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Neurocutaneous Syndromes in Children
What are neurocutaneous syndromes?
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Neurocutaneous syndrome is a broad term for a group of neurological (brain, spine, and peripheral nerve) disorders that have cutaneous (skin) manifestations. These diseases are lifelong conditions that can cause tumors to grow inside the brain, spinal cord, organs, skin, and skeletal bones. The most common disorders found in children are skin lesions.
The three most common types of neurocutaneous syndromes include the following:
Tuberous sclerosis (TS)
Neurofibromatosis (NF): Type I, Type II, and schwannomatosis
Sturge-Weber disease
What causes neurocutaneous syndromes?
TSNF, and Sturge-Weber disease are all conditions that are congenital (present at birth), caused by genetic mutations.
Although the true prevalence of TS is not known, it is estimated that this disease occurs in one in 6,000 persons in the U.S. It is an autosomal dominant condition. Autosomal means that both males and females are equally affected and dominant means that only one copy of the gene is necessary to have the disorder. Many children born with TS are the first cases in a family, since the majority of TS is caused by a new gene change (mutation), and is not inherited. However, parents of a child with TS may have very subtle symptoms of the disorder, and should be carefully examined. Even if no symptoms are present, the parents are considered at a slightly increased risk to have another child with TS, greater than that of the general population.
There are three distinct types of NF. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1) occurs in about one in 3,000 to 4,000 births in the U.S. NF1 is an autosomal dominant condition caused by mutations in a gene on chromosome 17, which is inherited from a parent with the disease (in half of the cases). Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF2) occurs less frequently, affecting about one in 25,000 births in the U.S. The gene which causes NF2 is found on chromosome 22.
A parent with NF has a 50% chance of passing on the genetic mutation and disease to each child.
NF may also be the result of a new gene change (mutation). From 30% to 50% of NF cases are caused by a new mutation and not inherited. Males and females are equally affected, regardless of how the disease occurs. Schwannomatosis is a recently-recognized form of NF that is genetically distinct from NF1 and NF2. It occurs rarely, and only 15% of cases are the inherited form. There are two genetic forms of schwannomatosis. Schwannomatosis 1, also known as congenital cutaneous neurilemmomatosis, is caused by mutations in a gene called SWNTS1. Scwannomatosis 2 is an adult-onset disorder, with schwannomas growing throughout the body, but without other manifestations of NF1 or NF2.
The cause of Sturge-Weber disease is unknown, and is considered to be sporadic (occurs by chance). Sometimes, other family members will have hemangiomas (a benign growth that consists of blood vessels) to a lesser degree than the person with Sturge-Weber disease. Mutations in a gene called GNAQ are found in some cases.
What are the symptoms of neurocutaneous syndromes?
The child may have varying degrees of symptoms associated with each condition. The following are the most common symptoms of tuberous sclerosis, neurofibromatosis, and Sturge-Weber disease. Symptoms may include:
Tuberous sclerosis. Growths, called tubers, are often found growing inside of the brain and retinal area of the eye. Tuberous sclerosis affects many organs in the body including the brain, spinal cord, lungs, heart, kidneys, skin, and skeletal bones in the child. Intellectual disability, developmental delays, seizures, and learning disabilities are also associated with this disease.
Neurofibromatosis (NF).
Neurofibromatosis I (NF1). This is the more common of the two disorders. It is also called Von Recklinghausen's disease. The classic symptom of NF I is light brown patches of pigment on the skin, called cafe-au-lait spots. Benign (non-cancerous) skin tumors associated with this condition are called neurofibromas. Neurofibromas are often found growing on the nerves and in various organs of the child's body. There is a higher rate of brain tumors in patients with NF. Less than 1% of individuals with NF1 will have malignant (cancerous) changes in the neurofibromas. Lisch nodules, which are small tumors on the iris (colored part of the eye), may appear around adolescence, but usually do not cause problems. Hearing loss, headaches, seizures, scoliosis, and facial pain or numbness may also be present. Intellectual disability of varying degree may be slightly more common in individuals with NF1, while about half may have a variety of learning problems and attention deficit disorder. Renal artery stenosis and other vascular problems may occur with NF1.
Neurofibromatosis II (NF2). According to the NINDS, this type of neurofibromatosis affects approximately one in 25,000 people, and symptoms are usually noticed between 18 and 22 years of age. In the past, the tumors were called bilateral acoustic neuromas, but the tumors are actually schwannomas that start on a vestibular nerve branch, so they are known as bilateral vestibular schwannomas (BVS). These tumors, on the eighth cranial nerve, can lead to hearing loss, headaches, problems with facial movements, problems with balance, and difficulty walking. Hearing loss may be noted in childhood. Other clinical signs of NF2 may include seizures, meningiomas (tumors of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord), neurofibromas (skin nodules), and cafe-au-lait spots (although these are not nearly as common as in NF 1).
Schwannomatosis. Schwannomatosis 1 causes multiple cutaneous neurilemmomas and spinal schwannomas, without other signs of NF1 or NF2. Schwannomatosis 2 causes schwannomas to grow through the body, but without other manifestations of NF1 or NF2. Extremely intense pain is the main symptom, which occurs when a schwannoma becomes larger or presses on a nerve or nearby tissue. Other symptoms that may be experienced include numbness, tingling, or weakness in the fingers and the toes.
Sturge-Weber disease. The classic symptom of this disease is a port wine stain located on the child's face, typically near or around the eye and forehead areas. A port wine stain is present from birth and is a flat area on the child that varies in color from red to dark purple. The birthmark is caused by the formation of too many tiny blood vessels under the skin. There may also be associated brain abnormalities on the same side of the brain as the face lesion. Neurological changes that occur with this condition may include seizures, muscle weakness, changes in vision, and intellectual disability. Glaucoma (a condition that causes increased pressure in the eye) may also be present at birth. Unlike tuberous sclerosis and NF, Sturge-Weber disease does not affect the other organs of the body.
The symptoms of neurocutaneous syndromes may look like other conditions. Always consult your child's doctor for a diagnosis.
How are neurocutaneous syndromes diagnosed?
Tuberous sclerosis, NF, and Sturge-Weber disease are congenital (present at birth). The diagnosis is made with a physical examination and diagnostic tests. During the examination, the doctor obtains a complete prenatal and birth history of the child and asks if other family members are known to have any of these conditions. In older babies and children, the doctor will also ask about developmental milestones, since these disorders can be associated with other neurological problems and may require further medical follow-up.
Diagnostic tests may include:
Genetic testing (blood tests). Diagnostic tests that evaluate for conditions that have a tendency to run in families.
X-ray. A diagnostic test that uses invisible electromagnetic energy beams to produce images of internal tissues, bones, and organs onto film.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A diagnostic procedure that uses a combination of large magnets, radiofrequencies, and a computer to produce detailed images of organs and structures within the body.
Computed tomography scan (also called a CT or CAT scan). A diagnostic imaging procedure that uses a combination of X-rays and computer technology to produce horizontal, or axial, images (often called slices) of the body. A CT scan shows detailed images of any part of the body, including the bones, muscles, fat, and organs. CT scans are more detailed than general X-rays.
Electroencephalogram (EEG). A procedure that records the brain's continuous, electrical activity by means of electrodes attached to the scalp.
Eye examination
Tissue sample of the tumor or skin lesion
Treatment of neurocutaneous syndromes
Your/your baby's/your child's health care provider will figure out the best treatment for you/your baby/your child based on:
How old your child is
His or her overall health and medical history
How sick /he or she is
How well your child can handle specific medications, procedures, or therapies
How long the condition is expected to last
Your opinion or preference
Since neurocutaneous syndromes are lifelong conditions that are not curable, the focus is on medically managing the symptoms. A child is best treated with an interdisciplinary team that may include the following health care providers:
Pediatrician/family practitioner
Neurologist. A doctor who specializes in conditions of the brain, nerves, and spinal cord.
Neurosurgeon. A surgeon who specializes in operating on the brain and spinal cord.
Orthopedic surgeon. A surgeon who specializes in conditions of the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bone.
Ophthalmologist. A doctor who specializes in conditions of the eye.
Oncologist. A doctor who treats cancer and other tumors.
Rehabilitation team (physical, occupational, speech therapy, audiology)
Surgery may be needed to remove tumors that may be cancerous, as well as for cosmetic reasons.
Lifelong considerations for a child with neurocutaneous syndromes
Since tuberous sclerosis, NF, and Sturge-Weber disease are lifelong conditions that are not correctable, management includes focusing on preventing or minimizing deformities and maximizing the child's capabilities at home and in the community. Positive reinforcement will encourage the child to strengthen his or her self-esteem and promote independence.
The full extent of the disease is usually not completely understood immediately after birth, but may be revealed as the child grows and develops.
Genetic counseling may be recommended by the doctor to provide information on the recurrence risks for these disorders and any available testing.


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|Trad, 1 pitch, 50'
|YDS: 5.9 French: 5c Ewbanks: 17 UIAA: VI ZA: 17 British: HVS 5a [details]
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|ClimbandMine on Jun 6, 2002
|Season raptor closures MORE INFO >>>
|Comments on Yosemite Crack
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Comments displayed oldest to newest — Skip Ahead to the Most Recent Dated Oct 24, 2016
By Charles Vernon
From: Tucson, AZ
Jun 6, 2002
|This route is already on the site, under Twin Owls (this small rock lies up against Twin Owls). Incidentally, there are no bolts on top, but it is easy to TR off of clean gear.
By Brad Brandewie
Aug 22, 2002
Is this really 5.9? It seems a lot harder to me.
By Joe Keyser
From: Scottsdale, AZ
Aug 22, 2002
|I thought it seemed pretty tough, but, I tried to lie it back too much on the upper section, and after I felt like I would have suffered less by staying more in the crack... 5.9 seemed about right for the area though. Definitely seemed a grade or so harder that the first part of Wolf's Tooth which is an 8.
By Andrew Gram
From: Salt Lake City, UT
Sep 9, 2002
No liebacking required - excellent jams the whole way except for the last few widish moves, but those aren't so bad. Getting the feet in where it turns to fists and bulges a little bit was the crux for me.
