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December 1, 2004, 12:00 AM
By Tom Junod
Se-Jin Lee and Lee Sweeney know how to stop muscular dystrophy. That's great, you say, but what does it have to do with me? Well, their work can also curtail the destructive power of cancer and obesity and, yes, even old age. Interested?
YOU REMEMBER THE MICE. They were pretty big news when pictures of them went around the world, what was it, seven years ago? Mighty mice, they were called. And indeed, they didn't look like the fruits of sober scientific inquiry so much as they did the figments of some fervid comic-book imagination out to create mice capable of redressing the insult of being, well, mice. They were mice with really big muscles. They seemed unfortunate, in their way, saddled by their creators with ludicrous baggage when they had no say in the matter. Whoever heard of mice with really big muscles?
They were so extreme that you'd be forgiven for thinking that they wouldn't have any application for humanity--for thinking that they had nothing to do with you.
ACTUALLY, THERE WERE two groups of mice. The first was revealed to the world in 1997, the second in 1998. The first was the product of the deletion of a gene, the second the product of an addition. The gene that was deleted in the first group was the gene for a protein called myostatin, which inhibits the growth of muscle tissue; the gene that was added in the second group was the gene for IGF-I (insulin-like growth factor), which stimulates muscle growth. It is thought now that myostatin and IGF-I work in tandem to keep muscle cells in the yoke of some homeostatic balance. Or, rather, that they work in opposition to each other . . . that myostatin is an antagonist to IGF-I . . . that they are the yin and yang of muscle growth.
The scientist responsible for the myostatin mice was Se-Jin Lee, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins. The scientist responsible for the IGF-I mice was Lee Sweeney, a physiologist at the University of Pennsylvania working in concert with a scientist at Harvard. In their way, they are as different from each other as their mice are--and as different as their respective ways of arriving at their preferred methods of genetic manipulation. Dr. Lee arrived at his mighty mice almost by accident, and Dr. Sweeney because he had energized his will to pursue the very specific possibility that IGF-I could reverse the wasting of muscle caused by old age. Dr. Lee was shocked by what he had created; the only thing that surprised Dr. Sweeney was how well the intervention worked--how complete it was. Of the two, Dr. Lee is the cautious one, modest not only about his accomplishments but about the biotechnological possibilities his accomplishments raise. When asked if he has ever contemplated manipulating his own myostatin to combat the muscle wasting that comes with old age, he answers, "Well, my muscle is pretty wasted to start with, so I never really thought about it." Dr. Sweeney, by comparison, is openly ambitious and frenetically energetic, with an impossible travel schedule and collaborators on nearly every front of the war to combat disease by enhancing muscle. He's a zealot in a cause that takes on overtones ideological as well as medical. When he testified about the implications of his work to the President's Council on Bioethics, he was approached by a member of the council who suggested that, for his part, he'd be happy to be sitting in a wheelchair when he's ninety. "And when I'm ninety, I'll be happy to push," Dr. Sweeney said.
Dr. Lee was thirty-eight when the world found out about his mice. He's forty-six now. Dr. Sweeney was forty-five when the world found out about his mice. He's fifty-one now. They're both relatively young men who have been remarkably productive as scientists. Sure, they started with mice. But they have no intention of stopping with mice. Indeed, for all their differences in personality and style, Dr. Lee and Dr. Sweeney are once again ending up in the same place. Because their work has the potential to be elective as well as necessary, and vice versa, they're the guys who will prove that the biotechnological revolution will not be about mice for long. It will be like all great societal changes. It's not about you, until one day it is.
HUMAN BEINGS LIVE in a biological moment as well as a historical one. That's nothing more than a truism--as true, say, three thousand years ago as it is now. But the human beings alive in the year of Our Lord 2004 have the advantage of living in a moment that is as much a biological moment as it is a historical one--a moment that history may remember, and judge, for its biology more than for its history, terrorism notwithstanding.
Simply put, humanity has, for the millennia of its checkered existence, been living in, and at the mercy of, biological time--that is, the vast temporalities necessary for nature to further evolution. The mutations we suffer from and sometimes profit by are not of human design. Until now. Because now our ancient and honorable and stumbling and painstaking and agonized inquiry into the origins and nature of our biological existence has finally yielded the possibility of going beyond understanding to intervention. Evolution's timeline is ceding to our timeline, for if biological time has the advantage of unfolding exactly as it must, in utter indifference to human wishes, then the human timeline has the advantage of continual acceleration, in answer to our wishes. Human change is simply not as patient as biological evolution, and our impatience is starting to bear its first fruits.
CONSIDER HOW LONG it took humanity to figure out the structure of DNA and then how quickly after that humanity mapped its own genome.
Or consider myostatin. It is an evolutionary success story, although its success is counterintuitive. You would think that the gene that creates a protein that does nothing but make muscles smaller would have been winnowed out by the ruthless machine of natural selection a few million years ago. But the gene for myostatin is everywhere and in nearly everything. It's in chickens, mice, cows, humans. And not only that, it's pretty much the same, in both form and function, in chickens, mice, cows, humans. It's highly conserved, which means that it does something very important--in this case, preventing muscles from chewing up so many calories that the body's other organs and tissues starve to death.
And yet humans didn't know that myostatin existed until 1992, when Se-Jin Lee discovered it. Well, isolated it in his lab. He didn't know what it did. He didn't even have a name for it. He called it GDF-8 to distinguish it from the other genes he'd cloned. He had about thirteen of them, and he didn't know what they did, either. So what he did was conceive litters of mice in which the genes he'd cloned were deleted, or "knocked out," and waited to see what happened. The mice born without GDF-1? They were mirror images of normal mice, with the organs that were supposed to be on the right on the left, and vice versa. They died. The mice born without GDF-11? They were born with eighteen pairs of ribs instead of thirteen, and some were later born with four arms. They died, too. The mice born without GDF-8, though, were the mighty mice. They didn't die. They were normal in every way except in the extent of their musculature and the paucity of their body fat. They were simply advantaged, biologically speaking, by what Dr. Lee had taken out. Se-Jin Lee had discovered both myostatin and its function, and when he concluded the paper reporting his lab's findings with the phrase "we will hereafter refer to GDF-8 as myostatin," he coined a brand-new word for good measure.
That was 1997. Right away, Dr. Lee started advertising in muscle magazines, asking bodybuilders to send him blood samples. He was sure that he would find a human being with the same myostatin mutation he had engineered in his mice. He didn't--or hasn't yet--and not from a shortage of bodybuilders eager to account for the miracle of their own development. Nature apparently really likes myostatin, so he put the project aside. Then in the spring of 2003, he received a call from a pediatric neurologist in Berlin named Markus Schuelke. He told Dr. Lee about a little boy he had been called to observe in the neonatal ward of Berlin's Charité hospital. The boy had been jittery at birth, so there was concern that he was epileptic. His muscles were extremely large and well-defined, so there was concern that he might have a muscle disease that would have made them fibrotic, like Duchenne muscular dystrophy. As it turned out, Dr. Schuelke had sequenced the boy's DNA and found mutations in the gene for myostatin that canceled myostatin's limiting hold on the boy's muscles. Dr. Schuelke sent the sequence to Dr. Lee, who confirmed that the gene produced no myostatin. He also sent the boy's blood to Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which had retained the rights to all "human therapeutics" derived from Dr. Lee's myostatin work. Wyeth confirmed that the boy's blood was entirely myostatin free, and in the summer of 2004 news of the overly muscled boy's existence went around the world, much as news of Dr. Lee's mice had back in 1997.
It had taken humans the full duration of their existence on earth to chance upon nature's plan to inhibit muscle growth. It then took less than six years for humans to begin deciding whether they wanted their muscle growth inhibited. Now, as a spokesman for Wyeth said, "there is more evidence for the hypothesis," the hypothesis being that humans might benefit from myostatin suppression. The boy, though, is more than just evidence. He's a harbinger of sorts, the bridge between one biological era and another, between the epoch of spontaneous mutation and the new age of mutation wrought by human hand. He doesn't represent nature's validation of a method; he is nature's validation of humankind's new design.
IF YOU WANT IT NOW, you can get it. You can get your myostatin inhibited. Of course, it helps if you're willing to be a guinea pig, which means it helps if you're a student at a university attached to the medical centers where Wyeth is running its first trials of the human antibody it calls MYO-029. This is the first drug that targets myostatin. It has nothing to do with gene therapy. It leaves your genes alone. It allows them to produce all the myostatin protein they're capable of producing. What MYO-029 does is locate and attack the myostatin protein itself in your blood. It was developed by Wyeth to answer the first big question about myostatin's clinical significance. Se-Jin Lee demonstrated that without the impediment of myostatin, mice with muscular dystrophy don't get as weak and mice engineered for obesity don't get as fat. But his mice were genetically engineered to lack myostatin from conception, and the genetic engineering of embryos is, in his words, "off the table" for humans.
What Wyeth proved was that myostatin didn't have to be engineered out of a mouse for a mouse to benefit from its absence. It supplied a University of Pennsylvania scientist named Tejvir Khurana with its antibody, and when Khurana injected the antibody into mice with muscular dystrophy, he achieved results as promising as Lee's.
Now Wyeth is testing MYO-029 in human volunteers. The testing is in Phase I, which means that the volunteers are healthy and that MYO-029 is being tested for toxicity rather than effectiveness. Not until testing enters Phase II will Wyeth be expected to show that the MYO-029 works on victims of muscular dystrophy.
