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jessicsd needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 53 designs submitted by 17 freelance designers.
Kids Walk Across America
We are a grassroots organization in LA. We host a weekly 'adventure' walk through a local mall. This walk promotes health, exercise, family fun and educational elements. Each week we feature fun facts about different states in America! We need a fresh fun logo.
Our website is: kids walk.org
Please find images of our event attached. Thanks!
Families and parents, kids age 5-12.
adjectives that describe the image of our company:
American, active,fun, exciting, full of energy


text:
SPIN provides ready access to the most current funding information available in the SPIN files. Information is accessed through a system of related or hierarchical menus of directories and files so that searching SPIN seems to be intuitive, or at least very clear. Menu items send users directly to the SPIN, CBD, and FR. A topical list of disciplines goes from Agriculture to Science and Technology entries. Under each discipline are dozens of funding agency records. Individual agency records provide a contact name, address, phone, applicant requirements and program abstract. Other menus allow for searching by keywords, deadlines dates and sponsors in these same records. A Quick Guide is available to help you get started accessing SPIN.
Access InfoEd SPIN if using an off-campus computer
Access a list of other research resources and databases provided by the TWU Library
page last updated 4/7/2017 4:11 PM

subset: commoncrawl


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I don't know what it is about today, but I'm fooling in love with you.
Girl, you're Fool's gold. And I don't ever want to know the real thing.
Guess what day it is? Let's fool around. (I'm not joking.)
You're cute. April Fool's! You're MINDBLOWINGLY SEXY.
That hipster dress is a joke. Better take it off.
You put the "oh oh" in "fool."
It's April Fool's Day, and you look you could turn tricks, baby.
Girl, I'd let you flush the toilet while I'm in the shower.
Did someone replace the Splenda with cement? Cuz I just got really hard.
I have a box full of baby kittens in my room. Wanna see? …April Fool's! But now that we're here…
Are you Fool proof, or can I trick you into buying me a drink?
You make an April Fool out of me every day.
—Written by Emily Winter and JK Payne for HowAboutWe.com
Which pick-up line is your favorite? Would you fall for the baby kittens one?
More from HowAboutWe:


text: The A Flame upon the Sea! wiki last edited by MoonBoi on 03/03/14 07:40AM View full history A Flame Upon the Sea! - Once again reunited Valda, the Iron Maiden, Arak and Satyricus must battle the soldiers of Byzantium when Valda spurns the Emperor. But they are soon freed by the Emperor's mother who secretly plans a double cross on White Cathay in a deal for the secret of Greek Fire! Isle of the City, Isle of Death! - Malagigi and Valda seek refuge in the stronghold of Greeramada, only to get caught up in a reliquary heist on St. Denys' Eve!


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Seven Marines from the Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, spent two days hunting teal at a camp north of Welsh with help from Operation Military Embrance, a non-profit military-support charity that provides financial assistance and helps organize events for wounded soldiers. (Special to the American Press)
Last Modified: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 10:50 PM
By John Guidroz / American Press
The calm atmosphere of a duck hunting camp was a new experience for Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Ray Coffey and a far cry from the combat he faced in Iraq and Afghanistan that left him recovering from several serious injuries.
Coffey, along with six other Marines from Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, spent two days hunting teal at a camp north of Welsh with help from Operation Military Embrace, a nonprofit support charity that provides financial assistance and helps organize events for wounded service members.
Coffey joined the Marines in 1998 and was one of the first groups that deployed to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He later served two tours in Iraq.
During the second tour he was hit by a roadside bomb. He lost most of the sight in his right eye and has 21 titanium screws in his face, along with artificial cheekbones and teeth.
Despite his injuries, Coffey stayed in Iraq. He later was shot in his right ankle and suffered extensive back injuries after jumping out of a two-story window to avoid a grenade. Today, he said he has difficulty walking and has little short-term memory.
Jerry Reed is the president and executive director of Operation Military Embrace and a Vietnam War veteran. He said the trip helped the soldiers not think as much about the injuries they deal with every day.
"It's healing for these young men," Reed said. "It's good to get them away from the hospital, and they had a blast. They took to it like ducks to water, so to speak."
Staff Sgt. Phillip McGill said he wants to continue hunting. McGill joined the Marines in 2003 and spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan disarming bombs. He was injured in January when an explosive detonated during a humanitarian mission in Cambodia.
"We were training the Cambodian demining teams and in our off time taking apart explosives we had found to use as training aids," he said.
The explosion severed a major blood vessel in his left arm, ruptured his spleen and collapsed his left lung. A tourniquet was placed on his arm to stop the bleeding, but it was several hours before McGill underwent emergency surgery. He suffered extensive nerve damage to his left forearm.
"After I was discharged, I had no feeling in my forearm," he said. "Now, I can actually feel the breeze blowing on my hand. But it could take a year to two years to get all the feeling back."
McGill said he wants to continue being a bomb technician if he regains the feeling in his arm to perform the job correctly.
District 14 Calcasieu Parish Police Juror Hal McMillin and Reggie Knowles, owner of the private hunting club, accompanied the soldiers during the hunt. McMillin said the experience was a "tremendous opportunity to show them a great part of Southwest Louisiana."
"These guys put their lives on the line for us and our freedom," he said.
Like most of the Marines who participated, Coffey said he had never hunted before.
"It's been a big learning experience for all of us," he said. "It wasn't just shooting; it was cleaning the ducks. We learned enough to actually take up the hobby if we ever wanted to."
Online: www.operationmilitaryembrace.com.


