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Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation:
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What Happened in the Tunnel and Other Open American Secrets
A recent cover story in Jet entitled "Is It Still Taboo for Blacks and Whites to Kiss in Movies?" helps me articulate two apparently simple but persistently significant characteristics of this book's subject: its particular forms of cultural familiarity and spectacularity, both of which function (paradoxically) to keep us from thinking about what the filmic representation and repression of interracial desire can mean. The first of these is evidenced by my strong, if unsubstantiated, memory upon discovering the cover at the grocery store of having seen others like it at checkout counters past. That this sense of familiarity is not simply that of an author's with her subject is further evidenced by the most recent waves of films that feature, and loudly contemplate, interracial couples (e.g., Far from Heaven [2002], Monster's Ball [2001], Bulworth [1998], Jackie Brown [1997], Lone Star [1996], One False Move [1992], Zebrahead
[1992], Jungle Fever [1991]). Our cultural familiarity with such representations predates these films and is certainly tied as much to the extensive legal, extralegal, political, economic, and familial histories of "miscegenation" in the United States, as to the extensive history of interracial fantasies throughout American popular culture and its cinema.1 What I am calling cultural familiarity might also be described as a sense of cliché, or "obviousness," that clings to them.2 To say this is to suggest that to the degree such fantasies have become cliché, the ideologies sustained with them remain obstinately obscured.
The simultaneous sense of our collectively knowing and not knowing about this subject is demonstrated by the story that lies behind Jet's inquiring cover. Apropos of checkout stand literature, and of Jet's particular interest in black celebrity, the story effectively consists of a star-oriented list, with pictures, of contemporary black actors who have and have not kissed whites and in which films. The "still" of the title's question is given no historical context; there are none of the expected references to first or forbidden interracial kisses in film and TV history, and scant attention is paid to the politics of the filmic "taboo." The most direct answer to the title ambiguously asserts: "If it's still taboo, they [Laurence Fishburne, Whitney Houston, and Lela Rochon ha]ve all committed the forbidden act."3 Perhaps because the structure of the question wants a "yes" or "no" that is not forthcoming, the most interesting complexities hinted at are not acknowledged or pursued.4
I begin here not because I expect critical analysis in the checkout line but because this example so resonates with the popular screen productions that preoccupy this book; and because, until recently, the academic world, certainly in film studies, has been a good deal like the reader constituted by the article in Jet: we knew such couples signified a lot, we did not take much care to consider exactly what.5
Certainly that state of academic affairs has changed considerably in recent years, as is attested by the growth of scholarship in history, literature, and a range of critical "studies" (e.g., legal, cultural, American) interrogating "border" crossings, breeches of "the color line," and the like.6 Such scholarship, much of which has emerged in the course of this book's writing, signals increasing awareness that representations of interracial desire and sex have much to teach us about the erection and transgression of racial categories. In a short but provocative essay, Nick Browne declared as much about Hollywood film in particular, arguing that "the ideological centerpiece of American popular representation of racial relations" was a certain "constituting prohibition"--"no non-white man can have sanctioned sexual relations with a white woman"--that effectively "constructs parallel racial worlds and puts a boundary between them."7 Interrogating open transgressions of such boundaries via blackface, Michael Rogin proposed in a different vein, borrowing from the lyrics of an Al Jolson song, that the figurative couple "Uncle Sammy and My Mammy" is fundamental to the cultural production of white American identity.8 The project at hand pursues these and related issues that emerge when one recognizes that a whole range of interracial pairs, triangles, and quadrangles have perpetually served as key sites of American cinema's mutual constitution of race and gender, and of continuous, shifting relations among these and other categories of identity and difference.9
The bookend-like "classics" near the historical extremes of this study, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), make it apparent that to imagine an interracial couple in popular American cinema has always meant to imagine identity in ways that put into alignment, and utterly bind together, a series of identity categories.10 Birth begins with highly patriarchal and bourgeois depictions of family and home that are then threatened and restored in explicitly interracial terms that in turn give birth to the white supremacist and decidedly phallic nation finally celebrated. In Guess the alignment moves in the opposite direction. With its "How would you feel if your daughter . . ." premise, the film takes us from the public space of a crowded airport where the young lovers are first spotted to the private, patriarchal space of Tracy and Hepburn's modern mansion and, ultimately, to the titular dinner table of the film's final shot--here figured as the last stand and absolute core of all social relations. In any number of permutations, with an assortment of functions and outcomes, and despite common assumptions that they are simply "about race," Hollywood fantasies of miscegenation thus invariably bind together multiple registers of difference, necessitating interrogation of that very binding despite, and because of, the excesses of cliché that also often accompany this process--excesses that drip and bleed from Guess and Birth, respectively.
While the chapters that follow attempt to map the crowded intersections of difference thus embedded in, and negotiated through, American screen fantasies of miscegenation, I should clarify from the outset the primacy of race and gender for this project.11 For the inextricable join between these categories in popular American cinema is perhaps nowhere more visible than in texts that fantasize interracial desire.12 And here we arrive at the second point I take from Jet's cover story, more specifically from its images, and that is the spectacular quality of my subject.
The cover is filled by four stills of interracial embraces (not kisses) from four contemporary films.13 The story within is also photo-filled, with thirteen more illustrations, nine of which are explicitly intimate. The text asks, without really answering, the title's question. But the sheer volume and repetition of images--mostly close-ups and medium shots of couples holding and touching each other, in compositions that emphatically juxtapose light and dark faces, arms, and hands--insist that even if interracial desire is not categorically taboo (there are seventeen images after all), it is nonetheless a sight to behold.14 Even so, despite all this exposure, the sight of interracial kissing itself is mostly withheld, even in the photos from films that the text reports include it.15 Nevertheless, whatever the identities of individual readers attracted by the cover, and however they might interpret the ambiguous messages about the subject (something "still taboo" for better or worse? a liberating sign of changing times? a titillating transgression?), all are invited by the serial repetition of seventeen photographs to consume it as an immanently visible one.16 Like the publicity still that covers the front of the videotape box for Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, a close-up of interlaced white and black fingers, the details of photography and layout in Jet produce the interracial screen couple as an iconic image that presumes to signify instantly, transparently. In fact, such representational details produce the complex and ambiguous subject as if its meaning were transparently visible.17
What is more, these images produce race and gender as themselves visible categories and insist upon the certainty of each in part by drawing upon the visual codes of the other. The repeated juxtaposition of contrasting skin tones draws attention to skin color in ways that reaffirm the notion that it is a natural, "obvious" signifier of "race."18 And visual codes of heterosexuality and gender also permeate the depictions of bodily posture (the men often hold protectively as the women cuddle under and wrap around them), hair (shortly cropped vs. long and "soft"), and states of dress and undress (floral prints, bridal gowns, plunging necklines; suits, athletic and military garb). In combination these images make especially clear that if the possibility of sexual "mingling" across racial lines always implies the potential dissolution of those "lines" and the categories and social structures they enforce, then such destabilizations of race are partly grounded by the rigid conventions of gender identity and heterosexual romance also on display. Conversely, on the occasions when those conventions seem less absolute (e.g., when couples are dressed or undressed similarly), lighting and casting often produce differences of skin tone and hair as more visible. This kind of interplay, wherein temporary transgression of one register of difference is negotiated or stabilized through the reassertion of another, is a regular feature of interracial screen fantasies, providing unique opportunities to interrogate such simultaneous, but shifting, coproductions.
Two contemporary films explicitly comment on the familiarity and spectacularity of popular fantasies of interracial desire, one largely suggesting and the other all but insisting on their cinematic histories. In Spike Lee's Jungle Fever the camera suddenly aligns itself with an unidentified gaze from an apartment window that (mis)sees a playful lovers' quarrel on the street below as a black man's assault of a white woman; this look of white surveillance quickly results in the black man's harassment and near beating by police. The combination here of the camera's pronounced alignment with an invisible witness (the only such shot in the film), the instantaneous judgment that presumably leads to the phone call to the police, and the police's arrival with blinding lights (and guns) immediately pointed at the accused emphatically places the scene in a history not only of lynching and police brutality but also of vision and visibility. Indeed, the view from the window Lee momentarily forces us to occupy is in part the product of a history of white vision that cannot be read apart from the history of American cinema.19 And insofar as this is the moment that makes Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) turn away from his white lover (Annabella Sciorra), the overwhelming force of that white gaze and the blinding violence it portends are pivotal to the film's final rendering of what the relationship between the black man and the white woman signifies. For this is the encounter that makes Flipper flip back, so to speak, to his black family and neighborhood to purify himself and the young (light-skinned) black prostitute he protectively embraces in the film's final shot.20
In Warren Beatty's Bulworth the spectacular status of a very different interracial couple is also unmistakable, and its familiarity is called out. When a powerful white male senator (Beatty) finally goes public with his desire for a black woman (Halle Berry), a circus of reporters' flashing cameras literally renders their kiss a mass tele-photo event. While the film's politics are debatable, it speaks one cinematic truth for this book in the implied assertion of a knowing bystander, played by Amiri Baraka. Admonishing the gathered spectators who stand agape at the spectacular interracial kiss, he asks, "Why are you looking like you haven't seen this before?!" Reading "this" not simply as the sexual encounter of a white man and a black woman--that most disavowed but institutionally sanctioned miscegenetic encounter in U.S. history--but also as the production of miscegenation fantasies for our viewing pleasure, this book confirms that viewers of American cinema certainly have seen it before, or at least have been sorely tempted, whether or not we remember it. And when cinematic energy has not been expended on showing "this" to us, it has been spent in equally meaningful ways on withholding it from view.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of Hollywood's preoccupation with the subject is the fact that the most long-beloved origin story of classical Hollywood cinema itself depends upon a relentless fantasy of miscegenation. For it is the ostensible fear of black men raping white women that not only sets the narrative of The Birth of a Nation in motion but increasingly fuels much of the cinematic form that caused an earlier generation of film historians to celebrate the film as the "birth" of Hollywood cinema, and to crown its director, D. W. Griffith, as that cinema's honorary father.21 Identifying the desire it strives to eradicate, but upon which it ironically depends, in one of its intertitles the film names miscegenation, like a kind of shadow title, the "blight [of] a nation."
But the mixed origins of American cinema can be traced back further to a host of early short films, beginning at least with Edwin S. Porter's What Happened in the Tunnel (1903). And ongoing Hollywood preoccupation with the subject is evidenced not only by a wide range of films produced in each subsequent decade but also by the industry's explicit prohibition against it for nearly thirty years. With a clause inherited from the guidelines known as the Don'ts and Be Carefuls (1927), the Production Code forbade the depiction of "miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races)" from 1930 to 1956. Interrogating such striking appearances and disappearances, this book attempts to understand miscegenation as variously defined and denied by popular American cinema itself, focusing on fantasies of black and white sexual relations when appropriate but also considering related fantasies of desire between whites and Native Americans, Asians, Mexicans, and a range of typically unspecified islanders. In analyzing such a range, I aim to discern how such fantasies are depicted and modified throughout the larger historical period, and to what ends.
I do not attempt a comprehensive treatment of this history. Rather, I read pivotal clusters of popular films, censorship documents, and related cultural material at a series of punctual moments. In the process, my readings are guided by two primary concerns. The first I have come to think of as the musical chairing of popular Hollywood (and pre-Hollywood) fantasies of miscegenation: the arrangements and rearrangements of players and interracial scenarios that invite us to consider how perpetually shifting and recurrent paradigms are revised and resurrected over time. The second focuses on matters of cinematic form, interrogating how conceptions of gender and race have been mutually produced and negotiated through filmic articulations of vision, visibility, voice, and cinematic space. The ways in which these two conceptual paths repeatedly converge in turn lead me to propose that particular interracial scenarios in particular historical periods reflect not only historically specific ideological concerns but also specific filmic mechanisms for (mutually) constituting race and gender.