If this is at, or as in my case beyond, your limit, bring one piece bigger than a 4 Friend - I was sandbagged into leaving the 4 Camalot on the ground, and I was a shaking mess topping out.
I thought it was full credit 5.9 and certainly not the 9- Gillett calls it, but if I can lead it it can't possibly be 5.10
By David Warriner
May 4, 2003
Great climb but a total sandbag. I think this was harder than Dementia at Happy Hour which is a 5.10a. Of the few 5.10s I've led, this is harder than any of them and more strenuous.
I got exhausted and I shamelessly rested on my gear. 5.9 A0 for me. Fortunately we had double cams in big sizes or I never would have made it.
On a weird note, when my buddy did it and I seconded it, I went in my approach shoes and found the foot jams to be easier.
By Chris Fisher
May 8, 2003
|Great jams all the way. Not as hard as other Lumpy 5.9s but still a lot of fun. Used a Camalot #'s 1, 2, and 3.
By Leo Paik
From: Westminster, Colorado
Aug 31, 2003
rating: 5.9- 5c 17 VI 16 HVS 4c
|Booty, did you see that biner about 12 feet back in the crack? :) How the...
By Leo Paik
From: Westminster, Colorado
Sep 4, 2003
rating: 5.9- 5c 17 VI 16 HVS 4c
|Interesting. Kimball rated it 5.8+, Gillett 5.9-, Rossiter 5.9. Jams are good enough, you can stretch your day one more pitch, despite rain. Tape is nice. Allen will tell you, don't layback the sucker, especially in the rain. Jam it!
By Anonymous Coward
Apr 23, 2005
|A #4 Friend will also come in handy, protecting the scrunchy bellyfolppish topout move. -Sloth
By Anonymous Coward
Apr 23, 2005
|Resist the urge to lieback the crack. Good crack technique is all it takes. 1 #2 Camalot, 2 #3 Camalots, 1 #3.5 Camalot, and 1 #4 Camalot will protect the meat of it. Once you bellyflop over the top, a couple mid-size nuts and .5/.75 Camalots will build a nice anchor.
By chris parks
Jul 31, 2005
rating: 5.9 5c 17 VI 17 HVS 5a
|I just did this today. I feel that this is a 5.9. I am not typically that good at fisting, but once it gets that wide the feet get really good so you can almost palm the inside of the crack while you work your feet up or get some sloppy fist jams. This was a good route and [definitely] a good one to practice for wide stuff.
By Tony B
From: Around Boulder, CO
Jul 6, 2008
rating: 5.9 5c 17 VI 17 HVS 5a
|People with small fists like me may end up fore-arm jamming in up to elbows in sections of this one. Slow motion that way, but great climbing.
By Eric Dearing
Jul 12, 2008
|fun climb. It's short, but the couple moves of offwidth (like Tony, forearm jams for me) had me panting by the top...don't let the perfect jams at the start lull you to sleep. I thought it felt harder than Rooster Tail, but pretty similar in difficulty to other 5.9 offwidth climbs.
By James Beissel
From: Boulder, CO
Sep 12, 2011
rating: 5.9 5c 17 VI 17 HVS 5a
|It's pretty obvious from the top, but the walk off is to the left, not the right as stated above.
By Mark Roth
From: Boulder
Sep 12, 2011
|Really? I walked off to the right...(I think?).
By ssimonson09
From: Gladstone, OR
Oct 9, 2011
rating: 5.9+ 5c 17 VI 17 E1 5a
|I've done this thing on TR a few times, it's freaking hard! At the same time, wish it went on for another few hundred feet!
By chris magness
Jul 12, 2013
rating: 5.9 5c 17 VI 17 HVS 5a
A few notes:
This pitch is not 50 feet, more like 30 feet and a few more back to an anchor stance that takes #1 and #2 Camalots, nor is it an offwidth (perhaps if you're a 5'4", 95 lb., trad chick!). My fists are a 3.5, and I had jams the whole length, rattly at the top with one #4. Approach shoes made for good feet. Stiff 5.9 seems like a reasonable grade. Well worth the effort. Walk off to the right.
By Joe Catellani
From: Seattle, wa
Oct 15, 2013
|Agree difficulty is hand-size dependent. Rougher texture than Yosemite cracks, tape or bleed!
By Cocanower
From: The High Country
Jan 1, 2014
|Excellent! Good jams the whole way! Gets a little wide up top, but definitely a Lumpy 5.9!
By Anthony
From: Northern CO
Aug 1, 2016
rating: 5.9 5c 17 VI 17 HVS 5a
|Oh LAWDY! This thing is awesome. Splitter crack that protects well. Find the constrictions, use some off-fist technique, and this thing stays pretty casual until the very top, but there's even some flakes to pull on to ease the pump. Feet are great the whole way. Walk-off to the west or scramble up from behind and set-up a TR. I'd give more stars if it was longer.
By Petsfed
From: Laramie, WY
Oct 24, 2016
rating: 5.9- 5c 17 VI 16 HVS 4c
|The top of this takes new and old style #4 Camalots and a lot of forearm jams. If you don't have big fists, it will be offwidth. Fortunately, there's a bunch of holds inside the crack if you've the time to look. Keeps the grade reasonable. Don't bring anything smaller than a #2 Camalot and maybe doubles of #3 and #4. Shortest walk off is to the right, but it's 4th class.

subset: commoncrawl


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TV & Radio Appearances
Chat about any TV progammes and radio shows that Nicki appears on
If You Stand For Nothing, You Will Fall For Anything
Did anyone hear Nicki Minaj address the Lil Kim Situation Directly? She said her name and vented aka WENT OFF! Listen live http://www.hot97.com/HotStream/
I didn't get to see it yet lol what did she do? Pink Friday fur lyfe!! rawr
"I just swerve on em' sorta like I missed dat deer" ~Nicki Minaj
Get that exposure gurl! lol.
My Blog: http://anomalyx.blogspot.com


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Cubs reportedly claim righty Turner off waivers
DENVER -- The Cubs have reportedly claimed right-handed pitcher Jacob Turner from the Marlins.
Turner, 23, was 4-7 with a 5.97 ERA in 20 games (12 starts) with Miami, striking out 54 over 78 1/3 innings. He was designated for assignment two days after giving up five runs in four innings in a 7-3 loss to the Reds.
Comcast SportsNet Chicago reported the Cubs had made the claim, but that the deal had not been finalized yet. Team officials would not confirm the transaction.
The Cubs could be hoping pitching coach Chris Bosio and his staff can help Turner get on track the way they did with Jason Hammel and Scott Feldman. Justin Ruggiano was Turner's teammate in Miami, and knows the right-hander well.
"He was a teammate of mine, and a great teammate, and he's a competitor out there on the mound," Ruggiano said Wednesday. "He's so young and he was a big piece in that Anibal Sanchez trade. That may have come with a little bit of pressure and may have caused him to press, I don't know.
"I'm sure he's capable of pitching at a high level," Ruggiano said. "Sometimes it takes guys a little longer to figure it out. I played against Cliff Lee when he was in Triple-A, and all of a sudden he's making $140 million twice. This game is crazy. I think Jacob has the personality that given another opportunity, he'll do OK with it."
The ninth overall pick of the Tigers in the 2009 First-Year Player Draft, Turner was pushed through the Minor Leagues quickly, and made his Major League debut in 2011 at the age of 20. He was dealt to Miami in July 2012 as part of the Sanchez-Omar Infante deal.
This season, Turner was 4-5 with a 6.03 ERA in 12 starts, and had a 5.74 ERA in relief.
Carrie Muskat is a reporter for MLB.com. She writes a blog, Muskat Ramblings, and you can follow her on Twitter @CarrieMuskat. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.


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View Transcript
Boss: Take a look at this resume. Alice: Ha ha! This guy is a piece of work! Lie... lie... exaggeration... misspelling... bad format... worked on failed products. Ooh! He's also a champion salsa dancer. What a tool! Wait. Why aren't you joining in the traditional mocking of the applicant's resume? Dilbert: I'm waiting to find out if he's the handsome fellow standing behind you. Alice: Scoot over. You're blocking my view of a handsome guy.


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March 29, 2012/Mlive.com
By Susan J. Demas
A reasonable person might come to the conclusion that Michigan's Republican-led Legislature is on a mission to kill higher education in our great state.
Sadly, this is not the hyperbole of an overworked columnist.
It was bad enough when Gov. Rick Snyder, a product of three degrees at the University of Michigan, last year proposed a 15-percent cut to state aid for the state's 15 public universities -- and GOP lawmakers couldn't sign off fast enough.
That comes, of course, after Michigan has slashed state aid for universities over the last decade, putting us in the bottom five states in the nation (something for which both Republicans and Democrats, especially former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, deserve blame and shame).
It's bad enough that their clumsy actions could choke off what has been the only consistently vibrant part of our economy in the last couple decades. (Don't believe me? Check out the history of unemployment rates in Michigan in Ann Arbor, Lansing and Kalamazoo, local economies fueled by university employment and research).
But now, particularly in the House, GOP lawmakers have taken to haranguing universities about every little thing, as part of the culture war and their general distrust of what they consider to be "liberal" institutions.
The Legislature just passed and Gov. Snyder signed a ban on graduate research students unionizing at the state's public U's, because universities are apparently incapable of making their own labor policy decisions.
Last year, lawmakers passed a bill banning domestic partner (read: gay) benefits for the 15 public universities, which Snyder showed a rare independent streak and vetoed. But Republicans could still try to sneak language into the budget, as they did last year.
Why did the guv do that? The U's have constitutional autonomy -- which is basically a neon, flashing sign to lawmakers to butt out of their affairs -- not that term-limited, ideologically driven Tea Party-types appear to give a fig for the Constitution in this regard. But more on that in a minute.
This year, House Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittee Chair Bob Genetski (R-Saugatuck) has held hearings about Michigan State University's totally non-controversial decision to require students to have health insurance, as many Big Ten schools do. (But anytime Republicans get to say "Obamacare" in a frenzy for a couple hours, they're induced to a state of near-religious ecstasy, so that explains that).