Still, Wyeth's participation in a Phase I trial means that someone out there knows what myostatin inhibition feels like. It means that someone has already gotten big muscles from it, because, as Lee Sweeney--who keeps a shrewd eye on all potential commercial applications of muscle-enhancement technology--says, "If that hasn't happened, then it doesn't work."
What does even provisional freedom from myostatin feel like? Is its impact steroidal, without the dark shadings and the testicular backlash? Does it feel . . . good? Wyeth won't say. Like most pharmaceutical companies in the first stages of testing a promising compound, it won't allow its scientists to do interviews, and its spokesman is extremely tight-lipped. The only elaboration the company volunteers is that MYO-029 is delivered intravenously, which means it's not a pill, not yet, although muscle enhancement that comes in pill form is the Holy Grail of biotech companies like Wyeth. So right now you'll have to give up a vein. You'll have to sit there while the bag empties into you. How many times? Well, after four doses, delivered over four weeks, the mice at Penn showed changes that were visible to the eye, and at the end of three months, they exhibited a 25 to 30 percent increase in muscle mass. Of course, they were all sacrificed to science before they got the opportunity to enjoy their new physiques. Humans, though, will have the opportunity to make some decisions. MYO-029 is a drug made by a drug company. It doesn't change your body permanently; you'll have to keep taking it for it to keep working. If you have muscular dystrophy, you'll keep taking it. If your cancer has conspired to degrade your musculature, you'll keep taking it. If you're getting old, or getting fat . . . well, right now, the only human being known to be myostatin free is a five-year-old boy in Germany. He's not talking. But his doctor is. When Dr. Schuelke first did an ultrasound of the boy's muscles, he expected to find abnormalities. Instead, what he found was a baby who had twice the muscle mass and half the fat of "normal" babies. A baby who was, in Dr. Schuelke's words, "twice as normal."
How many times will you keep on coming back to be twice as normal?
THE INHIBITION OF MYOSTATIN can't cure disease, because myostatin itself does not cause disease. The best that can be hoped for is that it strengthens the weak--that it keeps kids with muscular dystrophy functioning until a cure can be developed. But you have to understand what this rather conditional hope means to those kids and their families: something. As opposed to what they have typically had for the entire duration of the human species: nothing.
It is the other reason why this is all happening, why you will almost certainly gain the power to keep your muscles from decaying before you die: because the power is being developed to help those who are dying much faster. On the one hand, there are those who are terrified by the continual acceleration of human biological inquiry; on the other, there are those who are terrified by its deliberateness--by the terrible fact that it cannot accelerate as fast as the suffering of their children.
TEN YEARS AGO, Lee Sweeney had nothing. He told Pat Furlong that, and she still wouldn't leave his office. She wasn't used to scientists telling her to get out of their offices. She had two boys who were dying of Duchenne muscular dystrophy; she was head of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy; she--or her organization--had money to spend. Those facts alone usually allowed her to stay awhile, even though half the time she'd come uninvited. That's what she was doing in those desperate days: telling security guards at medical libraries that she was a doctor so that she could sneak in and read the literature; visiting the offices of any scientist whose work seemed to have a bearing on Duchenne, which of all the muscular dystrophies is the most common and the most catastrophic; promising them money if they promised something that would help. Most of them took it, or tried to, telling her how close they were to a cure. Dr. Sweeney told her that he had nothing, that he would have nothing, that a cure was twenty years away.
"I have money," she said.
"I don't want your money. I want you to get out."
"But my sons . . ."
"Look, if you really want to help your boys, go home and have them checked for heart abnormalities. That's what's going to kill them."
She left, and after lying down on the floor of a bathroom at the University of Pennsylvania and weeping for three hours, she went home and asked her sons' doctor to check their hearts. There's nothing wrong with their hearts, he said. Check, she said.
Within two years, both her sons were dead of heart abnormalities. Patrick was fifteen. Christopher was seventeen. She called Dr. Sweeney back and thanked him for his honesty--for being, in fact, the only scientist who told her the truth. He was impressed, because most people who watch their sons die of Duchenne want nothing more to do with the disease. But now Pat Furlong was talking about saving the next generation of boys with Duchenne. We've lost this generation, she said. The boys who are just being diagnosed now, the ones who are four and five, those are the ones we have to do something for. But they don't have twenty years. They don't even have ten.
"All right," he said. "But you have to grow up. If you're going to do this, you have to educate yourself. You can't allow yourself to get taken advantage of. . . ."
It wasn't that Dr. Sweeney was averse to putting personal causes at the heart of his research. His own scientific interest at the time was not in Duchenne muscular dystrophy but rather in gene therapy for the elderly, and it was motivated by the experience of watching his grandmother lose muscle and mobility until she was mind-trapped in a body that could no longer walk or perform any of the functions that brought her peace and pleasure. What he was averse to, however, was the idea of pursuing half measures--something less than a cure--in order to palliate the desperation of parents who were watching time run out on their sons. "God forbid, if someone should put a dying kid in front of me," he says now, quoting his concerns back then. "I'll lose my objectivity. . . ."
He has talked to the parents of a lot of dying kids since then, and he has seen a lot of kids die. He had nothing to offer to the generation that Pat Furlong wanted to save, and so the genetic mutations they were born with still took their inevitable course: Their genes still didn't produce the dystrophin protein their muscles needed to absorb the shocks of movement, the shocks still inflicted damage that can't be repaired, damaged muscle cells were still taken over by fiber and fat. The boys still began falling at four or five and still began losing their ability to walk by the time they were ten. Although they tended not to die as early as Pat Furlong's sons did, they are now in wheelchairs if they are in their midteens, or on ventilators.
It is the next generation--the generation of boys being diagnosed with Duchenne right now--that stands to benefit most from Dr. Sweeney's ardent pursuit of the necessary half measure, his determination to offer something instead of nothing. In the spring, a compound he developed with a small biotech company called PTC Therapeutics will enter clinical trials; it stops the dystrophin gene from prematurely stopping the production of the dystrophin protein and offers the chance of something like a cure for about 15 to 20 percent of the boys with Duchenne as well as kids with genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. He is also planning to test a kind of therapy best known for use in cancer and AIDS patients--protease inhibitors--in boys with Duchenne, because protease inhibitors have shown the potential to slow muscle damage to such an extent that Dr. Sweeney has seen the potential for their use in preventing muscle atrophy in everyone from people who are bedridden to astronauts on a manned mission to Mars. And although he dedicated the paper that made his name in scientific circles back in 1998--the paper reporting the success of IGF-I in restoring muscle in elderly mice--to his grandmother, he has since devoted himself to finding ways of using IGF-I in gene therapy, primarily with muscular dystrophy in mind. Indeed, he has gone from kicking Pat Furlong out of his office to serving on scientific-review boards for both the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the Parent Project.
And because he has seen what his therapies can accomplish for victims of disease as well as victims of the natural biological timetable, he was amazed when he wrote a story on muscle enhancement for Scientific American and the editors insisted he make it a story about gene doping in sports.
You'll probably be able to get it on the black market soon. You'll probably be able to get it in Mexico or Belgium or any of the other places where sports doping has become a popular science. And we're not talking about muscle-enhancing antibodies, either; we're not talking about protease inhibitors, although they may well come into common use to allay muscle loss resulting from injury. We're not talking about drugs at all or anything that's detectable in a blood test. We're talking about the real thing--gene therapy.
Of course, it's been talked about for a long time--so long, in fact, that you might think it doesn't work. Didn't somebody die from it a while back? Somebody did, at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1999. His name was Jesse Gelsinger, and he had a fatal immune reaction to the virus that vectored the foreign gene into his body. Since then, there has been a different virus developed for what is called the "delivery" of the therapeutic agent, and though many scientists--including Dr. Sweeney--are working to improve the process, it still presents formidable difficulties.
It's strange, then, that not only might there be a way to get around some of the problems but that it turns out to be kind of easy. The trick in gene therapy is getting the targeted cells to absorb the new gene into their own machinery, which is why viruses, so adroit at cellular invasion, have been the vector of choice. Last summer, however, Jon Wolff and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin published a paper that offered "a facile nonviral method for delivering genes . . . to skeletal muscle of mammalian limbs," and what Dr. Wolff did was facile indeed. Instead of pinpointing cells with viruses, he tied off limbs with a blood-pressure collar and poured naked DNA into a vein. That's it. The DNA was for dystrophin, the missing protein in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and up to 30 percent of the targeted muscle cells absorbed and expressed it. The results were the same in mice, dogs, and monkeys. It is not a method that can be used right now in torso muscles, so it will not be able to get boys with Duchenne up and walking. But it could be used to cancel myostatin genes, and Dr. Sweeney has already contacted Dr. Wolff about the method's particular promise for pumping up limbs with IGF-I.
Dr. Wolff and Dr. Sweeney agree that if gene therapy goes to the black market, the naked-DNA method could be the preferred means of delivery, not just because it is so easy but because it is so cheap. Viruses are expensive, but you can mix up vats of DNA for a fraction of the cost. "I've been waiting for this for twenty years," Wolff says. "I never thought it would be this easy."
Okay: Biotechnology is here. The changes it might effect are not, at least by the standards of a German boy, unnatural. They might be easier to implement on the human organism than previously thought. Cheaper, too. Sounds promising, right? Wrong. Lee Sweeney has encountered a reflexive resistance spoken in the name of human purity by people who endorse the application of his work to muscular-dystrophy patients. Strangers have asked him to stop. They've said, "How can you keep doing what you're doing, knowing what it's going to do to the Olympics?"
