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Sufficiently Forceful, Opinionated and Professional
Four women, among the few in senior management in technology firms, talk about their battle for power
Although it is considered a liberal, young, vibrant and trail-blazing industry, based on principles of innovation, the high tech field is not dotted with women in senior management. In fact, it was hard to find four Israeli women holding the senior position of manager of information systems.
Last week, the four managers gathered to discuss the image of the senior woman manager in posts that until recently was reserved for men. The are the director of information systems at Delek, Flora Levin, who earned her degree in Computer Sciences at the Technion during a period when the entire department included no more than five women; the director of information systems at Marvell, Annie Zarbiv, who began her career as a secretary at Intel Haifa, until one day she informed her managers that if she wasn't promoted, she would leave; the director of systems at Tadiran Telecom, Leah Ashkenazy, an 18-year veteran in the field of computers; and deputy director in charge of operations and director of information systems at Nice, Carmela Avner, who previously worked at EDS, Teva and Scitex.
The panel was arranged by Haaretz and Oracle, a company with whom they work a great deal.
They manage without great difficulty to solve the internal contradictions common to the figure of the woman manager: Although they are aware of the "glass ceiling" that prevents women from advancing, they believe that if they want to, they will be able to advance to the job of CEO at a company; they believe that they weren't required to work harder than men in order to achieve their senior status, and that the managerial challenges with which they deal are similar to those dealt with by men. On the other hand, they find it difficult to find a mutual topic for conversation with clients, most of whom are men, but overcome the hurdle by talking about books and films.
No connection to motherhood
Women serve as managers of information systems today, says Flora Levin, because of the advantages inherent in working in front of a computer. "You don't have to use force or authority on anyone, you can work from home, the hours are flexible - it attracts many young women," she says.
"The area of computers has developed mainly during the past decade," adds Annie Zarbiv. "Since the 1990s, it was clear that women can work in technological fields, many women have managed to achieve senior positions."
Nevertheless, they are quick to say their greatest advantage is not their technological expertise, but rather their administrative talents."I get embarrassed when they ask me to recommend anti-virus software. It's not my field of expertise"' says Carmela Avner. "I am familiar with administrative processes, I know how to manage people - that's where I excel."
Leah Ashkenazy agrees: "The job of a manager of information systems is clearly an administrative job. The technology part doesn't interest me. What does interest me are the needs of the organization and my ability to support these needs."
"Even CEOs who were once outstanding development people no longer deal with development," says Zarbiv. "The are involved in managing the organization, managing manpower, making decisions. The same thing is happening with us."
However, at senior levels of administration, the differences can now be discerned, even among the women themselves. Ashkenazy, for example, insists that women in senior management must work harder, and overcome higher hurdles than do men. "We are different in that we are `the other,'" she says. "Anyone entering a board meeting here will immediately notice that I'm the only woman. Only for that reason do I have to excel all the time."
Levin and Zarbiv reject this position. "The expectations are the same, and the demands are the same. A manager of my status is expected to be sufficiently forceful, sufficiently opinionated, sufficiently professional. In that context, nobody cares whether I'm a man or a woman," says Levin. Zarbiv agrees: "Women don't have to try harder. They have to do the work, without any connection to the extra burden they bear because of the fact that they are mothers." "How can you just neutralize that?" says Ashkenazy angrily, but she is left without an answer.
One of the issues that preoccupies the women on the panel is creating the first contact with the client, who is usually a man. The lack of a built-in masculine advantage is felt, they say, during initial meetings between the two parties, when the small talk that is meant to relax the atmosphere and break the ice is always about soccer and reserve duty.
"I don't know anything about soccer or army units. There is a hurdle here that has to be overcome, it's a challenge that must be met," says Avner. Ashkenazy agrees. "The men also discover somehow that they served together in the army. And I, with all the best intentions, don't understand soccer."
The small talk, it turns out, is not a negligible issue, and is very important for creating relationships with clients. "When you are a junior programmer and you sit in front of the computer, it doesn't matter which soccer team you root for, or what diapers you use," says Levin. "But when you reach senior administrative positions and meet with suppliers or with clients, there's small talk. You can't get right down to business. And what can we do" We're not British and we don't talk about the weather, we talk about soccer. There's no doubt we have to try harder in order to create the initial human contact."
Zarbiv, who was born and raised in France, doesn't feel the very Israeli need, as she puts it, to talk right off about the army. "I talk with the men about culture, cinema, food and even literature. I have discovered several men who read."
"But not about cigars," calls out Ashkenazy.
"No, but I smoke cigarettes, I can talk to them about that."
Although the percentage of woman CEOs is small, the panel participants claim that it depends mainly on them whether they can achieve this. "The real question is not whether we can achieve the position of CEO, but whether we want to," says Avner. "It's first of all our own decision," adds Ashkenazy. "The meaning of being a CEO is giving up many things. I go through a crisis every few years and ask myself if it's worth it to me to miss out on the things I do because of my job. The answer isn't always easy."
They say their being women doesn't prevent the senior executives from offering them the job of CEO. The consideration is practical only. "I don't know if I have the necessary talents to be the manager of company," says Avner. "But in that sense, I'm no different from the vice president in charge of finances, the vice president in charge of manpower or other executives. Decisions of that nature are made on a practical level."
Although the conversation raised the term "glass ceiling" (which prevents women from advancing within the organization) several times, the four managers insisted on the same line when it came to advancing women when they recruit workers. "I don't engage in affirmative action. There's no such thing for me," says Avner.... "If the worker is good, I'll hire him. The question of an employee is a man or a woman is immaterial to me."
"They say that because women are likely to become pregnant, it's better to give preference to men. That's not true," explains Zarbiv. "A man takes two weeks of vacation each year, another week of sick leave, and afterward, he does a month of reserve duty. That's two months of work that are lost. For that reason, I don't give preference to either men or women. I hire anyone who is suitable, since I'll harm the company if I take a woman just because she's a woman."
Ashkenazy also insists that ability, and ability alone, is what is required of an employee, without regard to gender. "I don't advance women on the spot," she says. "In order to achieve a certain position you need tools, and a work force is such a tool. Every manager knows that he won't be able to make progress if he doesn't choose the best manpower. If I have two candidates, a man and a woman, and the woman is 5 percent less capable than the man, I won't take her just because she's a woman. I take the best, because I want to succeed."
"What we are saying is that we are more loyal to the organization than to the female sex," sums up Levin, but adds: "I must admit that if a woman comes for an interview and tells me that she has a baby at home, it does something to me."
"I think that on the organizational level, it's better to have a balanced mix of men and women in executive positions," says Levin. "I want to believe that we do have an advantage," says Avner. "When I look at a project, I look at wider perspectives than men do. I have seen that I can better predict the needs of the user, the organizational behavior. Especially in the field of technology, when the projects enter at all levels of the organization, this ability is an advantage."
"I agree that for broad and long-range projects there is a need for acrobatic talents, which require that you be more sensitive," says Zarbiv. "But I don't know if I have an advantage in being a woman. There are men with analytic talents like mine, too. On the other hand, there aren't many men like that."
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Though Tajikistan's financial structure was largely protected from the direct effects of the global economic crisis because of its weak integration into the international financial system, in 2009 the country experienced very severe secondary effects. Tajikistan's national economy was heavily dependent on remittances from labour migrants working abroad, and these sharply declined as migrants lost their jobs owing to the spread of the economic downturn in Russia and Kazakhstan. By the end of March, remittances were down an estimated 30%, with a 40% reduction expected by year's end.
The Tajik government drafted a package of anticrisis measures, but most of them, while highly beneficial if implemented, were designed for future needs. Among the long-term proposals was a revival of the vocational-technical education system, which could provide young people with much-needed technical skills. For immediate relief, Tajikistan turned for help to the international community, using the country's position on the front line with Afghanistan and the danger posed if the Afghan insurgency spread across the border. A number of major international financial institutions, including the IMF, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, provided additional assistance, including budget support. Tajik Pres. Imomalii Rakhmon told the UN General Assembly in September that the wealthy and developed countries that had caused the financial crisis should help less-developed countries overcome its effects. Specifically, he asked that debts be partially written off that were accumulated as a result of the crisis. An IMF official visiting Tajikistan at the time retorted that it was the responsibility of the government of every country to manage its own economy.
Effects of the economic crisis became increasingly apparent as the crime rate rose. According to official law-enforcement sources, the crime rate increased 11.6% from January to August. September saw a wave of attacks on currency exchanges, some resulting in the killing of exchange employees. In July a shoot-out between security officers and what was officially described only as an "armed band" took place near Tavildara in north-central Tajikistan, but the importance of this region to the Islamist opposition during the 1992–97 civil war led to speculation that the disturbance might have been connected to the possible return to the area of Mullo Abdullo, a prominent Islamist field commander. Members of the militant extremist Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were believed to be crossing the border from Afghanistan into Tajikistan, raising fears that the influence of extremists in a society shaken by the effects of the economic downturn might grow.
|Quick Facts
|143,100 sq km (55,300 sq mi)
|(2009 est.): 6,952,000
|Chief of state:
|President Imomalii Rakhmon
|Head of government:
|Prime Minister Akil Akilov

subset: commoncrawl


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Hi all-
I'm fairly new around here, though I've lurked for a long time.
Here's my deal: I've had a couple bouts with pretty severe pancreatitis in the past year. My body's been through a ton (including some organ failures, necrosis in the abdomen, hospital-acquired C. diff, etc), and I spent a lot of time on a pure IV feed (weeks/months with no food at all, many more months on limited liquids only).
I can eat solids again now, but between the time spent not eating, the trauma/healing, and pancreatic/absorption issues, I am WAY skinny.
Pancreatic patients need to eat within the following guidelines:
NO alcohol
NO transfats
NO artificial sweeteners
No caffeine
No deep-fried foods
Generally low-fat
Generally not meat-heavy
Minimal dyes
Minimal preservatives
Minimal refined sugar (especially avoid HFCS)
I eat 6-8 times a day. Large volume/bulk is hard on my system, so I eat smaller meals.
I generally eat mostly vegetarian/pescatarian, though I do eat some chicken, pork, etc. I don't eat beef, as it hurts my system. I do fine with most plant fats (nuts, seeds, avocados, vegetable oils, etc) in moderation. i MUST have high calcium intake, as I quickly develop severe calcium deficiencies (which lead to seizures). The more natural and "whole food" the diet, the better; I love food, I love eating, and I am looking for advice! No food allergies or squeamishness, just the doctor guidelines for the pancreas stuff.
So, I challenge you, friends; can you offer me suggestions of delicious things for a single girl to make so I can get back to a remotely normal weight?!


