text:
Bored to tears in the house, Ms. Guilana Alexis recollected her co-worker offered her the street address to the Cum Fiesta. She desired to determine for herself precisely what the wild sexual exploits where she'd heard of. Once she arrived on the scene, she demonstrated her gorgeous boobs at the doorstep and came into. Straight away she desired to be screwed, and yet first she showed off her bubble rear end. Then she crammed her mouth with hard wang and proceeded to get screwed good.
The lads caught up with Moniique when she was washing off inside the shower room. Her rear end was looking so lovely and flavorful and she was happy to see them. She begun to enjoy herself and delivered a naughty dance. Our man moved in and she stuck her massive butt up, as she curved over to lick his wang. There after he oiled her up and pounded her slit, he slid it into her butthole.
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Today we've got a gorgeous lady with lengthy legs to suit your needs. When Ronny dropped by along with Ms. Sophia Fiore, the very first thing we noticed was her remarkable body and rounded ass. We all promptly made praise to her exceptional behind. Undoubtedly she was a physical fitness fanatic which worked out vigorously and had her fun. The instant she got a wang right in front of her, everyone learned how hard she trained with her snatch.
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The group previously sen Jaslin Diaz while out and about having a few drinks. They actually had been in a position to persuade her to return to the condominium. Once there, Willy placed the moves on her and she got her ass straight out of her tight jean miniskirt. That rear end was wonderfully round and she was aexpert cock rider. This latina cutie also took a drink of sperm everywhere on her pretty face.
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Last time we watched Ms. Stacey Foxxx on Realitykings, it was actually pretty much all about her massive tits. This occassion the main focus ended up being her wonderful bum. Without any panties, she was wearing lycra pants to show off her pussy. She stripped down nude with her awesome curves and showed her butt. So there was initially loads of titty fucking and thorough twat drilling.
View Ms. Stacey Foxxx and More Wild Curvy XXX on Monster Curves
This past week Round and Brown delivered you the beautiful Leila. A twenty four year-old native babe with a lot of curves. She was the full deal with a lovely face, a luscious rear end and good titties. Jmac came in and started twiddling with her and pleasing her. He needed virtually no time to get down and deeper in to that great vagina.
Mike decided to go check out his hot buddy Ms. Nicole Ferrera. The pair were meant to go to the movie theater, nonetheless, they spent the night in to screw. She was appearing ultra sexy and raised her skirt to uncover her yummy booty. Just after, she was licking that cock and she got her slit licked. He then turned her around and pounded her snatch.


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THE largest artificial object in orbit has long been the butt of cruel jokes. Some call the International Space Station (ISS) a "turkey in the sky", while others deride the $100 billion spaceship to nowhere. Now it seems that the great sprawling structure may be the key to getting people to asteroids, Mars and beyond.
After nearly 50 years of space travel, we still haven't figured out how to keep people healthy in low-Earth orbit, let alone on journeys to exotic destinations that could last months or even years. The ISS is the perfect lab to overcome our lack of data, with the astronauts as the guinea pigs.
We already know that being in microgravity for just six months turns astronauts' muscles into those of an 80-year-old (see "How to survive in space"). If crews arrived at Mars in that condition, they might have trouble standing once they experienced ...
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subset: commoncrawl


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These days, it's the media conglomerates who are drunk with power--demanding a larger share of the nation's airwaves and threatening to turn the World Wide Web into an electronic theme park--and
On May 14, 2002, the first wave of Internet file-sharing died.
Unions are gradually making fuller use of the Internet's capacities to
improve communication with their own staffs or members. But increasingly
they are also using the web to recruit new members or to establish
"virtual communities" of union supporters in arenas not yet amenable to
the standard collective-bargaining model.
Alliance@IBM (www.allianceibm.org) is an example of an effective
Net-supported minority union, operating without a demonstrated pro-union
majority and without a collective-bargaining contract at a traditional
nonunion company. The alliance provides information and advice to
workers at IBM through the web. A similar effort at a partially
organized employer is WAGE ("Workers at GE," www.geworkersunited.org), which draws on contributions from fourteen cooperating
international unions. The Microsoft-inflected WashTech
(www.washtech.org) and the Australian IT Workers Alliance
(www.itworkers-alliance.org) are open-source unions that are closer to
craft unions or occupational associations. Both are responsive to the
distinctive professional needs of these workers, such as access to a
variety of job experiences and additional formal education, and the
portability of high-level benefits when changing jobs.
The National Writers Union (www.nwu.org), a UAW affiliate, is another
example of a union virtually created off the Net. It provides
information and advice--including extensive job postings--to members,
and it lobbies on their behalf, most spectacularly in the recent Supreme
Court decision it won on freelance worker copyright rights. But most of
its members work without a collectively bargained contract.
In Britain, UNISON (the largest union in the country) and the National
Union of Students have a website that tells student workers their rights
and gives them advice about how to deal with workplace problems
(www.troubleatwork.org.uk). It is a particularly engaging and practical
illustration of how concrete problems can be addressed through Net
Finally, for a more geographically defined labor community, take a look
at the website of the King County AFL-CIO (www.kclc.org), the Seattle
central labor council that uses the Net to coordinate its own business,
bring community and labor groups together for discussion and common
action, post messages and general information to the broader community,
and otherwise create a "virtual" union hall with much of the spirit and
dense activity that used to be common in actual union halls in major
Media policy need to change in the digital age—but how?
The Institute for Creative Technologies makes Star Wars–type simulations for Army personnel
The Supreme Court, in the final week of June, handed down three decisions, each of which seems to endorse a valuable social principle.
In the first, involving the right of legal immigrants who have pleaded guilty to crimes in the past to a judicial review of deportation proceedings, the Court upheld the principle that no matter who you are, you are entitled to your day in court.
In the second case, the High Court affirmed the right of writers and artists to share in the wealth made possible by the new media. The case was brought by a group of freelancers who objected to the inclusion of their work in electronic databases without permission or remuneration; the group was led by Jonathan Tasini, the president of the National Writers Union and a man with an admirable mission.
In the third case, the Supreme Court made it more possible for Congress to provide correctives to the influence of money in politics by upholding Watergate-era limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for federal office. Had the Court eliminated the restrictions, it would have legitimized the parties as cash-laundering machines for donors.
Left to be determined, in all three cases, are the appropriate remedies for the ills the rulings addressed, and the difficulty of fashioning these should not be underestimated. But it is heartening to see the Court acting in its proper role as the guardian of both the individual and society.
I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
--Michel Foucault
Ever since I was assigned to read A Room of One's Own in college eight years ago, I have kept it close for support. Besides the fact that, like Virginia Woolf, I had also read Leo Tolstoy's journals and was similarly enraged by the clarity he exhibited at such a young age, I felt she was on to something. "A room of one's own," however, wasn't quite it.
I grew up in the 1980s inside a charming, if small, Spanish-style California home with a mom, a sister, a piano, many dogs and two brothers who were relentless in their efforts to jimmy my locks with butter knives. Although I liked to think I had my own room, the space's original and (now that I'm an adult I can say it) idiotic plans called for its doubling as a shortcut to one of the house's more popular bathrooms. I went to great and occasionally violent lengths to discourage use of this particular feature. The results? Ha, as DrRogue would say.
Time and time again, my brothers broke triumphantly in, capturing me on my bed writing in my journal. I smile now, but back then, those intrusions enraged me. You see, unlike those jerks I was becoming a woman, and it was making me miserable. I liked being a girl. And it wasn't necessarily that I was surprised to discover that girls became women--in a rational way, I knew it happened all the time. It was just that I found the obvious sexuality of it offensive. It was clear to me that once breasts made their appearance against a shirt, a person could not be taken seriously.
I looked around at school and saw happy, pretty girls who went to the beach. They seemed content being female, and I liked boys too, so I did what they did. Then I went home depressed, slammed my doors, locked them and wrote to my journal about how much I loathed myself, until my brothers broke in after school. Here is a genuine entry from November 4, 1988: "I've gained five lbs. in a week if that's possible. I loathe myself. I'm sick of being regarded as 'muscular'--I want to be petite like Kate. Sports have ruined me."
Yes, you could say I was self-involved, melodramatic, petty. Worse, I was repetitive: November 4, 1988, was no date with an epiphany. Nonetheless, I was in pain. All I knew was that I'd gone from being an outspoken girl interested in everything to someone withdrawn and incapable of participating in class. I was depressed, but more than that I was hating myself for being a woman. I'd slipped onto a path that is as vicious and uncreative as it is a cliché of young womanhood. In a rare moment of teen lightness, I named it the Dark Horrible Sucking Trail of the Lost Voice. The Trail shouldn't be underestimated. Every day, another girl gets stuck in its mud.
Virginia Woolf would have liked DrRogue, a bright, confident writer with a lashing wit. As to whether DrRogue is a genius as defined by Woolf, only time will tell. In the meantime, she manages beyond the confines of a tiny school (there are just five girls in her class), her parents' limited financial means and, oh yes, childhood, to find experience and "a room of her own" for the cultivation of her talents. You see, DrRogue is known to those in her small New England town as 13-year-old Susan.