Richard Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency has asked him to tag the genes for IGF-I with some kind of marker so that WADA could find out who's using gene therapy to cheat. Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, has spelled out his eloquent philosophical concerns about the consequences of elective biotechnological enhancement, based on what he sees as the dignity of human performance and the integrity of a life cycle that includes infirmity as part of aging and death as part of life.
"What would it mean if there really came a time when the son could never surpass his father in strength?" Kass asks. "Under these circumstances, the only thing meaningful about growing old would be pretending not to be. It's easy to see how one would be tempted to choose this technology. But if one asks oneself what society might be like, the aggregate choices might usher in a society no one would prefer."
"It's a matter of technology versus humanism, I guess," Richard Pound says. "A lot of people might say, 'Who gives a shit about eight guys in the Olympic final?' But very few people think of the downward multiplier. For every eight athletes in the Olympics, there are eight hundred million dreaming of getting there. Do we really want to tell them that they need these drugs in order to compete?"
For his part, Dr. Sweeney believes that there are precisely two ethical questions that he needs to ask about any biotechnological or biopharmaceutical intervention he authors: Does it work, and is it safe? Once he is able to answer those questions, he says, "I live in my own world, where I presume that if people suffer, you want to stop it."
He is stunned that people don't automatically share his presumptions. He is particularly stunned by how many people seem to think that the main issue of these biological advances is not suffering but sport.
But then so is Se-Jin Lee, who says, "The idea that sick people won't get this technology because a few bozos might abuse it is ludicrous."
So is Pat Furlong. So is Jon Wolff. But the culture's anxiety about the biotechnological contamination of athletics is just its way of voicing a larger anxiety about humanity's move into the biotechnological era; it has simply chosen sports as its nagging conscience. What myostatin is to muscle, sports is to the debate on myostatin inhibition. It is an expression of our limits, or our nostalgia for limits, which is not a nostalgia that Dr. Sweeney shares.
Last year, he spoke at a scientific conference sponsored by WADA. After Sweeney described his research, Richard Pound asked him if there was anything he could or would do to make it possible for WADA to keep doing its job once "the genie was out of the bottle" and gene therapy became commonplace.
"I kept asking Dr. Sweeney, 'Is there anything you can do?' " Richard Pound remembers. "He was very pleasant about it. But his answer, basically, was, Nah--you guys are fucked."
Fucked? A future in which sick boys don't die, people with cancer stay whole, old people keep walking, the once morbidly obese are no longer fat, Jerry Lewis benefits from the treatments developed for Jerry's Kids, and, oh yeah, Barry Bonds keeps hitting home runs until he's, like, fifty. Yeah, we're fucked, all right.
You might be able to shoot the works, you know. Myostatin, IGF-I, protease inhibitors. That should do it, right? That should make you twice as normal in no time. Anyway, that's the idea behind the decision of Se-Jin Lee and Lee Sweeney to join forces, along with clinician Kenneth Fischbeck and Kathryn Wagner, who was a researcher in Dr. Lee's lab before she became the head of the center on muscular diseases at Johns Hopkins. The four of them have recently applied for a grant that would get them the funding to establish Hopkins as one of the federal government's designated muscular-dystrophy-research centers. There are three such centers now; two of them focus on using gene therapy to deliver dystrophin to boys with Duchenne, an approach that would essentially offer a cure. The Hopkins approach assumes that no cure will be found, at least for the time being. "Our idea is basically to accept that muscle is degrading and then to try to slow the process down," says Dr. Lee. Of course, once there is a cure, you won't need the combination myostatin/IGF-I/protease-inhibitor therapy to compensate for your muscular dystrophy, because you won't have muscular dystrophy. You'll need it only if your muscles are degrading by the usual means--or if you want them to get really, really big.
What will you look like, stripped of myostatin, amped with insulin-like growth factor, and given protease inhibitors as a prophylaxis against muscle decay? Will you look . . . natural? Will you even look human? Assuming such a therapy works, the answer might depend on what your definition of what natural is--and what human is. The German boy born without myostatin is natural. His mutation occurred naturally, and although he is, strictly speaking, a "mutant," he is obviously no more or less human than you are. Pat Furlong's two sons were natural in the same way. They were fully human, although heirs to spontaneous mutations that caused them to suffer and to die. Which is why neither Dr. Lee nor Dr. Sweeney spend too much time thinking about whether their work is natural or not. And why they don't worry about asking nature for permission. "Nature does a lot of horrible things," Dr. Sweeney says. "People talk about evolution. Well, evolution doesn't care about kids with muscular dystrophy. It doesn't care about old people. That's our job. That's why we have to take care of them."
Technology versus humanism? You have to understand: From the viewpoint of the scientists creating it, technology is humanism. It's all we have. It's all we've ever had. And so when the time comes to choose whether to reject the technology or use it to improve upon the body your ancestors gave you, you're going to have to rely on the knowledge that connects you to those ancestors as surely as your myostatin and IGF-I genes do. You're going to have to rely on what they could have told you the moment some lucky mutation enabled them to recognize the terrible fact of being human in the natural world:
Hey, man, you're on your own.
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Laura L. Carstensen, Director, Stanford Center on Longevity
Ron D. Cordes, Co-chairman, Genworth Financial Wealth Management
Lewis M. Feldstein (Treasurer), President, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation
Ellen Goodman (Secretary), writer, speaker and commentator
Paul H. Irving, President, Milken Institute
Sherry Lansing, Founder, The Sherry Lansing Foundation
Suzanne Braun Levine, writer, editor and authority on women and family issues
Webb McKinney, consultant
Judy Jolley Mohraz (Chair), President and CEO, Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust
Joseph Plummer, Professor, Columbia Business School, and former Executive Vice President, McCann Worldgroup
Beverly Ryder (Vice Chair), education reformer
Lester Strong, Vice President and CEO, AARP Experience Corps
Board Members
Laura L. Carstensen, PhD is Professor of Psychology and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr., Professor in Public Policy at Stanford University, where she is also the Founding Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. For more than twenty years her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging; in 2005 she was honored with a MERIT award which extends this support another decade. Dr. Carstensen is best known for socioemotional selectivity theory, a life-span theory of motivation. Her most recent empirical research focuses on ways in which motivational changes influence cognitive processing and emotional experience. Dr. Carstensen is a Fellow in a number of professional organizations including the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association. Her honors include Stanford University's Deans Award for Distinguished Teaching and a Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America. In 2003, she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow. Currently, she is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Aging Societies and the National Advisory Council on Aging. Dr. Carstensen received her BS from the University of Rochester and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from West Virginia University.
Ron D. Cordes has enjoyed a 30-plus year career in the investment industry, having co-founded and then sold AssetMark Investment Services to Genworth Financial in 2006. He is currently Co-chairman of Genworth Financial Wealth Management, which is responsible for over $24 billion of assets under management for individual and institutional clients. Cordes is also co-founder of the Cordes Foundation, which has a global mission of driving market-based capital to address the world's most important problems. Cordes speaks extensively on impact investing and achieving meaning and purpose in an encore career, and has been profiled in multiple publications including Fast Company, Forbes, Financial Advisor, Financial Planning and Private Wealth Management. Cordes chairs the Executive Committee for ImpactAssets, a nonprofit financial services company launched in 2010, and is also co-chair of the Opportunity Collaboration, a global poverty business retreat. In addition, he is a regent of the University of the Pacific, and chairs the Board of Stakeholders for the university's Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Cordes also serves on the Advisory Committee for the Clinton Global Initiative, and as a board member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, Fair Trade USA and MicroVest Holdings.
Lewis M. Feldstein (Treasurer) is President of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the principal sourceof venture capital for New Hampshire's nonprofit community. An expert on civic engagement, Feldstein co-chaired Harvard University's three-year executive seminar on civic engagement in America with Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. He and Putnam co-authored Better Together: Restoring the American Community in 2003. In recent years, Feldstein was selected as one of the 100 People Who Shaped New Hampshire in the 20th Century, published by the Concord Monitor; one of The 2008 NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50 members of
the U.S. nonprofit world; and one of the 10 most influential people in New Hampshire
by Business NH Magazine. Feldstein started his career working with the
civil rights movement in Mississippi. He served in senior staff positions to
New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and worked as provost of the Antioch New
England Graduate School (now known as Antioch University New England), among
many other jobs. Feldstein serves on several boards, including the board of directors
of Independent Sector. Feldstein is a graduate of Brown University and holds
a master's degree in law and diplomacy from Tufts University. He has received
seven honorary doctorates.
Ellen Goodman, who was a longtime syndicated columnist for The Boston Globe and the Washington Post Writers Group, has spent most of her life chronicling social change and its impact on American life. The Pulitzer Prize-winner continues that tradition from her observation post now as a writer, speaker and commentator. Goodman began her career as a researcher for Newsweek magazine in the days when only men wrote for the newsweekly. She landed a job as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press in 1965 and, in 1967, for The Boston Globe, where she began writing her column in 1974. The Washington Post Writers Group syndicated her column from 1976 to 2010. A 1963 cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, Goodman served as a Nieman Fellow from 1973-1974 at Harvard University, where she studied the dynamics of social change. In 2007, she was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she studied gender and the news. As the first Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism, she taught at Stanford University in 1996. Goodman's first book, 1979's Turning Points, detailed the effect of the changing roles of women on the family. Six collections of her columns also have been published. She is co-author with Patricia O'Brien of I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women's Lives, published in 2000. Goodman won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1980. She has won many other awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award.