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Nov. 18, 2013
Press Conference
Game Notes | Game Central
Michigan Head Coach Brady Hoke
Opening statement ... "Thanks for coming out; it was a game where I think our defense really kept us in the football game. We thought from the overtime, the offense started making a couple of more things happen down in the red zone. That's one we need to keep working on both on offense and on defense is our red zones. They haven't been as good as we'd like them to be. But I thought offensively we started doing some good things. We start the game, and after the first kickoff we drive down, but we need to finish better. We got the field goal, but we've got to do a little bit more with it. We were 0-for-10 at one point on third downs, and that is not a number that we want; we'll be better. The two backs -- I think Derrick [Green] and De'Veon [Smith] did a nice job -- averaged 4.4 yards per carry between the both of them. I think Devin [Gardner] ran 17 times, five of those were sacks, and there were probably seven or eight called runs and the rest scrambles. He threw it, I think, 43 times and did a nice job. We had some that we dropped; we've got some that we need to be a little more accurate and read through. But at the end of the day there are two things: [Jeremy] Gallon jumping on the ball in that punt late to save time was a smart football play by him, and then I can't give enough credit -- and I told you this after the game -- one of the best team plays I've seen with the field goal team getting on the field and guys on offense getting off the field. I think [Drew] Dileo -- where he was, he ran a vertical route on the other side of the field -- the effort to get there and slide in and hold. Gibby [Brendan Gibbons] not having the chance to go through his normal kicking procedure. Jareth Glanda, you can't say enough about his snaps with that wind during the PATs and field goals -- that whole team and the team getting off the field did a tremendous job. They gave us the opportunity to keep playing and win the game in three overtimes."
On the improved rushing production ... "I think the three guys inside really established the line of scrimmage. When you watch the tape, they're able to get started better -- the backs were. I thought the bubble screen and the fake bubble, pulling the linebacker a little bit and made it a better angle for a guy to combo up to, both those guys (Green and Smith) are pretty much downhill runners -- they have a chance to end up north-south because of their size and their style. They have pretty good vision, most of the time. We thought one in the end zone and one in the red zone, we probably read that wrong. For the most part they both ran hard, but they got started."
Michigan Stadium
Gardner Goes Wild: Michigan Clips Hawkeyes for Perfect Home Record
Postgame Press Conference (live) | Photo Gallery | Storify (game timeline)
Devin Gardner totaled six TDs (3 rush, 3 pass) and 314 pass yards, Jeremy Gallon had 133 receiving yards and Denard Robinson rushed for 98 as No. 23 U-M completed the 6-0 home record with a 42-17 win over Iowa.
On Jake Butt's one-handed touchdown grab ... "Jake Butt is coming along; he's a freshman, and he made a great catch. It doesn't surprise any of us because we've seen him do it in practice. But he's a guy who is really maturing into being a good weapon for us and just developing as a football player."
On how Saturday's rushing performance will affect the competition at running back ... "I wouldn't say there will be more (competition), we always have a competition like you said. You've got to give them credit, though, for how they played."
On the positive impact Saturday's win can have on the team ... "We needed to go out and play Michigan football and fight for 60-plus minutes. I think the teaching moments that are so critical for a team, and especially when you've got young guys, just what you did with that hurry-up field goal -- how we practice it and how we do it, the emphasis that's made there. I think winning the football game, you can throw the weather in, you can throw a lot of things in, they responded well, and they never panicked. It was kind of neat on the sidelines -- when the offense was out there the defensive guys were chanting 'offense,' it was like high school; it was neat, they were having fun. And we did the same thing when the defense was on the field. They really, as a team, played. And they cared and were accountable."
On Devin Gardner's performance on Saturday ... "A couple of things, I thought his ball security was much better. We had a couple of instances where they had a dropped interception here and there, so we have a couple of reads that we need to detail through a little more. I think his attitude and just fighting, we kept going. We called a timeout, he told me 'Coach you need to call a timeout, I can't feel my left arm,' so we called a timeout, and he worked it back where he could feel it and did a tremendous job."
On scouting Iowa for this week's game ... "For those of you who have covered it for years, you know it's going to be a physical line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. I think they've only let four rushing touchdowns all year. They are averaging 197 yards rushing the football. They'll be physical at the point of attack. They are not going to be flashy, and you know that going in. Both of our fronts have got to be physical -- and from an offensive standpoint, target things right. From a defensive standpoint we've got to get with the stretch plays and zone plays, as much up the field penetration as we can."
On Thomas Gordon's performance against Northwestern ... "I thought Thomas really played fast in that game. I thought he did a nice job with his eyes, his discipline. That's always where it starts in the back end. From his stance to his feet and his discipline, getting his reactions and reads, I thought he really did a nice job and then triggering."
On how Saturday's hurry-up game-tying field goal came to be ... "Coach [Dan] Ferigno and myself, (the field goal unit) was basically all standing behind him, and I saw where the ball finally got marked. They went from there. When that drive started, we started making sure that Quinton Washington and the guys on defense were where they needed to be, and then the guys that come in like Erik Gunderson. I think Gibby [Brendan Gibbons] was still kicking (in the practice net), Matt [Wile] went and got him and said 'You need to be ready for a hurry hurry field goal.'"
U-M Sophomore Linebacker James Ross III
On scouting Iowa ... "I haven't really got to the film yet, I plan on doing that today, but as for last year I know what this game is all about. It's about being really physical, not too flashy. Those guys are real physical up front. They are going to run the power, and they are going to run the stretch, all that type of stuff. You just have to be physical. We have been doing a good job of that lately, and our d-line has been stepping up. We're going to get into the film and see what they got."
On the defense making key stops at the end of the game ... "One of the biggest things we talked about that whole week was the game coming down to the defense. We felt like we've lost game because the defense didn't finish. At Penn State, we wouldn't have had to go to overtime if we stopped them in the two minutes. The biggest thing about the whole week was knowing how to finish. We felt that the game was on our shoulders, and we wanted the game on our shoulders. We wanted to prove that we could finish, to prove to ourselves and to everyone else watching. It was great that we got that opportunity."
On his thoughts about the last-second field goal ... "I was speechless. I was walking back to the sideline not knowing what was happening. Everyone was running on the field, and they finally kicked it, and I looked. It went in, and Gibby was running off the field. It was a great moment. It was probably the best moment since I've been a part of the team. Just to see all of those guys come together. That was something we have practiced for so long, all the guys on the field goal team with the quick field goal. And just to see it actually take place. I never thought it would happen like that. In practice Coach Hoke counts so fast, and I'm like, it could never happen like that. But it did, and the practice paid off. It was great to see it happen the way it did."
On playing his best football at this point in the season ... "I feel like I am, but it is due to the d-line doing a great job up front. When you have a great d-line like that doing their job and taking up blocks, you are free to play, so you have to make the plays. They are doing all they can do so you can be free. Without those guys, we wouldn't be as good as we are today."
U-M Fifth-year Senior Offensive Tackle Taylor Lewan
On the offensive line's improvements ... "We had better targeting and getting on guys. Pushing the line of scrimmage and doing things an offensive line should do. Obviously, Devin got sacked a bunch again, so that's not good. We've got to be better at pass protection. We've got to protect our quarterback. "
On the growth of the younger interior line players ... "I'm really proud of them. I know this year hasn't been the year we wanted, especially on the offensive line, but all the experience that the guys are getting will do so much for them in the future. I'm excited for them. I'm excited for a year down the road, two years down the road, when they are the offensive line that they want to be. "
On worrying about time running out on the final kick ... "Honestly, my biggest focus was getting off the field. I ran off the field, and I hear the crowd cheer. I turn around, and the ball is in the air, and then we're going to overtime. If Brendan has the opportunity to put it through the uprights, he going to put it through the uprights. I know he had a couple here and there at Penn State, but Brendan has done more good for us than bad. I'm proud of him and how he's developed over the years. I'm proud to call him my friend. "
On his thoughts on Iowa's pink visitor's locker room ... "It's soothing. It's nice. It keeps it mellow. It's a light pink, not a dark pink or anything like that. Every away locker room that we visit has its own little quirks. Michigan State has a smiley face when you walk down, and Iowa has pink locker rooms. The game is not played in the locker room. If it was it would be a very calm and soothing game."
» Learn about ticket packs and individual game tickets for the 2017 Michigan football season.


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Still Blazin
It seems promising that Miami Heat players are getting banged up now, halfway through the season. In the loss to the Lakers the other night, Jason Williams and Dwyane Wade both came up lame, especially bothersome to fans because these two have evolved into the NBAs most formidable backcourt. Maybe theyll be predisastered at playoff time. Dont blame the Phoenix Suns for any lack of sympathy. Their best player, Amare Stoudamire, is missing the season thanks to serious injury. Yet still they win, leading a division over other top contenders, the Lakers and the Clippers.
FIU alum Raja Bell has been hitting his threes, MVP Steve Nash and dunkmaster Shawn Marion continue to shine, and the Suns have beefed up their bench with former Heaters Brian Grant, Eddie House, and Jim Jackson. In any case, its a rare opportunity to see the best of the West at the Heats house as the Suns come to town for this 8:00 p.m. battle at American Airlines Arena.
Thu., Jan. 26, 8 p.m.
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text:
Article - Office of College Advancement
Watching over the Wolves
By Marty James.
Monday, April 30, 2012—Reprinted from Napa Valley Register. (Original article.)
Rob Brandon's first year at Ohlone College in Fremont was a life-changing experience.
As a senior, he was the MVP as a utility player for his Amador Valley High School-Pleasanton baseball team. But he was cut during tryouts as a freshman at Ohlone, which is a member of the Coast Conference.
He was a "B-minus/C-plus" student in high school. But his grade-point average really soared his first year of college. Brandon has a biology 101 instructor to thank for inspiring him and making the class interesting and exciting.
"When I would arrive in the morning, there was a long chalkboard and it would be full of colorful chalk drawings of anything biology," Brandon recalled. "The guy was really excited to do what he was doing. He really was an excellent teacher. With his inspiration and working hard at academics, I got an A. In sciences, that's what I had not done. That just inspired me to study and get confident academically and get better grades.
"I got cut from the baseball team, got some good grades, and got the confidence of being able to achieve academically."
There is someone else that Brandon — one of the owners of Napa Valley Physical Therapy Center and the trainer for the American Canyon High School football program — has to thank.
It's Carol Brachna, a physical therapist in San Ramon.
It's Brachna who treated Brandon for an ankle injury that he suffered from playing basketball and then a problem with his lower back when he was younger.
It's Brachna who also steered Brandon toward the field of athletic training and physical therapy.
"She helped me learn how to move better and keep me moving. She helped me learn how to hold my posture and get stronger and be able to get back and play sports the way I enjoyed," Brandon said.
When Brandon was 18 and going to Ohlone, he went to work for Brachna as a physical therapist's aide. He said he enjoyed what he was doing, learning as much as he could and taking in all that was going on around him.
It was Brachna who served as a mentor to him.
Gaining experience in college
From Ohlone College, Brandon transferred to Cal State Hayward, where he earned a degree in kinesiology/physical education while obtaining additional experience by working in the Pioneers' athletic training room.
He was a student athletic trainer and served as a senior trainer for football, soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, track and field, softball, swimming and volleyball.
"I knew I still loved sports, so I got to work with the athletes at the school, help them in injury prevention and rehabilitation. I grew that bit of knowledge," said Brandon, a native of Castro Valley.
He went on to get his masters in physical therapy from USC. He thoroughly enjoyed his time at Southern California.
"It was an excellent experience," he said. "The level of education at that school is top notch. The instructors were phenomenal. The experiences that they provided for us, learning how to take care of movement-related problems was excellent. The expectations are very high there. That just brings your level of performance up. That helped me to excel. We worked really hard. We had a great group of people. We had a lot of fun.
"That was actually a good point in my life. Looking back, it was a good road that I've traveled down. I've learned a lot and continue to learn about how people move. I met my wife because I went to USC. Now we have three great kids."
Brandon, who is a certified athletic trainer and a registered physical therapist, worked in different outpatient orthopedic practices after completing his master's program. He was with Novato Back Care and Sports Physical Therapy, Inc., for six years, working as a physical therapist, clinical instructor and clinic supervisor.
He was also the head athletic trainer for Novato High School.
Napa arrival in 2005
In July 2005, he went to work at Napa Valley Physical Therapy Center. He has joined Bruce McCall and Glenn Hughes as one of the owners of NVPTC, which has facilities on Soscol Avenue and Claremont Way in Napa.
"I'm honored to be able to work with Bruce and Glenn," said Brandon, 42. "Bruce and Glenn have really worked very hard within the community. I knew when I first met Bruce and Glenn that this was somewhere I wanted to be serious about staying, because I knew the quality that they were providing, the quality care here at both our Soscol and our Claremont clinics. The quality of care is just superior. This is really top notch. I know that Bruce and Glenn have put a lot into this, so I am honored to help continue the traditions that they have instilled in Napa.
"I got to see first of all what they were doing within the high schools and how much they're involved In the community of being out on the fields, helping with injury prevention and volunteering their time for the community also in the clinic, seeing kids and helping them to recover safely and get back appropriately."
McCall is the trainer for Vintage High football and Hughes is the Napa High football trainer. Together with Brandon, they are on the sidelines on Friday nights during the fall, assisting those schools and their athletes with treatment for injuries.
They are also taping players before games and seeing anyone who is injured during the week for additional therapy and treatment.
Brandon is part of an athletic training team at American Canyon — which plays in the Solano County Athletic Conference — that includes Jill Stewart and Michelle Davis. The team physician for Wolves' football is Dr. Phu V. Truong, who is with Kaiser Permanente in Napa.
"I got into this because I really enjoy working with people," Brandon said. "I enjoy the reward of someone coming in, having a problem that's related to movement, and helping them be able to move better and keep them moving more efficiently and more comfortably."
American Canyon, which will be playing its second varsity season of football this fall, has a training room on campus.
Brandon will be starting his third year with the Wolves' football program in August. He works both home and away games.
"There's a good team approach there about how to take care of the kids," he said. "It doesn't completely fall back on me 100 percent. We all work at it as a team to try and get those kids taken care of. Not having a fulltime athletic trainer on campus makes it such that the community has to get involved in order to take care of the kids. It's good to have a multitude of people helping.
"I enjoy being involved in athletics and working with kids. It's nice to work in a clinic and it's also nice to be outside, to enjoy the Friday night lights. That's fun."
Brandon is a great help to ACHS football, head coach Ian MacMillan said.
"When a football player is injured, Rob helps them get back to being able to play," said MacMillan. "Rob attends all the games and helps keep players healthy and he even comes in on Saturday morning after the games to check on injuries or players that were hurt during the game. He meets with the players and determines if they need to see a doctor or not and gives them a plan to get healthy.
"Right now he is helping Riley Williams and Jeremiah Johnson, who tore their ACLs last season. He is doing a great job helping them get ready for this coming season. We are lucky to have him."
Brandon is also a certified kinesio taping instructor. He received the USA Kinesio Taping Association Instructor of the Year award in 2004.
"I'm happy to be a part of the Napa community. A lot of great people in this community," he said.


