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Data showed manufacturing in the world's largest economy expanded in August: The Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index increased to 55.7 in August from 55.4 a month earlier. An additional report showed construction spending in the U.S. increased in July to the highest level in four years, while data yesterday showed China's manufacturing index increased to a 16-month high in August.
Equities: The SEP13 E-mini S&P 500 (CME:ESU13) is up 15.25 points today to 1646.50, breaching a key resistance level of 1644, but still below one of our resistance levels of 1650. We believe that even with the upbeat economic data from the U.S. released this morning, as well as from China yesterday, this market's upside potential may not be too extended, as the markets prepare for a potential tapering announcement this month from the Fed. Longer term, we believe that the global growth story will propel the equity markets to new highs. We have key resistance levels above 1650 at 1666 and 1684.
Bonds: "Septaper" is the theme this week for the bond market, as investors may be preparing for a tapering announcement at this month's Fed meeting. Additional positive economic data such as ISM and yesterday's Chinese manufacturing data also probably are causing the bonds to slide heavily today. This market is down 1.8% to 129'17 (CBOT:ZBZ13). We believe new lows below the 128 level might be in store soon, especially if this Friday's jobs report is above forecasted estimates.
Commodities: NOV13 Soybeans (CBOT:SX13) start off the week up big again, today trading up $.30 to $13.88, still below the contract high of $14.10. This is a "weather market" and thus changes in weather forecasts may be responsible for large price swings. This market is up today due to hot and dry Midwest weather over the long weekend. DEC13 silver futures are up $.90 or around +3.7% on the market trying to price-in potentially higher industrial demand for this metal, as we saw impressive manufacturing data come out today from both the US and China. DEC13 gold (COMEX:GCZ13) is up $5 to $1,401. But, we believe this product may be capped in the short term at the previous high of $1,430, as the US dollar may continue to strengthen on good US economic data.
Currencies: Speaking of the U.S. dollar, the SEP13 U.S. Dollar Index (NYBOT:DXU13) is up 35 ticks to 82.50, which is a very key level to us. Our next target above here is 82.90, but we believe this index could head much higher this month, especially if the economic data keeps coming out higher than the analysts expect. We have 82.40 as our key line in the sand, and 83.50 as the next major target higher on the daily chart. The big story in the currencies today is the Aussie Dollar, with the SEP13 Aussie rallying a whopping 160 ticks to 90.51. We are looking at 90 as a key decision level, and at this point we believe the Aussie might continue its rally to at least the 92 level, mainly due to recent Chinese manufacturing data coming out very strong.


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subset: commoncrawl


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QD145 Series
Encoders, Hollow Shaft
1.45" Diameter Optical Encoder
from $165.00/ea
Quantum Devices, Inc. Model QD145 was designed to provide an improved feedback solution in applications typically using modular encoders. With an over all length of just only 0.87" and the stability of a bearing encoder design, the model QD145 can provide significant performance upgrades in applications limited by traditional modular encoder solutions.
Outputs consist of quadrature with reference pulse and three-phase commutation, which can be configured with either the industrial standard 5 volt RS422A Line Driver or the 5 to 26 volt OL7272 line driver. A flexible member allows for much greater tail shaft run out than can be tolerated by modular encoder designs plus 30 degrees of rotation for commutation timing. A housing constructed of conductive carbon fiber composite provides the EMI shielding of an all metal housing and performance of a lightweight robust assembly.
Features of Encoders, Hollow Shaft


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It may seem crazy to suggest wearing something as warm as a sweatshirt given the recent heat spell, but cooler days will come again, they will. Ever iconic, Steve McQueen popularised the short-sleeved sweatshirt in The Great Escape. Perfect for breezier days when you can stand a bit of arm chill but want to feel hugged, a short sleeved sweatshirt is a great item. Customise your own (Uniqlo sell quality, slim fitting versions) by cutting the sleeves off, or consider this more 'finished' version by Nom de Guerre from OkiNi. This is a macho look best worn with a throbbing motorcycle between your thighs. At least, wear with chunky boots and faded jeans.
Nom de Guerre 'training sweater' at OkiNi, in sale at £84


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John Smythe, executive director of USDA's Farm Service Agency in California wants the agricultural community to know that with the publication of an interim final regulation today in the Federal Register, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced changes in Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) qualifications, program payment limitations, and direct attribution for FSA and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) programs. These changes became effective in accordance with the 2008 farm bill.
Public comments on this interim final rule must be submitted to the Department within 30 days of the date of publication.
"Farm bill changes are to ensure that active and eligible farmers and ranchers are the ones receiving program benefits," stated Smythe. "Lowering AGI ceilings, further defining farm and non-farm income and tightening the attribution of payments whether entities or individuals further strengthens these programs and targets those farms and ranches in need of this assistance."
For commodity and disaster programs, the AGI limitation was reduced from $2.5 million AGI from all sources to a three-year average non-farm AGI of $500,000. This means a person or entity shall not be eligible for such programs if the non-farm AGI exceeds $500,000. Also, under the new regulations, an individual or entity must have a 3-year average AGI less than or equal to $750,000 per year from farm income in order to qualify for direct payments issued under the Direct and Counter-cyclical Program.
The definition of income derived from farming, ranching and forestry operations was expanded to include among other activities, the packing, storing and transporting of agricultural commodities; production of livestock products; farm-based production of renewable bio-energy; and in some instances, the providing of operational inputs to farmers, ranchers and foresters.
For conservation programs, the average nonfarm AGI limitation is $1 million or less for eligibility. However, an individual or entity who has non-farm AGI in excess of $1 million remains eligible for conservation programs only if 66.66 percent or more of the total AGI is derived from farming, ranching and forestry operations. In addition, the AGI limitation for conservation programs may be waived on a case-by-case basis if it is determined that environmentally sensitive land of special significance would be protected.
Program payments are limited by direct attribution to individuals or entities. A legal entity is defined as an entity created under Federal or state law that owns land or an agricultural commodity, product or livestock. Through direct attribution, payment limitation is based on the total payments received by the individual, both directly and indirectly. Qualifying spouses are eligible to be considered separate persons for payment limitation purposes, rather than being automatically combined under one limitation.
States, local governments, political subdivisions, and other agencies were eligible for payments prior to enactment of the 2008 act. The 2008 act and this rule make such jurisdictions ineligible for payments unless such payments are earned on state-owned land and are used to support public schools. Payments under this exception are limited to $500,000 annually; the limitation is waived for a state that has a population of less than 1.5 million.
Individuals and entities must be "actively engaged in farming" with respect to a farming operation in order to be eligible for specified payments and benefits. To be "actively engaged in farming," the individual or entity must make significant contributions to the farming operation of: (1) capital, equipment, land, or a combination; and (2) personal labor or active personal management, or a combination.
Under rules in effect since 1988, not every member of an entity had to contribute active personal labor or management. The interim final rule requires each partner, stockholder, or member with an ownership interest to make a contribution of active personal labor or active personal management. The contribution must be regular and substantial, and documented as well as separate and distinct from any other member's contribution. The rule limits the ability of passive stockholders to continue to realize benefits from the entity.
Under the interim final rule, the addition of individuals or entities to an existing operation to qualify for additional payments is more restrictive than under previous regulations. The prior rule in effect since 1988 said the acquisition of new cropland to the farming operation of at least 20 percent qualifies for the increase of an unlimited number of new persons and/or legal entities as eligible for payment. The rule changes the 20-percent increase requirement from cropland to base acres and only allows for the addition of one new person to the operation. However, based on the magnitude and complexity of the change in the farming operation, the state FSA office may approve additional persons or legal entities for payment in the farming operation. The change eliminates the loophole that previously allowed an unlimited increase in the number of limitations that could accompany a 20 percent increase in eligible land area that meets the definition of cropland.


