text:
When we left that old journalistic evergreen, the evils of daycare, two weeks ago, the media hysteria over the NICHD study had just about peaked. The researchers had begun to turn on each other in public, never a good sign--Jay Belsky, a champion soundbiter who had seized the media initiative by strongly suggesting that the study showed that more than thirty hours a week with anyone but Mom would risk turning little Dick and Jane into obnoxious brats, was sharply challenged by numerous co-researchers, who claimed the study's results were tentative, ambiguous and negligible, hardly results at all, really. After a few rounds of this, the media suddenly remembered that no one had actually seen the study, which won't be published for another year and which does seem on the face of it rather counterintuitive: Daddy care is bad? Granny care is bad? Quality of care makes no difference? What really did the trick, though, I suspect, was that every fed-up woman journalist in America sat down and bashed out a piece telling the doomsayers to lay off, already. With 13 million kids in daycare, and two-thirds of women with children under 6 in the work force, working moms are a critical mass, and they are really, really tired of being made to feel guilty when they are, in fact, still the ones doing double duty at work and home.
Compare the kerfuffle over the quantity of hours spent in daycare with the ho-hum response to studies of its quality. On May 1, Worthy Wage Day for childcare workers, came a study from Berkeley and Washington, DC, that looked at staffing in seventy-five better-than-average California daycare centers serving kids aged 2 1/2 through 5. According to Then and Now: Changes in Child Care Staffing 1994-2000, staffers and directors are leaving the field in droves. At the centers in the study, 75 percent of teachers and 40 percent of directors on the job in 1996 had quit four years later. Some centers had turnover rates of 100 percent or more (!) from one year to the next. Half the leavers abandoned the field entirely--raising their incomes by a whopping $8,000 a year compared with the other half, who remained in childcare. Nor were those who left easily replaced: Most of the centers that lost staffers could not fill all their job slots by the next year.
The demoralization and turmoil caused by constant turnover stress both the workers who stay and the children. Making matters worse, the new workers are "significantly less well-educated" than those they replace--only a third have bachelor's degrees, as opposed to almost half of the leavers. Pay, say the researchers, is the main issue: Not only have salaries not risen with the rising tide supposedly lifting all boats; when adjusted for inflation, they have actually fallen. A daycare teacher works twelve months a year to earn $24,606--just over half the average salary of public-school teachers, who work for ten months (not that schoolteachers are well-paid, either). Center directors, at the top of the field, earn on average a mere $37,571; the recommended starting salary for elementary-school teachers in California is $38,000. (In France, which has a first-rate public daycare system, daycare teachers and elementary-school teachers are paid the same.) Daycare teachers love their work--two-thirds say they would recommend it as a career--but simply do not earn enough to make a life in the field.
It's a paradox: Even as more and more families, of every social class, rely on daycare, and even as we learn more and more about the importance of early childhood education for intellectual and social development, and even as we talk endlessly about the importance of "quality" and "stability" and "qualified" staff, the amount of money we are willing--or able--to pay the people we ask to do this demanding and important job goes down. Instead of addressing this reality, we endlessly distract ourselves with Mommy Wars. (You let your child have milk from the store? My child drinks nothing but organic goat milk from flocks tended by Apollo himself!) And because as Americans we don't really believe the rest of the world exists, when a study comes along suggesting that other-than-mother-care produces some nasty and difficult kids, we don't think to ask if this is a problem in Denmark or France, and if not, why not.
Two new books of great interest, Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood and Nancy Folbre's The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, point out that there is a crisis of care in America. Women are incredibly disadvantaged when they perform traditionally female work--childcare, housework, eldercare--unpaid within families. (According to Crittenden, motherhood is the single biggest cause of poverty for women.) The free market cannot replace this unpaid labor at decent rates, Folbre argues, because it would be too expensive: Even now, most families cannot afford tuition at a "quality" daycare center, any more than they can afford private school. And men are hardly falling over themselves to do their share--nobody's talking about the Daddy Track, you'll notice. Both writers call for recognizing the work of care as essential to the economy: Top-quality daycare should be funded by the government, like school, because it is a "public good."
Unfortunately, funding public goods is not exactly a high priority of government, which is busily cutting programs for children in favor of a huge tax cut for the rich. These days our main public goods seem to be prisons ($4.5 billion), the drug war ($19 billion, including $1 billion in military aid to Colombia), abstinence education ($250 million) and executing Timothy McVeigh ($50 million, not counting plane tix for celebrity death witness Gore Vidal). You can always find money for the things you really want.
Once again the Bosnian Initiative Frankfurt, a German human rights group, is asking Nation readers to help fund summer camp for Bosnian refugee children. Many readers have become an integral part of this wonderful effort, sometimes going beyond donations to correspond with particular children. $150 makes you a "godparent" and pays for two weeks of camp for a child, but gifts of any size are welcome. Send checks made out to the Bosnian Initiative Frankfurt to me at The Nation, and I will forward them.
One recent Tuesday, members of the literary old guard gathered at the Church of All Souls on Manhattan's Upper East Side to bid final farewell to one of their secret society and to be reminded that the literary agent Candida Donadio, who had died some weeks earlier, was always clear in her devotion to the
written word and the men and women who make it. So much so that she never allowed herself to be pulled off her course by issues of money or power, meanness or shortsightedness. She had represented, over the years, so many of our literature's mega-authors--Heller, Pynchon, Roth and so on. Everything was always personal with Candida. You sensed her Sicilian past the moment you met her, and with Candida business was always the handservant of literature, not the other way around.
I met Candida in 1984. At the time, all of Nelson Algren's novels were out of print, and Algren himself had died just three years earlier. A short story of his that I'd read in a battered anthology compiled by Robert Penn Warren, "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," had knocked me off my feet. A young editor at Norton then, I blazed through the Algren canon. Although the books were out of print, people everywhere seemed to love to say they had known Algren, and two separate short-fiction prizes had been named after him. He was being silenced and cited simultaneously, and to me that seemed like a kind of posthumous torture. So I called Candida, who had represented him, and said I would like to start reissuing his books, which I could arrange through a company called Writers and Readers, where I moonlighted. Candida dutifully called each of Algren's previous publishers--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Doubleday, Putnam. None were interested in putting him back into print, so after about six months of demurring she told me yes, and from then on she never ever said no to me. Once she accepted me as a fellow keeper of the flame, I could have proposed running the texts backward and I think she would have given serious consideration to the proposal.
Candida's connection to her authors, and particularly Algren, was devotional both in the sense of requiring an absolute loyalty and in that there was an incense of faith and ritual that surrounded her--and you also, if you were fortunate enough to be on the inside with her. Her youthful partner Neil Olson said that Candida never thought of herself as a literary agent at all, but rather, she said, as a person polishing silver. You could picture her as a goddess disguised as a servant, in order to make sure that the silver--those words written by her clients--not be denied its brightness. For its sense of egolessness in the extreme, and its implied narrative of enhancing the beauty of what is precious, the image is brilliant and pure Candida.
The anecdotes at All Souls were revelatory of how her values increasingly stood out in a changing landscape. Knopf associate publisher Vicky Wilson recalled that Candida used to say sometimes that she wanted to become a Carmelite nun--not a big change, I can't help thinking--and how, at one of their regular lunches, Candida had fixed her large eyes on Wilson and said of a contract, "Can't you do better on the dough?" The interesting thing is that the anecdote suggests mostly they were talking about things other than money.
Robert Stone regaled the crowd with his favorite Candidaism: "She loved to say, 'Trust is good, not to trust is better.'" And then added, "Not that she believed that not to trust is better. Just that she loved to say it." Leaving us in the audience who knew her to be infused one last time with her complexity: Not that she didn't believe that not to trust wasn't better. She knew when to do both. And loved to say it.
Peter Matthiessen added some color along those lines: During a lunch at which Candida had been drinking heavily, she was sitting next to Matthiessen and hardly responded to an attorney's harsh demands during a negotiation over one of Matthiessen's books. At the very end she turned to the attorney and thanked him politely for the pleasure of lunching together, and then raised her voice to say: "We like you but we don't love you. You are not our brother!" And then she countered each of the attorney's points. "She hadn't missed a single thing," Matthiessen recalled, still marveling.
Frank Conroy recalled when Candida and he were both just starting out, he a pimply-faced, 24-year-old unknown, she the receptionist and assistant at a literary agency. At the end of their first meeting, he described how he called up his courage and reminded her that she was never going to make any money off him, then asked, "So why do you want to represent me?" And how she had leaned forward and whispered in his ear, "The prestige!" The complete implausibility of her response had stayed with him all these years. And perhaps too that in the end she had been proved right.
Eden Collinsworth, a young, willowy Hearst executive who had grown close to Candida in the past decade, told a story that was not related to publishing and yet expressed her magic nonetheless. On the evening Collinsworth introduced her to her fiancé, Candida pulled her aside to say, "He has a very interesting mind, but have you looked at his shoes?" Collinsworth had to confess she had not. "Have you looked at his shoes," Candida repeated, "and considered their implication? They're handmade shoes; it's not going to be easy for you."
We miss her. We need more like her.
Studies on the effects of childcare on the young are colored by researchers' views about educated women who go to work.
This is not going to be a column blaming Ralph Nader and the Greens for the daily disasters of the Bush Administration, so don't stop reading--yet. That column has been written dozens of times, in every shade of emotion with which the words "I told you so" can be uttered, and I think it's been pretty well established that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are at best fraternal rather than identical twins. Or are there readers out there who think the Gore Administration would be proposing a budget that would end contraceptive coverage for federal employees while angling for a huge tax cut for the richest 1 percent? If so, you won't have any problem washing your delicious school-lunch salmonellaburger down with a big glass of arsenic-laced water from one of our fine mining and timber states.
Nader's assistant called me recently to say that he had been misquoted last summer in Outside, which had him hoping for a Bush win. But those who thought the Democrats deserved to die seem to have gotten their wish. I mean, where is Al Gore? I've been an adjunct professor myself, and the duties are not all that taxing. He could be going on the Sunday morning talk shows every week, rallying opposition to Bush's onslaught against the environment--the Kyoto treaty was supposedly his baby, after all. Maybe he read Alexander Cockburn's column in the testosterone-addled New York Press claiming global warming is bunk, and now thinks it's good that Bush slammed the door on the treaty and the Europeans are just crybabies. Clinton's off riding elephants in India, Hillary voted for the bankruptcy bill, nobody wants to pay to make sure votes get counted in poor neighborhoods (remember when voting booth upgrades were definitely on the agenda, whoever won Florida?), and the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which was going to start the arduous process of getting big money out of electoral politics, has morphed into a measure that doubles the Republican hard-money advantage while abolishing soft money, where the Democrats had edged ahead. Thanks a lot, Senator Feingold! And you too, Senator Wellstone! Now advocacy organizations like the ACLU and NARAL will be barred from running issue ads for sixty days before the election. Forget the First Amendment: Let them buy their own radio and TV stations like the right-wingers do.