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Tube Buffered LM1875
Hello all,
I am thinking that I am going to make a Tube buffered LM1875.
The reason why I am thinking a LM1875 is because I already have 2 transformers that are 16vac which would work nicely for the dual supply for the LM1875.
I want to get my feet wet with tubes and am in the process of building a tube amp but I dont have the money right now. So I want to build a Tube front end onto this chipamp.
I have not seen much on the web about tube buffered chipamps and the website's do not have alot of information.
I have found this one and thisas well as this one .
I was wondering what would be a good front end to the amp?
I have liked the Tube Cad Aikido Amplifier but I do not know much.
I am kind of at a lost to how to create a hybrid like this. Any good insight would be greatly appreciated!
Read thru Joe's tube buffered gainclone thread... that's the way i'd go (with a CCS on the tail of the cathode follower.
The problem is that the tube wants to run on a high voltage B+ supply and needs either 6V or 12V for the heater. You can't use anything from the chip amp power supply so you need an independant PS for the tube(s). One you do that you may as well build a stand alone tube based pre-amp.
A tube pre is a good project becasue you don't need expensive transformers. No output transformer is required at all and the power transformer only needs to put out milliamps.
the common 12AX7 or 12AU7 is easy to get as they are current production items
I would __strongly__ suggest using conventional tube construction techniques. A mettle chassis with tubes and transformers on top and point to point wres nder. Do NOT try and mix the chip amp and tube in the same chassis. the reason is that a tube's B+ voltage is lethal. Keep that high voltage stuff away from everything else.
I'd recommend that you adjust your approach to your skill level and the level of danger that you are comfortable with.
If this is one of your first projects, I would suggest reading up on tube technology (Tube forum, Morgan Jones "Valve Amplifiers", Valve Wizard, etc.) Also study electrical safety. Then you can start building tube circuits.
If this is one of your first projects, I would suggest separating it into two - preamp, power amp - simply to limit the number of headaches. But once you have completed both projects there's really no reason why they can't reside in the same chassis. I don't see any clear advantage of this, but also no reason against it.
The tube amp will likely need relatively high voltages. +150~250 V at a few 10's of mA seems pretty reasonable for a preamp. Plus you'll need either 12.6 V or 6.3 V at upwards of 1 A for the heaters. As some of the heaters may be floating at higher voltages, I wouldn't plan on deriving any power for the heaters from the power amp supply.
Note that all components have a maximum operating voltage rating. Even resistors (typ 250 V for leaded parts, less for SMD) and wire (typ 300 V). If you stay below 250 V, you usually don't need special components. But pay attention!
Good luck.
Hi i would suggest to build the LM 1875 and buy a tube buffer from arjen helder on ebay.
This tube buffer works with a 12 Volt power supply. Makes things easier and safer. Best regards Thorsten
But you are right that in theory there is no reason, it's more a practical reason.
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Rick Pitino Now Caught Up in an ABORTION and Extortion Case?May 14, 2009
Something big is going to drop in this Rick Pitino vs Karen Sypher case and we just might know what it is. But first a quick overview of the case. Karen Sypher, who is married to the Louisville Basketball Manager, plead innocent to charges that she tried to extort close to $10 mil from Rick Pitino yesterday.
Now up until now no one knew what bit of info Karen had on Pitino to make her think that she could get him to pay for her kids college tuition, buy her two cars, pay off her house, on top of getting $3,000 per month.
We were all thinking he just beat one night and she was trying to get the money to keep quite. But now new evidence shows it might have been deeper than that.
Direct your attention to the photos above. That's one Karen's sons (Kaleb Wise the one with the Astrix next to him) and the one on the far right holding the sign that reads, "What's The Price Of An Abortion?".
Could it have been $10 million to Karen Sypher's? And if you need proof that that is her son look no further than here.
For those that hate reading: We're saying that Karen was trying to get paid from Pitino because she was pregs with his kid and he made her have an abortion and this all went down while he was married!
Mystery solved, call us Sherlock Holmes.


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Controversy about a plan for an AT&T antenna facility atop a Southern Marin firehouse continues to boil in Mill Valley, where neighbors are turning up the heat on elected officials.
At issue is a plan for six panel antennas disguised as a cupola on the roof of the Southern Marin Fire District firehouse at 309 Poplar St., where Sprint already has an antenna array in a fake chimney.
The county Planning Commission approved the plan despite spirited opposition from neighbors worried about health issues. The commission endorsed the proposal on a 5-2 vote after county staff approval was appealed by neighbor Kim Rago.
Rago and neighbor Deanna Lee have now appealed to the Board of Supervisors, which is tentatively scheduled to review the plan June 10. In the meantime, neighbors will ask Southern Marin fire officials to reconsider the plan when the fire district board meets at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 28 at Station 9 at 308 Reed Blvd. A smaller version of the facility was approved by the board several years ago.
AT&T officials will explain the latest plan, and Poplar Street neighbors will outline their concerns, at the fire board meeting.
"The community is concerned that a multiple percentage increase in ... radiation emissions will have drastic health impacts in the neighborhood, not to mention increased noise and construction for a large infrastructure that will be used to support the antennas, and the impact it will have on property values," according to Rago.
Rago told county planners the facility would generate electromagnetic emissions as well as noise from generators that keep cooling equipment humming around the clock. "We welcome the fire station but not the telecommunications site it is becoming," Rago said in a letter to the county. "Please stop our neighborhood from turning into an industrial park."
But AT&T officials said the proposal for a second antenna array on the roof meets all requirements of county code, telecommunications policy and the countywide plan, and is allowed by federal law enabling such facilities to plug coverage service gaps. The company noted the ability of local government to regulate such facilities is limited.
Southern Marin Fire Chief Jim Irving indicated that antenna improvements are needed to ensure public safety in the region. "Our fire and sheriff's units use AT&T as the primary communications service (linking) our mobile data computers," the chief said. "Coverage is very sporadic there. Computers are unable to get a connection."
The result is a communication gap for emergency responders en route to fire, medical and police calls, as well as for people trying to get through to 911, he said. "All of the research we've read indicates there is no link between cell towers and any type of cancer," he added.
It will be up to public officials, he noted, "to decide what is best for the community."
Rago, who lives near the firehouse, said residents remain fearful about health and noise impacts — and have paid $1,200 to appeal county staff and commission decisions. "This is getting expensive," she said.