A look at What Happened in the Tunnel is instructive here. In this short comedy a white woman and her black maid respond to a white man's persistent flirtations with the white woman (fig. I.1) by trading places with one another as their train passes through a tunnel. When the train emerges into the light, the man who has moved in the dark to kiss the white woman finds himself kissing the black woman instead (fig. I.2). The film ends with the women's laughter as the flustered kisser pretends to read his newspaper (fig. I.3). The first interracial screen kiss is thus staged as a kind of spectacular secret exposed, an "attraction" advertised by the title that dare not name it but sets us up to want to see and know it.22 That we do only fleetingly, that we are denied the critical moment within the tunnel itself and experience more its aftershock than its occurrence (the man pulls away almost as quickly as they come back into the light), further toys with our pleasure in interracial screen fantasies, as Jane Gaines and Sharon Willis have both suggested in different contexts, as one of seeing/not seeing, knowing/not knowing their conditions and implications.23 And for good reason: if we extend our contemplation of the scenario much is exposed, even by this shortest of films.
Most significant, perhaps, is Tunnel's open display, albeit fleeting and significantly qualified, of the very interracial sexual encounter that will be most avidly disavowed for many decades to come, namely, that between a white man and a black woman. For, as we will see, the future suppression of this interracial pair, and thus of the legally sactioned history of sexual exploitation under slavery it might threaten to evoke, combined with its replacement by the far more popular and enduring Jim Crow era fantasy of the black rapist, will profoundly shape and obscure the meaning of "miscegenation" in dominant American cinema, and American culture, for the better part of a century.24 While later chapters will consider how such a profound restructuring of popular memory and fantasy occurred at the movies, here it pays to consider how even this momentary flash of racial-sexual history is filmically negotiated in 1903 before being more forcibly denied.
Lasting no more than a minute all told, several seconds of which feature a black screen, even this very short and relatively simple film foregrounds the routine complexity of interplays between multiple orders of difference in film fantasies of miscegenation, as well as cinema's capacity to position and reposition the spectator in relation thereto. Most obviously, the blackout experienced by the onscreen passengers is also experienced by the film's spectators, a reminder that we, too, are subjected to the machinations of an apparatus that locates us in space, time, circuits of desire and identification, and the looks that enforce and subvert such relations.25 And in this case that positioning has been much debated. Several feminist critics have seized upon Tunnel as evidence of resistance to patriarchy (the women laugh at the man) and/or of its restoration (the women are defined as spectacle, despite and beyond their laughter), often noting the intersection of these with the film's racist humor.26 Jacqueline Stewart reads it also as an example of early cinema's registration of black mobility into formerly "white" spaces in the period and white anxiety about that movement.27 And Jane Gaines has recently prodded us to pay more attention to the importance of sexuality in this film: "There is room here to consider the acceptance or rejection of the heterosexual kiss as a position equal in importance to race or gender. Wanting to be or not wanting to be kissed may override everything else" (90). My contribution to such readings is to insist not only that we need them all but also that if we read Tunnel as negotiating anxieties about the simultaneous instability of multiple orders of difference, we can develop our understanding of how it intricately binds those orders together, negotiating potential breakdowns of one through the strictures of the others.
As its critics have observed, the film's racial joke depends on visual codes that direct the spectator how to read the women as (proper and improper) spectacle.28 It is because the black woman is inscribed as not properly a "woman," as anything but the object of this man's desire, that the racial divide is so rigid in the first place.29 This is enforced even before the joke through the direction of the man's attentions and the representation of the women. The white woman, first centered within the shot as the recipient of the diegetic male look, wears a dark, high-fashion hat and dress with an elaborate collar that frame her face to be seen. The black woman, wearing a mostly white maid's uniform, is obese and very dark. Displayed in this fashion, her facial features almost disappear in the composition, and she is visually marked as "other" than the white man and woman, who are more visible and visually joined.
At the same time as the film's racism thus depends upon conventional terms of sexual difference and heterosexual (male) desire, these women--traveling alone, pulling such a trick, and enjoying their laugh at the man--clearly signify female movement and transgression of male control.30 But, in a reversal of the gesture whereby the film manages racial chaos through conventional orders of gender and sexuality, we can also read the racial joke and its assumptions as the sanction and the limit of the women's transgression. They travel without men, but with an evident racial and class order of mistress and maid that makes them appear as a "proper" female couple. And their switch and laughter can also be read as in part complicit with the assumption that the black woman is not a proper object of desire for a white man.
Hence, in this earliest film fantasy of miscegenation, we find a structure that at once allows for the expression of anxiety about the unstable state of dominant racial and sexual affairs but also offers, in its dovetailing of said affairs, means of negotiating its multiple anxieties. If there is one thing that binds together all American film fantasies of miscegenation, this is it. Throughout this book I aim to interrogate the ways in which race and gender, most vividly, are thus repeatedly defined and redefined through one another in such texts--in a host of different ways, at different moments, in response to a host of particular and ongoing worries and pleasures.
Even this introductory glance at the project's main concerns should make it evident that the racial and sexual logics at work throughout the texts under examination, and already in What Happened in the Tunnel, are not unique to the cinema. Fantasies of miscegenation, and the desires and relations they articulate, have a much longer and wider history than cinema itself. While this study cannot attempt to address all of that history--including extensive rhetorics of miscegenation in the law, literature, science, and so forth--we must keep it in mind in order to discern the particular ways cinema inhabits and shapes that larger cultural landscape.
The complex relations that can obtain between American cinema's investments in miscegenation and those beyond it are suggested in part by the way The Birth of a Nation's title echoes the first antimiscegenation statute in the United States. Passed in 1661 by the Maryland General Assembly, that statute deemed intermarriage between white women and black men "the disgrace of the nation."31 Yet, although this originary law and Griffith's film both imagine sexual union between blacks and whites as tantamount to the ruination "of the nation" itself, the former targeted quite a different relation than those that made it to the screen. While Birth is fixated on a fantasy of newly freed black men chasing upper-class white women in the reconstructed South, the Maryland statute addressed intermarriage between black male slaves and white female servants.32 Indeed, it capitalized on that relation by declaring that a white woman who married a black man "was to serve the master of her husband, and all her children were to become slaves." In other words, as one legal historian explains, "What the Maryland miscegenation statute did . . . was to insure the slaveholders the right to keep in bondage both parties of a miscegenous marriage as well as their children. This property aspect of the Maryland statute quickly spread to the other states. According to some historians it became a practice of plantation owners to encourage their slaves to marry low class white women in the hope of gaining more slaves."33 This juxtaposition of a legal and a filmic treatment begins to demonstrate that even when the rhetoric is similar, the two spheres of discourse can function quite differently. Whereas miscegenation law so often works to protect and fortify white male property, dominant filmic treatments of miscegenation typically work to fortify and protect white male identity.34 And while such projects certainly overlap (the law keeps boundaries of "whiteness" and "maleness" intact, and cinema legitimates systems of material privilege), American cinema's ongoing concern with miscegenation is more squarely devoted to negotiating the psychic colorations, if you will, of identity and desire.
At the same time, without forgetting the very real and often brutal social histories that have given rise to, and resulted from, dominant cultural fantasies of miscegenation, it is nonetheless also relevant that significant portions of that history have also taken place within the field of representation. The rhetoric of miscegenation that sought to legitimate lynching was targeted by Ida B. Wells already in the late nineteenth century as itself a misrepresentation. As Hazel Carby quotes and paraphrases her, Wells argued that "the association between lynching and rape was strictly a contemporary phenomenon there was no historical foundation for that association, since 'the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.'"35
The "bestial" image of black men appears "all at once" when other attempts to justify black disenfranchisement had failed. As Carby vividly writes, "The cry of rape was an extremely effective way to create panic and fear . . . the charge of rape became the excuse for murder" (308). While the reported (real) violence sparked by Hollywood fantasies of miscegenation has fortunately never approximated anything of the catastrophic magnitude of lynching, these texts have nonetheless long fed and solicited anxieties, desires, and beliefs of considerable consequence. This book thus interrogates popular cinema as a unique form of history in its own right, as a record of dominant fantasies consumed in the course of everyday life by whites and people of color alike.36
Focusing on the status of miscegenation fantasies in this project for a moment, a final consideration of those lurking outside the cinema can better attune us to reading the filmic versions in which we will soon enough be immersed. Useful here is Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, a book which "begin[s] . . . an inventory of whiteness as a subjective terrain" by analyzing interviews conducted with thirty white women in the mid-1980s on their attitudes about race.37 From a chapter on these women's ideas about interracial sexual relationships, two interviews are especially relevant here. The first is with a woman given the pseudonym Chris, in her early thirties at the time, speaking of her middle-class upbringing in an all-white community on Long Island:
CHRIS: The Black boys--I was just scared to death of them, figured they wanted to be sexual with me.
In a strikingly conscious manner, Chris openly attributes the "stereotype" of the black rapist to cultural representations, seeming even in her list of sources to conflate those with her "education" proper. Yet as soon as she acknowledges the effect of this representational saturation, she disavows it by projecting the fantasy onto an alleged history of distant "parts of the country . . . the South." Chris's divided belief in the myth of the black rapist--her knowledge of its being a pervasive, influential construction and her disavowal of her own investment in that construction--is indicative, I think, of the wider status of such fantasies in dominant U.S. culture. Even when we as subjects of that culture, especially "we" white subjects, can begin to recognize where they come from, we do not seriously admit the degree to which they have invaded us.
It is this invasion of American subjects by cultural fantasies of miscegenation, and the forms they can take on within and among us, that is this book's deepest concern. Because popular cinema is such a ripe site for analyzing collective belief, it offers an ideal set of texts for such a study. And Frankenberg's interviews with real people not only confirm the power of popular media to disseminate such fantasies but highlight the complex and contradictory ways we can internalize them.
Chris's singling out of To Kill a Mockingbird is particularly suggestive. For the only text she names as a source for her belief in the myth of the black rapist is one whose narrative seeks to expose and critique that myth. Although the visible majority of white townspeople in the novel and the film are quick to believe Mayella Ewell's charge that Tom Robinson raped her, the extended courtroom scenes prove Tom's innocence and go so far as to suggest that Mayella's white father is the true abuser. And yet, defying the logic and purpose of this narrative, Chris remembers the myth and forgets the critique. Certainly Mockingbird gives her the means to do so insofar as the jury convicts Tom despite his innocence, and he is shot to death when he tries to escape. Nevertheless, still striking is the degree to which the accompanying critique of that chain of events disappears from Chris's account of the representational education that taught her "that Black men wanted to rape white women." This suggests that what makes these fantasies is in part their ability to supplant and reconfigure rational logics of classical narrative with the often blatantly fictional and contradictory maneuvers of the psyche and representation.
Such forms of contradiction are further suggested by another of Frankenberg's interviewees, a white woman raised in Alabama in the 1930s:
GINNY: Black people would ride in the back of the bus, had different restrooms, and couldn't eat in the same cafeteria as a white person. When I went into town with my husband to buy my kids some clothes--it's funny, I guess you're raised like this--if you see Black people touch anything, you won't buy it. I don't know why.
Recognizing the contradiction between Ginny's simultaneous insistence on sameness ("they're like me or anyone else") and difference ("I didn't want them to marry into it"), Frankenberg interprets it to mark a "shift [in a racial boundary that nonetheless] remains intact: from a position of full avoidance of shared space, Ginny will now allow Blacks into the house and into the friendship circle, but not into the family and not into the bodies of family members" (96). After examining such overtly sexual anxieties about interracial contact, Frankenberg concludes that the idea of interracial relationships threatens boundaries of race, culture, and, "more than that," the economic hierarchy that depends upon those boundaries (100).
While Ginny's racial-sexual phobias certainly do work to shore up economic hierarchies, in our context the complexity of her utterance begs further analysis. What seems missing is attention to the fact that the stakes of her narrative are not simply cultural and economic but also fantasmatic. The continuing fluctuations of uncertainty and contradiction ("I always--never") seem to mark it strikingly as an eruption of unconscious desire--an eruption that only makes sense if we listen to the contradiction, the mistakes, the certain uncertainty it repeatedly trips over. Because Ginny's text seems to operate more by the illogic of a transcribed dream than by the rules of rational thought, it seems appropriate to dissect and rearrange it to pursue the relations between her segregation memories and interracial phobias.38 For there are distinct echoes between her analysis of shopping and her conception of white woman as sexual commodity: "I didn't want them to marry into it." "If you see Black people touch anything, you won't buy it." Ginny, mother of a white daughter, implicitly links these statements herself when she describes a white woman she knows who married "into the Black" and had a child in that marriage and now "she can't go with a white guy" (96). To marry "into it" is to touch what black people touch and to be touched by "it," to become spoiled goods in a white sexual marketplace.