Paul H. Irving is president and a member of the board of the Milken Institute. In addition to executive leadership, Irving leads the Institute's Longevity Initiative, focused on improving aging lives across America and the world. He also heads programs to enhance philanthropic engagement and impact, and to expand capital access and opportunity. Irving is a member of the boards of directors of East West Bancorp, Encore.org and Operation Hope, the board of counselors of the USC Davis School of Gerontology and the national advisory board on aging of Partners for Livable Communities. Previously, he was an advanced leadership fellow at Harvard University and chairman, CEO, managing partner and head of the financial services group of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, a prominent law and consulting firm. Irving attended New York University, Harvard University and Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, where he served as an adjunct professor and received the Board of Governors Award for outstanding contributions to society and the law.
Sherry Lansing (Secretary) is the founder and CEO of The Sherry Lansing Foundation (SLF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to cancer research, health, public education, and Encore Career opportunities. Among the foundation's initiatives is the EnCorps Teachers Program, founded by Lansing to retrain retirees from the technology sector to serve as California public school science and math teachers. Another SLF program is PrimeTime LAUSD, a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District, designed to engage retirees in improving the state of public education through targeted volunteerism. Lansing is also a co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, an initiative which funds multi-institutional cancer research "dream teams." In addition, Lansing serves on the Board of Regents of the University of California and on the boards of The American Association for Cancer Research Foundation, the Carter Center, Encore.org, the Entertainment Industry Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. In 2004, she was appointed to the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
During nearly 30 years in the motion picture business, Lansing was involved in the production, marketing, and distribution of more than 200 films, including Academy Award winners Forrest Gump (1994), Braveheart (1995), and Titanic (1997). In 1992, she was named Chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures and began an unprecedented tenure that lasted more than 12 years, during which the studio enjoyed enormous creative and financial success. In 1980, she became the first woman to head a major film studio when she was appointed President of 20th Century Fox.
Lansing graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science Degree from Northwestern University in 1966.
Suzanne Braun Levine is a writer, editor and nationally recognized authority on changing gender roles. She was the first editor of Ms. magazine (1972-1988), and the first woman editor of the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review.
Her most recent published work is an e-book You Gotta Have Girlfriends: A Post-fifty Posse is Good for Your Health (Open Road Media, 2013). It continues the conversation with women in the new stage of life she celebrated in three previous books, How We Love Now: Women Talk About Intimacy After Fifty, 50 Is the New Fifty: 10 Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood and Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood.
She is a regular blogger for Huff/Post50 and AARP.org and contributes to Encore.org, TheTransitionNetwork.org,VibrantNation.com. She is a Contributing Editor at More Magazine and reports on the ongoing changes in women's lives on her website SuzanneBraunLevine.com.
Her pioneering book on how men are changing the role of fatherhood, Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First was published in 2000. In 2007, she co-authored (with Mary Thom) a widely acclaimed oral history of New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug. While at Ms. she developed and produced the Peabody Award-winning HBO special She's Nobody's Baby: American Women in the 20th Century and edited the book based on the documentary. She also conceived and co-edited A Decade of Women: A Ms. History of the Seventies in Words and Pictures.
She is on the board of Encore.org, the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication, and on the Advisory Board for the Women's Media Center and The Transition Network.
Webb McKinney is currently a management consultant with a primary focus on merger integration. He also serves on the boards of four nonprofit organizations, besides Civic Ventures: Resource Area for teaching, the American Leadership Forum - Silicon Valley and ALearn. McKinney also serves on the board of SMART Modular Technologies. Prior to retiring from the Hewlett Packard Company after 34 years in November 2003, McKinney was the Executive Vice President leading HP's ongoing merger integration and global citizenship efforts, as well as HP's organizational effectiveness and governance initiatives. Previously, McKinney co-led HP's postmerger integration team. His responsibilities included planning and leading the integration of HP and Compaq's systems, processes and people. Before the merger, McKinney served as President for the Business Customer Organization at HP, with responsibility for worldwide sales of HP products and services and worldwide marketing and delivery of HP products to large companies and small- and medium-sized businesses. McKinney was born in Upland, Calif. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California.
Judy Jolley Mohraz (Chair) joined the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust as its first president and CEO in September 2000. Prior to joining the trust, she was President of Goucher College in Baltimore. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Baylor University and her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mohraz serves on the Council on Foundation's board of directors, the advisory board of the Morrison Institute at Arizona State University, the board of Greater Phoenix Leadership and the advisory board of the William Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. She previously chaired the Council on Foundation's Committee on Public Policy and served as President of the Arizona Grantmakers Forum.
Joseph Plummer is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and Senior Associate at Olson Zaltman Associates. He is co-author of The OnLine Advertising Playbook, focusing on the emergence of the Internet as a marketing platform. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Plummer was Executive Vice President at McCann Worldgroup, Vice Chairman at D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB & B), Executive Vice President at Young & Rubicam and Senior Vice President at Leo Burnett. He was also a managing director at Paine Webber/Y&R Ventures and Chief Research Officer at the Advertising Research Foundation. Plummer is a board member of Media Advisory Partners LLC, Zogby International, Voxpop Investing, AdSafe, Innerscope Research Inc. and C3 Research. Previously he was a board director of Sunstus, Audits & Surveys, McCann Worldgroup, DMB & B, and Young & Rubicam. He was a member of the Board of Trustees at his alma mater, Westminster College, where he earned his bachelor's degree, and on the Presidents Council at The Ohio State University, where he received his master's and doctorate degrees. In addition to The OnLine Advertising Playbook, Plummer has published more than 25 articles in journals, written more than 20 chapters for books and has been the editor of The Journal of Advertising Research. He was selected as Distinguished Marketing Practitioner by the Association of Marketing Science in 2007. In 2012 Plummer received the distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the Advertising Research Foundation.
Beverly Ryder (Vice Chair) is an accomplished executive with 30 years of corporate experience in the banking and energy industries. Since leaving the private sector in 2007, she has been actively engaged in improving and reforming K-12 education. Ryder worked with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) from 2006 to 2008, forming the Office of Parent and Civic Engagement. She is the co-author of For the Benefit of Our Children: Parent School Collaboration, a report on the quality of parent engagement in the LAUSD. With the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, she initiated a joint office between LAUSD and the chamber specializing in developing school-business partnerships in small learning communities and small schools. Ryder served for nine years as the Corporate Secretary of Edison International and its utility subsidiary, Southern California Edison Co. Additionally, she was the company's Vice President of community involvement, overseeing philanthropic and employee volunteer activities. Ryder has had extensive nonprofit experience as a board member of numerous community and civic organizations. She currently serves on the board of Claremont Graduate University as Chair of the Presidential Search Committee and Vice Chair of the Audit Committee; on the boards of advisers of the Stanford University and Claremont University schools of education; and as President-elect of the National Women's Hall of Fame. She is an emeritus trustee of Stanford University and a former member the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Accrediting Commission of Senior Colleges and Universities. Ryder earned her bachelor's degree in economics from Stanford University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. She completed the Broad Superintendents Academy in 2006.
Lester Strong represents AARP Experience Corps, which tutors and mentors elementary school children (through third grade) who struggle with reading by utilizing the skills and experiences of adults 55-plus. AARP Experience Corps serves 20,000 students in 19 cities across the United States through a program recognized as the one of the most effective in-school interventions in the country. Strong has served as a leader in educational entrepreneurship and development. He was the Chief Development Officer for the BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) Foundation, which provides tutoring and mentoring services to underserved children. Strong's efforts doubled the foundation's endowment and propelled expansion from three to five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, New York and Springfield, Mass. A longtime proponent and practitioner of meditation, Lester was also CEO of the SYDA Foundation, an organization that provides instruction in yoga and meditation in 46 countries. Strong spent 25 years in the television industry as an executive, producer, reporter and anchor in Charlotte (WBTV), Atlanta (WSB), New York (ABC Entertainment) and Boston (WHDH). His work earned him a host of national and regional awards, including five regional Emmy Awards and a White House commendation from President Ronald Reagan.
At the time of his appointment to the Cabinet by President Johnson, Gardner was President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. During that time, Gardner served continuously as a consultant to various government agencies: AID, the State Department, the U.S. Air Force, the White House, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, and others. In addition, he served as a member of President Kennedy's Task Force on Education; Chair of President Kennedy's Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs; Chair of President Johnson's Task Force on Education and the 1965 White House Conference on Education; a member of President Carter's Commission on an Agenda for the Eighties and Chair of the President's Commission on White House Fellowships. In the early 1980s, he served as a member of President Reagan's Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives.
Gardner authored several books on leadership and self renewal, and wrote extensively on public service. He was editor of President Kennedy's book, To Turn the Tide, and authored Excellence, Self-Renewal, No Easy Victories, The Recovery of Confidence, In Common Cause, Morale, and On Leadership. He was the co-editor, with Francesca Gardner Reese, of Quotations of Wit and Wisdom (Know or Listen to Those Who Know). In 1991, Independent Sector published his brief treatise entitled, Building Community.
Gardner received his B.A. and M.A. in psychology from Stanford, where he returned as a trustee and professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and taught psychology at the University of California, Connecticut College for Women, and Mount Holyoke College. In 1943, Gardner joined the U.S. Marine Corps and earned the rank of captain before his release from active duty. Gardner served on numerous boards and councils and received many awards and honorary degrees. In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. In 2000, the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities was established at Stanford University in honor of his lifetime of public service. John W. Gardner died February 16, 2002, at the age of 89.