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Making a videogame used to be something to which only the highest-level geeks could aspire. And then Bill Budge came along.
As one of the prototypical computer hackers of the early 1980s, Budge loved to program his Apple II computer, and he loved all the money he was making creating and selling games out of his house.
What he wasn't really into was game design. He savored the challenge of working with low-level instructions to coax high performance out of a simple machine, but he wasn't into making the levels. So after creating a successful pinball videogame for the Apple II called Raster Blaster, Budge hit on a revolutionary idea for his next title: Just build the parts and let the users make their own pinball tables.
The resultant game, called Pinball Construction Set, is considered to be the first game built around user-generated content. Besides its graphical user interface — quite unique for 1983 — its ability to let players create and play their own game designs was the inspiration for a host of hit DIY games to come, from SimCity to LittleBigPlanet.
Budge's name isn't nearly as recognizable as those of some of his contemporaries. But the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will award him its second annual Pioneer Award on Feb. 10 in recognition of his trailblazing efforts, the group has revealed exclusively to Wired.com. Budge joins Pitfall! creator David Crane in the honor.
"Pinball Construction Set is one of the giants on which LittleBigPlanet stands," said David Smith, co-founder of Media Molecule, in an e-mail to Wired.com.
SimCity creator Will Wright offered similar plaudits for Budge's groundbreaking work. "Pinball Construction Set was the first game that introduced me to the idea of constructive games and systemic thinking," Wright said in a statement forwarded by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. "I doubt SimCity would have existed without it."
The Birth of BudgeCo
As the 1980s began, Budge was working every computer programmer's dream job, writing the graphics driver for the Apple III computer. The seeds for his breakout hit game were planted by a group of pinball fanatics at the company that included Steve Wozniak among its members.
"They were students of the game," Budge says, "talking about catches, and how to pass the ball from flipper to flipper, and they really got into it. And I would go and watch them play and listen to them talk about it."
By this point, Budge had already made considerable money selling games he'd created for the Apple II in his spare time. When he was in college, he'd traded the rights to his first game, a collection of Pong clones called Penny Arcade, to Apple in exchange for a $700 Centronics printer.
Later, he met a traveling salesman who sold 8-inch floppy disks to computer stores. The salesman offered to sell them copies of Budge's games, in the then-traditional "disk in a Baggie" format, and split the profits with Budge. When the first check came in, it was for a whopping $7,000.
Not bad for what Budge calls "some very quick knockoffs" of games like Asteroids, written in about one week each.
Budge put considerably more effort into his pinball game, which he named Raster Blaster. "It struck me that it was the kind of thing that could be done on the Apple II," he said. "The graphics weren't that intensive — a very small part of the screen that changes at any one time." Mostly, though, Budge wanted to impress Woz and his pinball buddies.
"I wanted to see if I could build it as a technical exercise," Budge said. "Making it fun to play was kind of secondary."
Just as he was finishing Raster Blaster, Budge decided he could make more money if he cut out the middleman and went into business for himself. So he left Apple and founded BudgeCo, a two-person operation that he ran with his sister. She handled the business side; he wrote the games.
"We bought a glue machine, and bought a shrink-wrap machine, and made the packaging. It was very doable for a couple of people," he said.
Budge's sister had hundreds of stores all over the country as her clientele, and BudgeCo would ship them copies of Raster Blaster directly. Eventually, BudgeCo would sell tens of thousands of disks at once to distributors, who would take care of the rest.
All the while, Budge worked on his new idea, Pinball Construction Set.
Bill Budge, Rock Star
While Budge was at work on the failed Apple III, there was another project at Apple that grabbed his attention — Lisa, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface.
"You could, using that, build some pretty powerful creativity apps," said Budge. He started building Pinball Construction Set based on an idea he got from a primitive Lisa art program that let users drag a magnifying glass around a screen and paint pixels. Then, he added code that would let users move a polygon around a screen, dragging its vertices to create shapes.
The hard part, Budge says, was collision detection — making sure the ball bounced off the parts, and at the correct angle. With Raster Blaster, he was able to individually tweak each part of the screen until it worked. With this new game, users could place their parts anywhere, so it all had to be done on the fly.
The other wrinkle was that the Apple II did not yet have a mouse. Budge would eventually help create one and write the MousePaint program for it, but in 1983 the only tools available were game controllers — Pong paddles and joysticks.
"I'm sure we would consider it horrible to use today," he said. But he made it work, using one paddle to position the cursor horizontally and the other for vertical movement, like an Etch A Sketch.
Budge originally released Pinball Construction Set through BudgeCo, but the game was a slow mover. Luckily for him, he was constantly being pestered by Trip Hawkins, the founder of a new company called Electronic Arts.
"Trip was really pushing, and I was kind of stubborn," Budge said. "I didn't totally trust anybody else."
Hawkins wanted game developers to be treated like rock stars. He believed they should be famous, making television appearances and signing autographs. Electronic Arts' games were sold in what the company called "album covers," LP-size sleeves with exotic artwork. One of the biggest things on the cover of Pinball Construction Set was Budge's name.
Moreover, Electronic Arts was better at the business side. The company had a marketing firm, and it could hire contractors to port the game. Budge had written Pinball Construction Set for his first love, the Apple II, but the versions EA commissioned for the IBM PC and Commodore 64 sold far more copies.
Budge's boyish good looks helped make him an ideal member of EA's crew of videogame rock stars. He was pictured wearing a spiked wrist cuff in the company's infamous early advertisement, a portrait of the designers next to the question, "Can a Computer Make You Cry?"
"A lot of people were fascinated with this whole thing, computer hackers," he says. "I didn't look like a typical hacker, like a real oddball kind of character."
Budge did tons of magazine interviews and appeared on television multiple times, including Charlie Rose. ("He knew absolutely nothing; he seemed like your typical blow-dried guy without a lot of substance," Budge recalls. "But I guess I was wrong about him.")
Electronic Arts even sent Budge on a personal-appearance tour with his fellow "Can a Computer Make You Cry?" developers. At a Lechmere store in Boston, Budge showed up in his casual clothes, ready to sign some autographs.
The manager, recalls Budge, was aghast: "Wait a minute, you guys are going to be behind the counter selling games! You can't wear a T-shirt and sneakers in Lechmere!" So Budge had to hit the store floor and buy a new wardrobe, then stand behind the counter and ring up sales.
"That's when I realized maybe I wouldn't be a rock star," he says.
After Pinball Construction Set, Budge entered what he calls his "wilderness period," five years mostly spent windsurfing and tooling around with an even bigger dream called Construction Set Construction Set — that is, a game that would let you build any sort of game you could imagine. It eventually proved just too complicated a project.
Budge spent more time with EA in the '90s, creating a Sega Genesis version of his landmark game that it released as Virtual Pinball. Soon after, he took a job with game publisher 3DO, where he stayed on for nine years, programming its games. Stints at EA and Sony followed, leading to Budge's current job at Google, where he is hard at work on Native Client.
Although he has worked in the game industry almost his entire life, Budge's breakout hit was the last game he was personally known for. But by inspiring an entire genre of games, Budge played an integral role in putting power into players' hands.
See Also:
- Pitfall! Creator David Crane Is Named Videogame Pioneer
- Electronic Arts Unveils User-Gen Platform Game Create
- Wired 2.01: Will Wright: The Mayor of SimCity


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English: Barwell is a civil parish and village in Leicestershire, England, with a population of about 6,300. The name literally translates as "Stream of the Boar" and is said to originate from a boar that used to drink from the well near a brook in Barwell. It was originally known as Borewell, but later became "Barwell", the name in use today. The brook is now called the River Tweed a tributary of the River Trent.
Italiano: Barwell è un paese di 6.300 abitanti della contea del Leicestershire, in Inghilterra.
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Rob Ford and rivals, Olivia Chow, John Tory, Karen Stintz and David Soknacki, will face off at a mayoral debate in Scarborough on Tuesday evening.
Mayoral candidates including Ford face off in Scarborough
Posted Jul 15, 2014 6:40 pm EDT
by News Staff
Posted Jul 15, 2014 6:40 pm EDT
Rob Ford and rivals, Olivia Chow, John Tory, Karen Stintz and David Soknacki, will face off at a mayoral debate in Scarborough on Tuesday evening.
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vonbearsalot wrote:
Kilroy1872 wrote:Million dollar talent...ten cent head.
How many more chances is this dufus gonna get? Not like the injury flags werent beginning to pile up, even before he and mamma went wild on some guy.
Owners will have to sit tight, non-owners will be pointing and laughing right now - can't say as i blame em none, either.
My money would be on Stupar as potential replacement over Goethel, but i know they like Gothel, so it'll likely end up as a camp battle to watch ... they could even go for an LBBC of sorts. 2 downs with an LB and then use an exclusive DB set on passing downs. Not like they dont have a DBs on the roster that could be aggressive tacklers in the box as well as play coverage. Stupars not the sort of caliber of LB we've come to expect from Penn St, but hes fundamentally sound if a little clunky.
Whichever route they go it may well end up as good thing to get some practice in for when McClains ankle gets gimpy again, anyway *sigh*
There IS another window of opportunity on the horizon should either option not prove to be viable during roster cuts. Not ideal, but its there. Either that or their legal team is happy enough and the FO confident enough that between reduced time served and in-house options they can wait till next year when they have more draft picks to use. This year they were somewhat hamstrung after their previous trades from prior years.
Im no lawyer, but id guess McClain might be incarcerated for what? Half of his sentence, maybe less? So thats 3 months out (Mid May right now) - he'll be back by mid August. He wont miss all that much regular time. BUT// Staying in shape and match fitness will be a very real issue. He'll only get limited time in the yard and theres only so much he'll be able to work on with the facilities there and lack of personnel and equipment - even in a min sec facility.
So unless you can get the add on the ultra cheap i really wouldn't worry all that much about it.
McClain will be the same rollercoaster fitness ride next season, but he will play the majority of next season's games. Branch owners are the only real winners here.
Id expect a draft pick next season aimed at resolving this mess


