text:
America's Decisions
By the Honorable Pete du Pont would like to begin my remarks today with a simple reminde r: We are meeting in the capital of the greatest country in the history of mankind. Great, yes, because of God's gifts-resources, location, size, but also great because of secular contributions-freedom, enterprise, and markets. Cod's gifts and Americans' w ork have not only served us well, we are reaching the climax of an em that proves just how well one country can serve ft whole world's peoples. America's decisions and the actions and results they triggered have been signposts to all of humanity. Not ever y corner of the earth has followed the lead of the American revolution. Some places and peoples have. been slower to reach the turning points than others, but fewer and fewer = miss- ing America's sips about which way to go. The American example contribute d to opportunities in places where for generations, centuries even millennia-the people were blocked or blind to that golden shaft of light. America has done this not through conquest, but through inspiration. Today, I want to talk to all of us and most of our fellow citizens who constitute the American majority-we, the people who have helped to move the world forward while making our own land a citadel of opportunity: The majority, who not only cherish personal freedom, but demand individual responsibility . The majority, who acknowledge the importance of security for the rela- tive few in true need, but also value the fundamental principle of market opportunity for all Americans. The majority, who not only exalt America's unique and indispensable diversity, but also protect America's cherished and equally indispensable common links-our families, our communities, and our values. Of course, I am not describing every American-and certainly not every American political leader. There are many-who lack a commitmen t to individual responsibility, many who abhor the arketplace, resent values, and exude pessimism. That is their choice.- but thankftdly it has sel- dmn been the American choice. The American choice has been to make decisions based on our strengths, not ou r weaknesses. We have made decisions based on the expectations of success, not the fear of failure. And American decision-making is usually marked by our infectious optimism. Cmdal Period. But isn't this an unusual time to be reaffftming America's values? W hy is it so important to reemphasize America's success just as our philosophy has triumphed? The answer is that America is embarking on another period of crticial decision-making-crucial to us and crucial to a world that pays increasing attention to us. W i ll we lower taxes so that the marketplace can restore our prosperity-or will we not? Will we push for increasingly open in- ornational markets to fuel die world's prosperity? Will we maintain our defenses and our leadership position in the world's relatio nships-or will we not?The Honorable Pete du Pont is a Director at the law firm of Richards., Layton and Finger. He is a former U.S. Representative and former Governor of Delaware. He spoke at The Heritage Foundation on January 16, IM. ISSN M72-1155 0 1992 by The Heritage Founation.
Much as it would be reassuring to assume that America's decisions will be correct by divine in- tervention or inevitable wisdom, neither is true. We must work at iL We do make mistakes and we have made more than our share in t he last quarter century. Isn't it ironic that after nearly two hundred years of momentum, and just as the force of our inspiration was reaching its broadest impact, America seems to have faltered-not for a day, not for a few years, but for over a quarter o f a century? But now is not the time to dwellon America's past mistakes. Now is the moment to remember the principles of America's majority. Consistent Voice. Next week in the State of the Union message America will resume making the decisions that will g u ide us through the decade and into the next century. To clear our minds and firm our swp, perhaps a longer perspective will help us understand!ft vision, the principles, the legacy, and the wishes of the American majority. Over the yem the majority has sp b n with a remarkably consistent and conservative voice, regardless of the era, the circumstarms, or the leader of its choice. The American majority inspired President Roosevelt, for example, to make the retirement pen- sion program he launched be a modest a nd necessary security net. We inspired Roosevelt's welfare efforts to propel individuals back into the work force rather than blocking them from it. Overall, the New Deal kept the share of America's income transferred to the federal government for domesti c programs under 10 percent. Would that any President in the last quarter century could say that. The majority inspired the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, the containment and ultimate rejection of communism. But most important, the American majority throughou t the history of our country has inspired the emergence of an economic engine the likes of which the world had never seen. As we entered the 1960s, the majority's values and objectives were still dominating American policy, from the expansion of our defens e s to the cutting of our taxes. Even Lyndon Johnson, as Michael Barone recently wrote, campaigned in 1964 on tax cuts, a civil rights bill banning racial quotas and, I might add, a desire to keep the federal budget under $100 billion. Johnson did not campa i gn for Great Society programs. His election provided no mandate for them. Nevertheless, 1965 marked not the continuation of an America gukled by its majority, but rather the beginning of an America moving to the will of a political minority. Phantom Manda t e. Democrats, giddy with huge majorities in both Houses of Congress, majorities won on a promise to continue America's prosperity, instead,launched an attack on that prosperity that continues to this very day. Ile Great Society was built upon a phantom ma n date, false promises, and alien values. Anti-market politicians created a panoply of centrally directed agencies the likes of which America had never seen. Despite the distinctly conservative message of the Nixon-Wallace and Nixon majorities in 1968 and 1 9 72, despite the extraordinary effort of Jimmy Carter to disassociate himself with all that his party built in Washington, it was not until the election of 1980, fifteen years later, that the American majority would again give powerful direction to its gov e rnment But even with that mandate, even with the overwhelming instruction of die elections of 1980, 1984 and 1988, Washington -continued to fail us. Ile m4jority's mandates were evaded as much as they were respected. The trouble with the 1990s is not a pr o duct of what happened, but what did not happen. The growth of taxes was slowed, that was good. But the. growth of taxation was not reversed. That is the problem. The regulatory knot was loosened ftun the, neck of American enterprise, and that was @good. B ut the rope was not removed hun our necks. That is the problem. Ile defense Amenca, needed to.protectItself and deter its enemies in the 1980s was built, and that is good.
2But the defense we need for the 2 1 st Century has not yet been built. That is the problem. The growth of government bureaucracy was slowed, its virus momentarily contained, and that is good, but the growth was not reversed, the virus was not killed. That is the problem. Resolve of the Meek. Why have we not been more successful? Why did the elected repre- sentatives of the 1960s ignore their own platform and launch upon a separate course? Why were the obvious mandates of the 1980s pursued so tentatively? I t is not because America's majority lost its principles, its vision, its understanding, or its numbers. No, the problem has been that our leaders have lost the self-confidence that should be so easily maintained by those chosen to implement the majority wi l l. And as their confidence has waned, our influence has eroded. Too often our leaders look for compromise out of fear of confrontation. Too often they seek to cut our presumed losses rather than to claim the prerogatives of our victories. Too often they s h ow the resolve of the-meek despite the power of champions. Too many of our own leaders simply have not believed that our views are majority views; they do not see themselves as representing a majority at all. They see themselves as loyalists to a minority party, members of minority caucuses, captives of a minority mentality. I suppose it is a forgivable sin for I can tell you from personal experience as a Congressman in the early 1970s how difficult it was for me to remember that I represented the power of a Republican presidential landslide when I watched Carl Albert's election as Speaker of the House by a 2-1 margin. Forgiv- able, but nevertheless, unacceptable. Our candidates talk with the people of the majority in the coffee shops and on the plant floor s , but too often embrace the policies of the minority at the conference tables of the executive branch and in the halls of Congress. Isn't that our problem? Pattern of Conduct. Consider the pattern of our leaders' conduct. Prior to 1965, the American major i ty knew that the creation of opportunity, comfort, security, and prosperity for all of our people could only come with a fi-ee and competitive marketplace. Nixon's wage and price controls and Carter's national energy policy are just two examples of the th o usand cuts market principles have endured-from Johnson's inauguration to Darman's budget deal. From the beginning of the civil rights awakening in America, when-Martin Luther King Jr. elo- quently pled that we be judged "not by the color our skin, but by t he content of our character," America's majority understood that the essence of civil rights was equal opportunity in a color blind society. Yet, since the 1970s, America's politicians have repeatedly, if not consistently, acted as if quotas and the aspir a tion of equal outcomes is the definition of "civil rights." Prior to 1965, America's majority saw to it that our nondefense federal spending virtually never topped 10 percent of our income. Since then, America's politicians have seen to it that domestic f e deral spending has never dropped below 10 percent. Today it is nearly 20 percent. But all is not lost. Our majority is intact if not in complete order. Our principles am in vogue around the world, if not completely in place here at home. Our opportunities , while fewer than they might have been if the last quarter century had been different, are greater than those of any generation ever. Once again, our political leaders have a magnificent opportunity to implement the wishes of the American majority. Again, America is called upon to issue key decisions which the world has become accustomed to use as signposts. And again, our job, the majority's job, is to make our politicians remember, embrace, and work for the principles that will ensure those decisions are the right ones.
3Year of Decisions. How do we do that? Let me suggest some of the things that everyone who is a member of the majority-from this audience to the President-must remember in this year of important decisions. We must first understand tha t the economic policies of the minority launched in the past quarter century, and stunningly reenforced in the past few years, must change. If they do not, un- employment will continue to grow, lowering the expectations and diminishing the futures of mill i ons of American families. The increases in government intrusions into the private sector must be reversed. They are placing impossible burdens on our ability to compete, to employ, to make a profit, and to grow. And, of course, the budget deal must be aba n doned. Many of us un- derstood that it would accomplish the exact opposite of its goals. Now all of us know, and it is time for a change. President Bush said in the last campaign that "...expansions don't die from old age. They die from bad policies." It i s time to remember what good policies are. We must remember that taxes must come down, not go up. That is what is best for America. When tax rates were lowered in 1964, the economy grew. When capital gains tax rates were cut in 1979, investment blossomed i n spite of double-<_hgi3b_> 4
of the will of the A merican majority? Or was it the beginning of the last hurrah for the prin- ciples, values, and policies that have guided America to greatness? We will learn a great deal about the answers to those questions in the next few weeks and months.Let us pray tha t we like what we learn. But more important, let us recommit ourselves to the task of assuring that our politicians come to understand with crystal clarity the American majority and the principles for which it stands. I was talking to Fred Smith this week a nd he put it just right: The principles of the majority, he said, might best be called "The American Alternative." Isn't it ironic that as we have watched 'The American Alternative' blossom around the world, we must still struggle to keep it in flower her e at home? Clear Sipposts. So we enter one of the great decision times-a time of change, opportunity, and challenge. Yet another t 'ime like the early thirties with the world in depression, like the early Forties with the world at war, like the Fifties whe n expanding communism was contained, and like the Eighties when opportunity returned to America and the world's oppressors were diminished. America's decisions created signposts of unmistakable clarity at those moments be- cause America's majority worked i ts will. Let us hope that we will work our will again.5 }}