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Our dumb state
Yet another installment of our semi-regular compendium of idiocy
Published: December 2, 2010
Private nursing homes are the bread and butter of the old Florida economy, but like most under-regulated food products, when left to fester and rot they become a breeding ground for squirming horror. John Stumpp, a 76-year-old veteran who had lost his eye to cancer, was whiling away his glory years at the Gainesville Health Care Center in Pahokee, Fla.; that center, one in a chain of health care centers that received horrible ratings from state regulators, is operated by Okeechobee executive Maxcine Darville, who was known to live a lifestyle of "luxury cars and hot tubs," according to The Palm Beach Post. Back in September, during a routine visit to a Veterans Administra-tion facility, doctors peeled back Stumpp's eye-cover only to find that his socket had become a sort of nursing home for baby flies: maggots.
Not coincidentally, just a month earlier the Gainesville Health Care Center was cited by the Agency for Health Care Administration for similar treatment on an unnamed client. That client, according to the report filed, was "often uncooperative and refused to allow staff to change his dressing on the second shift 43 out of 57 times." But the nursing home failed to notify the client's doctor or legal representative, and is now bathing in the scalding water of a state investigation.
Normally Florida reserves its unbelievable child abuse extravaganzas for the living, gleefully cheering on its daughters as they scratch each other's eyes out for their parent's amusement. But in the case of Jacksonville's Harper family, the cruelty inflicted on their daughter was far more morbid. Angela Harper died in a car wreck when she was 12, way back in 1988. So it was odd when the postman started delivering "stacks of bridal magazines, working mother publications, college inquiries, vacation guides, information on fertility clinics and credit card applications," according to The Florida Times Union, addressed to Angela at the Harper's home – where Angela had never lived – in 2004. It was as if their daughter had taken on a second life as a demographic expectation.
Turns out the Harpers had an enemy. Mark Wilcox, 50, had been harboring a grudge for more than a decade. In 1992, Mr. Harper fired Wilcox from his extermination business after repeated customer complaints; in the intervening years, Wilcox took a turn for the crazy and was, according to The Florida Times-Union, under "past and frequent psychiatric care." All it took was a little dabbling in mail fraud to soothe Wilcox's angst, and though in court he refused to admit exactly why playing out Angela Harper's afterlife in the form of glossy magazines was a good idea, he did offer that "he didn't realize how much grief he would bring to the Harpers and never meant to be cruel." He was sentenced to six months of home detention and two years of probation. In both cases, stamps will be available.
Harper's mother didn't buy Wilcox's shoulder shrug. "I mean he even sent information to my daughter on how to become a funeral home director," she told the Times-Union. "How can you not consider that cruel?"
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Calvin MurphyObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
Calvin Allen Murphy, 83, of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, died Friday, November 21, 2014, at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He was born August 1, 1931, in Drew County to Charlie...
Avris McBrideObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
Mrs. Avris McBride, 61, of Pine Bluff passed, Saturday, November 22, 2014. Funeral Arrangements will be made by Brown Funeral Home of Pine Bluff.
Earnest MarshallObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
Mr. Earnest Junior Marshall, 54 of Pine Bluff passed Friday, November 14, 2014. He was born in Magnolia, Ark. to the late David and Francile (Hayes) Marshall.
Funeral service will be 12...
Carolyn HaynieObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
Mrs. Carolyn Haynie, 51 of Pine Bluff, Ark., passed Friday, November 21, 2014. Funeral Arrangements will be announced by Brown Funeral Home of Pine Bluff, Ark.
David CraigObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
David T. Craig, 64, Pine Bluff, born March 8, 1950, passed away November 7, 2014. Preceded in death by parents, Howard and Dortha Craig; siblings, Karen, Jeanette, and Kenneth; and son, Melvin "...
Marilyn GrahamObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
Marilyn Miller Graham, 94, a lifetime resident of Pine Bluff, passed away November 21, 2014 at Trinity Village Medical Center.
She was born October 31, 1920, in Pine Bluff, a daughter of...
Roy BryantObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
Roy "Bubba" Bryant, 60, a lifetime resident of Pine Bluff, passed away Thursday, November 20, 2014 at his home.
Born August 20, 1954, in Pine Bluff, he was a son of the late Francis Leroy...
Glenda JohnsonObituariesCommentsNov 23, 2014 6:11am
WHITE HALL - Glenda Dudley "Charlie" Johnson, age 79, of White Hall, completed her earthly journey on Friday, November 21, 2014 surrounded by her children.
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Preps Roundup: Chapel boys win tourneyHigh SchoolCommentsNov 23, 2014 12:11am
JACKSONVILLE — Four Watson Chapel players reached double-figures to help the Wildcats win the North Pulaski Tournament on Saturday afternoon.
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Digest for 11-23-14High SchoolCommentsNov 23, 2014 12:11am
UAPB volleyball still alive in SWAC tourney
BATON ROUGE, La. — The Arkansas-Pine Bluff volleyball team reached the second day of the SWAC Volleyball Tournament, despite losing...


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Mælinar said :
astrojax said :
how do i make the url a 'link' when i create the post? sorry…
Its all contained in the FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions. I suppose its presumably not far removed from that big orange button at the top of the screen labelled 'posting instructions'.
Oh, yes, of course … there it is in bubble number three in 3pt font, how did I ever miss that … and I was wearing my monicle and all !
Heaven help me if I ever want to add a url to an EXISTING post … or is that "presumably" in some big fat purple button somewhere?
Don't worry about it M, I'm sure J and the powers that be are aware of this missing piece of the puzzle …
@CanberraResident – I'm not sure if I understand the tenor of your post. You are attacking me, because I helped out another rioter ?
Say 'welcome' to the tard brush.
Aaaaaannnddd before you go on with another vitriolic spurt, I didn't see you jumping up and offering any help before I piped up, so you can shove it as far as I am concerned as an immediate starting point.
Phah! I've started to realise that people who say "one city is better than the other" usually only mean one or two things; (a) The city I like has more places to go and get p!ssed, and (b) The city I like has more places to go see live bands.
Yep, those are indeed the credentials required in the 21st century to determine how boring a city is
The big cities are great if you like city life, and all that comes with it – bands, bars, artsy stuff, traffic, crowds…
Canberra however is awesome, the feeling of space and living in a (somewhat) planned city can't be beat. Probably my main like for Canberra is the outdoors and sporting scene, which just doesn't exist in the big smoke. There's a reason Canberrans are fitter, stronger, smarter and live longer than other Aussies.
OK, now everyone shut up and stop saying how good Canberra is, otherwise we'll be flooded with fat buggers from Syd & Melb looking for a tree-change.
Skidbladnir said :
Tis a pity we get left off every major tour circuit, though.
I mean, Daft Punk played everywhere civilised (and then Sydney) except Canberra, and Vanilla Ice even played in Wagga Wagga but left Canberra off his tour.
(I am in no way supportive of the Ice Baby, just using him as an example)
Exactly. This frustrates me to no end, as I'm sure everyone I know will attest to – I rant about this all the time. (The lack of tours, not the lack of Vanilla Ice.)
Frontier Touring once told me it was because historically, Canberra didn't sell as many tickets as Perth or Adelaide. I had to restrain myself from pointing out that this was obvious due to the population differences.
All right stop!
Collaborate and listen
Ice is back with my brand new invention
Something grabs a hold of me tightly
Then I flow that a harpoon daily and nightly
Will it ever stop?
Yo–I don't know
Turn off the lights and I'll glow
To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal
Light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle.
Bum rush the speaker that booms
I'm killin your brain like a poisonous mushroom
Deadly, when I play a dope melody
Anything less that the best is a felony
Love it or leave it
You better gain way
You better hit bull's eye
The kid dont play
If there was a problem
Yo, I'll solve it
Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it
Ice Ice Baby Vanilla (4X)
Now that the party is jumping
With the bass kicked in, the Vegas are pumpin'
Quick to the point, to the point no faking
I'm cooking MC's like a pound of bacon
Burning them if they're not quick and nimble
I go crazy when I hear a cymbal
And a hi hat with a souped up tempo
I'm on a roll and it's time to go solo
Rollin in my 5.0
With my ragtop down so my hair can blow
The girlies on standby
Waving just to say HI
Did you stop?
No–I just drove by
Kept on pursuing to the next stop
I busted a left and I'm heading to the next block
That block was dead
Yo–so I continued to A1A Beachfront Ave.
Girls were hot wearing less than bikinis
Rockman lovers driving Lamborghinis
Jealous 'cause I'm out getting mine
Shay with a guage and Vanilla with a nine
Reading for the chumps on the wall
The Chumps are acting ill because they're so full of eight balls
Gunshots ranged out like a bell
I grabbed my nine–
All I heard were shells
Fallin on the concrete real fast
Jumped in my car, slammed on the gas
Bumper to bumper the avenue's packed
I'm tryin to get away before the jackers jacke
Police on the scene
You know what I mean
They passed me up, confronted all the dope fiends
If there was a problem
Yo, I'll solve it
Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it
Ice Ice Baby Vanilla (4X)
Take heed, 'caese I'm a lyrical poet
Miami's on the scene just in case you didn't know it
My town, that created all the bass sound
Enough to shake and kick holes in the ground
'Cause my style's like a chemical spill
Feasible rhymes that you can vision and feel
Conducted and formed
This is a hell of a concept
We make it hype and you want to step with this
Shay palays on the fade, slice it like a ninja
Cut like a razor blade so fast
Other DJ's say, "Damn"
If my rhyme was a drug
I'd sell it by the gram
Keep my composure when it's time to get loose
Magnetized by the mic while I kick my juice
If there was a problem
Yo–I'll solve it!
Check out the hook while Deshay revolves it.
Ice Ice Baby Vanilla (4X)
Yo man–let's get out of here!
Word to your mother!