None of this cowardice, confusion and collapse is the fault of Ralph Nader or the Greens: Would the Republicans be quivering in fear if they were the ones out of power? Still, the political landscape we confront today does call into question some of the arguments that were made for the Nader candidacy. You will remember that I expressed a certain skepticism about these claims last spring and summer, for which I was belabored with e-mails from Nation readers for months. The Last Marxist often points out that progressives don't like to analyze their past enthusiasms in the light of history, preferring to move right along to the next glorious cause. So let's go to the videotape and see what happened:
§ I said the Greens would do poorly because that's the general fate of progressive third-party and symbolic presidential candidacies; for the decreasing number of Americans who actually vote, the two parties are not identical and each offers concrete rewards to its constituency. Perhaps nonvoters would bring a new set of concerns and demands to the electoral table--that was the thinking behind the motor voter bill--but to register nonvoters on a massive scale and get them to the polls was quite beyond the capacities (or radar screen) of the Greens. What happened: Nader polled 2.7 percent.
§ I said that history suggested presidential candidacies did not build movements, as many supporters claimed Nader's run would do. I noted the rapid descent into nutty irrelevance of the most successful third-party candidate in modern history, Ross Perot, and his Reform Party. A party that cannot attract large sums of money and cannot deliver favors to its supporters is just not in the game. What happened: The Greens tool along at the same modest level as before, with eighty-one mostly low-level elected municipal officials thinly scattered around the country. Nader claims he is shut out by the media--surprise--but media never built a movement. Can you imagine Eugene Debs or Bob La Follette, to whom Nader is often compared, letting Rupert Murdoch or the Washington Post decide whether his message gets out or not?
§ I pooh-poohed the Greens' somewhat contradictory prediction that Nader would attract new voters who would not have gone for Gore but would vote for "good Democrats" lower down on the ticket. Why would voters drawn to the polls by a candidate who spent months bashing the Democrats turn around and vote for them? What happened: Despite much spin on both sides, Nader votes were probably a wash for down-ticket Dems. There was no major influx of new voters lured by Nader. Youth voting went down.
§ I took issue with the argument that the Nader candidacy would push the Democratic Party left. As the Greens themselves have observed in disclaiming responsibility for Bush's win, thirteen times as many registered Democrats (13 percent) voted for Bush in Florida as for Nader (1 percent). Nationally too, many more Democrats voted Republican than voted Green. So if you were thinking of running for President as a Democrat, where would you look for votes? Left to the Naderites, or right to the Dems and moderate Republicans who voted for Bush? Answer: Joe Lieberman's already exploring his options for 2004.
* * *
Speaking of past enthusiasms, the Teamster-turtle alliance isn't looking too good: Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa Jr. supports Bush's proposal to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. According to the New York Times, Hoffa said drilling would help stabilize the economy and create employment, including 25,000 Teamsters jobs at a time when the nation appears near recession. Turtle soup, anyone?
A woman two months pregnant goes to see her Ob-Gyn for prenatal care. As required by law, her doctor informs her that her condition places her at greater risk for a wide range of medical problems: hypertension and diabetes if she is overweight; complications of surgery if, like one in four women, she has a Caesarean section; permanent weight gain with its attendant problems, including heart disease; urinary tract infections and prolapsed uterus if she has had multiple pregnancies; postpartum depression or psychosis, leading in rare cases to suicide or infanticide; not to mention excruciating childbirth pain, stretch marks and death. There are ominous social possibilities, too, the doctor continues, reading from his state-supplied script: increased vulnerability to domestic violence; being or becoming a single mother, with all the struggles and poverty that entails; job and housing discrimination; the curtailment of education and professional training; and lowered income for life.
No state legislature would compel doctors to confront patients with the statistical risks of childbearing, serious though they are; a doctor who did so on his own would strike many as intrusive, offensive and out of his mind. Should a woman seek abortion, however, anti-choicers are pushing state laws requiring that she be informed of a risk most experts do not believe exists: a link between abortion and breast cancer. Like the supposedly widespread psychological trauma of abortion, which even anti-choice Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop was unable to find evidence of, the abortion-breast cancer connection is being aggressively promoted by the anti-choice movement. (Even Mother Jones, always quick to take feminists down a peg, leapt on this bandwagon, with an April/May 1995 piece entitled "Abortion's Risk.")
"It's yet another example of efforts to encumber this legal choice and make it more difficult and painful for women," says Dr. Wendy Chavkin, professor of public health and clinical obstetrics and gynecology at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association. It's also an attempt by anti-choicers to reframe their opposition to abortion as concern for women's health, something not usually high on their list. These are, after all, the same people who fight health exceptions to "partial birth" abortion bans and who have successfully prevented poor women from receiving medically necessary abortions with Medicaid funds.
Nonetheless, such is the power of the anti-choice movement that laws have been passed in Montana and Mississippi, and bills are pending in fifteen other states, mandating a breast cancer warning (and in some cases, a waiting period for it to sink in). Along with laws come lawsuits: In Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River Women's Clinic is being sued for failing to give such a warning; a 19-year-old Pennsylvania woman is suing a New Jersey clinic for her abortion two years ago, which left her, she claims, with an overwhelming fear of contracting breast cancer. In ferociously anti-choice Louisiana, a new law permits women to sue for damages--including damages to the fetus!--up to ten years after their abortion. Given today's high rates of breast cancer, a deluge of litigation is in the making.
Does abortion cause breast cancer? Some studies have appeared to suggest a connection: Dr. Janet Daling, for example, an epidemiologist who says she is pro-choice, compared the abortion histories of 1,800 women with and without breast cancer and found that, among those who had been pregnant at least once, the risk of breast cancer was 50 percent higher for those who had abortions--but her cancer-free sample was obtained through telephone interviews with women chosen at random from the phone book. Not everyone has a phone, of course, which raises questions about the comparability of the samples, and besides, how many women would volunteer information about their abortion history to a voice on the phone? Like other studies showing a link, this one was marred by "recall bias": Cancer patients are more likely to volunteer negative information about themselves than healthy people. They are looking for an explanation for a disease--and one many feel must somehow be their fault. Demographic studies, which are free from recall bias, produce different results: Lindefors Harris, analyzing the national medical database of Swedish women in 1989, found that women did deny their abortions, that breast cancer patients were less likely to do so--and that women who had had abortions were less likely to get breast cancer. The largest study to date, of 1.5 million Danish women, found no correlation.
"The supposed link between breast cancer and abortion is motivated by politics, not medicine," says Dr. David Grimes, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina. "The weight of the evidence at this time indicates no association. To force this on women is just cruel." Indeed, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the World Health Organization, none of which have an ax to grind, reject the notion. The standard medical textbook, Diseases of the Breast, concurs. The main figure advocating the link is Dr. Joel Brind, professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College, who has done no original research on this issue but is a tireless anti-choice propagandist--plug "abortion breast cancer" into a search engine and the top half dozen sites are his.
Abortion is just about the only medical procedure in which doctors and patients are hemmed about by lawmakers. No other operation has legally mandated waiting periods, although many are dangerous, life-altering and irreversible; with no other operation are doctors legally required to give specific information--certainly not information that the vast preponderance of medical opinion believes to be false or at best unproven. Good medical practice calls for discussion of the pros and cons of particular courses of treatment, not burdening the patient's choice with unsubstantiated fears. Will we ever see a law requiring doctors to tell pregnant patients that abortion is statistically safer than carrying to term--which it is? Sure, the day state lawmakers put a waiting period on Viagra prescriptions, to let male patients really consider whether an erection is worth a heart attack.
I was born by a Kerouac stream under Eisenhower skies
--John Gorka
The New Folk Movement is now about twenty years old, and John Gorka is one of its leading voices, along with peers like Nanci Griffith and newer arrivals like Ani DiFranco. Over nearly two decades, Gorka has honed his warm baritone and offbeat songwriting skills with 200-days-a-year touring. His fine new album, The Company You Keep (Red House), is a characteristically bittersweet disc, understated but sharpened by deft word usage and a grasp of life's conundrums and paradoxes.
Gorka fits contemporary notions of a folk musician. He was a history and philosophy major in college, and got his performing start at coffeehouses in the late 1970s. His tunes are self-reflective, wry, pungent, pessimistic but unwilling to despair; they have titles like "Joint of No Return" and "Wisheries." In "What Was That," he sings, "Guess I'd better get back up/Get up off the ground again/Guess I'm really not so tough/Up is farther than it's ever been." And up he goes, discarding regret and clearing a space for whatever future he faces.
His country-tinged group has tasty yet simple arrangements, augmented with guest vocals by DiFranco and Lucy Kaplansky and Mary Chapin Carpenter. He's got real range, from on-point satire ("People My Age," which mocks baby-boomer elective plastic surgery) to playful ("Around the House"). And like older generations of folk musicians, he uses found material. The lyrics for "Let Them In" come from an unknown soldier in a World War II military hospital; God tells St. Peter to "Give them things they like/Let them make some noise/Give roadhouse bands, not golden harps/To these our boys."
The Eisenhower years saw the beginnings of the postwar folk revival; it gathered strength and followers in the 1960s. Maria Muldaur was part of it; her funky Greenwich Village apartment at the time often hosted other scene-makers, like John Sebastian. (Check out The Lovin' Spoonful Greatest Hits [BMG/Buddha], a wonderful CD of Sebastian's mid-1960s folk-blues-pop quartet issued last year; its only flaw is incompleteness.) This was the first generation of white kids exploring the folk blues, the language invented by dispossessed rural black America that underpins this country's music. Many went on Kerouac-like journeys in search of the originals, turned some up and then recorded them, resuscitating their careers. Their new audience of white college kids on campuses and in coffeehouses was a far cry from the plantations and street corners and juke joints where the music was created.