There's also been talk about the "anti-business" attitude being fostered at U of M, so perhaps we can see action on that useless front, as well.
Now Rick Santorum's presidential campaign tanked after he declared in Troy, Michigan, that President Obama was a "snob" for wanting all kids to go to college because they're all a bunch of liberal indoctrination factories, dontcha know? So perhaps that brilliant political strategy is at work here.
But the real war against universities -- mainly the University of Michigan -- has been over embryonic stem cell research (ESR). In 2008, Michigan voters decisively decided to lift the ban on ESR in the state Constitution, but folks like Rep. Kevin Cotter (R-Mt. Pleasant) have been giddy and brazen in their zeal to nullify the will of the people. He's on record expressing skepticism that most Michiganders really want that kind of life-saving research.
Why is ESR important? Because this is the cutting-edge technology that is our best chance to cure debilitating diseases like ALS, Type I diabetes, Alzheimer's and more. I don't claim to be a scientist or doctor, unlike many Luddite lawmakers, so I'll leave it to the likes of Harvard-trained surgeons like former U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz.
"It is difficult for a layperson -- even one who is well-educated in issues other than scientific issues -- to understand embryonic stem cell research and its ramifications for the future of regenerative medicine, which is, in fact, very bright and will, in time, be the preferred treatment for numbers of disease processes that for now there are no treatments," he says.
Good enough for me. But sadly, it is not for the mostly non-scientists and non-doctors at Right to Life, which provide Republican and some Democratic lawmakers with most of their information on embryonic stem cell research.
Those against ESR, who famously deployed scare tactics and misinformation during the '08 campaign, believe that life-saving medicine is somehow anti-life. That's because it uses embryos couples no longer want after in-vitro fertilization -- cells that will never become a baby because they literally would be chucked in the trash bin. But one day, those embryos will help those with Alzheimer's, which claimed my grandfather 20 years ago this spring.
Because some of our finest universities -- particularly U of M -- do ESR, they've become targets in the state budget process. Right to Life, er, lawmakers have demanded a report of sorts on what they imagine are the sordid activities of ESR. No other state in the country does this.
This, of course, is meant to be a chilling effect on research that, it should be said, can have a big economic impact in Michigan -- not to mention on millions of people's lives. We've already lost world-class stem cell biologist Sean Morrison, who'd had enough of the Legislature trying to kill the biotech industry.
"You don't compete by looking for ways to put stem cell biologists in jail," he noted, before high-tailing it last year to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.
But lawmakers just seem emboldened to go even further. Genetski and Cotter had a sad over U of M's report and are now threatening to dock its state funding.
"If we roll over, I think it will have a precedent effect, and we'd be really weakening the power of the Legislature," said Cotter, a Cooley Law School-trained attorney who may want to read the Constitution.
Now Snyder, who is U of M-trained lawyer, doesn't want this fight. Neither does Higher Ed Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Tonya Schuitmaker (R-Lawton), who earned her J.D. from the Detroit College of Law and is pro-life.
They know that Michigan's university system is wholly unique because of its autonomy under the state Constitution. But somehow, the Detroit Free Press managed to spill 1,317 words on the ESR controversy last week without once mentioning the words "constitutional autonomy."
Schwarz, a GOP former Higher Ed Appropriations chair, could give lawmakers (and the Freep higher ed reporter) a primer:
"A friendly and respectful reminder to our legislators: the Michigan Constitution is very clear on the constitutional autonomy of our universities and the U-M, as well as all of our other public universities operated under that mandate. It is inappropriate for the Legislature to make threats or even hint of threats to university funding because a member or small number of members may have some objection to a type of research they do not understand."
This is not the first time higher ed has endured attacks from a meddling Legislature. In fact, since universities were granted autonomy way back in 1850, that's been a near-constant battle, with the state perennially on the losing side in court.
No wonder Genetski wants to do an end-run around the Constitution and "investigate" dumping the U's into a statewide system firmly under the Legislature's thumb.
It may be helpful for him and others to read up on U of M's history, like Science and Engineering Professor Emeritus James D. Duderstadt's "The Michigan Saga":
"From its founding in 1817 until the legislature made its first appropriation to the institution in 1867, the university was supported entirely from its Federal Land Grant endowment and the fees derived from students. During its early years, state government actually mismanaged and then misappropriated the funds from the Congressional land grants intended to support the university. Throughout its history, the state of Michigan has rarely been among the national leaders in its support of public higher education. Rather, many (including the author) believe that the real key to the university's quality and impact has been the very unusual autonomy granted the institution by the state constitution. The university has always been able to set its own goals for the quality of its programs rather than allowing these to be determined by the vicissitudes of state policy, support, or public opinion."
The Legislature's fight with U of M over ESR, domestic partner benefits and the indoctrination canard are best viewed in this historical lens:
"it viewed itself as an enduring social institution with a duty of stewardship to generations past and a moral obligation to take whatever actions were necessary to build and protect its capacity to serve future generations. Even though these actions might conflict from time to time with public opinion or the prevailing political winds of state government, the university's constitutional autonomy clearly gave it the ability to set its own course."
It's helpful to remember that this Legislature isn't the first to go on a power trip with universities and the venerable institutions have endured.
But it doesn't make this latest skirmish any less damaging -- or stupid.
Susan J. Demas is a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service (MIRS).
She can be reached at email@example.com.


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Yes, Padres!
OK, maybe something a little less exuberant.
Yes, Padres.
I mean, I am not implying that people ought to start planning where they'll set up on downtown sidewalks for the ticker tape parade in October 2013.
What I am implying is progress. A plan for growth.
Josh Byrnes has parlayed trades he made in December into building blocks laid in July.
Clearly, what's underway is an attempt to reverse history, to stem the attrition and to no longer be awful.
For now, that should be celebrated.
I certainly hope it's a sign we can expect even more wheeling and dealing in November, after the O'Malley family has officially taken over ownership and says to Byrnes something we worried no Padres general manager would ever hear again: "Go spend some money."
Otherwise, who cares? The extensions given Huston Street and Carlos Quentin are simply advancement, indications that the new will not be the old.
This is a journey.
"We're happy to keep them rather than turning the roster," Byrnes said. "… It's the next step in a long process."
Think of the possibilities. The Padres keep this up and maybe there could be so much hullabaloo that it results in more than 58 percent of the county being able to see them on TV next year.
The Padres on Sunday extended Street through 2014 at a cost of $14 million. Just a week ago, the team that so often casts off its best parts this time of year made a $27 million investment in Quentin, locking him up through '15.
Street is a closer with enough of a history to go with current results that you can consider ninth-inning leads safe for a while. Quentin isn't a cornerstone, but he is solid enough to be built around in the middle of the lineup.
There are signs these Padres are progressing.
They have won 23 of their past 42 games. That's not AL East good. But it's one game better than San Francisco, three games better than Arizona and five games better than the Dodgers over that span.
Yasmani Grandal is batting .312 with five home runs in 22 games. Edinson Volquez is 3-0 with a 1.36 ERA in his past six starts.
Consider, too, that at least some (not all) of the injured players in 2012 will be positive contributors in '13, and we can at least agree that there are reasons for optimism.
"I've felt good about the direction," Byrnes said, making sure to credit predecessor Jed Hoyer with emphasizing the remodeling of the franchise's thin minor-league system. "Now we're seeing some progress."
But playing better isn't good enough. On their way is not even close to arrived.
This is pleasant momentum.
Those who are familiar with the pending ownership group predict a significantly higher Padres payroll in 2013. The O'Malley family will certainly invest enough to lift the Padres out of the bottom five, where they've been four straight years.
Byrnes was tempering expectations Sunday afternoon.
"As happy as we are with these contracts," he said, "they're fairly sizable."
He cautioned that what he has to spend this winter won't be "infinite."
The Padres need a right fielder, some pitching and maybe a shortstop upgrade.
With a little more leeway in free agency and some trades like those he made last December, we can at least be looking forward to something.


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Carshalton Athletic boss Stuart Massey reckons his squad needs to break some nasty habits despite a feel-good first-half performance on Saturday.
The struggling Robins gave Ryman Premier title favourites Wealdstone a fright, twice coming from behind and creating the better chances in the opening 45 minutes, however they eventually succumbed 4-2 to remain rooted in the relegation zone.
Carshalton forward Jason Henry headed his side level 10 minutes after they fell behind to a second minute goal, while young left back Paris Hamilton-Downes claimed his first senior league goal on the stroke of half-time by heading home a corner, again a few minutes after the visitors had retaken the lead.
Massey said: "I was enjoying the game until their third went in.
"We acquitted ourselves well in the first-half but still have a nasty habit of giving away silly goals.
"That said, I saw many little positives which we now need to put together to become a consistent force across a full game."
He added: "I was pleased with our energy levels, some of our passing and it was satisfying to see the lads score two goals. Their goalkeeper made a couple of outstanding saves too."
Robins keeper Michael White conversely gave an inconsistent performance at the other end, but his boss retains great faith in the teenager.
Massey said: "All players have off days, but Michael will learn much more by playing at this level then he would simply at training or playing in the reserves. I believe he has the attributes to become a fine goalkeeper.
"This was not about just one player's performance however, we need all our guys to play at a consistent level if our results are to improve."
Carshalton now prepare for two away games as a trip to Suffolk-based Leiston this Tuesday is followed by a visit to Grays Athletic on Saturday.


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Behavioral Assessment and Intervention Team (BAIT)
Muskingum University strives to maintain an environment that is safe from any kind of threats to the community. This requires a proactive community approach to behavioral threat assessment. One aspect of this approach is the Behavioral Asessment and Intervention Team (BAIT). If you feel that a member of the campus community presents behavior or language that appears threatening to the health and safety of himself/herself or others, we ask that you do the following:
In these situations, University Police essentially act as a switchboard to contact the appropriate staff members to intervene in a situation. For example, University Police can contact a counselor at any hour of the day, 7 days a week.
After any of the above actions, please file a report so that there can be a written account of the incident and the action(s) taken thus far. The report will be forwarded to a member of the Behavioral Assessment and Intervention Team and the situation will be assessed.