text:
Accountable Healthcare Staffing Inc. opens Atlanta, Georgia "de novo" branch
Sep 30, 2013, 10:30 ET from Accountable Healthcare Staffing Inc.
BOCA RATON, Fla., Sept. 30, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Accountable Healthcare Staffing Inc., "AHS", one of the nation's fastest growing providers of quality healthcare staffing solutions based in Boca Raton, Florida announced that the company opened its newest de novo office, located in Atlanta, Georgia. To date, Atlanta marks the twentieth de novo office opened by Accountable, and the thirty-second AHS office.
New Branch Manager, Randy Bernard, has been tasked with opening the Atlanta location and introducing the Accountable brand to the market. A familiar presence in the area, Mr. Bernard's leadership experience in healthcare staffing and recruiting in Atlanta has spanned over a decade. Prior to joining Accountable, Bernard ran the Georgia region for InteliStaf Healthcare as Georgia Branch Director and was responsible for the acquisition of both client hospitals and nurses around the state through his sales and recruiting teams located in three offices. In addition, Bernard was the Vice President of Healthcare Staffing for Essential Resources where he focused on staffing and recruiting for hospitals and physician practices.
Shared Randy Bernard, Atlanta Branch Manager, "After spending many years in the healthcare staffing sector in Georgia, joining Accountable Healthcare Staffing has been a great experience, and it is evident by the leadership that this is a different kind of staffing company. They have taken the best practices of the industry and are singularly focused on the clients and healthcare professionals to ensure that their experiences are second to none. I am proud to be opening the Atlanta branch for Accountable and building even more lasting client and nurse relationships in the years to come."
Kevin Little, President, of Accountable Healthcare Staffing, commented, "We are excited about our expansion into Atlanta with Randy Bernard as the Manager. Randy has an established local reputation for the highest quality of service. We look forward to him leading the successful launch of Accountable Healthcare Staffing in Atlanta."
Demonstrating its commitment to the state, Atlanta marks the second AHS location in Georgia. The Atlanta office opening promises to create new opportunity in the local vicinity for job seekers in the healthcare industry. AHS looks forward to bringing even more career choices and personalized service for these professionals.
With over two centuries of combined experience between their Executive Management and Branch Teams, Accountable Healthcare Holdings Corp is one of the fastest growing healthcare staffing agencies in the U.S. A provider of quality healthcare staffing solutions with locations in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, the Company's combined experience began in the '70s when healthcare staffing was just gaining recognition and momentum. Today, their teams bring together the experience and expertise of this dynamic industry as accountability and standards play an increasing role.
To learn more about Accountable Healthcare Staffing, visit the Company's website at www.AHCStaff.com. Want to find out about job opportunities in the Atlanta, Georgia area – call the branch directly at (678) 250-9197 or email questions to email@example.com.
Media Contact: Thomas Adamson, Accountable Healthcare Staffing Inc., 5612357812, email@example.com
News distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.com
SOURCE Accountable Healthcare Staffing Inc.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
502 Cummings St, Abingdon, VA 24210Request info Add to list
To view building contacts please sign in with your Pro account or create a pro account.
Jerry P.
Company: requires Pro account
Email: requires Pro account
Phone: requires Pro account
Building Details:
502 Cummings St is aland property for lease in Abingdon, VA.
Excellent 1.3 acre redevelopment site! Located adjacent to new Food City Shopping Center development and proposed Abingdon Sports Complex. On Cummings Street at I-81, Exit 17 interchange, this 1.3 acre parcel also joins Washington Crossings shopping center which includes Magic Mart, H&R Block and ABC Supply. Property currently has restaurant building with large parking lot. Building roof is 4 year old standing seam roof. Portions of the parking lot repaved and striped in 2011. See attached for details of equipment included with restaurant and Site Survey. Cummings Street is main commuter route from I-81 into historic downtown Abingdon with Barter Theatre, Martha Washington Inn and The Tavern restaurant.
Request Property Information
Please describe your commercial real estate requirements. We'll introduce you to local properties that match your criteria.


text:
Police are still investigating a rollover accident that occured on Tuesday, April 16, around 11 p.m. on Georgetown Road. According to the police report, at that time, there was a one-car rollover motor vehicle crash in the vicinity of 72 Georgetown Road.
A witness said the vehicle, a 2012 Nissan Versa, was traveling at a reasonable to high rate of speed when it skidded and overturned.
Police rescued the driver, who was injured and trapped inside the vehicle. She was transported to Norwalk Hospital.
Police are waiting for blood test results before any further action is taken.


text:
Jose Mourinho tells French TV that Chelsea WILL NOT sign PSG's Edinson Cavani or Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Jose Mourinho, who started his football career as a translator alongside Sir Bobby Robson at Sporting Lisbon, Porto and FC Barcelona, gave an in-depth interview with Canal+ on Sunday night in French in which the Special One discussed Chelsea's transfer targets this summer.
The headline news from Mourinho's interview on the Canal Football Show was that the Chelsea boss ruled out any moves for PSG forwards Edinson Cavani or Zlatan Ibrahimovic this summer.
Below is a translation of Jose Mourinho's interview on French TV:
Would you coach in France?
"I'm very happy in England. I'm at a club, which for me is more than a club, I have a special relationship with Chelsea. This is a project that I love. I can work in France in the future, why not. Right now I think it's a championship that was not the same league as in England. This is a championship in which it is easy to say who will finish first and who will finish second, and for me, at this point in my career, I need a little more."
Did PSG offer you a job?
"I did not say yes or no, I have not received any actual direct communication. We have a relationship, I was honored to be invited into the owner's house in Qatar three or four years before they bought the club, and I respect this relationship, but after being at Real Madrid I told everyone what I wanted to do, I wanted to return to England. I do not want to feed false questions, I want to stay at Chelsea, I have four years of the contract and then we'll see."
Zlatan to Chelsea?
"This is impossible. This is another topic I do not want talk about because it is impossible. He is happy in Paris. I know this because we're friends and we are in contact. Paris, with its economic potential, will never want to open the door. It's mission impossible [to bring Zlatan to Chelsea]."
Exchange Cavani – Hazard?
"No. Eden is our boy. This is the guy we want to have for ten years, and we want to build the team around Eden. He is a player who has this style of football and being that we want."
See a video of Jose Mourinho's interview on French TV in Sunday night below.


text:
Acrobatiq Smart Author Content for Information Systems Management instructs students in the key components of implementing and managing all forms of information technology. Modules focus on information technology infrastructure, data resource management, networking technologies, system design and implementation. Databases, data warehousing, analysis and mining are discussed, along with networking foundations of telecommunication, the Internet, e-commerce, social media, ethics and security issues relevant to this field.
As students interact with the learning activities, learning data is continually collected, analyzed and reported to The Learning Dashboard™, providing educators with real-time actionable insights about how well students are mastering courseware learning objectives.
Information Systems Management Includes:
- 7 Units
- 14 Modules
- 48 Learning Objectives
- Over 1800 Formative and Summative Assessment Opportunities
Unit 1: Information Systems Foundation
Unit 2: Information Technology Infrastructure
Unit 3: Data Resource Management
Unit 4: Networking Foundations
Unit 5: Systems Development and Decision Making
Unit 6: Information Security and Ethics
Unit 7: E-commerce and Social Media
Learn More


text:
Mrs. Drucilla Garris Singleton will be speaker Sunday at the St. Paul AME Church's 11 a.m. service.
Mrs. Singleton is employed in the public school system of Putnam County.
Mrs. E.D. Brown and committee presented a Fashion Revue for the West Augustine Improvement Association Wednesday evening at Volunteer Fire Station 14.
Mrs. Melissa Heard was committee mistress of ceremonies, and Mrs. Mary Sanks was narrator. Music was furnished by W.L. Edwards.
Among those helping to make the affair successful were Elmo Slappy, the group Chosen, Miss Lisa Jones, who each rendered a solo, Mrs. Hercules Williams, who spoke on doing things right with strength of purpose.
The entire committee, which also includes Mrs. Luiza Bennett and Mrs. Angie Weaver, is grateful to all those who helped to make the affair a success.
Mr. and Mrs. Davis Mancini are arriving from New York tonight and will make their home in St. Augustine, occupying the St. Augustine Beach cottage of Dr. and Mrs. Carle T. Elkins.
Mrs. Mancini is the former Miss Evelyn Elkins of this city, and she has many friend here who will be delighted to know that she is returning here to live.
Mr. Mancini, is to have a position in the St. Augustine National Bank.
Mrs. Olivia Andrews, of No. 221 1/2 West King Street, has returned to her home after spending a delightful two weeks in Granite Falls, N.C., as guest of Mr. and Mrs. Dave Williams.
Mrs. Williams and a friend, Mrs. Kelly Shoemaker accompanied Mrs. Andrew on the return trip to St. Augustine and plan to visit here for several days.
Talking over conference plans and camp clothes, are five of the young folks who will go to Ridgecrest, N.C., tomorrow to attend Music Week at the Baptist Camp there.
These girls, all from Ancient City Baptist Church are Jeannie Stephens, Elsie Priester, Jackie Bedenbaugh, Lucile Stafford and Doris Mobley.
In all, some 25 young folks and their chaperones from among the youth of Ancient City Baptist Church will depart early tomorrow morning in a motorcade.
The Rev. Phil Maxwell, pastor of the church, and members of his family are at Ridgecrest, having left last week.
© 2017. All Rights Reserved. Contact Us


text:
Frank Cashen, who helped build the Orioles dynasty of the late 1960s and early '70s and rebuilt the laughingstock Mets into a World Series winner in 1986, died Monday. He was 88.
Cashen spent 26 continuous years in the front office of a major league team, starting in 1966 as executive vice president with the Orioles, who that year won the first of their six American League pennants. He was promoted to general manager in October 1971 and presided over two division titles in Baltimore before resigning following the 1975 season. He remained as assistant GM in Baltimore until 1980.
When the Mets, then struggling as a last-place team with attendance figures below 800,000, were purchased by Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday in 1980, they sought to turn around the flagging franchise.
According to the New York Daily News' Bill Madden, Cashen was recommended to Doubleday by Baltimore Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger.
Cashen told Madden he reluctantly took the Mets' job, knowing it was an enormous task to turn around a woebegone franchise that had traded its best player, Tom Seaver, three years earlier.
But Cashen, through a series of trades, turned the Mets from a doormat into a perennial contender. Most famous was the deal on June 15, 1983 that sent Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey to the Cardinals for first baseman Keith Hernandez, who had fallen out of favor in St. Louis after disagreements with team management, notably Whitey Herzog.
In another deal, Cashen—who was distinguished in part for wearing bow ties—traded the popular Lee Mazzilli to Texas for two pitchers, Walt Terrell and Ron Darling. Darling became a mainstay of the Mets' 1980s contenders, while Terrell was later traded for power-hitting switch-hitter Howard Johnson.
The Mets' poor record also helped them get high draft choices. They drafted first overall in Cashen's first year as GM, in 1980, and drafted Darryl Strawberry with the pick. They signed Strawberry for $210,000. They also snagged Dwight Gooden fifth overall in 1982.
Those players, along with the stunning deal Cashen pulled at the 1984 Winter Meetings for Expos all-star catcher Gary Carter, culminated in the Mets' World Series title in 1986.
In a statement, Wilpon said Cashen "revitalized our franchise when he took over in 1980 as general manager and helped engineer us to a world championship in 1986. I dealt with Frank on a daily basis and he was a man of integrity and great passion. No one had a more diverse career than Frank. He was also a lawyer, sports writer and marketing executive. His accomplishments will always be an integral part of our team history."