The rediscovery of rural blues roughly paralleled the rise of the mass civil rights movement, and reflected it. Blues seemed a true folk music, in the original German sense of the word: a manifestation of something fundamental and authentic about a people. Inevitably, some revivalists had a few misguided notions about authenticity, putting acoustic guitars in the hands of electric-blues masters like Muddy Waters. And yet they also knew what they wanted. Blues material certainly couldn't have been less like Tin Pan Alley's: Love may be a central theme for both, but the blues' gritty realism, with its raw sex and violence and irony and humor, exposed the superficiality of 1950s American pop. It let listeners step outside America's conformity. Not coincidentally, it also let them see black people as cultural heroes--a dramatic reversal of racist stereotypes.
Muldaur has always admired Memphis Minnie, one of the few folk-blues musicians who happened to be a woman. Minnie played mean guitar and wrote lustily double-entendre songs about the life she led. Her "Me and My Chauffeur Blues," with the signature lick that Chuck Berry swiped decades later for "You Can't Catch Me," is among the best moments on Muldaur's twenty-fifth album, Richland Woman Blues (Stony Plain). Age has deepened and coarsened the lilting flutters that shaped Muldaur's girlish voice, but to compensate she's developed heft and power. Maybe it's the spirit she's found in the largely African-American church she attends. Whatever the cause, she both evokes her idols and makes their music her own; her emotional identification with them enriches nearly all of these fourteen songs.
Like Gorka's, this disc gathers like-minded souls, a community joined by music and history. Sebastian's nimble John Hurt-inspired fingerpicking backs Muldaur on the opening cut, and the list spins on from there: Taj Mahal, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Tracy Nelson (whose duet with Muldaur, "Far Away Blues," is riveting and heartbreaking) and Bonnie Raitt. With Angela Strehli, Muldaur reprises the Bessie and Clara Smith classic, "My Man Blues," where two women, discovering they're sharing a man unwittingly, agree to continue the triad "on the cooperation plan," since they like how things are. The fluent piano behind them is courtesy of Dave Matthews.
History has been kind to the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. The original jubilee-style quintet met in 1939, at the Talladega Institute for the Blind, which they snuck out of to sing at a nearby military base. By the 1950s, the peak years of the "gospel highway," the church-based circuit that produced stars like Sam Cooke, they were shouters recording hits for Art Rupe's prestigious Specialty label. These top-tier, soul-rending performances are collected on Oh Lord--Stand by Me (Specialty).
In 1983 they were "rediscovered" in the electrifying remake of Sophocles called The Gospel at Colonnus; the musical hit Broadway in 1988. Now they've opened for rock superstars like Tom Petty and have headlined at the House of Blues chain. It sure ain't church, but in the wondrous way of art, the Blind Boys transform everything they perform into a forum for testifying. Clarence Fountain's massive voice is a monument in motion; few other than bluesmen like Howlin' Wolf match his raw timbre and full-lunged forcefulness.
Spirit of the Century (Real World) deliberately crosses gospel with blues, sacred with profane. It joins the three remaining Blind Boys with 1960s-vintage roots diggers like veteran guitarist David Lindley and blues harp great Charlie Musselwhite, who led one of the earliest and best 1960s electric-blues revival bands. They infuse Tom Waits's off-kilter "Jesus Gonna Be Here" with fearsome fervor, and deepen the resonances of Ben Harper's "Give a Man a Home." And they set "Amazing Grace" to the music of that whorehouse anthem popularized in the 1960s, "House of the Rising Sun." Though he's reimagined himself into something sui generis, Tom Waits has self-evident blues roots. In the early 1970s, he opened for an undersung hero of the 1960s folk-blues revival. Back then, John Hammond was known as John Hammond Jr.; his famous father, the leftist Vanderbilt scion who'd made his name "discovering" and recording black musical talents from Bessie Smith to Charlie Christian, the man who signed Bob Dylan to a major label, was still alive and looming.
The younger Hammond has never reached mass audiences, but some of his students, like an ex-sideman named Jimi Hendrix who worked with him at the seminal Cafe Wha? in the Village, did. Hammond mastered a dizzying variety of folk-blues styles and performed hundreds of old blues, back when the stuff was hard to impossible to find on disc. White kids were scrounging through attics and flea markets and the like searching for old blues records, trying to piece together biographies, compiling oral history and field recordings--work that, along with the Lomax field recordings for the Smithsonian, unearthed most of what we know about blues today.
Long underrated or simply overlooked, Hammond serves up Wicked Grin (Pointblank), and it's a marvelous treat: In a way, it's this year's second Tom Waits disc. That's not a putdown. Old friend Waits produced this edgy album; he also penned and plays on twelve of its thirteen songs. Backed by other roots veterans like keyboardist Augie Meyers, Hammond makes Waits's surreal, character-driven tunes more emphatically bluesy, and Waits endows each song with a sound that evokes different original blues recordings. It's a more creative use of the blues than most have come up with in years. And dig Waits's open-lunged gravel voice dueting with Hammond on the spiritual "I Know I've Been Changed."
Since he joined the Yardbirds, then John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and became the Godhead of the 1960s British blues revival, which paralleled the folk and blues revivals in America, Eric Clapton has changed fairly constantly, yet remained recognizably the same. That, after all, is how superstardom works. One of the biggest shifts came thirty years ago, when he was touring with Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and they taught him to sing for real. His next album, with Derek and the Dominos (PolyGram), showcased his heartbreak, his suddenly raunchy vocals and his slash-and-burn band featuring slide guitarist Duane Allman.
In the decades since, Clapton has made a few good, even great albums and a pile of slush. Last year's much-heralded outing with B.B. King sounded haphazard and undercooked--a shame, really, given what it could have been. By contrast, Reptile (Reprise) is a keeper, reminiscent in style and pacing to the classic album he made as Derek. During recording, his uncle died. Raised by his grandmother, Clapton had grown up thinking his uncle was his brother. His uncle's favorite term of endearment gave this disc its name. On it, Clapton tours his past with consistent conviction, and his guitar is spry and sharp and ready to slice almost everywhere. He taps oldies like "Got You on My Mind," which gets a nice Jimmy Reed-ish blues treatment, and covers Stevie Wonder and Isley Brothers hits. "Travelin' Light," the latest installment in his ongoing J.J. Cale tributes, is stuffed with rheumy guitars snarling. But "Come Back Baby," his Ray Charles tribute, is the show-stopper. Clapton's overdriven guitar blazes and curdles the clichés of his millions of imitators, and his voice exposes just how rich and craggy it has grown to be. Brother Ray could still outchurch him without too much pain, but Clapton makes us believe he's got us gathered, swaying, in Charles's pews, to the music compounded of the sinful blues and heavenly gospel, the music called soul.
Over a decade ago, Clapton covered Robert Cray's "Bad Influence" and gave the now-multiple Grammy winner an early boost. Cray started mixing blues and soul with touches of jazz in 1974, working the circuit relentlessly; older bluesmen like Albert Collins and Muddy Waters championed his updated sound and lyrics. As time went on, he pumped up his soul-music aspect, deliberately extending the tradition of singer-guitarists like Little Milton and the B.B. King of "The Thrill Is Gone."
On Shoulda Been Home (Rykodisc), Cray's limber voice and spiky guitar once again merge blues and r&b with Memphis soul, with profitable results. Cray is well-known for tackling topics he sees as contemporary versions of the blues. "The 12 Year Old Boy" may even attract the unholy mob of politically correct leftists and Lynne Cheney followers who've climbed on Eminem's back, much as they would have onto Elvis Presley's. In this hard blues, Cray suggests ways to avoid having a preteen rival steal your lover: "If a young boy hangs around you/You should do what I shoulda did/Send him over to your neighbor's/And hope your neighbor likes kids."
Cray writes lyrics that tell stories, and storytelling is one reason I, like Charlie Parker, dig country music as well as blues. Which brings me to Charley Pride. Pride was a black star in country music in the 1960s, at the height of the whitebread "Nashville Sound," and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame last year.
It's often been said that country music is white folks' blues, but that's what Pride always sang. In the midst of sharecropped Mississippi fields, he hugged his radio to listen to the Grand Ole Opry. Not good enough for the ballplayer career he wanted, he went into the Army, became a smelter and moved his family to Montana, where he sang part time and caught the attention of touring Nashville stars. Chet Atkins signed him, released his first album without a picture, and started the hits rolling.
Country Legends (BMG/Buddha) collects them. Some, like "Snakes Crawl at Night," are period curiosities. There are solid genre efforts: the wistful look home ("Wonder Could I Live There Anymore"), infidelity ("Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger"). There's a tribute, a nice version of Hank Williams's classic "Honky Tonk Blues." There's his biggest hit, "Kiss an Angel Good Morning," a tune whose hooky bounce always makes me grin as it offers advice to "kiss an angel good morning/and love her like the devil when you get back home." And there's "I'm Just Me," to which you can add racial inferences, if you like: "Some want more and more's a-getting less/I just want what I got/Some wanna live up on a hill and others down by the sea/Some wanna live behind high walls/I just wanna live free."
The panorama that is American folk music opens in all directions on guitarist Bill Frisell's latest, most far-reaching album, Blues Dream (Nonesuch). For years now, Frisell has been integrating elements of jazz, folk, blues, new music, rock, pop, parlor tunes, you name it, into his musical quest. Unlike too many of his contemporaries, though, he's been trying to distill them into something of his own; he's not trying to slap together yet another postmodern slag heap of influences. With Blues Dream, he's succeeded incredibly.
The album charts many paths across the American landscape. The tremolo-shimmery title track is a brief minor-mode intro, an evocation of post-Kind of Blue Miles Davis. Track two, "Ron Carter," named for the great 1960s Davis bassist, opens with metallic horn squiggles that wind over a brief bass ostinato and off-kilter guitar licks, then builds with horns and overdriven guitar solos. It evokes and updates 1960s experimentalism--no mean feat--as do the rest of the album's tracks.
Music has one big advantage over the real world: Resolution is always possible, if you want it. Take "The Tractor." It kicks off as backporch bluegrass, drummer Kenny Wolleson and bassist David Piltch laying down a shuffle behind Frisell's arpeggiated rhythms, sometimes doubling Greg Leisz's mandolin. Suddenly a snaky, slightly dissonant horn section slices across it. With each chorus, the fine section--trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, saxist Billy Drewes and trumpeter Ron Miles--connects the riffs, filling in until they're almost continuous, a Monkish counterpoint to hillbilly jazz heaven. It's a brilliant work, a wondrous musical portrait of a melting pot or tossed salad or whatever metaphor you prefer for the multiracial, multicultural place America has never, in sad reality, managed to become.
