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Amputees who experience "phantom limb pain" could find relief with a 3D virtual reality system that creates the illusion that they can once again control their missing limb.
Stephen Pettifer, from the University of Manchester in the UK, developed the system with colleagues Craig Murray and Toby Howard.
The person using the system wears a head-mounted display and operates a controller with their remaining limb. The system lets them control a virtual arm or a leg, which is shown in 3D in place of their missing limb.
Many people who lose a limb experience the sensation that it is still attached to their body. This is also often accompanied by a feeling of pain in the missing appendage - a condition that can be very severely debilitating.
Brain rewiring
Phantom limb pain is thought to relate to a "rewiring" of different parts of the brain associated with physical stimulus. Signals from other parts of the body may inadvertently be fed into parts of the brain that relate to a missing limb.
Drugs can be used to treat the condition, but Vilayanur Ramachandran, based at the University of California, San Diego, US, also discovered that the illusion of a missing limb can help reduce pain. Ramachandran developed a "mirror box" that creates the visual illusion of two hands for people who actually only have one (see They do it with mirrors).
Pettifer's team tested their high-tech version of the mirror box on five patients suffering from severe phantom limb pain. Each was asked to use their virtual limbs to perform simple tasks, like catching a virtual ball or stepping on highlighted squares. Four out of the five patients said that pain decreased after using the system, although the amount of pain relief was not quantified.
Complete illusion
The researchers believe that the technique may work by somehow activating nerve pathways in the brain that were linked to the missing limb, but that became dormant after its loss.
Brain areas tied to the remaining limb may try to compensate for the dormant side, perhaps creating phantom limb pain. The virtual system may prevent this compensation by reactivating the dormant areas, they speculate.
Pettifer admits that the results are preliminary but says the experiment shows promise. "These were all people who have stubborn conditions," he told New Scientist.
He adds that the virtual reality system may have advantages over the mirror box because it creates a more complete illusion for a user.
The researchers intend to test their system on more patients to discover which patients it is most effective for.
Details of the research will appear in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Disability and Human Development.
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Buy Tickets Family Films
Show From Series
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January 05, 2014
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
What's that very blue thing?
It's the new V60 engineered by Polestar, a Swedish motorsport outfit that's proved it knows a thing or two about building fast race cars.
Polestar has been making championship-winning Volvo-based STCC cars since '96, and more recently caused quite a stir Down Under by splitting the Holden/Ford dominance in V8 supercars. This V60, however, is the speedy Scandis first full-on production road car.


text:
EAVESDROPPING on Saturn's rings is revealing secrets of the gas giant's vast interior.
Conventional wisdom says that Saturn contains a solid central core surrounded by a roiling gassy-liquid mix of helium and hydrogen. "It's like a giant lava lamp – a slow boiling motion," says Jim Fuller of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California. This flow was thought to keep everything evenly mixed.
But images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft revealed steady vibrations at six different places in Saturn's rings. Even though the rings are thousands of kilometres from Saturn's surface, vibrations in them correspond to the way the planet squishes and contracts.
Now Fuller has run a computer simulation of the vibrating rings. The results suggest that Saturn must have a stable, stratified layer, perhaps of liquid and rock, between the core and roiling exterior (Icarus, doi.org/vbh).
This is the first time a seismological investigation has been conducted on another planet. Future work should reveal more about the structure and evolution of gas giants.
This article appeared in print under the headline "To see inside Saturn, watch its rings"
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text:
Canada's John Tavares Done In Sochi
By Sports Talk Florida
News Desk
Follow @ SportsTalkFLA
News Desk
Follow @ SportsTalkFLA
According to Arthur Staple of News Day, John Tavares of Canada is done in the Olympics due to a knee injury that he suffered today against Latvia. No timetable has been set for return.
Source says Tavares has a knee injury, done for Olympics. No word beyond that as of yet. #Isles
— Arthur Staple (@StapeNewsday) February 19, 2014


text:
The Growing Threat from Female Suicide Bombers
IPT News
March 29, 2010
Two women believed to be Chechen rebels blew themselves up in Moscow's metro during morning rush hour Monday, killing at least 35 people and injuring 100 more.
Law enforcement officials in Washington and New York beefed up security in their respective subway systems in response.
The attacks at Lubyanka and Park Kultyry stations come on the heels of a recent threat assessment issued by the Office of Intelligence and Operations Coordination at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency.
The Investigative Project has reviewed the sensitive, but unclassified, assessment, Female Suicide Bombers, which puts the attacks in Russia in the context of a broader threat. Referencing open source reporting, the primary finding of the threat assessment is that:
"al Qa'ida terror cells have trained a group of female suicide bombers to attack Western targets including airlines. These women may have a non Arab appearance and may be traveling on Western passports."
These "bombshells" are part of an evolving terrorist threat challenging U.S. law enforcement to reassess not only the physical and psychological characteristics of terrorists but also the methods available for concealing explosives.
As the report details, while the Moscow bombing is the most recent, it falls into a long line of attacks by female suicide bombers. "Since 1985, there have been in excess of 262 women suicide bombers," it says.
The first known female suicide bomber may have been 16 year old Sana'a Youcef Mehaidli, a member of the secular Syrian Social Nationalist Party. On April 9, 1985, Mehaidli drove an explosive laden truck into an Israeli Defense Force convoy, killing two soldiers and injuring another two.
On May 21, 1991, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam a female militant with the Tamil Tigers, carried out a suicide bombing which resulted in the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Of interest, the Tamil Tigers have used more female suicide bombers than any other militant group.
In July 1996, the Kurdistan Workers Party, utilizing a female suicide bomber, attacked a military parade marching through the eastern town of Tunceli, Turkey. As Turkish soldiers were walking by, an apparently pregnant woman stepped from the crowd, revealed that she was carrying a bomb and not a baby under her dress, and detonated it, killing nine and injuring 20 others.
Between 2000 and 2004, female Chechen rebels, known as "Black Widows" repeatedly attacked Russian military targets on subways, at concerts and on airlines. For example, two women, dressed head-to-toe in black, carried out an attack on an annual music festival in July 2003, killing 14 people. Both bombers tried to enter the concert but were denied entry, and instead detonated the explosives at the venue's entrance.
On May 1, 2008, a female suicide bomber from al Qaida in Iraq blew herself up at a wedding reception in Baghdad. The bomber, imitating pregnancy, detonated the explosives while members of the passing wedding party played music and danced.
A November 2008 attack in Baghdad which left five people dead and 17 wounded was carried out by a female suicide bomber outside the green zone in Baghdad. The attack occurred as people were waiting to go through a security checkpoint.
In February of 2010, a female suicide bomber walking among Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad detonated an explosive belt, killing at least 54 people and wounding more than 122. The bomber hid the explosives underneath an abaya, and detonated the bomb while waiting with other women to be searched by female security guards.
Reviewing these and other cases, the Office of Intelligence and Operations Coordination, identified the following commonalities among female suicide bombers:
- The majority of female suicide bombers are young, primarily between the ages of 17 and 24, however, the overall range in age for female suicide bombers is from 15-64.
- Female suicide bombers come from various educational, religious, social, and personal backgrounds.
- Education places a role, with the "more educated" females such as lawyers, paramedics, or students accounting for the greatest percentage of suicide attacks.
- Most tend to be of average economic status and are rarely impoverished.
- Some may be "dishonored" through sexual indiscretion, or unable to produce children.
- Some appear motivated by revenge or grief from losing husbands or children.
While their socioeconomic background and motivations may vary, one thing is clear. Terrorist groups have been more than happy to welcome female militants into the fold. Both Osama bin Laden and Egyptian radical cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi have endorsed the recruitment of women to attack U.S. and Western interests. Even Hamas, which initially forbade the use of female operatives, sponsored female suicide attacks, acknowledging females suicide bombers as fellow martyrs.
Female Terrorists Pose New Obstacles
With female suicide bombers becoming more and more common, it is important to realize that not only will females have different - or possibly greater - access to particular locations, but they will be able to conceal bombs in different ways. As the threat assessment explains:
"[T]he continued use of female suicide bombers indicates that terrorists judge this tactic as effective in increasing defenses and thwarting security measures, referring to the advantage that female suicide bombers have over male counterparts in their ability to conceal explosives as well as their capacity to approach their targets with less scrutiny."
Nowhere are these benefits clearer than in a recent story detailing how terrorists could use exploding breast implants to blow of airplanes.
In the past, terrorist groups primarily utilized many of the same mechanisms that were available for male suicide bombers. As the threat assessment demonstrates, explosive devices concealed on women in the past had the following characteristics:
- A simple toggle or push button switch commonly used to complete the electronic circuit. If the individual was hesitant, the device could be triggered remotely allowing an experienced cadre to retain control until the desired detonation time.
- Included shrapnel, such as nails, glass, fragments, marbles, or other small metal pieces. In many suicide attacks, the dispersal of fragments is the primary mechanism that causes death.
- Closely attacked to the body by use of a vest or belt. Explosives have also been concealed in a backpack or pocket book.
But now, terrorist groups are taking advantage of the "benefits" of using women to carry explosives. A recent news account revealed that MI5 discovered that doctors have trained at Britain's leading hospitals and have returned to their own countries to fit individuals with surgical implants filled with explosives. Reportedly, al Qa'ida has already experimented with placing PETN in plastic bags and surgically implanting them in female's breasts to give the impression they have undergone breast augmentation.
Monday's attack in Moscow wasn't the first example of female suicide bombers, and as the threat assessment reveals, it is not likely to be the last. U.S. law enforcement officials recognize that the deadly tactic one day may make its way to America.
Reader comments on this item
Increase in female Suicide Bombers
Submitted by Farukh Sarwar, Apr 6, 2010 07:25
The increase in female suicide bombers is a dangerous trend, but it is also important not to affiliate it with Muslims only. As the author explained, there are a number of other examples where women with other religious affiliations carried out these attacks in order to pursue their respective objectives.
Collective Retribution
Submitted by Ed Zuiderwijk, Apr 3, 2010 10:12
The conclusion that security forces will draw is that if you take out an islamic terrorist, you also go after his wife or wives. And if that's not effective then after the rest of the family, until the message gets through that making choices has consequences.
It appears that the Israeli policy of collective retribution is right after all, however unpallatable.
The first government which actually implements such tactics, likely Russia, will, predictably, face a torrent of criticism, not least from Muslim countries. The proper way to counter that is by pointing out that, according to the mohammedan faith, everything that happens does so because it is the will of Allah. And one can't disagree with his will, can one?
Support for Female Suicide Bombers
Submitted by Philip Henika, Apr 1, 2010 14:20
Suffice it to say, successful bombings by suicidals have plot and logistical support in terms of recruitment (e.g. kavkaz.com?), training (in the past - alias Umm Usama or Osama - female suicide bombers were alledgely trained by her), and operations.
as always, Steven, spot-on
Submitted by Abigail Esman, Mar 30, 2010 01:27
What many also are forgetting are the women from the West who are also being recruited - such as Muriel Degaques, the Belgian woman who blew herself up in 2005. Women are especially likely to convert to Islam these days, as noted in a British report, and new converts are especially vulnerable to recruiters from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. New York's efforts to search backpacks on the subways brought on a slew of complaints, but the fact is that the failure to do so would only bring on more protest in the event of an attack -- and there will be one. And still, most European countries refuse to ban the burqa.
When will the public understand?
Abigail R. Esman
Coming soon from Praeger:
RADICAL STATE: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy In The West
Comment on this item
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- Egyptian Magazine: Muslim Brotherhood Infiltrates Obama Administration
- Is the Obama Administration Forfeiting IAEA Inspections of Iranian Military Sites?