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mkswap - set up a Linux swap area
mkswap [-c] [-vN] [-f] [-p PSZ] [-L label] device [size]
mkswap sets up a Linux swap area on a device or in a file.
(After creating the swap area, you need the swapon command to start using it. Usually swap areas are listed in /etc/fstab so that they can be taken into use at boot time by a swapon -a command in some boot script.)
The device argument will usually be a disk partition (something like /dev/hda4 or /dev/sdb7) but can also be a file. The Linux kernel does not look at partition Id's, but many installation scripts will assume that partitions of hex type 82 (LINUX_SWAP) are meant to be swap partitions. (Warning: Solaris also uses this type. Be careful not to kill your Solaris partitions.)
The size parameter is superfluous but retained for backwards compatibility. (It specifies the desired size of the swap area in 1024-byte blocks. mkswap will use the entire partition or file if it is omitted. Specifying it is unwise - a typo may destroy your disk.)
The PSZ parameter specifies the page size to use. It is almost always unnecessary (even unwise) to specify it, but certain old libc versions lie about the page size, so it is possible that mkswap gets it wrong. The symptom is that a subsequent swapon fails because no swap signature is found. Typical values for PSZ are 4096 or 8192.
Linux knows about two styles of swap areas, old style and new style. The last 10 bytes of the first page of the swap area distinguishes them: old style has 'SWAP_SPACE', new style has 'SWAPSPACE2' as signature.
In the old style, the rest of this first page was a bit map, with a 1 bit for each usable page of the swap area. Since the first page holds this bit map, the first bit is 0. Also, the last 10 bytes hold the signature. So, if the page size is S, an old style swap area can describe at most 8*(S-10)-1 pages used for swapping. With S=4096 (as on i386), the useful area is at most 133890048 bytes (almost 128 MiB), and the rest is wasted. On an alpha and sparc64, with S=8192, the useful area is at most 535560992 bytes (almost 512 MiB).
The old setup wastes most of this bitmap page, because zero bits denote bad blocks or blocks past the end of the swap space, and a simple integer suffices to indicate the size of the swap space, while the bad blocks, if any, can simply be listed. Nobody wants to use a swap space with hundreds of bad blocks. (I would not even use a swap space with 1 bad block.) In the new style swap area this is precisely what is done.
The maximum useful size of a swap area depends on the architecture and the kernel version. It is roughly 2GiB on i386, PPC, m68k, ARM, 1GiB on sparc, 512MiB on mips, 128GiB on alpha and 3TiB on sparc64. For kernels after 2.3.3 there is no such limitation.
Note that before 2.1.117 the kernel allocated one byte for each page, while it now allocates two bytes, so that taking a swap area of 2 GiB in use might require 2 MiB of kernel memory.
Presently, Linux allows 32 swap areas (this was 8 before Linux 2.4.10). The areas in use can be seen in the file /proc/swaps (since 2.1.25).
mkswap refuses areas smaller than 10 pages.
If you don't know the page size that your machine uses, you may be able to look it up with "cat /proc/cpuinfo" (or you may not - the contents of this file depend on architecture and kernel version).
To setup a swap file, it is necessary to create that file before initializing it with mkswap , e.g. using a command like
# dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=65536
Note that a swap file must not contain any holes (so, using cp(1) to create the file is not acceptable).
If no -v option is given, mkswap will default to new style, but use old style if the current kernel is older than 2.1.117 (and also if PAGE_SIZE is less than 2048). The new style header does not touch the first block, so may be preferable, in case you have a boot loader or disk label there. If you need to use both 2.0 and 2.2 kernels, use the -v0 option when creating the swapspace.
fdisk(8) , swapon(8)
Table of Contents


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DescriptionHere's a video from my private collection for you, it was my first attempt to deep throat that I had filmed. The tail was just too thick for me. The video is uncut, of course! :)
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text:
Eager Free celebrates 100 years of service
Books were being hauled around town and checked out from businesses and the school.
But in this week in 1908, the Eager Free Public Library opened as the city�s first public library. It offered more than 4,000 books at 39 W. Main St., which at the time was on the edge of a bustling downtown, said local historian and Arrowhead Library Director Ruth Ann Montgomery.
The community this week is celebrating the library�s 100th anniversary with various activities, including a ceremony at 1 p.m. Saturday at the library, where people are encouraged to dress in 1908-era clothing.
The library was the first in a series of Prairie School libraries designed by the Madison architectural firm of Claude & Starck. In the following 100 years, the only major change to the building was a 1996 addition that doubled the facility�s size. Preparations are being made to expand the library again in coming years.
�It�s unusual for a building that was built that long ago to still be used,� Montgomery said.
In the library�s first years, residents donated books from their personal libraries, she said.
�Most of the books that were checked out were fiction,� she said. �I think people have the idea that people (back then) only read biographies, science or history books, but even in the very earliest day of the public library, fiction was the most popular item.�
The library�s name�Eager Free�comes from Almeron Eager, a prominent local businessman who served in the state Legislature, Montgomery said. When he died in 1902, his will designated that $10,000 be donated to the city to build and maintain a public library.
His will also requested the name of the library in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie, who had been donating $10,000 to communities across the country to build and maintain libraries.
Eager also wanted to leave a personal touch to the library. Designated in his will, a life-size statue of Eager was to be placed at the entrance to the library.
The Eager family remains involved. At least one descendant of Almeron Eager has always been on the library board, including current president Eloise Eager, Montgomery said.
What: 100th Anniversary of the Eager Free Public Library
Where: 39 W. Main St., Evansville
-- 6:30 p.m. today��An Evening of Elocution-1908,� presented by the fourth-grade class of Nancy Greve-Shannon and the fifth-grade class of Stephanie Johnson.
-- 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday�Family game night featuring games of the 1908 era.
-- 10 a.m. Friday�Children�s crafts time, featuring popular crafts of 1908.
-- 1 p.m. Saturday�Celebration ceremony with reception.
Last updated: 8:54 pm Thursday, December 13, 2012


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A lawsuit is now targeting Santa Clara's ballot measure to ask voters about building a 49ers stadium.
If Santa clara voters approve Measure J on June 8, officially called the Santa Clara Stadium taxpayer Protection and Economic Progress Act, the city plans to put up to $75 million toward building the stadium.
Our friends at the Examiner tell us the suit, filed by Deborah Bress, aims to strike the measure from the ballot or force the city to change its title and ballot language.
Santa Clara officials strongly support the measure, which would facilitate the team's move from its longtime home of Candlestick Park to a new as-yet-built stadium next Great America theme park for the 2014 season. The team is already comfortably seated in the city for training and administration.
Opponents criticize the planned use of public money to build a stadium for a privately owned football franchise. The lawsuit says the city is low-balling the estimate on how much money it would contribute.
Even if the measure is approved and the the team starts playing their games in Santa Clara, they would remain the San Franciso 49ers. Who would cheer for the the NFL's "Santa Clara 49ers," anyway?