Yet these echoing details suggest an even greater horror. To marry "into the Black" is to lose that inexplicable distinction ("I don't know why") that kept them at the back of the bus, in different rest rooms and cafeterias. This distinction and the hierarchy it works to maintain seem all the more tenuous when we read the clues in Ginny's speech elsewhere that mark her lower-class background (89, 96). To keep your child from marrying into it, as Frankenberg claims, is to keep the distinction alive and certain. Further, the social and economic reasons underlying racial difference are obscured precisely by being displaced onto an even deeper psychosexual layer of racial beliefs.39 In Ginny's narrative the shift from shopping to marriage facilitates a restructuring of racial knowledge, such that the reason for segregation--the fact that racial difference and separation worked to secure social and economic hierarchies--becomes forgotten and is supplanted by the "self-evident" belief in the miscegenation taboo: she cannot explain why you don't buy what black people touch ("I don't know why"), but she assumes there is no need to explain why you don't want your children to marry into it ("you know what I mean"). As racial ideology is mapped onto the sexual, its "reality" is thus firmly implanted and secured at the level of psychic belief.40 Only by recognizing this kind of displacement of the social apparatus of racism onto the fantasmatic, and the kinds of affective investments in often contradictory and irrational beliefs it facilitates, can we begin to understand how Ginny and the dominant white culture of which she is a part can come to speak and believe such an open contradiction as, in effect, "they're just like me or anyone else, they're human; they're nothing like me, they're not human."41
Without a doubt, Ginny is not alone in having "forgotten" whatever explanations she might have once known about race, segregation, and interracial contact. Indeed, the racial-sexual fantasies and beliefs imparted to her in the South in the 1930s seem quite close to the ones that Chris "studied in school [and out] a lot" on the East Coast in the 1960s. Moreover, I think we have only just begun to understand the degree to which such psychologics structure dominant American fantasies of race and sex. At the very least, these white women's words strikingly illustrate the constancy and strength of dominant miscegenation fantasies, and their dissemination throughout the United States throughout the twentieth century.42 In addition, they would seem to call our attention to the ways in which the social, cultural, and economic hierarchies held in place through the fiction of racial difference are in fact installed in us, produced and reproduced, through sexual fantasy. While Frankenberg's project is a welcome attempt to begin uncovering such relations in the white imagination, it also implicitly reveals the need to pursue that project in the field of representation, a field uniquely devoted to the production of cultural fantasy. For only through such examination can we begin to see, and remember, the meanings behind fantasies of miscegenation that are in many ways still as "obvious" in our national unconscious as in Ginny's. Because of Hollywood's unique contribution to the production of such "obviousnesses"--its powerful mechanisms for inviting spectators to desire, identify, and believe--it is to that cinema that I now turn.
This book is divided into three parts, interrogating dominant American screen fantasies of miscegenation before, during, and after the Production Code's express refusal of them. Chapter 1 considers a variety of short films from 1903 to 1912 that flirt with interracial desire, most of which were directed by D. W. Griffith at Biograph. Proposing that these films mark a transitional phase in the development of classical modes of constructing gender and race, as well as a significant backstory to The Birth of a Nation, I analyze the ways they regularly subject not only women but also men and the spectator to states of intense vulnerability. I then consider how such representations were transformed into the now "classic" spectacles of white female suffering, an investigation that continues in chapter 2. There I begin with the inflamed contemporary rhetoric that surrounded black boxing champion Jack Johnson, arguing that the popular fantasy of a black man beating a white woman was a direct effect of the repression of the fantasy of a black man beating a white man. I demonstrate how this process is cinematically elaborated in Birth to produce a transcendent form of vision for its white male protagonist that is systematically differentiated from forms of white suffering Griffith now confines for the most part to female bodies, and from a form of black male looking he insists is utterly carnal. It is the fusion of these forms, I propose, as well as the familiar ideologies they perpetuate, that gives rise to the film's new "nation," its privileged white subject, and a filmic spectator modeled after him.
Turning in the second part to the Production Code's prohibition, I argue that although Hollywood's was not the only such ban, its forms and effects were considerable and unique: it shaped not only who could be imagined doing what with whom but also how spectators would be cinematically trained to read "race."43 Chapter 3 offers a cultural context for, as well as a history of, the Code's miscegenation clause and selectively surveys the files of the Production Code Administration (PCA) to decipher what the Hollywood censors did with it. Reading their often confused and contradictory interpretations of a seemingly specific ban on "sex relationships between the white and black races," I argue that the PCA was ultimately complicit with the reduction of questions of "race" in U.S. culture to issues of "black" and "white," and that it helped to construct those identities in increasingly visual terms. Chapter 4 expands this argument through case studies of two tremendously popular films from roughly the beginning and near end of the Code's strict ban, Imitation of Life (1934) and Pinky (1949). Reading these extraordinary PCA files and the films that eventually emerged, I argue that with the help of the miscegenation clause classical Hollywood cinema gradually shifts the location of racial meaning from invisible discourses of "blood" and ancestry to visual discourses of skin, color, and cinema itself. And these racial projects, it becomes clear, thoroughly depend upon classical cinematic mechanisms for producing sexual difference as well.
In the last part, chapter 5 considers the surge of miscegenation films in the 1950s, following the dismantling of the Production Code's ban. Interracial tropes examined in earlier periods return with a vengeance in attempts to fortify increasingly beleaguered white male subjects facing increased demands for racial justice and a host of gender pressures. And when old methods repeatedly fail, new and sometimes drastic measures are taken to restore white male privilege and vision. The extremes to which the films go in this period, I argue, reflect both the tremendous strains on, and the stubborn tenacity of, conventional representational systems. In chapter 6 such trends culminate in arguably America's favorite miscegenation film of the late twentieth century, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I probe the high stakes of this popularity by juxtaposing Guess with two other profoundly influential interracial texts of its day, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that put an end to laws prohibiting interracial marriage and Eldridge Cleaver's best-selling Soul on Ice (1968), a book that boldly diagnosed the effects of dominant miscegenation fantasies on the politics and experiences of everyday U.S. life. This triad throws into relief what the popular film could and could not do: it could embrace the transformation of the dominant racial order but only with forceful reassertions of the dominant sexual order; and it could renounce the miscegenation taboo only by updating and reasserting a series of classical Hollywood identities and forms that had long been sustained with it.
By the end of the book it is clear that American cinema has envisioned the very meaning, appearance, and limits of racial and gendered identities in perpetual relation. While the Biograph films openly display masculine failure and suffering, they can only do so against the backdrop of an extremely conservative racial order; and when that order is disturbed in the most popular silent miscegenation film, an emphatically white masculinity emphatically reasserts its authority and privilege. Conversely, Hollywood's codification of "race" through the Production Code utterly depends on the malleability of female bodies and identities. And as psychic and political battlefields shift in the late fifties and sixties, with new spaces opening up to black men--albeit in highly regulated ways--it is masculinity that is protected above all. Understanding this legacy, I hope, puts us in a better position to understand its continued, shifting forms and effects.
File created: 8/7/2007
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text:
The patent, which extends to September 2023, covers the use of inhibitors which block the binding of VEGF-C or VEGF-D to VEGFR-3 for the treatment of cancer. Inhibitors covered include any soluble forms of the VEGFR-3 receptor and any antibodies directed against VEGF-C, VEGF-D or VEGFR-3 which inhibit the binding of VEGF-C or VEGF-D to VEGFR-3.
The corresponding patent applications in Europe and Canada, which contain claims analogous to those granted in the US, have both been allowed as well. The European application will grant European Patent No. 1119371 on November, 24 2010. Canadian Patent No. 2345276 is expected to issue in the first half of 2011.
Circadian already controls worldwide rights to an extensive intellectual property portfolio covering the VEGF-C, VEGF-D and the VEGFR-3 receptor targets. Specifically, Circadian already has a two granted Australian patents in this family, AU 200013121 and AU 200408675, and continues to prosecute the case in Japan. The grant of this family of patents relating to anti-cancer uses provides a strong commercial underpinning to Circadian's development of its proprietary VGX-100, VGX-200 and VGX-300 candidates as well as a major boost to Circadian's already significant intellectual property position in this area of research and development. VGX-100 (a fully human VEGF-C antibody), VGX-200 (a humanised VEGF-D antibody) and VGX-300 (a recombinant VEGFR-3 molecule which works by trapping VEGF-C and VEGF-D in the circulation) are all being developed as cancer therapies. Additionally, Circadian's licensee, Eli Lilly through its subsidiary ImClone Systems, is developing an antibody to VEGFR-3 (IMC-035), also for cancer therapy, which is expected to commence clinical trials in early 2011.
"The development of antibody drugs targeting angiogenic molecules such as VEGF-C or VEGF-D or their receptor VEGFR-3 is widely considered one of the most promising strategies in the pharmaceutical industry," said Circadian CEO, Mr Robert Klupacs. "These newly issued patents extend the life of our considerable estate of intellectual property covering selected VEGF family members to September 2023 in the United States. They provide vital protection for our development programs and represent a major asset which can form the basis of potential commercial and drug development partnerships moving forward."
Company Enquiries:
Robert Klupacs
Managing Director - Circadian
Tel: +61 (0) 3 9826 0399 or
99956525 Media Enquiries – Australia:
Kyahn Williamson
Buchan Consulting
Tel: +61 (0) 3 9866 4722
Media Enquiries – International:
Lauren Glaser
The Trout Group LLC
251 Post Street, Suite 412
San Francisco, CA 94108
Tel +1 215 740 8468
About Circadian Technologies Limited
Circadian (ASX:CIR) is a biologics drug developer focusing on cancer therapies. It controls exclusive worldwide rights to a significant intellectual property portfolio around Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) C and D. The applications for the VEGF technology, which functions in regulating blood and lymphatic vessel growth, are substantial and broad. Circadian's internal product development programs are focussed on novel anti-cancer therapeutics for large unmet needs. Circadian has also licensed rights to some parts of its intellectual property portfolio for the development of other products to ImClone Systems (a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly & Company - NYSE: LLY). ImClone Systems is currently developing an antibody-based drug targeting VEGFR-3 for the treatment of solid tumours.
About Circadian's pipeline of treatments for cancer
The clinical and outstanding commercial success of Avastin, an antibody that blocks the activity of VEGF-A, clinically validated anti-angiogenic drugs as an effective means of inhibiting solid tumour growth. By blocking the interaction of VEGF-A with its receptors, primarily VEGFR-2, the multi-billion dollar cancer therapeutic slows tumour growth by inhibiting blood vessel recruitment into the tumour, effectively starving tumours of essential nutrients and oxygen required for growth. Avastin, which is sold by Genentech, now part of Roche, had U.S. sales in 2009 of US$5.7 billion and worldwide sales in excess of US$8.6 billion. Avastin is approved by the US FDA in the following indications: metastatic colorectal cancer, non-squamous-cell lung cancer, metastatic breast cancer, glioblastoma, metastatic renal cell carcinoma.
The VEGF-C inhibitor, VGX-100, a key therapeutic in Circadian's portfolio, block this alternative stimulator for VEGFR-2. As such, it has the potential to block blood vessel growth in tumours resistant to anti-VEGF-A therapy and, when used in combination with drugs like Avastin, may completely shut down angiogenesis (the growth of blood vessels) mediated by VEGFR-2, resulting in greater clinical efficacy.
VEGF-C along with the molecule VEGF-D. are also the only known proteins to bind and activate VEGFR-3 which drives lymphatic vessel and tumour-associated blood vessel growth. Inhibitors of VEGF-C thus have therapeutic potential to inhibit not only primary tumour growth through their anti-angiogenic activities, but to also inhibit tumour spread or metastasis via the lymphatic vessels - a mechanism of tumour dissemination that is often the deadliest aspect of many tumour types and a mechanism that is not effectively blocked by anti-VEGF-A or anti-VEGFR-2 therapeutics.
Inherent risks of Investment in Biotechnology Companies
There are a number of inherent risks associated with the development of pharmaceutical products to a marketable stage. The lengthy clinical trial process is designed to assess the safety and efficacy of a drug prior to commercialisation and a significant proportion of drugs fail one or both of these criteria. Other risks include uncertainty of patent protection and proprietary rights, whether patent applications and issued patents will offer adequate protection to enable product development, the obtaining of necessary drug regulatory authority approvals and difficulties caused by the rapid advancements in technology. Companies such as Circadian are dependent on the success of their research and development projects and on the ability to attract funding to support these activities. Investment in research and development projects cannot be assessed on the same fundamentals as trading and manufacturing enterprises. Thus investment in companies specialising in drug development must be regarded as highly speculative. Circadian strongly recommends that professional investment advice be sought prior to such investments.
Forward-looking statement
Certain statements in this ASX announcement may contain forward-looking statements regarding Company business and the therapeutic and commercial potential of its technologies and products in development. Any statement describing Company goals, expectations, intentions or beliefs is a forward-looking statement and should be considered an at-risk statement. Such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, particularly those risks or uncertainties inherent in the process of developing technology and in the process of discovering, developing and commercialising drugs that can be proven to be safe and effective for use as human therapeutics, and in the endeavor of building a business around such products and services. Circadian undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Actual results could differ materially from those discussed in this ASX announcement.
Senior Account Executive
Buchan Consulting
Business Strategy | Communication | Public Policy