If the behavior is less imminent than all of the above, file an report. Such behavior could include persistent aggression in the classroom, outbursts in the residence halls, or other disruptive behavior.
When a potential threat is reported, the person receiving the report will determine the level of urgency and either refer the problem to the appropriate University professionals to resolve immediately, or refer the situation to the Behavioral Assessment and Intervention Team for assessment of non-urgent matters. Once the potential threat has been assessed, the appropriate action will be taken, following Campus policy (ex– student conduct referral, outreach from Counseling, etc.).
For a quick reference, please see this chart.
Members of this team include the Dean of Students, Assistant Dean of Students, Director of Residence Life, Director of Counseling, and representatives from Academic Affairs. Other staff may be included depending on the nature of the potential issue or threat.
Contact Amber Farley
Title IX Coordinator and Director of Student Conduct
Office: (740) 826-8087
Maps & Directions
Academic Affairs
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Puzzle Levels
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|Take apart and put back together
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An unbelievably difficult packing puzzle. All pieces form a part of a regular pattern, and the shape of the pieces makes finding the proper placement very difficult to do.
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VOTING is soon to close for much-needed grants for community groups in Winchester.
Nineteen organisations have applied for a Hampshire County Council Have Your Say grant, which is designed to improve local environments, groups, or strengthen communities.
Up to £1,000 is up for grabs, and the money is administered by Winchester Area Community Action.
Among those hoping for the money are 1st Hursley Scouts, The Carroll Centre, Street Reach, Hyde900, Winchester Area Access for All and Crawley Village Indoor Sports Club.
Voting closes at midnight on Friday (Aug 22).
To vote go to waca.org.uk/haveyoursay.


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Made on the Margins
The most remarkable thing about Bart Weiss, founder and director of the Dallas Video Festival, is not his patience or taste but his empathy for filmmakers and audiences alike. He knows there will be plenty of films, both short and long, screening in the 15th Annual Dallas Video Festival that moviegoers will dislike, and he has no problem with that; he welcomes the debate for and against his choices. (And one can only imagine the reject pile.) There are, in fact, some entries of which he is not entirely fond, though he will insist there is a purpose to even the most seemingly erratic and juvenile entry. That is precisely the point of this festival and has been for more than a decade, when Weiss founded it on the belief that if video is to insinuate itself into our daily lives, then at least it should incite if it can't always entertain. Weiss is both film-fest director and would-be provocateur--a curator of good, bad and in-between; a true believer in the medium of video and its ability to shock and shake the static out of its audience's fuzzy heads.
"We do provoke," Weiss says. "That's part of what we do...in a good way. We want people to have talks in the lobby after screenings, and if they're yelling at each other, that's fine with me. To me, the images mean something. You might not like them all, but if they affect you, if they're able to talk to someone about something in a different way, well, we want that to happen. We don't want the media to just massage your heads."
For years, he's had to answer the inevitable question: What, precisely, is the theme of this year's festival? He's never had a simple answer, because the dozens upon dozens of entries are not bound by an unswerving thesis or common purpose. This year's collection, which boasts some highlights of festivals past, does feature a handful of films dealing with the terrorist attacks of September 11 and its hangover, some of which are infuriating in their use of footage of those planes crashing into those buildings; no doubt people will leave those screenings debating such things as recontextualization vs. misappropriation. There will also be a day spent celebrating two of television's earliest and best pioneers, including Ernie Kovacs, whose wife, Edie Adams, will arrive bearing an hour's worth of rarely seen footage displaying her late husband's absolute genius, and local icon Icky Twerp, host of Channel 11's long-departed Slam Bang Theater. The Kovacs and Twerp tribs will even be paired with a collection of Moe Howard's home movies, presented by his son, which offer a glimpse into the domestic life of a Stooge.
The 15th Annual Dallas Video Festival
Dallas Theater Center Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd.
May 16-19. Tickets, ranging from $65 for an all-fest pass including Video Association of Dallas membership to $10-$15 for single-day passes, are available at the door or at www.videofest.org. The opening-night film, Hotel, will screen at 7:30 p.m. May 15 at the Magnolia Theater, 3699 McKinney Ave.
The fest will also debut recent, little-seen offerings from Leaving Las Vegas' Mike Figgis and The Pillow Book's Peter Greenaway; theirs are two extremely challenging works that will divide their respective audiences between those who will love and those who will absolutely loathe. And it will host a 24-Hour Video Race, during which 60 teams made up of novices and veterans will be given a prop, a setting and a theme and, yeah, 24 hours to complete a three- to five-minute digital-video short, to be judged by panels of local film-bizzers.
No doubt, some of the best entries tend toward the documentaries, among them Blue Vinyl, Larry v. Lockney, Demon of the Derby, Daughter From Danang and Tribute, the latter of which was executive produced by Steven Soderbergh and languishes inexplicably without distribution. To be able to gather at the Kalita Humphreys Theater and see but one of these films, much less all, only serves to remind how valuable such a festival can be even in a town flooded with so-called alternative cinema houses and other, more narrowly focused fests.
"When we started, it was us and the USA Film Festival, and part of it was we showed things they weren't interested in," Weiss says. "Now it's a different, cluttered field where you have all of these festivals that are ethnic-specific. We're broad and touch on a lot of bases in the way they don't. To me, the kind of beauty in our fest is it's not singular, so you can't just say it's about this or that."
What follows are some of the high, and low, points of the festival--though, as Weiss will happily point out, your worst is someone else's best, and for proof look no further than Figgis' all-star circle-jerk Hotel, discussions about which could fill a night's worth of happy hours. As Weiss likes to say, "Everything may not be of interest to one person, but the conglomerate's very powerful. One thing somebody will hate, somebody else will love, which is a great thing."
Animal Attraction How do you solve a problem like Ernie the cat? For director (and mother to the troublemaking feline) Kathy High, the solution included contacting "animal communicator" Dawn Hayman, who counsels pets and pet owners over the phone and teaches workshops at Spring Farm that instruct people how to talk to animals. High takes the Dr. Dolittle class and spends days chatting away with the farm's residents, including ducks, llamas, sheep, cats, dogs, horses and cows. At the end, she's not convinced the "conversations" are anything more than her own internal dialogue, but that doesn't stop her from trying to relieve Ernie's boredom by letting him make his own movie. Screening with King's Day Out. (Shannon Sutlief)
Blue Vinyl If nothing else, Judith Helfland's documentary explains why Louisiana always smells like a lit fart: That's where one-third of the nation's PVC is manufactured, in cities like Lake Charles, where the trees don't grow so well anymore. Similar in spirit to Michael Moore's Roger and Me, though certainly less confrontational, Blue Vinyl begins simply; Helfland's parents decide to replace their house's rotting wood exterior with vinyl siding, amid protest from their daughter--not because, as her mother assumes, her parents are dismantling her childhood home, but because Judith's rare form of cervical cancer (brought on by some questionable medical advice and bad prescriptions) has caused her to question pretty much everything. She wants to know how dangerous vinyl siding is to the environment and the people in it, so she goes to the source, interviewing Louisiana plant workers and the residents in the cities surrounding the factories. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, what she finds there confirms her worst fears. Equal parts enlightening and entertaining, Blue Vinyl plays like a great episode of TV Nation. (Zac Crain)
The Case of Jonathan Pollard Jonathan Pollard, a former Navy intelligence analyst with top-secret clearance, has been imprisoned in various federal facilities since 1987, when he was convicted of passing surveillance photos and weapons information to Israel--a rare instance in which a spy was caught handing over classified docs to an ally. His case has been well-documented in a handful of books, beginning with one written by Wolf Blitzer in 1989; yet another, Miscarriage of Justice, appeared only last summer. Pollard has been portrayed as many things: devout Zionist, greedy stooge, true believer, do-gooder schmuck. His supporters would have you believe he was betrayed by the Israelis and too severely punished by the U.S. government; his detractors would insist he belongs in prison for life. Eran Preis is sympathetic to Pollard's cause, but not necessarily his case; the director lets his family and attorneys plead for his release, and his prosecutors, through old news clips, condemn him to eternal imprisonment. The film presents a fully realized portrait--from a boyhood obsession with the Holocaust and Israel to an adulthood spent thinking he was doing the right thing even when horribly wrong--and lets you judge. (RW)
Confessions of a Sociopath Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself in this autobiographical (or is it?) film, detailing a life lived on Super 8 projectors and plenty of drugs and alcohol. "This helps me understand," Gibbons says near the beginning of the 40-minute Confessions, talking to a huge mug of beer he promptly drains. Clean and sober now, Gibbons steps back into the gutter to guide viewers through a ticker-tape parade of old mug shots, arrest reports and psychiatric hospital records, detrimental detritus picked up after "some kind of dark force" came out of him in his teens. Never shying away from his past pratfalls into addiction and jail and God knows where else, Gibbons employs the psychiatric jargon that was used to lock him up to point out that the only problem he really had was bad luck. (ZC)
Dances on the Prairie It's just like Dallas to locate something as grand as a privately funded, open-to-the-public garden of sculptures by living Texas artists next to an office complex. Luckily, the art--which towers and sways and shines deep in the heart of Frisco in the Texas Sculpture Garden--looks worth the drive. Patricia Meadows curated the composition, which includes postmodern metalworks and pieces crafted from Texas' own fossil-filled rocks and piney woods. Meadows, gushing about how "the rest of the world is about to see the wealth of talent we have in this state," shares equal screen time with the artists who get to talk about their own inspirations and visions, the real heart of the project. (SS)