text:
|Related Sections:
|Pine Plains
|Columbia County
Thomas Carvel Country ClubTaconic State Pkwy & Ferris
Pine Plains, NY 12567
Phone: (518)398-7101Fax: (518)398-7104
This hilly course has well-manicured greens. Water hazards (eight ponds) come into play on a number of holes, and the tree-lined fairways are bordered by a standard cut of rough. The ladies' par is actually 75. There are two separate weekday green fees available; one for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and the slightly higher fee shown for Monday and Friday.
|Holes: 18
|Greens: Bent Grass
|Fairways: Bermuda Grass
|Greens Fees:
|Course Type:
|Dress Code:
|Collared shirt, no cutoffs, denim OK
|Apr 1 to Nov 15
|Guest Policy:
* Update this Course: Update/modify the details for this golf course's listing.
*All Greens Fees provided are subject to change. Please call the golf course to confirm the current fees.


text:
When sutures are placed by the emergency department (ED) physician and removed by the patients primary care physician (PCP), coding becomes more complex. Using the proper modifier and billing code will ensure appropriate payment to both physician groups.
Dari L. Bonner, CPC, CPC-H, CCS-P, an independent corporate compliance, coding and reimbursement specialist in Port St. Lucie, Fla., offers perspective on appropriate coding for these situations.
Most Laceration Repair Codes Have Global Periods
As noted in the answer to the reader question Suture Removal in the November ED Coding Alert (page 86-87), many laceration repair codes are starred (*), which indicates that they include the surgical service only and no evaluation and management (E/M) services. According to CPT rules, an E/M code should be reported in addition to the code for laceration repair. However, most payers, notably Medicare carriers, apply a 10-day global period to laceration repairs. Therefore, any service (i.e, suture removal) that is performed within 10 days of the surgical service (laceration repair with sutures) would be included in the service reported with the repair code.
If the ED physician performs a laceration repair with sutures, and the patients PCP removes the sutures before the end of the global period, that procedure would in most cases be considered to be bundled into a single code for the laceration repair.
The common practice for the scenario listed above is that the ED physician bills the repair as if he is performing the global service (all preoperative, surgery and postoperative services) and the PCP then charges an office visit (99211-99215) for the removal of the sutures and subsequent office visits for the same problem, says Bonner. However, there are various interpretations from coding and reimbursement experts on whether this is the proper billing of these services.
ED Physician Reports Laceration Repair Code with Modifier
For example, lets use a case of a patient who presents in the ED with a hand laceration. The ED physician performs an intermediate repair of the 8.0 cm laceration and reports code 12034 (layered closure, intermediate, 7.6 cm12.5 cm). The physician also would add modifier -54 (surgical care only) to the code to indicate that he would not be providing follow-up to the patient.
The patient is then referred to the PCP for the suture removal, she continues. The PCP also should report a code 12034, but with a modifier -55 (postoperative management only). If the services are billed with the appropriate modifier by each physician, then the patient will not be responsible for payment outside of the global period for [...]
Recent Issue ofEmergency Department & Reimbursement Alert


text:
Qatar Airways is gearing up for two key travel industry events next week by participating at the prestigious Dubai Air Show and World Travel Market b
Chairman of Qatar's Civil Aviation Authority, Abdul Aziz Al Nuaimi, will head a delegation, including Qatar Airways Chief Executive Officer, Akbar Al Baker, from Doha to the Dubai Air Show, where the airline will have a dedicated chalet together with a stand in the exhibition hall.
The Dubai Air Show, now in its 10th year, takes place at Dubai International Airport between November 11 – 15 and will feature static displays of commercial and military aircraft, together with aerial displays. Tens of thousands of visitors from around the world are expected at the five-day event, one of the most prestigious in the aviation industry calendar.
The airline will showcase its fine hospitality with a luxurious chalet draped in its burgundy corporate colours. The airline's award-winning lie-flat First Class seat-cum-bed and two Business Class seats will be on display at Qatar Airways' exhibition stand.
World Travel Market is one of the industry's premier travel trade events bringing together airlines, hotels, car rental companies, tourist boards and cruise lines for four days of business.
Qatar Airways will be showcasing a mock-up of its unique First Class lounge which is fitted onboard the carrier's long-range Airbus A340-600 aircraft, currently used on flights between Doha and both London Heathrow and Washington DC.
Al Baker said both events were highly important for Qatar Airways to maintain its high profile across the travel industry.
"Dubai Air Show and World Travel Market are key events where we have traditionally enjoyed our participation – and this year is no exception as we are again privileged to be taking part in such prestigious shows," he said.
"We look forward to a highly productive week to build and renew business partnerships, welcoming visitors to our chalet and exhibition stands at both events."
Qatar Airways currently operates a modern fleet of 58 all-Airbus aircraft to 79 destinations across Europe, Middle East, Africa, Far East, Indian subcontinent and North America. The highlight of this year's expansion has been the launch of flights to New York (Newark) and Washington DC – the airline's first move into the North American market.
With a growing international network, more travellers have an opportunity to use Qatar Airways' Premium Terminal at Doha International Airport, exclusively for departing First and Business Class passengers.
The Premium Terminal features facilities including a spa, jacuzzi, exclusive duty free shopping, business centre and fine dining restaurants. Built in just nine months, the US$90 million terminal is the world's first commercial passenger building dedicated to First and Business Class passengers and offers departing and transit passengers an excellent opportunity to relax and unwind prior to their flight.
Qatar Airways is one of only five airlines in the world with a Five Star ranking for service and excellence awarded by Skytrax, the independent aviation industry monitoring agency. Skytrax also named Qatar Airways' cabin crew as Best in the Middle East for the fifth year running in 2007 following a survey of more than 12 million passengers. During the 2006/07 financial year, Qatar Airways carried more than 8 million passengers worldwide. For more information, log onto www.qatarairways.com
Qatar Airways' award-winning Privilege Club recently won an unprecedented eight accolades at the annual US-based Freddie Awards, designed to honour loyalty programmes across the global travel industry. For more information, visit www.qmiles.com
Doha-based Qatar Airways will have a fleet of 110 aircraft by 2015 – almost double the existing size. Qatar Airways has ordered 80 Airbus A350s in a deal worth more than US$16 billion, and 22 Boeing 777s, with deliveries of the latter beginning in November 2007. The airline is a launch customer of the twin-deck Airbus A380 'super jumbos' with five aircraft on order and scheduled for delivery from 2010. Qatar Airways moves to the New Doha International Airport in 2009, when the first phase of the new facility is scheduled to open. For more information, visit www.ndiaproject.com
Top Headlines
- Angola's travel trade size up Dubai
- qatar airways looks to future following historical announcements at dubai air show
- Qatar Airways prepares for major presence at Arabian Travel Market in Dubai
- ADNEC gears for six events including two debuts next week
- Saudi Arabia's Premier Telco Show to Take Place Next Week in Bahrain


text:
Hawthorne >> Police have identified a man wanted for questioning in the stabbing death of his stepdaughter inside their apartment.
Alvin Hunt Jr., 54, is "considered a possible suspect and is considered armed and dangerous," according to a Hawthorne police wanted flier.
"Hunt has a prior conviction for murder and multiple other violent felony offenses," the flier said.
Hunt vanished after his wife's daughter, 22-year-old Naquia Danielle Catching, was discovered stabbed to death Sept. 26 in an apartment she shared with the couple in the 4800 block of 118th Place.
The stepfather was immediately called a "person of interest" in the case.
A family member told reporters that Hunt had called Catching's mother and told her he had a surprise for her. When the woman arrived home, she found her daughter dead.
Sheriff's homicide Detective Joe Ramirez said the motive for the slaying is unknown. Catching died from multiple stab wounds. A relative told reporters her throat was cut.
Police said Hunt has ties to Long Beach, Oregon and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Los Angeles County Superior Court records show Hunt was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in 1989. Police said he has robbery, burglary and murder in his background. Those records were not available.
Hunt and his wife also have a 9-year-old child.
Police asked anyone with information about Hunt's whereabouts to call Hawthorne police Detective Vincent Arias at 310-349-2841 or Sheriff's Department Detectives Ramirez or Ray Lugo at 323-890-5500. Anonymous tipsters can call Crimestoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.