subset: commoncrawl


text:
3 Extravagant Valentine's Day Gift Ideas
This Valentine's Day, gift your sweetie (and yourself) with these extravagant indulgences.
Double Your Pleasure
A few of our favorite things in one holiday special: Champagne, chocolate, and side-by-side couple's massage and facials.
$300 for 90-minute treatments for two
The Haven Spa in Pleasantville (25 Wheeler Ave 914-923-4516 havenofbriarcliff.com)
Getting Warmer
Luxuriate in a cozy cocoon with the Desert Heat Body Wrap From Pevonia Botanica. The mixture of seaweed and Arizona desert mud hydrates, nourishes, tones, and leaves you in a lovely limp-noodle state. Follow with an aromatherapy, relaxation, deep-tissue, or lavender hot-stone massage.
$125 per each 60-minute treatment
Bellava Spa in Bedford Hills (182 Rte 117 Bypass Rd 914-600-5294 bellavaspa.com)
How amazing does this sound: a 45-minute jasmine body scrub followed by a 30-minute bubble bath and a choice of a 90-minute massage or a 70-minute facial in the VIP suite. Chocolate-covered strawberries and hot jasmine tea are bonus treats. Spa guests also can use the gym, steam room, hot tubs, and relaxation lounge.
$735 per couple
THANN Sanctuary Spa at Castle Hotel & Spa in Tarrytown (800-616-4487; thannsanctuaryspany.com)