Daughter From Danang Heidi Bub, a Vietnamese woman brought to the United States in 1975 during the so-called Operation Babylift that uprooted orphans out of alleged concern for their safety in the ravaged land, is torn between two cultures, two mothers and two identities (neither of which quite fit, because she was told she didn't, either). She's Tennessee Suth'n by way of North Vietnam; hers is a sunny optimism tempered by the pitiless reality of the past. Heidi, you see, was no orphan, but a 7-year-old girl torn from her mother, Mai Thi Kim, who was bullied by Ford administration officials to give up her little girl. "It's better for everyone," she was told (we see the moment, and it horrifies); it was a lie, of course. But Heidi's reunion with her mother is not necessarily a pleasant one; there's too much distance and anguish between the two for the tidy, loving resolution Heidi had hoped for, and we feel the ache that keeps--and rips--the two apart. Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco's 80-minute doc isn't easy to watch--it's so intimate and sorrowful you feel guilty for the invasion--but this film, which won the top-doc honors at Sundance, won't be easily shaken. Fact is, you may never forget it. (RW)
Demon of the Derby: The Ann Calvello Story How do you best describe roller derby? "Like angry squirrels, the derby skaters endlessly circle 'round their wheel," offering fans release from the tensions of their own squirrel-cage jobs, says one derby announcer in a fit of tortured simile. Somehow "angry squirrels" doesn't quite capture the strange appeal of a bygone "sport" that essentially put professional wrestling on wheels. For that, you need Sharon Marie Rutter's entertaining biography of Ann Calvello, "the meanest mama on skates," who devoted 50 years of her life and countless broken bones to a game that eventually abandoned her. Rutter tracks Calvello, who supports herself by bagging groceries, as she tries to break into a revived version of roller derby at age 69. A punk long before there was such a thing as punk rock, Calvello wants just one thing out of life--to skate for her fans, a strange mix of fey men, children and aging devotees who truly love this independent woman with the tricked-out 'do and unwrinkled "tickets" (Calvello's word for breasts). Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, Demon of the Derby is a moving depiction of a working-class proto-feminist who spent her life giving far more to her sport than it ever gave back to her. (Patrick Williams)
From High on the Hilltop and Life After Death From High on the Hilltop is a dry but fascinating look at the early history of Southern Methodist University. (Well, fascinating for an alum. You, maybe not so much. Go Ponies.) From its unlikely birth (once they lost Vanderbilt to future hell-dwellers, the Methodists established SMU and Emory to compensate) throughout its first 40 years or so of achievement and frustrations, this documentary looks at the school largely through the accomplishments of its presidents, from Robert Hyer to Umphrey Lee. They took it from a one-hall university and prairie college to its post-World War II acceptance as a true national university. Most compelling is the look at how, even from its beginning in the early '20s, the football team had been alternately a source of pride and anti-academic shame, foreshadowing the school's 1980s national triumph to its near-collapse after the death penalty in 1987. Two quibbles: The film relies too heavily on a few (articulate and compelling, but still) voices, and it ends rather abruptly. Life After Death , which looks at SMU's football program pre- and post-death penalty, begins as the worst sort of hero worship. The angelic score, the endless slow-motion shots of Doak Walker and the Pony Express--it's almost too much for even this graduate to take. Although there is much time given to professors and writers who explain how damaging the pay-for-play scandal was to the school, the overarching theme seems to be that football is what made, and can once again make, SMU great. As much as I love the school and the sport--I was news editor of the school paper when the SMU team won its first post-death penalty game, and wrote the 1A banner headline "Mustangs Win!" in we're-going-to-war point size--this film stands more as testimonial than documentary. (Eric Celeste)
Guy Stories Three shorts that ostensibly have similar "guy" themes but have as much in common as do a dog, a frog and a hog. Pillowfight is the worst sort of hack stand-up humor: A dude's gal snores, steals his covers, hits him in her sleep and screams through nightmares. Stephanie Etie as the sleepy annoying woman is very good, actually, but it's a concept that's funny perhaps only in a commercial. Perhaps. The New Brad begins with much more promise. It's the day before Christmas Eve, and Brad (Mark Duplass) travels 600 miles from Atlanta to New Orleans to chase down his girlfriend Kelly (Rachel Harris), who has just left him. Why does he think this will win her love? "[Because] when you lock in, and when you're, like, you know, say, 'We're going to choose each other and no one else,' that, like, brings it to the next level. I think if we could get on that level, we'd get along better." Shot in a semi-verité fashion, Brad works best when it's just stoner Brad riffing in front of the camera about why the relationship went wrong and what he'll do to make it right. The staged scenes of chasing Kelly and staking out her parents' house don't hold the same slacker charm. Invisible Man is just insane. A man goes to a hotel, someone keeps anonymously leaving him presents (a Sharpie pen, a toy wind-up train, a bottle of wine and a wine glass), he gets naked, cleans his bathroom, orders food, scares off the young woman who delivered it by showing her his hangy-down, masturbates, takes a bath and rips out one of his teeth. I was not high when I watched this. Perhaps you must be for it not to seem silly. (EC)
Headcheese Trippy, moody, nonsensical, black-and-white, pretentious, devilish, stylized, spiritualized, Elvis chops on a suede-jacket-wearing dude who eats flowers, throws tires, drinks beer, smokes, wears shades, talks like Vincent Price funneled through Freddie Prinze, screws a cow's head with a drill before drilling himself in the head. What's not to like? (EC)
Hell House The only shocking thing about Hell House--a documentary about the controversial "alternative" haunted house in Cedar Hill that depicts botched abortions, teen suicides and date rapes--is that it refuses to smirk. To date, most of its reviewers have expressed faux horror at the thought of normal American teen-agers believing in anything as intellectually embarrassing as hell, demons and the like. But director George Ratliff plays it straight with good reason: He was granted unlimited access in 1999 to the teens and adults of Trinity Church of the Assemblies of God as they planned Hell House X, complete with a Columbine skit, and the camera doesn't judge. Ratliff does a great job of creeping into the subculture of evangelical Christianity and letting his subjects explain their world as they compete for such roles as "Abortion Girl" and "Suicide Girl." The kids' acting is hilariously over the top--"It's too late, you killed your baby--you're a murderer, Jan!" shrieks one stringy-haired girl--but when Ratliff follows one family, the Cassars, you begin to understand where all that passion is coming from. (Julie Lyons)
Hip Pocket Theatre on Exhibit at the Kimbell I love Fort Worth's Hip Pocket Theatre troupe, and I think the Kimbell in Fort Worth is easily the best museum in North Texas, if not the Southwest. Put one inside the other for a documentary about preparing for the performance, and what do you get: The most god-awful home movie ever shown outside a living room. Endless shots of rehearsals. No care to tell us about the personalities of the players involved. Minutes upon minutes upon years of scenes about designing their damn costumes. Go to the museum. Support Hip Pocket. Don't see this unless you are a family member of someone on screen, in which case you may pretend you like it. (EC)
Hollywood Inferno (Episode One) Laura Parnes' recasting of Dante's Inferno into the fluorescent-lit hell of suburbia follows Sandy, wannabe actress and candy-counter clerk, as she trails shoe-fetishist screenwriter Virgil through a bargain-basement world of effed-up high schoolers and whatever else she could swipe from a Gregg Araki flick. Which is probably the point, for all I know, since Parnes brazenly brandishes her thievery throughout Hollywood Inferno; much of the dialogue is cribbed from other films and cut up for her own purposes, whether it's American Beauty ("Sometimes, there's so much beauty in the world...it makes me totally want to fucking puke," Sandy says), A Clockwork Orange or "anything with Willem Dafoe or Christopher Walken in it," as she points out in the credits. It all leads up to a scene where Kel O'Neil (playing a famous director, like it matters) does his best Walken doing his best George Lucas doing the best drugs while wearing a mask of Dafoe's face. But of course. (ZC)
Hotel Mike Figgis, Oscar-nominated a mere six years ago for directing Leaving Las Vegas, further slides into self-indulgent oblivion, irrelevance and, most of all, incoherence; if there's a point to Hotel, his latest shot-in-digital-video botched experiment, it's on the top of the filmmaker's head. This all-star shambles renders his previous film, the four-paneled Time Code, almost quaint by comparison; at least one could tell where it was going, if only straight down the commode. No doubt, Figgis lured his cast--including John Malkovich, David Schwimmer, Lucy Liu, Selma Hayek, Rhys Ifans, Julian Sands, Saffron Burrows, Valeria Golino and, in a hilariously deadpan-nuts performance, Burt Reynolds--with the promise of partying in Venice, where the story takes place; everyone appears out of it, hungover and disinterested. A film within a film, Hotel ostensibly documents the Dogme-styled adaptation of John Webster's 1623 play The Duchess of Melfi, directed by Ifans' manic Trent Stoken and produced by Schwimmer's disheveled Jonathan Danderfine, who plots his helmer's assassination. At one point, Schwimmer and Ifans bark at each other, literally; it's dog-eat-dog, till they start dining on people. Documentary filmmakers, fronted by a grating Hayek, tag along, proving as pretentious as Ifans' motley crew. The random inside jokes elicit the cheap smirk (Jason Isaacs, one of the stars of Black Hawk Down, begs out of Melfi early to shoot a Ridley Scott movie, har har). And, with its pointlessly gratuitous sex scenes (including one in which Burrows buggers her man from behind, just as she, ahem, gives birth) and gratuitously pointless references to cannibalism (Malkovich, inexplicably behind bars, dines off a plate of human carapaccio), the damned thing's screwy and senseless enough to hypnotize. Or maybe it's supposed to be ludicrously wretched and laughably twisted, in which case, bravo. (RW)
Independent Spirits: Faith Hubley/ John Hubley The animated films of John and Faith Hubley--the best known of which aired during The Electric Company, rendering them one of the most unwittingly influential filmmakers on a generation--would often feature the voices of their children (among them Emily, currently an animator, and Georgia, lead singer of Yo La Tengo) and jazzers (Dizzy Gillespie was a blessed constant). But theirs were often grim cartoons that dazzled even as they dealt with such topics as overpopulation, disease, war and death; the Hubleys were satirists with enormous hearts. John began as a Disney animator working on the likes of Snow White and Dumbo; he left after the acrimonious Disney strike of 1941, moved to Columbia, wound up on the underground all-star team of animators at, of all places, the Army's First Motion Picture Unit and went on to co-found the filmmaking collective United Productions of America. Faith came to filmmaking through a more circuitous route, beginning as a messenger on the Columbia lot. The two married in 1955, and theirs was a fruitful partnership: They won Oscars, made commercials (which Faith didn't much care for) and animated The Doonesbury Special in 1977--the year of John's death at 62 years old. Faith would continue making more experimental films; hers were almost line drawings, abstract enough to let the viewer fill in the myriad, magical blanks. Faith died last December, but the Hubleys left an extraordinary legacy; without them, says one fellow animator, there'd be no Simpsons, as one small instance. Sybil DelGaudio and Patty Wineapple's doc is wonderful but frustrating; it leaves you wanting to see more of the couple's films. (RW)