text: Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream Lip Protectant Stick SPF 15 Review Posted on June 10, 2012 by Shrilata Posted in Brands, Elizabeth Arden, Lip Care, Product Reviews, Skin Care 2 Comments Beautiful lips get attention. They also get a lot of sun. Protect yours with this all-weather, SPF 15 treatment stick. It helps moisturize, soften and smooth your lips. Also available in a range of beautiful sheer shades. Continue reading→ Also ReadIntroducing THE BEAUTIFUL COLOR COLLECTION by Elizabeth Arden! Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream Skin Protectant Review Elizabeth Arden High Shine Lip Gloss in Honey Glaze (06): Review & Swatches Elizabeth Arden High Shine Lip Gloss in Golden Pearl (10) Elizabeth Arden Color Intrigue Cheek Color : (02) Tearose : Review, Swatches & FOTD Share this:FacebookTwitterEmailLinkedInGooglePinterest


text:
Bachelor's and Master's Degree Recipients
Diplomas will be mailed to the graduate's permanent address—or to the diploma address if one has been created by the student in Wolverine Access—by the end of June. Address updates can be entered on Wolverine Access through May 29, 2017.
Doctoral Degree Recipients
Doctoral degree recipients that have confirmed their attendance for the Rackham Graduate Exercises (RGE) will receive their diplomas during the ceremony. Those not attending RGE may pick up their diploma at the Registrar's Office at 1207 LSA Building, 500 South State Street between 8:00 a.m and 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday the week prior to the commencement ceremony and the week after the ceremony. Diplomas not picked up will be mailed on May 8.
Additional diplomas may be ordered through the Registrar's Office, Student Services at either of two locations: 1210 LSA Building, 500 S. State Street or B430 Pierpont Commons.
Details are available at the Office of the Registrar's website.