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Remembering Chloe......
(Page 1 of 2: Viewing Diary Entry 1 to 10)
Page Links: 1 2
The 9th year without youJuly 17th 2014 4:33 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
I still remember the days of you being here like yesterday. Never any trouble really, well behaved from the start, gentle, loving, always a happy girl... I see your pictures around the house and remember you and playing ball in the back yard till my shoulder would hurt, watching you "eyeball" the squirrels and bounce up and down in the front window as the kids went off to school each day. I remember those first days when I was on my own, all alone after you were gone and how awful it was. Then Chopper came and he was so much trouble. I compared him to you all the time and then I learned not to. Now my buddy is ailing and I must take care of him. Ivy is 17 yrs old and they both need me the way you needed me. I promise you I will do a better job for them because of the things I learned from you. Rest in peach my precious girl. There will never be another you.
8 long yearsJuly 17th 2013 3:51 am
[ Leave A Comment | 1 person already has ]
I still miss you each and every day Chloe. I must feel now the way you felt then, old and tired. Sometimes I just want to give up but I haven't yet. I hope you are free from pain and running after a tennis ball the way you used to love to do. I just thought of you and our mornings together today and remembered what to today was and how much I miss you. One day, perhaps soon, we will play together in "our" back yard once again. I still love you. Dad.
the 7th yearJuly 17th 2012 6:47 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
I bet you thought I forgot... I might have but my heart won't let me. I think of you everyday and how gentle and soft you were. My heart still breaks at the loss of you and I can only hope that one day I will feel that warm muzzle against my neck and I can feel the way I used to feel. Ivy and Chopper are great companions but there will be forever only one Chloe for me. Love Dad.
The 6th year, everything changes.July 17th 2011 4:53 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
Just before you went away, everything changed. I was at home happy to be with you until you were gone. Then I was alone, some more hurt came and went... then Chopper came and helped me by just being here. Now things have changed again. I am grateful that he and Ivy have each other through the day and I know that you are there to watch over them in spirit. I still think of you most everyday. Your picture is still everywhere and I do my best not to forget. The tree we planted as our last outdoor adventure blew over in a storm this week. I always called it "Chloe's tree". I feel more change is coming. I count on the things you taught me to get me through it. I still remember, miss and love you Chloe... especially today. Love Daddy.
5 years and still rememberingJuly 17th 2010 8:50 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
It's been 5 years Chlo and still remembering you. So much has changed in life but so much of you is still here. I remember our last days and our first days as if they were yesterday. Your picture is still on the fridge and I still find bits of you around the house :) Your yard is well taken care of I think of you every mowing day. I remember how much you liked the back yard just after it was mowed. We miss you.
Four long yearsJuly 17th 2009 6:06 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
Dear Chlo,
Three years gonebyJuly 17th 2008 6:56 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
Today it has been three years since we last held our Chlo. The day still haunts me and it is truly one of the saddest times of my life. For now I try to keep Chlo's memory alive with me and remember little things about her. At about 7 years old she learned to talk. She would grumble at us and "roo" then at about 11 years she just became quiet again. We still had long conversations though. I still miss you stinkerbell, I guess I always will.
Two Years Gone ByeJuly 17th 2007 5:02 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
It's been two long years since Chloe left us. So much has happened since then. Grandma Betty has left us and Ivy lives with us now. We remember how when you visited Grandma Betty and Ivy that you couldn't wait to leave because Ivy was such a pest to you. Well my dear sweatheart with Chopper around she is getting a little taste of her own medicine. They are so different from you as you were quiet and retiring, steadfast, gentle and mindful. They are loud and the world is all about them. It's so different from sharing my quiet days with you. I miss you still to the point it hurts. I love you my little "stinkerbell".
Holiday TimeNovember 8th 2006 6:44 am
[ Leave A Comment ]
Halloween has come and gone and now the holidays are here. Chloe used to love Halloween. She would greet every visitor and try to stick her head in their goody bag. She never took anything, she just wanted to see if there was anything in there. She loved to woof at the door each time the bell would ring and then stick her head out. Some people would step back just due to her size but most just wanted to pet her. She loved being patted on the head and then she would retire to the window to wait for the next group. Sometimes when it was really busy we'd just sit out on the front porch and wait. She would sit and wag her tail at everyone that approached and when they got close enough she would stand and do the "wiggle walk" over to them to pet her. In the later years when she would get cold she would stand at the door and we'd go back inside. I miss those times.
Chloe comes homeJuly 23rd 2006 12:05 pm
[ Leave A Comment ]
I remember the day when and how I met Chloe. There is a story about how she got home but this is when I first saw her. Carol and I didn't have a lot of money and we lived in a 950 sq foot house in the North St. Louis suburbs. It was our first house and it was warm and cozy cool in Summer with a large fenced back yard. For a while we had been "borrowing" various neighbor's dogs and playing with them in our back yard but when ever Carol broached the subject of a dog I always said no. Carol had gone to the park to walk and I was home. It was a hot 4th of July week-end and I was in the basement doing laundry. The laundry room had a small ground level basement window about 12x12 inches that looked out onto the patio. I was loading clothes into the washing machine that sat just under the window but wasn't looking out. I heard the back door open above my head and footsteps in the kitchen which I though odd because Carol would come in through the front door. She would have to go through the outside side gate and into the back yard and walk around the house to come in the back... I couldn't understand why but no matter I went on trying to stuff as many clothes into the washer as would fit. I heard the back door again and the outside faucet come on which is about 2 feet to the right of the window. This made me finally glance out the window. There dancing in front of th window were 4 black dog legs one with a white toe on one paw. You couldn't see the body of the dog because I was standing in front of the washer and she was right in front of the window. I knew in moment what had happened. I was already forming my mouth into a "No". I figured out that we were already watering the dog and I'm sure feeding would come next. Then I heard the back door open and the sweet voice of my dear Carol say these words... "Galen... Can you come up here and look at something?" This is the way she would say things when the kitchen faucet wouldn't shut off, the toilet was overflowing, the microwave was making lightening bolts inside or something like that. I already knew what it was, I just wasn't prepared for what I saw. She was a large puppy. Not a dog but a puppy, but it was too large to be a puppy but it obviously was a puppy. She was black all over except for a couple of white toes and a white patch on her chest that looked like the greek letter "pie". She was happy and dancing around and lapping at the water bowl. I heard the story of how she was found at the park. (which I will leave for Carol to tell) and how Carol had to bring her home and why. So there we were... I opened the back door and in she went bounding up the 3 steps into the kitchen running, no, lopeing from room to room in our tiny house. I sent Carol off to the local Pet-co to get the largest crate they had ($124.00 out of our budget) and some food. Chloe wasn't entirely happy with the sleeping arangements that first night, the crate barly allowed her to stand up straight, but it wasn't terrible and that was the start of many memories for the next 12 years. (and a new crate just a week later...)
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Chloe ~Over the Rainbow Bridge
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Network Synchroniser by Emlyn O'Regan
Syyncc is a tool for tying together your social networks. Currently it supports Facebook and Google's Buzz, with read-only Google+ and experimental Wordpress support, but plans are to add support for many more networks.
With Syyncc, you can post in one of your networks, and have the post automatically copy to the rest. For example, you can post in Google+ and have that post copy to Facebook, Buzz and to your Wordpress blog. Even better, if anyone comments on your post in any of your networks, the comment will be copied to all the other networks too.
Google+ support: currently one direction only (from Google+ out to other networks, Syyncc can't yet write anything to Google+). Syyncc works with PUBLIC posts only.
Facebook support: Syyncc respects your privacy, and will only work with your posts to Everyone, not with those to Friends or Friends of Friends.
Buzz support: Syyncc will only work with your posts to Public, and will leave Private posts untouched.
Experimental Wordpress Support: Wordpress support still has some issues, but is available to try.
Syyncc is free. Help me with server fees!
Want to know what's happening with Syyncc? Join the google group "syyncc", here.
Find Emlyn on