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Erika Cuéllar, co-coordinator of the Bolivian Committee for the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), recently received a Rolex Award for Enterprise. Her project will support the conservation of the Gran Chaco region in South America by training local people with the skills needed to manage this region sustainably.
As the founder of two Bolivian non-governmental conservation organizations, Erika is known in Bolivia for her dedication to conservation. She initiated a project that got people living in the Gran Chaco region of Bolivia involved in conservation, and today, local people can receive accredited training as parabiologists. People trained as parabiologists have the skills to carry out scientific survey methods allowing them to collect and report information about the environment and conservation threats. Funding from the Rolex Award for Enterprise will ensure this training can continue, benefitting both local communities and the Gran Chaco.
The Gran Chaco is an extensive hot and arid area that is spread across parts of Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. Described by some as one of South America's great wildernesses, this area is being damaged by extensive cattle grazing, the construction of a gas pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil and the extraction of groundwater. Living in the Gran Chaco is a wealth of wildlife including the Guanaco (Lama guanicoe), the White-lipped Peccary (Tayassu pecari) and the Jaguar (Panthera onca).
Erika has chosen the Guanaco, a species listed as Least Concern on The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, as a flagship species to spearhead the expansion of her conservation initiative from its roots in Bolivia into Argentina and Paraguay. Although there are approximately 500,000 Guanaco in the wild, only about 200 remain in Bolivia and Erika believes that the fate of this one species can foretell the fate of many other species in the Gran Chaco.
The Rolex Award for Enterprise not only gives Erika an opportunity to extend her Guanaco conservation programme into additional countries, but it will also provide an opportunity that allows more local people to make conservation a long-term employment option. Erika hopes that those who train as parabiologists will be able to play a critical role in policy-making at all levels, from within local communities to a national level.
Already the award has allowed Erika to put her project into action. Contact has been made with government authorities in Argentina and Paraguay and now that she can travel to meet these authorities it will make a big difference to obtaining the support needed to make the project happen. In Bolivia, she has already met with local representatives and reinforced conservation initiatives that had already been put in place. The Rolex Award has also allowed Erika to hire three parabiologists to join the research team that will develop this conservation project.
"The environment of the Chaco is rapidly deteriorating," said Erika Cuéllar. "Yet we can still protect the guanaco, and what remains of the Chaco, if the three countries work together."
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Can ANY company or organization afford NOT to be involved in social media? It's a fair question and one may argue that it's a CRITICAL question!
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and others that have just joined the game—and the list goes on and on ad nauseam!
"We already have a website and we get email. Isn't that enough?"
The words invading our vocabulary are legion… and silly at times: blogs, fans, tweets, diggs, etc. Is this trip really necessary?
PERHAPS NOT. Let's start by exploring why NOT to participate in social media:


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Jimmy Nelson captures the last glimpses of dying tribes in Africa, Asia, South America, and Siberia.
The photos are part of Nelson's series "Before They Pass Away," a captivating set of photographs that beautifully capture the purity and authenticity of a dying culture.
The homogeneous characteristics of today's digitalized world compelled him to document a timeless document of these tribes.
"In all this homogeneity, people no longer think that their ethnicity and authenticity is valuable. They think what's valuable is what they see here," he said, gesturing to the many indistinguishable laptops that sat on almost every table in the crowded cafe before pointing to his heart, "and not in here."
Since 2009, the photographer has been traveling through the most remote areas of the world in order to capture the "pure beauty in their goals and family ties, [and] their belief in gods and nature."
With genuine interest and purpose, Nelson embeds himself in the culture of these tribes without judgement. Whenever I see a project of this kind (one that captures the lives of non-western peoples), I feel as though the westerner capturing and creating a narrative based on what he sees, tends to have an air of superiority. In small ways, the images become these objects of amusement. Nelson, however, is appreciative of these cultures, not because they are exotic, but simply because they carry, through their rituals and social rules, an imminent duty to preserve and nurture their culture and social rituals in ways that are, in fact, absent in Western societies. (via huffpost)


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WOOD DALE, Ill., June 12 (UPI) -- Airlift services for the U.S. military in Afghanistan will continue to be provided by Illinois company AAR through a $104 million contract option.
"We are proud of our role as the largest independent provider of airlift for the U.S. government and its allies in Afghanistan and to serve as an integral part of our nation's transportation and logistics capability," said Randy J. Martinez, president of AAR Airlift and Group vice president, with AAR Corp.
"This renewal acknowledges the dedication and work of our pilots and support teams and the confidence that they have earned from USTRANSCOM and the Department of Defense."
AAR is using 15 fixed-wing aircraft, in addition to helicopters, to transport cargo, personnel and mail around Afghanistan for U.S. and NATO forces.
Similar services are provided to the U.S. Department of Defense in other regions of the world under existing contracts.
AAR said its independent airlift support operation in Afghanistan is the largest by contractors.


text: You can take your keys and/or remotes, along with your vehicle, to a professional locksmith shop for cutting and programming. If you are unable to find a locksmith in your area, you can take them to your local dealership instead. We do not recommend taking the keys to a hardware or department store (i.e. Home Depot, Wal-mart, Ace Hardware, etc.) We give a short explanation at the bottom of every listing telling you whether or not you are able to program the item by yourself. Note: We are not able to cut or program keys for you!! The vehicle and original key(s) must be present to cut and program new keys and remotes!!


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Helz Cuppleditch brings us her latest collection of festive products direct from the North Pole. Christmass most adorable Penguins are joined by a range of cute characters as they help Santa get ready for Christmas. The collection comprises of designer paper and decoupage with a range of co-ordinating embellishments including ribbons, blossoms, stamps and much more.


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These inexpensive herbs and flowers can add decoration to your garden and flavor to your meals...and they just happen to deter mosquitoes too!
When summer hits, the mosquitoes start swarming. Here are several easy, cheap, and chemical-free recipes for making homemade mosquito repellent.
File this one under "Wow, that's a great idea... or is it?"
Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have developed a mosquito containing a gene that makes it resistant to the malaria virus. [more]
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Game of Thrones' Characters Get Fashion Advice From Celebrity Stylist Brad Goreski
Embrace your inner Liberace, Joffrey!
Should Joffrey embrace his inner Liberace? Is it time for Lord Varys to embrace colors? Doesn't Robb Stark deserve some tailored armor? These are the questions of our time, Game of Thrones fans. To weigh in on the iconic looks of our players, Vulture recruited Brad Goreski, celebrity stylist and star of Bravo's It's a Brad Brad World (airing tonight at ten). He's outfitted people like Jessica Alba, Christina Ricci, and Lily Collins, so if anyone knows what Melisandre should be doing with all of that hair, it's him! Check out his suggestions for what to wear in Westeros in the slideshow below.BEGIN SLIDESHOW


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If you're looking for love and would enjoy fun filled night's meeting like-minded people, Speed Dating could be just what you're after. At MySpeedDate we arrange a whole host of events throughout the UK.
Our top priority is making sure all our guests have a great time and enjoy the experience. It's a great opportunity to make new friends, and who knows - you could even find yourself a soul-mate!
At MySpeedDate we aim to give you enough time to get to know your dates. Unlike many other organisers, who only give you three minutes to make each other's acquaintance, we opt to give our guests up to five. This can give you that little bit of extra time you need in order to decide whether you'd like to get to know your date better.
Our speed dating events give you the chance to meet up to twenty new people in one night. We're not saying everyone will find love, that part is down to you, but we'll provide an entertaining atmosphere that will help you relax and be yourself. Whether you're new to speed dating or have been to these kinds of events before, get yourself booked into one of our stylish venues and our experienced hosts will guide you through a fun filled evening.
We understand that most people don't want a long chain of dates straight after one another, so we break the evening up by giving you time to go to the bar and mingle. Your night doesn't have to end after your final date, and although the event is over you can choose to mingle and enjoy each other's company into the early hours.
Click here to view all Cardiff speed dating events


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A seven-game Jeopardy! champion, Stephanie Jass' return to the game show didn't go as she hoped.
The 42-year-old Milan, Mich., resident finished third with $13,000 in the first match of the opening round of Jeopardy!'s Tournament of Champions, in which 15 winning contestants from the previous 18 months went head to head. The show aired Wednesday. Jass, an associate history professor at Adrian College, is not out of the tournament just yet, though. Four losing players with the highest money totals will be brought back to compete as wild cards. The tournament runs through Feb. 26.
"I felt good about my chances when the game ended," she said in an email, "but then I had to sit in the audience the rest of the day, watching the subsequent games. It was a nerve-wracking experience, wondering if my score would be good enough, and the viewing public can experience that anxiety right along with me over the next three games.
"The first five games are all taped in one day, so it was quite an exhausting afternoon, even though I was done playing. And my mom, husband, and in-laws were in a different part of the audience, so I could only imagine what they were thinking."
During her October run on the show, Jass earned $147,570 in winnings, making her among the top overall performers in Jeopardy!'s long-running history.
The show airs at 7:30 p.m. weekdays on WTOL-TV, Channel 11.
Two Toledo contestants will appear next week on Who Wants to be a Millionaire's Countdown to the Oscars movie-themed week.
Tim McMahon of Perrysburg competes Tuesday and Nick Montalbano of Toledo on Thursday.
McMahon is a former sports anchor at WNWO-TV, Channel 24, and Wood County bureau reporter at WTOL. Montalbano, who works in automotive sales, is married to Diana and has a 16-year-old-son, Jonah.
Hosted by the Emmy Award-winning Meredith Vieira, Who Wants to be a Millionaire airs at 12:30 p.m. weekdays on WTVG-TV, Channel 13.