text:
Posts Tagged 'Michael DeForge'
STC on DeForge in RSJanuary 19, 2015
Comics Time: First Year HealthySeptember 18, 2013
Comics Time: Ant ComicMarch 25, 2013
I reviewed Michael DeForge's masterful webcomic Ant Comic for The Comics Journal.
Please read the comic; it's gorgeous, funny, troubling, and powerful, and you can read it all on a lovely single scrolling page.
VorpalizerFebruary 6, 2013
I'm going to be writing about science fiction, fantasy, horror etc. with some dayjob coworkers at our new group blog Vorpalizer.com. I got started with posts on Michael DeForge's Ant Comic and Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising. Come check it out.
Thickness #3: Back cover, bed of contentsJune 6, 2012
30XX by Lamar Abrams
PROTESTPLOITATION by Jimmy Beaulieu
NIGHTCRAWLERS by Edie Fake
THE CHASM by Julia Gfrörer
THE COCKROACH by William Cardini & Sean T. Collins
STANDING OVATIONS by Gengoroh Tagame
QVIET by Andy Burkholder
…and a pinup by HamletMachine
(via Ryan Sands)
Love Me Like a Reptile/Feel My SerpentineJune 1, 2012
Behold Edie Fake's cover for Thickness #3, the erotic comics anthology featuring Edie Fake, Lamar Abrams, Julia Gfrörer, Jimmy Beaulieau, Sean T. Collins (yep, me!), William Cardini (who drew the thing I wrote), Gengoroh Tagame, Hamletmachine, Andy Burkholder, and True Chubbo, edited by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge. Debuts at CAKE on June 16, available online everywhere shortly thereafter.
xoxoMay 24, 2012
xoxo, a Gossip Girl zine
edited by Robin McConnell
cover by Maré Odomo
contributions by Warren Craghead, Sean T. Collins and Dan White, Benjamin Marra, Jacob Ferguson, Michael Deforge and Steve Rolston
Coming soon!
The full ThicknessApril 29, 2012
- Edie Fake
- Lamar Abrams
- Julia Gfrörer
- Jimmy Beaulieu
- Sean T. Collins / William Cardini
- Gengoroh Tagame
- A pinup by HamletMachine
- A new TRUE CHUBBO strip
- An Andy Burkholder mini supplemental
Turn me on, dead man!
Down with the ThicknessApril 17, 2012
I'm honored to announce that I'm collaborating with William Cardini on a story for Thickness #3, the forthcoming issue of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge's excellent and sexxy erotic comics anthology series. I just couldn't be more humbled and pleased to be sharing such auspicious company in the service of that noblest of goals: using comics to increase the blood flow to people's genitals. Wish us luck!
The 20 Best Comics of 2011January 1, 2012
20. Uncanny X-Force (Rick Remender and Jerome Opeña, Marvel): In a year when the ugliness of the superhero comics business became harder than ever to ignore, it's fitting that the best superhero comic is about the ugliness of being a superhero. Remender uses the inherent excess of the X-men's most extreme team to tell a tale of how solving problems through violence in fact solves nothing at all. (It has this in common with most of the best superhero comics of the past decade: Morrison/Quitely/etc. New X-Men, Bendis/Maleev Daredevil, Brubaker/Epting/etc. Captain America, Mignola/Arcudi/Fegredo/Davis Hellboy/BPRD, Kirkman/Walker/Ottley Invincible, Lewis/Leon The Winter Men…) Opeña's Euro-cosmic art and Dean White's twilit color palette (the great unifier for fill-in artists on the title) could handle Remender's apocalyptic continuity mining easily, but it was in silent reflection on the weight of all this death that they were truly uncanny.
19. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century #2: 1969 (Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, Top Shelf/Knockabout): I'll admit I'm somewhat surprised to be listing this here; I've always enjoyed this last surviving outpost of Moore's comics career but never thought I loved it. But in this installment, Moore and O'Neill's intrepid heroes — who've previously overcome Professor Moriarty, Fu Manchu, and the Martian war machine — finally succumb to their own excesses and jealousies in Swinging London, allowing a sneering occult villain to tear them apart with almost casual ease. It's nasty, ugly, and sad, and it's sticking with me like Moore's best work.
18. The comics of Lisa Hanawalt (various publishers): As I put it when I saw her drawing of some kind of tree-dwelling primate wearing a multicolored hat made of three human skulls stacked on top of one another, Lisa Hanawalt has a strange imagination. And it's a totally unpredictable one, which is what makes her comics – whether they're reasonably straightforward movie lampoons or the extravagantly bizarre sex comic she contributed to Michael DeForge and Ryan Sands's Thickness anthology, as dark and damp as the soil in which its earthworm ingénue must live – a highlight of any given day a new one pops up.
17. Daybreak (Brian Ralph, Drawn and Quarterly): Fort Thunder's single most accessible offspring also proves to be its bleakest, thanks to an extended collected edition that converts a rollicking first-person zombie/post-apocalypse thriller into a troubling meditation on the power of the gaze. Future artcomics takes on this subgenre have a high bar to clear.
16. Habibi (Craig Thompson, Pantheon): It's undermined by its central characters, who exist mainly as a hanger on which this violent, erotic, conflicted, curious, complex, endlessly inventive coat of many colors is hung. But as a pure riot of creative energy from an artist unafraid to wrestle with his demons even if the demons end up winning in the end, Habibi lives up to its ambitions as a personal epic. You could dive into its shifting sands and come up with something different every time.
15. Ganges #4 (Kevin Huizenga, Coconino/Fantagraphics): Huizenga wrings a second great book out of his everyman character's insomnia. It's quite simple how, really: He makes comics about things you'd never thought comics could be about, by doing things you never thought comics could do to show you them. Best of all, there's still the sense that his best work is ahead of him, waiting like dawn in the distance.
14. The Congress of the Animals (Jim Woodring, Fantagraphics): The potential for change explored by the hapless Manhog in last year's Weathercraft is actualized by the meandering mischief-maker Frank this time around. While I didn't quite connect with Frank's travails as deeply as I did with Manhog's, the payoff still feels like a weight has been lifted from Woodring's strange world, while the route he takes to get there is illustrated so beautifully it's almost superhuman. It's the happy ending he's spent most of his career earning.
13. Mister Wonderful (Daniel Clowes, Pantheon): Speaking of happy endings an altcomix luminary has spent most of his career earning! Clowes's contribution to the late, largely unlamented Funny Pages section of The New York Times Magazine is briefly expanded and thoroughly improved in this collected edition. Clowes reformats the broadsheet pages into landscape strips, eases off the punchlines and cliffhangers, blows individual images up to heretofore unseen scales, and walks us through a self-sabotaging doofus's shitty night into a brighter tomorrow.
12. The comics of Gabrielle Bell (various publishers): Bell is mastering the autobiography genre; her deadpan character designs and body language make everything she says so easy to buy – not that that would be a challenge with comics as insightful as her journey into nerd culture's beating heart, San Diego Diary, just by way of a for instance. But she's also reinventing the autobiography genre, by sliding seamlessly into fictionalized distortions of it; her black-strewn images give a somber, thoughtful weight to any flight of fancy she throws at us. What a performance, all year long.
11. The Armed Garden and Other Stories (David B., Fantagraphics): Religious fundamentalism is a dreary, oppressive constant in its ability to bend sexuality to mania and hammer lives into weapons devoted to killing. But it has worn a thousand faces in a millennia-long carnevale procession of war and weirdness, and David B. paints portraits of three of its masks with bloody brilliance. Focusing on long-forgotten heresies and treating the most outlandish legends about them as fact, B.'s high-contrast linework sets them all alight with their own incandescent madness.
10. Too Dark to See (Julia Gfrörer, Thuban Press): It was a dark year for comics, at least for the comics that moved me the most. And no one harnessed that darkness to relatable, emotional effect better than Julia Gfrörer. Her very contemporary take on the legend of the succubus was frank and explicit in its treatment of sexuality, rigorously well-observed in its cataloguing of the spirit-sapping modern-day indignities that can feed depression and destroy relationships, and delicately, almost tenderly drawn. It's like she held her finger to the air, sensed all the things that can make life rotten, and cast them onto the pages. She made something quite beautiful out of all that ugly.
9. The comics and pixel art of Uno Moralez (self-published on the web at unomoralez.com): What if an 8-bit NES cut-scene could kill? The digital artwork of Uno Moralez — some of it standard illustrations, some of it animated gifs, some of it full-fledged comics — shares its aesthetic with The Ring's videotape or Al Columbia's Pim & Francie: a horror so cosmically black, images so unbearably wrong, that they appear to have leaked into and corrupted their very medium of transmission. Moralez fuses crosses the streams of supernatural trash from a variety of cultures — the legends and Soviet art of his native Russia, the horror and porn manga of Japan, the B-movies and horror stories of the States, the formless sensation aesthetic of the Internet itself — into a series of images that is impossible to predict in its weirdness but totally unflagging in its sense that you'd be better off if you'd never laid eyes on it. I can't wait to see more.
8. The comics of Michael DeForge (various publishers): The last time you saw a cartoonist this good and this unique this young, you were probably reading the UT Austin student newspaper comics section and stumbling across a guy named Chris Ware. All four of DeForge's best-ever comics — his divorced dad story in Lose #3, his shape-shifting/gender-bending erotica in Thickness #2, his self-published art-world fantasia Open Country, and his gorgeously colored body-horror webcomic Ant Comic — came out this year, none of them looking anything at all like anything you could picture before seeing your first Michael DeForge comic. It's almost frightening to think where he'll be five years from now, ten years from now…or even just this time next year.
7. The comics and art of Jonny Negron (various publishers): What if someone took Christina Hendricks's walk across the parking lot and trip to the bathroom in Drive and made an entire comics career out of them? That is an enormously facile and reductive way to describe the disturbing, stylish, sexy, singular work of Jonny Negron, the breakout cartoonist of the year, but it at least points you in the right direction. No one's ever thought to combine his muscular yet curiously dispassionate bullet-time approach to action and violence, his Yokoyama-esque spatial geometry, his attention to retrofuturistic fashion and style, his obvious love of the female body in all its shapes and sizes, and his ambient Lynchian terror; even if they had, it'd be tough to conceive of anyone building up his remarkable body of work in such a short period of time. Open up your Tumblr dashboard or crack an anthology (Thickness, Mould Map, Study Group, Smoke Signal, Negron and Jesse Balmer's own Chameleon), and chances are good that Negron was the weirdest, best, most coldly beautiful thing in it. It's like a raw, pure transmission from a fascinating brain.
6. The Wolf (Tom Neely, I Will Destroy You): Neely's wordless, painted, at-times pornographic graphic novel feels like the successful final draft to various other prestigious projects' false starts. It's a far less didactic, more genuinely erotic attempt at high-art smut than Dave McKean's Celluloid; a less self-conscious, more direct attempt at frankly depicting both the destructive and creative effects of sex on a relationship via symbolism than Craig Thompson's Habibi; a blend of sex and horror and narrative and visual poetry and ugly shit and a happy ending that succeeds in each of these things where many comics choose to focus on only one or two.
5. The Cardboard Valise (Ben Katchor, Pantheon): Prep your time capsules, folks: You'd be hard pressed to find an artifact that better conveys our national predicament than Ben Katchor's latest comic-strip collection, a series of intertwined vignettes created largely before the Great Recession and our political class's utter failure to adequately address it, but which nonetheless appears to anticipate it. Its message — that blind nationalism is the prestige of the magic trick used by hucksters to financially and culturally ruin societies for their own profit — is delightfully easy to miss amid Katchor's remarkable depictions of lost fads, trends, jobs, tourist attractions, and other detritus of the dying American Century. He's the very most funnest Cassandra around.
4. Love from the Shadows (Gilbert Hernandez, Fantagraphics): I picture Gilbert Hernandez approaching his drawing board these days like Lawrence of Arabia approaching a Turkish convoy: "NO PRISONERS! NO PRISONERS!" In a year suffused with comics funneling pitch-black darkness through a combination of sex and horror, none were blacker, sexier, or more horrific than this gender-bending exploitation flick from Beto's "Fritz-verse." None also functioned as a rejection of the work that made its creator famous like this one did, either. Not a crowd-pleaser like his brother, but every bit as brilliant, every bit as fearless.
3. Garden (Yuichi Yokoyama, PictureBox): Like a theme park ride in comics form — with the strange events it chronicles themselves resembling a theme park ride — Yokoyama's book is a breathtaking, breathless experience. Alongside his anonymous but extravagantly costumed non-characters, we simply go along for the ride, exploring Yokoyama's prodigious, mysterious imagination as he concocts a seemingly endless stream of increasingly strange interfaces between man and machine, nature and artifice. As a metaphor for our increasingly out-of-control modern life it's tough to top. As pure thrilling kinetic cartooning it's equally tough to top.
2. Big Questions (Anders Nilsen, Drawn & Quarterly): Last year, I wrote that if the collected edition of Nilsen's long-running parable of philosophically minded birds and the plane crash that turns their lives upside-down didn't top my list whenever it came out, it must have been some kind of miracle year. Turns out that it was. But you'd pretty much have to create a flawless capstone to a thirty-year storyline of neer-peerless intelligence and artistry to top this colossal achievement. Nilsen's painstaking, pointillist cartooning and ruthless examination of just how little regard the workings of the world have for any given life, human or otherwise, marks him as the best comics artist of his generation, and solidifies Big Questions' claim as the finest "funny animal" comic since Maus.
1. Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 (Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Fantagraphics): Gilbert got his due elsewhere on my list, so let's ignore his contribution to this issue, which advance the saga of his bosomy, frequently abused protagonist Fritz Martinez both on and off the sleazy silver screen. Instead, let's add to the chorus praising Jaime's "The Love Bunglers" as one of the greatest comics of all time, the point toward which one of the greatest comics series of all time has been hurtling for thirty years. In a single two-page spread Jaime nearly crushes both his lovable, walking-disaster main characters Maggie and Ray with the accumulated weight of all their decades of life, before emerging from beneath it like Spider-Man pushing up from out of that Ditko machinery. You can count the number of cartoonists able to wed style to substance, form to function, this seamlessly on one hand with fingers to spare. A masterpiece.
Comics Time: Thickness #2October 17, 2011
Thickness #2
Angie Wang, Lisa Hanawalt, Michael DeForge, Mickey Zacchilli, Brandon Graham, True Chubbo, Jillian Tamaki, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, October 2011
60 pages
Buy it from the Thickness website
Anthology of the year? I'd need to double-check some release dates, but it certainly seems that way to me. The second installment of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge's art-smut comics series is an intense, diverse collection of sex comics, beautifully printed and rich enough to revisit well after your first virgin read.
Michael DeForge, god help us all, continues his juggernaut run with what could well be his best comic yet. "College Girl by Night" stars a young man who's transformed by the light of the full moon into a beautiful young woman, and uses the time to seduce and fuck college boys. His/her narrative captions don't comment on the night-in-the-life activities depicted in the art, but rather explain the background of the transformations, her preferred conquests (tired of her "spoiled, drunken nineteen-year-olds," she's "made vague plans to set my sights on Edgeton professors, posing a student seeking advice after hours"), her almost idle questions about the science of it all ("Maybe if I got pregnant, it would only show when I transformed. If I even have a uterus, that is"), fictional precedents ("When Billy changed into Captain Marvel he wasn't technically 'transforming'…he was having his Billy Batson body physically replaced with an entirely different Captain Marvel one"), and daydreams about starting a relationship while in female form ("I once found a Missed Connection written about me on Craigslist"). It's funny stuff, featuring DeForge's trademark juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane. But it's also really, really hot stuff. His character design for the main character's female form is a note-perfect assemblage of alluring details: spagetti-like tendrils of hair, a dusting of freckles, a short and nearly translucent dress, long lashes that flutter when she throws her mouth open in ecstasy. But then DeForge takes the ruthlessly (if ironically) heterosexual nature of the situation (as she herself puts it, "Is it hugely unimaginative that during my time as a woman, the only activities I've done so far is fuck myself or get fucked?") and crashes it right into its own subtext, reversing the transformation mid-coitus and presenting the two college guys now present on the scene with the opportunity to pick up where they left off, or not. Even if your door doesn't swing in that direction, there's a willingness to be led solely by pleasure and desire, a "Shhhh–no one can see, so why not?" quality, that's hard to deny.