text:
Martinsville, VA (Sports Network) - Kevin Harvick won his second straight
Sprint Cup Series race on Sunday, but it wasn't to the delight of the
estimated crowd of 60,000 on hand for the Goody's Fast Relief 500 at
Martinsville Speedway.
Harvick, who won last weekend at his home track in California, prevented Dale
Earnhardt Jr. -- NASCAR's most popular driver -- an opportunity to end his
winless streak that dates back to June 2008 at Michigan.
Earnhardt Jr. passed Kyle Busch for the lead with 21 laps remaining in the
500-lap affair at the flat, half-mile Virginia track. But Harvick took over
the top position with four laps to go when Earnhardt Jr. got loose, allowing
Harvick to squeak by him.
Harvick dealt with a loose car and fell back in the field in the early going,
but he patiently made his way to the front in the late stages. He crossed the
finish line 0.7 seconds ahead of Earnhardt Jr. to become the first repeat
winner in the series this season.
"I didn't think we had the car to do that," said Harvick, who led just six
laps. "I had a lot of fun racing with Dale Jr. I hate to be the bad guy here,
but we're in it to win it."
Last Sunday at California, Harvick passed Jimmie Johnson and led only the
final lap for the victory.
It was Harvick's 16th career Cup win, but his first at Martinsville. He also
gave team owner Richard Childress his first victory here since Dale
Earnhardt's win in the fall 1995 race.
Earnhardt Jr.'s winless drought now stretches to 99 races.
"[Harvick] was coming, and there wasn't much I could do," a disappointed
Earnhardt Jr. said. "I got a little loose coming into [turn] one, and I wanted
to do a cross-over move. I thought I had that."
Busch dominated during a series of long green-flag stretches in the second
half, but the final caution for an incident involving Regan Smith occurred 34
laps away from the finish. That allowed Earnhardt Jr. to chase down Busch for
the lead just after the last restart.
"We just didn't have a short-run car today," Busch said. "We were really good
on the long runs, but it just wasn't a long-run race there at the end."
Busch led the most laps with 151, but ended up in third.
Juan Pablo Montoya finished fourth, while Jeff Gordon, a seven-time
Martinsville race winner, took the fifth spot.
Matt Kenseth, pole sitter Jamie McMurray, David Ragan, Clint Bowyer and Mark
Martin, who made his 800th career Cup start, completed the top-10.
Five-time defending series champion Jimmie Johnson was in contention to win
until he was slapped with a pit-road speeding penalty during the final round
of stops. Johnson, who has won at Martinsville six times, settled for an 11th-
place finish.
Denny Hamlin, who had won the last three races at Martinsville, led a total of
89 laps, but faded in the second half en route to a 12th-place run.
The race featured a track-record 31 lead changes, as well as 11 cautions --
including one for a vicious accident involving Martin Truex Jr. and Kasey
Kahne on lap 221.
The throttle in Truex's car became stuck, causing him to hit Kahne, therefore
sending both drivers straight into the wall.
"When you usually get hit here, you spin out because somebody is mad," Kahne
said. "I knew that the throttle had stuck on Martin's car, because he drove me
through the wall."
Truex's battered car briefly erupted into flames. Both drivers were not
injured in what is being considered one of the hardest crashes to occur at
NASCAR's oldest and shortest track on the schedule.
NASCAR halted the race for 25 minutes to allow track personnel to repair the
SAFER (Steel And Foam Energy Reduction) barrier on the outside wall.
"I was thinking, 'Oh man, this is going to hurt,' but it didn't hurt at all,"
Truex said. "I want to thank NASCAR and everybody who built the SAFER barrier
and these cars; they're unbelievable. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have been
standing here."
After the sixth race of the season, Kyle Busch took over the points lead. His
advantage is five markers over Carl Edwards, who finished one lap behind in


text:
Hello March, I am so glad to see you. February was kind of rough. Between the bitter cold and deary cloudy days making me mopey and the lovely letter from the IRS that required over 100 hours of work to prove my business expenses for my 2012 tax return, and emotionally/logistically prepping for my first… [read more]
Why Women Really Cut Their Hair
Double Your Eyelashes The Natural Way
If you are in the mood to really let your light shine bright and be seen, check out my new obsession! Younique mascara. After living in Palm Beach County, I started to notice that all the fashionable mamas here had these beautiful, long-but-natural looking eyelashes. Later, I found out they were fake eyelashes and the… [read more]
2013 Recap and 2014 Goals
Two years ago, I implemented a new way to do New Year's Resolutions in hopes that it would give me a higher success rate of actually accomplishing my goals. In the past, I would write a 4 page diatribe of everything that I wanted to improve on in my life and then at the… [read more]
Advent + St. Nicholas
This year I am starting a new tradition for my little family and I thought I would share. It was inspired by my sweet friend Haley and her new book: Feast! Real Food, Reflections and Simple Living for the Christian Year. Haley, like me, is Catholic, but her ebook is great for any Christian wishing to… [read more]
Is There a Healthy Way to Smoke?
Now don't anybody go and stone me because what I am about to say is pretty radical. Y'all know I believe that everything in moderation is healthy. Even smoking. I'm talking nicotine here, I don't really know anything about marijuana other than I really don't like the feeling of being high, I didn't like feeling… [read more]
No More Ads! + Be a M+BL Angel Investor
Hey, reader! You've been around here awhile (Can't believe my 4 year blogging anniversary came and went last month!). You've got kids of your own, maybe a couple, maybe a bunch, maybe a home and a husband. Maybe you're a young woman, smartly starting to learn about motherhood before you conceive. Maybe M+BL has helped… [read more]
Stay Together
Since we moved a month ago, staying connected with friends has been a priority. I have never been so happy to have an iPhone and live in a time when I can call someone on my computer and see their face instantly. I have never been a good keep-in-toucher, but hopefully with things like… [read more]
I am Catholic and I am Pro Gay Marriage
I have sat on this post for months, too terrified to actually publish it. But when my 17 year old cousin committed suicide a few weeks ago, possibly in part because he was struggling with being gay, it was the last straw. This post was originally about me being pro-gay marriage, but I will not… [read more]
Entheos Presents: May Cause Miracles – A Free Life-Changing Seminar
Mamas! If you are short on time, don't even read my post. Just GO NOW AND SIGN UP for this event. Trust me. If you need a little nudge, check out Gabby's YouTube channel and website. Or her book May Cause Miracles-a 40 Day Guidebook of Subtle Shifts to Radical Change and Unlimited Happiness. Her… [read more]
Who's Taking Care of the Little Girl in You?
The article that was written about me this month in a local magazine (I am the cover too!) is about Self Love and making yourself a priority. So here is a quick little Valentine's Day message from me to you about this topic! It's just a little reminder to not forget yourself this holiday and to… [read more]
Let's Talk About My Potty Mouth
Sooooo….can we talk curse words for a minute? I have been cussing on my blog since I very first started blogging back in 2009. As M+BL grew, I started getting emails like this: "You are so awesome, I love you so much, but why do you have to cuss, can you please stop?" To which… [read more]
Ten Habits That Make Me Happy and Healthy
Over the years I have picked up healthy habits here and there. Some I would only pull out in an official detox period, like dry brushing, and some have always been a daily habit, like lemon water. After finally reading the GAPS Diet book (it took me years to get the courage to even read… [read more]
A Seasonal Habit
A tattered, faded, pinkish chair looking orange in harsh winter sunlight coming through the window. Ugly but with a "sink into it" comfort. I'll be sitting here later. A glass topped end table. With wheels. A small metal tub sits next it. Repurposed. It used to house geraniums on a tiny porch in a bygone… [read more]
Unlock Your Greatness Event with Sarah Finks (I'm a Speaker!)
The Unlock Your Greatness Event With a Free Pass for YOU! January 28th – February 1st Did you know that the majority of women today describe their life as fine? There is certainly nothing wrong with fine. But have you ever imagined what a little bit of greatness in your life could do? Do you… [read more]
Workout Just 3 Hours a Week and be Slim and Healthy
There are 148 hours in every week. I only use 3 of them for working out, and that's plenty. Yes, you can workout just three hours a week and be healthy and slender. To prove my point, I am going way out on a limb and showing pictures of my full body (and my sweet… [read more]
2012 Recap, 2013 Goals (with free printable) and Reader Survey!
2012 was quite the year for me. The beginning was incredibly difficult – I had a miscarriage at the end of my first trimester. But it also brought so many beautiful things, which is usually how it goes. There can be no birth, renewal, or beginnings without something dying or being destroyed. The Destroyer Archetype… [read more]


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Hello there — I'm Paul Bupe Jr! I'm a freelance designer currently based in Statesboro, GA with an interest in print media, web design and development, and video / motion graphics. I design wedding invitations, logos, posters, resumes, t-shirts, websites, user interfaces, and a whole lot more.
I've created logos and designs for Georgia Southern University, created many websites, real-time apps, and WordPress themes; designed one of the all-time best selling postcards on Creationswap, and overall just created many clean and beautiful works. Take a look at a few of my designs here.
Interested in hiring me for a project? Use the simple form below!