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Derived from the Italian word "cartone", meaning paper, cartoons were originally full-scale line drawings used in the creation of frescos and tapestries. In 1843, in London, the term was appropriated to include humorous published drawings that parodied cartoons submitted for the fresco decoration of the houses of Parliament. The key element in cartoons as we know them today is caricature, and one of the earliest practitioners of this needling craft was the French painter, Honore Daumier. In the mid 1800's he raised caricature to a high art displaying mocking figures of French politicians and bureaucrats rich with sharp, dry wit. At his death, he left a collection of some 4,000 such painted and inked works of art--a very major part of his lifetime work.
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Dear Clover,5 years ago
I found a brand new Dave and Busters card in my boyfriend's jeans. I haven't gone there since our first date 7 years ago. I asked him about it and he said he went alone, "a while back," and then he got mad at me for implying that he was cheating on me. I have no other signs of him cheating, but something in my gut is telling me to run. Is there anything I should do, or should I let it go?—anonymous
2 answers
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Dear anonymous,5 years ago
It sounds like he's not being straight with you. I think your "gut" is probably telling you something. Probably you should take a step back and look at the relationship and where it is going. You've been dating for 7 years. What's next? If it's not the right thing for you, you should move on as disruptive and painful it might be. If you want to make it work, you should sit with your partner and open the lines of communication so that you're both working together for a shared future instead of sitting on a gut feeling of suspicion.
1 vote by starfish
Dear anonymous,5 years ago
I would normally go with my gut instinct, but a Dave and Buster's Card? I'm wondering more about how you found the card in his jeans. Did you suspect something was going on with him; hence the need to search his jeans, or were you simply doing laundry and emptying out his pockets?
If it was instinct that made you search the jeans, clearly you think something else is going on, so continue to go with your gut and get out. Otherwise, I really don't see the need to make a big deal of it especially with no other signs of him cheating. Good luck with whatever you decide, and update us if you have a minute.
1 vote by starfish


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May 23, 2017 Disclaimer: Please read.
Statements and opinions expressed in articles are those of the authors, not Truthdig. Truthdig takes no responsibility for such statements or opinions.
25 Years After Exxon Valdez, BP Was the Hidden Culprit
Posted on Mar 23, 2014
By Greg Palast
Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska's coastline 25 years ago on March 24, 1989.
The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit—British Petroleum, now BP—got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.
And because BP's willful negligence, prevarications and fraud in the Exxon Valdez spill cost the company nothing, its disdain for the law, for the environment and for the safety of its workers was repeated in the Gulf of Mexico with deadly consequences, resulting, two decades later, in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.
It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez BP files. They would see a decades-long pattern of BP's lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout—and that continue today within BP's worldwide oil operations.
Square, Site wide
Fraud No. 1: The Emergency Sucker Boat fraud
Containing an oil spill—preventing spilled crude from spreading to the shore—is not rocket science.
As the principal owner of the Alaska Pipeline and Terminal, BP, not Exxon, was designated by law to prevent oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez from hitting the beach. It was BP's disastrous failures, more than Exxon's, that allowed the oil to devastate Alaska's coast.
To contain a spill all you need are rubbers and suckers. It works like this:
If a tanker, oil rig or pipe bursts open, you surround it with a giant rubber skirt known as "boom." Then you suck the oil out through vacuum hoses on board special "containment" ships. The containment ship, which lays out the boom and skimmer hoses, is the firetruck of oil spills. You simply don't let tankers out of port unless a containment ship is ready to roll. It's against the law.
But the law has never meant much to BP.
In May 1977, as the first tankers left Valdez, BP executives promised the state of Alaska that no tanker would leave port unless there were two containment barges at the ready and loaded with boom, with one placed near Bligh Island.
In fact, on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, right at Bligh Island, the containment barge was far away in Valdez, locked in a dry dock, its boom and hoses under Alaskan ice. As a result, by the time the emergency oil spill vessel got to the stricken ship, the oil slick was a hundred miles in circumference and beyond control.
Two decades later, I watched fireboats uselessly spraying the burning oil on the Deepwater Horizon. Once again there were no BP skimmer barges, no boom surrounding the rig. Just as in Alaska, the promised spill containment operation was a con. By the time the Navy set out 400 miles of rubber boom days later, the slick was already as big as Cuba and slathering the Gulf shores.
Recently, Chevron and other big oil giants, now drilling the Gulf, have printed a series of full-page ads in papers across America touting their new state-of-the-art oil spill containment operations. Hey, thanks. But these are the same vessels BP and its fellow Gulf drillers promised before the Deepwater Horizon blew apart.
Fraud No. 2: Ghost Crews
There's no sense having a firetruck without firemen. And so, years before the Exxon Valdez grounding, Alyeska, the oil company consortium headed by BP, promised the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Congress, under oath, that the oil shipper would employ a trained and equipped crew around the clock to jump from helicopters, if needed, to contain an oil spill. My clients, the Chugach Natives of Alaska, agreed to give up ownership of the land under the Port of Valdez to the oil companies in return for those jobs.
The night the Exxon Valdez grounded, Chugach Natives watched from the beach at nearby Tatitlek Village as the tanker headed into the reef. They could have prevented the disaster—but they were helpless: BP had fired them.
In my team's investigation for the Chugach, we discovered that, to save money, BP's Alyeska simply drew up lists of nonexistent emergency spill response workers or wrote down names of untrained, unequipped dockworkers: an imaginary crew to man phantom emergency ships.
Fraud No. 3: Phantom Equipment
And the rubber boom? That was a phantom as well. BP's Alyeska had promised that too, in writing. The equipment was supposed to be placed along the tanker route including Bligh Island—exactly the spot where the Exxon Valdez grounded.
And so, it was no surprise to me that 21 years later in the Gulf there were neither skimmers nor boom at the site of the Deepwater Horizon. The equipment was there, as in Alaska, only on paper.
Indeed, part of BP's Gulf Coast response plan was a photocopy of the Alaska plan, including ways to wash down Arctic seals.
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You can hear Triangle Sports Talk -- home of Inside Carolina's radio show -- on 1490AM in the Chapel Hill-Durham area and 1090AM in the greater Raleigh region. Their programming is also streamed live online at trianglesportstalk.com.
Coming this fall, listen to Inside Carolina's weekly radio show! Heard only on Triangle Sports Talk. Stay tuned for more details.


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Those with a passion for edgy alt.country and Neil Young in vinegary acoustic-rock mode need only know Chris Eckman (the Walkabouts, the innovative Sahara blues-influenced band Dirt Music) is one of those behind this occasionally churning, electro-rock outing with musicians from Slovenia where he now lives.
The other prime mover is Rupert Huber (of the European downbeat electronica outfit Tosca) who feels a similar sense of unease and displacement.
With a chorus of women offering the spooky backdrop behind the keening and sharp guitar on Land of the Lost, groove-riding instrumentals which deliver a sense of unease (Longitude Zero has distant ululations and sinuous vocoder) and titles like Wrong Train Comin' (a whispery, poetic spoken piece like Nancy 'n' Lee in the desert before dawn) and Shame This Darkness, this album by a musical odd couple suggests emotional dislocation, restless spirits,
the shadow of death and departures.
Doubtless Hubert brought the downbeat, electronic layerings to give coherence, but throughout are alt.country narratives.
Run of Days is chilling, Shame This Darkness offers the evocative "I'm not the triggerman, I'm not the bagman, I'm just the janitor who comes in on weekends" and it is like a gloomy mine where your eyes adjust to identify narrow veins of dirt-covered gold.
Stars: 3.5/5
Verdict: An unusual pairing delivers uneasy Euro-American sensibilities
- TimeOut


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I want to see them focus on Nintendo 64/Gamecube games, first off. The 64 was horrifically neglected on Wii's VC.
DREACAST games would also be a welcome addition.
You're blinded by romance, you're blinded by science...
Your condition is critically grave...but don't expect mercy from such an alliance..
Suspicion of tradition's so new wave!
Nintendo Network ID: ClassicJetterz