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Vintage Taborame cologne for Men by Creed
9 out of 10 based on 1 ratings
|Design House
|Fragrance Gender
|Men's Fragrance
|Year Introduced
|Available Types
|Henry Creed 3rd Generation
|Bottle Designer
|Scent Classification
|Fragrance Notes
Popularity Total Hits: 12711
Voting Results
Scent Sillage: soft
based on 2 users opinions
Scent Longevity: 1-3 hours
based on 2 users opinions
Season: spring
based on 2 users opinions
Audience: 26-55
based on 2 users opinions
Occasion: night
based on 2 users opinions
Vintage Taborame Creed - Description
Fragrance Vintage Taborame cologne for Men by Creed was introduced in 1875. Creed Vintage Taborame is classified as Chypre fragrance. Scent notes of Vintage Taborame Creed include top notes of citrus fruit, citrus bergamia, middle notes of pepper and base notes of oak moss, sandalwood, ambergris. Creed Vintage Taborame fragrance composition is a creation of Henry Creed 3rd Generation.
Vintage Taborame cologne for Men by Creed 9 out of 10 based on 1 ratings and 2 user reviews.
Vintage Taborame Creed - Full Story
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Vintage Taborame Creed - User Opinions and Reviews
Date Added: 03/09/2015Creed Vintage Taborame is extremely powerful and a just a little goes a long long way... the deep mysterious vibe this has with leathery opulence is magnificent. Its a completely different smell to the original Tabarome i also have.by Clarence
Date Added: 25/03/2013This is a dark, rich, ponderous fragrance, a bottle will last you a VERY long time!!! Good projection, outstanding lasting power. One of Creed's finest. Literally mind blowing.by Polar John
Total User Opinions: 2
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text:
The Human Rights Council's special rapporteur, Richard Falk, urged the international community to boycott 13 companies benefiting from business with Israeli settlements [2], the United Nations reported on its website on Thursday."Businesses should not breach international humanitarian law provisions," Falk said in a statement during the U.N. General Assembly aimed at discussing international issues concerning the Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories."They might otherwise be subject to criminal or civil liability, which could extend to individual employees," he warned. The rapporteur named the companies, Caterpillar Incorporated, Veolia Environment, G4Sm, The Dexia Group, Ahava, the Volvo Group, Riwal Holding Group, Elbit Systems, Hewlett Packard, Mehadrin, Motorola, Assa Abloy and Cemex, as violating human rights for their linked business with Israeli settlements. "The scale of Israel's settlement enterprise, especially the massive financial investment in it, appears to confirm Israel's intention to retain control over much, if not all, of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."These companies according to Falk have "to implement its international human rights and humanitarian law obligations and certify that private business conducting operation in Palestine were accountable for any activities that may affect Palestinians' rights."
Falk, who blamed Israel for not making any efforts in cooperating with his humanitarian goals in Palestinian territories, said that Israeli settlements have control over 40 percent of the West Bank. [3]In his report, he said that around 600,000 Israeli citizens had already transferred in Palestinian territories [4] and that an estimate of 200,000 had settled in East Jerusalem.A record of 15,000 people made up the "settler population" in 2011, he added. The Israeli settlements-linked businesses may have been put-up in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, he said, urging an advice from the International Court of Justice.Falk, assigned on the current situation of human rights in Palestine, said that unless these profiteers brought their business operations in line with international human rights and humanitarian law should be reprimanded and forced to take necessary actions.The Fourth Geneva Convention is a treaty signed to protect the rights of civilians in war zone countries and areas.
[1] http://www.syndigate.info
[2] http://www.albawaba.com/news/jewish-voice-peace-hails-growing-israeli-support-settlement-boycott
[3] http://www.albawaba.com/news/us-calls-settler-violence-%E2%80%98terrorism%E2%80%99-what-will-it-mean-ordinary-west-bankers-439017
[4] http://www.albawaba.com/editorchoice/un-palestine-israel-432326
[5] http://www.alarabiya.net/english


text:
East Providence, R.I. — To celebrate 30 years of developing plastic bearings, igus has retrofitted a car with 56 of its iglide bearings and sent the vehicle off on a multi-continent journey to showcase their benefits in demanding applications. The components have been fitted into all areas of the car, including the pedals, alternator, window regulators, convertible top, gearshift, and more. The company says these come on top of the 200 million plastic iglide bearings that were already installed in cars and trucks just last year.
During the 20-country journey, the company will be showcasing some of the main benefits of its plastic bearings, which include:
- Increased wear resistance to tribologically optimized plastic compound, designed to withstand high stresses.
- Resistance to dirt, oil, and chemicals, pressure resistance and shock absorption, all of which make them good choices for use in the chassis, engine compartment and gearbox.
- A corrosion-free, self-lubricating and silent operation, which also makes them suitable for door hinges and other moving parts.
- Lower weight than metal bearings, which can contribute to a vehicle's overall lightness, reducing fuel consumption.
To learn more, visit www.igus.com.
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text:
I think Halloween is kind of geared towards women. If you're a guy trying to find a Halloween costume that's "sexy," there are not a lot of options. You can be like a Johnny Depp pirate, a cowboy or maybe like Aladdin or something dumb. On the other hand, women have sexy everything. I mean EVERYTHING.
The Halloween store I was in the other day had to have had over 100 "sexified" women's costumes. From the classics like French Maid, Devil, and Police Officer, to sexy versions of super heroes, the Mario Bros. and food items. That's right, sexy food. When it comes to women's Halloween costumes, literally ANYTHING can be made super sexy.
But do women want all these hot costumes? As a man I'm obviously a big fan of looking at them, but maybe a girl just wants to be a regular pirate? I'm not saying women aren't hot in a regular costume, but hopefully you understand what I mean when I say "sexified."
So ladies, I'm curious, are you going to rock an extra sexy version of a costume, or be a little more conservative? Let me know in our poll below, or take the poll here to get points!


text:
Author has written 4 stories for Naruto, Martin Mystery, and Luna Online.
Welcome 2 my profile! ^_^ (God knows it needs an update >.>)
Somethings about me... well I'm the typical some- what sterotypical american:
Fat, lazy, smart, and always with a smile on my face. ^o^ Bite me!
But to get into more specifics: I'm a believer in astrology. I would love to become an astrological psychologist (I think that's what the occupational name is called). I also love doing puzzles. The best kind of puzzles are logic, math, and whodunits. I'm very into many kinds of religions, and I'm currently looking into Wicca. I love all kinds of tv shows whether from the U.S., Japan, or Canada (They been making some kickass shows). More specifically these shows: Umineko no naku koro ni (guess which country that's from), Naruto, Martin Mystery (made in Canada... yeah I know), Air Gear, and Total Drama Series (Also Canadian). There are more but... I think of them. I love books too (yeah I'm a nerd, >.>). These as examples: Twilight series (yeah I'm a fan, shut up!), Pretty little liars, and Uglies series. Yeah still more but can't think of them. Well I think that tells quite a bit about me... or something close.
Story Progress:
Call Waiting: Hiatus (may just delete).
Wake up call: In all honesty Naruto has really lost my interest, but I'll be probably rewriting the series and getting back too it...eventually.
Show off: I didn't expect to delay it this long, but I'm geeting back to. Chap.2 to is already being written.
Underneath on fictionpress.net: Need to revise and start on chap. 2. Here's the link: http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2747205/1/Underneath
|Anime/Manga Kuroshitsuji


text:
Page 3 of 3
Japanether's Vanek emerges from the percussion lair, and bassist Matt Reilly descends from the "River House" where he plucked at the bathtub bass.
"There's a lot of good culture going on here, a strong work ethic," Vanek says. "A community of people actually doing something — that's attractive to be around. When we're playing, we're playing the same way a child would play. It's for no other reason than to get out of yourself and participate, something that the end result is fun. A lot of musicians and players lose that idea. .... You should be able to play and have fun with limited means. That's the challenge this Music Box provides."
Days before Quintron unveiled his final compositions with the current iteration of his Shantytown Orchestra, artists from The Music Box gather one last time to revisit their creation.
"There's something about this space that turns adults into children and children into musicians," Pennington says. "There's really nothing else like that."
Curry says the challenge in building Dithyrambalina, what she says will be a musical "diminutive mansion," is holding on to the "strange, magical feeling" that kept The Music Box alive. Whether that will include a cathedralesque frame, or dozens of musicians playing simultaneously in a partial amphitheater, or serving as a pitstop and meeting point for street parades is yet to be determined.
"I want to build this kind of classical yet spontaneous and newly envisioned Victorian, New Orleans mansion," she tells Gambit. "Something so it's really both a gargantuan and very human scale."
When asked what will happen to the structures and instruments at The Music Box once it closes, Martin surveys the village. The gamelan, she says, or some version of it, will likely move into Dithyrambalina. Quintron suggests it could be part of an elaborate doorbell system, with different ringtones for each room. The possibilities seem endless.


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BSE causes progressive degeneration of the nervous system in cattle resulting in changes in temperament, such as nervousness or aggression; abnormal posture; lack of coordination and difficulty in rising; decreased milk production; or loss of body weight despite continued appetite. Early in the clinical course of the disease, symptoms may be slight, undetectable or unrecognizable. Not all affected cattle display all signs of the disease.
To assist in the recognition of clinical signs at all stages, the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in the U.K., one of four OIE Reference Laboratories, has placed video clips on its Web site that can be accessed by the general public to increase awareness around the world.


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Former Del Norte High School wide receiver Cody Hoffman capped off his storied college career at Brigham Young University in the Fight Hunger Bowl in San Francisco on Friday night.
But BYU lost to the University of Washington 31-16 as Bishop Sankey ran for 95 yards and two scores to tie Washington's career touchdown record.
Keith Price added a 16-yard TD pass to Austin Seferian-Jenkins, and John Ross returned a kick 100 yards for another score to help the Huskies (9-4) win their most games since going 11-1 in 2000.
Taysom Hill threw for 293 yards and ran for 133 yards and a score for the Cougars (8-5), who had their four-game bowl winning streak snapped. Hoffman, who is the Cougars career leader in receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns, led BYU with 12 catches for 167 yards.
See Tuesday's Triplicate for more on Cody Hoffman from the Fight Hunger Bowl.
- The Associated Press contributed to this article