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After a decade long wait the plan to open an Islamic arts centre at the Louvre Museum has finally materialized. The department, initially suggested by France's ex-President, Jacques Chirac, has now officially opened.
Over $130 million dollars put forwarded by the French government and several Islamic states, including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman and Azerbaijan, have been spent in a bid to restore the glory of Islamic art and culture in the heart of Paris.
The official inauguration ceremony took place on Tuesday, with Princess Lalla Meryem of Morocco participating in the event. The museum will open to the public on Saturday.
The Islamic art gallery is set to open on September 22, becoming the museum's first major development since the infamous glass pyramid.
That project, built by Architects Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti, created a modern addition to the Louvre's historical 17-century facades. Their golden glass roof resting on transparent glass walls covering the palace's Visconti courtyard.
Today's latest addition includes a 3000 square meter wing, housing around 3,000 exhibits from the 7th to the 19th centuries, many of the pieces will be showcased for the first time. The collection includes an impressive selection of carpets and textiles. It comprises pieces from Spain, Egypt, India, Persia and Central Asia.
The head of the Islamic arts department at the Louvre, Sophie Makariou, said the aim is to show "Islam with a capital I."
"We must give back the word Islam its full glory… and not leave it to the jihadists to tarnish it," she said.


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Endangered Turtle Hatches At Oregon Coast Aquarium
December 19, 2005
A highly endangered species of turtle added a new member to its dwindling population this month. A baby Vietnamese leaf turtle hatched at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and is doing well — showing signs of growth and strength. "Turtle Trek: A Journey of Survival" has been a popular exhibit since it opened in May of this year at the Aquarium. Key topics of this exhibit reveal how turtle and tortoise habitats are disappearing at an alarming rate world wide and show what we can do to help. "I did my best to replicate this turtle's native habitat, Halong Bay, Vietnam," according to aquarist, Evonne Mochon-Collura, who cares for the Vietnamese leaf turtles. "This particular pair, the male and female are from a private collection, and we were told she was very old, so we assumed there was no chance for her to lay eggs—this was a complete surprise!"
Mochon-Collura noticed the female turtle had stopped eating and had propped herself up against the edge of her tank for four days straight. She began to watch her carefully because unusual behaviors could indicate changes in health. "I was concerned because we had ruled out the possibility that she might lay eggs," said Mochon-Collura. That was until the morning of August 14 when Mochon-Collura came in to work and found three eggs sitting in the turtle's tank. She removed them to protect them and began incubation. As it turned out, only one of the three eggs was fertilized; the other two contained only yolk and fluid.
Mochon-Collura found an internet group that exchanges information about this specific species, so she was able to get a wealth of information about incubating the eggs and caring for the baby turtle after it hatched. She began candling it (shining an LED light to it) every ten days after 60 days of incubation to monitor its growth. "I was so excited to see the turtle's silhouette move – it was just amazing!" Mochon-Collura, who is an aquarist at the Aquarium and also teaches biology at OCCC, said the embryo was just a dense spot at first, but as time went on she watched formation of its body and eyes. Incubation took a total of 108 days. "I went in to check on it on the 108th day and saw a head peeking out of the egg!" She said it stayed there for most of the day but then it finally walked out that night, with the yolk-sac still attached. The yolk continues to nourish the baby for a few weeks after hatching.
The baby had its first meal at 13 days old. "We put a tiny cricket in its water dish and it saw the movement and went for it." Mochon-Collura says she is now interested in captive breeding because it alleviates pressure on wild populations. The owner of the Vietnamese Leaf Turtle has another pair that has reproduced in captivity, but the female on loan to the aquarium hadn't produced eggs until now. "It's unusual for this species to lay more than two eggs at a time and these were larger than normal as well, so we think she must be very content in her habitat we created for her here. It was incredible how the baby turtle just knew what to do after barely a day," said Mochon-Collura, who cites this as one of the best experiences of her life. "It has been very active, alert and strong. When it wrapped its claw around my finger I couldn't believe how strong it was!" The baby turtle, which is barely bigger than a quarter, will be on display this week in the turtle exhibit near its parents and will remain here until the turtle exhibit ends in April, 2006.


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Filmed February 28th, 2010 in Vancouver, Washington. First part is Becca talking, second part is Sing Me A Love Song acoustic.
This was filmed on February 28th, 2010 at the Love & War Tour stop in Vancouver, Washington.
Here is yet another wallpaper. I really like the song Come Alive, so I decided "Hey, why not make a wallpaper?" And so I did.
Here is another wallpaper I made. I guess you can tell what I do on rainy days. I hope you like it!
I really liked this picture for the new album, so I decided to make a wallpaper.
Here is another BarlowGirl wallpaper that I made. I hope you like it!! :)
BarlowGirl's new album, Love & War is so awesome. I really like the message, the songs, and the pictures.
My favorite songs would probably be:
Come Alive
Running Out of Time
Our Worlds Collide
Time For You To Go
And Beautiful Ending.
I love all of the songs though. :)
I like how they showed two sides of Christianity. The side of love (For God so loved the world - John 3:16). And the side of the spiritual battle, war ( Sustain from the passions which wage war against your soul - 1 Peter 2:11). And that all that we fight for is for the love of God.
This is a really great cd, and if you have not bought it yet, I urge you to do so.
"For I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes..."
- Romans 1:16
Here is a BarlowGirl wallpaper I made from their new photos from Love & War!!!
© 2012 Word Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.


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The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says an "open" internet, free of Government and corporate controls, is crucial.
The physicist is in New Zealand for a series of public appearances, including a rare public lecture at Te Papa museum in Wellington.
Three hundred people attended the lecture tonight and appropriately those who missed out on tickets could log on and watch it streamed live through the internet.
Sir Tim said it was important to ensure the internet is a place of open communication.
"The fact that everybody can talk to everybody else is really important," he said ahead of his lecture which looked at the value of the 'Open Internet' and why it matters for New Zealand and the world.
"That's sometimes called net neutrality so make sure Governments and companies across the world don't try to take control of the web for their own purposes."
Sir Tim explains net neutrality to be like a sheet of paper.
"A sheet of paper does not have opinions about what's written on it. You can write good things and bad things but the paper itself is neutral."
The physicist is revered within computer programming circles for creating the system for interlinked web pages which are accessed using the internet.
Berners-Lee uploaded his first web page using the internet back in 1990 and has since overseen the development of the Web as the director of the World Wide Web Consortium.
He even had a cameo spot at the Opening Ceremony for the London Olympics last year, tweeting live from the stadium on one of the computers he used to first pioneer the Web more than 20 years ago.
The issue of copyright and internet freedom has been particularly topical in New Zealand in the past year with the ongoing extradition case for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom.
The internet tycoon is wanted by US authorities for online piracy charges related to his former file sharing website.


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CU: Home • A to Z • Campus Map
The University of Colorado Boulder's Center for Community has received a LEED platinum rating -- the highest possible designation -- from the United States Green Building Council.
LEED certification is a U.S. benchmark for sustainable building design and construction. The $84.4 million Center for Community, with 317,000 gross square feet, is about 30 percent more energy and water efficient than modern code-compliant buildings of the same size and function.
The University of Colorado Student Government has reduced the net emissions of greenhouse gases, or GHGs, from its student-run facilities to zero after committing in 2007 to reach carbon neutrality.
CUSG operates three large CU-Boulder facilities including the University Memorial Center, Student Recreation Center and Wardenburg Health Center.
Anchored by a 900-seat street-market style dining hall offering freshly prepared food in nine specialty dining stations, the new Center for Community at CU-Boulder opened for students in August 2010.
The central dining hall is the hub of the 183,000-square-foot student center, which brings together 12 student support offices that had been scattered in buildings and dorms throughout the campus. The offices include Career Services, the Center for Multicultural Affairs, Counseling and Psychological Services, the Office of International Education, and the Office of Victim Assistance.
Every gift matters, no matter the size.
What kind of Buff will you be?
Be in the know. Know what to do.
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Kismayo — Heavy fighting erupted in Afmadow town of southern Somalia between Somali government forces aided by Kenyan-AMISOM troops and Al Shabaab militants, Garowe Online reports.
Local reports say that Al Shabaab militants attacked the town from different directions.
"We heard the sound of heavy gunfire in the outskirts of [Afmadow] town. After the fighting, there were 7 reported casualties including civilians," said a Afmadow resident speaking to Somali media via telephone.
Casu alty figures could not be independently verified.
Somali military officials confirmed the fighting, but noted that they "repulsed" the Al Shabaab attack on Afmadow.
Al Shabaab spokesman claimed that the militants killed a number of Somali and Kenyan soldiers. Kenyan troops serving under the auspices of the U.N.-approved AMISOM peacekeeping force are deployed in parts of Lower Shabelle region bordering Kenya, including the strategic port town of Kismayo.
Af madow residents said it was the "heaviest fighting" in Afmadow since Al Shabaab militants were removed fr om the town in 20 12. Al S habaab militants still control many districts across Somalia , while governm ent forces have seized provincial capitals.
Al Shabaab militants controlled Kismayo and most districts in Jubaland regions between 2008 and until September 2012, when Somali government forces aided by Kenyan-AMISOM troops seized Kismayo and neighboring towns.