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Issue 135, Summer 1995
The serious American publication of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels began in 1987. They were greeted with yelps and growls of satisfaction rising rapidly to a thunderous ovation as deserved as it was belated. But the earliest brilliant flicker of lightning dates back to 1952, when his first novel, Testimonies, appeared. Delmore Schwartz, in an omnibus review (which has lately become famous along with O'Brian) including novels by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Waugh, and Angus Wilson, gave O'Brian pride of place and praise.
Testimonies had been preceded by a collection of short stories, and was followed by novels, more stories, several poems, many translations from the French (including Papillon and most of Simone de Beauvoir's books), more lately biographies of Joseph Banks and Picasso, a constant flow of book reviews, and of course the Aubrey-Maturin series, beginning with Master and Commander in 1969. Fifteen years earlier O'Brian had written The Golden Ocean, a cheerful fiction based on Anson's expedition to the Pacific in 1740. ("I had been reading naval history for years and years, and I knew a fair amount about the sea: I wrote the tale in little more than a month, laughing most of the time.") The novel is a lark, and had, as its author later noted, "pleasant consequences." Among those are the now seventeen volumes of the Aubrey-Maturin series, which are in many languages, including Japanese, and are justly famed. O'Brian's eloquent admirers include not merely distinguished critics and reviewers but noted novelists (Mary Renault wrote, "Master and Commander raised almost dangerously high expectations; Post Captain triumphantly surpasses them. Mr. O'Brian does not just have the chief qualifications of a first-class historical novelist, he has them all"), actors, judges, professors, reporters—and thousands upon thousands of fervent readers who thank the gods for him, quote him, thrust him confidently upon friends, and give whole sets for Christmas.
The young O'Brian spent long periods in England, "but it was Ireland and France that educated and formed me, in so far as I was educated and formed." The reservation is too modest; he studied philosophy and the classics formally, and certainly has a way with languages. The young man met the sea, and canvas, with delight (" . . . although I never became much of a topman, after a while I could hand, reef, and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailoring later on"). During the war he and his wife drove ambulances and served in intelligence together. Afterward they lived briefly in Wales, but presently "sun and wine came to seem essential," and they settled in a little fishing village in the Roussillon. O'Brian knew early that he was a writer, and seems never to have been tempted by other vocations. He is also a reader, of course, and the range of his knowledge is rather daunting, but the tact and skill with which he uses that knowledge are remarkable. He values privacy and dignity, loves his work and his home, resents interruptions but is unfailingly courteous. In our bizarre age of masquerade and mammon, of footlights and flashbulbs, of tabloids and television, O'Brian seems extraordinary: he is his own man, he does his work, he values history, the arts and sciences, morality. He lives on good terms with his neighbor and with Homer, with the birds in his garden and with Mozart, with his readers and with Linnaeus. He is surely "one of the best storytellers of the age," as one eminent admirer put it, and his work accomplishes nobly the three grand purposes of art: to entertain, to edify, and to awe.
This interview took place by correspondence over a period of months in 1994.
Delmore Schwartz wrote of Testimonies, "In O'Brian, as in Yeats, the most studied cultivation and knowledge bring into being literary works, which read as if they were prior to literature and conscious literary technique." Homer and Hesiod come to mind. Are your "influences" all classical, or are there moderns as well among them?
Before I comment on "influences" may I first take up Delmore Schwartz's "conscious literary technique"? Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years. Earlier, in the wicious pride of my youth, I sometimes threw myself into postures, imitating writers I admired and producing a certain amount of Proust and water (the recipe for the Avignon lark pâté comes to mind: one lark, one horse) to Joyce and very small beer; but none of this survived the war, and by the time I was writing Testimonies, for example, I was setting down what I had to say in the words and with the rhythm that seemed right to what might perhaps be called my inner ear, and doing so without any immediate debt to anyone.
Which does not mean that you were unaffected by literary predecessors. Just how do these influences operate? Can they teach you morality, or elegance, or plotting? Do you feel a special kinship to Smollett?
Of course deeper formative influences were there by the hundred, barely touching the conscious level: the obvious classics, together with a fair amount of Vulgate and later Latin, and people like Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Fielding, Jane Austen, as well as quantities of dear, somewhat out-of-the-way writers such as Camden, Selden, Burton, Isaac Disraeli, and by means of Waley, the Chinese poets. You mention Smollett. No, I feel little or no kinship with him. For although the influences that I have mentioned did not, as far as I know, teach me morality or elegance (can either be taught?) they did perhaps make me dislike a certain variety of coarseness that Smollett shares on occasion with Sterne, a kind of sniggering that calls for a complicity that I am unwilling to give, though I find Rabelais excellent company and laugh wholeheartedly with Chaucer when he is bawdy. " 'Te-hee!' quod she, and clapt the window to" seems to me a splendid line.
Along the same lines: your erudition, plotting, and style (to say nothing of Maturin's quotations from a hundred classical authors, some indeed "out of the way") seem not sudden ingenuities or laboriously prepared effects, but the products of habits of mind formed by long and serious reading. Which great literatures, which great writers, have taught you most? Do you reread them continually? Or is the past wholly incorporated, so to speak, so that rereading ceases to be a joy?
As for the point about prepared effects, they do not exist. Effects, in so far as there are any, either present themselves or they do not come at all. And if they do present themselves, it is because they rise from a fairly copious stirabout of reading in which countless books and pieces of books are merged, oddments coming to the surface either of their own volition or in response to some computer whose working is far beyond my reach.
Which great literature, which great writers have taught me most? An earnest and a solemn question, and it seems odiously flippant to say that all they have taught me is that writing (as Picasso said of painting) is not only but also. The eighteenth century had the notion that literature's function was to encourage virtue and to lash vice; but that is scarcely a view shared by those who read for delight (or for pity and terror) rather than instruction, and although a man like Shakespeare may teach one respect, admiration, and humility to the point of putting down one's pen, at least for a while, I do not believe he teaches anything else. Indeed, apart from the mechanical trades and the exact sciences, what of value can be taught? Taught directly? And where the heart of writing is concerned, if you have to ask, surely it ain't no good.
Yet there are many who have certainly and directly taught me admiration, and yes, I do read them again and again. I have a Horace upstairs and a Horace down; last summer I read Homer right through in the warm evenings out of doors, with a female black redstart fluttering angrily about my head because I read under the light that was her usual perch; and indoors I have a set of Jane Austen, all early editions for the added delight of immediacy, that I very often consult and rarely put down in less than an hour. In all these and in the more glorious parts of Dickens, Boswell, Gibbon, and many more I continually find new joys. The same applies to very good painting: less so, alas, to top music other than plainchant.
The Aubrey-Maturin series is shot through with the blissful sort of humor that cannot be invented or learned but must spring from deep within. Until The Golden Ocean, your work was not at all playful. Was it the sea that brought out your sunny side?
What you say about humor that "cannot be invented or learned but must spring from deep within" really applies to the rest of writing: le style c'est l'homme même, said Buffon, taking style in the broadest possible sense. But where the rest of your question is concerned fun came into my writing on the shores of the Mediterranean, with sea, wine, sun, and a happy marriage.
Had you any formal training as a naturalist, biologist, taxonomist, or have you learned all that for the sheer joy of it? And medicine?
Science? What little I have was mostly acquired by osmosis: one relative was a bacteriologist, another a physicist who worked on radium with Rutherford and Louis de Broglie, another a geologist. Yet I was taught a certain amount of biology; and being very sick I necessarily learned a certain amount about medicine.
Every now and then a Frenchly phrase pops up, e.g., "entered into the line of count." Do you also read widely in French and hop from one language to the other all day?
Gallicisms: yes, they exist. My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland. At one time we used them for fun, saying, for example, Foute it in the poubelle, and insensibly this has come to taint my English idiom. If I am suddenly asked my telephone number, I am sadly puzzled to say it in anything but French. Yet a slightly shaky idiom is a small price to pay for having the whole of French literature open to one; and French translations, too, for the great Russians, and how astonishingly good they are, are splendid in French, often ludicrous in English.
The Russians: War and Peace is a "historical novel" (though Russia had not altered much in the interval), and many of its leading characters—even Platon—are aspects of Tolstoy or people he knew. Are Jack and Stephen aspects of you? Or do you think of them as friends? Or are they your creatures only?
I do not think they are. I am fond of them both, but I am in no way identified with either.
Do you agree with Maturin that Napoleon was a tyrant, an unmitigated disaster? Buonaparte did, after all, reform French law, politics, taxes—doesn't much of his code civil endure today? He also restored French national identity after the Revolution and the Terror. Wellington and Metternich, not to mention Louis XVIII and Charles X, were unreconstructed reactionaries. Yet Maturin sees Napoleon as a kind of early Stalin.
Yes, I do agree with Maturin. I think Buonaparte did France—a country that he hated as a youth—very great harm indeed, not only because he brought about the death of vast numbers of Frenchmen, far more than even Louis XIV, but because he left the country with a curiously vulgar notion of glory, which Louis did not. I do not think he restored French national identity at all, but superimposed upon it a trashy chauvinism that is still sadly active, particularly in the army. One cannot blame him entirely for the miserable decline in music, painting, architecture, and furniture-making that coincided with his altogether regrettable existence, for zeitgeist had a great deal to answer for; but there is no doubt that he was devoid of taste (he admired Ossian) and his manners were as indifferent as his French. His utterly unscrupulous rapacity in Italy, Switzerland, Malta, and Spain, to say nothing of his treatment of the Pope, may not quite qualify him as a rival to Stalin, but it seems to me quite enough to justify Maturin's opinion.