Ice Ice baby Too Cold
Ice Ice baby Too Cold Too cold (3X)
I do not think there is a direct correlation between level of traffic and level of boredom in a city. Except that it is definitely boring to sit in traffic. So what a stupid illogical statement for a Minister to make! No wonder everyone hates the NSW government – including the people who live there mind you! The only reason they're still in power is because there is no viable opposition.
How exactly did I attack you Maelinar? With a pick-axe from my garden shed?
If anything, I was having a go at the design of the site. The url instructions are not clear, but I'm sure they're aware of it and will eventually fix it …
Not everything in this world is about you Maelinar, although I'm sure you would like it to be …
A mighty big tarnished bronze medal to you for helping out astro-jax in your usual … errr, manner …
How exactly did I attack you Maelinar? by quoting me and then being snarky.
As I said, the tenor of your comments was unclear. Thankyou for clarifying that it was about the site design, and thanks for the medal. Since I already wear 5 on ANZAC day, I'll just put this one in the cupboard with the other less important ones.
Ok, so you have service medals. Congratulations, and thank you for your service to this country. A couple of weeks too late, but all the same, thank you. No, I mean that sincerely, as difficult as that may be to believe. But I will stop you there, or next you'll be telling me about the style of zipper you have on your perfectly ironed trousers …
tap, naaaaahhhhh, think about it … Maelinar has this tough exterior … not much of a sense of humour, has one known enemy, seems to know a lot about everything, never makes a spelling or grammatical error, opinionated, ready for an heated debate …
and on the homefront … probably perfectly ironed shirts and trousers, not to mention the measured to the millimetre, precisely folded, striped handkerchiefs, oh and the dinner is always on the table at 6pm on the dot …
Reeks of ex-serviceman to me … needless to say, I reckon the medals are real … I doubt he'd be such a d!ck as to lie about something so sacred as service medals … even Maelinar wouldn't do that … surely …
Back on topic, managed to catch 5 minutes of my not-so fav 2CC radio jock this arvo, Mike Welsh, he was talking about boring towns too … listeners were asked to call in with their most boring town … didn't get to hear the rest … now THAT's boring …


text:
Author Archive
Articles by Liz Cox Barrett | Email the Author
And Now, Our Story About the Story About the Story About the Scream
By Liz Cox Barrett Feb 10, 2004 at 10:55 AM
Building on Diane Sawyer's story last week on how the media had both overplayed Dean's now-infamous post-Iowa address and taken... More
Hey, Wasn�t There A Primary Campaign Going On?
By Liz Cox Barrett Feb 10, 2004 at 10:54 AM
With the conventional wisdom telling us that John Kerry's got the nomination all but wrapped up, most bloggers are feeling... More
Clark's Campaign Makeover
By Liz Cox Barrett Feb 5, 2004 at 01:55 PM
ABC News's Deborah Apton, on the road with Gen. Wesley Clark, reports today on some of the Clark campaign's recent... More
Premature Coronation
By Liz Cox Barrett Feb 4, 2004 at 04:29 PM
Remember that tall guy with the four stars on his shoulder? Madonna's pick for the presidency? What was his name... More
An Information Deficit
By Liz Cox Barrett Feb 3, 2004 at 08:52 PM
In a nearly numbers-free New York Times "News Analysis" of the federal budget Elisabeth Bumiller describes the projected federal budget... More
Serial creators don't know what will happen to Adnan Syed - New developments in his legal case suggest that the outcome is wide open
The press is responsible for ignoring Bill Cosby rape allegations - Where were journalists 10 years ago when claims originally surfaced against him?
Journalism has a plagiarism problem. But it's not the one you'd expect - Fareed Zakaria's case highlights news organizations' ethical grey areas
4 topics John Oliver explained more clearly than television news - The political satirist brings explainer comedy to HBO viewers
Will radio save science journalism? - WNYC will soon have a new health unit
My take: The end of an era in Tampa (14)
Serial creators don't know what will happen to Adnan Syed (14)
The press is responsible for ignoring Bill Cosby rape allegations (6)
The Boston Globe finally digs in to a big story (4)
Journalism has a plagiarism problem. But it's not the one you'd expect (4)
Email blasts from CJR writers and editors
CNN reporters in Ferguson provide coverage of CNN reporters in Ferguson (Slate)
"[T]here was little that justified CNN's egocentric coverage"
Which media outlets use 'illegal immigrant'? (Fusion)
"[I]n spite of all the good reasons not to use the phrase, it is still very easy to find in the US press, even in headlines"
Jack Shafer on losing his job (Capital New York)
"Right now, my immediate plan is to go to work as a lay therapist at The Intercept to bring the healing there so John Cook and Matt Taibbi can return. I have great interpersonal skills."
On outlets that continue to call unknown drone victims 'militants' (The Intercept)
"Like the US drone program itself, this deceitful media practice continues unabated"
Greg Marx discusses democracy and news with Tom Rosenstiel of the American Press Institute
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
ACEsTooHigh.com – Reporting on the science, education, and policy surrounding childhood trauma
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
Should all journalists be on Twitter? – Reasons to take up or forgo the 140-character platform
Is it ever okay to name victims? – Editors question the policy of omitting information in sexual assault and domestic violence cases


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Robot 6
Seth Kushner's 'Faces of MoCCA Fest 2010′
by Kevin Melrose | April 13, 2010 @ 11:00 AM | 2 Comments |
If there were an award for best convention report, Seth Kushner would surely win with this series of portraits from last weekend's MoCCA Festival featuring such notables as Bill Ayers, Kyle Baker, Gabrielle Bell, Dean Haspiel, Jaime Hernandez, Chip Kidd, David Mazzucchelli, Frank Miller, Paul Pope, Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw.
Tagged: art, cartoonists, comic conventions, comics creators, MoCCA
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2 Comments
And they say comics isn't a boys' club anymore.
I expected a better-fitting jacket from Pope. Poor form!


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Digital Camera Buying Guide - Basics
This general Digital Camera Buying Guide consists of 4 easy steps. Those who are already familiar with digital cameras and are considering a DSLR should read the DSLR Buying Guide. If you are not sure what a DSLR is, keep reading, you are on the right page.
Step 1 - this page - introduces basic digital camera concepts. The terms explained here are often prominently displayed on camera boxes and advertisements. Understanding these is essential for knowing what to pay attention to when comparing digital cameras.
6 Megapixels
3 Megapixels
1 Megapixel
Megapixels is a measure of resolution. With more megapixels, a camera can capture smaller details. This makes it possible to make larger prints without looking blurry.
A few years ago, megapixels were the high mark for which cameras competed. Now that modern cameras rarely have fewer than 12 MP, more megapixels are not needed except by those intent on making huge prints. Buyers would better concentrate on other digital camera features now.
Camera makers label their cameras with the maximum number of megapixels they can capture. This is usually written as 18 MP, with MP standing for MegaPixels. Specifically, a megapixel corresponds to roughly one million pixelsFor example, a 3 megapixel image is composed of about 3 million dots. A pixel is a tiny dot from which all digital pictures and videos are composed.
Optical Zoom
Optical zoom is the ability of a camera to photograph a smaller area from a given point of view. Greater optical zoom lets you capture more details from distant subjects. This is important for certain subjects, like wildlife and sports photography where you cannot easily get physically close to your subject.
Optical zoom 4X
Optical zoom is actually a property of the lens, so it applies only to cameras with a fixed lens. It is measured by how much closer the camera can zoom compared to its widest setting. For example, a 2X optical zoom can make a subject appear twice as close. A few cameras have fixed-focal length lenses, which means they do not zoom at all.
Plenty of cameras, have interchangeable lenses, meaning that the lens can be changed. Those are called ILC which stands for Interchangeable Lens Camera. In this case, each lens may have its own optical zoom and the camera's reach can usually be extended both longer and wider by buying new lenses for it.
Digital Zoom
Digital zoom refers to a digital camera's attempt to emulate optical zoom. Digital zoom gives the impression of getting closer to a subject without actually capturing any more detail. Digital zoom is the equivalent of cutting the center of a picture and blowing-up just that portion.
- Original
- Digital Zoom
- Digital Zoom
Digital zoom must be ignored when purchasing a digital camera because it can easily be done with better quality and precision by computer after a picture is taken. Camera manufacturers tend to emphasize digital zoom in small models to compensate for short optical zoom but this only confuses buyers.
Despite cameras having up to 50X optical zoom now, certain manufacturers still boast regarding digital zooms but hide it under other names, such as Smart Zoom, Fine Zoom, Quality Zoom, etc. These are all digital zooms in desguise.
LCD stands for liquid crystal display. It refers to the small screen on the back of a digital cameraSome very old digital camera did not have an LCD but all the ones from this decade do. which is used for viewing the pictures you took and, in most cases, to preview the picture you are about to take. When an LCD previews the image correctly, it is called Exposure-Priority as opposed to display-priority, which shows a bright and clear image regardless of exposure.
LCDs are described by their sizeA 3" LCD measures 3 inches diagonally. and by their resolutionA 920K pixel LCD has 920,000 pixels.. Larger sizes give a more comfortable experience but small differences are not easily noticeable. Between a 3" and a 3.2" LCD, usability is the same but not between 2" and 3". A higher resolution means a more crisp display and makes judging focus easier. At least 460K pixels is recommended to show fine details clearly.
DSLRs, which are a type of cameras supporting interchangeable lenses and known for their high image quality, are intended to be used through their optical-viewfinder (OVF). Recent models can also preview images on the LCD which is called Live-View. Not all Live-View are equal but, regardless, the performance of DSLRs drops in terms of autofocus speed and sometimes limited functionally when using Live-View.