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Surprise treats mean a lot on a trip — just ask Norwegian explorer Aleksander Gamme, who in this video finds a secret stash of junk food, and promptly freaks out.
Do you see things like chocolate and treats as unnecessary dead weight on a trip? Think again. It's no mistake that bags of cheez doodles, gumdrops(?), chocolate and snooty cheese are in Gamme's supply cache… These things fuel morale.
Gamme describes the scene:
This is day 86 on my full return South Pole Expedition 2011/2012. I'm quite hungry and about to pick up my last cache by my second pulk which I left on the way in. As a part of my motivational plan I have on purpose not made notes on what goodies I have left behind in the cache… and on this last one, I didn't expect very much…
The video is, of course, in Norwegian, but while we here on staff don't know his exact words, he's happy enough to be purring (2:50) and singing the Hallelujah Chorus.
Gamme's notion of planning unexpected delights (no less, for himself!) is a really smart one. Morale can take many different forms, but when it's bathed in chocolate or hydrogenated cheese powder, it turns even a mundane trip around 180 degrees.
Are you planning a wilderness trip soon? Here are some ideas we've used to keep spirits high among our ranks:
Snacks as rewards
I've brought bags of individually-wrapped Twix bars on guys' trips, and used them as rewards in contests of skill. Delicious caramel-coated cookie crunch goes to whomever catches the first fish; or can hit a target with the slingshot, etc.
Sweets as sanity-savers
A dozen or so Tootsie-Roll Pops are always in our thwart bag when we have kids with us. When boredom strikes or bickering ensues, it's amazing how a little sugar can inspire a 'tudinal adjustment.
Saving for a rainy day
Stuck under a tarp in a downpour? or worse, in a tent? In times like these, even the smallest bits of happiness can save the day. Go for the secret stash of sweets.
Dessert to the rescue
Nothing caps off a day like dessert. And that doesn't always have to mean more dishes, or fussing with improvised reflector oven. Candy bars, cookies from home, instant pudding mixed into your drinking cup… anything goes. Your camp mates will never ever forget desserts you serve on the trail. A favorite of ours are packs of mini-stroopwafels we purchase at Trader Joe's.
I've now made it a personal goal to plan a surprise worthy enough to make my friends howl in surprise on our next trip… just like Aleksander.
What are your favorite snacks or desserts to bring on a trip?
Via Trailspace.


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MySQL 5.1: New Version of Open Source Database
Sun Microsystems has realized the second quarter announced release of version 5.1 of MySQL.
On this new release, the developers have concentrated on performance, which has improved database acceleration by 15%. New are five methods of horizontal partition: range, hash, key, list and composite. Also new is the hybrid replication and the Event Scheduler, which enables repeated SQL based tasks to be automated.
Supported operating systems include Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Enterprise Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Free BSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, IBM i5/OS and all Linux distributions.
Sun has made three MySQL versions of the 5.1 available for download: The community server under GPL, a subscription on the Enterprise Server and the commercially licensed embedded server.
Issue 177/2015
Buy this issue as a PDF
NoScript Flaw
Mozilla's script blocker add-on could be putting malware sites on the whitelist.
RIP SSLv3
The Internet community officially banishes the notoriously unsafe Secure Sockets Layer protocol.
Mate 1.1 Arrives
Popular desktop environment continues the Gnome 2 legacy – with new support for the Gnome 3 toolkit.
US Government Requires HTTPS
The Obama White House has issued a memorandum telling all US government agencies they must use HTTPS for all websites and web communication.
Mozilla Signs Firefox Add-Ons
New program will dial up security for the Firefox browser.
Fedora 22 Arrives
Red Hat's community distro embraces the cloud.
Code.org and College Board Team Reach Out for Talented High School Coders
New partnership will bring more and better CS training to US schools
A Peek Inside TeslaCrypt Ransomware
Criminals offer online help over Tor network
Mumblehard Still Spams
Sophisticated malware is still present on Joomla and WordPress sites around the world.
Launchpad Gets Git
Future versions of Ubuntu's code service will support the popular Git version control system used with Linux and other open source projects.


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River Falls will again have its own bookstore
October 18, 2012 at 4:24 am in Pierce County Herald
A River Falls couple with bookstore careers will open Fox Den Used Books, 120 S. Main St., this week. That downtown address once housed Mr. Movies, Gemini Jewelers and, in the early 1990s, The Shoe Den. Continue Reading