Brandon Graham's "Dirty Deeds" is the most lighthearted of the contributions (well, aside from True Chubbo's), and his sense of humor isn't mine. It's got this bigfooted vaudevillian underground schtickiness to it that's just not my thing unless it's Marc Bell. (Lots and lots of puns: "prostate of shock," "cervix with a smile," "I was young, I needed the monkey" — that last one's a bit of a long story.) But that's not to say that a breezy sex romp isn't a welcome addition to this issue's 31 flavors. Certainly Graham's warm, curving line is shiny and happy enough to make up for a few jokes that leave me cold, and it's fascinating watching him use it to achieve certain unique effects — the way he crams detail into limited segments of the page, piling line on line like a soft-serve ice cream cone, while letting the rest of the page breathe, say, which in turn lets him work wonders with images of massive science-fictional scale. And he really makes the most of Sands's red-orange risograph'd coloring, particularly with his vivacious heroine's hair and a sexy tan-line effect using what looks like the world's tiniest zipatone dots. I'm kind of amazed that anything would give this Adrian Tomine print a run for its money in the "Sexiest Use of Tanlines 2011" sweepstakes, but there you have it.
Mickey Zacchilli's contribution is the most off-model of the bunch, a melancholy affair in which a Brian Chippendalesque lost girl loses her wedding ring and therefore enters some weird subterranean sex chamber, in which a brawny beast and a "slime worm" have their way with her as she worries about other things. What keeps her going is the promise of ice cream on the other side of the chamber, but the showstopping reverie begins with the phrase "All I could think about at that moment were all the various objects that I had never stuck in my vagina." Arrayed in the closest thing to a clinical grid as Zacchilli's noisy, scratchy line can muster, this assortment goes from "Yeah, okay, feasible for a curious young woman" ("screwdriver," "chisel tip Sharpie permanent marker") to "uh-oh" ("rawhide dog bone," "rotting arm," "disembodied head"). When added to the brusque treatment she receives from the creature who lets her in — "Thru the door Alice, Jeanette, Angie, whatever" he says, her identity unimportant — and her tears when she discovers the ice cream shop is closed, it makes for a distressing portrait of disconnect between mind and body, thought and deed.
Dare I call Angie Wang's contribution erotica rather than smut? Wang offers a four-page start-to-finish portrait of two women — one seemingly shy or hesitant, the other taking charge — having sex. Each panel depicts a discrete body part or moment of connection. It's a familiar panoptic effect for this kind of thing, and I usually find it to be a bit false to the experience of sex, presenting it as a sort of greatest-hits grab bag rather than a journey from start to finish where the momentum, the upping of the ante from moment to moment, is key. But Wang cleverly jettisons the mishmash approach with an array of techniques: ratcheting the panel grid back from page to page, from 16 to 9 to 4 to a final, climactic (pun intended) splash page; using tangents to connect one panel to the next; paring away dialogue and sound as she goes; altering the focus of each page, from foreplay to initial genital contact to climax to afterglow. Whether despite or because of its delicate, painterly line, it's got oomph.
Lisa Hanawalt's contribution is profoundly Hanawaltian. Using the tried-and-true porn setup of the teacher with the hot student, she subverts (or heightens, depending on what you're into) the fantasy by having the pair's taboo rendez-vous take place in full view of the rest of the class; the teacher doesn't even stop delivering his lesson on unreliable narrators ("the narrator makes mistakes" he says as he unzips his fly). Hanawalt apes the male focus on individual body parts with alarming accuracy: "Oh god, her tits! Tiiiiiits…And that ASS," thinks the teacher over a series of panels focusing on the student's curves with that familiar combination of thumbs-up celebration and lizard-brain leer. Oh, did I mention she short-circuits the whole thing by giving the girl the featureless conical head of a worm while stuffing her cleavage with fibrous miniature worms, and by giving the bird-headed teacher a penis that itself ends in a bird's head, which literally vomits its semen all over her ass and vagina when he pulls out? When she slaps a David Lee Roth-referencing "CLASS DISMISSED!" on the final panel, I'm not sure whether to run for the door or stay for extra credit.
The final two contributions hearken back to Sands's zine roots: Ray Sohn and his anonymous wife serve up one of the funniest, grossest True Chubbo strips to date (you'll love the Lawrence of Arabia "NO PRISONERS!" quote, especially once you see the context in which it's being quoted), while Jillian Tamaki's centerfold pinup intrigues with its incongruous details — a monumental topless woman kneels amid lush flowers and a small army of Russian doll-like people-shaped dildos (I think?), her implacable gaze juxtaposed with her very human bikini-area stubble and a big goofy digital watch on her wrist. They give Thickness #2 a welcome diversity of form as well as content, a "hey, here's everything that was fit to print" feel.
Thickness #2 is the real deal: talented, fearless cartoonists working in that viscous red zone of pleasure, terror, filth, and fun where the only thing that matters is what the body does and doesn't want, and your brain is simply forced to go along for the ride. Bravo, thumbs up, panties down.
Comics Time: Prison for BitchesJune 10, 2011
Prison for Bitches
Ryan Sands, Hellen Jo, Calivn Wong, Anthony Ha, Makkinoso, Gea, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Chris Kuzma, Johnny Ryan, Sophie Yanow, Chris "Elio" Eliopoulos, Michael Kupperman, Adam Bronson, An Nguyen, Mickey Zacchilli, Lisa Hanawalt, Anthony Wu, Evan Hadyen, Leslie Predy, Monika Uchiyama, y16o, Ryan Germick, Saicoink, Angie Wang, Tony Tulathimutte, Andre Syzmanowicz, Raymond Sohn, Michael DeForge, Mia Shwartz, Patrick Kyle, Derek Yu, Jordyn Bochon, Seibei, Ginette Lapalme, Nick Gazin, Harvey James, Zejian Shen, Robert Dayton, Aaron Mew, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, 2010
64 pages
Buy it and see an extensive preview at PrisonForBitches.com
The wonderful thing about recruiting a galaxy of underground comics and illustration stars to make a Lady Gaga fanzine is that no matter what kind of extravagant weirdness they concoct, there's a better-than-even chance that at any moment the Lady herself could come along and comfortably out-weird them all. Nearly to a piece, the art, comics, photography, interviews, and essays assembled here by the Thickness team of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge appear to have been created with a healthy appreciation for their own potential obsolescence in mind, and admiration and awe for the relentlessly and exuberantly creative young woman who'd make it happen. How else to explain the number of contributions that portray Gaga as godlike? In the hands of the Prison for Bitches team, Gaga is a queen seated on a giant telephone throwing trinkets to the huddled masses (Foster-Dimino); a vision appearing in dreams to espouse Anarcho-Gagaism to her supplicants (Yanow); a Big Brother-style disembodied head whose kohl-rimmed eyes stare at the viewer with a totalitarian sex-death gaze like something out of Metropolis (Kupperman); a She-Ra/ELA-esque figure riding through space atop a crystalline Battle-cat (Hayden); a Ray-Ban-wearing Baphomet (Predy); a giant sea goddess towering over the bodies of the drowned (Wang); an empress who lives to be 110 years old (DeForge); a severed head whose tongue, hair, and blood vessels are Cthulhoid tentacles (Aaron Mew). She is seen as supernatural, both a Delphic oracle of fabulousness and a Ring-claiming Galadriel proclaiming "All shall love me and despair."
On the "love me" point, only a handful of the contributors work with the fact that she's a very attractive person, but they're among my favorites: André Syzmanowicz lovingly depicts the curves of her stomach, her breasts, her armpits, even as a werewolf creature gropes her from behind; a strip from Robert Dayton sees an ostensible fan complain about her mediocre music and ripped-off style, finally responding to the question "What do you like about her then?" with "Her navel—I want to lick her navel"; and right between the staples in the centerfold spread that anchors the book's central full-color section, Mickey Zacchilli sticks the singer's famously fit rear end.
Still other contributors take advantage of Gaga's graphic potential for maximum maximalist imagemaking — artist after artist (Jo, Wang, Gazin, Yu, Bochon, Foster-Dimino) have a ton of fun with her hair, culminating in a spectacular caricature of her Coke-can curlers from the "Telephone" video by Harvey James. An Nguyen and the team of Hellen Jo & Calvin Wong provide concert reportage, the former with photos of her cosplaying fans, the latter with comics about the on- and off-stage spectacle of the concert experience.
A trio of prose pieces appear in what seems like ascending order of skepticism; in descending order, Adam Bronson has a funny piece that uses Deleuze and Hegel to analyze the relative potential of Gaga's "Let's Dance" and Frank Sinatra's "My Way" to provoke violence in Filipino karaoke bars; Anthony Ha interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of New York magazine's seminal profile of Gaga's origins and rise to fame, that's best summed up by its title – "I'm a Total Fan of Hers, I Just Am Not a Huge Fan of Her Music"; editor Sands kicks the whole thing off with an utterly sincere and descriptively, persuasively argued "UNDISPUTED TOP 5 LADY GAGA SONGS," featuring genuine gems like "['Alejandro'] sounds like ABBA's 'Fernando' rubbing lotion all over Ace of Base's 'Don't Turn Around' while bathing nude on 'La Isla Bonita'" and "['So Happy I Could Die' is] really just a simple song about being convinced you are the hottest and most desirable person on the earth, and that this can be the best of all possible worlds if we allow ourselves the pleasure." Taken in tandem, they're like a debate between different modes of Gaga fandom, from arch irony to measured respect for a pop-culture needle-mover to downright love for someone who makes awesome songs to dance to.
The whole zine works like this, basically. Whatever it is you get out of Gaga — a pop-art deity, a gorgeous girl, an eye-inspiring spectacle, a thinkpiece generator, a hitmaker — by all means share that fun with a world that doesn't have enough of it. This book is a snapshot of the Gaga conversation, post-"Telephone" video 2010; it's a testament to the contributors and their subject alike that even now that the specifics of that conversation have now been rendered moot by an album full of pinball music and Clarence Clemons sax solos with a cover that reads "BORN THIS WAY" over a picture of the artist as a motorcycle with a human head, I'd love to hear them have it all over again. Prison for Bitches is a Little Monster must-have for any Gaga fan.
Comics Time: Thickness #1June 8, 2011
Thickness #1
Katie Skelly, Jonny Negron, Zejian Shen, Derek Ballard, True Chubbo, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, May 2011
48 pages
Buy it from the Thickness website
The great altcomix fuckfest continues! Of the recent releases I've read that pass smut through the same art-comics filter that science fiction, fantasy, action, and horror have all recently traversed, Thickness is the book that seems most concerned with creating out-and-out pornography. Chalk that up primarily to the anthology's centerpiece and unquestionable standout, "Grandaddy Purple, Erotic Gameshow," by cover artist Jonny Negron. "Dreamlike" is an adjective that gets tossed around a lot, by me not least of all, but that's absolutely the right way to describe the plot of this thing, which starts with two sinister gangster-type figures falling victim to a rooftop assassination, then follows the assassin as he's rewarded with a Let's Make a Deal selection of prizes hidden behind three numbered doors, then shows him claiming his prize — a beautiful woman — in explicit detail, and ends with his post-climax black-widow murder. Negron can't seem to contain his glee during the sex scene: The woman shouts out no-fuckin'-around, let's-have-fun-with-our-bathing-suit-area exclamations like "Mmm, let's see how much I can fit in my mouth!" and "Fuck! We're goin' to have fun with this cock!", while Negron frequently breaks down his large panels into sub-grids of as many as nine, 10, or 11 panels, using the layout language of Acme Novelty Library to cram in as many of the deliciously dirty details of the characters' liaison as possible before running out of room on the page. To quote Maude Lebowski, sex in Negron's hands is a zesty enterprise. But it's just one of the arrows in his quiver: His story also features angular artificial environments and M.U.S.C.L.E.S.-style character designs that, when combined with his women's King magazine physiques and his bad guys' skinny-suit-and-shades-sporting comportment, makes him come across like a happy marriage of Yuichi Yokoyama and Benjamin Marra. His depiction of action is really a marvel, too: It can be dynamically staged as all get-out, but then he does something off-kilter, like showing a falling man's impact with the floor and his subsequent post-mortem prostration in a fashion that totally flattens the moment, calls attention to its ludicrousness, and yet somehow makes it feel all the more brutal and unpleasant for that. Ditto the final image, which I won't spoil.
By comparison the other contributions can't help but feel slight. Katie Skelly's "cute-sexy floppy-eared lady has sex with plants in a sci-fi paradise that suggests Vaughan Bode mated with Georgia O'Keefe" entry "Breeding Season" is covering well-worn territory for SF erotica, though her thick rounded inks are nice to look at and she has a knack for capturing certain visual details that entice, like the gap between the fabric of the heroine's suspender-like bathing suit and her breast and torso when viewed from the side. Zejian Shen's "Pearl Divers" wrings an amusing dual joke out of its title's double entendre by anthorpomorphizing both the oysters captured by the titular fisherwomen and their clitorises as they celebrate their catch with some beachside tribadism. Derek Ballard's "Trap Shadez" is another sci-fi story whose sexual content is actually relatively minimal; for my taste it overelies on angular '80s-tinged figurework and design that can't quite overcome storytelling that's deliberately but still unsuccessfully unclear. The True Chubbo comic that closes out the collection is a solid example of that strip's unusual charm (it's more charming than funny), wherein the love between creators Ray Sohn and his anonymous wife comes through all the clearer the worse their ridiculously violent sexual violations of one another get. Sands and DeForge's high-quality production, including risograph printing that gives each story a fitting primary color ink, certainly elevates each contributor — the murky purple selected for Negron makes that particular freakout even seedier, somehow. He's worth the price of admission all by himself, and hey, a home run after four singles still puts a lot of runs on the scoreboard.
Comics Time: Open Country #1June 1, 2011
Open Country #1
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
self-published, May 2011
16 pages
Read some preview pages, and buy it eventually, I'd imagine, at Michael DeForge's website
I think there's a greatest-hits compilation called A Young Person's Guide to King Crimson? That's sort of what this is for Michael DeForge. Nearly all his themes can be heard here: deadpan slice-of-life dialogue juxtaposed with extravagantly odd SFF concepts; deconstructed, dismantled, dismembered, disfigured human bodies and faces, like cubism reimagined as body horror; friendship depicted primarily as a venue for venting ideas and concerns at one another rather than real emotional interaction; uncomfortably accurate and funny lampooning of the disconnect between lofty art-school philosophizing and post-graduation economic reality; visually spectacular treatment of altered states shared by two people; creepy horror slowly oozing out of and eventually overwhelming previously established ideas. Conspicuously absent are the full-fledged rubble-strewn wastelands of the sort seen in Lose #3, but in their place there's a conversation about such post-apocalyptic landscapes. It comes in the context of an interview with the visual artist whose work is the catalyst for the comic. She works in the medium of psychic projection, said by our leading man to be the province of the educated and access-granted elite: "Sometimes I wish I had actually stayed in art school so I could have learned how to do that sort of thing. There are so many techinques that I don't have the time or resources to learn on my own…psychic projection, silkscreening, linocuts, darkroom photography–all that stuff." Our hero tries to bone up on the form by watching an interview with the artist (whom we first see as she projects an avatar of herself that's gigantic, nude, impaled in a field of debris, and begging for help) on YouTube: "[Do you] really believe that? That there's 'nothing left to build on?'" asks her interviewer. "Your imagery is so preoccupied with debris, clutter, refuse…'" This might as well be an interview with DeForge himself. And like a good interview, Open Country #1 is a great thing to hand someone who wants to see what's up with the artist in question.