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This is the electronic pet door that automatically opens when a pet approaches. The unit installs in a sliding patio door frame and when a pet wearing the included ultrasonic collar comes within 1' to 10' (the distance is selected by owner) the pet door automatically opens to let the pet in or out. When the pet passes through the door it closes automatically; the door can be set to restrict a pet to only being able to enter or leave the house or to prevent the door from opening. Its rigid aluminum frame, dual pane window made of hermetically sealed, tempered glass, and air-tight pet door that locks with a dead bolt ensure a secure, weathertight barrier. The included lock installs at the base of a sliding door to provide security and allow owners to enter or exit. Fits 77 1/4"-80 1/4" high sliding patio door frames. Plugs into AC.
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The longest decline in Treasuries this year has left U.S. government debt the cheapest since March 2011 when measured by real yields and the best relative value compared with German bunds in more than two decades.
After inflation, 10-year U.S. notes yielded 0.91% last week, or 1.77 percentage points more than real yields on U.K. gilts, the widest spread in 25 months. Versus Germany, the securities are the least costly in 23 years when adjusted for the recent record-low interest rates around the world that distorted the normal relationship, according to FTN Financial.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is counting on Treasuries to contain borrowing costs as the central bank buys $85 billion a month in securities to sustain the economic recovery that lifted U.S. consumer confidence to the highest in almost six years. The better relative yield for U.S. bonds may help bolster demand even as Warren Buffett said this month that he pitied fixed-income investors because of about record-low interest rates.
"The Treasury market is cheaper than almost any other comparable market on a relative value basis," Jim Vogel, an interest-rate strategist at FTN, said by phone May 15. "There is the thought out there that Treasuries are expensive when in reality they offer the most value given the improving economy and the relative real yield they offer compared to others."
Relative Yields
The Memphis, Tennessee-based firm has correctly been less bearish on bonds than consensus forecasts for the past two years. In May 2012, the firm's chief economist, Christopher Low, said 10-year yields would fall to 1.5% from a then 1.79%. They hit that mark three weeks later, and fell as low as 1.38% in July. The rate fell three basis points to 1.92% as of 9:38 a.m. in New York.
Treasuries due in at least 10 years were yielding 40 basis points more than non-U.S. sovereign debt on May 16, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. As recently as September, U.S. rates were lower than those for the rest of the world.
While yields on 10-year Treasuries rose to 1.95% last week, below the average of about 5% since 1990, they are 60 basis points, or 0.6 percentage point, higher than similar-maturity German bunds. That's about double the average since 2003. They are five basis points more than gilts, versus an average of about 30 basis points below over the same period.
Copyright 2014 Bloomberg. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


text: Low-impact exercise program for men and woman who have or are at risk of osteoporosis being held in Borough Hall. The class teaches how to improve and stabilize bone density, increase strength, balance, flexibility and build muscle mass. The class is on Wednesdays from 10-11 am excluding July and August and takes place in the Mountainside Community Room in Borough Hall. The cost is $15 for residents and $72 for non-residents. To register, call Kim 908-232-4406.