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Israeli Writers & Their Problems
The recent American reissue of A Whole Loaf,1 Sholom J. Kahn's anthology of Israeli fiction, raises a number of questions about the kind of literature that is being created in Israel. The most obvious fact about this collection of stories—and about the Israeli literary scene as well—is that it is not a whole loaf at all, but two loaves so different from each other that they hardly seem to have been baked in the same oven. The organization of material in the Kahn collection is itself partly a concession to the profound disparity that exists between two broad modes of fiction practiced in Israel today. The first half of the anthology is devoted to "Wars and Independence" and mainly represents the younger generation of Israeli writers, that is, writers still under the age of forty when the volume was originally published in Tel Aviv in 1957. The second half of the book, entitled "Backgrounds," is, with one exception, the work of the older literary generation. It is ironically appropriate that this second section should be bracketed with two stories by S. Y. Agnon. For though the seventy-four-year-old master of Hebrew fiction was nurtured in roughly the same cultural environment as the other writers of his generation, his moral and artistic concerns and his technical virtuosity lead him both further back and further forward than his close contemporaries; he is at once more distant than they and closer to the younger writers.
Every literature, of course, has more or less recognizable literary generations, usually defined by the inevitable movement of rebellion by the younger writers against the tastes, standards, and objectives of their immediate predecessors. But the literary situation in Israel is in some respects unique. To get an idea of the position in which a young Israeli novelist finds himself, one must imagine writers with the interests, say, of Malamud, Bellow, or Styron, setting out to create their novels of moral quest when their older contemporaries are people like Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.
Though some qualification would have to be made, it is not misleading to think of the Hebrew literary generation now in its sixties as deriving from the same world as Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and certainly Isaac Bashevis Singer. The typical Sabra writer, on the other hand, has grown up in Mandatory Palestine in a socialist youth movement, worked for a while on a kibbutz, fought in the Israeli army and perhaps earlier in the British army, supported himself with a variety of odd jobs ranging from manual labor to journalism and high-school teaching. The limiting pressures of his native milieu thrust against—but do not mold—the contours of his personality: in most cases he has outgrown the Sabra's pose of toughness, his strident self-assertiveness, and is self-consciously attempting to overcome his provincialism. The writer's attitude toward the traditional Jewish life that used to exist in the Diaspora is not necessarily negative—as is often claimed—but is certainly unconcerned. East European Jewry, by and large, is simply beyond the horizons of his own life. The language he writes in is the language he has always spoken—a new Hebrew whose vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and idioms are often determined by its present-day speakers and whatever languages they have brought with them to Hebrew. This modern Hebrew, of course, takes advantage of linguistic resources from the Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash, even the prayer book, but a novelist who writes in it is as far away from the older stylists who model their language on tradition as Malamud's prose is from Fielding's.
A Whole Loaf gives a reasonably fair idea of the relative success or failure of Israeli writers in representing Israeli life, though some details of the picture suggested by the fifteen stories will have to be corrected. Except for certain peripheral areas the older writers are quite incapable of capturing the new accents and rhythms, the distinctive nuances in feeling and thought that characterize the contemporary Israeli scene. The younger writers, on the other hand, continue to fumble—with considerable intentness—for ways to bring their awareness of themselves and their culture into sharp literary focus.
Flipping through the "Backgrounds" section of A Whole Loaf, and thinking back over the novels located in Israel written by the older Hebrew writers (Ag-non always excepted), I formulated the following rule-of-thumb: when an older Hebrew writer sets his narrative in Israel, he either succeeds by selecting an enclave of life in Israel which is not Israeli and therefore is in some sense familiar ground to him, or he fails by writing a story with such a thin social texture that it could fit almost anywhere, but nowhere in particular. The latter alternative is seductive to the many derivative writers in contemporary Hebrew letters; their imaginations seem principally engaged in imitating a literary model—or more often, an amalgam of models—rather than in transcribing real human problems in real human situations. Two painfully clear examples in the Kahn anthology are the stories by Yehuda Yaari and Yisraeli Zarchi; though both are set in Jerusalem, the only detectable local atmosphere is a certain odor of pulp magazines compounded with a mustiness of late 19th-century Continental fiction.
The success of the other strategy is attested by several stories of the older writers in A Whole Loaf. Pieces like Haim Hazaz's "The Lord Have Mercy," Yaakov Churgin's "Reb Shmelke of Safed," and Yehoshua Bar-Yosef's "The Lateborn" have a distinctive warmth and charm which should be familiar to anyone even casually acquainted with Yiddish literature. Like so many Yiddish stories, these examples of "Israeli" fiction have little plot, no tight structure, no crisis, moral or otherwise; they seem to stand apart from any main tradition of Western fiction. The stories are pleasantly ambling sketches of colorful folk types—and the types themselves are familiar in Yiddish literature: the long-suffering pure-hearted simpleton, the quixotic ne'er-do-well, the genuinely loving couple constantly at swords' ends. A writer does not have to have grown up in Eastern Europe in order to go in for this kind of Old World art. As a matter of fact, both Churgin and Bar-Yosef are native Palestinians; but Churgin was born at the turn of the century and Bar-Yosef, a decade younger, was raised in the old Orthodox community of Safed. There are abundant pockets of Old World life in Israel: whether they derive from Galicia or Lithuania or Yemen, they all have the same appeal of quaintness for the practicing "folk" artists and literary ethnologists among Hebrew writers.
The career of Haim Hazaz, generally considered the most important of the older writers after Agnon, illustrates with paradigmatic clarity how the Old World oriented novelists have responded to the challenge of Israeli reality. Hazaz is a writer with great gifts for lyric description, for bold caricature, and for lively characterization. A good part of his earlier work concerns itself with the portrayal of colorful figures from the East European shtetl. Later, as a resident of Palestine and Israel, Hazaz began to devote his abundant energies to his portraits—the word is inevitable with such a writer—of Yemenite Jewry, both in Yemen (the Yaish trilogy) and in Israel (Mori Said, available in an English translation by Ben Halpern). The transition, of course, was not from Diaspora to Israel, but from one kind of Jewish folk-material to another. When Hazaz tries to deal with the more characteristic aspects of modern Israel (as in the volume of stories, A Belt of Constellations, published in 1958), his work is much flatter and suffers more obviously from ideological tendentiousness. Hebrew critics like to praise Hazaz for his "vivid depiction of the life of the Yemenites." To an American critic this is likely to seem a rather limited and anachronistic achievement in the middle of the 20th century. To a young Israeli writer, it is likely to seem that way, too. In any case, the older writers who spend their energies on quaint and loving portraits of quaint and lovable types can teach the young novelist nothing about how to render his own problematic world.
A young Israeli setting out to be a writer is confronted with a further difficulty—or at least annoyance—from which creative artists in the West are comparatively free. While he is doing his best simply to probe with honesty and intelligence the reality in which he finds himself, something more is often expected from him—by many critics, by older writers, by the press, by educators, by his party, by the regime. Modern Hebrew literature, from its beginnings in Central and Eastern Europe, was to a great extent publicistic in nature; by the latter half of the 19th century, it had become the handmaiden of nationalism for many Jews: Ahad Ha'am in the Odessa of the 90's could feel justified in rejecting for publication in his Hashiloach some fine lyric poems by Bialik because they did nothing to heighten national consciousness. It is hardly surprising that in an Israel of the Age of Ideology there are circles—often the product, in fact, of Ahad Ha'am's cultural nationalism—that preserve this quasi-propagandistic notion of the function of literature.
The persistence of such an attitude was made extremely clear by the furor raised over the publication in 1958 of S. Yizhar's long novel about the Israeli-Arab War, The Days of Ziklag. Though Yizhar's book suffers from some artistic uncertainty and too much verbiage, it is a strikingly revealing moral document. Yizhar's young soldiers, both in their interior monologues and in their lengthy discussions, lay bare all the pained questionings and radical self-doubts of sensitive Israeli youth: about the significance of statehood, about their Jewishness and their cultural future, about the existence of any certain values by which they can live. While the novel had many enthusiastic defenders, particularly among the younger intellectuals, it was denounced by most of the older critics as "cynical" or "nihilistic," and it was turned down for the coveted Bialik Prize largely because, as one of the judges asserted, it "betrayed" the brave Israeli youth that had fought in the War of Independence.
There is, moreover, little indication that this demand for good Zionists and good Jews in Hebrew literature has relented since 1958. Just this April, at the festive twentieth convention of the Hebrew Writers' Association, the younger novelists and poets found themselves assaulted from two sides. The convention began with a message from Ben Gurion which sharply criticized Hebrew writers for their lack of social responsibility, for their indifference to the great national effort of Israel's ingathering of exiles. Then Haim Hazaz, in the opening address, castigated with equal vehemence both the younger writers for turning their backs on the riches of Jewish tradition and the Israeli public for its lack of interest in Hebrew books.
It is true that literature in Israel must struggle to keep its own footing in the tide of translated culture that floods its relatively tiny reading audience. But it is also true that the indigenous literature of Israel often seems pale and uninteresting not because its writers have failed to be loyally Israeli or authentically Jewish, but because they have not yet found adequate ways to be themselves in literature. The problem is not that "there is nothing really authentic about you or the life you lead," in the words of the protagonist of one story in A Whole Loaf, but that the younger Israeli writers are only beginning to discover coherent literary forms for their lives.
One fact that is clear about the novels and stories of this younger generation is that their authors are honestly trying to find what they can or should expect of themselves instead of attempting to write what others may expect of them. For example, there is not the slightest echo of patriotic drum-beating among their stories in A Whole Loaf. In the "Wars and Independence" section, each of the younger writers finds that war tests traditional values and brings moral ambivalences or conflicting allegiances into high tension; and much the same moral tenor is found in their authors' longer works. One finds the characteristic tone in the battle-hour reflections of the protagonist in "The Living and the Dead," an excerpt from S. Yizhar's first novel, The Grove on the Hill:
. . . you remember that there are others like you and they haven't forgotten you, and the job you're doing and your own life are part and parcel of the big undertaking, and so on and so forth; and yet for some reason these are only fine phrases that are far from the truth. For the heart feels sour, so sour, far beyond any supposed deeds of daring, beyond sacrifice or all kinds of things; and you have to hide this well, because you're among people who believe in and look up to you. . . .
The passage illustrates both the moral integrity and the artistic weakness which characterize the work of Yizhar and his close contemporaries. One often has the feeling that these writers—particularly when they move beyond the short story to the novel—are unable yet to establish a necessary distance between themselves and their narrative. In their intent desire to grapple with their own moral problems, they frequently neglect the artistic demands of fiction, so that instead of structured novels with individualized characters and realized social settings, they are likely to end up with long, amorphous dialogues or monologues in which faceless voices crying out in a void discuss the moral dilemmas which beset the writers. Yizhar, who is probably the most talented and is certainly the most ambitious of the younger novelists, still suffers from this tendency to slide into formlessness; eleven years after The Grove on the Hill, it persists as the chief weakness of The Days of Ziklag, despite the strands of leitmotif with which he tries to hold together the twelve hundred pages of his later novel.