As for the Code Napoleon, I am not scholar enough to know how much Bonaparte had to do with it, but from what I have seen of the system, or of what remains of it, I do not think it reflects much credit on the authors. It is shockingly authoritarian and misogynistic, and since according to its provisions, all the children have equal rights in their parents' property it has a disruptive influence on both family life and the cohesion of an estate. I have often seen the miserable results of this among our friends in the remote provincial corner of France where we live and where many people still depend entirely on the land. The children soon learn—it is a matter of common knowledge—that apart from the small proportion that can be left according to the wishes of the leaver, the whole of the rest is theirs as a certain, wholly dependable legacy, however badly they may behave. I will not say that the prospect of being cut off with a shilling in the traditional English way necessarily turns all born under that law into models of filial piety, but I believe it has some effect. And in passing, I may observe that parricide is back-page news in this neck of the woods.
As for the rest of the code that is associated with Bonaparte's name, it is so slow, and often so harsh to the accused, that one might almost prefer the English jungle, which does at least preserve some ancient customary law; though indeed Isaiah dismisses all human systems in a line that the Vulgate renders et quasi pannum menstruate universae justitiae nostrae and the Douay version "all our justices as the rag of a menstruous woman."
No event in your series seems arbitrary or unmotivated, and even your most labyrinthine plotting seems not merely reasonable but inevitable: you have a Shakespearean talent for establishing and foreshadowing. Think of Admiral Byron's warning about shipwrecked seamen early in Desolation Island, or the three (at least) perfectly integrated mentions of the newfangled sternpost. The horrible old Leopard is the heroine of that book, but she is introduced briefly midway through the previous volume, The Mauritius Command. Do you habitually go back into a completed manuscript to insert delayed charges, signposts, booby traps? (Mary Renault called that "plugging" an event or theme to come.) In H.M.S. Surprise, for example, the experiment with madder is not only exhilarating but instructive, as are the fates of the rats and rattivores. But very early on, Stephen shops for madder; did you insert that afterward? You introduced Richard Canning in Post Captain, and made us like him immensely: had you already planned the dramatic sequel? Andrew Wray maneuvers through several volumes before his final contribution to medical science; how much of his tale did you know when?
There are many, many such instances—perhaps a doctoral candidate will one day have fun with them. In general, how far ahead have you been able to plot these volumes?
Let me just say that I never go back and insert booby traps into a manuscript. Yet on the other hand I rarely work out any of those detailed sequences that constitute a plot. My usual way is to fix upon one central idea—a given voyage or campaign or whatever, a vehicle—and then to envisage a mass of potentialities, often loosely related; and among them I roam about in an often opportunist fashion, either when I lie awake, which I do, often quite peacefully, for hours, or when I walk on a well-known mountain road by night, easy going and generally silent. Then dialogue runs in my head, situations, all the matter of a book, or of several books, since in these naval tales given incidents can be moved in time and space.
On reflection I find this a far from satisfactory answer, but I scarcely know how to make it much better. Where some of the particular instances you mention are concerned, I just do not remember what was in my mind at that juncture. Does it sound pretentious to say that even some quite simple books are the result of tension, of a series of tensions; and that once the book is written, once the tensions are resolved, the whole drifts into oblivion? Sometimes I look into an earlier novel or tale and I am astonished, favorably or unfavorably, that I should have written it—I do not even know what happens next. A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences, but just how that mind picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding. Yet there is a certain analogy with conversation. When one is with friends, talking hard, maintaining a point against severe and well-informed opposition, one draws on resources scarcely to be imagined at ordinary times; and when they are exhausted—all hope gone—fresh reserves come to cheer one's heart, apt quotations forgotten these forty years and more, fine strokes of scurrility. And after all a book can be represented as a conversation with one's demon.
A related question: how far has your plotting been altered, even superseded, by the very course of events you set in train? This is similar to the question, Do your characters take on a life of their own and force your hand from time to time? (Nabokov said his were his "galley slaves.") But plot is a more protean beast.
I do not think my plot has ever turned upon me in this way, though sometimes fresh developments suddenly appear, and if they seem to lead in the right direction I often follow them. As for characters taking on a life of their own, I have heard writers assert that for them this is the case—an assertion sometimes accompanied by a modest simper or a rueful shrug—but I have never experienced it.
How do you name your characters? I note that a Plimpton turns up—a seaman flogged for drunkenness.
Names just float up, often with some remote suitability. Sometimes I go through the DNB, the Directory of National Biographies.
You have remarked that it's important not to put important statements in the mouths of celebrated people, Lord Nelson, say, and that one is pretty much limited to having him say such things as, Please pass the salt.
Yes, I think that's so. I don't really think you should. It's horrible when important characters pontificate.
Do you think Nelson really said, Kiss me, Hardy?
I don't know. I very much doubt it. It probably came out of Robert Southey, hardly to be trusted. I don't think it's the sort of thing admirals say whatever the circumstances.
One theory is that he may have said kismet . . . fate.
Much more sense there. But, alas, the OED quotes no kismet before 1849.
You've mentioned your need for intercalary years—there just aren't enough 1813s to hold all your stories—but sooner or later you will arrive at 1814 (will we see Lord Keith aboard the Bellerophon, I wonder?), and Waterloo in 1815. Is the grand climax, the termination of the series, already in your mind, or written in outline? There are alarming hints (as near the end of The Nutmeg of Consolation: "swirling without pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end. And there is at least one Mozart quartet that stops without the slightest ceremony: most satisfying when you get used to it") that you may leave your readers desolated by a subtle and inconclusive stroke of high art. Can you say anything now about the story's future?
The intercalary years—yes. I do like a fairly high degree of historical accuracy—even the chronological exactness to which I adhered in The Mauritius Command—but it is historical credibility and what I might call poetic truth that matter most. Then again, as I think I have said before, it seems to me that for the English-speaking people this war against France has assumed something of the character of the Troy Tale, which, ranging in all its countless variations and embroideries from Homer to Boccaccio and well beyond, never took much notice of the calendar, and therefore the writer concerned with this more recent epic struggle is not to be strictly confined by dates.
As for the end of my tale, at present I have two themes in mind, but which I shall follow depends on how well I seem to be lasting. The other day I fell off a ladder, and although I just avoided a harpoon hanging on the wall, I nevertheless broke a vertebra (the third lumbar, to be exact) and now I feel rather more mortal than before.
What is it like to fall into the past?
The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays from a new, strenuous, unpleasant school, and finding oneself back in wholly familiar surroundings with kind, gentle people and dogs—inconveniences of course, such as candlelight in one's bedroom (hard to read by), but nothing that one was not deeply used to.
Your love of music shows often. Do you play an instrument? Good listeners are essential too; is that what you are? One thinks of the opening Corelli: Jack's shocked discovery of old Bach, and his later metaphor for the chaconne in The Ionian Mission; and the triumphant concluding quotation of Mozart in Letter of Marque.
Alas, I play no instrument at all. If I were capable of playing a cello, I feel, like Dr. Johnson, that I should do nothing else at all. By the way, I have not been able to check that quotation. My edition of Boswell, the first octavo of 1793, is a very beautiful set and it has been so much read that the pages are limp and the opened volumes will lie flat; but its index, strangely placed in the front of the book, is sadly imperfect.
Like good listeners, good readers are essential. You credit readers with high intelligence, and vast numbers of them seem delighted, even vindicated, by your recent great public success. Have you been much aware of your audience, or have you simply written the sort of book you'd want to read yourself? (Gide once reproached Malraux because all his characters were intelligent; Malraux replied, Je n'écris pas pour m'embêter.)
I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself. When words are flowing faster than one's pen can catch them, writing is a strong though wearing delight, but these splendid bursts are rare and they are paid for by many, many days of only a thousand words or so, and long periods of silent reflection. And for me the process works best with no interruption, no breaks in the steady application, no letters to be answered, very little social life, no holidays; it is therefore a form of happy imprisonment to which no man would submit without at least the hope of publication and its rewards, often dimly seen, often illusory.
Do you still work with pencil (or pen) and paper, and write all morning? Do you often talk to yourself, or laugh aloud, or utter cries of satisfaction, while at work?
Yes, pen, ink, and paper (generally the back of proof sheets, for the surface) are my tools. I have occasionally beaten out an unimportant letter on a typewriter; and some people with quicker minds than I can use a word processor with great speed; but upon the whole there is much to be said for the reflective pen. Many capital books have been written with it, and then it is comparatively economical—Dr. Lodge is said to have completed his famous translation of Josephus (eight hundred and twelve folio pages) with one single goose quill.
Talking to myself? No, not at all—I will admit to an occasional laugh, particularly by night. No cries of satisfaction, alas.
You once complained about the blocks of dialogue that come to you in the night and force you to take notes. Does it happen often?
Dialogue still comes to me, usually about three in the morning, but I no longer try to note it down. Instead I do my best to seize upon a key word that will release the rest next day. Sometimes it works.
Do readers ever find errors?
A Cambridge don who interviewed me for the Times diffidently suggested in later conversation that I might be mistaken in having Sir Joseph Blaine attending a performance of Figaro at Covent Garden, for said he, there was no Mozart opera to be heard in London until (I think) 1832.
There's nothing you can do about this?
How about the material about the sea. Have you ever had that wrong?
Well, that's remarkable, isn't it?
Fairly remarkable, but I have observed a great deal and read an enormous amount.
You have total recall?
Absolutely not. I'm always forgetting where I've put keys to various padlocks.
How important is a reference library?
Although I have encyclopedias and dictionaries on either hand and behind me, a place like the London library, which will send almost any book that you can think of, is of the very first importance.
Would you describe where you write.