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On "Medusa"
Deborah Pope
"Medusa" continues the previous poem's ["A Tale"] final image of a static, unproductive landscape dominated by forces "looking quietly upon each other." In order to create the ideal environment the youth sought, Bogan turns to the figure of Medusa, whose mythic power stops time and process, seeking the goddess the way the youth seeks his desert.
[. . . .]
After this apparition, the speaker is frozen in a landscape that evades the death wish of the youth by virtue of its water and foliage; yet, through the agency of Medusa, any threatening process is also evaded. In this fantastic realm, the speaker has it both ways, much like the figures adorning Keats's Grecian urn. There is fertility (water, grass, hay) without the corruption of it (the water does not fall, nor the hay get mown).
[. . . .]
This paradoxical stasis and motion is not "dreadful" to the speaker, as are the opposing forces of "A Tale"; here all has come to a "great balanced day." The drawback is that this balance is possible only through the intervention of the supernatural. At this point the speaker cannot appropriate for herself the feminine power embodied in Medusa, and so she remains still and passive in the dead scene.
from A Separate Vision: Isolation in Contemporary Women's Poetry. Copyright © 1984 by Louisiana State University Press.
Elizabeth Frank
This Medusa is known and recognized; she has been seen before. The speaker violates some unknown taboo by entering this site of freedom and movement, and in punishment is turned to stone. Afterward, like the voice of Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death," she speaks from the "dead scene" which had once been alive with "Sun and reflection." Recounting the experience and thereby reenacting it, the speaker is no longer a living body, but "like a shadow," arrested in the equally deadened landscape. This is the dreadful equilibrium of stasis:
[. . . .]
Bogan was so little given to invention that we do no violence to the poem to regard it as a transcribed dream. Theodore Roethke called it "a breakthrough to great poetry, the whole piece welling up from the unconscious, dictated as it were." Interpreting it in psychoanalytic (chiefly Jungian) terms, he saw it as a struggle with the Anima, according to which the house in the cave is a "womb within a womb," and the Medusa the "man-in-the-womb, mother--her mother, possibly." Certainly it makes sense to see this terrifying figure as a much-transformed memory of the desired and destructive mother. From this central meaning flows yet another, in which the poem can be read as an allegory of the fate of the imagination when it goes forward to meet itself unprotected. Art requires the shield of form, of the mature personality's defenses, of experience. The speaker transformed into a statue or thing, imprisoned in memory, closes the poem, as Roethke points out, on "the self-revelation, the terrible finality of the ultimate traumatic experience." She is locked inside her own speech.
from Louise Bogan. Copyright © 1985 by Elizabeth Frank
Cheryl Walker
"Medusa," from Bogan's first book, mythologizes the experienc of psychic injury:
When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.
Since this scene becomes frozen in the mind, and since it retains not only terror but beauty, as we shall see, the poet seems to be inviting us to note the connection between the traumatized individual and the artist who would preserve in form the content of psychic crisis.
[. . . .]
Through her final years Louise Bogan became a woman obsessed with the memories she had accumulated in her childhood and in her young life with Raymond. [Her marriage with Raymond Holden had disintegrated by 1933]. Thus the "Medusa" poem written in the early 1920s may be read in part as a terrifying prolepsis:
[. . . .]
This is a scene whose beauty and terror has pollinated her imagination with its "yellow dust" that does not drift away. The shadow to which she refers in line eighteen suggests both the sense of her own insubstantiality in the face of this truma and the embodiment of her desire to echo it, to become the shadow of suffering.
from Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets. Copyright © 1991 by Cheryl Walker.
Lee Upton
In "Medusa," first published in the New Republic in1921, Bogan enacts a break from living being to deadening stasis, precisely rendering the moment of division. The poem is in five stanzas, four of them quatrains. The second stanza is composed of five lines, as if the stanzaic form must enlarge slightly to accommodate the Gorgon's ability suddenly to change conceptions of time and space. The repeated sibilants emphasize Medusa's threatening, snakelike power. With the poem's alternating line lengths, the first and third lines of quatrains often more than doubling in syllables the second and fourth lines, the poem mirrors the effect of foreshortening, contracting upon itself as the speaker in the poem experiences an abrupt halt in motion.
Initially, the woman who speaks is a threshold figure who sees the Medusa's head "through a door." The Gorgon herself would appear curiously without volition, suggesting that what may be viewed is her decapitated head, which will share the same fate as her victim, for her eyes, likewise, will be stiff and "bald," unable to turn from an offending sight. In his 1961 essay on Bogan, Roethke points out the connection between the speaker and the Medusa, noting that the Medusa is herself located in womblike maternal space, "the house in a cave of trees." Roethke was the first to suggest that the Medusa of Bogan's poems is "the anima, the Medusa, the man-in-the-woman, mother--her mother, possibly. . . ." Medusa paralyzes beings who are then confined forever to her yard and, by extension, to the matemal. Immobilized, the speaker remains attached to her "creator" within "the great balanced day."
[. . . .]
"Medusa" is marked by Bogan's central conflicts: a threateningly permeable consciousness; ruptures between will and action; and ambivalence toward matemal power as the speaker is, in a sense, "Shot dead." Beyond such conflict, the poem emerges, despite its ambiguities, as a paean to maternal power even when that power is dislocated and cut from its source. As Karen Elias-Button has contended, the Medusa encloses "female creative energies." Such a "Terrible Mother" proves a "metaphor for the sources of our own creative powers." In "Medusa" Bogan creates a testament to the frightening power of the matemal and, in subterranean form, intimates her own identification with her mother, for Gorgon and speaker assume similarities through sight as the "stiff bald eyes" of Medusa are mirrored in those of the speaker. Ensnared in Medusa's gaze and duplicating the Gorgon's perceptions, the speaker must continually gaze ahead, her own eyes rigidified by staring. Finally, she is a "shadow" Medusa:
[. . . .]
The poem's network of assonance and and word repetitions (bell, fall, shadow) further emphasize mirroring, the effect of alliteration between lines allowing us to experience an aural identification, linking sound and semantics. And from the depth of the poem's ambiguity, the mother emerges as both a bonding and a blinding force.
from Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan. Copyright © 1996 by Associated University Presses.
Suzanne Clark
Louise Bogan's haunting, melancholy, but fierce poetry challenges me to sort out the question of poetic language and écriture féminine. Her experiments with the lyric earn her an important place in the history of writing by women as well as among modernist poets, and the beauty of her work opens the larger historical problematic of art. These strongly contained poems may seem to represent a look that is as alienated as it is aesthetic, the gaze of the artist at the work of art. But if we listen to the affective tone, we hear the insistent changes of sound and repeated chords, a subtle but extraordinarily intense musicality of voice that inhabits the coolly distant look. The poems exhibit and sound out a femininity that is both lovely and furious--in fact, that threatens to be sublimely awe-ful. Hers is a kind of reversal of irony in the unexpected return of body and feeling to the distanced work of art. As I read Bogan, I listen also to the double possibilities of the critical moral to this story. According to Hélčne Cixous, men have made women hate themselves; male dominance has created an antilove in language which women must rupture by the laughter of the very Medusa which men figure as monstrous.
Bogan rouses the Fury to speech, but she also shows us how this can release the most terrifying images and unrelenting despair. She shows us the threat of psychosis about which Kristeva warns us. Should she have written more, dared more? Instead of the fragile structures of normalcy that she constructed to keep herself going, should she have challenged the Oedipal versions of maturity taught her by the psychoanalysts who offered her treatment when she broke down? Bogan feared revolution: hers is the conservatism of a politics of interiority, and of a woman who ruptures the stability of gendered subjectivity and finds the woman's antilove goes much deeper than what we usually mean by ideology, deep into the unconscious. In Bogan's work, we live in a fallen world, and it is a fall into gendered sexuality. If the musicality of her work does indeed function as an écriture féminine to write the woman into language, what I hear is not a laugh but agony. What Bogan suggests to us is the difficulty of escaping the familial enclosure and the possibility that woman's writing will open up the scene of "my scourge, my sister" rather than the scenes of reconciliation we long to find.
In Méduse, his study of mythological representation and the problematic of art, Jean Clair asks if there is a bond between horror and beauty. He points out the doubleness of human and animal traits in the Medusa, of male and female, and also the doubleness of meanings in the history of Medusa mythology. She was not only a monster but also a fascinating and seductive girl, and it was the latter image that prevailed for Hellenistic culture. Her face has much to do with the history of art and seeing, and with the separation of mind and body. By his account, Clair wishes to explore the enigma of beauty which neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis has been able adequately to address. He argues that the representation of Medusa took a decided turn in the Renaissance, away from the beautiful girl and toward the monstrous. Clair draws intriguing connections between the representations of Medusa and, on the one hand, other beheaded figures from John the Baptist to Louis XVI (appearing on a revolutionary poster), and on the other hand, fertility images including ancient bodyfaces and René Magritte's "Le Viol," suggesting as did Freud the possibility that Medusa represents the female genitals. Clair closes his speculations with the uneasiness that modern art raises in the civilized: "The 'dripping' of Pollock [who was nicknamed 'Jack the Dripper'] is no other, in fact, than the blood running out of the cut-off head of Medusa, tracing the aleatory figure of our perdition."
[. . . .]
Glimpses of the fatal figure appear as reflections of the speaker again and again in Bogan's poems. Instead of a "belle dame sans merci," the youth of her "A Tale" finds a place "Where something dreadful and another / Look quietly upon each other." In "Medusa," the glimpse of "The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead / Formed in the air" leaves a "dead scene forever." What the husband discovers in "For a Marriage" is the woman's "barbed heart": "The sullen other blade / To every eye forbidden, / That half her life has made." And the speaker of "The Sleeping Fury" addresses "my scourge, my sister" from the calm of having rendered her into symbol: "You, with your whips and shrieks, bearer of truth and of solitude; / You who give, unlike men, to expiation your mercy."
She shows how the woman's place as imaginary eternal object of the lyric (stopped, still) becomes terrible, "dreadful," Medusa-like if fixed as the mirror image of the self, like the antinarcissism Cixous describes: "A narcissism which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven't got. They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove." Her poetry at once recalls and rejects this imaginary. Bogan seems both to cite the rejected tradition and to inscribe the feminine into language as estrangement. On the cover of The Blue Estuaries, Roethke approves her "scorn" of what he calls the usual lyric "caterwauling," and Adrienne Rich praises her committing a "female sensibility" to language. Bogan both constitutes and distances an ideology that is female, situating herself within the struggle of asserting a lover's discourse which is at the same time a forsaken language.
By refusing the "caterwaul," she also accedes to male standards, male codes, male criticism. Like Marianne Moore, Bogan was severe with her own work, pruning mercilessly, and perhaps giving the critical spirit so large a scope that she curtailed her own productivity, unbalancing the relationship between the critical and the creative. Literary history, emerging as American modernism, recuperated the severe demands of Mallarmé in the purifying and defining break between literature and ordinary language. In the post-Eliotic modernist criticism which Bogan practiced, there is a resistance to the more commonplace identification of poets with femininity. Yet this everyday meaning stood ready at all times to capture her, as it had Millay, in the figure of the "poetess." Bogan seems, writing as a woman, to be caught between antinarcissism and sentimentality, between being critically serious and engaged in gendered social practices.
Nonetheless, Bogan's diamondlike poems cut through the looking-glass to a writing which carries the revolution of poetic language into the authority of gender, fracturing the surfaces of narcissisms, introducing struggle into the portrayals of a self. She thought she was trying to do that by struggling toward "maturity." The tragedy, the paradox, or the distance between her self-understanding and her poetic practice, is that her power comes not from the maturity of resignation but from the fury of her resistance to the Oedipal resolution. She opens up a place for hysteria or "emotion" by struggling with the austere retreats of the symbolist text. The retreat itself is, in Bogan, furious.
[. . . .]
Bogan rewrites the narratology of myth into a fantasy or nightmare of loss. The hero loses the plot itself, as time becomes space, as narrative becomes antinarrative. This is, of course, part of what makes her "modernist " and also part of what makes the modernist subject seem feminized, outside history. But in Bogan's work, the other and another are without hierarchy, and gender is without a weighted marking. The fantasy may be a horror story--Bogan does not idealize this ungendering. In "A Tale," the search for the unchanging results in a terrible reciprocity. In "Medusa," the shape of the countermyth emerges as nightmare: the hero/heroine is stopped forever by looking into the eyes of the Medusa. If something terrible haunted Bogan, it was not simply a matter of personal psychology. Is this not the general nightmare, the context of Bogan's life, the fear of what will happen if the repressed woman shows her face?
In "Medusa," the temporality of a life narrative becomes the thematic foreground, as life becomes the "still life" of art and therefore becomes as well the reminder of death, like the skull in so many paintings about meditation, representing the subject's gaze into a mirror. The hero/heroine confronts Medusa and is turned to stone; not only the hero/heroine but the entire scene becomes "dead," unchanging. This is perhaps the moment not only of artistic seduction but also of the woman's seductive encounter with woman. The moment when the woman encounters the monster and is transfixed has been theorized within film theory. Linda Williams suggests that this is an extension of woman's condition within the gaze, so that the shared status as objects results in a moment of identification. When woman sees the other woman, the monster, she is seized by an uncanny recognition. Here the alternative pleasures of beauty and feminine desire break up heroic looking and promise a horrified enchantment.
The "still" immortality of art explored by Keats depended upon a separation of artisan and urn, speaker and object, poet and poem. Here it is the speaker that must stop, so that the poem pivots on the sequence of verb tense: "I had come," "Everything moved," "This is a dead scene forever now," "Nothing will ever stir," "And I shall stand here like a shadow." While the time of the verbs locates the speaker in an eternal present, narration itself does not necessarily stop. The story addresses a reader with a past, present, and future. Thus the story is dissociated from the storyteller by the possibility of a reader. The separation is not between subject and object but between that specular instance and the subject of another text where life goes on, perhaps beyond horror and despair.
"Medusa" signals its entanglement with the maternal in a number of ways. The scene is womblike, an ambiguous shelter, the house itself enclosed "in a cave of trees" in contrast to a "sheer sky" that seems vaguely threatening by its very (clifflike?) height. The multiplied resonances of house-cave-trees recall both good and bad maternal figures, witches and grandmothers, rather than the abode of the Gorgons where Perseus slew the mortal one of the trio, Medusa. The other kind of medusa, the bellshaped creature which is the sexual stage of the hydra, is here in the boundlessness: "a bell hung ready to strike," a transparent shape of silence.
Time is monumental, cyclical. Sun and reflection define a paradigm of life's mirroring. If the bell sounded it might articulate this scene with a particular moment of time; instead, it is the house--or space--which is particular. The stanza sets up strong but irregular patterns of rhythm, with all three lines after the first beginning on an accented syllable: "Facing," "Everything," "Sun," and a number of words accented as part of a spondee: "sheer sky," "bell hung ready," so that emphasis supersedes regularity. A number of sibilants--lines ending with "trees," "sky," "strike," "by" with a repetition beyond rhyme, "facing a sheer sky," "Sun" beginning the final line--reinforce the repressed menace of "strike" and the hissing of the stanza. As in "A Tale," the sounds invoke certain paradoxes of relationship between motion and stillness. The "strike" would continue life, not bring death. The spondee rhythms seem to resist the level of expression with its sibilants and its alliterative repetition of "come," "cave," "sky," "strike," "reflection," almost like a ticking. Thus "Everything moved" but is stopped at the moment of telling.
[. . . .]
The second stanza describes an instant of horror and recognition. The speaker is elided as a syntactic subject, and subjectivity transfers to the third person, the "bare eyes" and "hissing hair." According to the myth, Perseus avoided the danger of the bare eyes by using his sword as a mirror, so he was able to kill Medusa, The serpent-hair, once, perhaps, an emblem of fertility, has become the symptom of evil and terror but also, perhaps, of a lost matemal power. This vision seems to be of a decapitated Medusa, a head "Held up at the window" almost as if held by someone else, a Persean shadow, and "seen through a door" as if the gaze were illicit. The signifiers of the Medusa are repeated, and this repetition of the forbidden look enters an extra line into the stanza: "The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead," so that only this stanza has five lines. The eyes seem not only horrible but horrified, "stiff" but perhaps also dead, and "bald," as if so wide open in fear that eyelashes are not visible.
The unnaturalness of this look makes it prototypically uncanny. Is the Medusa the cause of the speaker's fear, or its strangely familiar reflection? The eyes and the serpents are "Formed in the air," disembodied, unreal, dreamlike, perhaps the construction of the observing imagination.
The figure has much to do with the Freudian traumatic fantasy. The Medusa with the horror-stricken eyes is a reflection of the traumatized psyche, a memory of the mother caught in the revelation of sexuality but also the mirror image of a stricken self. The Medusa image is glimpsed like an unrecognized image in window glass. The words seem to form themselves out of one another like anagrams: "bare eyes" and "were before me," "door," and "forehead / Formed." The word "hissing" thematizes the sibilants and sutures sound to signification to produce a kind of terrified compulsiveness, a self being spoken. This is the inscription of Medusa mythology in the subject who knows herself in language. Clair reminds us how recently--since the Renaissance--this rational terror of Medusa has decisively prevailed over the representation of her as fascinating young woman, object of desire. In the poem, the Medusa speech is accompanied by the mutation of "I" to "me," an objective agency. What does this have to do with feminine subjectivity? Does it not record the horror of another woman? The hero of the Medusa myth cannot confront those bare eyes--cannot look at her as the subject.
At this point the speaker of the poem emerges to pass judgment:
This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.
The present tense intervenes to exercise its function of making present the subject of discourse. The peculiar effect of the statement arises from its connecting the deictic "This is," which ought to designate a very specific location of the subject, to "a dead scene forever now." The words resemble a curse. The other three lines of the stanza, in future tense, likewise seem ambiguously descriptive and prophetic. The absolute vocabulary rings out: "forever, " "nothing, " ever, " "never. " (Like lines out of Poe?) This decisive negation marks the "dead scene" as the place not only of paralysis but also of loss.
Bogan's poem is not quite ironic because it is not fully detached. What is lost is motion and change, but the vocabulary suggests also emotion. What is lost is ambiguously a quality outside the observer or an internal perception or feeling. The power of the poem depends on its externalizing and objectifying, so that the speaker has no agency, no imaginative will. Religious, mythological, romantic explanations of such visionary moments will not do, but neither will the therapeutic diagnosis. The poem may seem to represent an experience of the individual "I" and the particularity of this instance, yet the experience is, precisely, a catastrophic loss of particularity, a collapse of time's differentiating force, the spacing between ever and never.
Louise Bogan's success in unsettling the imprisonment of feminine subjectivity within the private and domestic space of personal experience depends on this experience becoming impersonal. The narrative itself is installed within the stasis of the scene's eternal present, "This is." Fear of the feminine is attached to the fear of art, with its "dead scene." Thus the rest of the poem will adumbrate what the observer, now outside the poem, must see--the fatally charmed moment, bright with sunlight, within which the kind of scene Keats mused about seeing on the Grecian urn seems dangerous. The rhetoric is the "never again" trope of elegy. It has a force which is the opposite of Keats's "happy melodist, unwearied, / For ever piping songs for ever new," even though both contemplate the ironic immortality of art. The speaker of Bogan's poem is--unlike Keats--captured by the otherness of the encounter.
The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.
The elements of the scene are divided from themselves by this future of never--the water from its fall, the bell from its sound, the grass from becoming hay. The subject in process is stopped. This internal separation is not like Keats; his lover will never kiss the maid, but "she cannot fade." The urn is "still," but its beauty is not dead. The speaker of "Medusa" will fade, become "like a shadow"--that is to say, she will be taken up into the system of sun and reflection, "the great balanced day." What she will see forever is not the paralyzing face of Medusa but "yellow dust." The pastoral scene is a simulacrum of the mortal human body, shadow and dust. This loss is of mortality, separating the human subject from what defines her, from her body.
This is also a loss of the maternal, at once a loss and a rejection. The bell of the womb, the "tipped bell," is stopped by that figure of matemal sexuality, Medusa. As one of the Gorgons, Medusa figures forth the remembrance of matriarchal goddesses made hideous by patriarchal mythology. What is glimpsed by the poem's speaker is a shadow of herself, a feminine subjectivity that is unspeakable and uncanny. Imaged in discourse she becomes the object, "Medusa," the poem, a terrible and life-threatening beauty. Bogan sees clearly how much the woman writer might fear the poem she might become.
What might becoming a poem mean? Thinking of this problem both from the point of view of the woman as the centering object, gendered image, and position which culture produces for "woman," and from the point of view of the woman as subject, the "other" of language and hence in a position of negativity as a subject, I want to suggest that Bogan's "Medusa" produces the effect of the uncanny because it is a narrative of feminine poetic agency, of the gendered pre-Oedipal melancholy and the word become fetish. The drift of sound is stopped and sutured. This is especially significant for Bogan's work, where the contrapuntal effects of sound figure so importantly. The rich complexity of the rhythm, the rhyme, and the play of anagrammatic punning develops usually into what she calls in "Sub Contra" "some thick chord of wonder." After the break in "Medusa," however, the sounds of words ever and ever seem melancholy and unstressed, and the tone almost nostalgic. There is a thinning out of affect to pure elegy.
Excerpted from "Medusa and Melancholy: The Fatal Allure of Beauty in Louise Bogan's Poetry." from Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and The Revolution of the Word. Copyright © 1991 by Suzanne Clark. Reprinted by Permission of the Author.
Paula Bennett
In taking Medusa for their muse, women poets of the past two decades are owning themselves, that is, they are owning those aspects of their being that their families and society have invalidated by treating such qualities as unfeminine and unacceptable. And in repossessing these aspects of themselves they are repossessing the creative as well as the destructive energies to which they give rise. Two poems on Medusa, one by Louise Bogan, written in 1923, the other by Karen Lindsey, published in 1975, will illustrate my point.
With extraordinary brilliance, Louise Bogan's poem on Medusa perfectly captures a vision of the gorgon that both symbolizes and embodies Medusa's traditional horror. . . .
Forced to look upon the gorgons monstrous visage, the speaker is paralyzed by the sight. Unable to escape the bald eyes and snake hair, or to embrace them, she is suspended where she stands and the world she inhabits is suspended with her. Her eyes are locked forever on the "yellow dust" that, lifted, "does not drift away." The "tipped bell" will "make no sound." Both she and everything around her are frozen by this nightmare vision of the terror latent in female power. In its death-like stasis, "Medusa" is a poem that, for all its artistic perfection, seems in retrospect tragically appropriate for a poet of extraordinary gifts who believed only 105 of her poems worthy of permanent record and who appears to have despised the very idea that she might be considered a woman poet.
From My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Copyright © 1986 by Paula Bennett. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Mary DeShazer
Silence also forms the core of "Medusa," a poem in which Bogan directly confronts her own demonic aspect in the guise of the terrifying Gorgon, who according to classical myth turns onlookers into stone. Rather than being a totally debilitating encounter, however, this confrontation enables the poet to assume some of Medusa's frozen, silent power. The poem begins with a description of the awesome meeting, which occurs in a "house, in a cave of trees," under a "sheer sky." As the poet encounters Medusa, a whirlwind carries the reflection of house, trees, and sky into the poet's range of vision. This image of reflection is especially crucial, since according to legend the Gorgon's hideous face must be viewed only indirectly, lest the observer be petrified with fright and cast into stone. Significantly, however, the poet confronts the "bare eyes" and "hissing hair" directly. This act of boldness recalls the male quester of another Bogan poem, "A Tale," who finds endurance only "where something dreadful and another / Look quietly upon each other"; and it also anticipates later poems such as "March Twilight," in which a watcher gazes into "another face," only to see "time's eye"; or "Little Lobelia's Song," whose childlike speaker sees reflected in her own face the image of a potent other. As these other poems suggest, this eye-to-eye encounter between speaker and "shadow," that other self both frightening and recognizable, is crucial to Bogan's poetic imagery and to her perception of the poet-muse relationship. Only by looking squarely at the "beast within," Bogan believes, can the poet come to terms with her own hidden powers.
The last three stanzas of "Medusa" describe a scene transformed, as both time and motion are suspended in the wake of the Gorgon's power: "a dead scene forever now," in which "Nothing will ever stir." Medusa has exercised her powers of transformation by recasting her surroundings into silence and stasis, a state which parallels the perpetual suspension of the scene on Keats's Grecian urn. Surprisingly, however, the poet's resolute voice emerges from this silence. Although Bogan calls this a "dead scene," life flourishes amidst the stasis ("The grass will always be growing for hay / Deep on the ground"), and her description conveys a tentative resolution. As the poet stands "like a shadow / Under the great balanced day," she becomes a new Medusa, a potent and demonic goddess capable of controlling herself and her craft, of "killing" life into art. Medusa's silence provides Bogan a powerful, if static, stance from which to speak. The poet's usurpation of the goddess's strength recalls Yeats's enigmatic question at the end of "Leda and the Swan."
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Unlike Leda, who was forced by Zeus into female subservience, the poet confronts her goddess as a same-sex equal, and that makes all the difference. Bogan assumes both the knowledge and the power of Medusa, her demonic muse, and through this power she redefines stony silence as vital creative energy.
From "My Scourge, My Sister: Louise Bogans Muse." In Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press., 1985. Copyright © 1985 by the University of Michigan.
Return to Louise Bogan