It is worth noting in this respect that of the fiction included in A Whole Loaf, Yizhar's piece is the only one—again with the exception of Agnon's stories—that shows any experimenting with literary form. While it would be silly to want or expect Israeli fiction to be particularly avant-garde, the timidity or indifference of the younger writers in exploring the medium in which they work results in their failure to develop an original style. And this is to say that none of the writers has adequately reproduced in language the distinctive texture of the world around him. Yizhar comes closest to doing so, but as the passage quoted from "The Living and the Dead" indicates, he does not seem to have really worked out what he wants to do technically with the stream-of-consciousness form, or rather, with the rough approximation of it which he uses. The presumable justification for his blurring of syntactical connections, his redundancies, his sprawling, ungainly sentences, is that this is the way people think. But, in fact, Yizhar's sentences are far too conversational, too much like slack monologue.
The Days of Ziklag, impressive a book as it is for what it has to say, similarly put off many intelligent readers in Israel by its awkward manner. The long interior monologues are sometimes so amorphous, and so undifferentiated from one character to the next, that one has to look back to the beginning of the chapter to recall who is supposed to be thinking. Yizhar is particularly effective in reproducing the impact of fear and the weight of boredom upon a soldier's awareness, and he shows real virtuosity in his detailed lyric descriptions of natural settings. However, he will have to develop a more disciplined and resourceful technique to carry out his intentions as a novelist.
The two names of the younger generation most often mentioned with—or after—Yizhar's are Moshe Shamir and Nathan Shaham. Each is represented in A Whole Loaf by a well-told war story, though Shamir's piece is flawed at points by melodramatic clichés. In their longer narratives, both Shamir and Shaham have suffered from the typical failure to achieve sufficient artistic distance from what they were writing. That You Are Naked (1958), one of the most recent novels of the prolific Shamir, illustrates this general weakness with great clarity. The novel is meant to present a young Israeli trying to define himself as an individual against the pressures of a group—in this case, his youth movement. Like a number of novels by the younger writers in Israel (including Yizhar's major work), all the principal characters are adolescents: they are precisely at the age of confused seeking and frequent self-definition. The hero of That You Are Naked is the most thinly-veiled autobiographical figure: his name is Moshe Avni (both Shamir and Avni suggest "stone" in Hebrew); he was born in the same year as Shamir; like his author, he has grown up in Tel Aviv and is a member of a left-wing youth movement. Moshe Avni, moreover, takes frequent pains to remind the reader what his story is all about: "With desperate persistence we are searching for ourselves, as though we were seeking a sanction for our existence, as though without some sanction we would be thrown out into the cold." This slow-moving, repetitious book reads more like a personal declaration of independence than a novel; there is little evidence that the young novelist has made as yet the subtle but crucial distinction between life and literature.
The Poor Man's Wisdom (1960), Nathan Shaham's latest novel, offers a somewhat different illustration of precisely the same failing. There is nothing obviously autobiographical about Shaham's novel, but again the writer is bent on the pursuit of his own existential problems to the manifest neglect of the novelistic demands of his book. The protagonist of The Poor Man's Wisdom is a Polish Jew who has devoted his life to the Communist party. Finally disillusioned with the party, he escapes to Israel in the hours of grace in 1956 and goes to live on a kibbutz. Through a long series of unwieldy flashbacks, through repeated discussion and debate with his old party friends and with kibbutzniks, he ponders the problem of individual conscience within a party discipline, the difficulty of the intellectual in adapting to communal life and manual labor, the force of moral obligations outside the sphere of political activity. In all this earnest but somewhat tedious dialectic, elements like plot and character receive only the most perfunctory attention, and again one feels that the book is not quite a novel.
One might expect that the younger Israeli writers would turn for help in their technical difficulties to the one major creative figure of the older generation, S. Y. Agnon. Yet the fact is that Agnon, at least until very recently, has had no appreciable impact upon them. The reasons for his lack of influence are clear. However profound his artistic vision may be, it is also highly idiosyncratic, intimately connected with his own background and personality. Agnon's stylized, traditional Hebrew is, as I noted, centuries removed from the language of the Sabras, and his imagination was nourished in a Galician study house, not on a collective farm in the Negev or in a war against the Arabs.
Nevertheless, there are some significant points of contact between Agnon's world and that of the native Israeli writers. Like them, he is essentially concerned with moral issues; that is to say, at the center of his work stands an individual who is continually faced with critical choices or imperatives. And Agnon, for all his attachment to tradition, often reveals a disturbed sense of ambivalence toward values about which tradition or society claims to be sure. His great theme of radical homeless-ness even provides a specific parallel to the sense of disinheritance and moral isolation which makes itself felt in much of the writing of the younger generation. Yitzhak Kummer, the doomed outsider torn apart between two worlds in Agnon's Not Long Ago, is no less an Isaac bound for a meaningless immolation than the soldiers in The Days of Ziklag or the young socialists in That You Are Naked. (All three novels use the Binding of Isaac as a central motif.)
Even apart from his affinities in outlook, it seems almost inevitable that Agnon's fertile symbolic imagination and fine control of tone and style would eventually tempt the young Hebrew writers to borrow and even to imitate. Three recent pieces of Hebrew fiction suggest the possibility that Agnon's influence may prove to be more fruitful than anyone has yet guessed. Yehuda Amichai's In This Terrible Wind (1961), Yoram Kaniuk's The Acrophile (published in English in 1961—the Hebrew original has not yet appeared), and Aharon Meged's As It Happeneth to the Fool (1959) make use in varying degree of Agnonesque effects and techniques, particularly those that come from the rich anti-realist and symbolic vein of Agnon's work.
In This Terrible Wind is the most radically experimental and also by far the most uneven of the three books. Amichai, who has acquired a reputation as a poet in the last few years, attempts in this volume of stories to apply some of the methods of poetry to first-person narrative. Many of the longer stories wander unsteadily through a plotless, characterless vacuum, but a few of the shorter pieces are quite striking. One is tempted to describe Amichai's world as surrealistic, but it would be more accurate to say that reality is essentially metaphorical for him: people become metaphors and metaphors become people, every element of experience demands a symbolic reading. Amichai diligently explores the possibilities of each passing comparison. "[When the war was over] we scattered like papers after the elections, in every direction. Only the dead were cast into the dark ballot box, only they influenced what would be." And he finds tongues in trees, sermons in stones, and, generally, gloom in everything.
When I drew near [the sickbed], I heard the great oxygen bomb whispering. It used to be that an angel stood by the beds of the sick. Now there are bombs filled with whispering oxygen. Divers and pilots are also given oxygen tanks. Where will my father go? Maybe he'll dive, maybe he'll climb. Anyway, he'll leave us.
This sort of brooding over the mysteries of metaphor sometimes occurs in Agnon, though it is certainly never given such free rein. Be that as it may, the entire dreamlike mode of narration of In This Terrible Wind is in some degree inspired by the expressionistic stories of Agnon's Book of Deeds. Though Amichai's touch is often unsure, he has made a brave attempt to create a new kind of story which can serve as an artistically coherent expression of his own inner world.
Yoram Kaniuk, on the other hand, has a firmer grasp of his method: The Acrophile is a spare but skillfully managed novel. It also gives evidence of considerable technical indebtedness to Agnon. Kaniuk's tone is often reminiscent of his: it has many of the same resonances, even much the same pace, the same quiet control, ranging from wry humor to muted lyricism. This, for example, is the way Kaniuk conveys the pain of separateness of a couple who will soon be divorced.
Mira remained silent. I put my arms around her and tried to kiss her. She was cold. I let her go, feeling like a fool. Two strangers, we walked together through the morning chill, the play of wind and trees, the game of the yellow leaves on the sidewalk.
And this is how Agnon, in "Metamorphosis," one of the stories included in A Whole Loaf, presents the same emotion in a couple who have just been divorced.
The sun was about to set. In the fields the wheat swayed silently, and the sunflowers gazed one-eyed out of their darkening yellow faces. Hartmann stretched his hand out into the vacant air and caressed Toni's shadow.
Some of the situations and symbols in The Acrophile also distinctly call Agnon to mind. The protagonist of The Acrophile is involved in the symbolically significant work of piecing together "the language of the black cave people," just as Adiel Amzeh in Agnon's "Forevermore" (COMMENTARY, August 1961) is trying to reconstruct the ancient civilization of Gumlidata, and just as Dr. Ginat in Agnon's longer story, "Ido and Einam," unearths the two archaic languages which provide the link "between the very beginnings of history and what preceded." Or again, when Kaniuk's Daan locks himself out of his apartment on his wedding day and all circumstances conspire against his getting back in, readers of Agnon will recall the similarly archetypal situation in The Book of Deeds. With all this, I do not mean to imply that Kaniuk is a derivative writer, merely that he appears to have borrowed a little and learned a great deal from the older Hebrew novelist.
Agnon's influence on Aharon Meged is more tangential, perhaps no more than awakening him to the possibilities of adopting a Kafkaesque narrative to Hebrew fiction and Israeli reality. In any case, As It Happeneth to the Fool derives much more clearly from Kafka than from Agnon. The presence of the German writer in fact makes itself felt with awkward obtrusiveness in the first section of Meged's novel. The nameless protagonist is invited by somebody called "B." to a meeting of the Society of Evildoers; after he has been laughed out of the meeting for claiming he has a conscience, he tries desperately to win acceptance from the Society, but his efforts end in a shattering fiasco when he tumbles from the lofty scaffolding where he was to give a speech on the Society's behalf. As Meged works further into his novel, the symbolic machinery creaks less, and the protagonist who began as a pawn in a Kafkaesque chess game turns out to be a rather believable homme moyen moral involved in an absorbing struggle against both the pressures of conformity from without and the limpness of his own timidity.
It is significant that Meged, in following Kafka's conception of the novel as a moral fable, manages in the end to get across a much sharper sense than his more conventional colleagues of the distinctive reality of present-day Israel. Perhaps he owes part of his success to the entrenched bureaucratic way of life in modern socialist Israel. Kafka, of course, was himself a bureaucrat (as is the hero of As It Happeneth to the Fool), and the kind of novel he created reflects in many ways the peculiar character of this experience. In a bureaucracy, people have initials instead of names. In a bureaucracy—as anyone who has ever dealt with Israeli officialdom certainly knows—the individual is at the mercy of a madly confused machine in which no part accepts ultimate responsibility and from which on occasion inscrutable decrees are issued without warning or possibility of revocation. For an Israeli, there could be no more appropriate image for Judgment Day than the one offered by Meged's novel: an obdurate tax-examiner, clutching the dossier that contains the protagonist's entire adult life, seems literally to hold the hero's fate in his unrelenting hands.
The case of As It Happeneth to the Fool could be particularly instructive to the writers we have been considering. While borrowing generously from a European writer, Meged has not been solely imitative and, in fact, has managed to invoke and explore his own national climate with considerable fidelity. The small strip of Hebrew-speaking culture at the east end of the Mediterranean does not have to be engulfed by the imposing cultural blocs of the West. At the present, there are at least a few hopeful indications that the new Israeli fiction may be developing its own distinctive voices.
1 A Whole Loaf: Stories from Israel, edited by Sholom J. Kahn, Vanguard Press, 344 pp., $4.50.