text:
Study of SystemCHANGE-HIV
This study has been completed.
Case Western Reserve University
Association of Nurses in AIDS Care
Information provided by (Responsible Party):
Allison Webel, Case Western Reserve University
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
First received: December 8, 2010
Last updated: August 29, 2011
Last verified: August 2011
- Full Text View
- Tabular View
- No Study Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
No Study Results Posted on ClinicalTrials.gov for this Study
|Study Status:
|This study has been completed.
|Study Completion Date:
|June 2011
|Primary Completion Date:
|No date given


text:
Swamp-Root Almanac [1938]
The front cover shows an indigenous village and an indigenous woman wearing a red, blue, and green blanket. The corner reads, "Dream book." Down the left side are twelve round patches of the zodiac. The back has a drawing of the home of Swamp-Root above the dealer's name which reads, "Compliments of Roussin's Drug Store, Cadillac, Mich." A drum, bow, and tomahawk are in the lower right corner. Machine punched hole with a string is in the upper left corner.
Donor: Sliker, Shirley Brocker
Brand Name: Dr. Kilmer Remedies
Publisher: Dr. Kilmer and Co. (Binghampton, N.Y.)
32 p.
21 x 14.3 cm
Language: English
Key Terms:
- Almanacs
- Animals
- Children
- Coupons
- Endorsements
- Farming
- Health
- Native Americans
- Seafoods
- Insects
- Patent Medicines
Copyright: This item is under copyright.
Citation: Swamp-Root Almanac [1938]. The Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker Collection, MSS 314, Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries. Available at http://www.lib.msu.edu/exhibits/sliker/detail.jsp?id=4402


text:
The Note's Must-Reads are a round-up of today's political headlines and stories from ABC News and the top U.S. newspapers. Posted Monday through Friday right here at www.abcnews.com
Compiled by ABC News' Jayce Henderson, Will Cantine and Janine Elliot
UKRAINE Wall Street Journal's James Marson: " East Ukraine Town Digs In for Fight" Coal miner Andrei Sharenko never fired an automatic rifle in his life, he says, until he saw a Ukrainian army column emerging from the woods across the river from his hometown early one morning last week. "We knew we couldn't let them across the bridge and into town. My wife and daughters are here," said Mr. Sharenko, a tough-looking 42-year-old with a buzzcut and scars on his hands from years of toiling underground. LINK
USA Today's Jim Michaels: " Ukraine Ramps Up Offensive Amid Increasing Violence" After months of hesitation, Ukraine is pressing a military offensive against pro-Russian militias operating in the east, intensifying the bloodshed in a risky gambit to quickly crush the revolt. On Thursday, rebels struck back, downing a military helicopter and killing at least 12 people aboard, including a general, outside the city of Slovyansk. LINK
VETERANS AFFAIRS ABC News' Serena Marshall: " Shinseki Meets With Veterans Groups, No Sign of Resigning" One day after the bombshell interim Inspector General report showing "secret waiting lists" as a Phoenix veterans hospital, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki met with leading veteran service organizations today. The embattled secretary, who faces an ever-growing list of lawmakers asking for his resignation, showed no signs he has any plans to leave anytime soon, despite a growing outcry fueled by the report, which showed that as many as 1,700 veterans in need of care were "at risk of being lost or forgotten" by not being placed on the official waiting list. LINK
Wall Street Journal's Ben Kesling and Dion Nissenbaum: " VA's Eric Shinseki Under Fire Amid Scandal" During his 38-year military career, Eric Shinseki recovered from losing half of his right foot to a land mine in Vietnam, went on to be awarded the Bronze Star for valor in combat and became the Army's chief of staff. His latest battle is to stave off bipartisan criticism long enough to rehabilitate the Department of Veterans Affairs after a report Wednesday that swayed many of his former supporters in Congress to begin calling for his resignation. LINK
USA Today's Susan Davis: " Lawmakers to Obama: Shinseki Must Go" Confidence in Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki disintegrated further Thursday on Capitol Hill, where a rising chorus of lawmakers in both parties said he should resign and let new leadership address systemic problems at VA medical centers. The disapproval was most potent in the Senate because the chamber would have to confirm a new secretary if Shinseki resigns. LINK
The New York Times' Jonathan Weisman: " Boehner And Pelosi Resist Cries For Ouster Of Veterans Affairs Chief" As the list of lawmakers calling for the resignation of Eric Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs grew by the hour Thursday, leaders in both parties worked to quiet the politics and find a legislative solution to the crisis of care at veterans' health centers. Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and the minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, both said that replacing Mr. Shinseki would not solve the core issue of unacceptable wait times and secret waiting lists at Department of Veterans Affairs health centers around the country. LINK
The Washington Post's Greg Jaffe and Ed O'Keefe: " Call For VA Secretary Eric Shinseki To Resign Intensify Following Watchdog Report" Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki made an impassioned case Thursday to Democratic lawmakers and veterans groups that he can repair the Department of Veterans Affairs, even as calls for his resignation mounted and support from the White House appeared to wane. The White House skirted questions about whether President Obama still has confidence in Shinseki's ability to lead the department and a spokesman said the president is withholding judgment about who is responsible for the department's failings until he reviews pending investigations of what went wrong. LINK
Politico's Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan: " GOP Leaders' VA Strategy: Blame Obama" John Boehner and Eric Cantor don't want to make the Veterans Affairs scandal about Eric Shinseki. They want to make Barack Obama responsible. The "secret wait lists," supposedly subpar medical treatment and failure to fix a bulky VA bureaucracy, they argue, are just the latest examples that the president is asleep at the switch and disinterested - or unable - to manage the federal government. LINK
Bloomberg's Michael C. Bender: " More Lawmakers Urge Shinseki To Resign Over Veteran Care" Pressure grew for U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign as an internal report found "systemic" scheduling problems that have stymied health care for veterans, and lawmakers held a rare nighttime hearing to vent their frustration with the agency. "Where in the world is the urgency" to fix the deficiencies? U.S. Representative Jackie Walorski, an Indiana Republican, asked a trio of VA officials at a session that lasted four hours and ended shortly before midnight in Washington. "I have more questions tonight than I did when I walked in here." LINK
GUN CHECKS The Hill's Cristina Marcos: " House takes action on gun checks" The House on Thursday approved a funding increase for the national background check system in response to last week's mass shooting in Santa Barbara, Calif. Adopted 260-145, the amendment to a 2015 appropriations bill provides an additional $19.5 million in grant funding for the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is intended to prevent the sale of guns to criminals and the mentally ill. LINK
CINDY McCAIN & GWYNETH PALTROW The Los Angeles Times' Maeve Reston: " Cindy McCain calls Gwyneth Paltrow's war comments ignorant, selfish" When Gwyneth Paltrow stirred controversy this week by comparing her daily struggles with Internet trolls to the "dehumanizing" experience of soldiers at war, she messed with the wrong woman: Cindy McCain.Hearing about Paltrow's comments, the wife of Arizona Sen. John McCain took to Twitter, calling the actress "a joke" and stating that "My 2 sons serving in the military should talk to her." LINK
HILLARY CLINTON Boston Globe's Matt Viser: " Political Passions Stir as Hillary Clinton Prepares Book Release" Hillary Rodham Clinton is in a purple suit, sitting in a living room, pink flowers just visible in the background, speaking with passion to the camera about her views of the world and what can be done to fight the "cancer of inequality" in the United States. "It doesn't happen by accident, or wishing for it, or engaging in ideological and rhetorical battles," she says in a new video. "It happens because people come together." LINK
FORMER Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG The New York Daily News' Annie Karni: " Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg slams intolerance by liberals on college campuses during fiery Harvard graduation address" In a fiery address to Harvard graduates, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg lashed out Thursday against intolerance by liberals on college campuses - citing how Brown University treated his police commissioner last fall. Delivering the main speech at Harvard's 363rd commencement in Cambridge, Mass., Bloomberg complained that campuses have become citidels of "modern . . . McCarthyism" where conservative views are too often shunned and shouted down. LINK
DRONES The Washington Times' Guy Taylor: " Obama's Afghanistan pullout may end domination of drones" President Obama's call to cut the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan to 5,000 troops in 18 months will end an era of American drone superiority over the region and jeopardize hard-fought gains against al Qaeda just as the terrorist movement's original core is rising again, former senior defense officials and national security sources say. LINK
ABC NEWS VIDEO " Shinseki Meets With Veteran Groups, Shows No Sign of Resigning" LINK " White House Puts Spotlight on Sports-Related Concussions" LINK
BOOKMARKS The Note: LINK ABC News Politics: LINK George Stephanopoulos' Blog: LINK ABC News on Twitter: @ThisWeekABC | @ABCPolitics ABC News Mobile: LINK ABC News Apps: LINK ABC News YouTube: LINK


