more than pocket change. They also considered a "freemium" model, but there wasn't much you could add to the basic services that would really be worth paying for:
Freemium models work best when the premium features are relatively independent of the basic features. If someone else pays for more space on Dropbox, you don't get less space in your free account. In the case of CS, the main thing they can offer a premium member is various types of priority over non-premium members. You can dress that up however you want, but in the end you're not really adding a new service, just pitting your existing users against each other: the premium service degrades the free one. If frequent flyers board the plane first, the rest of the passengers have to wait a bit longer. If premium CS members show up higher in searches, then free members show up lower.
In the meantime, they've brought back this "verification" gimmick — a way of aggressively hitting you up for a voluntary $25 donation when you join by arbitrarily attaching it to this "trust" marker whereby they send you a postcard to verify that you have a mailing address, and then you get a little check mark icon on your profile. I don't know how much money that's bringing in, but it can't be very much. (And just think about it: if this process actually does have a material impact on member safety and trust, shouldn't it be mandatory? Isn't that the last thing you'd want to charge for if you have any regard for your members' safety?)
So now they're going to "focus on mobile"? To be honest, I'm not sure what that even means. They've already got mobile apps, which could certainly be better, but this is a network that relies on huge amounts of text-heavy user-generated content — forms, member-to-member references, discussion boards — exactly the kind of content that's difficult to enter and consume on a tiny touchscreen. It's about the farthest thing possible from apps like Instagram or Shazam that play to the strengths of a mobile platform. It seems more like OKCupid or Quora: it needs a good app, no question, but it also needs a fully-featured, well-functioning website — not the kind that can be run by a "skeleton support crew" while they redirect most of their budget to mobile development.
Anyway, maybe this "mobile" thing is just the latest round of buzzword bingo at a company that's out of ideas, but I hope there's something more substantive behind it. And it does suggest the glimmer of a revenue model, which is to simply charge for a mobile app while keeping the website free. That way they're not technically charging for any functionality, just charging to make it easier from a phone.
I can imagine a lot of travellers setting up an account on the website, sending out some hosting requests, and somewhere in transit, frustrated with trying to load the full site on their crappy mobile browser just to find a host's phone number or something, being willing to pony up $5 for the app.
(I can't imagine many new members joining through an app and filling out a decent profile, because that's just too much data entry for a small-screen environment. So again, they still need a usable website.)
Anyway, this paid mobile app strategy would be kind of sneaky, I guess, but at least it would bring in some additional revenue, and it's the only thing I can think of that really would. What else is there?
Last year I wrote about situations where NBA and NFL coaches call more conservative plays than the odds would dictate. Today there's a good article about the baseball equivalent: the sacrifice bunt.
Why do managers call for so many bunts with no outs and a runner on first, when the stats show that it lowers your expected runs scored?
Most sacrifice bunts occur when there's a runner on first with no outs. In those situations the average offense will go on to score 0.783 runs. Let's say a sacrifice bunt in that situation is successful … Now you have a runner on second and one out. The average offense with a runner on second and one out scores 0.699 runs. The run expectancy has decreased thanks to the sacrifice bunt.
Well, I'm not sure those stats go into enough detail to resolve the question. You'd have to know what led up to each situation, for one thing, and where you are in the batting order. Sacrifice plays are not called at random; there are a lot of potential confounding variables.
Also, the expected runs scored may not always be the right metric; sacrifices are more common in one-run games in the late innings, where you'd rather maximize your chances of scoring a single run than maximize the total number of runs scored.
But let's concede for the sake of argument that managers like Dusty Baker are costing their team wins in the long run by bunting too often. Which seems especially likely given that the gap in expected runs has more than doubled in the modern higher-scoring game. Does that fit with my argument in the previous post? Not really.
To recap: the two complaints I talked about were NFL coaches punting too often on fourth downs and NBA coaches not calling for enough three-pointers at the end of close games. In both cases, observers tend to look for the "irrationality" in the coach's head; I thought it might be a fan preference for minimizing regret, one that interfered at the margin with our preference for maximizing victories.
This doesn't usually apply in this situation. If a team has a man on first with no outs, doesn't bunt him to second, and doesn't score, I don't usually think "if only they'd bunted." So I guess we can blame this one on the old-fashioned managers:
…for these reasons of history, psychology, and nerd-hating-ology, the bunt endures, like a cockroach crawling around baseball's basement, even as other relatively new practices … become uncontroversial. At this point, after all we've learned over the past 30 years, calling for the sacrifice bunt feels like muscle memory more than anything else.
What does trigger more regret in baseball, at least for me, is being caught stealing. So you'd think that according to my theory managers might steal fewer bases than is optimal. But I gather that the Moneyball types think that most teams steal more than they should. So … who knows. I guess this is why I'm not a sports pundit.
It's not often that a book is so bad that I feel the need to write about it as a warning to others, but this is one of those times.
That was the opening line of my review of Stranger in a Strange Land two years ago. This month, writer Ian Sales had a similar reaction to another Heinlein "classic":
I'm starting to wonder what I've done that you should all hate me so much you'd make me read Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress…
It's good to know I'm not the only one. His rant is more knowledgeable than mine, but it hits a lot of the same points: Heinlein's sexism, pedantry, clumsy writing and utterly hateful politics make it impossible to understand why he's still considered such a titan of science fiction, or why he ever was.
…as the story progressed, and Heinlein spouted his bullshit through his various characters and manipulated situations to make points with all the subtlety of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I grew to really dislike the book … And I will cheerfully mock anyone who claims it as a classic of the genre. It is didactic in the worst possible sense, its politics are risible, its moral landscape is hopelessly confused, and it reads like the wet dream of the dirty old uncle everyone ignores at the family barbecue.
Go read the whole thing, and then check out Sales' excellent review site Mistressworks to find some better choices.


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