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Faux Leather Sock Garters with Suspender Clips
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♠ Men's Socks ♠ Made in the USA ♠ Sock Garters ♠ Victoriana ♠ Plus Sized
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Tony Parker, who? Eva Longoria works the PR and TV mogul tip in hard times
Every star has their own way of dealing when private news goes public. Sandra Bullock made herself scarce. Tiger Woods threw himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion. But "Desperate Housewives" star Eva Longoria is coming off anything but desperate after news of her impending divorce from Tony Parker.
For Longoria, the big wheels, they keep on turnin', as her friends and business associates circle the wagons around her.
According to "friends" who spoke to the New York Daily News, Longoria isn't considering adoption, but "spending time with her family, lawyers and her special-needs sister." We must admire the craft of that statement.
Not only that, but Variety reports she's co-executive-producing two new shows for ABC and producing a miniseries for the Starz channel. Yes, she is quite literally working it.
Which leads us to ask: Tony Parker, who?
Photo/Video credit: Getty Images


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|Print version
Related Links
|The SAP Theme Editor
|Brand Adaptation of the mySAP Enterprise Portal
|Branding and Usability in Software Products
Background Links
|Resources: Visual Design
By Michael Hatscher, SAP AG – February 21, 2003
Companies strive to align their outward and inward appearance and presentation with their corporate design or corporate identity (CI), trying to establish their own name and logo as a brand. Getting all of the customer's printed and online materials in visual sync – stationery, business cards, brochures, the intranet, and the corporate Internet site – creates a feeling of unity and identity for people within the organization and an impression of quality and solidity to the outside. The CI's goal is to communicate a carefully shaped corporate image to its audience – the company's customers and partners, as well as its employees. It can be used as a channel for expressing the corporate culture. That incorporates the way the members of an organization see themselves and their organization, how they interact and communicate with each other, and their common understanding of how to address and solve problems. So the CI can remind employees of the corporate culture whenever they deal with materials that incorporate the CI (carrying the corporate brand) and help foster a feeling of belonging.
Adapting the visual appearance of mySAP Enterprise Portal to the customer's CI is very important, at least for some of our customers: The portal is always there; it constitutes the frame in which users work. Designing this frame to effectively convey the company's management view helps confirm that it recognizes and agrees with certain values.
The same holds true for customer-specific development projects for outward-facing Web applications. These apps have to be in sync with all the other marketing material and outward appearance of the company in order to create a unified impression. In this case, the application (or the service provided through the software) is part of the marketing strategy of the company. Its usability, as well as the quality of its visual design, contributes to shaping the public image of the company.
Most customers already have a very detailed CI for their printed materials and outward-facing Internet site. When it comes to the intranet site, there can be different levels of alignment. In a number of cases, mySAP Enterprise Portal replaces a (sometimes huge) number of unrelated, often regional intranets, each with their own design. In this case, it is a good idea to overhaul the look and feel of the intranet solutions and come up with something completely new – in order to ensure consistency in visuals and usability.
mySAP Enterprise Portal 5.0 offers a wealth of options for customizing the look of the portal. Using the Theme Editor, an administrator can easily change a few colors, replace the graphics files for some interaction widgets, and create new styles. The styles are then published and can be used throughout the company. If more profound changes are required – for example, changing the position of iView window widgets in the iView tray header, adding color-coded nested hierarchies to the appearance of the detailed navigation iView, or altering the user interaction in the portal – the customer will have to invest in customer-specific development efforts (Java or ASP development; see interview with Sven Kannengiesser in this edition).
However, in order to achieve a convincing design solution it may not be sufficient to rely on the administrator's design skills and taste. A design consultancy can offer higher quality support in this area. Designers don't just consider the existing CI documents – they also contribute their in-depth knowledge of things like color perception (including the varieties of color blindness) and the emotional effects of colors and shapes. A high design consistency can only be achieved with a thorough design sketch prior to style sheet adaptations and product knowledge is a must, too. The Usability and Design Group within SAP's Global Professional Services Organization can provide these services, as well as consulting on all matters relating to enterprise portal design and usability.
As consultants in the Usability and Design Group (formerly the SAP Portals Europe Professional Services Organization User Interface Design Group), we have been involved in mySAP Enterprise Portal 5.0 implementation projects for large corporations. Design work was often not part of the original scope and we succeeded in convincing project managers and customers to incorporate design efforts into the project.
In some cases we devised a special portal style guide to incorporate mySAP Enterprise Portal features. This usually occurred by first analyzing the existing CI style guide and then mapping the CI style guide elements to the portal product and its elements – colors and fonts in navigation areas, content iViews, and widgets. We then designed simulated screenshots using graphics software like Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks and presented them to the customer. After the proposals had been agreed, the actual design adaptations took place in mySAP Enterprise Portal's Theme Editor (see article by Esther Blankenship and Inge Winkler-Hansen in this edition), and the final style sheets and accompanying graphics files were exported and sent to the customer's site to be incorporated into the product (if we were not already working at the customer's site). Collaboration between the customer and the technical consultants usually worked very smoothly; each successful portal implementation and design project serves as another success story for SAP.
Time is money – particularly in IT implementation projects. In more than one case, the customer had to be convinced that our services provided real added value. The time we were given to perform our tasks was also very limited: After lots of negotiation in one case, the customer agreed to pay for five consulting days for visual design adaptations, but we could have worked for another ten on the project, polishing the interaction and doing usability tests. So we had to work very efficiently and sometimes had to improvise. In some projects we were initially asked to carry out some completely different tasks (for example, to help the team optimize some JavaScript coding) and then later managed to show the project team what they were missing (in terms of our visual design and usability engineering services). In other cases, we joined the project through our visual design services and were then able to prove – by pointing out the shortcomings in the design presentation – the importance of doing some more usability related activities.
In a number of cases our close collaboration with the customer-specific development and portals groups helped us a lot in achieving our goals and plans – for example, if the customer insisted on getting certain design elements that were not part of the original portal product. The experiences from these projects were collected and fed back into the Product Design Center (PDC) to be analyzed and considered for inclusion in the next revision of the product. Thus our close contact to the PDC and the user interface designers in the mySAP Enterprise Portal platform and knowledge management groups helped us to solve some tough problems and allowed us to get customer project insights to these more central groups.
Style guides are collections of designs and templates: highly in-depth descriptions of small details of the design for print or online material. They usually contain extremely detailed information on colors, font faces, font sizes, formats, measurements, distances in pixels, and so on. Good style guides really help the designer to develop something new without overly constricting the creative professional's options.
In the projects we did, we came across style guides in various stages of development. We usually welcomed the style guides as they could help reduce consultation with the customer and provided a basis from which to start. Yet, in at least one case, we came across a style guide that provided a detailed description of an interaction design that we simply could not agree with. As far as we were concerned the use of the element in question was plainly wrong and we told the customer so. However, the customer had already built another application following this style guide and had had the style guide tested (and approved) by another design consultancy. For the sake of consistency they insisted on sticking with the design we considered faulty. In this case it is clear that consistency does not always lead to better usability or better design: Consistently following bad design decisions lead to a consistently bad user interface.
In this section you can see some examples of successful projects. Figure 1 shows the standard look of mySAP Enterprise Portal 5.0. This look can be changed easily using the Theme Editor. Figure 2 presents an example of the modifications possible with this tool. If more profound changes are needed, appropriate development effort has to be invested.
Figure 1: Portal standard design Mango and Polarwind (mySAP Enterprise Portal 5.0)
Figure 2: Customized mySAP Enterprise Portal 5.0 using the Theme Editor
Figure 3 shows the solution for a major customer – the United Nations. (It should be noted that this result could only be achieved by a significant amount of change to the original portal product.) A graphics designer within the organization developed the design sketches. We then worked very closely with the designer and our internal development teams to create the solution seen here. Note the efforts made to change the branding and the navigation area of the portal: The logo has been moved to the right, spreading across two frames; there is an additional context-sensitive navigation to the right; the portal itself has been changed to accept non-logged in users as well as authorized users, with the latter admitted to some restricted areas of the portal. A very similar feature, guest user access, has meanwhile become part of the standard product with the portal's Service Pack 5: This allows users to log into the portal without being prompted for a user id/password, if this has been configured by the administrator.
Figure 3: Highly customized mySAP Enterprise Portal 5.0
Between these extremes we have had a lot of projects for design adaptation with different degrees of "desire for change" on the customers' side. Some just wanted their logo to be in the branding area and some colors adjusted (which is easily done using the Theme Editor), others opted for huge changes.
Branding is an important service offering in consulting. Corporations realize that enterprise portals and other applications serve as parts of their communication strategy, be it inward or outward facing, and thus need their software products to be adapted to the look of the other collateral and printed or online materials. Providing these services needs expertise in design, usability engineering, and technology as well as communication and negotiation skills (and a good deal of perseverance).