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Dark Matter, 2010
Installation, Photography, Sculpture & Video, Dimensions Variable, Duration Variable
Dark Matter
curated by Manuel Acevedo
Dark Matter focuses on the social umbrella inherent to ritual, structural and artistic evolution as a keystone to the significant influences by people of color in contemporary visual culture. NASA defines dark matter as an undetectable structure that emits electromagnetic radiation, or light. This structure never emits sufficient light for direct detection, yet the traces of its presence can be indirectly detected in peculiar ways, such as in the marked gravitational pull on visible light sources.
As a subject, Dark Matter is shadowy, grotesque, peripheral, and extends itself through the human body into a space of abjection. This exhibition explores the photographic and time-based works of seven contemporary artists: Irvin Morazan, Germen Pitre, Terry Bobbie, Elia Alba, Heidi Kumao, Rajhamal Kahlon and Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz. Symbolically, the works and artistic processes underscore these concerns through performative art practices, re-constructive notions of identity, encryptions, and re-framed histories of indigenous peoples and their post-colonial past.
Rajhamal Kahlon's project, Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada was performed at Artist Space in 2008. It explores the transformed and grotesque body within historical moments of crisis. She deals with events addressing the post-colonial conditions of her subject matter, transforming the body into a vehicle of physical experimentation and brutalization.
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz's performances examine gender identity through parody and subversion of feminine identity in speech, gestures, and dress. Si Te Dejara, is a self-portrait exploring the Madonna as a feminine icon. She subverts the icon's stereotypical "passive" nature, while at the simultaneously being forced fed by handfuls of rice.
Heidi Kumao engages viewers with "low tech" cinematic machines composed of rhythm, light and shadows. Each device tells a silent story, as it opens into a projection of a childhood scene or dream.
Terry Boddie's locks of hair poetically connect to a myriad of cultures consider hair an important part of human existence, possessing spiritual and religious properties. He applies a cipher-like scheme to create an alphanumeric message in his large-scale digital images.
Elia Alba reconstructs the human form from living models. The "soft sculpture" made from actual body measurements and photographic texture maps that are transferred onto muslin finely stitched together. The hollowed three-dimensional busts of her subjects have an allusive demeanor.
Irvin Morazan's public performances mix pre-Columbian mythologies and Latin American hip-hop sounds with costumes and headdresses that embody the resurrection of ancient deities; reminiscent of characters from Alejandro Jodorowsky's film Santa Sangre.
German Pitre uses textured materials, removing the inner stuffing of toy animals and creatures to present them as large-scale photographs. He works mostly with large, black painted surfaces, building up his narratives on canvas and cloth. The faces and bodies of the dismembered toys appear as alien at first then seem orbit a larger, dark space.


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The Kansas supreme court has agreed to consider the appeal of a gay teenager who was sentenced to nearly two decades in prison for consensual oral sex, according to a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday.
Matthew R. Limon was sentenced to 17 years for having sex with a 14-year-old boy in February 2000. Limon was 18 at the time, and he and the other male teen were students at a school for developmentally disabled youth in Miami County, Kan.
Under Kansas law, consensual oral sex between two teens is a lesser crime if the younger teenager is 14 to 16 years old, if the older teenager is under 19, if the age difference is four years or less, if the sex is consensual, if there are no third parties involved, and if the two teenagers "are members of the opposite sex." Such "Romeo and Juliet" laws exclude gay teens.
This is the second time that Limon's case has been sent to the Kansas supreme court for review. In July 2002, the court refused to consider the case, and the ACLU asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear it. The high court sent the case back to a Kansas appeals court, ordering it to reconsider in light of its decision last summer in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down sodomy laws. In January, the appeals court again upheld Limon's conviction.
"The only reason Matthew Limon is still in prison today is because he's gay," said Tamara Lange, a staff attorney with the ACLU Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, which represents Limon. "The Kansas supreme court has an opportunity to correct the grave injustice that has been done to this young man and the mockery that his sentence makes of the equal protection guarantees in the Constitution."
The earliest that the Kansas supreme court is likely to hear arguments in the case will be in August.


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Listen To Music Online For Free - Legally
If you forgot your iPod at home, or are squeamish about file sharing, you can still listen to great digital music online simply by plugging in your headphones or turning up your speakers. Mercora.com is a hip peer-to-peer radio network composed almost entirely of music resident on people's computers. It's legal because you don't actually download the files.
The music is free, CD-quality, and like the illegal downloading sites, the collection is massive.
I'm a fan of the site because of its mission to uphold the letter and spirit of music copyright law by paying performance royalties to organizations that represent songwriters and music record labels. Everybody wins!
Mercora supports Internet Explorer version 6.0 and later and Mozilla Firefox version 1.03 and later. Works on PCs.


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Riddle was cut by Bellator this week after pulling out of a fight for undisclosed reasons. The situation marks another low for the 27-year old who was, at one point, considered a solid prospect based on a 5-1 record in his first six professional appearances (with all of the wins coming in the UFC). He would also be on a four-fight winning streak had he not tested positive for marijuana use after two victories in the UFC, the latter of which resulted in his release from the organization. Riddle will fight again but it won't be for a big promotion. Think Legacy FC for example. If he can clean up his act, he could be back in the UFC in 2-3 years as long as his performances support the signing. Otherwise, it looks like he will have sadly washed out before ever truly entering his prime or delivering on his promise.
Welcome back to the 10-Point Must! Every week I'll give my thoughts on ten topics from the past seven days with hopes the readership will contribute their takes as well in the Comments section. This time around, subjects range from a few new match-ups to the UFC's decision to entertain a new division to, of course, the fallout from UFC 167. (Photos by USA Today Sports Images)
Front-Page Photo Credit: Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sp
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Before I delve into the final showdown last night, I have to share two thoughts that were competing for attention in my brain last night moments before the winner was announced.
First, I still can't believe I was on vacation last Wednesday night, the same week that Zac was eliminated. True, he is the definition of crazy-pants, what with his disco dust and blue cake, but I dare you to show me another person this season who's been truer to himself—and one who can somehow make disco work in almost any situation. (Emphasis on "almost any.")
Second, Yigit has a boyfriend?! Ugh, of course. I'm sure gay men and, let's face it, some women, are still hurting from that revelation.
Okay, now that I've got those things off my chest, let's move on.
Last night's finale opened with the same offensive sentiments that left a bad taste in some of your mouths last week. "Zac is an annoying little fairy," Morgan said, kicking his "like a little girl" insult up a notch. Is Morgan actually homophobic? The (well-edited) video evidence might make some of you think so, but "ignorant moron with no tact" is probably the description we can all agree upon.
After Morgan spouted off another insult ("[Zac] acted like a bitch and he went home like one."), Gail was on hand to announce the final challenge: Create a progressive four-course dessert menu to serve to 12 elite members in the pastry world. A fairly unsurprising task for a finale, but what came next was
a good and shocking twist.
Downstairs waiting in a bordello, er, restaurant, Johnny tried his best to get into peer mentor role, as he swirled his cocktail and revealed that pastry pros Sherry Yard, Claudia Fleming and Elizabeth Faulkner would serve as the finalists' sous chefs. I'd say that was the right time for a Danielle facial tick: "That's like being a director and having Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese…it's like HUH?!"
She got Elizabeth Faulkner, while Yigit got Sherry Yard and the pairs got along quite well. (I particularly loved how adorable Yigit and Sherry were.) But Morgan, being the arrogant, insensitive guy that he is was totally rude to Claudia, talking to her like a child, not the, oh I don't know, superstar pastry chef that she is. They may be two different personality types—she's old school, he's chemical-loving—but Morgan could've been paired with a judge who would be deciding his fate, and he'd still create problems. "Will [Claudia] approve or will she just think I'm some ass clown who doesn't belong here?" Morgan wondered. His words; not mine!
Sherry and Yigit had a nice rhythm going, and though I'd like to say the same about Danielle and Elizabeth, it was a little kooky to see the latter woman shelling pistachios. Shouldn't Danielle have been poaching tips from her?
Well, if Danielle was saving Elizabeth's skills for day two, it was a waste, because on the second day, the three finalists were in for yet another surprise: no professional sous chefs. Instead, they used the cookie jar to pick a new assistant from the crop of eliminated contestants through this season. (Seth was, of course, noticeably absent.)
NEXT: Is that karma or just plain sabotage?


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My question may sound trivial but here it goes:
When doing a sample regression by the ordinary least squares method, does the sum (nonsquared! ) of the residuals have to be equal to zero??
Here's what I know. If we have numerous "y observations" per x, one important assumption is that the residuals conditional on a given X follow an identical distribution usually with mean 0 (which also suggests that the sum of the residuals is 0)
Σ e_ij= 0 where j is the iterating term and where
e_ij = (Yj - Y(estimated)) for a given X_i
However when we do a sample regression we usually have one Y observation per X. With the ordinary least squares method we try to :
min Σ (e_i)^2
Does this however mean that the sum of the residuals will be equal to 0?
Σ e_i = 0 ??
Ah that's great thank you
Advertise on Talk Stats


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LORAIN — One group is working to increase safety and business downtown by developing a zero-tolerance policy for panhandling and loitering.
Jim Long, president of the board of the Lorain Growth Corp., said that while panhandling isn't a major problem in the city, it does affect area businesses. He said the Lorain Growth Corp., in its efforts to promote area business, is distributing "No Loitering/No Panhandling" signs to business owners, who will post the sign on their doors.
The signs were paid for by business owner Jon Veard, who started posting the signs last year, according to Long.
Veard suggested a zero-tolerance policy during a meeting of citizens and business owners, according to a news release.
"The only way we can handle this problem in our community is to have no tolerance for this sort of behavior," he said via the news release.
Long said the Lorain Growth Corp. will distribute the signs today. The signs serve as a warning that loitering and panhandling will not be tolerated in the downtown area, and anyone being reported as bothering patrons or panhandling will be prosecuted using city ordinances already in place.
Loiterers and panhandlers could face misdemeanor charges.
Long said the Lorain Growth Corp. has the support of the Lorain Police Department.
He added that the signs will serve as a preventative measure, especially with the holidays approaching.
"(Panhandling) affects people who intend to shop," he said. "Some of the people feel that they don't want to get out of their cars and shop."
He said many of the panhandlers are not homeless and are coming from other cities, like Cleveland.
Supporting the project is the owner of Club Copa, Jose Ramirez, a safety committee member who designed the sign.
The Lorain Growth Corp. and the city's downtown businesses also have been working to develop the Lorain Waterfront District as a viable business district. The group has worked with the city of Lorain to install new, brighter street lights and digital, broadband surveillance cameras downtown, according to a news release.
Contact Chelsea Miller at 329-7123 or firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow her on Twitter @ChelseaMillerCT.