Comics Time: Lose #3May 18, 2011
Lose #3
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
Koyama Press, May 2011
Buy it from Michael DeForge
It's one thing to take a Chris Ware/Daniel Clowes middle-aged sad-sack comedy of discomfort and plop it into a slime-encrusted anthropomorphized-mutant-animal-inhabited post-apocalyptic hellscape that looks like Jon Vermilyea staging a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles revival in the middle of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's quite another thing to do this well. And it's still another thing to do it so well that while the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts, the parts work all on their own, too. That's the achievement of Lose #3, the latest installment in Michael DeForge's old-school one-man alternative comic series.
In past issues, as well as in his minis and anthology contributions, DeForge has proven adept at crafting razor-sharp embodiments/lampoons of what have been termed "first world problems" and placing them in the mouths of fantastical, outlandishly designed and drawn creatures and monsters and superheroes and giant mecha and what have you. ("I feel like things have been weird between us lately," reads the image of the shaggy faceless beast rolling around on the ground — that sort of thing.) And he does that here, too, to cringingly devastating effect: The text for the opening one-pager is a letter from a fresh-faced intern high on his first trip to NYC to his mother back home ("I asked if there were any paid positions opening at the magazine in the fall. They said things were still up in the air for now. Fingers crossed, I suppose!"), juxtaposed against the images of a naked man riding a spotted deer through a debris-strewn wasteland in order to pour the coffee he purchases at a still-standing chain coffee house into the maw of the creature that lives in his cave. Toward the end of the collection, ants wax pessimistic about life in these weird, dark times ("But, like — why do we live this way? It's — it's nuts that this is the 'norm' for us," says an ant about the potential for human beings to burn them with magnifying glasses) and debate whether or not to move the dead body of a friend when its pheromones start attracting a crowd ("Just leave it. It's a party") Even in the main story, there's a bit where the two teenage sons of our divorced protagonist talk about The Wire that nails the clichés of that particular conversation so accurately even without mentioning it by name ("The show introduces a new part of the city at the beginning of each season, so it's always, like, BOOM! Bigger picture! BOOM! Bigger picture! You know?") that I wanted to delete my old blog entries about the show.
The innovation of "Dog 2070," Lose #3's centerpiece story, is, well, that it's a story, a look at a very shitty month in the life of a middle-aged flying-dog-man-thing. He concern-trolls his ex-wife over her current husband, his attempts to connect with his teenage and twentysomething kids are rebuffed with casual cruelty, he fixates on his own problems to the pint where he can't empathize with cancer patients, his neurosis leaves him equally unable to spend his time at the computer productively writing or unproductively masturbating, he drunkenly confronts his middle-school son's ex-girlfriend after a cyberbullying website the kid made about her nearly gets him expelled from school, he ends up in the hospital after a freak gliding accident. It's easy to focus on the yuks here, which are abundant in the same way they are in Wilson or Lint — the sudden reveal of our hero Stephen's inebriation when talking to his kid's ex is impeccably timed to elicit an "Oh, Jesus" guffaw, and DeForge nearly always chooses dead-on details to illustrate the guy's creepy self-absorption, from giving his ex-in-laws gifts on Thanksgiving just to stay in their lives to interrupting a conversation about a co-workers chemo to announce he's begun therapy as research for his screenplay. (The flying scene, in which a soaring Stephen sums it all up by saying "Sometimes it's as if I forget we're able to glide!," then crashes into a bird, is a bit on the nose, though.) But DeForge reveals the true emotional stakes in a pair of dream sequences as recounted by Stephen to his therapist. In the first, we watch the flesh slowly slough off his daughter, who recently attempted suicide, before she fades away from view; in the second, he and his former family, reduced to four-legged animalistic versions of their anthropomorphized selves, fight over a scrap of meat. "I just feel so ashamed I don't know why. I'm watching it and I just feel awful." This, of all the notes he hits, is the one he chooses to leave us with, a nightmare representation of a failing man's worst fears and shames, to which he has no adequate response and to which no adequate response is provided. That's when you realize that these emotional stakes have been present all along, hiding in plain sight: In the omnipresent beads of sweat oozing down Stephen's fleshy body, in the debris-strewn streets and burned-out buildings that form a backdrop for the story, in the walls that seem to sweat and drip and bleed themselves. Something is wrong, the art says, even as the narrative chronicles the banal travails of a relatively normal guy. DeForge doesn't need to come right out and say it himself. Lose #3 isn't the bolt-from-the-blue paradigm-shifter I've seen some people describe it as, but it's a confident enough comic that it doesn't need to be, pushing its author out of his comfort zone only to discover he's perfectly comfortable here, too.
Comics Time: Spotting Deer and SMFebruary 4, 2011
Spotting Deer
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
Koyama Press, December 2010
12 pages
Buy it from Michael DeForge
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
self-published, December 2010
12 pages
I forget what it cost
"Although physically similar to a common white-tailed deer (Ocoileus virginianus), the spotting deer (Capreolus vulgaris) is actually a kind of terrestrial slug." So begins the first of two short, creepy comics debuted by Canadian wunderkind Michael DeForge at this past December's Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, and so does one get a sense of the type of skin-crawly, dis-ease driven horror DeForge is creating here. In the guise of a nature guide, the cartoonist not only piles discomfiting detail ("Its 'antlers' are actually colonies of parasitic polyps that are first attached to the deer during adolescence") upon discomfiting detail ("biologists nickname this phenomenon the 'sexual acqueduct'"), but trots out a unique and fully formed full-color palette to do so; he then whisks the comic into unexpected territory by making it just as much about the obsessive in-story writer of the guide, whose face we never see even as evidence quietly accrues that his interest in these strange creatures has more or less ruined his life. The self-published SM is similarly based in the horror of the squicky and gross (a snowman stands mutely smiling as two teenagers take a knife to it, unpleasantly revealing that it's somehow made out of real flesh) and similarly takes off into unpredictable territory (the flesh is hallucinogenic; the snowman's nearest neighbor is a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style old man who doesn't take kindly to trespassers). As if compensating for the comparative lack of color, DeForge makes the book's centerpiece as sensual as possible: It's a full-on psychedelic freak-out laid atop a topless makeout session by an ersatz Maggie and Hopey. It's enough eye candy to send you into the visual equivalent of diabetic shock, which somehow leaves you even better prepared to picture the unpleasantness that goes on between panels on the subsequent page and is about to go on after that elegant final panel. The best part of all, of course, is that while DeForge's alt-horror idiom is familiar enough (especially to me, especially lately), his personal drawing style isn't; DeForge's comics really do look only like themselves. Give me more.
Comics Time: Studygroup12 #4February 2, 2011
Studygroup 12 #4
Zack Soto, Steve Weissman, Eleanor Davis, Michael DeForge, Trevor Alixopulos, T. Edward Bak, Chris Cilla, Max Clotfelter, Farel Dalrymple, Vanessa Davis, Theo Ellsworth, Jason Fischer, Nick Gazin, Richard Han, Jevon Jihanian, Aidan Koch, Amy Kuttab, Blaise Larmee, Corey Lewis, Kiyoshi Nakazawa, Tom Neely, Jennifer Parks, Karn Piana, Jim Rugg, Tim Root, Ian Sundahl, Angie Wang, Dan Zettwoch, writers/artists
Zack Soto, editor
Milo George, editorial/technical advisor
Published by Jason Leivian and Zack Soto, December 2010
80 pages
Buy it from Zack Soto
This is going to come out sounding waaaay more like a diss than it's intended to, but in flipping through the comeback installment of this Zack Soto-edited alt/artcomix anthology a few weeks after my initial read-through, I realized I didn't remember anything in it prior to cracking the covers once again. Which is fine, I think! Looking at it now, Studygroup12 #4 seems to me to be much more an art book than a comics anthology. For one thing it's exquisitely made: Beautiful screenprinted neon-pink-and-aqua covers inside covers (trust me, it's much glowier than the scan above suggests); a gallery of impactful pink/blue/purple splash pages to kick things off and close things out, including some of the most striking images Jon Vermilyea and Dan Zettwoch have ever constructed out of their customary melty-monster and diagram styles respectively; pages printed in the vivid, inky blue-purple of a carbon copy. It's a lovely package even compared to the similar approaches of Mould Map and Monster. My point is simply that all these things point to a book that works better from moment to moment as a catalog of images and illustrations rather than one whose strength arises from the cumulative impact of individual sequential narratives. Flipping through, I'm struck by the weird mystical sensuality of Aidan Koch's portraiture and triangular caption boxes; the Renee-French-on-a-photocopier haze of Jennifer Parks's creepy little strip; the pleasure of seeing Tom Neely images reproduced at a much larger size than his customary minicomics; the strength of the way Vanessa Davis designs leering faces, something that's much clearer to me here than its ever been in the comics I've seen from her elsewhere, which frankly have never bowled me over the way they have so many readers; some funny punk/thrash/metal/trash pastiches from Vice Magazine's mustache-at-large Nick Gazin (I wish a HAUNTED HOLOCAUST: "THE TEENAGE TITS TOUR" t-shirt actually existed). But much of what really reads as comics does so rather weakly — an uncharacteristic experimental misfire from Michael DeForge; the return of USApe, my least favorite Jim Rugg character; diminishing returns from Vermilyea's anthropomorphized breakfast gang, which here get a little too Milk and Cheese-y; a Farel Dalrymple strip that's drowned out by its over-shading; etc. Ultimately it's really only Blaise Larmee's riotously confrontational anxiety-of-influence comic, in which one of his trademark prepubescent/elfin protagonists navigates her way through some sort of abstract geometric maze only to stand in front of a menacing reproduced photograph of Charles Schulz (!!!), that hits me hard as comics; perhaps not coincidentally it's the first time I've seen anything from his whole Comets Comets crew that makes good on their kill-yr-idols gotta-make-way-for-the-homo-superior internet trolling. As a look at the Portland-helmed turn-of-the-decade artcomix look, it's swell; as a look at their comics, and where they might take everyone else's, it's only a start.
Comics Time: MonsterJanuary 21, 2011
Paul Lyons, Jim Drain, Michael DeForge, Michaela Zacchilli, Brian Ralph, Chuck Forsman, James Kochalka, Jim Rugg, Peter Edwards, Andy Estep, Oscar Estep, CF, Brian Chippendale, Blade, Keith McCulloch, Mike Taylor, Roby Newton, Edie Fake, Leif Goldberg, Keith Jones, Dennis Franklin, Jo Dery, Erik Talley, Beatrice McGeoch, Tony Astone, Mat Brinkman, Nick Thorburn, Melissa Mendes, Aaron DeMuth, writers/artists
Paul Lyons, editor
self-published (I think), October 2010
88 pages
Buy it from PictureBox
They're gettin' the band back together, man! From out of the rubble of Fort Thunder rises the surprise 2010 revival of the gigantically influential Providence underground-art institution's house anthology, featuring mostly-about-monsters work from all six of the Fort's core cartoonists — Brinkman, Chippendale, Ralph, Drain, Lyons, Goldberg. Plus Andy Estep, Peter Edwards, Roby Newton, and a lot of other people you'll see listed as having lived/worked/played in the Fort. Plus fellow-travelers like Providence's CF and Jo Derry and Highwater's James Kochalka. Plus Jim Rugg and Michael DeForge and Chuck Forsman and other leading lights of post-Fort alternative comics. And a reunion tour is exactly what it feels like.
Don't get me wrong, there's fine comics in this beautifully printed navy-blue-and-white package, many of which take advantage of its unusually large trim size. (We're not talking Kramers Ergot 7 territory, but the thing is big. Think the Wednesday Comics hardcover.) Brian Ralph uses his comparatively clean cartoony style for a hilariously violent giant-robot comic, "Voltron from Hell," basically, with huge panels and splash pages taking perversely pretty delight in mass destruction and death. The final panel of CF's weird tale about an ambulance driver-cum-cat burglar who sneaks into the house of a woman with a mysterious disease actually made me jump — just a beautifully done little scare. Brian Chippendale's story ties in with his Puke Force webcomic and gives him a chance to draw some villains at full splash-page size. I thought Chuck Forsman cut himself off at the knees a bit with his punchline ending, but until then his contribution was a creepy little thing that reminded me favorably of the urban legend my Delawarean wife recounted to me about the zoobies, the inbred mutant children of the DuPont family who would roam around the woods waylaying passers-by. There are insanely METAL full-page illustrations from Brinkman (who's by now made a wonderful career of such things), Tony Astone, and Dennis Franklin — I mean, I laughed out loud at how fuckin' devil-horns they were. And Lyons's wraparound cover portraits of various barfing beasts is breathtaking, one of the most impressive single comics images of the year.
But in a way, the Fort Thunder aesthetic is a victim of its own success. I lost track of the number of good-to-great comics that came out this year bearing its influence, and those apples-to-apples comparisons make it hard for the work here, which I think all parties involved would admit was done more for fun than for tear-down-the-walls boundary-pushing, to stand out. In terms of anthologies alone, you could stand this one right between Studygroup 12, Closed Caption Comics, Smoke Signals, Diamond Comics, and Mould Map. Fort Thunder and the Providence scene's DNA is now deeply embedded in an array publishers, including not just the late and lamented Highwater, Bodega, and Buenaventura, but also PictureBox, Secret Acres, Koyama, Nobrow, Pigeon, Gaze, and even the mighty Drawn & Quarterly. Moreover, whether you call it fusion or New Action or simply slap an alt- prefix in front of horror or SF or fantasy, Fort Thunder's pioneering jailbreak of genre from the mainstream American comics prison has subsequently allowed it to become almost inescapable in smart-comics circles. Finally, Chippendale, Brinkman, Forsman, DeForge, CF, Fake, and Rugg are all in direct competition with work they put out elsewhere last year, most of which was more ambitious. And understandably so! Seriously, I'm not complaining — Monster is what I think it set out to be. It's seeing Floyd get together for an awesome Live 8 gig, rather than seeing Waters and Gilmour working together again, and as such it's more a treat for the fans than documentary evidence of why we became fans in the first place.
Comic of the Year of the Day: Lose #2December 20, 2010
Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today's comic is Lose #2 by Michael DeForge, published by Koyama — the breakout artist of the year.
DeForge's actual comics, as contained in these two issues, are straightforward, funny, and sharp as a knife. Inside, he wields a precise line to create character designs that read like a slightly more avant-garde version of what you might see on a post-millennial Nickelodeon cartoon. The storytelling and punchlines are always crystal-clear even as the material bounces back and forth between long-form, surreal horror stories and laser-precise gag strips….In issue #2, virtually all the page space is devoted to a long and no-fucking-around nasty horror story about a little kid who manages to domesticate a large spider whose brethren are simultaneously ushering in a quite lethal and disgusting plague-style demise for his uncaring family and abusive classmates. Imagine Skyscrapers of the Midwest weaponized and you're almost there….DeForge has landed himself on my must-watch list.
Click here for a full review; unfortunately, this comic is out of print and unavailable.