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Over the years, I've been lucky enough to receive some pretty spectacular hate mail. However, what I've noticed is that people will never get more offended than by the stuff I'm saying the least seriously, with my tongue most obviously in cheek, that has the least relevance to anything happening anywhere in the world of any importance whatsoever.
Take Monday's column on naked old men parading around gym locker rooms. First of all, everyone knows this is true. Second of all, I obviously wasn't saying, "Shame on you for being alive, old people! Cover up your disgusting bodies and let us younger men parade around free in an exhibitionist paradise! We are Adonis! You would be our Soylent Green if we had our way, old men!"
Which is clearly how some took the column. I wish I could publish every letter I got, but if you're offended super easily by the most obvious of observations that wouldn't make the cut at even the tamest stand-up comedy club, you apparently cannot write a letter to the editor under 50,000 words. Here then, are some of my favorite bits ([sic]s are all their own):
• You said you are not "advocating peeing on naked old men, but…wait, I guess that's exactly what I'm advocating". What an absolutely horrible thing to say. If "naked old men" were replaced by any other group of people we would be outraged, and no newspaper would print it… How sad and hateful. And please keep in mind that not everyone is given the gift of aging.
• Someday, if you are fortunate, you will be 58 years old, and if you are even more fortunate, you will come to realize what a shallow, self-absorbed, insufferable prick you are. If the appearance of my contemporaries, or someone even older, disturbs you, don't look. I am a combat veteran and I have been in physically and mentally demanding profession for the last thirty years. I earned getting to look this way. Again, if you are fortunate, you might be able to say the same.
• I can't believe the tribune would allow such a jerk to write such a column and then print it. I'm a 74 year old tribune subscriber, who goes almost daily to a health club and have no idea what he is talking about. I know the biggest jerks I see at the club are mostly 20 somethings. STEPHEN MARKLEY you are an a--hole.
• I voted in the Nixon election but did not vote for him so, yes, not all of us old folks are moneyed Republicans with nothing else to do but hang around showers naked (as you'll find out, 58 year-olds still work for a living). I abhorred Nixon and all he stood for. I demonstrated in Washington D.C. against the Vietnam War. You probably don't remember that war, but many young men were killed who didn't have a chance to attain a Cryptkeeper physique.
Wow, Vietnam! How'd we get there? Nothing could be more telling than the fact that everyone who hated the column chose to express that opinion by e-mail (and were obviously having a very difficult time not employing the word "whippersnapper") while those who enjoyed it, tweeted at me. Obviously, I'd tend to side more with those who took sixteen seconds to tweet "@stephenmarkley laughing out loud at doctor office reading your article in @redeyechicago. Made my day. Hilarious and true"—But that's only because sixteen seconds is the appropriate amount of time to spend replying or commenting on that particular column.
Most interestingly, the column seemed to cleave open a divide between those who can feel their mortality and those who blithely assume it's not something to worry about right now. As many of my hatefans correctly pointed out, one day I will have that aging body and the shadow, the specter, will grow long, something any sane person my age should already be taking into account as they watch the number of gray hairs disperse at their temples from day to day in the bathroom mirror. Youth and beauty (or in my case, exactly average white-guy lookingness) are the most impermanent of gifts. A sense of f***ing humor, on the other hand, is obviously one of the sturdiest and most cherished.
And hell, if as I grow old I lose that sense of humor along with my youth, I can always go to the gym and dangle my balls in some whippersnapper's face.