Kimono Ostensibly made for a collection of erotic shorts, this 27-minute offering from Hal Hartley (whose latest feature, No Such Thing, is so terrible it's going straight to home video) isn't erotic...or even fathomable. The apologist might refer to it as a cinematic tone poem; the pragmatist will damn it as a monotone poem, rightly so. A Japanese woman in a wedding dress is booted out of a car, presumably by her new husband, and wanders the woods in her gown. After a while, she stumbles upon a cabin, falls asleep in its comfy bed and awakens in a different outfit; she's tended to by two women (apparitions, perhaps) who set her in a bath and pour milk on her legs. More stuff happens, by which I mean absolutely nothing happens; it's a dream, it's not, who cares. By then, the apologist is asleep. (RW)
Larry v. Lockney When the people of the West Texas community of Lockney decided to require mandatory drug testing for public school students, no one there thought anyone would kick up a fuss. In a tiny, tight-knit town where "everybody knows everybody," the majority wanted the tests, and the majority rules. Well, not quite. Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck's documentary tracks the battle that ensued when lanky, laconic farmer Larry Tannahill decided to stand up for the Bill of Rights and, more important, his boys. "The way I feel about it, it's telling my son I don't trust him, [that] I don't believe in him, and I believe in him with all my heart," Tannahill says. Tannahill's principled stand eventually leads to an alliance with the American Civil Liberties Union--and costs him his job and his home. It would have been easy for Birnbaum and Schermbeck to vilify the people of Lockney for trampling on civil liberties, but instead the filmmakers take an evenhanded approach. Yes, Lockney created a policy that was as misguided as it was well-intentioned, but the town also gave us people like Tannahill, who, the film suggests, is both a patriot and hero. Turns out there are worse places than Lockney to weigh the balance between freedom and public safety. (PW)
The Last Record Store Jeff Liles (an occasional Dallas Observer contributor) knows that any film about music has to at least get that part right, so he stacks the deck, showing live in-store performances by Daniel Johnston and James Hall and loading up the soundtrack with songs by such locals as Centro-matic and Hydroponic Sound System. And that's not all he gets right in The Last Record Store, showing at the fest as one of the Substance TV selections. This is only a 13-minute snippet of Liles' unfinished documentary about Bill Wisener and his store on Coit and Spring Valley, Bill's Records and Tapes, but it's more than long enough to prove that the store is as much about the people who walk through the door as the man who opens it every morning. One of the largest independent record stores in the country, Bill's attracts a variety of oddballs and record geeks, and by the end of this glimpse into Liles' work-in-progress, you get the feeling that everyone who shows up on screen deserves his own documentary. Maybe he'll get to that next. (ZC)
Late Nite Pleasure Sex--or something like it--is what binds together three short films in this compilation. Ladyporn , by Austin student filmmakers Maggie Carey and Elena Carr, is a documentary detailing their efforts to make a hard-core porn flick for women, followed by the movie itself. What do women want in porn? In this case, no cum shots, more foreplay and women on top. (Surprise!) The documentary half of the offering is the better of the two, as the students struggle to find normal people willing to bare all for the camera. "It's not about size; it's about personality," they tell the men. (Show of hands, who's heard that one before?) The resulting movie resembles a late-night offering from Cinemax, only one in which the camera actually pans down to where the action is. Hello, willy. There's plenty of willy--in plaster, not in the flesh--in My Legendary Girlfriend , Braden King's interview with confessed groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, who memorializes various male rock stars' members in plaster castings. Is a mold of Jimi Hendrix's semi-erect penis, on display in an art gallery, really art? If you can get past the underlying silliness of the image and listen to Caster's explanation of how she wishes to memorialize musical artists whose work moved her, you might actually say the answer is "yes." Finally, there is Bryan Poyser's Pleasureland , a sort of soft-core anti-porn film. The short's unnamed star is a young man who wants nothing more than to be alone with a rented hard-core video for an evening wank, only every movie he rents ends up transmogrifying into a flesh-and-blood porn actress willing to service him as she would in the movie. Sounds sweet, except for the fact that after they do the deeds, the actresses, who remain plugged into a cable attached to their navels, disconnect, die and vanish, leaving our hero alone, frustrated and facing late charges for the missing rented videos. Pleasureland is well-acted and neither as silly nor as prurient as it sounds by the description, and the final image of the young man snared in his own web of TV cable may provide viewers a different perspective on the power and effect of porn. (PW)
The Legend of Leigh Bowery Leigh Bowery, a statuesque Australian, lived his life as a work of art, bouncing from fashion design to performance art to music to club-owning to dance as his overactive imagination saw fit. While friends and biographers use Charles Atlas' biography to try to keep Bowery wrapped in enigma after his sudden death in 1994, Bowery's designs, especially his outrageous clothing, truly secure his immortality. He strove to make physical appearance into something transformable, wearing S&M-like masks and padding to enlarge and draw attention to neglected body parts such as the feet, belly and shoulders, and creating his own "cult of artifice" that only painter Lucian Freud, who used Bowery as a nude model, seemed to crack with his literally stripped-bare portraits. (SS)
London Intl. Advertising Awards Always a crowd-pleaser, which is ironic since most of this compilation consists of bathroom-break art or must-skip-TV. Many of these ads have been seen on American television: the Budweiser spot with aliens asking "Whassup?" (stale, but clever); the Fox Sports Net clips featuring, among other things, a slapping contest and a cliff-diver who strikes dry land; and others familiar to prime-time viewing. But the highlights are jarring, including an anti-smoking spot from TheTruth.com that breaks out into a garish musical number "celebrating" Big Tobacco and two drunken-driving PSAs that all but turn you off the booze completely. One's violent and heartbreaking--a perfect narrative, in which a father grieves for a daughter seen gruesomely killed when her drunken boyfriend's car plows into a trailer. The other's darkly comic, as young men and women visit a wheelchair salesman and a plastic surgeon in preparation for a night of drinking and driving; they're planning ahead, sadly. (RW)
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra Spoofing '50s B-movies is a tricky proposition. Why make fun of a medium that's already so inherently amusing? Writer-director-star Larry Blamire's Cadavra pits feuding scientists, alien invaders and an evil skeleton against each other in a race to obtain the rare radioactive element "atmospherium," with a big, foam-rubber mutant and an animal woman running around in there somewhere. Blamire has his deadpan dialogue parodies down pat ("All skeletons are against me--they always have been!"; "Mysterious...and yet still perfectly understandable!"), but he falls in love with the script a bit too much; the endless talking slows down the film's pace. It also would have been better shot on film than digital video and could use a deliberately poor mono sound mix (cf. Ed Wood). Still, the skeleton's a hoot, and the score, credited to the solo-monikered Valentino, is pitch perfect, adding a crucial atmospheric element lacking from similar films. Andrew Parks is particularly retro as the alien "Kro-Bar," and despite the slack pacing, the movie's frequently very funny. (Luke Y. Thompson)
Make Me a Match Desperate Jewish singles don't look much different from desperate singles in general, except they're willing to try just about anything to find a mate, from Web sites (Jewish Quality Singles, among hundreds more) to dating services (including Profiles, which boasts of producing 100 couples and 43 babies) to old-school matchmakers such as Pearl Lubovic and her rabbi husband and Simshon Stock, who's been "nudging people to go out" for 30 years. They'll even travel from as far away as Alaska for the Nationwide Jewish Singles Convention in Dallas, where they indulge in such Jewish delicacies as guacamole. And it's clear from Allen Mondell and Cynthia Salzman's often fascinating documentary that it's a buyer's market for Jewish males; their religion alone bumps all the overweight or balding (and often, both) men who show up early and often in Make Me a Match to prime-catch status, and they know it all too well. Doesn't help much that Stock's main method for successfully setting up couples is convincing women to wear clothes two or three sizes too tight on dates: "That's how you get him." Genius. (ZC)
Matinee Idyllis Interspliced with B-movie footage produced in the San Francisco Art Institute's Studio 8 film laboratory are scenes of the lab professor's mission to track down his former students and assistants as they play with their cats and watch porn. It proves that the lives of filmmakers aren't always as interesting as the films they make. (SS)
Metrocomplex Stories Compilation Espresso Con Panna : Shot like porn or, at best, a Mexican soap opera, Kevin Nash's Espresso Con Panna explores the intersection of art, commerce, coffee and opera, and gets there just in time for a four-car pileup. There are jealous lovers, tax dodges, pistachio biscotti and, of course, the titular beverage, but what's missing from Nash's romantic comedy is most of the romance and all the comedy. Kung Fu Teenage Bigfoot : Just a trailer for the (presumably) forthcoming film of the same name, Kung Fu Teenage Bigfoot features plenty of slo-mo footage of a hirsute Jon "Corn Mo" Cunningham and more than its fair share of bad puns. No telling if this will actually be filled out into a proper feature, but it's just fine as is, a two-minute glimpse into the life of the last remaining sasquatch. And, more than likely, the basis of another Corn Mo song. eMALE: Daniel Roebuck (The Late Shift's Jay Leno) stars as Dale Fortunato in director Bryan Harston's short about a man who agrees to barricade himself in his loft--no food, no furniture, no anything--and live only on what he can order online. Believing he's "heroic"--that's what he tells whoever will listen--Fortunato is welded inside; if he can make it through the entire year, he'll win $100,000. But thanks to some naughty e-mail and a vengeful soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Fortunato loses his Internet connection. The whole thing looks and feels like a beer commercial. Only, you know, not quite so fun. Lie to Me : Lonely businessman hires an escort so he can act on the feelings he's had since high school for a classmate nicknamed "Ocean"; the escort who arrives just happens to be the very same "Ocean." Not a bad idea, but not a single good performance, and the camera was apparently operated by a drunken child. Luckily, it's a short that lives up to its name, in and out in 16 minutes. The Tunnel : Ramzi Abed's bit of dime-store David Lynch is a mess of dreams and memories, held aloft by the twin poles of certain death and short-lived love. Abed likely flinches when watching The Tunnel, figuring it's too personal or something like that, that too many of his thoughts and feelings are on the screen, but he shouldn't worry, because who knows what anyone's talking about anyway. And for some reason, American Movie skewer Mark Borchardt and The Toxic Avenger director Lloyd Kaufman are in it. (ZC)