We met on July 14, 2000. I'm a part-time producer of commercial websites for teen girls and was spending some time perusing the vast number of homepages linked to one another on the Internet. There are thousands out there, colorful and animated, with names like Glitter Girl, Fairy Dawn, Overcooked, Pixie Kitten, Foily Tin, Quasi Grrrl, Peppermint and Intelligent Life. They can be constructed at established homepage-building areas of sites such as gURL, ChickClick, Lycos and Bolt. Or they can be created independently, then hooked into freer-floating webrings like "Shut Up You're Only 16!" and "Music Girl." Some are smart; some are sappy. Most are filled with poetry. If you visit, you may find writings, drawings, photos, interactive games and the creator's deepest, darkest secret. But you won't ever find her. Instead, your experience will be that of discovering an anonymous diary on a crowded city street. You can read it and learn everything about its owner, but look up and she's long gone.
DrRogue, however, is right here. I have no idea who she is.
DrRogue: Hello!
She flashes onto my screen, an insistent clump of text in a small, square dialog box aboard America Online's ubiquitous Instant Messenger (IM).
DrRogue: Hey, Bronwyn!
Aha, exclamation points. Dead giveaway. DrRogue, I now know, is one of the dozen or so teen girls whom I have e-mailed about their homepages. By now, I've visited enough to identify the prints.
I flip through my list of teen e-mails. DrRogue is Susan, the one with the website called Intelligent Life. Evidently, she has made a note of my AOL e-mail address and posted it to her "buddy list" to see when I'm online. She's flashing again.
DrRogue: Hello, it's Susan.
(Slowness, you see, is terminal here.)
BGAR2: Yes, Susan, of Intelligent Life. Hello.
DrRogue: Yeah, yeah, just thought I'd reiterate.
In my web travels, I've discovered that most Internet-savvy, homepage-creating girls provide only first names on their sites and to people they meet online. Discussing this find via e-mail with many different young women, I learn that the "first name only" policy is pretty strictly followed in these parts. Not every teen, of course, approaches her online development in the same way. Websites like Goosehead, for example, the work of a 15-year-old student, her parents and a growing staff, serves up a huge number of provocative photos of the pretty tenth-grade founder. For self-run sites, however, those who forgo anonymity are just throwing bait to bad people. "Avoid the psychopaths," as DrRogue says.
Anonymity is one of the hallmarks of safety online. And both anonymity and online safety, I learn, are crucial to privacy. If you'd asked me in high school what privacy meant in my life, I might have said, locked physical space that cannot be invaded with a butter knife. I mention this to DrRogue. It becomes clear that things have changed.
DrRogue: Privacy is [about] having your personal space in a more intellectually abstract, metaphysical sense. It is making sure that no one can find out too much about your real life through your online follies, keeping relationships strictly anon and not putting yourself at risk of psychopaths.
Evidently, DrRogue's issues go beyond keeping her brother out of her room (although this is cited as an ancillary goal). No matter the "horror stories blown up by newscasters," Susan asserts that she doesn't "feel threatened that [her] anonymity is slipping away." On the contrary, she blames the media for exacerbating the situation with their stupidity:
DrRogue: Newscasters report the invasion of my privacy very sternly, as though they're the ones decoding the human genome. From the way they speak, as though every technical word is new and unknown, it's clear that they're still asking their kids how to log on to the Internet.
Notwithstanding adult ignorance, DrRogue's understanding of privacy, "metaphysical" as it may be, is still predominantly about hiding the cord that could lead "psychopaths" to the "real" her. But isn't this paranoia for good reason? I ask. Haven't we all heard stories of "psychopaths" locating teenagers from clues carelessly dropped in chatrooms? DrRogue blisters at this one.
DrRogue: And then we have, "Cyber stalkers! Are your kids safe on the net?" If they have an IQ higher than a rock. Never give your full, real name, specific location, or phone number to a stranger. EVERY kid should know that!
"Keeping relationships strictly anon," in fact, is just the beginning of what a user, child or adult, must learn about the web, according to DrRogue. Sensing my ignorance, she outlines society's paranoia, the real issues as she sees them and the solutions--albeit in a somewhat mocking tone:
DrRogue: "Companies are putting something called 'COOKIES' onto your hard drive to TRACK WHAT SITES YOU VISIT!" screams the television. Anyone with a brain and a mouse should know that you can clear all the cookies off your hard drive anytime, or even set your computer to not accept them at all. "CREDIT CARD FRAUD!" is another big one. If you have a grain of sense, you won't give your credit card number to sites with names like Bob's Discount Warehouse. If you're not sure it's credible, DON'T SHOP THERE. "A new virus is spreading like wildfire around the world and through major corporations!" Major corporations where the employees are so out of touch, apparently, that they'll download anything.
Although DrRogue and most of the teens I encounter online are very careful about their privacy, the Annenberg Public Policy Center's The Internet and the Family 2000 reports that 75 percent of teens consider it acceptable to reveal what the study has defined as "private family information" in exchange for gifts, online. These "older kids," aged 13 to 17, are even more likely than younger ones, according to the study, to divulge personal details, including the names of their own and their parents' favorite stores, the type of car their family drives, whether their parents talk about politics and what their parents do on the weekends.
In the adult world, a person's concern for her own physical safety goes without saying, while the current discourse surrounds public image more than it does personal safety. In a New York Times Magazine article on privacy and technology, Jeffrey Rosen states that through the interception of e-mails, the tracking of browsing habits and purchases online and statements made in chatrooms, one's "public identity may be distorted by fragments of information that have little to do with how you define yourself."
Indeed, we've all heard stories about e-mail fragments being taken out of context by employers and others. The Washington Post described the case of James Rutt, the CEO of Network Solutions Inc., who feared his years of candid postings about sex, politics and his weight problem might be taken out of context, thus damaging his reputation and his ability to run his company effectively. Consequently, the new CEO employed a program called Scribble to help erase his online past.
Rutt's story is not unusual. This fear of being taken for a "fragment" of information is enough for most of us to employ private e-mail accounts we switch to at work when we have something personal to communicate. Even though we take these precautions, everyone I know goes to great lengths to erase all of her business e-mails when leaving a company. Why? Because the medium is seductive: Web travel is about exploration, and e-mails begun as impersonal memos often become more intimate exchanges. Intimacy does not translate well to third parties.
Take the 1997 example Rosen cites of Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig's e-mailed comment to a friend that he had "sold [his] soul" in downloading Microsoft Internet Explorer. Lessig, who had downloaded Explorer simply to enter a contest for a PowerBook, was not stating a biased opinion about the company, he was flippantly quoting a song. However, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who had chosen Lessig as an adviser in the Microsoft antitrust suit, was forced to take such a bias seriously, removing Lessig as his adviser.
Rosen makes the point that we all wear different social "masks" in different settings and with different people. This may be true, even as it is socially taboo. From our estimations of Joan of Arc down to President Clinton, we celebrate and trust those with consistent (and consistently good) characters and criticize those who "waffle," or behave as if they are "spineless." Because we do not know how to define someone who changes with each new setting, we call her things like "mercurial," a "chameleon" or "two-faced." Consequently, the web induces fear in an adult not just for the things online crooks might do with Social Security numbers and other personal information but what a user herself may do to complicate her own "character."
However, while the adult world may suffer from a preoccupation with consistency, teens have the peculiar advantage of being dismissed as inconsistent before they begin. Adolescence is the societally condoned window in which we may shuffle through identities with abandon. My older sister, for example, horrified my grade-school self by morphing from punk to hippie to Hare Krishna to surfer girl all in the next room. Yet by the time I graduated from high school, I'd been through a few of those identities myself.
Besides their assumed role as explorers, teens may actually face fewer risks of this kind than their adult counterparts. Statistics relate that around 45 percent of large companies monitor their employees e-mail accounts, while few junior highs and high schools in America offer all their students computers or e-mail accounts. Even if they did, chances are that monitoring kids' private mail in public schools would raise countless legal issues. DrRogue's school is just now hooking up six new computers for the whole school of fifty-six students and has no intention of providing them with e-mail accounts. Ironically, it is this deprivation that has made monitoring less of an issue for students than it is for employees at big companies.
For girls like DrRogue who create and maintain personal homepages and explore the web's massive serving of chatrooms and boards, safety is not the only motivation for anonymity. "Bodilessness," it seems, can be the means to a more intellectual objective: credibility. Says Peppermint, a 17-year-old writer,
I definitely feel "bodiless" when writing for my page. The Internet has provided me with an audience that will forever be my biggest fan and my worst enemy. Just as I can say what I want on my site without fear of rejection, others can e-mail me their honest thoughts without the face-to-face consequences of criticism. My audience, as well as my privacy, is crucial to my development as a writer.
In a world with, as DrRogue sees it, "a seemingly endless supply of people to talk to and sites to visit, from all around the world," immediate, physical privacy gives some young women confidence they don't have when they're attached to developing physiques, school cliques or societal and familial expectations.