Honored Infidel,
In the near future we plan to expand our faith-based initiative, Holy Terror Sandblasting and Demolition Corp. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani finds much merit in our proposal for a workfare program in which homeless people (men only, naturellement!) would be trained in medieval theology, art criticism and the use of explosives. Please send dollars and the floor plan of the Brooklyn Museum. Or else.
The Taliban
Dear Professor DiIulio,
With medical costs going through the roof, you'd think there'd be a better way. And now, with the Lord's help, there is! Our idea is to buy up struggling inner-city hospitals and turn them into profit centers--no doctors, no nurses, no fancy-shmancy machines and best of all, no messy malpractice suits. Just the blessed healing power of prayer, provided 24 hours a day at bedside by recovering drug addicts as part of their therapy. It's total win-win--the government saves, the patient is saved--if not in this world, the next. And that's the world that counts, right?
Rev. Tommy Johnson
Pentecostal Holiness Church, Memphis, TN
Dear Director,
People say communism is just another religion, and they're right! We have everything the other faiths have--an all-encompassing worldview, sacred texts, meetings (and how!), schisms, excommunications and declining numbers and influence. We'd like to reverse that last item with funding for our workfare proposal: First, we provide welfare mothers a crash course in job readiness, parenting skills and the works of Karl Marx. Then, we get them jobs in daycare centers, where they pass their new "faith" on to the next generation, hopefully in time for the stock market crash. Don't count us out--a god that failed is still a god.
Call us,
The Communist Party, USA
Dear Brother in Christ,
Did you know the Chicago Archdiocese has an exorcist on staff? Our faith-based initiative, The Exercist, would get this superbly trained but underutilized man out of the apse and into the community, where he'd help the so-called mentally ill get their sillies out with a carefully graduated low-impact aerobic workout that goes beyond head swiveling and projectile vomiting to get at the real nitty-gritty of diabolical possession! Then, everyone cools down with a sharing session, novena and group hug: because admitting you're possessed by the Devil is half the cure!
Hope to hear from you soon,
Msgr. George O'Reilly
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago
Dear Prof. DiIulio,
For ten years we've been trying to get our own public school district so our kids wouldn't have to go to school with goyim. The courts keep turning us down. Then we wanted buses with only male drivers and sex-segregated seating, and the self-hating Jewish liberals said no to that too. So we would like to become a Faith-Based Initiative with ourselves as clients. Our project is, we stay in our own town and only talk to each other. Because that's what G-d wants. Eventually we hope to get NEA funding as a conceptual art project ("The Choice: Chosen People Choose Themselves"), but a starter grant from your office would really put us on track.
Let us know,
Rabbi Shlomo Greenblatt, Kiryas Joel, NY
Dear Mortal,
Ever wonder what's really behind that weird weather of recent years ? Hint: It's a long time between burnt offerings. How about paying some deadbeat dads to slaughter a herd of oxen and throw those fabulous thighbones on the barbie? Everybody benefits: They learn the meat business, you get fruitful harvests, favorable winds and calm winedark seas, and we get a decent meal. Reply soonest--the wife is pushing me to zap you with a thunderbolt.
Death Row Dad is a moving story of one father's embrace of capital punishment--despite his own imminent execution! While his ACLU lawyer tries frantically to turn up new evidence even as his own marriage unravels, and beautiful crusading nun Helen Prejean pleads with the governor for a stay, Leroy, who is in fact innocent, wants only that his son renounce his homosexual lifestyle and accept Christ as his personal savior. Soon the whole prison--even the crusty warden and a pair of racist guards--is praying for Leroy to get his wish. Jack, I promise you, when Leroy looks up from the gurney just before the lethal injection, sees his son standing there with his new girlfriend, and rejects the last-minute stay of execution ("I reckon the Lord is waitin' for my sorry self"), the audience won't know whether to cheer or go down on its knees. Morgan's people think yes for the lead, Julia's very interested in doing the nun. A major studio is ready to greenlight the minute your office comes through with co-financing.
Talk to you after the prayer meeting,
How about a grant where I become a lay minister and practice laying on of hands? There's a whole heck of a lot of lonely women out there with big spiritual needs. I mean, really big.
Just kidding,
Bill Clinton
If a critic's clout can be measured by the ability to make an artist's name, the most important art critic in America today is clearly Rudolph Giuliani. Just over a year ago he excoriated the Brooklyn Museum of Art for including in its "Sensation" show Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary--the elephant-dung-decorated painting of an African BVM, which the mayor found "anti-Catholic," blasphemous and disgusting--and turned Ofili himself into a sensation overnight: One collector, I heard, complained that the media attention had driven Ofili's prices so high he couldn't afford him anymore. If I were Jake & Dinos Chapman, represented by a perverse sculpture of deformed and weirdly sexualized children, I would have been seriously peeved, and if I had been Richard Patterson, whose Blue Minotaur, a profound meditation on postmodernity and the heroic tradition, got no attention at all, I would have wept.
You'd think the mayor would have learned to stay his theocritical thunderbolts, but once again he has gone after the Brooklyn Museum for including an "anti-Catholic" work--Renee Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper--in the new show of contemporary black photographers, "Committed to the Image." He's even suggested that what New York needs is a "decency commission," which got big laughs all around, since the mayor, a married man, is openly carrying on with his mistress, upon whom he has bestowed police protection worth some $200,000 annually at taxpayers' expense. As the whole world now knows, Yo Mama is a five-panel picture in which Cox appears naked, as Jesus, surrounded by male disciples--ten black, one white--at the Last Supper. As an artwork it's negligible, glossily produced but awkwardly composed and, to my eye, rather silly. Cox is thin and beautiful; the men, in robes and caftans, are handsome and buff--apparently the first Christians spent a lot of time in the gym and at the hair salon, getting elaborate dreadlocked coiffures. Unlike the figures in Leonardo's Last Supper, which are highly individualized and dramatically connected, the figures here are generic and stiff. My eye kept going to the limited food on offer: bowls of wax-looking fruit (did they have bananas in Old Jerusalem?), rolls, pita bread. Was the Last Supper a diet Seder?
If you want to see visually haunting work at "Committed to the Image," there's Gordon Parks, Albert Chong, Imari, Nathaniel Burkins and many others. LeRoy W. Henderson's black ballet student, dressed in white and standing in front of a damaged classical frieze, interrogates the Western tradition much more deeply than Yo Mama does. Mfon's self-portraits of her mastectomized torso, a meditation on beauty, heroism and tragedy expressed through the female body, lay bare the high-fashion hokiness of Cox's costume drama. For fan and foe alike, the interest of Yo Mama appears to be political. Cox describes her art in ideological terms ("my images demand enlightenment through an equitable realignment of our race and gender politics"), and she has been quite pungent in defending it. As with The Holy Virgin Mary, the mayor hasn't actually seen it, nor had the numerous people who sent me frothing e-mails after I defended government support for the arts on The O'Reilly Factor.
Even the New York Observer's famously conservative art critic, Hilton Kramer, who usually delights in withering descriptions of pictures he hates, apparently felt that depicting Christ as a naked black woman was so obviously, outrageously anti-Catholic he need say no more about the photo before embarking on his usual rampage. It would be interesting to know where the offense lies: Is it that Cox as Christ is naked, black or female? All three? Two out of three? If one thinks of Catholics, the people, there's nothing bigoted about any of this. (Like Ofili, Cox is Catholic--as are most perpetrators of "anti-Catholic" works.) There is no ethnic stereotyping of the sort on view, for instance, on St. Patrick's Day, when the proverbial drunkenness of the Irish is the butt of endless rude humor, especially from the Irish themselves. While we're on the subject of ethnic stereotyping, it's worth noting that in a great deal of Christian art, Jesus and the disciples are portrayed as Northern Europeans, while Judas is given the hooked nose and scraggly features of a cartoon Jew.
But if what is meant by anti-Catholic is anti-Catholic Church, why can't an artist protest its doctrines and policies? The Church is not a monastery in a wilderness, it's a powerful earthly institution that uses all the tools of modern politics to make social policy conform to its theology--and not just for Catholics, for everyone. It has to expect to take its knocks in the public arena. A church that has a 2,000-year tradition of disdain for women's bodies--documented most recently by Garry Wills (a Catholic) in his splendid polemic Papal Sin--and that still bars women from the priesthood because Jesus was a man can't really be surprised if a twenty-first-century woman wonders what would be different if Jesus had been female, and flaunts that female body. And a church with a long history of racism--no worse than other mainstream American religions but certainly no better--can't expect the topic to be banned from discussion forever.
At the Brooklyn Museum, Yo Mama's Last Supper is in a separate room with its own security guard. On Sunday afternoon, it attracted blacks, whites, Asians, parents with small children, older women in groups, dating couples, students taking notes--le tout Brooklyn, which is turning out in large numbers for the show. I asked one black woman, who described herself as a Christian, what the picture meant to her. "It shows Life as a woman," she said. "It's beautiful." Her friend, who said he was a Muslim, liked the picture too.
If only I could get the Mayor to review my book!
Show George W. Bush you support RU-486. Make a donation in W.'s name to the Concord Feminist Health Center (38 South Main Street, Concord, NH 03301) and help it buy the ultrasound machine this method requires. The center will send the President a card to let him know you were thinking of him when you wrote your check.
Imagine Madison Square Garden brimming over with 18,000 laughing and ebullient women of every size, shape, age and color, along with their male friends, ditto. Imagine that in that immense space, usually packed with hooting sports fans, these women are watching Oprah, Queen Latifah, Claire Danes, Swoosie Kurtz, Kathleen Chalfant, Julie Kavner (voice of Marge Simpson), Rosie Perez, Donna Hanover (soon-to-be-ex-wife of New York's bigamous mayor) and sixty-odd other A-list divas put on a gala production of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler's theater piece about women and their mimis, totos, split knishes, Gladys Siegelmans, pussycats, poonanis and twats. Imagine that this extravaganza is part of a huge $2 million fundraising effort for V-Day, the antiviolence project that grew out of the show and that gives money to groups fighting violence against women around the world. That was what happened on February 10, with more donations and more performances to come as the play is produced by students at some 250 colleges around the country, from Adelphi on Long Island--where it was completely sold out and where, sources assure me, the v-word retains every bit of its shock value--to Yale.
And they keep saying feminism is dead.