text:
Sounds dull, doesn't it? But if new reports about its growth are anything to go by then it could revolutionise how we buy games, not to mention the kind of games we consume.
Downloading games is hardly anything new, especially to PC gamers, but now all three major platform holders are investing heavily into online gaming portals, is the traditional boxed product under threat?
"My personal opinion is that retail will die," says Patrick Buckland, CEO of Stainless Games, the company that brought Crystal Quest and Novadrome to Xbox Live Arcade. "In 20 years time consumers will laugh at the idea of going into a shop. It is a more efficient way of getting content to consumers."
While such predictions are certainly not held by all sectors of the industry, forecasts do suggest that digital downloads will become the predominant channel of entertainment consumption in the future.
Indeed, in a 2005 report, market analysis group ScreenDigest predicted that the European market for legitimate movie downloads is poised to be worth more than £60m a year by 2010 in the UK and €250m across Europe as a whole. Significantly, it now believes these forecasts underestimated the growth of the sector.
To date, two factors have held back the explosion of digital distribution: reliability and speed. But a recently published YouGov report suggests that as much as 65 per cent of respondents would be interested in downloading files if these issues were addressed. The implication is clear: if speed and reliability improve, the expansion of e-distribution in gaming could turn from an increasing flow to a cascade.
"We now have 60,000 users a month and are currently experiencing a 100 per cent year-on-year growth," states Paul Howes, business manager at games on demand portal Metaboli. "Consumers are becoming ever more comfortable with downloading games and because of our streaming technology they can start playing the product after ten per cent of the file size has been downloaded. That's ten to 15 minutes on a decent 2MB broadband connection."
Other technology groups believe there's even more scope for improvement. CacheLogic has developed an innovative 'asset delivery framework' it believes will change the economic rules of online content delivery forever.
"Our custom-built CDN is different to the competition's," states David Barret, CacheLogic's marketing and communications manager. "It's faster, more robust and with a flexible service capacity that can reduce distribution costs by as much as 50 per cent.
"It's also aimed at all content owners who are looking to distribute their material over the internet – gaming and software companies, film and television program makers, studios, broadcasters and retailers."
But while there's a level of performance willy-waving going on among those set to benefit most from the proliferation of e-distribution, one thing's for sure: it's going to affect publishers, developers, retailers and ultimately the consumer in radically different ways. To ignore its impact would be folly; the equivalent of those who initially thought the internet was a bit of a fad.
But is there really a comparison? "I believe e-distribution will change the industry, but the analogy I would draw is the impact iTunes and the iPod has had on the music industry," points out Karl Jeffrey CEO of Climax. "It happened to that industry before ours only because the memory and bandwidth requirements for music are much smaller. As soon as the networks and storage are there to deliver premium games on demand why would anyone buy a boxed game?"
Unsurprisingly this is not a view shared by retailers. "Commentators have been writing off High Street retail for some time now and yet it shows a remarkable resilience," responds Gennaro Castaldo, head of PR at HMV.
"They have overlooked a key factor: while many of us increasingly appreciate the benefits and versatility of buying online or downloading, we also love to shop on the High Street. It remains a major leisure activity, and we like the idea of owning something tangible.
"That doesn't mean that retailers should be complacent, however, and we're currently trialling and evolving a 'store-of-the-future' format that will look to create a vibrant and stimulating shopping environment for our customers, that will cater to their changing lifestyle aspirations."
It's a plucky defence, but according to ScreenDigest, e-distribution is likely to see a shift in value chain power from retail to console platform holder.
Emerging portals like PlayStation Home, Xbox Live Marketplace and Nintendo's Virtual Console, along with other sites like Virgin's Awomo (A World of My Own) should not be underestimated. The ability for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to have direct relationships with their consumers can only strengthen their power, leading to lower game prices, less opportunities for pre-owned games, community and brand loyalty and the chance to build their own role as retailers, at least potentially.
Valve already knows about such advantages, having delivered games via Steam since 2002. "We view Steam as something that makes our games better, regardless of the channel through which they are purchased," comments Valve's marketing manager, Doug Lombardi. "For example, over five million Half-Life 2 retail customers around the world have seen HL2 Deathmatch and Lost Coast appear in their Steam menu of available games and been exposed to all the Free Weekends on Steam."
One fly in this ointment however is that retailers will still hold power in terms of selling consoles on the High Street. If the major platform holders increasingly miss out the middleman and deliver games direct to consumers, retailers could refuse to shift consoles. It's an unlikely scenario but does highlight the fact that partnerships will still be important going forward.
The truth is that no-one can be certain how e-distribution is going to affect each sector of the industry. In particular many publishers contacted were unwilling to outline their strategy for embracing e-distribution.
Some are watching and waiting, while others seem happy with existing relationships with sites such as Metaboli and JumboPlay. Indeed one prominent CEO of a UK developer told us that he couldn't go on record because publishers simply won't be so powerful in the future and this would undermine existing business relationships.
But there are exceptions. EA recently reported digital revenues of $127m, a 47 per cent year-on-year rise. Indeed, EA has been offering downloadable games online since 2005. And with companies like Disney, Codemasters and Ubisoft investing heavily in the online sector, direct sales would seem a logical next step.
For developers the growth of e-distribution couldn't be more intoxicating, encouraging innovation and new opportunities. "There are two main benefits for us," states Matt Edmunds, COO of Stainless Games.
"Firstly, it enables us virtually to self-publish titles. Secondly, it's been a real breath of fresh air with e-distribution opening up a whole new market for casual gaming. This is only just starting to be recognised by the mainstream publishers. In terms of the games themselves, in the short-to-medium term expect to see more episodic titles, more customisation via downloads and other features which exploit incremental or micro-payments."
But ultimately the consumer will decide whether games on demand will flourish at the expense of traditional boxed product. Adrian Pilkington, Commercial Director of Sky Games, already sees a shift in attitude.
"One thing that always strikes me from research is just how few games the average gamer buys each year. If digital distribution can increase the range and variety of games that gamers are interested in that's a good thing. If we can present games in a format and at a price that suits the customer, the natural assumption will be that they would buy more games."
Significantly, there are no hard numbers to predict just how big e-distribution will be in five years time, never mind 15. And while views about this sector differ wildly depending on the interests at stake, there's a general sense that a power struggle is going to emerge over who controls and takes advantage of the space.
So should retailers quake in the face of this new threat? CacheLogic's David Barrett puts it most succinctly. "I like to squeeze the avocados. Sure, I can purchase my goods online, but I still like to see the products. Predictions of retail's demise are greatly exaggerated."


text:
Movies by actor:
Grown Ups 2
After moving his family back to his hometown to be with his friends and their kids, Lenny (Adam Sandler), finds out that between old bullies, new bullies, schizo bus drivers, drunk cops on skis, and 400 costumed party crashers sometimes crazy follows you.
Premiere: August 9, 2013
Duration: 1hr. 41min.
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Gloria the Hippo, and Melman the Giraffe are still fighting to get home to their beloved Big Apple and of course, King Julien, Maurice and the Penguins are all along for the comedic adventure. Their journey takes them through Europe where they find the perfect cover: a traveling circus, which they reinvent – Madagascar style.
Premiere: October 19, 2012
Duration: 1hr. 33min.
2 Days In New York
Marion (Delpy) has broken up with Jack (Two Days in Paris) and now lives in New York with their child. But when her family decides to come visit her, she's unaware that the different cultural background held by her new American boyfriend Mingus (Rock), her eccentric father, and her sister Rose who decided to bring her ex-boyfriend along for the trip, added to her upcoming photo exhibition, will make up for an explosive mix.
Premiere: May 18, 2012
Duration: 1hr. 31min.
Grown Ups
Grown Ups, starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and David Spade, is a comedy about five friends and former teammates who reunite years later to honor the passing of their childhood basketball coach. With their wives (Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, Maya Rudolph) and kids in tow, they spend the Fourth of July holiday weekend together at the lake house where they celebrated their championship years earlier. Picking up where they left off, they discover why growing older does...
Premiere: August 27, 2010
Duration: 1hr. 35min.
Death At A Funeral
Directed by Neil LaBute, Death at a Funeral is a hilarious day in the life of an American family come together to put a beloved husband and father to rest. As mourners gather at the family home, shocking revelations, festering resentments, ugly threats, blackmail and a misdirected corpse unleash lethal and riotous mayhem.
Premiere: June 2, 2010
Duration: 1hr. 30min.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
All the loveable characters are back — Alex the lion, Marty the zebra, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the hippo, King Julien, Maurice and the penguins — in "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa." Left marooned on the distant shores of Madagascar, the New Yorkers have hatched a plan so crazy it just might work. With military precision, the penguins have repaired an old crashed plane – sort of. Once aloft, this unlikely crew stays airborne just long enough to make it to the wildest place of all – the v...
Premiere: December 5, 2008
Duration: 1hr. 30min.


text:
Thomasville, GA- A loud music complaint over the weekend ultimately led to a drug bust.
Angela Perez and Mitchell Hayes, both 20 years old, are charged with possession of cocaine, possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, and producing marijuana.
Nicholas Vance is also charged with possession of cocaine.
Around 2:30 Saturday morning Thomasville police arrived at the Quial Rise Apartment complex. They'd received complaints of a party going on.
After smelling marijuana coming from the apartment, narcotics agents got a search warrant.
Kevin Lee, the Thomas County/Thomasville Narcotics/Vice Commander said agents found three or four different quantities of marijuana. They also found a small bag of powdered cocaine and approximately a two foot marijuana plant growing.
Agents also seized an AR-15 assault rifle from the apartment.
Perez and Hayes were also charged with possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime.