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Sex abuse documents spark calls for Seattle mayor to resign
SEATTLE (KOMO) - A Seattle council member and at least one mayoral candidate are among the voices calling for Mayor Ed Murray to resign after the re-discovery of decades-old records indicating that Murray had sexually abused his foster son in 1984.
But Seattle's City Council president says that Murray shouldn't necessarily have to resign - and said that no one should have to be judged today for what they did decades ago.
The records, unearthed by Oregon's Department of Human Services, contained a child-welfare investigator's bombshell finding that Murray had sexually abused his foster son, Jeff Simpson, prompting state officials to conclude that "under no circumstances" should Murray serve as a foster parent in the future.
Simpson, now 49, was one of four men who publicly accused Murray this spring of sexually abusing them long ago. Murray has adamantly denied the allegations, but he declined to seek re-election. His term will end in January 2018 if he does not resign.
In response to the latest revelations, Seattle council member M. Lorena Gonzalez and mayoral candidate Mike McGinn called on Murray to step down. Another mayoral candidate, Jenny Durkan, called on Murray to "reflect deeply" about whether he can continue to lead the city.
In a prepared statement, Gonzalez said the city of Seattle for months has "reeled in the aftermath of sexual abuse allegations made against Mayor Ed Murray. I, like many in our community, take these allegations seriously."
While commending Murray's "collaborative approach" and his "tireless commitment to public service," she added that she is "now deeply concerned about this mayor's ability to continue leading the executive branch in light of the recently released documents."
"As a result, I am asking the mayor to consider stepping down ... and to work collaboratively with a subcommittee of the City Council to craft an executive leadership transition strategy," Gonzalez said.
If Murray refuses to resign, she called on the City Council to take its own action by convening a committee to determine if a transition to another executive leader is warranted under the circumstances.
"This situation is unprecedented in our city's history," she said. "We cannot pretend otherwise."
Other members of the City Council, however, were reluctant to forge ahead with any immediate action under Article V Section 10 of the Seattle City Charter, which defines how a mayor may be removed from office "for any willful violation of duty, or for the commission of an offense involving moral turpitude."
Council President Bruce Harrell, for one, said Murray has been diligent in reporting to work every day and doing his job, despite the latest developments.
"It's been my impression that the mayor has been showing up for his job every single day," he said at Monday's council meeting. "We all know he's not running for re-election and so we do have a short window here. ... We have nine strong leaders at this table - a good team. And we'll work through this together."
Harrell even went so far as to say that the sex abuse, if true, happened too long ago to be relevant.
"We just don't know. And I would ask that I don't want to be judged for anything 33 years ago," he said. "And I would challenge each of you to think about where you were 33 years ago. The question is - are you doing your job today, right now?"
Mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, by contrast, was blunt in his call for Murray to resign.
"The time for denials and victim blaming is over. The city deserves full attention to its pressing issues," McGinn said in a Twitter posting. "In order to focus on the future, for the sake of survivors (and) the city, I feel Mayor Ed Murray should resign."
Murray became Simpson's foster father after counseling him at a Portland center for troubled teens in the late 1970s.
Simpson said the abuse began in 1980, when he was 13 and spending a weekend with Murray. The abuse continued after Murray became his foster father and lasted until he left Murray's care at age 16, Simpson said. At times, Murray paid Simpson $10 or gave him drugs for sex, he said.
The Oregon prosecutor who reviewed the case at the time declined to pursue charges against Murray because of Simpson's troubled personality, not because she thought he was lying.
"It was Jeff's emotional instability, history of manipulative behavior and the fact that he has again run away and made himself unavailable that forced my decision," Deputy District Attorney Mary Tomlinson wrote.
Simpson considered suing Murray in 2008, but his lawyer declined to pursue the case over a statute of limitations issue. By then, Murray was a Washington state senator, Democratic power broker and gay rights advocate. He was elected Seattle mayor in 2013.
Simpson added that he and his attorney had tried to find the Oregon documents backing up his contention that he was sexually abused by Murray, but they were told none existed. They were later found and released in response to an open records request by The Seattle Times.