The viewfinder is the part of the camera used to frame images. This makes it the most used part of any camera and a critical one in terms of user-experience. There are several types of viewfinders. The rear LCD mentioned above can be used as a viewfinder on the majority of digital cameras. On small models, it is very often the only viewfinder available. Plenty of camera have more than one though and some can use an optional detachable viewfinder.
Table of Digital Camera Viewfinders
All non-DSLRs. Most DSLRs with limitations.
On most large ultra-zooms. Built-in on some mirrorless cameras. Optional on many mirrorless cameras.
DSLR cameras.
Some compact cameras.
Even between the same type of viewfinder, there can be significant differences. The size of the optical viewfinder on a DSLR greatly influences how precisely one can judge focus. EVFs have the broadest range of performance from very poor 0.2" ones with 115K pixels to large 0.5" ones with a whopping 2.4 megapixels. The best show an Exposure-Priority view at all times and make the camera completely usable at eye-level.
Digital Camera Types
There are various types of digital cameras as explained in Demystifying Digital Camera Types although, lately, boundaries are blurring. Broadly speaking, the simplest models are called Point & Shoot and give the lowest image quality. They are small and often referred as Compact or Ultra-Compact for pocket-size models.
|Single Lens Reflex
|A Digital SLR is made so that the viewfinder actually looks through the lens of the camera. All current Digital SLRAlso called a DSLR cameras allow their lenses to be changed. Digital SLR cameras are usually sold without lenses. They are known for high image quality and fast performance. These are used by professional photographers for most of their work.
Bridge or Premium cameras give more control than a point-and-shoot while sharing similar technology. Most models therefore offer a step above in image quality but cannot compete with DSLRs. A handful of exceptions exist though.
Mirrorless cameras are the newest type of digital camera. They are designed to offer high quality and flexibility without the bulk of a DSLR. Models differ greatly with some large models offering the same image-quality as DSLRs, small ones with compact-like image-quality and plenty of models in-between. Consult the Mirrorless Camera Guide for details.
No flash
A flash on a digital camera, just like on a film camera, is a small lamp that can add light to close by objects when a picture is taken.
A pop-up flash is normally hidden and pops-up when it is required. A flash is described by the maximum distance of objects it can sufficiently illuminate when the lens is wide-open and when it is completely zoomed-in.
Most digital cameras have a built-in flash. Those that do not, always accept an optional unit. The most common interface for optional units is called the hot-shoe with a few variants, so not all flashes function or even attach to all hot-shoe.
There is little need to worry about flash when comparing digital cameras except for specialized needs such as studio or high-speed photography.
Movie Mode
The vast majority of digital cameras can record short video clips. This can range from a few seconds to minutes or even hours, although European regulations limit this to under 30 minutes per clip. These clips are made by rapidly taking a sequence of images.
The video capability of a digital camera is described by its maximum resolutionThe number of pixels in each image., frame-rateThe number of frames taken each second. and durationThe length of the longest video clip that can be captured without interruption when enough memory is available.. While it is usually the highest resolution video mode which is prominently advertised, some cameras can also record High-Speed, Slow-Motion or Time-Lapse video. High-Speed videos cannot be acheived another way, so if this is important to you, look for that feature explicitly. Keep in mind that resolution drops rapidly as frame-rate goes up, so these videos are of limited use.
|Full 1080p HD Video: 1920 x 1080 resolution or more.
|1080p video is the highest HD resolution and is sometimes referred to as Full HD. It has a resolution of 1920x1080 with a 16:9 wide-screen aspect-ratio. Frame rates vary between 24 and 60 FPS with 30 being the most common. Digital cameras with CMOS sensors almost always do 1080p.
|720p HD Video: 1280 x 720 resolution or more but less than 1920 x 1080.
|720p is still HD but with a lower resolution of 1280x720 with a 16:9 wide-screen aspect-ratio. Digital cameras that do 720p and slightly higher, without reaching 1080p, are also labelled with this icon. A frame-rate between 24 and 60 FPS is very common for 720p with 15 or 120 FPS sometimes available.
|VGA Video: 640 x 480 or more but less than 1280 x 720.
|VGA video has a resolution of 640x480 or 848x480 for wide-screen aspect-ratio. This is the standard for older cameras but most cameras do at least 720p now. CCD sensors which are presently slower than CMOS sensors, rarely do more than 720p.
Video capabilities are relatively new among DSLRs, yet their video quality is excellent. The shallow depth-of-field provided by DSLRs makes video feel more cinema-like. They can also film in very low-light compared to smaller cameras. On the flip-side, DSLR are much more sensitive to focus precision, so produce out-of-focus videos most more frequently than cameras with smaller sensors when focus is not perfect.
There are more camera basics to learn for people looking for something beyond a point-and-shoot. Proceed to More Camera Basics if that is the case for you or learn how to choose between digital cameras in step 2 of this digital camera buying guide: Choosing Basics.
New Cameras & Lenses
Sony Alpha A7 II24 Megapixels Mirrorless (SLD)
Sony E Lens Mount
Built-in Stabilization
Canon EF 100-400mm F/4.5-5.6L IS II USMStabilized & Weatherproof
Canon EF Mount Zoom
Pentax HD DA 16-85mm F/3.5-5.6 ED DC WRWeatherproof
Pentax K Mount Zoom
Pentax WG-30w16 Megapixels Fixed Lens
5X Wide Optical Zoom
Waterproof to 12m
Canon EF 400mm F/4 DO IS USM IIStabilized & Weatherproof
Canon EF Mount Prime Lens
Canon EF 24-105mm F/3.5-5.6 IS STMStabilized
Canon EF Mount Zoom
Nikon 1 J4 Review
The smallest Nikon mirrorless packs an 18 MP high-speed CMOS sensor capable of 60 FPS drive and full 1080p HD video at 60 FPS, plus slow-motion video up to 1200 FPS.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-GM1 Review
Uniquely compact mirrorless that features a 16 MP LiveMOS Four-Thirds sensor with ISO 125-25600 range, 1/16000s-60s, 5 FPS drive and full 1080p HD video. Full manual controls and a very complete feature-set.
Fuji X30 Review
Premium compact with a bright 28-112mm F/2-2.8 mechanical-zoom lens and a 12 MP 2/3" X-Trans CMOS II sensor with built-in Phase-Detect AF. Now offers a large 0.65X magnification 2.8 MP 100% coverage EVF with Eye-Start sensor. Dual control-dials and full 1080p HD @ 60 FPS.
Expert Shield Screen Protector Review
Expert Shield Screen Protectors offer scratch protection with a crystal clear covering that uses no adhesive.
Canon EOS Rebel T5 Review
Entry-level DSLR with 18 MP, 9-Point Phase-Detect AF, 3 FPS drive and full 1080p HD video in a compact body. The lowest-cost Canon DSLR yet.
Nikon D810 Review
Professional DSLR with anti-alias-filter-free 36 MP CMOS sensor. Ultra-low ISO 32 to 51200. 5 FPS and 1080p @ 60 FPS. Large 0.7X magnification 100% coverage OVF. All new processing-pipeline and Highlight-Weighed metering.
Fuji X-T1 Photographer Experience
Photographer Experience report on using the Fuji X-T1 along with the Fujinon XF18-135mm F/3.5-5.6R LM OIS WR and Fujinon XF10-24mm F/4R OIS lenses.
Olympus Stylus 1 Review
Premium compact with bright F/2.8 constant aperture stabilized 10.7X wide-angle optical zoom lens. Full manual-controls with dual control-dials, plus a huge 1.15X EVF with 1.4 MP and an Eye-Start sensor. 3-Stop ND-Filter and WiFi built-in.
Canon Rebel SL1 Review
The smallest DSLR yet packs a 18 megapixels APS-C CMOS sensor with hybrid Phase-Detect and Contrast-Detect AF. Captures images at 4 FPS and 1080p HD video.
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2014 Review
The lightest 14" ultra-book features a high-resolution 2560x1440 QHD non-glare display in a carbon-fiber body with illuminated and spill-proof keyboard. WiFi, WiDi, 4G and Gigabit Ethernet all in one sleek design.
Neocamera Blog is a medium for expressing ideas related to digital cameras and photography. Read about digital cameras in the context of technology, media, art and the world. Latest posts links:


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How it helps
Honey coats and soothes the throat and helps tame a cough.
In a study conducted by Pennsylvania State University's College of Medicine, parents of 105 children ages 2 to 18 rated honey helpful and better than cough syrup for treating children's nighttime coughs.
What you need
Honey, available at any grocery store.
Honey often gets hard at room temperature. To soften it, spoon some into a heat-proof container and warm it briefly in a microwave or boil some water and then set the container in the very hot water for five or ten minutes.
Your child must be at least a year old to try this remedy.
How to use it
Give her 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of honey.
Some people mix their honey with hot water and add a squeeze of lemon, which provides a little vitamin C along with the soothing honey.
Because honey is a sticky sweet, it's important for you or your child to brush her teeth after she takes it, especially if you give it to her at bedtime.
Don't give honey to a child before her first birthday. It can cause a rare and sometimes fatal illness called infant botulism. Find out more.
How it helps
Clearing the nose of mucus helps your child breathe and sleep more easily and generally makes him feel more comfortable. And he'll be nicer to look at, too!
What you need
A container of soft tissues.
How to do it
Many kids don't master this skill until after age 4, but some are game by age 2.
Tips for teaching nose blowing:
If your child's nose is sore from all the sniffling and blowing, you can rub a little petroleum jelly or other child-safe ointment around his nostrils.
Find out more about when your child will be old enough to blow his own nose and how to teach him.