Only bodiless, confess some girls, can they relate certain ideas and thoughts at all. Indeed, screen names have become so popular that AOL is currently offering the option of seven aliases to the users of Instant Messenger. DrRogue herself has five that she can remember. In addition, girls can, if only for the experience, switch genders online. (Studies suggest 40 percent have done it.) "The ONLY reason I go into a chatroom is to pretend to be someone else!" insists DrRogue. Other young women are altogether wary of chatrooms. "I don't believe in chatrooms," explains Peppermint. "They've become a forum for online popularity contests and cyber sex." Does the monitoring of chatrooms add to their problems?
DrRogue: I've never felt like I was being monitored, because a monitor would do a better job of kicking out the scum.
Bodiless, many girls use their homepages as a sounding board before taking ideas out into "the real world." Others put the space and the "audience" to work on facets of themselves or ideas they plan to confine permanently there.
Peppermint, whose "real life" friends know her as Caitlin, addresses the consequences that she believes her physicality can have upon the reception of her ideas. "I do not post pictures of myself," she states in an e-mail, "simply because I want to be perceived as 'more than just a pretty face.'" Peppermint is so adamant that her physical self be distinct from her online self that she does not give her website address to "real life" friends.
Peppermint: I don't allow friends that I have known in person to have my Website address. The Web is a sacred place for me to speak to a receptive and critical audience, while at the same time, I do not need to worry about making a first impression, [about] coming off how I'd like to, or [about] what will happen the next time I see them. Because I don't need to make impressions, I am who I am, and I am being honest.
Peppermint believes her femininity and "real life" identity can negatively affect the reception of her ideas. She observes: "As a woman, I think we will always be viewed as sexual objects. [I want a person] to be able to look past the outside and realize that there is an opinionated, intelligent, creative young woman behind the pretty face." DrRogue, who at 13 is really just entering adolescence, simply may not have experienced her femininity as a handicap yet. If all goes well, she never will.
To many, appearance is the essential problem of female development. With the world standing by to notice her changing body, a young woman begins to perceive her somewhat limited access to what psychologist Lyn Mikel Brown (and many others, of course) points to as the patriarchal framework of our culture. From here, a struggle to retain her childhood identity and value system ensues, followed typically by a loss of voice, the narrowing of desires and expectations and the capitulation to conventional notions of womanhood. Yes, the Dark Horrible Sucking Trail of the Lost Voice is so trodden it is cliché. We've all seen countless articles on the phenomenon, but that doesn't make it any less painful for the young women going through it.
Less publicized, though more interesting than the pervasiveness of the Sucking Trail, is what Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan (author of groundbreaking studies of female adolescence) have identified as a period before adolescence when girls' "voices" are at their most powerful. Young women, most of whom I imagine to be variations on DrRogue, actively resist dominant cultural notions of femininity at the edge of puberty. Finding a means to connect, harness and preserve the loud, defiant voices may empower girls to defy cultural norms and, in the process, eclipse the resentment that Virginia Woolf so protested.
On the one hand, Peppermint's sensitivity to a societal bias we'd like to think has passed is tragic. On the other hand, unlike those of us who were teenagers even ten years ago, Peppermint and DrRogue can literally construct their own worlds, with their own standards, where the only thing that matters is their ideas. They can't live in it forever, but maybe a few hours a day is long enough to change their lives.
BGAR2: how many hours do you spend online each day?
DrRogue: 1, usually.
BGAR2: really? That's nothing.
DrRogue: 2, really.
BGAR2: hmmm.
DrRogue: 3, if I'm bored.
BGAR2: still, I imagined more.
DrRogue: well, I'm prolly scaling down a lot.
BGAR2: why's that?
DrRogue: let's just say I've had to LIMIT my online time in the past.
BGAR2: ahh. los padres?
DrRogue: si.
BGAR2: how much time did you spend yesterday?
DrRogue: lemme check my log.
DrRogue: ok, I lied. I spent 4 hours online.
Intelligent Life, DrRogue's latest homepage, which makes vague note of a Susan somewhere in the meat of its smart, sometimes acerbic, steadfastly spelling-error-free content, is exactly what it sounds like: an SOS for brain activity in a spectrum overwrought with misspelled emotion. Intelligent Life, when just a month old, had already received nearly 400 visitors--and that was during the summer. Whether they're up to DrRogue's standards is another matter.
Intelligent Life: I'm not being snobbish or narrow-minded, the time has simply come to draw the line. I want to meet people (of any age) who are bright and exciting, funny, kind, and intelligent. I want to meet people who are clearly individuals, not stereotypical, bumbling, senseless teenagers with limited vocabularies who take extreme liberties with spelling.
In short, do not visit Intelligent Life if you are, and there's no easy way to say this, a "ditz." Ding.
DrRogue: Have you been to Narly Carly yet?
Narly Carly's Super Awesome Page, to be specific, is DrRogue's spoof site--she recommended I look at it for research. Pulling the purple page with the rotating star up onto the screen, I see another reactionary move by DrRogue: a parody of the many sunny, earnest, "overwrought" teen sites splattered across the web. In the usual autobiographical style of these things, the fictional Narly Carly describes herself and her life, albeit without any of the eloquence DrRogue saves for, well, DrRogue. "I am a junior at Willingford High!" screams Narly at her visitors, "Go Wolfs!!!"
Although to the naked eye Narly Carly's Super Awesome Page looks quite a lot like any other teen site, its status as a farce lies in its suspicious abuse of exclamation points, the word "like" and an overload of personal information, among other things. Narly gives away reels of intimate details--for the visitors who "get it," this is a reproach of lax security. There is, after all, no one currently policing the Internet to keep people from divulging too much about themselves. In this era, something like Narly Carly serves as a gentle warning--as gossip does in a small town--to keep people in line. The irony is, of course, that a real Narly Carly may not understand irony.
Narly Carly bears the treadmarks of an adolescent critical of hypocrisy in older girls, making Susan appear to be someone Gilligan might identify as a "resister." Before they give up any measure of voice and shift into idealized femininity, girls are louder than ever, embodying what Gilligan believes may be political potential of an active adolescent underground. Whatever Susan's reasons for building an older "teenybopper's" site, they are her own. However, the underground political potential, along with Susan's strength and clarity of character, are palpable on Narly Carly. Indeed, a handful of the guestbook's visitors, whether male or female, passed the first test--they "got it." Said one visitor: "This page is so evil! I know whoever made it did this intentionally. No 'real' person acts this pathetic. And 'like' was WAY back in the 1980s. I know this is a joke and the person who made it is laughing their head off reading the guestbook."
When I argue that web diarists like her must be a bit self-conscious, DrRogue seethes: "People really put themselves out on these things!" Unlike my diaries though, they also get visitors who comment and provide discourse and insight, making the creator feel less alienated, making the pages actually useful methods of growth. Not to knock the diary--I certainly got somewhere venting in my own. Anaïs Nin kept a journal to "free" herself of "personae." The web is, in some ways, a more evolved journal, even as it is so many other things. Studies have shown that students write better papers and learn foreign languages more fluently when they actually have something to communicate to another person.
BGAR2: so these sites are like journals.
DrRogue: exactly.
BGAR2: couldn't you print them out and store them in a closet or something and then delete them?
DrRogue: AH no!
DrRogue: that would defeat the purpose of the web!
BGAR2: what's the purpose?
DrRogue: interactivity, for one.
DrRogue: longevity of information, two. i can visit the Susan of a year ago. she's there in the same place, just as alive.
BGAR2: but how do you know when you're done?
DrRogue: I stop visiting it. I'm sick of it.
D.W. Winnicott defined a process of imaginative "saturation" in children's play in which the child plays with a certain toy or enacts an imaginative experience until all of the emotional ambivalence, fear, anxiety, etc., are diffused from that action or thing. DrRogues may be "playing" out their emotions to make offline "reality" less emotional. Selfishly, while she contributes to the textual wasteland of so many sites created and then abandoned, DrRogue hates to stumble upon such a "haunted" site herself.
DrRogue: It makes me feel really bad, manipulated almost, when I'm browsing a site, and then there's a date, and that date is like, March 13, 1996.
BGAR2: why, because it's old?
DrRogue: "does this person still exist?"
BGAR2: hmm
DrRogue: because I spent time getting to know the person
BGAR2: is it a waste if it's old?
DrRogue: it depends.
DrRogue: I like retail sites because they're constantly busy.
BGAR2: yeah, the idea of an updated site is good.
DrRogue: like someone's alive.
A good character's job is to "manipulate" her audience. Perhaps then, a date is some sort of narrative flaw that pulls DrRogue out of the story. What should a date matter to her anyway, I wonder: She'll never meet the site's creators. Why does she care whether she or he is still "alive"? The presence of a date on a site is like an actor's mustache falling off--it brings reality back into focus.
DrRogue's sense that a retail site, for example, might have human qualities, or something resembling a heartbeat, implies her ability to suspend disbelief so that the mechanism--words on the web--dissolves away. Further, it suggests a narrative view of the Internet, a desire to read and live through other people's stories. Susan seeks to learn about the world, about people and about herself, insight she can glean from any good story, regardless of its medium. I express some weariness of the homepages, but DrRogue says reading about their creators' everyday doings is fascinating, "sort of like having someone's life for a minute."
Stories, like "playing," can be powerful agents of personal transformation. "The right stories can open our hearts and change who we are," says Janet Murray, a professor of a digital fiction course at MIT. Indeed, ultimately the best stories render their technologies transparent so that we experience only the power of the characters and the story itself.