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WEST PLAINS, Mo. – A lack of intensity Tuesday night, Jan. 22, cost the Missouri State University-West Plains Grizzly Basketball team its second loss in Region 16 action this season.
The Grizzlies, 13-9 overall, fell to Region 16 rival State Fair Community College 98-67 at the West Plains Civic Center, dropping their Region 16 record to 1-2. State Fair, 15-6 overall, is now 2-1 in Region 16.
"We didn't come out with the fire and intensity we needed to win this game, and they did," Grizzly Basketball Head Coach Yancey Walker said. "We didn't score through contact, so we stopped attacking the basket. We made them make some tough shots from the outside, but the difference in the score was such that those shots didn't have any repercussions if they missed."
The Grizzlies struggled from the field, hitting only 23 of 60 shots for 38.3 percent. Behind the arc, they hit only three of 13 attempts for 23.1 percent. They fared better at the free throw line, connecting on 18 of 25 attempts for 72 percent, but it wasn't enough to make up for the accuracy of State Fair on the court.
The Roadrunners hit 38 of 70 shots from the field for 54.3 percent and 12 of 23 shots from 3-point rage for 52.2 percent. At the free throw line, they hit eight of 17 for 47.1 percent.
Freshman guards Jonathan Tshibuy and Arroyo Edwards led the Grizzlies in scoring with 18 and 14 points, respectively. The Roadrunners were led by Kenny Chery with 28, Ayo Ojo with 15, Kevin Punter 13, Jacob Williams 11 and Deron Hill 10.
The Roadrunners also outrebounded the Grizzlies 46 to 34 and committed fewer turnovers than the Grizzlies, 11 to 16. The Grizzlies had four steals and one block, while the Roadrunners had six steals and three blocks.
"We don't have time to sulk," Walker said of his team's loss while pointing to Friday's 7 p.m. game against Quakerdale Prep of New Providence, Iowa. "Quakerdale Prep gave us everything we wanted at Coffeyville in November, so we have to be ready to go on Friday."
For more information about the Grizzly Basketball program, visit the team's website at http://wp.missouristate.edu/grizzly/bb.htm or call the Grizzly Basketball office at 417-255-7993.