Our house is built on the side of a steep slope: the terrace and the balcony therefore jut out, providing two long, low, sheltered rooms. In one, which is lined with bookshelves, I do work that requires continual reference: in the other, which I try to keep clear, I make my attempts at purely creative writing. There is also a small stone house in the mountain vineyard to which I can retire when there is too much noise in the village. I write or sit at my desk with paper before me just after breakfast and work or ponder until lunch. Unless writing is flowing very well, the afternoon is usually free—garden, mountain vineyard, lagoon, or seeing friends. Then after tea I go on until about dinnertime.
For each volume you must have studied intensively the geography, ethnography, zoology, etcetera, of the region; the climate, the holidays, the food, the social structure and business practices. Your Bombay, with Dil and the Parsee and the ecstatic Stephen, is startlingly vivid; so is your Greek-Albanian coast with its Mirdite Ghegs, the tournaji-bashi, etcetera; so are your Cape Town, your Malta, your Sydney. You are at home throughout the world, yet you are a private man, and you love your farm and its seasons—much more Hesiod than Odysseus. How many of your locales have you visited? Are there places other than your farm that you have loved? Or detested?
Of course, when I come to a new piece of the world I study it with close attention. But I have traveled fairly widely, both physically and even more in books. In my younger days I read vast quantities of voyages and I still possess the great eighteenth-century collections: Churchill, Harris, and the abbé Prévost in sixteen splendid quartos, most abundantly illustrated. A fair amount of the knowledge derived from this desultory but very happy and extensive reading lingers in my memory, and it is rare that the ad hoc study is not superimposed upon earlier acquaintance.
Do you know about the abbé Prévost? He was intended for the church and indeed after a spell with the Jesuits he became a Benedictine (the most amiable of orders), but for a while he either lost or mislaid his vocation and wandered about the world gathering the kind of knowledge that enabled him to write Manon Lescaut. In time however he was recalled and, becoming almoner to the Prince de Conti, he set himself to this prodigious work, a true travail de Bénédictin, assembling, arranging and often translating countless books of travel for his Histoire générale des voyages. The first volume has a charming frontispiece of the author looking as cheerful and benign as ever his best friends could wish, and it contains about three hundred and twenty-eight thousand words: all the other volumes are on the same scale or even larger, and the whole, filled with plates and maps, amounts to some five million words, ending with a capital index. Could any modern publisher contemplate such an undertaking?
Your series is in several languages. Are any of them odd, landlocked, unlikely? Do you know any of your translators, and do you—with French, perhaps—often lend them a hand?
I doubt there are more than a dozen, if as many; none of them very odd so far. Certainly I have helped the translators who have turned to me, French, Spanish, Italian, and German; and for the Dutch and Scandinavian whose languages I do not know I rephrase the passages they find incomprehensible.
Do you care to comment on current fiction? Do you read much of it? Current criticism?
My comments on current fiction would not be worth much, since I read so little: but I find Iris Murdoch at her best very good indeed, while A. S. Byatt's Possession seems to me an admirable tour de force, and Alan Judd's A Breed of Heroes is to my knowledge the only sound, objective account of the hideous situation in Northern Ireland. At the moment I am entranced by Jeannette Haien's The All of It in spite of some initial reserves. As for literary criticism, I see even less; though occasionally a lively and incisive piece comes my way, usually written by Linda Colley.
Some think we have arrived at a true discontinuity in history, rendering much of it obsolete by an astonishing acceleration in the technological rate of change. Do you "view with alarm" or do you trust the race's resilience?
Most people who have been to school have heard the master declare that this is the worst fifth form in all his experience: most people who have been to the university have heard their tutor sigh and observe that in his youth undergraduates used to read hard, very hard, much harder than they do now. It seems to me that humanity has always been tottering on the edge of an abyss, perpetually looking back to happier generations, when people knew how to build, paint, and write, when children sat up at table, mute and never touching the back of their chairs. I view the present with distress, but not with despair.
The historical novelist has at least one advantage: he has already answered the question, Did anything at all happen before World War II? That may sound like a cheap joke, but increasingly writers, critics, and readers insist that novels be timely (that is, reflect or outdo the faits divers and crimes passionels that we read of every morning) or "relevant" (that is, wring our guilty hearts about current social and political inequities). Have you had to contend with charges of irrelevance?
I do not remember having been accused of irrelevance, but it would not grieve me if I were, since I could point to the equally irrelevant Homer, Virgil, Lydgate, and a host of other eminent hands, including Madame de La Fayette.
Is there any limit to the liberties one can take writing historical fiction? I mean can you invent a substantial naval battle?
The limits seem to me the boundaries of historical verisimilitude. I very much doubt that one could invent a fleet action—certainly I could not, in my period.
Historians are often so scornful of historical fiction.
Perhaps because so much historical fiction is poor history and worse prose.
Did you come away from your recent tour of the United States—a triumphant progress, really—with any sharper impression of your audience? Are they older? Mostly white-collar, or plenty of blue as well? Preponderantly male? What note do your fan letters most often strike, questions ask, complaints lodge? Do you answer them all?
Yes, I did. I had almost never spoken in public before, and most of the time my eyes were fixed upon my text; but now and then I did look up and I was charmed to see such amiable, friendly, attentive faces—faces, moreover, that laughed when laughter was called for. They were, upon the whole, younger than I had expected; men and women in about equal numbers—perhaps rather more women—but whether white-collar or blue I cannot say. It is very difficult for a European to place an American by his appearance or even by his accent. At the book-signing sessions people always said something civil, but there was no time to exchange anything more than smiles. One of the few occasions I had to see my audience in greater depth was in Washington, where I spoke at the National Archives, and the archivists very kindly entertained me to luncheon—they also loaded me with gifts: books and reproductions of documents that might give me pleasure. There was time for real contact and among the many people whose conversation I enjoyed was a tall, cheerful young lawyer, so black that it was a joy to contemplate him, who talked to me, as I remember, about the Quasi-War of 1798. And later, when I told him that I had spent the morning with Mr. Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court and that I had watched the bench in action, he said, That is where I shall be presently, with a flash of brilliant teeth and a friendly smile. Indeed friendliness was the overriding impression that my wife and I carried away from the United States, and we look forward eagerly to our next visit.
The writers of fan letters: they fall into four main classes. One, those who say, I love your books and I wish to thank you. Two, poor lonely souls who just want to write to someone. Three, those whose ancestors went to sea and who would like information about their careers. And four, those who point out my errors, sometimes real (I am a left-handed man and when I am writing I easily confuse right and left, east and west; this does not happen aboard, however) but more often, I am glad to say, imaginary. All four classes have grown so numerous these last years that I have had to beg my publishers to sieve them, because I am a slow, indifferent letter-writer and even half a dozen eat all the cream of my morning work, the best time by far. Yet they are sometimes extraordinarily encouraging: I think primarily of sick people who have found some relief in my books, but also of that splendid admiral who, dating his letter from the North Atlantic, told me that after a strenuous day of exercising his submarines he would submerge, sinking to the calmness of deep water, and there, in the ocean's bosom unespied, he would turn to my naval tales: or of that other gentleman whose thank you took the form of a wholly gratuitous offer of his one-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot yacht with a numerous crew (including an excellent chef) and room for ourselves and six of our friends, to cruise for a fortnight in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean this coming spring or summer, himself making no appearance whatever. And if you do not call that handsome you must be very, very hard to please.
Do you still write poetry? You have kindly allowed us to print some here; are there many more, published or unpublished? Have you translated poetry? Which modern poets have moved you most?
Yes, there are more poems, some published in Poetry Ireland and the like, but many more in obscure heaps, most of which I cannot find without sorting through great masses of paper. But yesterday I did put my hand on one folder in which most of the verse went on far too long; still, here is a piece from it which at least has the merit of brevity.
Old Men
We are old bald ugly
impotent and fat or horribly lean
unarmed disarmed often unspeakably silly
Nobody wants us least of all ourselves
Our wives are short thick and spectacled
with elaborate hair
nobody wants them
least of all ourselves
It is a crime against humanity
that old people racked with ignominies, weak
should be made to pay pay pay
and then pay
for a life that has already been lived
And yes, I have translated poetry, but without much poetic success. Modern poets: does Eliot still count? He moved me deeply. And of recent years I have been stirred by one poem of Larkin's and another by Fiona Pitt-Kethley on the nature of unrequited love.
Your tribute to Mary Renault is moving and elegant, but too few of us these days know Greek. Will you tell us about it?
Do you mean the dedication in The Mauritius Command? It was a proverbial Greek saying that meant "owls to Athens," much as the English say "coals to Newcastle" and conceivably the Americans "cod to Boston"—a delivery of things to a place already overflowing with them. An owl (usually the little-eared scops owl, which haunts Greek temples) is usually to be seen on Athena's shoulder and on Athenian coins.
Why do you think the series has roused so much fervent admiration? Do you step back occasionally and wonder, Who is this Patrick O'Brian they are all talking about? In brief, how do you like fame? Beatus ille, wrote the poet, but also aere perennius.
I have no idea whatsoever of the reason so many people have taken to reading my books. Years ago the books, the selfsame books, were there: the people were there. But the two sides did not come together until some quite unexplained catalyst came into play. As for "fame," I quite like what I have of it, though at the same time it makes me feel uneasy, vaguely fraudulent; and then its consequences have a way of shattering old frugal values, making them artificial. I do not think it touches me much, or affects my self-esteem. When I sit down at this desk I am still as bashful before the virgin page as I was sixty years ago—perhaps more so, for in the interval I have acquired some notion of what very good writing can be.


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