DrRogue created Intelligent Life to find other people, to hear their stories, to "have someone's life for a minute." In exchange, she shares her own experiences and, in doing so, develops a bit more as a human being. Logging on has enabled DrRogue to get beyond her small town, her age and her financial situation and has allowed her through narrative to experience the world.
Somehow, maybe because she pummels me with Instant Messages whenever I log on, I have come to associate the web with DrRogue. It is her "room," you might say.
DrRogue: yo
BGAR2: yo
BGAR2: shouldn't you be at camp or something
DrRogue: I said ALL my friends were at camp. I'm not so fortunate.
BGAR2: oh. sucks. well, you have the web.
DrRogue: I have the web.
Writing has always allowed people to step outside their skin, to try on different identities, to see through other perspectives. Lyn Lifshin, who edited a collection of women's journals by professional writers and others, recalled that contributors' friends were often shocked at the people represented in the diaries. For Foucault, writing was about growth and escaping the confines of identity. No one understands this better than the growth-hungry DrRogue, who, thanks to technology, can go even further in her explorations. She can gain experience of the world from a tiny room in Vermont.
The term "cyberspace" was coined by William Gibson, the prolific science fiction novelist, to define the virtual landscape of a human being's consciousness. It is voyeurism, entertainment, education, communication, interaction and self-expression all at once. Above all, it is a human environment, an extension of, rather than an escape from, the "real world." As such, it poses "real world" risks as well as opportunities. For young women like DrRogue and Peppermint, it is the real stories, the sense of community and communication, that keep them coming back.
Peppermint: Receiving responsive email to something I've written is the most rewarding part of the experience. I've received in excess of fifty letters, especially from girls a few years younger than myself, saying that I've taught them that there is nothing wrong with being yourself. This is a lesson that I wish I had learned at their age, and to know that I have taught it to someone younger than me is an incredible feeling.
DrRogue: IGG. [I gotta go.] Time to do something productive today.
BGAR2: Go write your novel.
I forgot to mention that, since she's not going to camp, DrRogue is writing a novel. It's tentatively titled: Teen Girls: Not as Stupid as You Think.
The recording
industry has been celebrating the supposed defeat of Napster. The
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed the grant of a
preliminary injunction that may well have the effect of closing the
service down completely and ending the commercial existence of
Napster's parent (that is, unless the record companies agree to an
implausible deal Napster has proposed). But despite appearances, what
has happened, far from being a victory, is the beginning of the
industry's end. Even for those who have no particular stake in the
sharing of music on the web, there's value in understanding why the
"victory"over Napster is actually a profound and irreversible
calamity for the record companies. What is now happening to music
will soon be happening to many other forms of "content" in the
information society. The Napster case has much to teach us about the
collapse of publishers generally, and about the liberative
possibilities of the decay of the cultural oligopolies that dominated
the second half of the twentieth century.
The shuttering of
Napster will not achieve the music industry's goals because the
technology of music-sharing no longer requires the centralized
registry of music offered for sharing among the network's listeners
that Napster provided. Freely available software called OpenNap
allows any computer in the world to perform the task of facilitating
sharing; it is already widely used. Napster itself--as it kept
pointing out to increasingly unsympathetic courts--maintained no
inventory of music: It simply allowed listeners to find out what
other listeners were offering to share. Almost all the various
sharing programs in existence can switch from official Napster to
other sharing facilitators with a single click. And when they move,
the music moves with them. Now, in the publicity barrage surrounding
the decision, 60 million Napster users will find out about OpenNap,
which cannot be sued or prohibited because, as free software, no one
controls its distribution and any lawsuits would have to be brought
against all its users worldwide. Suddenly, instead of a problem posed
by one commercial entity that can be closed down or acquired, the
industry will be facing the same technical threat, with no one to sue
but its own customers. No business can survive by suing or harassing
its own market.
The music industry (by which we mean the
five companies that supply about 90 percent of the world's popular
music) is dying not because of Napster but because of an underlying
economic truth. In the world of digital products that can be copied
and moved at no cost, traditional distribution structures, which
depend on the ownership of the content or of the right to distribute,
are fatally inefficient. As John Guare's famous play has drummed into
all our minds, everyone in society is divided from everyone else by
six degrees of separation. The most efficient distribution system in
the world is to let everyone give music to whoever they know would
like it. When music has passed through six hands under the current
distribution system, it hasn't even reached the store. When it has
passed through six hands in a system that doesn't require the
distributor to buy the right to pass it along, it has already reached
several million listeners.
This increase in efficiency
means that composers, songwriters and performers have everything to
gain from making use of the system of unowned or anarchistic
distribution, provided that each listener at the end of the chain
still knows how to pay the artist and feels under some obligation to
do so, or will buy something else--a concert ticket, a T-shirt, a
poster--as a result of having received the music for free. Hundreds
of potential "business models" remain to be explored once the
proprietary distributor has disappeared, no one of which will be
perfect for all artistic producers but all of which will be the
subject of experiment in decades to come, once the dinosaurs are
No doubt there will be some immediate pain that will
be felt by artists rather than the shareholders of music
conglomerates. The greatest of celebrity musicians will do fine under
any system, while those who are currently waiting on tables or
driving a cab to support themselves have nothing to lose. For the
signed recording artists just barely making it, on the other hand,
the changes are of legitimate concern. But musicians as a whole stand
to gain far more than they lose. Their wholesale defection from the
existing distribution system is about to begin, leaving the music
industry--like manuscript illuminators, piano-roll manufacturers and
letterpress printers--a quaint and diminutive relic of a passé
The industry's giants won't disappear overnight,
or perhaps at all. But because their role as owner-distributors makes
no economic sense, they will have to become suppliers of services in
the production and promotion of music. Advertising agencies,
production services consultants, packagers--they will be anything but
owners of the music they market to the world.
What is most
important about this phenomenon is that it applies to everything that
can be distributed as a stream of digital bits by the simple human
mechanism of passing it along. The result will be more music, poetry,
photography and journalism available to a far wider audience. Artists
will see a whole new world of readers, listeners and viewers; though
each audience member will be paying less, the artist won't have to
take the small end of a split determined by the distribution
oligarchs who have cheated and swindled them ever since Edison. For
those who worry about the cultural, economic and political power of
the global media companies, the dreamed-of revolution is at hand. The
industry may right now be making a joyful noise unto the Lord, but it
is we, not they, who are about to enter the promised land.
Jason Epstein's Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future is the third memoir of a major American life in book publishing to reach print in less than two years. It is at once a sign that the guard is changing and a recognition that the business has already changed. It is also, in the case of the 72-year-old Epstein, an opportunity to gaze into the crystal ball to predict the changes to be, something he has been rather good at during the course of his long career.
Simon & Schuster's Michael Korda got the triumvirate rolling in 1999 with Another Life, gossipy and entertaining and novelistic, like the books Korda often publishes. The New Press's André Schiffrin--famously ousted from Random House's Pantheon Books, the once independent imprint his father started--followed suit more recently with The Business of Books, the kind of polemic he has sometimes featured on his list [see Daniel Simon, "Keepers of the Word," December 25, 2000].
It's not surprising, then, that the tone pervading Epstein's memoir--which began with a series of lectures he gave at the New York Public Library, formed two essays in The New York Review of Books and was coaxed into a book by Norton president Drake McFeely--is cool and elegant and full of the gravitas of a man who wanted to be a great writer and instead ended up publishing many such, Morrison and Mailer and Doctorow among them.
He arrived at Random House in 1958, having deemed it time to leave Doubleday when he was prevented from publishing Lolita there. While at Doubleday he had founded Anchor Books and with it the trade paperback format in America. He retired as Random's editorial director in 1998, and during the four decades in between started the Library of America, a unified series of reprints of great American literature; The Reader's Catalog, a kind of print precursor to Amazon; and The New York Review of Books. He had a reputation as a brilliant editor but went beyond that to envisage change and make it happen, and in the process made himself into a pillar of the New York intellectual establishment.
"If I have any regrets, I can't think what they are," he declared during an interview recently, sipping homemade espresso at his large kitchen table in an opulent downtown apartment that could double as the upscale set for one of Woody Allen's Manhattan tales. He still edits authors he's been associated with but now does it from home. He prefers to be based there rather than in the Random corporate offices, wishes to put space between himself and an "increasingly distressed industry" mired in "severe structural problems." Prominent among them are a chain-driven bookselling system that favors "brand name" authors and often returns other new books to their publishers after only a few weeks on the shelves, before the titles have a chance to establish themselves; and a bestseller-driven system of high royalty advances that often do not earn back the money invested, a system that ratchets up unrealistically high sales expectations for new titles overall, and in so doing makes it increasingly difficult to publish certain kinds of books.
One-third of the way through his slim text, Epstein writes that his career has demonstrated an "ambivalence toward innovation." Ambivalence also pervades this elegiac book. Perhaps it is inevitable when a man looks back to his youth and forward to a future in which he will not play a major part, even if he is hopeful about that future. Perhaps, too, it is inevitable when confronting the distress signals of an industry he has spent his life in and clearly loves. Epstein shares his visions of a publishing future liberated electronically, but that future harks back to a deep-seated nostalgia, a longing for what was. His book seems to predict that technology in the form of the Internet will restore to the book business a certain lost rightness from the past.