The Vagina Monologues, in fact, was singled out in Time's 1998 cover story "Is Feminism Dead?" as proof that the movement had degenerated into self-indulgent sex chat. (This was a new departure for the press, which usually dismisses the movement as humorless, frumpish and puritanical.) In her Village Voice report on the gala, Sharon Lerner, a terrific feminist journalist, is unhappy that the actresses featured at the Garden event prefer the v-word to the f-word. ("Violence against women is a feminist issue?" participant Isabella Rossellini asks her. "I don't think it is." This from the creator of a new perfume called "Manifesto"!) Women's rights aren't what one associates with postfeminist icons like Glenn Close, whose most indelible screen role was as the bunny-boiling man-stalker in Fatal Attraction, or Calista Flockhart, television's dithery microskirted lawyerette Ally McBeal. Still, aren't we glad that Jane Fonda, who performed the childbirth monologue, has given up exercise mania and husband-worship and is donating $1 million to V-Day? Better late than never, I say.
At the risk of sounding rather giddy myself--I'm writing this on Valentine's Day--I'd argue that the implied contradiction between serious business (daycare, abortion, equal pay) and sex is way overdrawn. Sexual self-expression--that's self-indulgent sex chat to all you old Bolsheviks out there--was a crucial theme of the modern women's movement from the start. Naturally so: How can you see yourself as an active subject, the heroine of your own life, if you think you're an inferior being housed in a shameful, smelly body that might give pleasure to others, but not to you? The personal is political, remember that?
The Vagina Monologues may not be great literature--on the page it's a bit thin, and the different voices tend to run together into EveEnslerspeak about seashells and flowers and other lovely bits of nature. But as a performance piece it's fantastic: a cabaret floor show by turns hilarious, brassy, lyrical, poignant, charming, romantic, tragic, vulgar, sentimental, raunchy and exhilarating. In "The Flood," an old woman says she thinks of her "down there" as a cellar full of dead animals, and tells of the story of her one passionate kiss and her dream of Burt Reynolds swimming in her embarrassing "flood" of sexual wetness. A prim, wryly clever woman in "The Vagina Workshop" learns how to give herself orgasms at one of Betty Dodson's famous masturbation classes. At the Garden, Ensler led the cast in a chorus of orgasmic moans, and Close got the braver members of the audience to chant "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!" at the climax of a poetic monologue meant to redeem and reclaim the dirtiest of all dirty words.
How anyone could find The Vagina Monologues antimale or pornographic is beyond me--it's a veritable ode to warm, quirky, affectionate, friendly, passionate sex. The only enemies are misogyny, sexual shame and sexual violence, and violence is construed fairly literally: A poor black child is raped by her father's drunken friend; a Bosnian girl is sexually tortured by Serbian paramilitaries. None of your ambiguous was-it-rape? scenarios here. Oprah performed a new monologue, "Under the Burqa," about the horrors of life for Afghan women under Taliban rule, followed by Zoya--a young representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)--who gave a heartbreaking, defiant speech. Three African women spoke against female genital mutilation and described ongoing efforts to replace cutting with new coming-of-age rituals, "circumcision by words."
I hadn't particularly wanted to see The Vagina Monologues. I assumed that it would be earnest and didactic--or maybe silly, or exploitative, or crude, a sort of Oh! Calcutta! for women. But I was elated by it. Besides being a wonderful night at the theater, it reminded me that after all the feminist debates (and splits), and all the books and the Theory and the theories, in the real world there are still such people as women, who share a common biology and much else besides. And the power of feminism, whether or not it goes by that name, still resides in its capacity to transform women's consciousness at the deepest possible level: That's why Betty Friedan called her collection of letters from women not It Got Me a Raise (or a daycare center, or an abortion) but It Changed My Life. Sisterhood-is-powerful feminism may feel out of date to the professoriat, but there's a lot of new music still to be played on those old bones.
Besides, if feminists don't talk about sex in a fun, accessible, inspiring, nonpuritanical way, who will?
* * *
Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics and Culture, a collection of columns originally published in this space, is just out from Modern Library as a paperback original. It has a very pretty cover and a never-before-published introductory essay, and contains most of the columns I still agree with, and one or two about which I have my doubts.
How many times did we hear during the endless campaign that Bush wouldn't go after abortion if elected? Republicans, Naderites and countless know-it-alls and pundits in between agreed: Pro-choice voters were too powerful, the country was too divided, the Republicans weren't that stupid and Bush didn't really care about abortion anyway. Plus whoever won would have to (all together now) "govern from the center." Where are all those smarties now, I wonder? Bush didn't even wait for his swearing-in ceremony to start repaying the immense debt he owes to the Christian right, which gave him one in four of his votes, with the nominations of anti-choice die-hards John Ashcroft for Attorney General and Tommy Thompson to head Health and Human Services.
On his first full day in office, Bush reinstated the "gag rule" preventing international family-planning clinics and NGOs from receiving US funds if they so much as mention the word "abortion." (This action was widely misrepresented in the press as being a ban on funding for performing abortions; in fact, it bans clinics that get US aid from performing abortions with their own money and prohibits speech--whether lobbying for legal changes in countries where abortion is a crime or informing women with life- or health-threatening pregnancies about their legal options.) A few days later, Thompson announced he would look into the safety of RU-486, approved by the FDA this past fall--a drug that has been used by half a million European women over twelve years and has been more closely studied here than almost any drug on the market. In the wake of Laura Bush's remark to NBC News and the Today show that she favored retention of Roe v. Wade, both the President and the Vice President said the Administration has not ruled out a legal challenge to it, placing them to the right of Ashcroft himself, who told the Judiciary Committee he regarded Roe as settled law (at least until the makeup of the Supreme Court changes, he did not add).
Don't count on the media to alert the public. The press is into champagne and confetti: Who would have thought "Dick" Cheney would be such an amiable talk show guest! Time to move on, compromise, get busy with that big tax cut. "Who in hell is this 'all' we keep hearing about?" a friend writes, "as in 'all agree' that the Bush transition has been a smashing success?" An acquaintance at the Washington Post, whose executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., claims to be so objective he doesn't even vote, says word has come down from "on high" that stories must bear "no trace of liberal bias"--interestingly, no comparable warnings were given against pro-Bush bias. So, on abortion, look for endless disquisitions on the grassiness of the anti-choice roots, the elitism of pro-choicers and the general tedium of the abortion issue. Robin Toner could barely stifle a yawn as she took both sides to task in the New York Times ("The Abortion Debate, Stuck in Time," January 21): Why couldn't more anti-choicers see the worth of stem cell research, like anti-choice Senator Gordon Smith, who has several relatives afflicted with Parkinson's (but presumably no relatives unwillingly pregnant); and why can't more pro-choicers acknowledge that sonograms "complicate" the status of the fetus? In an article that interviewed not a single woman, only the fetus matters: not sexuality, public health, women's bodies, needs or rights.
Now is the time to be passionate, clever, original and urgent. I hate to say it, but pro-choicers really could learn some things from the antis, and I don't mean the arts of arson, murder and lying to the Judiciary Committee. Lots of right-wing Christians tithe--how many pro-choicers write significant checks to pro-choice and feminist organizations? Why not sit down today and send President Bush a note saying that in honor of the women in his family you are making a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds to pay for a poor woman's abortion (NNAF: Hampshire College, Amherst MA 01002-5001)? March 10 is the Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers--send your local clinic money for an abortion "scholarship," flowers, a thank-you note, a bottle of wine, a Nation subscription for the waiting room! (Refuse & Resist has lots of ideas and projects for that day--call them at 212-713-5657.)
The antis look big and powerful because they have a built-in base in the Catholic and fundamentalist churches. But (aha!) pro-choicers have a built-in constituency too: the millions and millions of women who have had abortions. For all sorts of reasons (privacy concerns, overwork, the ideology of medicine) few clinics ask their patients to give back to the cause. Now some providers and activists are talking about changing that. "My fantasy," Susan Yanow of the Abortion Access Project wrote me, "is that every woman in this country gets a piece of paper after her procedure that says something like, 'We need your help. You just had a safe, legal abortion, something that the current Administration is actively trying to outlaw. Think of your sisters/ mothers/daughters who might need this service one day. Please help yourself to postcards and tell your elected representatives you support legal abortion, join (local group name here), come back as a volunteer' and so on." If every woman who had an abortion sent her clinic even just a dollar a year, it would mean millions of dollars for staff, security, cut-rate or gratis procedures. Think how different the debate would be if all those women, and the partners, parents, relatives and friends who helped them, spoke up boldly--especially the ones whose husbands are so vocally and famously and self-righteously anti-choice. If women did that, we would be the grassroots.
* * *
Correction: It was Joe Conason, not Chip Berlet, who reported that John Ashcroft had met with the St. Louis head of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. Berlet's equally fascinating story, cut for space reasons, was that Ashcroft made a cameo appearance in a 1997 Phyllis Schlafly video that claims that environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and even chemical weapons treaties are part of a conspiracy to bring about One World Government. See clips at www.publiceye.org.


text:
Before Denny Hamlin won the Helluva Good Sour Cream an Dips 400 at Michigan International Speedway I was thinking back on his season so far, and wondered what happened to the success he experienced in the 2010 season when he finished 2nd in points to 5-time champion Jimmie Johnson.
I looked back at previous second place points finishers and realized that those who finished second in points standings seemed to have less success the following year.
In 2009 Mark Martin finished second to Jimmie Johnson in the points standings, with five wins, and 21 top tens. However, in 2010 Martin finished outside of the Chase for the Cup, in 13th, with no wins, and only eleven top tens.
In 2008 Carl Edwards finished second to Jimmie Johnson, with an astonishing nine wins, and 27 top tens having a remarkable season. However, in 2009 he struggled with no wins, and fourteen top 10s. He rebounded some in the 2010 season, finishing fourth in points, but not finding victory lane until the end of the season.
Once again, in 2007, Jeff Gordon finished second to Jimmie Johnson with six wins, and an unbelievable 30 top tens (yes, THIRTY, I even had to double and triple check that to believe it). However, in 2008 he finished seventh in points, with no wins, and a respectable 19 top tens.
What causes this second place slump? Does Chad Knaus have a voodoo habit? Is it just a "second place hangover"? We may never know, but the statistics do not bode well for those who finish second to Jimmie Johnson. Perhaps with yesterday's win Denny Hamlin can break out and break the "second place curse".

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Book Search
Structures Subjected to Repeated Loading
Stability and strength
This book deals with recent advances relating to design, assessment and repair of structures subjected to repeated loading. Written by researchers from around the world this book will be of interest to those concerned with structural engineering....