Money for Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music More than ever before, the music industry's under siege from all sides: the record labels who insist peer-to-peer piracy is killing their biz, the artists who insist their contracts are tantamount to slavery and the consumers who're buying more blank discs than prerecorded CDs. It's gotten so bad millionaires are holding benefit concerts for themselves; one can only imagine the next step, the Labor Day Don Henley Rock Star Telethon featuring Courtney Love and the once-and-future Eagle singing "Hotel California" while Sheryl Crow rings the tote board and Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks man the phones. For the mildly interested (those who read Entertainment Weekly, not Variety), there's nothing particularly revelatory about Kembrew McLeod's abbreviated doc; it's inflammatory and infuriating and loaded with charts and graphs (befitting a film made by an assistant professor of communications studies at the University of Iowa), but never more insightful than a long magazine article in which the usual suspects (Ani DiFranco, Chuck D, Michael Franti, etc.) rant and rail against the corrupt system. McLeod stacks the deck too high in her and her subjects' favor. It would have been nice to have heard about this sordid biz from the labels' perspective, skewed though it may be; it also would have been better had narrator Thurston Moore stopped reading off cue cards and started talking about how his own band, Sonic Youth, was screwed into major-label oblivion when its label, Geffen, was swallowed whole during the Unigram merger some years back. And, look, you sign to a major, you know you're just asking to get bent over a chair. So, like, deal. (RW)
Murals of Magic City Magic City was what folks called the Texas Centennial celebration at Fair Park in 1936. In the middle of the Depression, the esplanade at Fair Park housed this World's Fair that energized the city and, in turn, the Southwest. The murals of the title refer to murals painted on the buildings for the Centennial, and the current restoration of them mirrors the restoration of Fair Park. (One delicious note from this fine documentary: Dallas had no business hosting this event. It marked 100 years after Texas gained its independence from Mexico, not 100 years after statehood. But in 1836, Dallas wasn't even a city yet. Houston should have been the site of choice. But, in typical Dallas fashion, the planners were offered the Fair Park acreage to construct their fair and, oh yeah, 10 million bucks. That's all it took. Some things never change.) FDR is seen saying that the Centennial wasn't just for Texas, "but for all the other 47 states as well." Although the story begins without much context, it gives an informative look at the history of one of Dallas' few civic treasures. As the film puts it, the murals are "replaceable legacies of an unforgettable era, standing as monuments to the faith and hope of the past." (EC)
Prize Whores People wearing freebie T-shirts shouldn't make fun of people wearing freebie T-shirts, but that's just what Austin DJ Jenn Garrison does in this irksome documentary about folks who come to radio-station remotes in search of giveaway goodies. Garrison's is the worst sort of documentary: judgmental and self-serving, less an attempt to understand people who literally live for free movie passes and concert tickets and rock-band T-shirts than a chance to bad-mouth and humiliate them in front of the camera. Prize Whores ought to run about 10 minutes, which it would have been had Garrison not wanted to make a movie about how condescending, self-righteous and inarticulate she could be. Her crew, who eventually discovers how much fun it is to win free junk, shows up to denounce the film's troubled trio of "prize whores" as "vultures"; they're oblivious to the fact they're equally as culpable, picking over the lives of three people who clearly need these remotes as a way to fill their empty lives and messy houses that are stuffed with little more than autographed posters and assorted effluvia picked up along the way. You'll come away hating only the jocks and radio marketing folks who bad-mouth their listeners and apparently hate their jobs and themselves; they're the real whores. (RW)
Rock Star Parking A handful of filmmakers explore and explode the myths of being disabled in Rock Star Parking, compiled by Houston-based Carlos Lama and Denise Ramos. Much of the film focuses on people living life to the fullest despite physical limitations, whether it's athlete Mike Haynes hooping it up in a wheelchair ("Passion: The Game of Life") or dancer Bruce Jackson deftly incorporating his handicap into his performance ("Bruce") or a paraplegic who refuses to give up on sailing ("Sea Legs"). The highlight, though, is Shin Hee Park and Theresa Shih's "Access Disabled," a trip through the good, bad and ugly public rest rooms with wheelchair-bound Megan O'Neil, which will have you demanding wheelchair-accessible facilities if there's any life left in your cold, black heart. Actually, the highlight is Haynes playing practical jokes with a prosthetic leg. But I don't want to spoil the fun. (ZC)
Rosa, The Death of a Composer Maybe the smarties will get it, but the rest of you (by which I mean, the rest of us) will be left confounded and bored; such is the usual response to the films of Peter Greenaway, which are often as brilliant and intoxicating as they are baffling and infuriating. A 3-year-old film of an 8-year-old opera--with libretto written by Greenaway, director of The Belly of an Architect and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and music by Dutch avant-garde composer Louis Andriessen--Rosa tells an intricate (if not downright daft) tale linking the mysterious deaths of composers real (Anton Webern, John Lennon) and fictional (Juan Manuel de Rosa, of the film's title). It's engaging only in fits and starts, never as a whole; Andriessen's monotone, minimalist music, which recalls Joe Jackson's ill-advised forays into "classical," wears thin, and Greenaway's multilayered visuals hypnotize and nauseate all at once. With its scrolling text and background videos and naked singers and on and on, there's just so much going on about seemingly so little. The plot, such as it is, deals with the murders of Rosa, who dreamed of writing for Hollywood westerns, and his would-be wife Esmeralda (Marie Angel), who's abused emotionally and sexually by the composer; he reserves his intimate love for his horse, forcing Esmeralda to become a four-legged creature as the piece progresses. Ultimately, she's entirely nude (it's remarkable Angel can keep singing in such a prolonged vulnerable state) and entirely mad; she's rendered human sacrifice by film's end. It maybe be brilliant. It may be awful. It's probably both. (RW)
Slam Bang Theater No doubt this will be the highlight for those who grew up in Dallas-Fort Worth in the '50s through the early '70s, back when Icky Twerp introduced the Three Stooges--and his own trio of monkey men--to the locals on Channel 11. This two-hour compilation, assembled by Paul Camfield, reminds that there was a time when local television was as exciting and as experimental as the network feeds; Twerp, "played" by Camfield's screwy pop, Bill, was the area's Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs and Milton Berle, an unkempt lunatic (black wig, ill-fitting fedora, etc.) willing to do anything for a laugh or half of one. He didn't always succeed--in retrospect, some of this stuff plays cutesy and quaint--but when Camfield was on, he was as much a subversive as TV's best ringmasters. One sketch, in which Icky Twerp and a TV repairman futz with the picture, recalls Andy Kaufman and David Letterman's later attempts at screwing the tube; another, in which two politicians debate each other for the job of porn inspector, remains viable and glibly profound (Q: "How long do you think politicians should serve?" A: "Till they're caught."). If only Channel 11 would rebroadcast these gems late at night, maybe after Craig Kilborn; then, we'd never get any sleep. Appropriately, this trib falls between Paul Howard Remembers Moe Howard , during which the son of Stooge will proffer a peek at Moe's home movies, and Edie Adams' presentation of The Best of Ernie Kovacs . Icky'd be proud. (RW)
T-shirt Travels According to Barney Lehrer, an American export agent, "95 percent of Salvation Army clothes aren't even unpacked." Instead, they're sold for 10 to 15 cents a pound to dealers who ship them to Africa so they can sell them to entrepreneurs like Luka, the young man hustling to make a better life for his brothers and sisters. Luka and his fellow street-level businessmen buy a bale of T-shirts for 360,000 kwatcha ($180 U.S.) and then sell them out of the secondhand shops, which seem to be the only successful businesses in Zambia. The largest export to Africa, the T-shirt trade is a multimillion-dollar operation that has put Mickey Mouse and X-Men and Kurt Cobain tees on the backs of the African people. And it has almost single-handedly crippled the economy of countries like Zambia, where Shantha Bloemen's documentary sets up shop and pleads its case. It's a strong one: The influx of "dead white man's clothes" (as they're known to some of the secondhand shop owners) has killed Zambia's own textile business, the industry upon which many African countries once based their economy. In its absence, Zambia and others were forced to take out loans they'll never pay back; between 1990 and 1993, Zambia spent $37 million on primary school education and $1.3 billion paying back its debt to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Bloemen provides the nuts and bolts to back up Bono's passionate speeches, and while it's difficult to grasp all the facts and figures and charts and graphs she tosses out, it's no less gripping for it. (ZC)
Tales of the Weird Two shorts make up this compilation, and, once again, this writer suggests drug use beforehand. Nitwit Predelick (you heard me) concerns a hick boy and his girl. They pour juice on pictures of horses and lick it off. Between scenes, floating pictures of baby heads and birds narrate transitions. Her man shaves while talking to the hick girl on the phone about playing "hot damn"--we then cut to them squatting over each other in a field yelling, "Hot damn!" (No, I'm not making this up. And, yes, it's pretty damn funny.) The horse-lickers then decide that there is "a whole house full of stuff" to lick, which they do. A clump of hair laughs and freaks out in a corner. It's completely horrible. I loved it. Transgenic Hairshirt , meanwhile, is shorter and more horrible, and I'm not sure what I think of it. Again with the hair: While we watch a chest protector made out of human hair and worn by a cat, we hear a man argue with his girlfriend. A choir sings. The end. It's probably brilliant. (EC)