His first chapter, like Dickens's Christmas tale, moves back and forth among past, present and future in an attempt to limn the larger changes of the past fifty years and what may yet unfold. The rest of the book is chronologically structured. It follows Epstein's career and the transformation of publishing from primarily small-scale, owner-operated enterprises rooted in the 1920s "golden age" of Liveright and Knopf to the "media empires" of today, which are forced to operate within an "overconcentrated," "undifferentiated" and fatally "rigid" bookselling structure. Now, he says, "there can't be Liverights or Cerfs because the context is so different. Roger Straus is the very last of them," and even he has sold his company to the German firm von Holtzbrinck.
Publishing must return to being "a much smaller business again," Epstein is convinced. "It has to, it's a craft and can't be industrialized any more than writing can. It's about to undergo a huge structural shift and there's nothing the conglomerates can do about it. The marketplace has shifted out from under them: the system of big money bestsellers defeats the possibility of building a sustained backlist. And without a sustained backlist, publishing cannot function in the long term. Providentially, just as the industry was falling into terminal decadence, electronic publishing has come along."
Epstein is in no way predicting the demise of print. Rather, his future is predicated on a kind of universal electronic Reader's Catalog, "much like Amazon" but far beyond it, "multilingual, multinational, and responsibly annotated. People will access it on their computers at home, in the office, and in kiosks like ATMs. It will be possible to browse those books, and downloading technology will eventually solve the problem of making it possible to buy those books. They won't exist in print until they're actually bought.
"There is no room on the Internet for middlemen, who sell the same product as their competitors, competing on the basis of price and service, and in so doing eat up their margins." Epstein is of course speaking of the Amazons and B&N.coms of today. "I think Amazon can't be here that much longer," says the man who sat at this same kitchen table doling out advice to its CEO, Jeff Bezos, a few years back.
As for brick-and-mortar stores, "the chains aren't tenable, either. They never were. The superstores have become what the old mall stores were. There are far too many of them, Waldens with coffee bars, and they will shrink. Stores run by people who love running bookstores will arise spontaneously like mushrooms and find a way to stay in business once the chains begin to recede."
And the conglomerate publishers? "I think they can show some financial progress for some years by cutting costs and cutting out redundancies, but eventually they'll find themselves with expensive traditional facilities that are increasingly irrelevant. They'll have to offload many functions on to specialist firms. In the end, they in turn will look for a buyer if they can find one. They should have noticed that the previous owners were all too happy to sell."
Meanwhile, authors will have found a way to bypass their publishers by going directly to the web. People will start independent authors' websites. Books will be much cheaper. Authors will have a much larger share of the revenue.
Stephen King has already gained notoriety in trying to do so. But the spectacular starting bang of Riding the Bullet, done in conjunction with his publisher, Simon & Schuster, attenuated when he tried to serialize online a novel, The Plant, on his own. A downturn in paying customers for the later chapters led King to abandon the project. Asked about this, Epstein insists, "It's like the days of the early cars that ran off the road into the mud. People said cars would never work. Well, one of these days e-publishing will work."
Of other experiments now being tried Epstein is openly dismissive, and he sees a kind of Darwinian process filtering chaff from grain. Mighty Words and similar online publishers "don't know what a book is," he contends. "But people know what a book is. Human beings are designed to distinguish value, and in my opinion that problem will take care of itself."
He disregards the tremors that have gone through the publishing houses ever since B&N.com announced it was getting into the business of publishing books. Barnes & Noble Digital was formed the first week in January to compete with the new electronic subsidiaries of traditional publishers, which are bringing out digital versions of new titles readable on PCs or dedicated devices, as well as original works specifically created for electronic distribution. In addition, they are digitizing backlist and out-of-print books that can be reprinted in very small quantities in a process known as print-on-demand."It's yet another premature entry," says Epstein. "B&N's publishing experience is limited to a remainder operation. That's entirely different from bringing out original works."
While Epstein criticizes the proverbial naysayers' laughing at those early cars stuck in the mud, at the same time he cautions, "I don't think an author who has worked hard to create something of value will want to risk it in the electronic format at this point." He says bookstores will wind up selling new titles at much lower prices than is now the case, $10 or so, but "can't figure out" how that will be done in the black. His predictions are compelling, but they are also much too vague--for instance, he sets out no time frame or actual mechanics for what he believes will transpire.
The bloat of the superstores is something publishers have worried about for years, almost from their rollout. This holiday season's flat sales at the three biggest chains; the margin-slashing of Amazon; and the re-energizing of the independent stores through a marketing program called Booksense, which includes web-based retailing, all serve to illustrate Epstein's points. Borders went so far as to put itself on the block, but found no willing takers. Recent murmurs about B&N's CEO Len Riggio entertaining a buyout offer from media conglomerate Gemstar-TV Guide International, which has aggressively entered the e-book technology market, did not result in a deal but also were more than simple gossip.
The past twenty years have seen the RCAs, MCAs, Advance Publications and the like learn their lessons and abandon book publishing, as Epstein has noted. Other conglomerates have already tried to offload their publishing components and in time will try again. But it also can't be ignored that companies like the German-based Bertelsmann (which acquired Bantam, Doubleday Dell and Random House and consolidated them) and von Holtzbrinck (which has bought Holt, St. Martin's and Farrar, Straus & Giroux) have their roots in the book business itself. They are therefore not as likely to exit the scene as Epstein would have us believe.
Undoubtedly, many of Epstein's electronic dreams are prescient and will one day come to pass. The companies that first turn them into reality, though, will likely be turning out works in the professional, scholarly, reference and educational sectors rather than in the trade world he knows so well. But although the Internet will change book publishing profoundly and in ways even Jason Epstein can't predict, other forces are at work as well and shouldn't be ignored.
A couple of years ago a brilliant and rich entrepreneur who also happens to be a profoundly bookish man devised a model, not unlike Epstein's nostalgic vision, of devolved companies publishing real books that share a central financial source. It is called the Perseus Group. It is still in its early days, far too soon to know whether it will last. But Epstein's longing for a more civilized, human-scale publishing business is shared by many. The Internet may help bring it about, but it won't do everything.
Bill Gates for President--next time. Now that we've gotten used to
millionaires running for the presidency, why not a billionaire and a
self-made one at that? At least Gates is aware that the biggest problem
in the world is not how to make some Americans even wealthier but how to
deal with the abysmal poverty that defines the condition of two-thirds of
God's people.
Odd as it may seem, it took the richest man in the world in a dramatic
speech last week to remind us that no man is an island, and that when
most of the world's population lives on the edge of extinction, it mocks
the rosy predictions for our common future on a wired planet.
Gates shocked a conference of computer industry wizards with the news
that the billions of people who subsist on a dollar a day are not in a
position to benefit from the Information Age. He charged that the hoopla
over the digital revolution, which he pioneered, is now a dangerous
distraction from the urgent need to deal seriously with the festering
problem of world poverty. Gates, who has donated an enormous amount to
charity, also made the case that private donations alone will not solve
the problem, and that massive government intervention is needed.
"Do people have a clear idea of what it is to live on $1 a day?" Gates
asked the conferees. "There's no electricity in that house. None. You're
just buying food, you're trying to stay alive."
The "Creating Digital Dividends" conference he addressed was one of
those occasions in which the computer industry indulges the hope that as
it earns enormous profits, it is solving the major problems facing
humanity. The premise of the conference was that "market drivers" could
be used "to bring the benefits of connectivity and participation in the
e-economy to all the world's 6 billion people."
As reported by Sam Howe Verhovek in the New York Times, Gates, who was
the conference's closing speaker, doused that hope by denying that the
poor would become part of the wired world any time soon. In a follow-up
interview, Gates amplified his view of what occurs when computers are
suddenly donated to the poor: "The mothers are going to walk right up to
that computer and say, 'My children are dying, what can you do?' They're
not going to sit there and like, browse eBay."
Gates, who has long extolled the power of computers to solve the
world's problems, criticized himself for having been "naïve--very naïve."
He has shifted the focus of the $21 billion Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation from that of donating Information Age technology to meeting
the health needs of the poorest, beginning with the widespread
distribution of vaccines.
The New York Times reported that Gates "has lost much of the faith he
once had that global capitalism would prove capable of solving the most
immediate catastrophes facing the world's poorest people, especially the
40,000 deaths a day from preventable diseases. He added that more
philanthropy and more government aid--especially a greater contribution
to foreign health programs by American taxpayers--are needed for that."
Given that Gates is presumably the biggest of those taxpayers, that is
the most provocative challenge to the complacency of the
"free-markets-and-trade-will-solve-everything" ideology that dominates
the thinking of both major parties. US foreign aid to the poor
represents a pathetic fraction of our budget, while we devote ever larger
sums to building a sophisticated military without a sophisticated enemy
in sight. Yet those misplaced priorities went totally unchallenged by the
presidential candidates of both major parties.
Poverty is the major security problem both within and without our
country. These days the have-nots have many windows to the haves, and
resentment is inevitable. It is the breeding ground of disorder and
terror, and it is absurd to think that a stable new world order can be
built on such an uneven foundation.