Published April 21st 2014 by CRC Press
Hydraulic Structures, Fourth Edition
Now includes Worked Examples for lectutrers in a companion pdf! The fourth edition of this volume presents design principles and practical guidance for key hydraulic structures. Fully revised and updated, this new edition contains enhanced texts and sections on: environmental issues and the...
Published December 21st 2006 by CRC Press
Hydraulic Structures, Third Edition
Hydraulic Structures demonstrates to the advanced undergraduate student the design of hydraulic structures in practice. It does this by explaining dam engineering, the design and construction of embankments, dam outlet works and pumping stations....
Published May 10th 2001 by CRC Press
Steel-Concrete Composite Structures
This is a collection of ten extensive review chapters by different authors....
Published December 31st 1988 by CRC Press
Composite Steel Structures
Advances, design and construction
Published July 9th 1987 by CRC Press
Steel Framed Structures
Stability and strength
Steel Framed Structures contains ten chapters on rigid frames, sway frames, multi-storey frames, interbraced columns and beams, elastic stability, moment-resisting connections, flexibly connected frames, portal frames, and braced arches....
Published March 1st 1985 by CRC Press
Plated Structures
Stability and strength
Published December 1st 1983 by CRC Press
Beams and Beam Columns
Stability and strength
Beams and Beam Columns contains eight chapters on lateral buckling, design of beams, design of beam columns, instability nonlinearity and collapse, and safety factor optimisation....
Published August 1st 1983 by CRC Press


text:
Attempting to benefit from differences in regulation in different jurisdictions, for example, moving trading activity to a more lenient regime in order to lower the amount of capital required to support certain trading activities.
Commodity trading and risk management is a subject that is necessarily complicated, and is becoming more so. The Energy Risk Glossary seeks to disentangle and clarify the jargon by providing definitions of commonly used energy and commodity market terms.
These include definitions related to a variety of underlying energy products, as well as technical terms about the many instruments and benchmarks used by energy market participants.
Many of the most recent terms to have been added to our glossary stem from the actions of regulators since the 2008 global financial crisis. The onset of rules, such as the US Dodd-Frank Act and European Market Infrastructure Regulation, has markedly increased the cost and complexity associated with commodity trading. Perhaps they have also increased the need for a handy reference guide such as this.
The glossary is extensively cross-referenced, making for easy and thorough searches. We hope you find the latest edition of the Energy Risk Glossary to be a useful resource.
More on Regulation
Why Europe's QE resembles a CDS trade
Minenna of Italy's market regulator warns of serious unintended consequences
HSBC admits to misgivings over ring-fence amid cost complaints
Vickers "surprised" by bank's loss of enthusiasm given its support in 2012
Benchmark rules risk stifling innovation, says Stoxx chief
New product issuance in Europe could dry up as result of overbearing new rules, says Graf
More central banks should oversee financial stability – Zeti
Malaysia central bank chief urges giving peers greater regulatory powers
Sign up for Risk.net email alerts
Related media
Video: FCStone calls for balance in capital and margin rules
Dodd-Frank rules must balance stability and market liquidity, says global head of risk
Video: E.on North America compliance head praises CFTC shift
Legal and compliance head says agency has been "very receptive" of industry concerns
Video: Prices and regulation posing challenges, says NRG's Mackey
CRO of US-based utility says low commodity prices and new rules are big concerns
Oil benchmarks should diverge in coming year, says BAML's Blanch
Research chief is sceptical about end of oil indexation in European gas
There are no comments submitted yet. Do you have an interesting opinion? Then be the first to post a comment.
Updating your subscription status
Email alerts
Readers poll


text:
- Made from heavy-duty plastic for long-lasting use Use for measuring all types of liquidsPatented angled design for easier measurement readingComes with 1-, 2- and 4-cup measuring cupsMarkings are in both US and metric units for versatilityMicrowaveable design for enhanced usabilityNonslip handles provide surer gripBPA-free design for peace of mind when baking for loved ones
Don't Miss Out!
Get an instant coupon for 10% off your next order*
plus the latest recipes, exclusive offers, and more straight to your inbox.
*Some restrictions apply.
Sign-up in progress...
Thank You!
Your instant coupon code is:
Enter code during checkout to receive 10% off your purchase.* This code will also be emailed to you.Close and Continue
*Some restrictions apply. To see restrictions, click here .
Sorry, it appears that you already have subscribed to Cooking.com e-mails.
Click here to modify your email preferences.Close
3-pc. Good Grips Angled Measuring Cups by OXO
Hurry, Only 7 In Stock! + Free Shipping on Orders Over $49
Free Shipping Restrictions
Offer applies to orders shipping to a single address within the contiguous U.S. and FPO/APO. Not available on shipments to AK, HI, U.S. Territories or orders shipping internationally.
About Subscription Ordering
With Schedule to Save Subscriptions, you will enjoy:
Free Shipping on Every Subscription Shipment
Easy Online Scheduling and Management
Ability to Update or Cancel at Any Time
The Benefits of Schedule to Save
All Schedule to Save orders ship free.
You schedule the frequency you wish to recieve orders in one-month, two-month, three-month, and six-month intervals. Choose your preference and we'll send out the shipments on that schedule automatically. You can return and modify your subscription schedule online at any time. You'll only be charged for each order when the item is shipped. The amount charged each time will reflect the price of the item on the day the order is placed, plus any applicable sales tax.
Simply login to your "Manage Recurring Orders" page in Your Account at any time to modify the frequency of your shipments, the quantity of your subscription, and billing or shipping address and payment methods. Changes will take place immediately and will be applied to all unshipped orders associated with your subscription.
Useful Links: FAQ My Subscription Orders Full Terms and Conditions
Gift wrap is available for this item. Item #201291
Ships from Our Warehouse in 1-2 business days.
- Cleaning & Care: Dishwasher-, Not microwave-safe.
- Material: Plastic
- Origin: China
- Size/Capacity: 1, 2, & 4 Cup
You may also like…
2-c. Good Grips Adjustable Measuring Cup by OXO
- $11.95 $6.99
Stainless Steel 4-pc. Measuring Cups by Cuisipro
- $34.99 $17.99
2-c. Liquid Measuring Cup by Progressive
- $7.95 $6.99
1.5-qt. Pop Collapsible Bowl Scale by Escali
- $49.95 $14.99
Red 14-in. Gourmet Series Large Shaver by Microplane
- $16.95 $9.99
2-in-1 Measuring Jug by Joseph Joseph
- $13.95 $7.99
11-lb. Baker's Dream Scale by Salter
- $39.95 $14.99
2-qt. Taso Mixing Bowl Scale by Escali
- $59.95 $14.99
4-qt. Collapsible Salad Spinner by Progressive
- $32.95 $18.99
4-Sided Box Grater and Zester Set by Microplane
- $39.95 $17.99
Aquatronic Kitchen Scale by Salter
- $49.95 $34.99
6-pc. Endurance Spice Spoons by RSVP International
- $13.95 $7.99
More Good Grips by OXO
9-pc. Good Grips Nesting Bowl and Colander Set by OXO
- $49.95 $19.99
13.75-in. Good Grips Pineapple Slicer by OXO
- $19.95 $12.99
Good Grips Perfect Cut Twine Dispenser by OXO
- $14.95 $7.99
Set of 4 Good Grips Measuring Cups by OXO
- $19.95 $11.99
Good Grips Large Chopper by OXO
- $19.99 $11.99
8-in. Good Grips Apple Corer by OXO
- $8.99 $5.99
Good Grips Angled Baster with Cleaning Brush by OXO
- $12.95 $5.99
11.25-in. Good Grips Potato Ricer by OXO
- $24.99 $12.99
14-in. Good Grips Handheld Mandoline by OXO
- $14.99 $9.99
Stainless Good Grips Box Grater by OXO
- $17.99 $11.99
The photos do not do this product justice, I know that this is available in plastic and metal. I got the plastic, as it corresponded with the rest of my things, and because the pictures don't show its tru potential, I stayed on the safe side. But with this you dont need to set the cup down and line your eye up with the edge of the counter to make sure you have the correct measurement, you just set it down, and look straight down and look at the line on the inside. You have to try it to understand.I recommend this product.Was this helpful?
These measuring cups are easy to read and the handles are comfortable to hold. They fit nicely inside each other so storage is not a problem. I recommend these highly.I recommend this product.
I don't know how I got along without these angled measuring cups! No more holding a cup up to guess if I have the right amount of liquid.I recommend this product.
Customer Reviews for 3-pc. Good Grips Angled Measuring Cups by OXO
Overall Rating:
4.5 out of 5 stars, based on 103 ratings
100% of reviewers recommend this product
96% say this is a "good value"
The three sizes are excellent and cover most needs. Had never had the angled type measuring cups before, but like them very much. Easy to use. Nice weight. Easy to clean. Easy to store. Very nice.I recommend this product.
- August 1, 2007
- By: Charlotte
- From: WA
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
No more bending down and/or holding your measuring cup up to the light to see if you've poured the correct amount! Great idea!I recommend this product.Was this helpful?
- May 10, 2007
- By: Lisa
- From: CT
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
Love these cups
I love these measuring cups! They're so easy to use. And my 3 year old, who likes to help me cook, can see the measurements easily from the top and tell me just when I reach the correct line. These are great! I highly recommend them.I recommend this product.Was this helpful?
- May 9, 2007
- By: Carolyn
- From: MA
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Family
Would purchase again
The cups are so light, the handle nice grip and very easy to read. Must have in your kitchen. Will purchase more for my daughters.I recommend this product.
- April 22, 2007
- By: Rachel
- From: ON
Work well but...
The angled measures are genius and they pour well. My only critism is that although there are metric measures down the side they're not on the angled part. Not a deal breaker but I often use european cook books and I could have purchased the oxo's european version.
All the 3 pack is a good deal really the angles measure gimmic doesn't warrant the additional expense compared to a run of the mill measuring cups.
The plastic feels pretty durable so I'm not sure I'd pay a great deal more for the steel versions which also have the problems that liquids will cool down/warm up quicker in and obviously you can't see the measures againsts the liquid as well on compared to the transparent version.I recommend this product.
- March 4, 2007
- By: Matthew
- From: NY
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Party Host
Love the cups, but have a couple concerns
It's so convenient to see how much is in the cup without having to get eye level to the measurements on the side of the cup. My daughter and daughter-in-law think they are a great idea also. A couple concerns is that I am not quite sure they will handle the dishwasher over time, so I tend to hand wash them. Also I don't know that the soft material on the handles will survive a microwave. If this is a concern, I would look into the durability issues.I recommend this product.