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International Accountability for CIA's "Torture Flights"
Starting next Monday, July 20, a five-member United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries will conduct a two-week examination of this country's use of private military and security contractors (PMSCs). Two members of the Working Group will meet with officials from the Obama administration, members of Congress, nongovernmental organizations (like the ACLU) and PMSCs. This official visit comes at the invitation of the U.S. government. From a statement released today:
The Working Group will in particular focus on questions of transparency and accountability of PMSCs and their personnel, instances and circumstances which may give rise to impunity of contractors for violations of human rights as well as guarantees for ensuring that victims of violations have access to effective remedies. It will also look into the general trend towards the privatization of war and its consequences.
Among those consequences is "extraordinary rendition"— the kidnapping and forced removal of individuals to places known to torture. The ACLU represents a group of such rendition victims in a lawsuit against a particular PMSC: Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan. In our lawsuit, we charge that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the rendition of our plaintiffs by providing flight planning and logistical support to the CIA to kidnap our plaintiffs to be detained and tortured in secret prisons overseas.
Today's New York Times editorialized about accountability for rendition, torture and other Bush-era war crimes:
Once the Bush team got into the habit of breaking the law, it became their operating procedure that any means are justified: ordering the nation's intelligence agents to torture prisoners; sending innocents to be tortured in foreign countries; creating secret prisons where detainees were held illegally without charge.
Americans still don't have the full story.
[…]President Obama has refused to open a full investigation of the many laws that were evaded, twisted or broken — pointlessly and destructively — under Mr. Bush. Mr. Obama should change his mind. A full accounting is the only way to ensure these abuses never happen again.
The Working Group's examination is a welcomed first step in shedding some light on the war crimes of the Bush administration. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate these crimes. While the U.N. takes action on the international stage, there isn't a more critical time to have your voice heard here at home. Send Attorney General Holder evidence of torture, and demand accountability.
Meet the new boss,same as the old boss.
- July 18, 2009
fuck aclu
- July 19, 2009
fuck you aclu or ac-fu that is the name of of org
- July 19, 2009
non profit my ass
- July 19, 2009
fuuuuuuuuucccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkk you
- July 19, 2009
assholes always backing up terrorist may be one day you will you will see first hand cock suckers
- July 19, 2009
My my the right wingers are so articulate today.
- July 20, 2009
Personally don't like that kind of language. You can't get your point across. However, we do not need a special prosecutor, I believe a special prosecutor will only be used as a diversion for this Horrible Horrible Health Care Program that is being rammed down our throats.
The new administration will not be doing anything about accountability. They are to busy taxing us to death and trying to push these socialist programs. I don't know about you but I am more concerned about this new administration then about the above story. If they keep going we will not even have this forum to voice our opinions.
In a war lots of people guilty or innocent are hurt. It would be nice if none of that happened. But...
- July 20, 2009
Michael Tuck
Paen, and so inventive, too. :)
Stephen Grey covered this to an extent in his 2007 book "Ghost Plane," but there's a lot more info out now than he had access to. We're covering it at the History Commons: http://www.historycommons.org . If you're interested in the subject, and your writing skills are perhaps superior to those of Duraid's, you might consider helping us cover this issue. We'd love to have you.
- July 20, 2009
Russell Beck
I keep waiting for the gov. to acknowlege that we have a police brutality problem. Perhaps Pres. Obama just did that with this Guantanamo issue. I just cannot understand how the police expect us to be proud americans when they constantly honer our war vet's by beating up on their kids. How many generations is it going to take before we evolve to the next stage of civilization.
- July 24, 2009


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Merit pay discussion on its way back to Florida schools
Now that Florida has won its share of Race to the Top money, the return of the effort to tie teacher evaluations and pay to student achievement is inevitable.
Florida education commissioner Eric J. Smith says the state doesn't need a change in law to make it happen. Current statute allows for the connection -- even calls for it -- and agreements at the bargaining table would take care of the RTTT requirement.
But that doesn't mean lawmakers won't take another stab at Senate Bill 6.
"Do we have to pass the exact same bill? No," House Education Policy Council chairman Will Weatherford told the Gradebook. "But we have to find a way to reward great teachers."
Key to success will be a "better job working with the teachers and receiving their input," he said. To that end, Weatherford and other key lawmakers head to Leesburg this afternoon for a forum about merit pay with Lake and Sumter teachers, sponsored by state Rep. Marlene O'Toole.
"This is an important opportunity to take the discussion of performance pay directly to those who will be affected by policy changes," O'Toole wrote in a letter inviting House Pre-K-12 committee chairman John Legg to the event.
A big possible monkey wrench in the plan becomes the Florida governor's race. GOP nominee Rick Scott has pledged support for a SB 6-like bill, while Democratic candidate Alex Sink has not. US Education Secretary Arne Duncan made clear in comments Tuesday that his department expects RTTT winners to follow through on their plans, regardless of the personalities that sit in the chairs of government.
"If any state doesn't implement well, we will simply stop funding them," Duncan said.
Will the publicity of Race to the Top, and the amount of money it brings, be enough to overcome years of opposition to this type of pay and evaluation plan? Watch union-administration talks over the next 90 days to get a sense of whether the RTTT will bring the reform that its proponents seek.


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May 4, 2007
Unfortunately, Gumball 3000 has been cancelled due to an incident www.gtspirit.com
Just read this on the news! its really bad but it was bound to happen with the Gumball growing in size every year.
The rally has now been dedicated to the local man killed in the accident.
Oh dear... That's not good news.
Will this spell the end for Gumball?
There is a serious accident in the gumball everytime its run. Its not so much that speed kills, its in-appropriate speed that kills.
Doing 200mph on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere where your only endangering yourself fair enough but zip zapping round traffic and high speed is a total no no.
Trying to remember all the crashes in the gumball.
The white 355 or 360 the guy spun off. The one when Jackass boys were on it.
The Viper with the guy in the Gimp mask was a bad one.
The Reyland Cossie was horrific lucky it had a cage in it.
If I killed myself then I wont know much about it but imagine killing someone cause you were driving like a clown and you survive, that would be hell.
The gtspirit link says the local's partner's died too now...
Such a shame ,
its all good fun and entertainment till somethings goes wrong like that
Just watched last years this morning, Rolls Royce Phantom 155mph gets bent out of shape and plows into the crash barrier. Real big mess. The guy gets out (a Brit) and says he only has 3rd party insurance...oops
Separate names with a comma.


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you cant imagine how terrible i cried when i re-read my older post in this blog. i cried-A LOT. it seems like i cant accept how IMMATURE i was back then. oh, how i can have the idea to post those nonsense posts *cry again*
you see, it all happen when one of my very very loyal follower mention about my blog to me. and i started to read my post, and i cry everytime i came across them, especially the one i wrote back in 2010 and 2011. i am full of regret rn.
but i guess, it was past right? so, goodbye the immature version of me. *big smile*
p/s: toksah duk click 'older post' 'older post', den dah delete dah. WAHAHAHAHAHAHA
lots of love from the apex of my heart,


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A car bomb explosion on the Turkey/Syria border [2] has left at least ten people dead with a further 30 wounded, according to the local mayor.
The blast happened after a Syrian-registered car arrived at the Cilvegozu border crossing [3] in the Turkish province of Hatay.
The attack came just three weeks after Patriot missile defense equipment arrived in Turkey [4], following fears that the ongoing violence in Syria could spill over the border.
"We don't know whether this was a suicide bomb or whether a car that was smuggling petrol across the border blew up," a Turkish official said, speaking to Reuters news agency.
According to local media reports, the Syrian opposition are currently in control of the area [5] over the other side of the Turkish border crossing.
[1] http://www.syndigate.info
[2] http://www.albawaba.com/news/clashes-turkey-syria-border-left-least-26-dead-450145
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyhanl%C4%B1
[4] http://www.albawaba.com/news/patriot-missile-defense-turkey-454858
[5] http://www.albawaba.com/news/israel-syria-khatib-469924
[6] http://www.albawaba.com