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If civic-minded Giants hero Harry Carson could do it all over again, he wouldn't
About twenty-five years ago, minutes before kickoff of Super Bowl XXI between the Denver Broncos and New York Giants, five members of the Broncos walked out to midfield for the pregame coin toss. Only one Giant did the same.
Harry Carson was 33 years old at that point, a team captain and 11-year veteran. The idea to send him out alone belonged to the Giants' coach, Bill Parcells. It was one of his little psychological games: One of our guys equals five of your guys.
Story Continued Below
Carson was used to standing alone, anyway. During the early part of his career, the Giants teams he played on were putrid. He had been a beacon of talent and dignity when the once-proud franchise couldn't get out of its own way. On the field, as the inside linebacker, he would have to stand his ground in the chaotic scrum of the play while enemy blockers hurtled toward him.
He looked the part of a football player. He was 6-foot-2, with a classic athlete's build: broad shoulders, accentuated by his boxy shoulder pads, that tapered down to a thin waist. His dark face, distinguished by his sharp jaw and high cheekbones, was smeared with eye black, and hidden behind the full-cage facemask that was near-universal among linebackers in the 1980s. In the late afternoon light of Southern California's Rose Bowl, he was the picture of a padded-up warrior leading his troops into battle.
Carson lost the coin toss—he always did, the running joke around the Giants' locker room went. But the Giants handily won the game, and Carson took his place in the pantheon of Giants legends: captain, champion and, as of 2006, Pro Football Hall of Famer.
I SPENT A DAY WITH CARSON IN SEPTEMBER AT HIS HOME in bucolic, well-to-do Franklin Lakes, N.J.. He lives in a spacious center-column brick colonial house, around the corner and up the street from Phil Simms, the quarterback of the 1986 team and now a prominent football analyst. Carson is in excellent physical shape, a shade over his playing weight of 237 pounds. He greeted me warmly, and we chatted for several hours.
This was before it was reported, earlier this month, that Carson was considering running for Congress in Northern New Jersey's 5th Congressional district, which includes most of Sussex County along with parts of Bergen, Passaic, and Warren. The incumbent is Republican Scott Garrett, one of the most conservative members of the New Jersey delegation, who has amassed ratings of 100 from the American Conservative Union throughout his career.
The news came as no surprise to me, not only because Carson possesses so many of the attributes of a natural-born leader, but because he's so clearly unsatisfied with the customary lot of a retired football hero. He believes he can do a lot of public good, and he is restless.
He had just published a memoir called Captain for Life. He gravitated to the captain role with the Giants, and is fondly remembered as the wizened Papa Bear of the '86 team.
Since he retired, he has been one of the most visible advocates for health benefits for former players, and for raising awareness about football's concussion crisis—an issue that hits home for him because of the post-concussion syndrome he has lived with for two decades. When he got elected to the Hall of Fame in 2006, Carson turned his induction speech into a message about what he sees as the N.F.L.'s negligent treatment of its former players.
I asked him about his solo walk to midfield before the Super Bowl.
"As I'm walking out, I realize, 'Damn, I'm representing the whole organization," he told me. "I'm representing all Giant fans. I'm one person, and I'm representing everyone."
"All the guys [in college] at South Carolina State, all the guys in high school, all the guys at the Florence [S.C.] Boys Club. I had navigated my way to be that person on the field, and I was representing all of them. To me, that's the significance—I'm sort of bound by all those relationships."
If being a politician, in the most basic sense, is about wanting to represent people, to lead them, to be the person who binds people together, it's not surprising that it would appeal to Carson.
But the second reason news of his potential Congressional run didn't surprise me was this: Carson has always harbored a deep ambivalence about the career path he fell into, and has long resisted being defined as a football player. This goes beyond the old "more than just a jock" cliché. It's about feeling trapped in an identity, both in terms of how the outside world sees him, and, because of the neurological damage football has wrought, how he processes the outside world. Football defines him from the outside in, and from the inside out.
"Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't do it again," Carson told me, a realization he took years to come to, but which crystallized for him with the writing of his book. It's a realization he is desperate to publicize as a cautionary tale.
CARSON HAS BEEN OUTSPOKEN ON CONCUSSIONS AND THE DANGERS of football for a while. He was on the front lines of the issue long before Alan Schwarz of The New York Times wrote a series of articles bringing into the mainstream the idea that America's favorite game has permanent, devastating consequences for its practitioners at a much higher rate than anyone had cared to think.
By Carson's estimate, he sustained between 12 to 18 concussions during his playing days, but neither he nor anyone else thought much of it at the time. It's a fairly common story you hear from football players about subjecting themselves to risks they didn't realize at the time were risks: They'd get dinged up, they'd get their bell rung, they'd see stars—then they'd clear out the cobwebs and get back on the field. The disturbing visualization of just what a brain injury entailed wasn't in the public consciousness. So Carson got dinged up throughout his whole career and he soldiered on, for 13 years.
"Players play," Carson told me, reciting a mantra of the N.F.L.'s culture of machismo that has come under scrutiny in recent years because of the concussion crisis. "And players are very insecure. They don't want anyone else to get out there and show that they can do the job as well as they can."
With Carson's concussions came headaches, but those too didn't seem more alarming than, say, a sore knee or back. Players ache all over, but they play through it or else risk losing their livelihood.
Other warning signs, much more alarming, were shuttled to the back of Carson's mind as well. Like the depression and suicidal thoughts Carson confessed to having in Captain for Life. A couple of times in the early '80s, while crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge from the Meadowlands back to his old house in Ossining, Carson would find himself thinking of driving over the side.
"I had these thoughts of, 'Why don't you just drive the car off the bridge? Instead of staying in the lane, why don't I just accelerate off the bridge?' And I thought about it a couple times. But then I was like, 'Nah. I got my daughter—what would happen to her?'"
After games, while his teammates celebrated, Carson often felt at an emotional remove. Sure, he took part in the celebration—it was Carson, after all, who famously drenched Bill Parcells with Gatorade after every Giants win in 1986. But the outward expression of joy masked an inner sadness.
"I sort of noticed there were times that I'd be down for no reason," he told me. "Like when you play a game and win a game, and everyone around you is jubilant, but you got this cloud over you, and you don't really feel what they're feeling. You want to be happy but you're feeling just down in the dumps."
Carson retired after the 1988 season, the depression having long since subsided. (Carson said it hasn't resurfaced to nearly the same degree since those days.) But his problems weren't over, as he discovered when he went into broadcasting immediately after he stopped playing.
He'd suddenly lose his train of thought mid-sentence, on air. He'd forget or mispronounce players' and coaches' names he knew that he knew. So he went to a specialist and endured a series of brain tests, which themselves gave him headaches. He was diagnosed with Post-Concussion Syndrome in 1990. He has been living with the after-effects ever since, like memory lapses, headaches, migraines and sensitivity to noise and light.
The diagnosis brought a measure of relief: At least Carson knew what was afflicting him. Now, he follows doctors' advice by taking supplements like fish oils and doing mental exercises to keep himself sharp. To compensate for his memory lapses, he is meticulous about writing down appointments and names.
But the diagnosis also brought with it a terror of what lies in store for him. Because in the years since then, medical research has conclusively determined a link between playing football and dementia, depression and other cognitive problems.
A 2007 study showed that N.F.L. players who reported sustaining three or more concussions were three times as likely to have depression as those who didn't report any concussions. A 2009 study determined that former N.F.L. players are between five and 19 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and other similar diseases than the general population, depending on age group.
The studies confirmed empirically what Carson saw in himself and his peers. He saw his friend, Ron Johnson, a former Giants running back, deteriorate to the point that his wife had to take his car keys away because he couldn't find his way home. He saw "Iron" Mike Webster, among the best centers ever, a man with whom Carson literally butted heads countless times in high-speed collisions, develop mental problems so severe that he would urinate in his kitchen oven and put himself to sleep by zapping himself with a Taser gun. ("I feel somewhat responsible for having played a role," Carson told me.)
He saw safety Dave Duerson, who he played in several Pro Bowls with and was later a member of the 1990 Giants championship team, shoot himself in the chest so that researchers could study his brain. They found an advanced form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative cognitive disease linked to repeated head trauma that most football fans are familiar with by now. It was the same condition found in former Eagles safety Andre Waters, who committed suicide at 44 and was found to have brain tissue in the condition of of an 85-year-old's.
"The only thing I know is, I know what other people have gone through, and I see the end result," Carson said. "And I know those other people have played football."
"Hopefully I live until I'm 90 and pass away of something else. But if there's nothing I can do about it, at least you have a book about what I thought about it before everything went downhill. If and when that time comes, I think it will open up the eyes of a lot of people, because I've been very vocal and upfront about it."
"God's honest truth, I started playing because I saw the girls flock to the football players, and I thought to myself, 'I wanna be a part of that,'" he told me.
"And so I went out for the team, and I quit. But I hated the taste of quitting in my gut—that people looked at me as a quitter. Now, if I'd never have stepped on the football field, or never even tried, different story. But you quit. So you have to redeem yourself. So I tried to redeem myself. I played Boys Club football and then high school football."
He was very good at it, and football became his ticket to college and out of poverty in Florence. And then the Giants drafted Carson in the fourth round, and there was no turning back.
Although he played on the defensive line in college, he was immediately moved to inside linebacker by the Giants. (He got a crash course on the position with an assistant coach named Marty Schottenheimer, who went on to a long head coaching career himself and whose son was until recently the offensive coordinator of the New York Jets.)
As the weak-side inside linebacker, Carson was an anchor of a run defense that, from 1981 through 1987, held opponents to an astoundingly low average of 3.59 yards per carry. Lawrence Taylor, Carson's teammate at outside linebacker, was the more exciting, talented player and got more accolades. But Carson was the rock, both on the field and in the locker room.
But he never relished the physicality of the sport. Rather, what appealed to him about the game was the sense of order and camaraderie. Carson had family members who were in the military, and was a proud member of ROTC in high school. Amid the poverty of Florence, the idea of putting on a uniform carried with it an automatic dignity. It made you someone.
This created one of the many paradoxes that define Carson: A man who claims to detest the violence of the sport grew up wanting to be a soldier, and then became a Hall of Fame inside linebacker.
"I was never one of those roughhouse guys," he told me. "Even though, physically, I have the size, internally, I'm not built that way. I'm more of a gentle, tender, nurturing person—my wife will tell you."
He added, "I never really enjoyed hitting anybody. What I loved was, in the course of playing with those ten other guys, me doing my job. From a leadership standpoint, from a teammate standpoint, I was able to contribute. But from a personal standpoint? No, it was never fun for me."
Referring a famous clip of Lawrence Taylor, his fellow linebacker, whose gleeful lust for the violent part the game was a central part of his and the team's public persona, Carson said, "Everyone sees Lawrence, and Lawrence goes, "Let's go out there like a bunch of crazed dogs! And I'm like, 'No.'"
"I went out there with a kind of matter-of-fact attitude of, 'OK, we have a mission to accomplish. And let's go out there and achieve that mission."
It's tempting to characterize Carson's attitude toward his football career as regretful, but it's probably more accurate to call it ambivalent.
On a wall of his den is an oversize poster of Carson pictured straight-on in a menacing pose, in full inside-linebacker regalia. In his living room are various mementos from his career, including a helmet from the 1986 season. On the mantle of the fireplace is his Hall of Fame bust.
The story of Carson's 2006 selection to the Hall of Fame is illustrative of his pride, sensitivity, and resentment of the idea that football alone can define him. He had been rejected by the voters for years, which became a flashpoint for indignation from Giants fans and turned Carson, to his great dismay, into a pitiable figure. The yearly ritual of getting rejected, of seeing people around him get their hopes up only to see them dashed, became too much for him to bear. In 2004, he wrote a letter to the Hall of Fame asking for his name to be removed from the ballot. He begged Record sports columnist Vinny DiTrani, who for years had lobbied his fellow Hall of Fame voters on behalf of Carson, to drop it. Two years later, he was elected.
I asked him about the bust. How could he be so proud of an honor he had previously written off in his mind?
"When I look at that bust, I don't look at me," he said. "I look at all the guys I played with who inspired me, and who made me the best player I could be."
During the season, Carson appeared regularly as a commenter on an MSG Network show about the Giants. Since he retired, he has been an honorary captain at Giants games several times. A few days before we spoke, he had been honored at midfield by Giants fans along with the rest of the '86 championship team. For a man who resents being defined by football, he sure spends a lot of time around the game.
Making things somewhat more complicated is a revelation from his book about having failed a drug test for cocaine during his final season. Carson insists he never used any drug, and harbors bitterness that so few people in the organization believed him at the time. He remains suspicious that someone in the organization might have gone so far as to engineer the whole thing.
"I think they were afraid I was gonna go into broadcasting, because there were [networks] seeking me out once they found out it was my last year," he told me. "They knew I was gonna speak my mind, and sometimes, I don't have a filter in terms of speaking my mind. And I felt that they were deathly afraid that I was gonna say something disparaging about the team—sort of like what Tiki Barber did after he left."
He then paraphrased a conversation he had with George Martin, his longtime fellow co-captain of the Giants, in which Martin said he had heard from someone else in the organization along the lines of, "The Giants are gonna fuck you before you have the opportunity to fuck them."
Yet Carson remains close, in many ways, with the game and the organization. Carson clarified that "it wasn't the New York Giants organization" he suspected had been out to get him, but just a person or two in it. And he said that for the most part, the organization—especially late, longtime owner Wellington Mara—had been good to him.
"Yeah, I feel conflicted," he told me. "And it is what it is. I did what I did. I played, and I can't take it back. But if I had to do it over again, I wouldn't. But those guys that I played with, they're my brothers. Those coaches—we're all part of the same bond. But I'm glad you asked the question because nobody ever thinks about that."
THERE ARE CERTAIN FOOTBALL-PLAYER HABITS Carson can't shake. He'll get to a restaurant with his wife, he says, and will switch into inside-linebacker mode, surveying the scene to see where people are sitting, and where the gaps are. A couple weeks before I spoke with him, he told me, some loud kids sitting nearby at the local Chili's had nearly triggered a migraine before he and his wife moved to another table.
His point was that football is in him, in ways that are sometimes deeply problematic.
He told me that his first marriage deteriorated in part because his ex-wife felt he wouldn't remember things she'd tell him. Was that because Carson wasn't listening? Or was this related to deficiencies wrought by football?
"In times of frustration, she'd say, 'You don't listen to me,'" he said. "And I'd be like, 'I do listen. But I don't hear it. Or I'm not taking what you're saying or analyzing it or storing it.'"
"It causes me to think a little deeper about the cause and effect of certain things. You look at some of the relationships that people who I know have had, and reasons why these relationships have failed. Now, it could be just guys being guys. Or it could be guys that truly don't understand that they're having some neurological things."
Another example:
"One of my childhood friends passed away this morning. And my sister called shortly before you got here. And one of the things that bothers me is, I'm sort of at a point where I don't feel emotion about certain things, like when people die. I feel very sympathetic, but I don't get emotional.
"And I don't know if it's just a fact of life of being where I am. This age where you've seen so many people pass away. Or if it's a neurological deal where you're unable to feel certain emotions. And so I get back to thinking about the brain: the brain controls everything."
He elaborated: "I always have to monitor myself, on a regular basis, my state of being, what I'm thinking. And it's a lot of work. Even as I set here and talk to you, I have to visually see every word that I'm going to say to you before I allow it to leave.
"And I go into these periods where I have problems looking for the words I want to use to convey a point, an I get into those 'umms,' 'you knows,' and all that stuff. So sometimes when I speak to some people, I may not be as sharp. And there are some times when I don't want to engage in conversation with anyone.
"There are certain things that people will never understand. It's very hard to put into words."