One of the ironies of the wired world is that those terrorists in
their remote mountain camps are wired into the Internet, which has
facilitated the coordination of their evil plans. The terrorists have all
the laptops and cellular phones they want, but they depend for their
effectiveness on recruiting from the ranks of the alienated poor who
don't have medicines, food or a safe source of water.


text:
The Voice
The Voice Season 3 Episode 1 Recap: Yodeling, Second Chances, and a Pink Cockatoo!
Well summer may be over, but at least we've got the newest season of The Voice to keep us warm! Once again, we welcome our favorite coaches back to their swiveling chairs, and settle in for some good singing, great stories, and the best celebrity arguments this side of network television.
This season, everything's bigger. With the teams expanding to 16 artists per coach, there will be tons of new rules and last minute dramatic twists, but first, the blind auditions!
Actually, first we had to give the coaches a chance to remind us that they're the real stars. Night one of the the hit reality singing competition started off in true superstar fashion, with all four of the returning judges singing a mixed medley version of The Rolling Stones's "Start Me Up," featuring a white peasant blouse number from CeeLo and a teeny sparkly one piece on our favorite diva Christina Aguilera. Ahh, how we missed you guys.
Then it was down to business.
Terry McDermott
The very first to brave the stage this season was Terry McDermott, a Scottish import who came to the States in 2003 to do his whole "rock star thing," which nearly 10 years later, still hadn't worked out for him and his family.
Singing "Baba O'Riley" by The Who, Terry belted out the classic tune like a champ getting Adam Levine, Cee Lo Green, and Blake Shelton to push their buttons. After a few moments of deliberation, Terry went with his fellow accented dude, Blake Shelton, to start off the evening on a high note.
And before we move on, we must acknowledge Cee Lo's newest animal accessory, a pink cockatoo, aptly named "Lady Bird" which was perched regally atop his shoulder during his one-on-one interview. It's casual.
Hailing from Chicago, the next hopeful, De'Borah, came from a religious family, with pastors for parents. Even though her unique style and sexuality was a problem for her conservative church community, her parents always supported her, giving her the confidence to be her self proclaimed "misfit" self.
With her bright personality and quirky fashion, it was no surprise that De'Borah wowed the judges with her soulful rendition of Train's hit "Hey, Soul Sister," with both Cee Lo Green and Christina turning their chairs. Even though Cee Lo appealed to her offbeat "swag," De'Borah instead went with judge Christina, who she credited with giving her confidence in her teenage years.
Gracia Harrison
Next up is country hopeful Gracia Harrison. Hoping to set herself apart from the pack, Gracia bet on her unusual yodeling talents to take her to the next round. Singing Patsy Montana's "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart," the young yodeler barely got out her first warble before judges Adam Levine and Blake Shelton turned their chairs, with Cee Lo quickly joining suit.
The boys clearly all wanted her, with Adam calling her the "best country singer on the show, by far," and Cee Lo pleading for her to be his "cowboy sweetheart." But, the original country crooner, Blake Shelton, swooped in and scored his second recruit, prompting Adam Levine to throw an (utterly adorable) tantrum in response.
Garrett Gardner
Then we had the young hipster legacy, Garrett Gardner. Though he's only 16, Garrett has lived a painful life, having lost his rockstar father two years ago to cancer. Singing in his father's memory, Garrett chose "Have You Ever Seen The Rain," a song which fit his unique gravelly voice. Unfortunately, the judges weren't convinced, and no chairs turned for the young upstart, even though Adam said he was "better than he was" at that age.
Devyn Deloera
Then we had the reclusive Texas beauty, Devyn Deloera. The homeschooled singer said she found herself through her singing, and was looking for a way to bring that confident side out even more on the show. And confident she was tonight, when the songstress took on Ms. Aguilera's own hit, "Ain't No Other Man." We all know how this could have gone, but Devyn managed to put a fun quirky spin on the diva's hit, getting all but Cee Lo to turn their chairs. Blake took his borderline flirting to another level, calling her talent "superhuman," or at least a skirt that flew up like one. Oh Blake, you're such a charmer. Surprising no one, Devyn chose to go with her inspiration, Christina Aguilera.
Bryan Keith
With a two-time Grammy winning father, Bronx native Bryan Keith was no stranger to music stardom. But Bryan wanted to make his own way, and sang Bruno Mars's "It Will Rain" for the judges in a bid to prove himself. And prove himself he did, earning the first four-chair turn of the season.
Judge Christina called him a "signature voice" with a "raw quality," but Bryan chose coach Adam Levine, making him the first on the Maroon 5 frontman's team.
Danny Rosa
Next, a familiar face from last season, Danny Rosa, came back for a second chance on that Voice stage. We've got to hand it to this kid, it takes guts to get up there once, but twice is downright bold. Singing Gotye's hit "Somebody That I Used to Know," Daniel somehow made the overplayed radio anthem sound new and refreshing. This time, the show was on his side, with both Blake and Cee Lo turning their chairs for this comeback kid. Overwhelmed with the love, it took Daniel a second to compose himself, after which he chose Cee Lo.
Anita Antoinette
22-year-old Anita Antoinette came all the way from Jamaica by way of Boston, to take her shot at stardom. The Berklee Music school grad was hoping to make her mother proud with a beautiful rendition of Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry." But alas, no chairs turned, with Adam pointing out mid song that you had "bring that song," rather than just "sing" it.
Undeterred, Anita proceeded to sing the tune a capella after getting a 'no,' giving the audience and viewers across America chills. Though Christina called the performance "phenomenal," Anita still left with no team no coach.
Joe Kirkland
Looking like he jumped straight out of the punk version of One Direction, Joe Kirkland came to The Voice with his bandmates behind him hoping to make it as a solo artist.
Singing The All-American Rejects, "Gives You Hell," Joe pretty much turned the judges into tweenage Directioners, bringing an "aggressive tone" to his already boyish charm, and getting Blake and Adam to turn their chairs. Though Blake appealed to the Texan in Joe, the vested crooner chose Adam as his mentor.
Jessica Sharpe
Next up was a hair stylist from North Carolina named Jessica Sharpe. Bathed in a white flowy flower child dress, the angelic southern belle surprised us and showed her wicked side, with a deep and rich rendition of "Son of a Preacher Man." Unfortunately it didn't seem to be enough for the judges to press their red buttons. Though none of them felt that "magical moment," Christina (literally) wiped the contestant's tears away and told her to try again next year.
Trevin Hunte
And last but certainly not least to take the stage was 18-year-old Trevin Hunte. Born and raised in the harsh neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, Trevin used music to escape his surroundings, listening to his father's radio in the basement.
Almost as soon as Trevin hit the stage, chairs were swiveling, with all but Adam pressing their buttons.
The humble Trevin was overwhelmed but managed to pull it together long enough to choose Cee Lo as his coach, who called him a "prodigy" from that one audition alone, giving the youngster a much needed confidence boost.
Don't fret Voice fans because we're just getting started! We're back tomorrow with another round of blind auditions! What did you think of tonight's performances? Tell us below!
Wanna chat with fellow fans of The Voice? Join the discussion on our The Voice Facebook page!
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text:
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Exclusive Author's Photo as Scene from the Novel; preview of the upcoming "Hell" by Robert Olen Butler
As mentioned in my review of "Severance: Stories", Robert Olen Butler's upcoming novel "Hell" became a highly awaited September release for me and a review of it will be forthcoming here around the publication date.
Mr. Butler was very kind to send me some extra material, including an author's photo that actually represents a scene from the novel.
As a limited preview I include two lines from the first page of the novel, lines that would always make me get and read such a book asap:
"...it's the Evening News from Hell. And now here's your anchorman, looking a little fragile himself, Hatcher McCord." The voice of Beelzebub, Satan's own station manager, mellifluously fills...."
"Later, in our ongoing series of interviews, 'Why Do You Think You're Here?', we speak to the Reverend Jerry Falwell and to George Clemens, inventor of the electric hand dryer for public restrooms." "
"...it's the Evening News from Hell. And now here's your anchorman, looking a little fragile himself, Hatcher McCord." The voice of Beelzebub, Satan's own station manager, mellifluously fills...."
"Later, in our ongoing series of interviews, 'Why Do You Think You're Here?', we speak to the Reverend Jerry Falwell and to George Clemens, inventor of the electric hand dryer for public restrooms." "
12:01 PM | Posted by Liviu | | Edit Post
1 comments:
- The Reader said...
Hi Liviu
Yeah these lines really make me want to rread the book " 'Why Do You Think You're Here?', we speak to the Reverend Jerry Falwell"
This looks like a fun book.
- May 27, 2009 at 2:24 PM
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Citi's extensive global presence is unmatched among financial institutions. Our rich heritage spans over 200 years, and each of Citi's alumni have contributed to this long and successful history.
Wherever your career may have taken you, the Citi Alumni Network provides you with an opportunity to reconnect with Citi or to strengthen existing connections with your current and former colleagues. We look forward to building long-term relationships with all of our alumni!