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Black Diamond Mayor Dave Gordon and City Council collide
The honeymoon between Black Diamond Mayor Dave Gordon and the City Council officially came crashing down amid a flurry of public allegations, accusation and acrimony.
The dispute soared past the boiling point after the mayor alleged two council members came to his office and demanded his resignation and threatened his job, marriage and reputation if he did not step down.
One of the council members present denied a threat was leveled, stating the council members were offering advice on the possible repercussions to his job, family and reputation if he did not resign.
Gordon, who had no previous experience as an elected official, took office Jan. 1 after a 68 percent landslide victory over former Mayor Rebecca Olness in the November general election.
Among Gordon's main campaign issues was his opposition to the two YarrowBay master planned developments in the city.
Minor disagreements on policy and procedures were apparent between the mayor and City Council early in his term, but the backroom hostilities broke into public view at an April 3 council meeting.
The council approved a resolution at the meeting authorizing Councilwoman Carol Benson, who is the mayor pro tem, to "obtain an investigatory report" of a public official concerning a hostile work environment allegation from a staff member. Specific names were not disclosed on the document, but according to multiple sources involved in the issue, the staff member is City Administrator Christy Todd and the elected official is Gordon.
The sources reported Todd's attorney filed a demand letter against the city and Gordon. The sources reported the demand letter was filed after the city's insurance company, Cities Insurance Association of Washington, returned a finding of no wrongdoing by the mayor in a sexual harassment complaint by Todd against Gordon.
Though the resolution was not on the meeting agenda, text for the measure was provided at the beginning of the meeting following an executive session.
Gordon wrote in a statement following the April 3 council resolution that he takes Todd's allegations "very seriously" and that he supports her role as city administrator.
"Her complaint is being investigated," Gordon wrote. "Ms. Todd never told me there was an issue or problem. Nor did anyone else. I welcome this investigation and have been cooperating fully. I know that I have done nothing wrong or illegal and I believe that the investigation will prove this."
Todd has been out of the office since March 24. A message was sent to her city email account by The Reporter seeking comment. An automatic reply said she would be out of the office and unavailable until April 8, which was after press deadline.
Investigation or Witch Hunt?
Councilman Ron Taylor, who was not present at the April 3 meeting, sent a statement to The Reporter expressing his personal views the afternoon of April 4.
He stated Gordon has been implicated in sexual harassment and hostile work environment allegations and he and the council take the allegations "very seriously" and intend to see they are "aggressively investigated."
"The unfortunate thing, in my view, is that this is only the tip of a bigger iceberg," Taylor wrote. "The very troubling matters surrounding the mayor are much broader and deeper."
Taylor issued a frank disapproval of Gordon's leadership abilities, writing the mayor's actions have caused "the fabric of the city government to unravel."
"If Mayor Gordon truly cares about the well-being of the city, as he says he does, then I call for him to resign now and let the city pick up the pieces," he wrote.
In a response to Taylor's statement, Gordon said the councilman leveled a number of "unwarranted" personal attacks that seem more like a "witch hunt."
"Mr. Taylor's letter is extremely unfair," Gordon wrote. "He would 'try and convict me' in the eyes of the public by issuing his letter first – before the city has even had an opportunity to complete its investigation."
Gordon added in his response the city's personnel policy protocols should be followed. He alleged Taylor's letter is attempting to "bypass" the protocols and, "Given Mr. Taylor's public statement before the investigation has been completed and the parties have responded, it raises serious questions regarding whether Mr. Taylor can objectively and fairly assess the results of that investigation."
Job, marriage and reputation
One of the most incendiary developments between the mayor and the council concerns a meeting that took place between Gordon, Taylor and Councilwoman Janie Edelman in late March.
According to Gordon, Taylor and Edelman came to his office to demand his resignation despite being aware the city's insurance company had cleared him of the sexual harassment claim by Todd.
"They both acknowledged I was perfectly innocent, but still demanded my resignation," Gordon said. "They both threatened my job (at Boeing), my marriage and my reputation in the community, after they both acknowledged I was innocent."
When Edelman was contacted concerning the conversation by phone on Monday, she said, "That (allegation) is an outright lie. I have asked for the mayor's resignation, but I have never said I am out to destroy his marriage or get him fired from his job. That is a lie."
Edelman called back on Tuesday with a different statement concerning the events. She said that there was a meeting between her, the mayor and one other individual, whom she declined to name, that lasted almost an hour. She said she made a point to the mayor that he should resign, otherwise there would be repercussions with his family and job if the story made the newspapers.
"I never threatened to go to his job or ruin his marriage; that was never our intent," Edelman said. "Our intent was to do this quietly so to save the embarrassment for everybody."
Edelman said she initially called the allegations "an outright lie" because the phrasing of the question was being twisted.
"I was in the meeting; I know what was said," Edelman said. "We did not say we were going to ruin his marriage or ruin his job. What we were trying to tell him is that there were repercussions for his actions and there would be consequences affecting his wife and his job. Not that we were going to do anything. That was never said."
When asked if the discussion could have been interpreted as threatening, Edelman responded, "I don't know. I don't know."
When contacted Sunday evening concerning the meeting Taylor said he could not comment.
Gordon called the meeting, "just a power grab. It's a political coup. What this is about is a conspiracy effort to change the form of government to council-manager after the people voted that down. This is a conspiracy and has nothing to do with the investigation."
The residents voted down a ballot measure by 59 percent to change the form of government to council-manager in November 2012.
Rival defends Gordon
Numerous allegations have surfaced about some council members attempting a "cabal" to force Gordon out of office in an effort to stop the YarrowBay developments.
The allegations included statements of conspiracy and "vigilante justice" concerning YarrowBay.
Edelman called the accusation "a bunch of baloney."
"That is crazy," she said. "We don't even talk about the master planned development, other than we notice there are trees cut down…. We as a council are not in the business to stop YarrowBay…. I have never said that I was going to stop YarrowBay. The mayor has said that when he was campaigning. I have never said that. I have said I want it responsibly done."
Olness, who was embroiled in a bitter campaign against Gordon, provided a statement to The Reporter that defended her rival and asked that the city move forward in spite of the City Council.
"No matter how you say it, the mayor has been bamboozled, hoodwinked or tricked by Save Black Diamond and most of the City Council," Olness wrote. "They thought he would be their puppet and when he stood up to them they are trying to get rid of him."
Olness said despite the unsettling campaign "with many lies told about me" she "admires" Gordon for trying to get help and fight the allegations.
"Gordon is being, 'depicted as the bad guy' when in fact he is being a 'good guy' by trying to get out of the mess he is in," Olness wrote. "The City Council is trying to run both the legislative and executive branches of the city."
The former mayor added the Black Diamond citizens should see Gordon through his term.
"There are many former adversaries (of Gordon) who are coming to the mayor's defense and are willing to help him," she wrote. "I have also spoken to many city staff members in the past few days and they are behind the mayor 100 percent."
The Right Thing
Taylor said during the phone interview Sunday, "We (the council) are simply trying to do the right thing. It is not about YarrowBay. I'm not against the development. Those words have been put in my mouth, but it's not true."
Edelman said Tuesday, "I don't regret anything I've said to that man (Gordon). Whatever I've said to that man I was thinking of the best interest for city of Black Diamond…. Now it's all coming out in the newspapers. We were trying to protect him in a way, but he chose to do something different."
Gordon has told The Reporter repeatedly he is innocent of any wrongdoing concerning the allegations brought against him.
"If Dave Gordon can't make it as a mayor, then an honest man can't do it," he said.


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November 29, 2008, 01:12 AM
i have two blackhawk holsters for my s&w M&P's but i recently aquired a TLR2 laser light combo for my rail bar and want a holster that will fit this now. here is a pic of my gun.
View Full Version : Looking for a good holster


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Our valuation of Lucasfilm is roughly comparable to the value we placed on Marvel when we announced that acquisition in 2009. Our Lucasfilm valuation is almost entirely driven by the Star Wars franchise, so any success from other franchises would provide upside to our base case. I realize it may be a challenge for you to quantify our opportunity given the limited amount of publicly available information. But to give you some perspective on the size of the Lucasfilm business-- in 2005, the year in which the most recent Star Wars film was released, Lucasfilm generated $550 million in operating income. We've taken a conservative approach in our valuation assumptions, including continued erosion of the home entertainment market, and we expect this acquisition to create value for our shareholders.In terms of the impact on our financials, we expect the acquisition to be dilutive to our EPS by low single digit percentage points in fiscal 2013 and 2014 and become accretive to EPS in 2015. Our capital allocation philosophy has been consistent since Bob took over as CEO. In addition to returning capital to shareholders, we have invested, both organically and through acquisitions, in high quality, branded content that can be seamlessly leveraged across our businesses. Our acquisition of Lucasfilm is entirely consistent with this strategy, and we're incredibly excited by the prospect of building on Lucasfilm's successful legacy to create significant value for our shareholders. Editor's note: Video of Bob Iger and George Lucas: http://bit.ly/TSrYay Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50459808&lang=en
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Mommy Makeover Q&A
Medical History + Mommy Makeover
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Can I Find a Surgeon to Do a Total Mommy Makeover if I Have Medical Problems?
Since I had my children several years ago I have gained both weight and inches. I have also had medical complications since that time. I am very... READ MORE
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Current Highlights on Broadway
Find a show or venue
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Your independent guide to the best shows in New York
Manhattan Center, 311 West 34th Street, New York, NY 10001
10 Sep 2012
Hugh Laurie impresses with another bluesy raid on the musical vaults of the deep South.
Take a look here to see if Hugh Laurie is showing somewhere nearby
Globally acclaimed recording artist, actor, and performer Hugh Laurie will will hit the road for a U.S. tour in October, accompanied by the Copper Bottom Band. He'll be performing in theaters across the country in support of his new album, "Didn't It Rain".
The Copper Bottom Band comprises David Piltch (bass), Vincent Henry (horns), Elizabeth Lea (trombone), Jean McClain (vocals), and Gaby Moreno (vocals), Herman Matthews (drums) and Mark Goldenberg (guitars).
Opening night: 10 September 2012
Closing night: 10 September 2012
Please note: The term Grand Ballroom and/or Hugh Laurie as well as all associated graphics, logos, and/or other tradermarks, tradenames or copyrights are the property of the Grand Ballroom and/or Hugh Laurie and are used herein for factual descriptive purposes only. We are in no way associated with or authorized by the Grand Ballroom and/or Hugh Laurie and neither that entity nor any of its affiliates have licensed or endorsed us to sell tickets, goods and or services in conjunction with their events.


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Univ. of Adelaide researchers have developed a new nanomaterial that could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power stations.
The new nanomaterial, described in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, efficiently separates the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from nitrogen, the other significant component of the waste gas released by coal-fired power stations. This would allow the carbon dioxide to be separated before being stored, rather than released to the atmosphere.
"A considerable amount of Australia's—and the world's—carbon dioxide emissions come from coal-fired power stations," says Assoc. Prof. Christopher Sumby, project leader and ARC Future Fellow in the Univ.'s School of Chemistry and Physics.
"Removing carbon dioxide from the flue gas mixture is the focus of a lot of research. Most of Australia's energy generation still comes from coal. Changing to cleaner energies is not that straightforward but, if we can clean up the emissions, we've got a great stop-gap technology."
The researchers have produced a new absorbent material, called a 'metal-organic framework', which has "remarkable selectivity" for separating carbon dioxide from nitrogen.
"It is like a sponge but at a nanoscale," says Sumby. "The material has small pores that gas molecules can fit into—a carbon dioxide molecule fits but a nitrogen molecule is slightly too big. That's how we separate them."
Other methods of separating carbon dioxide from nitrogen are energy-intensive and expensive. This material has the potential to be more energy efficient. It's easy to regenerate (removing the carbon dioxide) for reuse, with small changes in temperature or pressure.
"This material could be used as it is but there are probably smarter ways to implement the benefits," says Sumby.
"One of the next steps we're pursuing is taking the material in powder form and dispersing it in a membrane. That may be more practical for industrial use."
Source: Univ. of Adelaide