text:
So that's how I came to be reading a book on games programming (with an embarrassing title).
Chapter 2, "An Animation Framework" introduces double-buffering, and shows how to implement it in a
JPanel subclass. There's no mention of the fact that Swing provides double-buffering way up in
JComponent. A few pages later, the author switches from AWT-like
repaint-driven drawing to what the author calls "active rendering": calling the painting code directly from the game's main loop. So if you wait long enough, reimplementing double-buffering makes more sense, but in the meantime you're left with a feeling of distrust in the author's skill.
And even when you've waited, you're left wondering if the author knows about
JComponent.paintImmediately, and whether he has some reason to avoid Swing's seemingly far more sophisticated double-buffering. It could be that there is a good reason.
JComponent.paintDoubleBuffered and
JComponent.paintWithOffscreenBuffer are private, so you'd have to accept all the complexity in
JComponent._paintImmediately for dealing with overlapping components. Maybe for games that outweighs the benefits of the more sophisticated double-buffering.
But that's surely a decision worth talking about? If I'd made the decision in some of my code, I'd definitely write a comment. When we're talking about a book, where the programs aren't ends in themselves but examples used to demonstrate and explain techniques, it would seem essential to explain why you aren't didn't make the most obvious choice.
Conversely, coverage of the options for timers and reasons for choosing between them is pretty strong.
Chapters 5 and 6, "An Introduction to Java Imaging" and "Image Loading, Visual Effects and Animation", are pretty good. The former is a whistle-stop tour of various alternatives (and, if you know Java, you'll know there are plenty of alternatives) with some discussion of which you'd choose when. The latter is an equally quick tour of some of the options for rendering and processing images once you have them.
I flipped through the chapters on sound, because I've never had any need for it, nor can I imagine myself doing so. I don't write games, and in real programs, use of sound tends to be a mistake because the user's actually listening to a Haydn string quartet with the volume up really loud so they can hear the subtle articulation... BEEEEP! Well done: you just gave your user a heart attack, and now their monkey brain is panicked, and it's going to take a while for them to calm back down and work out what just happened.
2D games
Chapter 11, "Sprites", describes a simple game, similar to Arkanoid, but without the bricks. The image used for the bat is of a cartoon ant. This not only makes the use of the word "bat" confusing because the image isn't of a table-tennis bat; it also introduces ambiguity with "bat" the animal, because "ant" brings animals to mind. It's almost funny to see the whole chapter stumble over itself, including explanatory notes in several places intended to help the reader cope with a completely self-inflicted wound.
In the same chapter, there's this code:
player = null; // for garbage collection of previous player
player = new ImagesPlayer(...
I find this distressing from an educational point of view. There are cases where the "x = null" idiom can be useful, such as when x is an array element (see the implementation of
ArrayList for an example), or when you're finished with x but about to do a lot of work before you next assign to x (this might be true here, for example, depending on the constructor for
ImagesPlayer). But there's no mention of this at all in the text.
If it's non-obvious enough to be worth a comment, it's non-obvious enough to be worth a good comment.
Chapters 12 and 13 conclude the 2D part of the book. (Yeah, it's a pop-up book from then on. You're so funny.)
If you hadn't already noticed that the book is let down by the poor quality of image reproduction, you really notice around this point — the point where actual games are introduced. Not only is there no color, the images have either been crudely scaled or overly-compressed using some lossy mechanism. It's really hard to see anything. The line drawings are fine; it's the screenshots that are unrecognizable.
3D games / Networking
I stopped reading at this point. I'll come back if and when I have reason to, but as I said at the outset, my interest is really in 2D rendering.
The book suffers from not providing sufficient rationale for design choices. Worse, there's little or no attempt to write reusable classes (or explain why that's impossible or undesirable). The authors idea of reuse appears to be of the copy & paste variety, where the copies get new bodies for private methods such as
gameUpdate and
gameRender, and where you write new boilerplate code for key handling in each game rather than knocking up any kind of system for declaring the keys you're interested in. (There's the occasional
protected method, so it's not like the author's a total C programmer.)
On a related note, the book suffers from what feels to me like an insufficiently clear distinction between general principles and the specifics of implementing the particular game/demo each chapter sets out to build. So not only is it not obvious what code you're supposed to take away as generally useful, it's also not obvious how general-purpose the various ideas are, nor usually what the alternatives are, and how you'd choose between them.
And, as I've said, the quality of image reproduction is truly abysmal.


text:
It is not exciting; it is eggciting! :]
And yes, I would actually like to try soymilk eggnog, as I cannot have enough of their milky counterparts. It is probably a hopeless question, but does anybody know if it even exists as of yet in Sweden?
Yanno, I've never been a fan of eggnog. I blame it on my father, who probably ruined the drink for me by encouraging me to take a sip of his So-Co eggnog, complete with a shot or two of So-Co in it, as a child. I've always disliked the smell, taste, feel, etc of alcohol... So that probably didn't help things.
Who thinks I should try again, as a 20-something adult?
I tend to shy away from dairy because I'm lactose intolerant. If I can find said soy-egg-nog, I might try it. The soy part will keep my husband out of it, at least!
My favorite part of this comic is Jam's face in the last panel. =D
The Chocolate Peppermint is way better than Silk's eggnog. I found the eggnog to be kind of slimy in texture with an odd aftertaste. But if you can find So Delicious brand's coconut milk based eggnog, THAT is yummers! Definitely coconutty, but delicious with a little nutmeg and rum!
For those not in the know, a soymilk version of eggnog isn't difficult to make yourself.
6 oz soy milk, 1 well beaten egg, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, 1 tsp vanilla extract. Blend well.
This makes 1 tall glass. If you wish to truly nog it, add bourbon or rum to taste, I usually find a half-shot per tall glass tastes right. Might curdle soymilk, though. You can also, if you can find it, replace 2 oz of the soy milk with soy cream, to get it "fluffier" when you blend it.
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Frank Zappa in popular culture
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This is a list of tributes and references to the American composer, guitarist, singer, film director, and satirist, Frank Zappa.
Appearances in media[edit]
- Zappa made an appearance on The Steve Allen Show in 1963. This appearance featured Frank demonstrating the wide scope of percussion by playing the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel with drum sticks.[1]
- He made a cameo appearance in the 1968 film starring the Monkees, Head, with a talking cow. He also made a cameo appearance on an episode of the Monkees' TV series entitled "The Monkees Blow Their Minds" (air date: 3/11/68). Here, he was shown "playing" a car by beating it into submission. This is done in a Monkees-style montage to the Zappa song "Mother People" after being interviewed by Monkee Michael Nesmith. Zappa agreed to appear on the show provided he could "be" Nesmith; Nesmith, in turn, liked the idea, so long as he could "be" Zappa. The two wore cheap, exaggerated disguises and the interview was performed as if Mike was Frank and Frank was Mike, in a manner analogous to Ringo Starr's appearance as "Larry the Dwarf, dressed up like Frank Zappa" in 200 Motels.
- He appeared on What's My Line? in 1971, during the show's syndicated run, as a mystery guest.
- Zappa was the host and musical guest of a Season Four episode of Saturday Night Live in October 1978. His odd sense of humor and constant mugging to the camera once led Lorne Michaels to ban this episode.[citation needed] This, however, proved to be temporary as the Zappa episode has been rerun a few times on NBC. In the same show he portrayed Connie Conehead's date. He was also part of another skit, entitled "Night of Freak Mountain", in which Zappa met with a couple of hippies who offered various drugs to him, which he declined, stating "I don't do drugs." The hippies regarded his statement in awe and surprise. As part of the musical performance of "I'm the Slime" (on an earlier episode hosted by Candice Bergen), the transparent screen of a fake television monitor fills up with a slimy green goo.
- He played Attilla the Hunchback in Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre, in the episode titled "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers" (1984).[citation needed]
- He played drug dealer Mario Fuente in episode 19, "Payback" of the TV show Miami Vice first broadcast 14 March 1986.[citation needed]
- Zappa was the voice of the Pope in the 1992 Ren and Stimpy episode "Powdered Toast Man".[citation needed]
- In 2008 a cast of Zappa was installed in Baltimore created by Konstantinas Bogdanas, the Lithuanian sculptor.
- In 1995 a cast of Zappa was installed in the center of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Zappa was immortalized by Konstantinas Bogdanas, the Lithuanian sculptor who had previously cast portraits of Vladimir Lenin.
- In 2002, a bronze bust was installed in a square in Bad Doberan, a small town in the north of Germany, where, since 1990, there has been an annual international festival celebrating the music of Frank Zappa, the "Zappanale".[2]
Things named after Zappa[edit]
In the 1980s, biologist Ed Murdy named a genus of gobiid fishes of New Guinea Zappa after Zappa, stating that he liked "his music... his politics and principles" and that "the name itself is a good one for scientific nomenclature."[3]
Biologist Ferdinando Boero named a phialellid jellyfish Phialella zappai[4] in order to get the chance to meet the musician. A Zappa concert in Genoa focused largely on the jellyfish and on Dr. Boero. A small portion of this concert was released on You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore: Vol. 6 as "Lonesome Cowboy Nando".[5] Zappa stated, "There is nothing I'd like better than to have a jellyfish named after me."[6]
Other species named after Zappa include a fossil snail named Amaurotoma zappa and the Cameroonese spider Pachygnatha zappa, so named because a marking on the female's ventral surface resembles the Zappa mustache.[7] A gene of the bacterium Proteus mirabilis that causes urinary tract infection is named zapA (others are named zapB through zapE).[8]
After his death, an internet campaign to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center led to an asteroid being named in his honor: 3834 Zappafrank, the asteroid having been discovered by Czech astronomers in 1980.[9][10]
- A playable character from the video game Guilty Gear XX, Zappa, is named after Frank Zappa.
- The main character of the 2013 video game Killer Is Dead, Mondo Zappa, is also named after Frank Zappa.
- In late July, 2007, the city of Berlin, at the urging of the MUSIKFABRIK ORWOhaus (musicians community), renamed Street 13 in the Marzahn district (part of the former East Berlin) the "Frank-Zappa-Straße."[11]
- "Frank Zappa and the Mothers" are mentioned in the lyrics of the well known Deep Purple track "Smoke on the Water", which is about the 1971 Montreux, Switzerland fire at a Zappa concert.
- Gov't Mule recorded a song entitled "Left Coast Groovies (For FZ)", included on their debut album released in 1995. The introductory riff is followed by a voice in the background saying "what the fuck", a frequent expression of Zappa's. The song was often introduced in concert with a monologue about Zappa, concluding with the band telling audience members "If you don't like Frank Zappa, get the fuck out".
- ^ Slaven, 1996, Electric Don Quixote, pp. 35–36.
- ^ See Zappanale website.
- ^ Andy Murkin. "A fish called Zappa". Retrieved 2008-05-13.
- ^ Phialella zappai
- ^ Román García Albertos. "Information Is Not Knowledge". Retrieved 2008-05-23.
- ^ Andy Murkin. "Here's your jelly, Frank!". Retrieved 2008-05-13.
- ^ Spider of Destiny
- ^ ZapA (Proteus mirabilis)
- ^ (03834) Minor Planet Name
- ^ Zappafrank
- ^ "Berlin Names Street After Frank Zappa"
- Slaven, Neil (2003). Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa. London: Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-9436-6.