- February 9, 2007
- By: TERI
- From: WA
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
I found out after I got them that they are not recommened for the microwave oven. I do like to use them as it is easier to measure with them. I showed them to a person that is almost blind and the numbers are to small for her.I recommend this product.
- February 6, 2007
- By: A. Bruce
- From: WI
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
Good Product
I bought this as a gift. It was appreciated.I recommend this product.
- January 2, 2007
- By: Martha
- From: WA
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
3-pc. Angled Measuring Cups by OXO
Perfect for viewing the amount in the cupI recommend this product.
- January 1, 2007
- By: Joyce
- From: NJ
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Family
The value of the product is a good value but the shipping takes away from the value so you might as well buy the product at a local store. With that being said I love your web site and you do have things that we can't find at local stores.
Rick HarmsenI recommend this product.
- December 21, 2006
- By: Rick
- From: CO
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Party Host
Loving the view-from-above measurement
I had no idea I'd use the view-from-above measurement so much, now I'm spoiled and don't even want to use my other measuring cups. These are a nice weight plastic, not too thin or light but not heavy. The rubber grip makes them comfortable to hold.I recommend this product.
- December 5, 2006
- By: Rachel
- From: MD
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Party Host
I wish I'd gotten these a long time ago!
This is a fabulous set of liquid measuring cups (1, 2 and 4 cup sizes) and a great value for the price! I saw them a long time ago and finally decided to order them - and I have used them many times already. They make measuring liquids much quicker and easier due to their design - being able to read the amounts from overhead makes all the difference. They stack compactly for storage as well. I only wish I'd gotten them sooner!I recommend this product.
- November 4, 2006
- By: Sandra
- From: CA
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
I have had bilateral cataract surgery. Retinal tear lazer. What a great relief to finally be able to read the lines without juggling the lines. Sent a set to my daughter who has no visual problems and she is ecstatic from just ease of using it.I recommend this product.
- September 24, 2006
- By: Richard
- From: FL
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Family
When the recipe calls for more precise measurement of ingredients, the product provides me with the necessary accuracy. TheI recommend this product.Was this helpful?
- July 12, 2006
- By: Leonard
- From: NH
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
The first time I saw one of these cups was at my daughter's house. I just knew I had to have one. Imagine my smile when I discovered they came in sets too!!!
It is such a joy to be able to measure both liquids and dry ingredients without bending, stooping, holding the cup up in the air (and usually not straight at that). I just place the cup on my work table and go!!
Oxo has outdone themselves with this product. The only thing that would make them better in my opinion, is if they came in a glass version too.
Thanks Oxo and cooking.com for a great product.
:) AnneI recommend this product.
- April 12, 2006
- By: Anne
- From: FL
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
Wish I would have bought these as soon as Oxo put them on the market! Best idea ever for measuring cups ~ these are fantastic! Well worth the cost.I recommend this product.
- January 27, 2006
- By: Gary
- From: WI
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
I don't know how I got along without these angled measuring cups! No more holding a cup up to guess if I have the right amount of liquid.I recommend this product.
- January 10, 2006
- By: Mary
- From: WI
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Family
This is just a wonderful design, easy to use, accurate. Great price for the set.I recommend this product.
- January 4, 2006
- By: Judith
- From: MI
- I Cook: Every Day
- Style: Party Host
I like these measuring cups, but i think they would be better if they were made of glass. Also, I still end up looking at the side of the cups because I don't trust the top down measures.I recommend this product.Was this helpful?
- December 21, 2005
- By: Henry
- From: CA
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Family
These measuring cups are great. It's so convenient to be able to just look down and see the proper measurements. I got very tired of lifting the measuring cup (or placing it on top of the refridgerator) to get an accurate measurement.I recommend this product.
- December 12, 2005
- By: Beverly
- From: VA
- I Cook: Very Often
- Style: Family


text:
Dear Friends of the Buea Conference:
Bear with us as we revise our website to better serve the conference objectives. We will be completing the revision shortly. In the meantime,
……. mark your calendars …..
Third Conference: April 30, 2013 – May 3, 2013
Adjoining Summer School on Mathematical Finance: April 22, 2013 – May 3, 2013
The bi-annual Buea International Conference on …
… generating scientific collaborations and synergies to fuel African techno-scientific workforce and development


text:
Help us spread the word about PBS' new site for Black History and Culture. Choose from the colors and styles below. Grab your badge, pass it around! Click to download or share through the social media bar above.
Support for pbs.org
Learn more about PBS sponsorship
Stay Connected! Find us on:


text:
Thanks for redeeming.{{else}}
Success! Thanks for repurchasing.{{/if}} {{else}} {{#if Expired}}
Increase my visibility!{{else}} {{#if IsMultiPack}}
{{#if HasMultiPack}} You have {{MultiPackCount}} top spot(s) left. Now loading you into the search listings... {{else}} You have used all top spots. Now loading you into the search listings... {{/if}}{{else}}
We are loading you into the search listing pages...{{/if}} {{/if}} {{/if}} {{/if}}
{{Current}} just saw you!{{/if}} {{#if LastTopSpotPurchaseIsMulti }} {{#if HasAnyTopSpot}}
{{#if HasFreeTopSpot }} {{ UnclaimedTopSpotFree }} Free {{/if}} {{#if HasPaidTopSpot }} {{#if HasFreeTopSpot }} & {{/if}} {{ MultiPackCount }} {{/if}} Top Spot{{#if Plural}}s{{/if}} Left{{else}}
0 Top Spot{{#if Plural}}s{{/if}} Left{{/if}} {{else}} {{#if HasFreeTopSpot }}
{{ UnclaimedTopSpotFree }} Top Spot{{#if Plural}}s{{/if}} Left{{/if}} {{/if}} {{else}} {{#if HasResults}}
{{Current}} see you now!{{else}} {{/if}} {{/if}}
You can now invite anyone to meet at your favorite Starbucks.
Limited-time feature
26 year old woman | Saint Augustine, FL, USA | Seeking men 23-35 within 50 miles
*Insert witticism here*
Hi I'm a graduate student here in St. Augustine I'm usually extremely busy even working weekends, but when I do have spare time I make the most of it. I've recently become an avid runner and I'm training for the half marathon here in November! Despite my sometimes stressful job I'm really laid back. I'm looking for someone who can show me around the city and who likes the outdoors. Basically someone to have fun with. If that leads to something more serious: fantastic.
Book club , Camping , Coffee and conversation , Cooking , Movies/Videos , Museums and art , Music and concerts , Exploring new areas , Performing arts , Travel/Sightseeing
Cycling, Dancing, Running, Soccer, Swimming, Walking / Hiking, Weights / Machines, Yoga
I exercise 3-4 times per week.
I like Cats, Dogs, Exotic Pets, Horses
I don't know St. Augustine that well, I'm awful busy and I just moved here!
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, IL
I collect vinyl records, I'll try any exotic food at least once, I love watching films, I dabble with languages currently learning Russian and I'm buying a new road bike soon!
I like watching movies, biking or running outside when it's nice out. I want to learn to surf!
Science Articles for work. For fun: Game of Thrones
Z{{Cta}} {{#if HasMoreInfo}} ?{{CtaSecondary}} {{/if}}
|What she is looking for
|5'7" (170cms)
|5'10" (177cms) to 6'11" (210cms)
|Body type:
|Athletic and toned
|Slender, About average, Athletic and toned
|No preference
|Dark brown
|No preference
|No Way
|No Way, Occasionally, Cigar aficionado, Yes, but trying to quit
|Social Drinker
|Social Drinker, Regularly, Moderately
|Other profession
|No preference
Scientific Research
|$25,001 to $35,000
|No preference
|Never Married
|Never Married, Widow / Widower, Divorced
|Have kids:
|I'll tell you later
|No, Yes, and they live away from home
|Wants kids:
|Definitely, Someday
|White / Caucasian
|Asian, Black / African descent, East Indian, Latino / Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Native American, Pacific Islander, White / Caucasian
|Agnostic, Christian / Catholic, Christian / LDS, Christian / Protestant, Spiritual but not religious, Christian / Other
Not really serious about it. I don't go to church :/, but this is what I was raised.
|English, Other
|Graduate degree
|Associates degree, Bachelors degree, Graduate degree, PhD / Post Doctoral


text:
Thanks for redeeming.{{else}}
Success! Thanks for repurchasing.{{/if}} {{else}} {{#if Expired}}
Increase my visibility!{{else}} {{#if IsMultiPack}}
{{#if HasMultiPack}} You have {{MultiPackCount}} top spot(s) left. Now loading you into the search listings... {{else}} You have used all top spots. Now loading you into the search listings... {{/if}}{{else}}
We are loading you into the search listing pages...{{/if}} {{/if}} {{/if}} {{/if}}
{{Current}} just saw you!{{/if}} {{#if LastTopSpotPurchaseIsMulti }} {{#if HasAnyTopSpot}}
{{#if HasFreeTopSpot }} {{ UnclaimedTopSpotFree }} Free {{/if}} {{#if HasPaidTopSpot }} {{#if HasFreeTopSpot }} & {{/if}} {{ MultiPackCount }} {{/if}} Top Spot{{#if Plural}}s{{/if}} Left{{else}}
0 Top Spot{{#if Plural}}s{{/if}} Left{{/if}} {{else}} {{#if HasFreeTopSpot }}
{{ UnclaimedTopSpotFree }} Top Spot{{#if Plural}}s{{/if}} Left{{/if}} {{/if}} {{else}} {{#if HasResults}}
{{Current}} see you now!{{else}} {{/if}} {{/if}}
You can now invite anyone to meet at your favorite Starbucks.
Limited-time feature
37 year old man | Pontiac, MI, USA | Seeking women 25-35 within 50 miles of Troy, MI
Active within 3 days
Life is short so enjoy it with someone interesting.
I am a mid-west kind of guy, having grown up in Kansas City. I believe in honoring your family. Without their support, I wouldn't be where I am today. I am down to earth and always looking for new, positive experiences. Never having been one to drink, I believe in the power of genuine fun with sobriety. I am looking for a woman who likes her current progress in her ongoing journey for fulfillment. While my canvas is a computer, I am still an artist. I enjoy my career path, though it may never lead to great wealth. I know the suit and tie may suggest otherwise, but I am by no means rich. lol. I am Catholic and I know this is a deal breaker for some, so I wanted to share that with you now versus later. I'm really just a regular guy looking to meet someone nice. I would love to get to know you, learn from you, and share in your interests. If you're assisting the community, let me help you. If you need a dance partner...I'll try my best not to step on your toes. : ) I just want to support you as a friend and partner in life. If you have a busy schedule, I understand. I appreciate the hard work people put into their vocations. Don't worry, I'll still enjoy the time we spend together. I understand this is a very general introduction. Please feel free to ask me anything you like for further details.