Welcome to the Citi Alumni Network website! I am delighted to serve as Senior Alumni Ambassador. Throughout my career at Citi, I was fortunate to develop many deep relationships with my colleagues, and I continue to enjoy a global camaraderie with current and former Citi employees.
I believe the Citi Alumni Network is important to enable Alumni to reconnect with each other as well as to follow Citi's evolution in the coming years.
I look forward to visiting with old, as well as new, friends as we launch and grow the network.


text:
Cricket fans could sell old mobile to enjoy new app
14 June 2010 — 12:00 PM
With the domestic Twenty20 cricket season underway, fans may wish to sell their old mobile and put the cash towards a new Apple iPhone.
This is because Friends Provident, sponsor of the limited overs tournament, has commissioned a new app for the device specifically for the competition.
Users can take part in a predictions league where they compete with each other to correctly forecast the scores of a host of matches.
There will also be the chance to test out cricket knowledge in a series of quizzes and catch up with the latest news.
Friends Provident has enlisted the services of ex-England player and pundit Mark Nicholas to help craft the app.
It is thought the former Channel 4 anchor, famous for his partnership with Richie Benaud, will help the company design the features of the app so they are enjoyable to fans of the sport.
Sussex Sharks are the reigning Twenty20 Cup champions, having defeated Somerset in last season's showpiece final.
News brought to you by envirofone.com the UK's largest mobile phone recycling company
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Mobile recycling could be an option for recipients of unwanted gifts30 December 2010 — 12:02 PM
People can get money for a phone they do not intend to use.
Selling mobile can create chance to buy HTC Desire HD29 December 2010 — 3:54 PM
People who enjoy a large screen may find all they want in the HTC Desire HD.


text:
The place for Rammstein tour, Rammstein concert dates, Rammstein concert tickets, Rammstein concerts, Rammstein tour dates, Rammstein merchandise and more.
Rammstein Tour Dates and Rammstein ConcertsRammstein has announced a 2012 tour with many shows, dates and concerts on schedule. Rammstein shows are electric and all your favorites will be sang live in concert. The Rammstein tour is bound to continue to succeed, deep into 2012. Watch for more Rammstein tour dates to come. Rammstein tour dates for 2012 are listed below, so you have no excuse to miss any of the concerts, shows or dates of the 2012 Rammstein tour. Look at our Rammstein merchandise page too.
Rammstein Announces 2012 North American Tour :Rammstein announced that they will bring their epic live show to 9 cities in North America throughout the month of May 2012. The Berlin-based six-piece band, who immediately sold out two exclusive concerts last December at the Bell Centre in Montreal and the legendary Madison Square Garden in New York City, have not had a tour in North America since 2001. Rammstein 2012 Tour Dates : 5/5 New York, NY Izod Center (E. Rutherford, NJ) On Sale Feb. 26 5/7 Montreal, QC Bell Centre On Sale Feb. 26 5/8 Toronto, ON Air Canada Centre On Sale Feb. 25 5/10 Chicago, IL Allstate Arena (Rosemount) On Sale Feb. 26 5/13 Edmonton, AB Rexall Place On Sale Feb. 25 5/15 Seattle, WA Tacoma Dome (Tacoma) On Sale Feb. 26 5/18 Oakland, CA Oracle Arena On Sale Feb. 26 5/20 Los Angeles, CA The Forum On Sale Feb. 26 5/21 Las Vegas, CA Thomas & Mack Center On Sale Feb. 26 .. Keep checking back for newly updated Rammstein tour info, Rammstein tour dates and more Rammstein shows in live concerts.Rammstein Announces North American Tour for 2012 :After the success of last year's show at New York City's Madison Square Garden, we are happy to announce Rammstein has announced their first North America 2012 Tour Dates after 10 years. Keep checking back as more Rammstein tour dates and Rammstein concerts are added to the tour schedule.
RAMMSTEIN announce first North American Tour in a decade : It's been over ten years since German monsters RAMMSTEIN did a proper tour of North America, but in May that dry spell will come to an end. Following dates in New York City and Montreal last December, the band has announced a series of LiveNation-produced dates that will take them across the States and into Canada. Tickets go on-sale February 25 and 26th depending on location. Check out the dates above and stay tuned for more details on this tour as they're revealed.More tour dates to be added to the tour schedule as it unfolds. Watch for added Rammstein concerts.Don't miss any of the Rammstein concerts or Rammstein tour dates that play near you, fit your schedule.
Rammstein BiographyRammstein were formed in 1993 by an assembly of factory-weary proletarians raised in East Germany. They took their name (adding an "m") from the location of a German tragedy where 80 people were hurt and killed as the result of a crash during an American Air Force flight show. (The literal translation of "ram stein" is a battering ram made of stone.) Word of Rammstein's horror/romanticist blend of theater and music -- one-time Olympic swimmer Till Lindemann would sing entire songs engulfed in flame from head to toe -- spread quickly. The band's first album, Herzeleid (Heartache), built on the grounds created by the band's live reputation.Scaling the German charts (and remaining there until the release of the second Rammstein LP some two years later), the album also introduced the band to the world outside of the Germany/Switzerland/Austria region. As Rammstein's second album, Sehnsucht (Longing), was released, the band was headlining throughout Europe to crowds of 10,000 to 30,000 people. Sehnsucht entered the German charts at number one immediately upon its release and came very close to doing the same in Austria and Switzerland. Within weeks, entries on other countries' charts had Sehnsucht rubbing elbows with the Prodigy, Radiohead, and the Rolling Stones on Billboard's cumulative Eurochart. From there the fever spread, transcending any perceived language barrier. Mutter followed in 2001, Reise, Reise in 2004, and the live collection Volkerball in 2006. Last year, they sold out 2 North America shows in a blink of an eye.... full Rammstein biography
Dont Miss the latest Rammstein concert dates, Rammstein tour dates or any of the live Rammstein concerts. Also take a look at our Merchandise section for some of the coolest Rammstein merchandise on the market!
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text:
The following is an archive of a post made to our
'vox-tech mailing list'
by one of its subscribers.
On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
> Jeff Newmiller wrote:
> > I detest programs designed to behave this way... from "helpful" cpu status
> > displays to "Did you really want to quit this program?" dialog boxes to
> > "Your Windows resources are running low" to "We are backing up your
> > data... please wait" dialog boxes... they all suffer from either hubris or
> > programmers who couldn't handle multitasking. Please stop trying to take
> > control away from the users ... there has to be a way to avoid this
> > unfriendly behavior in your software ... be creative and find it.
> >
> <snip>
> I appreciate your comments. Let me explain a little bit more about my
> problem. I am helping with a 3D visualization add-on (octaviz, built on
> VTK) for a numerical math package (octave). Octave typically runs as a
> command-line interpreter in a shell window. Graphing commands (and now
> visualization commands) generate new windows that contain
> graphs/graphics. 2D plots can be exported in some vectorized format, of
> course. The 3D visualizations, however, are complex, opengl rendered
> objects with mouse interaction to rotate, zoom, etc. Image "snapshots"
> of the windows are often the only way to get a desired export of the
> visualization.
No way to extract the user-entered orientation data and re-render
offscreen? [1][2] If you really aren't interested in the user's geometry
input (automation of image generation) then offscreen solutions should be
fairly easy. If you are, then user interaction should include raising the
necessary window.
> There are functions in VTK to do just this, but the
> rendered window MUST be on top to work; otherwise, it exports whatever
> screen image is over the top of the VTK window. And yes, I do consider
> this to be a feature problem in VTK, but I do not have the technical
> expertise nor time to make changes to VTK.
Time and expertise... perpetual problems.
> So... a quick and easy fix for me is to force the window on top before
> my export command saves the window as an image. I did spend all weekend
> looking through Xlib programming docs to see if I could get around this
> some way, for example by keeping the window data in memory when it is
> covered up. Another option is off-screen rendering, but that path isn't
> short either.
An even quicker and easier fix would be to require that the user insure
that the view window is on top, or at least not overlapped, before
proceeding to extract image data from it.
> If anyone has further suggestions, I would be happy to hear them. For
> now I /try/ to bring the window to the top and have a warning in the
> user docs about this.
Hook an event off the vtk window that calls you back when the user clicks
on a button to generate the image. [3] At the appropriate place in your
octave routine, give the user an option to go print the window. Most
users will raise the window in order to interact with it... if not, they
can be trained to do so. When your code recognizes that this has been
done, it can proceed to use the "buggy" vtk output routines... or proceed
without saving when it directly receives appropriate keyboard input in the
octave window.
At some point, when the VTK code is fixed, or you figure out an offscreen
solution, you or someone else interested in getting around the user input
can fix the problem.
[1] http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2004-August/075593.html
[2] http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2004-August/075602.html
[3] I am lead to believe this is possible by the description on the web
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Do not use this medicine if you have had an allergic reaction to efavirenz, or if you are pregnant. Do not use this medicine if you also use St John's wort, bepridil (Vascor®), cisapride (Propulsid®), midazolam (Versed®), pimozide (Orap®), triazolam (Halcion®), or ergot medicines (such as dihydroergotamine, ergonovine, ergotamine, methylergonovine, Cafergot®, Ergomar®, Wigraine®).