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CRAFTSBURY – The Craftsbury Academy Lady Chargers suffered a heartbreaking overtime loss against Canaan Memorial High School. After leading 1-0 at the half thanks to an Olivia Jones goal, the game was a see-saw affair moving forward. Shortly after Canaan tied the game at 1, Melanie Sergiev put the Chargers on top once again, 2-1. Canaan High continued to fight and knotted the game at 2-2 with just over 20 minutes remaining.
JERICHO– The North Country Boys soccer team had a tough go of it on Tuesday when thy fell to the Mount Mansfield Cougars 2-0 on the road.
The Falcons battled hard for the the first 65 minutes before things came undone in the final fifteen minutes.
An intentional handball inside the box lead to one of the Cougar goals, as Cody Simoneau got his hand on the ball. The call usually results in an automatic red card and an ejection for the remainder of the game, and it did.
For Chris Bronson.
That would be lucky break number one for Simoneau.
ORLEANS– The winds blew cold and hard at Ranger field on Wednesday as the Hazen girls soccer team came in and completed the season series sweep with a 2-1 win over Lake Region.
"We played great the last twenty minutes. If we can learn to play that way all the time we would be a much better team," said Coach Brad Urie, "They are a young team and I don't think they understand the type of intensity you have to bring to the field."
NEWPORT, VT - When you're trying to make your food dollars go further, a few tips can help. An online search will come up with the following list or parts of this list, but experience is the key factor.
To learn how to shop smart, you have to take the time to educate yourself on budgets, nutrition, food costs and cooking. Overall, the more you purchase local, unprocessed foods and cook them at home, the healthier and cheaper your meals will be.
IRASBURG - It wasn't the controversy, the lawsuit, the political heat or the publicity that lead to Randy Wells resigning from the Irasburg Select Board Monday night, although any of those things could have had that result.
Instead, it was a simple matter of residence.
Wells has moved to Newport.
Wells said Tuesday that three people are vying for his seat: Robin Kaye, Brent Shafer and Paul Turner. His replacement will be selected by the board, he believes, in two weeks, at the next board meeting. If the board can't agree, Wells said the matter may go to a public vote.
NEWPORT CITY – On Friday, the sounds of cheers and laughter rose from the North Country Union High School gymnasium and field as dozens of students from all of the sending schools cheered each other on during the 16th annual Fitness Day.
Fitness Day provides an opportunity for some fifth through eighth grade students to spend the day at North Country and participate in fitness activities and games.
NEWPORT CITY – Saturday, Nov. 12, promises to be an exciting evening as the Court Jesters take on local law enforcement officers at North Country Union High School. The basketball game will start at 7 p.m.Â
According to their website, the Court Jesters are a group of highly talented former college and professional basketball players with great showmanship.Â
NEWPORT CITY – On Monday evening, the Newport City Council came under fire from East Main Street business owners who were upset the city closed the street for much of last week. The work entailed working on and updating the sewer system. The city plans to pave the street later this week.
Ken Stocker from the Brown Cow Restaurant said business owners are upset the city didn't notify them about the closure. He said there had to be some forethought because the city put up stenciled signs that read the street was open to East Main Auto and Lapierre's Decorating Center.
NEWPORT–The rains that had cleared early Tuesday afternoon came back out and helped to dampen spirits as the North Country field hockey team fell to visiting St. Johnsbury 1-0.
The Falcons played well in the match, and Coach Bouchard was pleased to see strong efforts by her girls in back-to-back contests.
"I think they played a great game. I think they had the momentum of the Stowe game and I think it was still with them."
The first half was a very even affair with both sides getting an equal amount of chances.


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For those who are not…Continue
Started this discussion. Last reply by Moderating Staff May 16, 2012.
Residents used to boast they had one of the healthiest rivers in their region, because there were no factories along its…Continue
Posted on July 26, 2014 at 11:00am — 1 Comment
© Photo: RIA Novosti/Aleksandr Kondratu
Posted on July 17, 2014 at 11:23am — 3 Comments
As news of the approaching announcement of the existence of Planet X and the upcoming pole shift reaches more and more people, signs emerge from time to time that these people are taking the message very, very seriously.
Most often, those that hear of this are the rich, who hear the gossip of…Continue
Posted on July 9, 2014 at 11:00am


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Herbed Dinner Roll Muffins
Why settle for refrigerated rolls when it's so easy to make your own? These cheese-topped bites baked in muffin cups are best served warm. —Harrison Carpenter, Longmont, Colorado
8 Servings
Prep/Total Time: 30 min.
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
4-1/2 teaspoons herbes de Provence
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup buttermilk
1 tablespoon butter, melted
1/2 cup grated Romano cheese
In a large bowl, combine the flour, herbs de Provence, baking powder
and salt. In another bowl, combine the eggs, buttermilk, and butter.
Stir into dry ingredients just until moistened.
Fill greased muffin cups half full. Sprinkle with cheese. Bake at
400° for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in muffin
comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan to a
wire rack. Serve warm. Yield: 8 rolls.
Nutritional Facts:
1 roll equals 161 calories, 5 g fat (3 g saturated fat), 65 mg cholesterol, 436 mg sodium, 20 g carbohydrate, 1 g fiber, 8 g protein.
© Taste of Home 2014


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Trekking the Ridges and Summits of Bulgaria
Bulgaria, Trek & Walk, 8 days - from £595 (land only) - from €745 (land only) - from $1,040 (land only)
A KE Classic
Pioneered by ourselves 10 years ago and still a KE favourite - the Ridges and Summits of Bulgaria walking holiday has all the ingredients of a classic trek: summits, airy ridges, wild views and fantastic mountain days.
- Walking holiday in the Rila and Pirin mountains of Bulgaria
- Climb Vihran, Kotelo and Musala - the highest peak in the Balkans
- Dramatic walking on the spectacular Marble Ridge
- Overnight trek via the Pirin Ridges to the atmospheric Dark Lake
- Wander through Sofia and visit UNESCO-listed Rila Monastery
A wild mountain walking holiday in the Rila and Pirin mountains of Bulgaria. Lying at the cusp of Europe and Asia Minor, Bulgaria has a mix of Greek and Ottoman cultural influences and vast tracts of dramatic mountain scenery. Our exploration of this fascinating country manages to combine its finest trekking with the very best of local hospitality. Following an ascent of the country's highest peak, Mount Musala (2925m), we traverse the extensive Rila Mountains and pay a visit to theornate Rila Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Following the main ridge of the Central Rila Mountains we bag the peaks named Vapa (2532m) and Chemerna (2511m). Then, after a short transfer and a cable car up to the Bezbog Hut, we begin our exploration of the Pirin Range, following ridge-top paths and traversing alpine meadows to the shores of the atmospheric 'Dark Lake'. Our overnight stay here, in a remote mountain refuge, surrounded by stunning rocky peaks, is an unforgettable highlight of the trip. The climax of this excellent adventure holiday is our trek to the imposing peaks of Vihren (2917m) and Kotelo (2911m), by way of the spectacular Marble Ridge.
Is this holiday for you?
This is a real mountain journey with significant amounts of ascent and descent on most days. The trails are predominantly good paths but sections of stony ground and boulders will be encountered. Other than the Marble Ridge (which is optional) there is very little exposure on either the ridges or summits and any exposed sections are cable protected. For the Marble Ridge, via ferrata harnesses are provided for extra security. As with any mountain area the weather can be unpredictable but we would anticipate good conditions for each of our scheduled departures. You will walk for an average of 6 to 10 hours each day, with some significant climbs and descents. However by using a support vehicle and with careful itinerary design, there is the option to take one or more "rest" days during the week. This walking and trekking holiday is suitable for regular, experienced hillwalkers, looking for an excellent week's mountain walking in a largely undiscovered part of the world.
You may also be interested in...
High Tatras Trekking - The Carpathian Mountains - Poland, Trek & Walk 8 days
Across the Julian Alps to Triglav - Slovenia, Trek & Walk 8 days
Transylvania Traverse - Trekking in Romania - Romania, Trek & Walk 8 days


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Roddy Scott, 31, a British freelance cameraman working for Britain's Frontline television news agency, was killed in the Russian republic of Ingushetia. Russian soldiers found his body in Ingushetia's Galashki Region, near the border with Chechnya, following clashes between Russian forces and a group of Chechen fighters.
Scott had accompanied the Chechens as they crossed from Georgia into Russia, United Press International reported.
September 26, 2002, in Galashki Region, Ingushetia, Russia
Medium: Television
Job: Broadcast Reporter, Camera Operator
Beats Covered: War
Gender: Male
Local or Foreign: Foreign
Freelance: Yes
Type of Death: Crossfire/Combat-Related
Suspected Source of Fire: Military Officials
Related Articles:
- In revolt, freelancers establish Frontline Freelance Register, June 12, 2013
- Journalists Killed in Russia 2000-2003, September 24, 2003
- Attacks on the Press 2002: Russia, March 31, 2003
- Cameraman killed during firefight in Ingushetia , September 26, 2002


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Raise your glass to Pink, readers. The singer has finally released a new track!
The first since "Bridge of Light" (off December's Happy Feet Two soundtrack), "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" will be the first single off Pink's upcoming album. It will hit a radio station near you on July 9 and its lyrics include:
"You'll be calling a trick/'Cause you no longer sleep/I'll dress nice, I'll look good/I'll go dancing alone/I will laugh, I'll get drunk/I'll take somebody home."
Give the breakup anthem a listen now and let us know: What do you think?
Pink – "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)"
Read this article:
Pink Releases New Track: Listen Now!