Coffee and conversation , Dining out , Movies/Videos , Museums and art , Exploring new areas , Performing arts , Travel/Sightseeing , Video games
Cycling, Dancing, Inline skating, Other types of exercise, Running
I exercise 3-4 times per week.
Don't display my sign
I like Cats
I don't mind pets at all. I had a feline friend for a number of years and I think pets can be a great source of support.
CO Cucina or Alejo Trattoria are my two favorites for italian food.
The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
I like music and my favorite genres/spheres are R&B, soul, jazz, and funk. I enjoy classical as well and I'm always open to finding new favorite interests through friends.
A good art exhibit, or a film with good animation or special effects. I love roller skating. I play the sax and flute, but haven't done so in years, but I have taken up the piano. I am no Gregory Hines, but I took a tap class and it was fun.
I am currently reading "Grace" by Max Lucado, and I just completed "The Strength to Love" by Martin Luther King.
Z{{Cta}} {{#if HasMoreInfo}} ?{{CtaSecondary}} {{/if}}
|What he is looking for
|5'10" (177cms)
|5'0" (152cms) to 5'11" (180cms)
|Body type:
|Athletic and toned
|Slender, Athletic and toned
|Black, Blue, Brown, Grey, Green, Hazel
|Black, Dark brown
|No Way
|No Way
|Social Drinker
|Artistic / Creative / Performance
|Artistic / Creative / Performance, Executive / Management, Financial / Accounting / Real Estate, Legal, Medical / Dental / Veterinary / Fitness, Political / Govt / Civil Service / Military, Sales / Marketing, Self-Employed / Entrepreneur, Education / Teacher / Professor, Technical / Science / Computers / Engineering, Travel / Hospitality / Transportation, Nonprofit / Volunteer / Activist, Fashion / Model / Beauty, Architecture / Interior design
One of my future goals is to develop and produce cg work that can be applied to personal film shorts or print.
|$25,001 to $35,000
|Less Than $25,000, $25,001 to $35,000, $35,001 to $50,000, $50,001 to $75,000, $75,001 to $100,000, $100,001 to $150,000, $150,001+
|Never Married
|Never Married
|Have kids:
|Wants kids:
|Black / African descent
|Black / African descent
My mother's family is originally from Oklahoma, and my father's family is from Baltimore. As a kid I visited both places during the summers, and experienced two very different rich African American cultures.
|Christian / Catholic
|Christian / Catholic
I'm a confirmed Catholic and I know that is a deal breaker for some women. My faith has definitely played a role in my formation. I'm really looking for someone who is open to Catholicism or at the very least not put off by it.
|Graduate degree
|Bachelors degree, Graduate degree, PhD / Post Doctoral
I have a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Kansas, and a master's degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design.


text:
Skip to Content
If you are seeking a world-class educational experience within a vibrant, Christ-centered learning community, Cedarville is the place for you. Step up to the challenge of our arts, sciences, professional and graduate programs, and achieve more than you ever imagined. Be challenged and transformed by professors who are experts in their fields and invest their lives at Cedarville to mentor and guide students like you.
The best way to experience Cedarville is to visit campus. Be our guest!
December 20, 2013
Merry Christmas!!
Posted in
Student Life
Did you know Cedarville offers online graduate and adult programs? Request information below.
RT @ChaseWalter_: Such a good experience visiting @cedarville today. http://t.co/BnnkQiMP67 #CUFridayintheSummer
Retweeted by Janice Supplee
Congratulations to the CU engineering solar boat team for being the 2015 @SolarSplash champions. #solarsplash2015 http://t.co/RWddHEjOay
Welcome to campus to all 575 #CUFriday visitors! What's your favorite part about your experience @cedarville today? #CUFridayintheSummer
RT @CedarvilleNews: ... @cedarville just named College of Distinction. Only 12 universities in Ohio with this honor. http://t.co/d7jZOhxuRy
@Cedarville commencement celebrates transformed lives, exciting futures. R you & your student ready 4 the adventure? http://t.co/F4QVqjJwhN


text:
Amateur chefs are invited to submit recipes in four categories: side dish, entrée, dessert, and snack. While each category has its own specific rules, all submissions must be diabetic-friendly, cost efficient, and above all, appetizing. Leving is most looking forward to the entrée portion.
"The requirements created for each area are what make this challenge so unique. Creating an entrée that is less than 750 calories, no more than eight ingredients, and delicious is not a simple task. These are the meals responsible parents prepare for their children."
Leving, Chairman for the Illinois Council on Responsible Fatherhood (www.responsiblefatherhood.illinois.gov)
"The involvement of a parent influences the growth of their child, emotionally and physically. In this case, it is important for parents to instill nutritious eating habits with their children to ensure they grow up healthy. Critical studies have shown that parental influence over children's eating habits outweigh that of their schools and the media".
The presence of Type II Diabetes in children, formerly known as adult-onset diabetes, has grown substantially within the past two decades. According to the advocacy organization Trust for America's Health, Illinois ranks 10th highest in the country for overweight or obese children, ages 10-17. Leving, and programs like The Southside Diabetes Project, recognize the need to promote healthy eating habits.
The contestant that Leving chooses will have the chance to walk home with a $500 award or other great prizes.
For more on the event or on diabetic-friendly eating, visit www.southsidediabetes.com.
To schedule an interview to promote this important event, please contact Jennifer Whiteside at 312.296.3666 for more information.


text:
LA weight loss- Sweet and Sour chicken
This LA weight loss sweet and sour chicken recipe is one that is healthy and a real treat for the taste buds. Using the stir fry method of cooking it ensures that minimum oil is used for cooking. The chicken broth too is low sodium and the cooking spray low fat. A delicious accompaniment with rice. A real comfort food that would see you through your diet and exercise regime.
|Boneless chicken
|6 Ounce
|Chicken broth
|3⁄4 Cup (12 tbs)
|Green pepper
|1 Small
|2 Tablespoon
|Red wine vinegar
|1 Tablespoon
|1 Tablespoon
|Pineapple pieces
|1⁄2 Cup (8 tbs)
|Tomato ketchup
|2 Tablespoon
Cut the chicken into cubes of 1" each. Take a skillet or saucepan and add in the cooking spray. Now add the onions and green pepper. Saute till the vegetables are tender. Add in the chicken pieces and stir fry. Saute till the chicken is well-cooked. Add in the red wine vinegar, vinegar and the sugar. Stir. Add the chicken broth and cook till the sauce thickens (if the sauce is very thin in consistency you could add cornflour mixed in water to thicken it. Let it coat the chicken pieces and vegetables well. Serve with rice or noodles.
Recipe Summary
Difficulty Level:Easy
Course:Side Dish
Method:Stir Fried
Preparation Time:10 Minutes
Cook Time:10 Minutes
Ready In:20 Minutes
Rate It
0 Comments
LA Weight Loss- Sweet And Sour Chicken Recipe


text:
You know how to tweet. You know what a Facebook Page is. You know all the different social media platforms and what they do. You're active in the Calgary social media community. You attend many of the social media events... but now what? What are the next steps beyond the foundational how-to sessions? nextstepYYC.
nextstepYYC is a discussion group intended for established social media professionals in Calgary who are seeking a safe space to talk about online engagement and social media in more detail. Topics may include strategy, policies, approaches, opinions, statistics, trends and best practice. Participants must be willing and able to discuss their ideas freely, share their challenges, celebrate their successes and debate opinions respectfully. An understanding of the foundational principles and industry terms is required to maintain thoughtful, quality conversations.
Just learning about social media? A presentation outlet for the general public will be coming soon! Please check out other fantastic social media Meetups in Calgary to learn your social media basics, such as Third Tuesday and Social Media Breakfast.
Membership is based on application and approval to maintain a small, efficient working group. Want in? Get a member to recommend you!
nextstepYYC is brought to you by Frontstep Communications and the hunger of Calgary social media professionals!
New members must be approved by the Organizer
Content of this Meetup Group is only visible to members
Monday, July 27, 2015 6:00 PM
Monday, August 31, 2015 6:00 PM
Monday, September 28, 2015 6:00 PM
Monday, October 26, 2015 6:00 PM
Monday, November 30, 2015 6:00 PM
Monday, December 28, 2015 6:00 PM
Monday, January 25, 2016 6:00 PM
Monday, February 29, 2016 6:00 PM
Monday, March 28, 2016 6:00 PM
Monday, April 25, 2016 6:00 PM
Monday, May 30, 2016 6:00 PM
Monday, June 27, 2016 6:00 PM
Meetup has allowed me to meet people I wouldn't have met naturally - they're totally different than me.
— Allison, started Women's Adventure Travel
Meetup members, Log in
By clicking "Sign up" or "Sign up using Facebook", you confirm that you accept our Terms of Service & Privacy Policy


text:
Nexus Terror
This NPC can be found in Mana-Tombs (60).
GainsAfter killing this NPC you will gain:
- Heroic
- 23 reputation with The Consortium
- Normal
- 11 reputation with The Consortium (stops at Honored)
- Timewalking
- 15 reputation with The Consortium
|Quick Facts
The Wowhead Client is a little application we use to keep our database up to date, and to provide you with some nifty extra functionality on the website!
It serves 2 main purposes:
You can also use it to keep track of your completed quests, recipes, mounts, companion pets, and titles!
So, what are you waiting for? Download the client and get started.


text:
Enlarge Cover
Vintage | Feb 25, 1997
| 368 Pages
| 5-3/16 x 8
| Feb 25, 1997
| 368 Pages
| 5-3/16 x 8
| Aug 24, 2011
| 368 Pages
The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience. 368 pp. 15,000 print.
The Size of Thoughts, a collection of essays that have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications, includes one never-before-published piece on the world of electronics. The essays celebrate the joy–and exquisite details–of everything from library card catalogs and reading aloud to the significance of wine stains on a tablecloth.Baker turns any subject, from feeding a child to phone sex, into literature with a style that is sparklingly original, frequently beautiful, and always thought-provoking. The Size of Thoughts, through its varied forays into the realms of the overlooked, the underfunded, and the wrongfully scrapped, is a funny book by one of the most distinctive stylists and thinkers of out time.
Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published six previous novels and three works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.
Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network