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For RSC, the play's the thing
by Ben Hoyle
MODERN DRESS productions of Shakespeare's plays sacrifice much of his intended impact and risk triteness, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company said at the weekend.
Speaking at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, Michael Boyd said: "You can't divorce the plays from their historical context or the present. But for me you get less juice out of the plays if you set them in the present. You lose shed loads."
Setting a play in a specific contemporary scenario can encourage the audience to draw overly simplistic, distracting links between it and Shakespeare's words, he said.
However there are also, he acknowledged, clear benefits to adapting Shakespeare's work to the present "if you are really alert to the major pitfalls."
"You can gain an enormous amount. The gain is immediacy and availability.
"It's a viable way to go and it has integrity. The problem is that you are stuck with the contemporary references."
The National Theatre staged one of the most provocative modern dress history plays of recent times in 2003, transposing Henry V to Iraq and strewing the stage with the jeeps, machine guns and television cameras. The critics unanimously saluted Adrian Lester's performance as the king but were split over the success of the adaptation.
Mr Boyd belongs in the camp which thinks that giving Shakespeare such a specific fresh context is fraught with difficulties. "I don't think we have gone into Iraq "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" which is the motivation passed on to Hal (the future Henry V by his father Henry IV)."
Directors of Shakespeare have to navigate between three periods- when the play is set, when it was written and when it is performed. Rupert Goold's acclaimed Macbeth, which stars Patrick Stewart as the ruthless Scottish king and opened in the West End last month, is a good example. It is styled after Stalin's Russia, with video projections of troops marching through Red Square and the murder of Banquo carried out on board a packed train carriage but at the same time an essay in the programme emphasises the play's multiple references to the politics of the time, including the recently discovered Gunpowder Plot.
"Shakespeare himself had a very bifocal view," Mr Boyd said. "When he is writing about Athens it's not really about Athens. When he is writing about Egypt it's not about Egypt and when he's writing about the 1400s it's really about the 1590s or the 1600s."
Mr Boyd is credited with revitalising the RSC since he took up his post in 2003.
His crowning achievement has been the Complete Works Festival which saw all of Shakespeare's plays performed in Stratford-upon-Avon in a single year, including an Indian production of A Midsummer Night's Dream spoken in eight languages, an Arab Richard III and a puppet show Hamlet.
The eight Wars of the Roses history plays are Mr Boyd's current project. He has staged warmly reviewed productions of both cycles of four plays in Stratford and next year will present them together in order of composition and then in order of chronological setting.
One of the productions- Richard III- is in modern dress "even though it follows directly on from a medieval Henry VI part III", alerting Mr Boyd to the hazards of drawing too many contemporary parallels.
"I always start from the premise that there's got be a very good reason to try and be very specific culturally outside of Shakespeare's time.
"My approach is to try and imagine that Shakespeare is in the room, to try and get inside his head. Therefore historians and the research they do into the period are very useful to me, helping me to put myself into the religious and political landscape that he might have been in.
"On the other hand if I pretend that I can make myself, or my cast or my audience come with nothing (of the contemporary world) in their heads I would obviously be being foolish. If they (the plays) are to be put on the stage now they have to come from where they came from- Shakespeare's brain- and speak as clearly as they possibly can now."
Times online
October 8, 2007
The administrator has disabled public write access.
Quote:[Mr Boyd belongs in the camp which thinks that giving Shakespeare such a specific fresh context is fraught with difficulties. "I don't think we have gone into Iraq "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" which is the motivation passed on to Hal (the future Henry V by his father Henry IV)."]
I wonder if Mr. Boyd reticence to accept the value of historical relativity has to do with the fact that perhaps he never turns on the telly?--also, has he read anything written by Orwell?
Perhaps he's concerned with Cultural Relativity, another thing altogether. "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" may not be the ultimate end result desired by those who pressed for our involvement in Iraq; but it certainly can be said to be a chief means of distraction for "giddy" minds. [inconstant; fickle] is one of the definitions provided by Mr. Onions' glossary, quoting Henry V, I, ii. . Not until much later, in James I, would the English Crown be able to expect any kind of steadfast Allegiance from the Scots; and allegiance to a cause produces a single, more steady mind in the bosom of a "giddy" populace, through which means to an end, the job of governance can get on with its true designs.
I realize the extent of the extrapolation I've performed might cause one to suspect that I might have stretched the point into the realm of cultural relativity. But having much the same influence as period or modern dress has, in its ability to define historical perspective, definitions of the meaning of words and phrases, and their relation to a particular subject, can also influence perspective. History Repeats Itself--constantly; and many times, unfortunately. And definitions of words or phrases will--if they are allowed-- hold their meaning in their relation to it. So I believe if the reference points haven't been altered simply to affect a means to an end, but only employed as a way to point up a striking historical resemblance (and a resemblance that can be concurred upon by a majority of observers without brow-beating being necessary) then modern dress does no harm. Personally, being the schizophrenic purist that I am, ( I've modern- concepted plays as a director; even going to the extent of mixing thematic metaphors) I think any similarity to modern events, even with actors dressed in period costume, will bleed through the fabric in most cases--although nowadays, being the jingoistic crowd-pleaser it is, Henry V might have an "anti-giddy" effect presented in any garb or setting.
So, if "getting into Shakespeare's head", to paraphrase Mr. Boyd, is the governing influence on faithfulness, then he has what would seem to be an impossible job description. Even the Philosopher for all time, whose open-minded judgement is blatantly evident in much of his other work, jumped off the fence for this one. The power (and blindness) of single-minded Patriotism, not for the first or last time, reared its ugly head. I wonder what Shakespeare's true feelings were about what he obviously allowed it to do to him? --Interesting that Henry V isn't one of his better-written plays--by a long shot. But of course, that's just an opinion as well.
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The Centre is dependent on a band of some 20 Volunteers for a good deal of its operation.
They serve mostly in the evenings, from 6.00pm till 7.30pm, when most of the seafarers come ashore. Members of local churches, mostly long retired from full time work, they work in pairs & perform a range of duties, from welcoming and serving the seafarers with money exchange and shop purchases, to giving directions, providing a listening ear, and stocking shelves if time permits.
Seafarers are paid in US dollars, so every transaction involves a calculation based on the current exchange rate – a test of their mental prowess (we do have charts for ready reckoning.)
There is always need for new Volunteers. Being retired people, they are prone to travel, illness, & grandparent duty. A frequently asked question is 'how do you get around the language barrier – seeing that most seafarers here are from the Philippines, China, SE Asia & Eastern Europe & Russia? As English is the language of the sea, there is usually enough for understanding, with sign language filling any gaps.
We provide basic training; the rest is done 'on the job' with an experienced partner. The wages are nothing, but the rewards are out of this world!
At the heart of the Mission is the spiritual welfare and nurture of seafarers, regardless of their nationality or religion. There is a Chapel upstairs, which seafarers use for personal quiet time & reflection. The Centre is well stocked with Bibles, in as many languages appropriate for the seafarers who visit, and a range of tracts, magazines and papers which are in constant demand. The Jesus DVD in 32 languages is offered to every ship in port and the Chaplain is on hand to listen, provide counsel, and to pray as required.
Christmas provides us with the opportunity to proclaim the good news of the saviour's birth on earth in a practical way, with the distribution of gift bags, filled with a range of personal & novel items & a Bible message, to all seafarers in port from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day. These are filled by our Volunteers, church members, school students & staff, and interested community members. The looks of surprise & delight on the faces of the recipients is a sight to behold, and reward for the year's service of our Volunteers.
In addition, on Christmas Day the Centre will host Christmas Dinner for seafarers, provided by the Volunteers and donations from churches & the community. The Christmas story will be read in the languages of those present, a carol or two sung, and prayer offered. For those with Christian heritage, it makes up in a small way what they are missing at home; for others it is a little taste of how & why Christians celebrate Christmas.
Please check your inbox and click on the link in this email within the next 2 days to complete your subscription.
If you don't find the confirmation email in your inbox, please look in your 'junk' mail folder (also sometimes called 'spam').