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Do You Still Have Holiday Debt?
It's six months after the holiday season and many people are still carrying credit card balances from holiday shopping sprees. Did you overspend buying Christmas gifts for friends and family? Have you been sending just the minimum payments to your credit cards since Christmas? It's not unusual for holiday shoppers to spend a year or two after each holiday season trying to pay off their holiday debts, but the cost of financing your purchases on credit for this length of time is staggering.


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PARIS (AP) — Many European countries with lagging economies are trying to draw in foreign investors. But in France, a Socialist minister says he wants to kick the world's biggest steel maker out of the country, accusing it of lying to the government.
The invective from Industrial Recovery Minister Arnaud Montebourg has soured an already tense relationship between France's leftist leadership and steel powerhouse ArcelorMittal. In a dispute that has caught the nation's attention, the company says it will shut down blast furnaces in northeast France — unless the government finds a new buyer by this week.
The showdown over the site in Florange, which is reportedly profitable but underperforming compared with other ArcelorMittal assets, exposes the simmering mistrust of capitalism in France. It also raises the prospect that President Francois Hollande's Socialists may pay out to nationalize in an old-world, labor-intensive industry despite a push for austerity across much of Europe.
"We don't want Mittal in France anymore because they haven't respected France," Montebourg was quoted as saying in Monday's edition of business daily Les Echos. The trouble, he said, "isn't the furnaces in Florange, it's Mittal."
ArcelorMittal's "lies since 2006 are overwhelming," he said, according to Les Echos.
Montebourg didn't specify how France could oust ArcelorMittal. But the stakes in the standoff are high: In France alone, the company has more than 20,000 employees at about 150 sites and brought in €4.6 billion in sales last year — about one-sixth of its total revenues worldwide.
The furnaces in question at Florange employ about 600 people, but unions fear that shutting them down will lead to other closures at the site and throughout the country's steel industry.
The company, assembled by Indian-born Chairman and CEO Lakshmi N. Mittal, one of the world's richest people, infuriated many on the French left by announcing Oct. 1 that it planned to stop the Florange furnaces. In the face of sustained worker protests, the company gave the French government 60 days to find a new owner.
ArcelorMittal said it would not comment Monday, though a person close to the Mittal family — who did not want to be cited by name — said the family was "shocked" by Montebourg's comments.
ArcelorMittal says it pours €150 million into the French economy each year, mainly through capital spending.
The outspoken Montebourg is a point man for the Socialist government, which is looking to revive France's lackluster economic fortunes and stave off debt concerns that have roiled markets in many of its European partners, including Italy, Greece, Ireland and Spain.
Talk of nationalization harks back to a wave of government takeovers of industrial giants in the early 1980s era under then-President Francois Mitterrand, the only other Socialist head of state in postwar France. In May, Hollande defeated Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative who has been softer on large corporations.
A top French steelworkers' union pressed Monday for the government to temporarily nationalize the Florange plant. The metal industry wing of the Workers Front union said "this is the only solution for this strategic activity for France."
The conservative opposition sought to ridicule Montebourg and the governing Socialists.
"We knew Francois Hollande didn't like the rich," said Camille Bedin of Sarkozy's conservative UMP party, referring to a quip by Hollande on a TV debate years ago. "Now, it's Arnaud Montebourg's turn to proclaim his hatred of companies."
"As if France could forego investors," Bedin said in a statement. "As if Monsieur Montebourg could allow himself to insult foreign companies."