Tribute How Tribute has gone for so long without distribution is incomprehensible, because it's a remarkable film--a years-in-the-making glimpse into the lives of fetishists and fanatics who live out their rock-star dreams by becoming their favorite rock stars. Filmmakers Kris Curry and Rich Fox, making their debut with a film exec-produced by Steven Soderbergh, aren't out to belittle their subjects but to sympathize with them, to explain precisely how someone can fall so deeply in love with an icon it's only inevitable he'd want to crawl inside his skin. We're presented with five bands that re-create, from look to sound, Journey (Escape), the Monkees (The Missing Links), Queen (Sheer Heart Attack), Judas Priest (Bloodstone) and Destroyer-era KISS (Larger than Life)--and, more poignantly, the toll such worship can exact upon its practitioners and their followers. Larger than Life's original Gene Simmons so loses himself in the character he goes mad, setting each room in his house on fire on his way to finding God and renouncing the band. The Missing Links' Davy Jones and Mike Nesmith part ways and form competing Monkees tribs, neither of which lasts long; Davy's too busy being George Harrison, anyway. The Queen trib nearly busts up when its Freddie Mercury departs for a stint in the German Cats, almost killing "superfan" Mark, a lonely soul who lives to hear his dead hero's voice every weekend. Funniest and saddest of all is the lead singer of Bloodstone, who forsakes family to be Rob Halford and can't stand that Tim "Ripper" Owens (made famous, barely, by Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star) got the Priest gig when Halford was booted from the band. The auditions scenes with Larger than Life and Sheer Heart Attack are hysterical; the interviews with superfan Mark are heartbreaking. And the whole thing's done without a whiff of condescension; sometimes, Fox and Curry seem to be saying, all you want to do is close your eyes and pretend you're somebody else (or with somebody else), which for some people is just enough. (RW)
Welcome to New York The problem with filmmakers pushing a liberal agenda is too often they believe it means merely making fun of the conservative ideal, which gets you only so far; it's easy to mock the solutions of others when you have none of your own. Norman Cowie's 23-minute doc, made pre-September 11 and part of the fest's compelling and often infuriating Reframing 9/11 collection, reveals the immaculate Manhattan of Rudy Giuliani as little more than a police state that carries out acts of "terrorism on the poor," in the words of one community activist, and "a campaign of racism and classism," says another. Giuliani often talked about bringing a "quality of life" back to New York City; his greatest achievement, he used to say, was cleaning up Times Square, replacing the old porn palaces with strip-mall outlets hawking Disney trinkets and overpriced CDs at the Virgin Megastore. He did so by enforcing seldom-used laws restricting street artists and the homeless alike; the result, insists one New Yawkah, was "an erosion of civil liberties and questionable street justice," and there's no question Rudy put a happy face on a grim situation. But Cowie insists on mocking those who hang themselves, including the head of the City Journal, a policy-making arm of the right-wing Manhattan Institute whose advice Giuliani too closely heeded. The filmmaker drowns out the debate by not only preaching to the converted, but shouting at them; the derision is deafening. (RW)
Women in Black Director Claudia Sherwood examines the image of Catholic nuns as ruler-carrying, knuckle-cracking spinsters who get their holy molies off by terrifying kids with whacks to the head and thoughts of eternal damnation. Unlike their male counterparts, the nuns seem only to have contributed to generations of very punctual but guilt-ridden and bitter adults who look back in anger and fondness at their years spent in school rooms learning reading, writing and religious devotion. But, as Sherwood points out, these Brides of Christ often had lousy marriages, some having been forced into the order by parents out of poverty, lack of marriage proposals or mental illness, and they take out their frustrations on the children they're supposed to steer toward godliness. While some former students reminisce about those wacky sisters, others relate horror stories about what they call institutionalized child abuse committed in the name of Jesus. (SS)
World of Photography Artists Michael Smith and William Wegman host this introduction to the basics of photography made in 1986. Smith plays the novice photog to Wegman's seasoned pro (as evidenced by his safari jacket, comically fake black moustache and goatee and smarmy mannerisms) as Wegman works through 10 rules of professional photography, including "Looking Good is Important" and "Keep Your Darkroom Door Locked." (SS)
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text:
There are substantial differences in chronic disease and health behaviors
across race/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic groups in our society (Kanjilal et
al. 2006). These differences contribute to startling discrepancies in mortality
in the U.S., where groups defined by race/ethnicity, gender, and geography have
life expectancy differences of up to15 years. (Murray et al. 2006). Two key
factors, diet, and physical inactivity, contribute to obesity and associated
risk factors (elevated blood pressure, high glucose, dyslipidemia) which are
frequently clustered together and labeled the metabolic syndrome (Grundy et al.
2004). Obesity prevalence has been increasing, affects the entire population
from youth to the elderly (CDC 2011) and threatens to reverse
20th century gains in life expectancy. Much of the focus in
addressing health inequalities has been to identify and address racial/ethnic
differences in the quality of health care. (2003) There is some evidence of
differential counseling for obesity by race and/or gender (Bleich et al. 2011)
however overall, obesity is poorly addressed by usual medical care.(Ma et al.
2009) Rather, social and structural inequalities, such as poverty, the built
environment, health literacy, and cultural preferences may need to be addressed.
Major trials demonstrate that even modest (5-7%) weight loss and increased
physical activity is associated with reduced incidence of diabetes and
improvement in risk factor control. (Knowler et al. 2002; The Look AHEAD
Research Group 2007). Translating such research into interventions that are
effective in different populations, either defined by cultural, geographic, or
socio-economic characteristics is imperative, as is determining whether such
interventions are best delivered in community-based settings or in the clinical
arena, by professionals, community health workers ( also known as lay health
advisors), or a combination of both. The Maya Angelou Center for Health
Equity (MACHE) has chosen the theme Translating evidence based,
lifestyle strategies to eliminate health disparities in diabetes prevention and
control for this application. The Research Core will provide an
infrastructure for the conduct of research addressing this theme among
vulnerable populations on multiple levels of the social-ecological framework,
from community-level research to individual-level
interventions. Vulnerable populations are those who are
marginalized economically, socially, geographically, or medically and thus are
unable to achieve optimal health. The projects included within this application
are new R01-level projects that are consistent with the MACHE mission.
Translating Lifestyle Trials into the
Clinic and Community for Diabetes (TLCC
Diabetes) will recruit overweight and obese adults with T2DM drawn from clinics
serving lower-income patients and minorities. The trial will test a lifestyle
intervention delivered either by physician-supervised group visits, or delivered
in community venues via groups led by trained community health workers.
Latino Diabetes Prevention Trial (LDPT) translates elements of
the Diabetes Prevention Program, focusing on Latinos at high risk for developing
T2DM. It will test whether a culturally adapted, church-based lifestyle
intervention will reduce glucose and associated factors (lipids, inflammation,
blood pressure) associated with IFG. The Research Core's role in these two
projects is to provide infrastructure and resources to facilitate the respective
research teams' ability to conduct their research projects according to the
highest standard.
The specific objectives of the Core:
Disclaimer: The information on this website is for general informational purposes only and SHOULD NOT be relied upon as a substitute for sound professional medical advice, evaluation or care from your physician or other qualified health care provider.


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I have written several columns this year on the situation facing the banks with respect to their large and increasing portfolio of non-performing loans, especially residential mortgages.
Since the housing bubble began to pop in 2006, which eventually led to recession, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the implementation of the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) and ZIRP (Zero-Interest Rate Policy) programs, the number of non-performing loans has increased dramatically.
The value of outstanding non-performing loans being held by the banks is now substantially larger than their loan loss reserves. As a result, many banks have simply stopped taking action on their non-performing loans because doing so would require booking losses that would be greater than their loan loss reserves.
One of the hopes by the banks, regulators, legislators, rating agencies, politicians and investors has been that the economy would eventually recover and it would be supported by increasing loan creation and decreasing loan defaults. If that were to occur, the banks would be able to build up loan loss reserves allowing them to begin to send non-performing loans through the recovery process.
Additionally, an expanding economy indicates that demand for the collateral associated with the non-performing loans would increase allowing for a greater rate of recovery of the balance owed on the non-performing loans which would decrease the amount of losses the banks would actually have to absorb.
In order for such a situation to arise, loans that originated since the recession ended must not begin to default. Unfortunately, there are nascent and broad signs that the consumer loans created since the most recent recession ended in June of 2009 are again increasing for the first time since then -- and before the older non-performing loans have been absorbed.
The early signs of this are loans that are accounted for as past due between 30 and 89 days by the banks. Across every consumer loan category, these numbers are rising again for the first time since the recession ended in June 2009.
First Trust residential mortgages that are past due from 30-89 days increased from 2.24% in the second quarter of this year to 2.27% in the third. Credit card delinquencies increased from 1.36% to 1.42%, home equity loans from .91% to .97% and auto loans from 1.32% to 1.50%.
Although the increases in the number and value of past due loans is relatively small, with the exception of autos, this is the first time since the last recession ended in 2009 that all consumer loan categories have experienced an increase at the same time. Another disturbing aspect of these numbers is that they are occurring with interest rates already at record lows and by borrowers with the highest credit quality.
This is also occurring broadly across the large money centers where these loans are concentrated: Bank of America (BAC), JPMorgan (JPM), Wells Fargo (WFC) and Citibank (C).
The data referenced is from the third quarter call reports filed by the banks with the regulators with the majority of them doing so during the last week of October and first week of November.
One calendar quarter of loan data does not yet indicate a trend, but be mindful of this issue. If the data for the fourth quarter of 2012, which will be available in early February, indicate that a new trend toward rising delinquencies and defaults is occurring, it will compound the issues facing the Fed and perhaps impact the ongoing discussions concerning the federal budget and tax policies.


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Then & Now: April 9
Updated 5:26 pm, Monday, April 8, 2013
Then: During Christmas 1976, the Newman brothers posed together (at top) at their family home in Iowa. They are (from left) Randy, Mark, David, Charles and Richard.
Now: Thirty-three years later, during a family reunion in Illinois, the brothers re-created the original shot, right down to David's arms around his brothers and Mark's big smile. "I found the photo before I went to the reunion," says Randy, who moved to San Antonio in 1998 to be nearer wife Gina's family. "The five of us don't get together that often, so it was a good chance to take another picture."
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