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This page was last updated: September 18, 2013


text:
Welcome to East Lincoln Park! This Beautifully updated 2bd/2bth duplex down offers a gracious floor plan with cherry cabinets, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, marble bathrooms, custom closets and blinds, and custom entertainment speakers on both levels. Lincoln School Dist and close proximity to Oz park, entertainment and transportation. Parking is steps from your back door and included in list price
2023 N. Cleveland Ave. #1E is a 1,150 ft2 condo/townhome built in 1900, and is located in Chicago, IL, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. It has 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, a 0-car garage, and has annual property taxes of $5,343. This home goes to Lincoln Elementary School.
The data relating to real estate for sale on this website comes in part from the Broker Reciprocity program of Midwest Real Estate Data LLC. Real Estate listings held by brokerage firms other than MRED Smart-Frame IDX Demo are marked with the MRED Broker Reciprocity logo or the Broker Reciprocity thumbnail logo (the MRED logo) and detailed information about them includes the names of the listing brokers. Some properties which appear for sale on this website may subsequently have sold and may no longer be available. Information Deemed Reliable but Not Guaranteed. The information being provided is for consumers' personal, non-commercial use and may not be used for any purpose other than to identify prospective properties consumers may be interested in purchasing.
© 2012 Midwest Real Estate Data LLC. All rights reserved.
Neither RE/MAX nor HomesByMarco nor its service providers are liable for errors or inaccuracies in the information provided.
Copyright © HomesByMarco. All Rights Reserved. RE/MAX Suburban Independently Owned and Operated
1344 S. Milwaukee Ave, Libertyville, IL 60048


text:
- 18 & over
- Two items minimum
- Dress Code Enforced-No sleeveless shirts or tank tops on men
Ontario, CA
Comedy Central Certified
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Julio Gonzalez Presents (DTF) Comedy Show
Purchase Tickets
Show Details
- Ticket Price: $0.00
- Door Time: 7:00 PM
- Show Type: Stand Up
- Tags: Stand Up Comedy
18 & over
Two items minimum
Dress Code Enforced-No sleeveless shirts or tank tops on men
Performing Artists (Click on Artist for Reviews and Previews)
Julio Gonzalez
Julio was a comedian before he even knew it. He was always the funny guy where ever he went. Always trying to make people laugh no matter where he was, be it the back yard party or the grocery store. He was a regular at the comedy clubs not as a comedian but as a fan of comedy. At a company party he sat at a table of all women and had them laughing the entire time. They told him he should be a comedian and he thought: Hey, now there's an idea!
Still considered new to the comedy world, Julio has built a following with his stage presence, jokes and funny face. Julio's comedy is based on his experiences from people reminding him he's fat, to relationships and just having fun with life. He has created a fan base in Los Angeles County, Orange County, Ventura County, Texas, Arizona and Minnesota. His goal is to make everyone laugh. And become famouser!
Upcoming Shows
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India's Got Talent - seas...
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Mere Angne Mein: Screenin...
Arjun Kapoor's b'day part...
Toilet Paper Brides
Most unusual people on ea...
Celebs caught off-guard!
Hotties in Naked Dress
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Top Social Network Controversies
Celebs at airport
Dilwale: On the sets
80s Hot Teen Movies
B'wood hotties without makeup
62nd Britannia Filmfare Awards 2014 South: Winners
Arjun Kapoor's b'day party
62nd Britannia Filmfare Awards 2014 South: Red Carpet
Celebs' 'Twitpics'
Beach Moments of Bollywood
Lesser-known Queens of Striptease
Pre and Post movie scenes Visual Effects
Celebrity photo bombers
62nd Britannia Filmfare Awards 2014 South: Starry Night
Shocking celeb deaths
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Take a Look Inside Celebrities Homes
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Common Uncommon Crazes of India
Movies' first look
Bold acts in B'wood!
Amy Jackson
Celebrity FB Pics
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Divas in sheer ensembles


text:
LG Outs Plan to Upgrade Some Smartphones to Android 4.0
Article Comments
Uh, oh
I just hope those upgrades don't screw up phones like the Gingerbread update did for Sprint's Optimus S.
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text:
This law lists state requirements and standards regulating the introduction of pollutants into Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTWs) by industrial users. The following substances shall not be introduced into a POTW:
(1) Pollutants that create a fire or explosion hazard in the POTW including, but not limited to, wastestreams with a closed cup flashpoint of less than 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees;
(2) Pollutants that will cause corrosive structural damage to the POTW, but in no case discharges with pH lower than 5.0, unless the POTW is specifically designed to accommodate such discharges;
(3) Solid or viscous pollutants in amounts that will cause obstruction to the flow in sewers, or other interference with the operation of the POTW;
(4) Any pollutant, including oxygen demanding pollutants, released in a discharge at a flow rate or pollutant concentration as to cause interference with the POTW;
(5) Heat in amounts that will inhibit biological activity in the POTW treatment plant resulting in interference or causing damage, but in no case heat in such quantities that the temperature exceeds 104 degrees Fahrenheit at the POTW treatment plant;
(6) Petroleum oil, nonbiodegradable cutting oil, or products of mineral oil origin in amounts that will cause interference or pass through;
(7) Pollutants that result in the presence of toxic gases, vapors, or fumes within the POTW in a quantity that may cause acute worker health and safety problems; or
(8) Any trucked or hauled pollutants, except at discharge points designated by the POTW.
All industrial users shall notify the POTW immediately of all discharges that could cause problems to the POTW, including any slug loading.


text:
This is mid-level technical and professional work involving research, analysis, evaluation, and reporting of statistical data.
Analyzes sociological, economic, demographic, health and vital statistics, and/or other types of data; assists in selecting methods and techniques to be used in the presentation and interpretation of research findings.
Prepares analyses and descriptive texts indicating trends and statistical evaluations of their significance; prepares data, charts, and narrative for publications.
Develops and revises reporting forms and procedures for the compilation of moderately complex statistical data.
Provides public and private agencies with technical assistance and advice in the gathering and assembly of statistical material.
Visits providers and users of information for purposes of public relations, validation, quality improvement, and the solution of problems.
Coordinates the development of information with the information technology section; monitors computer output for quality.
Conducts special research studies requiring the application of moderately complex statistical methods to a variety of social and economic data, vital and other health statistics, agency activity reports, etc.
Provides technical guidance or supervision to technical and clerical personnel in the collection, analysis, and presentation of statistical material.
Programs statistical applications using micro or mainframe statistical software.
Exercises judgment in data analysis and trend deviations; receives general administrative direction; work is reviewed for validity and quality.
Performs other related work as assigned.
Intermediate knowledge of mathematical and complex statistical methods and their application to the analysis and evaluation of health, social, and economic data.
Intermediate knowledge of the use of graphic presentations.
Intermediate knowledge of research techniques and sources and availability of information.
Intermediate knowledge of the use and capabilities of statistical software packages.
Introductory knowledge of programming utilized in conjunction with a variety of statistical computer packages.
Ability to supervise or oversee a small staff of employees in clerical and technical activities.
Ability to analyze moderately complex statistical data and to present conclusions clearly in written and graphic form.
Ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with other employees, outside agency personnel, and the general public.
Ability to program micro or mainframe statistical packages.
(The following requirements will determine merit system eligibility, experience and education ratings, and may be used to evaluate applicants for Missouri Uniform Classification and Pay System positions not requiring selection from merit registers. When practical and possible, the Division of Personnel will accept substitution of experience and education on a year-for-year basis.)
One or more years of experience as a Research Analyst I with the Missouri Uniform Classification and Pay System.
A Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university with a minimum of 15 earned credit hours in one or a combination of the following: Public or Business Administration, Mathematics, Economics, Sociology, Education, Psychology, Computer Science or a closely related field, including at least six earned credit hours in quantitative research methods or statistics; and,
One or more years of professional experience in the analysis and reporting of statistical data.
(24 or more earned graduate credit hours from an accredited college or university in the specified areas including statistics or quantitative research methodology, may substitute for the required experience.)
(Technical and professional experience in the field of statistical analysis and research may substitute on a year-for-year basis for the required education.)


text:
From the viewpoint of the target, the ransom payment may be referred to as a "goodbye kiss." The origin of the term as a business metaphor is unclear, although it will certainly be understood in context as kissing the greenmailer and, certainly, millions of dollars goodbye. A company which agrees to buy back the bidder's stock position in the target avoids being taken over. In return, the bidder agrees to abandon the takeover attempt and may sign a confidential agreement with the greenmailer who will agree not to resume the maneuver for a period of time.
While benefiting the predator, the company and its shareholders lose money. Greenmail also perpetuates the company's existing management and employees, who would have most certainly seen their ranks reduced or eliminated had the hostile takeover successfully gone through.


text:
|The Official Site - Q&A Forum
|Jack Russell Terrier Club of America
Forum Main Menu
Post Response (Restricted)
Re: jrtPosted by: Linda
Posted on: March 22, 2001 at 07:15:53
In Reply to: jrt
: I have A 5 month jrt and she doesn't listen but,she can sit, lay and shake I HAVE BOUGHT a book on dog trainning do Ineed one on jrt? please help us with Christi. WE love her very much she's like one of the family.
------------------ Response Area -------------------