text:
As truck manufacturers in the United States began to adopt diesel engines in the early to mid-1930s, partly thanks to the popularization efforts of Clessie Cummins, so did they also begin to realize their limitations, particularly their colossal weight and their need for efficient scavenging. Propo ... Read more
The Dick Skipworth Ecurie Ecosse Collection heads to auction. Photo courtesy Bonhams. Over a span of nearly 20 years, Scottish racing team Ecurie Ecosse fielded an almost countless number and variety of cars in Formula One, Formula Two, and sports car racing, and many of them hailed from Coventry o ... Read more


text:
Several companies are migrating to the cloud platform. Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) is one of those leading companies providing cloud computing solutions. It has a strong product portfolio with over 100,000 customers and offers cloud-enabled CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions.
The company is witnessing constant growth in revenue and its recent acquisition of ExactTarget is also contributing to revenue growth.
Salesforce on a Terrific Run
Salesforce.com projects revenue in the range of $4 billion to $4.025 billion for the current fiscal year, an increase of 31%-32% year-over-year and is confident about its prospects.
The market for cloud computing software is projected to be around $35.6 billion. Salesforce.com is a well established name in the cloud space and is popular among its customers due to its quality, support and features offered. Salesforce.com, through its services, is focused on reducing costs by saving manpower cost, capital cost and reduced business complexities for cloud customers.
- Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Signs with CRM. Click here to check it out.
- CRM 30-Year Financial Data
- The intrinsic value of CRM
- Peter Lynch Chart of CRM
Various corporate organizations are going with Salesforce.com for cloud computing due to its reduced implementation time with an accelerated return on investment.
Salesforce.com recently tied up with Oracle (ORCL) that illustrates its capabilities and market strength. The tie-up enables Salesforce to use Oracle's software and hardware, allowing it to serve a wider customer base. Salesforce entered into a partnership with Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) recently, which is a well-known player in the cloud and this tie up is good news for both companies.
Salesforce's earnings are expected to grow at a CAGR of almost 28% over the next five years, which is significantly above the industry average of 16%. This impressive growth rate is expected to be achieved through the company's alliances and huge customer base.
A Look at Workday
Workday is a subscription-based cloud-enabled software solution provider. It provides software solutions regarding Financial Management and Human Capital Management.
The company has displayed robust results of late. The revenue growth rate increased from 71.5% in the previous year quarter to $107.6 million currently. The company has close to 500 customers. Workday is generating around 75% of its total revenue from subscriptions.
However, operating expense increased from $60.8 million in the year-ago quarter to $99.1 million in the current quarter. The company plans to expand globally and release Workday Payroll for France and the U.K. targeted by 2016.
Going forward, Workday is expected to grow at a solid pace. Its earnings will grow at a terrific annual rate of 50% for the next five years as predicted by Yahoo! Finance. This is an impressive growth rate and tie-ups with bigger companies such as Salesforce.com should further boost Workday's growth.
Workday's investment for long term growth would probably contract its short term profitability but analysts expect solid long-term performance. The company has surpassed earnings estimates comprehensively in the last four quarters with 25% increase on an average.
Both cloud players are expected to grow effectively in the future and so investors should consider taking a closer look at them. Salesforce stock must be considered by more conservative investors as it is profitable on a non-GAAP basis, but those having a higher risk appetite must probably look into Workday due to its terrific earnings growth estimates.