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Weather Blog: No break, more rain ahead
Thank you for stopping by the Weather Watch 12 Blog! The good news this weekend, a little sunshine returns. The bad news is two rounds of rain return to the forecast on Sunday. In today's blog we discuss more rain chances, the timing, and how much rain to expect.
A wintry reminder greeted southeast Wisconsin to start the weekend. Snow showers and flurries swept across the area producing a light dusting of snow in a few locations. The photo below from West Bend courtesy of Twitter follower @seetseet looks more like late fall than spring.
With snow exiting, a few sunny breaks are possible on Saturday afternoon. Along with a little sun isolated showers and a few sprinkles can't be ruled out.
The bulk of the rain we see this weekend will occur in two rounds on Sunday. Keep an umbrella on standby Sunday morning as round one arrives by sunrise. The RPM computer model forecast below shows rain showers across the area by 7am. This round of rain would be mainly light to moderate rain.
After a break Sunday afternoon, when temperatures may jump into the 50s, especially inland the focus will shift to round two of the rain. By Sunday evening a line of showers and thunderstorms will move across the state from west to east. The line of showers and thunderstorms will be weakening as it approaches southeast Wisconsin.
The RPM forecast at 11pm Sunday shows rain just west of Milwaukee, with some pockets of moderate to heavy rain. The good news is any heavy rain should not last long.
Forecast rain totals will generally be in the 0.25" to 0.60" for the viewing area. The bulk of the rain will occur in round two. If the rain is less intense in the second round these totals will be much lower.
Even if escape heavy rain on Sunday or Sunday night, another good chance of rain arrives Wednesday and Thursday this week. Something we will keep a close eye on with flood warnings still in place for several areas rivers.
For the latest weather information watch WISN 12 News, and for updates throughout the day follow me on Twitter @jnelsonweather
Have a great day!
Jeremy Nelson


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TORONTO (AP) — The creators of a video purporting to show an eagle swooping down and snatching a toddler from a Montreal park admitted Thursday that it was all a hoax.
The video entitled "The Golden Eagle Snatches Kid," posted on Youtube earlier this week quickly went viral, earning millions of views and becoming the subject of news reports around the globe.
The video's creators said it was intentionally created as a part of a class project to create a viral video hoax at a new-media training institute in Montreal.
"We had no idea what was coming," a giddy Normand Archambault told The Canadian Press.
Archimbault who created the video along with fellow students Loic Mireault, Antoine Seigle and Felix Marquis-Poulin added: "We were all speechless."
The students were promised a 100 percent score if they received 100,000 page views — and within a few hours, sometime after lunch Wednesday, they had smashed that target 50 times over.
Valerie Boudreau, an admissions assistant at the Centre NAD told The Associated Press the school had not anticipated that the video would receive so much attention.
"We were expecting some reaction but not this big. The students succeeded very well," she said.
Claude Arsenault, a spokesman for the Centre NAD, said the video was done as part of a project in 3D animation and digital design. Both the eagle and the toddler were created in 3D animation and integrated into the film afterward, he said.
An online debate quickly raged about whether or not the video was real, with many people weighing in that it was fake.
The viral video came a week after a story about a monkey decked out in a stylish coat, wandering around an IKEA parking lot in Toronto, made news around the world after a picture of the tiny primate was tweeted by a shopper.


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Details about this Driver
|Download driver for: SONY VGN-TX610P
|Supported System
|Win 7, Win 10, Win XP, Win 8, Win Vista, Win 8.1, Win Server 2003
|File Size
|7623 kb
|VAIO Power Management Utility driver for SONYVGN-TX610P
This update installs an updated version of the Sony® VAIO® PowerManagement Utility and resolves an issue with the LCD Power Savingfunction
The Safest Way to Update Sony Drivers
There are a number of frequent warnings and also other messages which you might get in the driver updating procedure, several of which I've paraphrased and listed right here along with advice on how to proceed:
QUESTION: I have one Vaio SVE14126CXP once i changed to windows 8.1 and then windows 10 We have lost the initial program's Vaio. During all these transitions key pad backlight configurations have changed. Currently, it only glows when touched. Just how do i return the mode of constant lighting. I must say that my Vaio recuperation disks are lost. Thanks.
ANSWER: The key-board backlight is probably the limits of Windows 10 running on your own machine because of insufficient up to date drivers : http://esupport.sony.com/CA/p/model-home.pl?mdl=SVF15A190S&template_id=1®ion_id=3&tab=download#/downloadTab
For further assistance regarding your worry, make sure you make contact with the Sony workplaces/Sony agent offices nearby for your place of home in Asian countries Pacific area http://www.sony-asia.com/countryselector.html?hpid=countryselector:AsiaPacific Due to distance, they are inside a better position to respond to your questions or issues.
How to Update Drivers with Device Manager?
1. Click Start button and right-click on Computer.
2. Click Manage.
3. Click Device Manager in left pane.
4. In Device Manager window, expand categories and locate the hardware that you wish to update driver for. For instance, if you want to download a driver for Digital Photo of "SONY VGN-TX610P", find the related device. Then right-click on the device name and select Update Driver Software.
To set Windows to install recommended updates
To automatically get available driver updates for your hardware, set Windows to install recommended updates. You can set Windows to automatically install important and recommended updates or important updates only. Optional updates aren't downloaded or installed automatically. To get all available updates for your devices, periodically check Windows Update for optional updates.
- Open Windows Update by clicking the Start button. In the search box, type Update, and then, in the list of results, click Windows Update.
- In the left pane, click Change settings.
- Under Important updates, click an item in the list. You can decide which updates to automatically download and install.
- Under Recommended updates, select the Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates check box, and then click OK. If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. You can also allow anyone using your computer to install updates by selecting the Allow all users to install updates on this computer check box.
Fail to Update SONY VGN-TX610P Driver? Don't Give Up! You can Try DriverTuner
1. Click here to download Driver Updating Tool and install it
2. Scan your computer for outdated drivers. Select the ones(here you should choose SONY VGN-TX610P) you want to update and click download
3. After the download process is finished, you should click SETUP to install them. That's it! Your driver for SONY VGN-TX610P has been updated. Sometimes a reboot is required to let the changes take effect.
|Fix Driver Problems
|Driver Update Tool
Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista and XP


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SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Kimi Raikkonen enjoyed an unexpected podium finish at the Singapore Grand Prix on Sunday after racing from 13th to third despite a back injury that had threatened to prevent him driving.
The Lotus driver had taken pain killers to get through qualifying on Saturday but he improved overnight and made the most of a shrewd strategy on race day to claim his seventh podium of the Formula One season.
"I didn't feel it too much in the race," the 2007 world champion said of his ailment. "Yesterday not ideal and I almost didn't drive. We have to be happy enough with finishing third and we can sort the problems for the next race.
"It is not the first time I have had some issues with my back and I know I have some work to do over the winter so we will see what we can do."
The Finn, who will rejoin Ferrari next season after leaving them in 2009 and spending two years out of the sport, opted to pit on lap 26 under the safety car and expertly managed his tyres to finish the 61 lap race without any further change.
It was the same tactic employed by Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, who finished second and who will be with Raikkonen at the Italian team next season.
"We had a plan and we know that at the moment the safety car goes in we would try and go to the end. I knew that would happen and lucky that some other teams couldn't do it and they had to pit," the Finn said.
As those other teams pitted, Raikkonen moved up to fourth and into a battle with McLaren's Jenson Button who he eventually overtook on the outside with a canny move on lap 55.
"I was stuck behind Jenson for most of the race but I tried to give him some pressure and I noticed he was running out of his tyres and I started getting closer and closer and I decided to pass him," the former McLaren driver said.
"Maybe it looks more tricky. You have more grip when you brake on-line and it's easier to know where you have to brake than on the inside," Raikkonen said of his neat pass.
"It's not an easy one but I managed to get past and that is the main thing."
The Finn had begun his week in Singapore by going public with the failure of Lotus to pay him which had annoyed team principal Eric Boullier, but he was back in favour with the Frenchman after his expert drive.
"A brilliant drive, yes. He didn't do any mistakes and he was there when we asked him to push," Boullier said.
"Obviously he was helped by a brilliant strategy and a lot of clear laps at the beginning. We pitted him early on purpose, he got a lot of free air laps where he could push."
Raikkonen finished 11 seconds behind Alonso but was 43 adrift of race winner Sebastian Vettel who strolled to a third consecutive victory around the Marina Bay Street Circuit.
Boullier bemoaned the pace of Vettel's Red Bull, whose best lap was two-and-a-half seconds quicker than that of Raikkonen's.
"I don't think we can even speak about chasing this car because this car is flying compared with the others," he said.
"It's frustrating and it's a bit killing the show, let's say, so that's not very nice. But we do our best at least to make something better."
(Reporting by Patrick Johnston, editing by Alan Baldwin)


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Decker Memorial Highway Bill Gets First Hearing
ST. PAUL (AP) - A Cold Spring police officer killed in the line of duty could soon be remembered with a stretch of highway named in his honor.
A state House committee planned Tuesday to consider a bill to designate portions of Highway 23 in central Minnesota the "Officer Tom Decker Memorial Highway." Signs would be put along the part of the highway leading from Wakefield township to the city of Richmond.
Decker was the Cold Spring police officer gunned down while responding to a call in November. The investigation into the shooting has yet to conclude.
It's but one legislative tribute to Decker in the works. In Congress, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann is pushing a bill to name a post office after Decker.
(Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved)