text:
The Hobohemians
by ben ehrenreich for la weekly
july 26 - august 1, 2002
photos by virginia lee hunter (west coast virginia slim)
I won't tell you exactly where we are, lest Union Pacific get wise and throw up another security camera, a few more reels of razor wire or some of those infrared sensors I keep hearing about. Suffice it to say that we're east of the river, not too far from downtown, and that there are a lot of train tracks around - which is the point, really, since we're here to catch a train, but not Amtrak or Metrolink or anything so banal. We want a northbound freight, with luck one that will take us all the way up to Dunsmuir, just 50 or 60 miles below the Oregon line, in time for the annual hobo gathering there.
We heave our packs onto our shoulders and trek over mounds of concrete and twisted rebar. We settle in a clearing surrounded by rusted truck cadavers, their doors hanging open like broken wings, and listen to the hissing of air brakes in the yard behind us, to the hum of the electric wires, crickets chirping, and garbled orders from the Men's Central Jail PA system echoing across the river. What we don't hear is trains. Forty minutes go by, and not one has passed. "This is the waiting part," says Clare. Virginia, who has four years of sporadic train-hopping under her belt, nods in agreement. "This is what it's mainly like."
Virginia, Clare and I spend the night curled in our sleeping bags amid the chaparral and rubbish. Only two trains pass - one heading south, and a northbound that could've been ours had a crew of workers not been laboring a few yards away. With dawn our camp is revealed in all its postnuclear glory. I find an empty backpack, a handmade shank with its blade snapped off, a spool of surgical tape and a Bible, one of its pages penciled full with Spanish scribblings. I can make out only one sentence: "Love is extinguishing itself."
We return at night and are almost ready to give up when four locomotives roll slowly out of the yard, towing a northbound freight. They're gorgeous, sleek and huge and gleaming, all power and promise in the yellow lithium light. We jog through the gravel, lugging our packs and, running now, grab the ladder to a piggyback, leap up and pull ourselves on.
A piggyback is a flat car that carries the ass end of a semi truck, just the cargo box and the rear axles. We jam our packs into the narrow spaces above the axles and hide behind the wheels. I curl myself as small as possible, dreading the beam of a spotlight, the bark of a cop. The train stops for five minutes and I do my best not to move. It picks up again, slowly, and the river snakes by to my right. The towers on Bunker Hill loom bright in the distance, looking sillier than they ever have before. We pass Main Street and are out of the yard, picking up speed. Sitting there, wedged in among brake hoses, fluid reservoirs and spiny metal things, with dozens of identical cars ahead of me and more than I can count behind, I panic for a second and ask myself, "Just where in fuck's name am I going?" Then a smile spreads itself across my face, and I don't care at all.
We're heading to Dunsmuir to explore this curiously American phenomenon, which, despite rumors of its death dating back at least a half-century, seems to be catching on again. Men (and until recently, it has been largely men) began riding freight trains after the Civil War, when enough track had been laid to make it worthwhile, and enough dislocated veterans had become averse to staying still. Since then every major war and economic downturn has seen a return to the rails, providing a sort of shadow history of America, a constantly mobile underground of migrant workers, radicals, dreamers and thieves, misfits of all kinds who didn't mesh with the societal weave. During the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, it was a common if not entirely acceptable way for working-class men to get around in search of wages. In the '30s, Frank Czerwanka, one of Studs Terkel's sources in Hard Times, recalled, "When a train would stop in a small town and the bums got off, the population tripled."
The hobo's death knells began tolling shortly thereafter, and have been ringing ever since. Prosperity and the automobile kept people in houses and on the road, and by 1960, Jack Kerouac was blaming the hobo's death on the still-fledgling rise of the security state: "Today the hobo's made to slink - everybody's watching the cop heroes on TV." Though nearly every book written about hobos since then has mourned them as a dying breed, and despite all the cameras and infrared gadgets, thousands still manage to slip through Kerouac's "cop-avoiding night" to steal a little fast freedom from a shrink-wrapped world.
Today, except for immigrant workers eager to stay invisible, few ride the rails just to get from place to place. With all the risk and potential for mishaps, comic and tragic both, walking is almost more efficient. But since the early '90s, train-hopping has been gaining ground among a new generation of tramps. The grizzled old hobos may be dying off, but they're being replaced in boxcars and on the porches of grain cars by street kids, gutter punks, dreamy anarchists and eco-warriors, train-obsessed professionals, all held loosely together by a vision of freedom as old as the nation itself, an America of movement and self-reliance, of mythic vastness and silence, of discovery, escape, rebellion. It's an America that was offered long ago and never delivered, that we're all supposed to love but not allowed to look for, that's just around the corner and always out of reach.
The Ride
The world looks different from a freight train. There's no heat and no a/c. No meals are served. The restroom is wherever you find it. There are no buttons to push or cords to pull when you want off. The train goes where it wants when it wants to, and sometimes doesn't go at all. It doesn't care about your wishes. It doesn't like or want you, doesn't even know you're there. It can kill you without a thought, can leave you behind, maimed and bleeding, without a moment of remorse. There's no getting around it - it's ridiculously romantic.
We stay hidden as the train makes its way out of Los Angeles. Virginia's at the other end of the car, and I'm crouched beneath the axle beside Clare, a Web editor and sometime hobo who flew down from Berkeley to join us for the ride. We pass a Burbank strip mall, Krispy Kreme, Staples, Target, Best Buy, and I can't help but laugh out loud. All those packaged comforts, the shadowless, dust-free expanses of American convenience, exist now in another world completely. We thump off through the Valley, past auto-parts stores, taquerías, the leering pink neon of motels and topless bars. The L.A. night slides by - a different country, already far away.
We leave the city and chug up through the mountains. It's too loud to talk. The train shakes out a cacophony that seems intentionally musical: a high-pitched squeal that varies from hiss to yawn with the steady bass rumble of the turning wheels, in turns cruel and joyful and terrifically sad, layered with the backbeat of the shaking steel car. I hold my ears as we echo through a tunnel and the high notes break toward painful.
At around 3:30, the train shudders to a halt somewhere in the Antelope Valley. Bats flutter in the streetlights. After 10 minutes another train passes us, and we lurch on forward into the desert. We sleep for two or three hours, waking cramped under the axle, a cold wind blowing, our faces blackened with diesel smoke and dust. The sun rises and the air warms quickly. The Tehachapis roll by, golden on all sides, dotted with oaks and the occasional horse farm. We pack our gear and keep low behind the wheels until we've cleared the Bakersfield yards.
After Bakersfield we fly, maybe 70 miles an hour, past rusting factories of corrugated metal, pink trailer homes, a man watering his lawn, sunflowers as big as your head. We speed through miles of vineyards and citrus groves, along Highway 99, past sprinklers irrigating green fields in great white arcs, past three men trying to free a forklift stuck in dried mud. It smells of fertilizer, cow shit, diesel. We do our best to sleep through the morning, chasing the sun across the floor for the heat. I wake and see a world that is green forever in every direction but up. Later, I open my eyes to a huge white silo, filling the sky like a spaceship. This is the West as hallucination, as fever dream - as strange and beautiful as you always knew it was. Cows loiter in a flooded field. We pass a bowling alley, a truck stop, a burned-out nightclub, a street called Temperance Avenue, swallows diving over a field of corn, a Costco, a man standing alone beside the track, looking right at me but not seeing me at all.
The Bull
After 13 hours, the piggyback is just starting to feel like home when we're spotted by Union Pacific police in a small train yard in the town of Lathrop, just outside of Stockton. The train has come to a stop, and as a white Ford Explorer pulls up in the gravel at the far end of the car, Clare begins to laugh. "Please step off the train," someone says, and Clare's shoulders start shaking. Funny time to laugh, I think. She covers her mouth to try and hold it in. "What?" I say.
It seems Virginia had taken advantage of the train's stillness to heed nature's call, and was squatting over the edge of the car when the bull drove up. A stocky, pink man, he seems a little embarrassed - pinker than usual perhaps - but mainly pleased, like he's already looking forward to chuckling about it over a quiet beer after work. Clare doesn't have to wait, and is laughing openly when another Explorer stops beside us and we climb off too.
The second bull, a compact Latino man in a blue uniform, asks Clare and me if we are associated with "the FRA." (He's talking about the FTRA, which stands for either Fuck the Reagan Administration or Freight Train Riders of America, and is alleged by everyone from Fox News to The Times of London to be a "gang of killers who prey on the weak" - more on that later.) We are not. He asks me if I'm armed, asks where we're coming from, where we're going and if we've done this before, and seems as much motivated by curiosity as any putative intelligence-gathering. He takes our IDs, but doesn't bother to check them for warrants. He's almost apologetic when he finally hands us our tickets, citations for misdemeanor trespassing, and tries to make up for it by giving us directions to a homeless mission five miles off in Stockton, and offering a little advice: "Now you never heard this from me, but if you're going to ride freight trains, be careful, and I'd prefer you do it after dark."
It won't be dark for seven hours, so we hitch a ride to a bus stop and two buses later are in Roseville. We hike from the station to the freight yards, and by midnight have found an open boxcar on a northbound train. (On the West Coast, northbounds generally carry empty lumber cars, which come back south piled high with fresh-sawed timber.) We climb in, spread our bedrolls in a corner and fall asleep to the sound of hammers clanking far off in the yard, and to the steady click and kiss of the idling engines, like someone spitting on a white-hot stone. Three hours later the car rolls out of the yard, and within a few minutes is speeding along, singing and pounding, its floor vibrating at a frequency that could iron out your elbows and turn your spine to jelly.
For all that, a boxcar is a great ride. You have shelter from sun, wind, rain and the prying eyes of cops. If you're lucky and both doors are open, you have two huge bay windows and a choice of views. It's roomy, with a high vaulted ceiling, perhaps indifferently furnished - some broken two-by-fours, stray cardboard - but still bigger than a lot of apartments I've rented. Until last year, a boxcar could easily have fetched two grand or more a month on the Manhattan real estate market.
I lie awake until the boxcar's groans and belches begin to sound like voices. "Shhh!" they say. "Last! Phhhh. Eat 'em! Pht! Eat 'em! Tsph. Get 'em out!" I drift off and wake in the mountains, in a forest of high firs. The earth is red here. We pass fingers of Lake Shasta, dotted with fishermen and kids on boats, the water clear and green. Purple wildflowers line the tracks; the Sacramento River flows fast and white beside us. Finally Mount Shasta appears, a giant ice-cream sundae of a hill, alone on the horizon, snow-topped and startling. We've arrived.
The Convention
Dunsmuir is a pretty little town, nestled beside the river in evergreen hills, with a population (1,923) slightly lower than its altitude. It's been a railroad town for more than a century, a crew-change spot for the Union Pacific. It became briefly famous in 1991, when a train derailed and emptied a tank car filled with herbicide into the Sacramento, killing every bug, bird and fish for miles. It's been tidied up, I'm told. Today, railroad kitsch and fly-fishing are the staples of the local tourist industry, and this weekend, the trout are biting obediently and the Dunsmuir Railroad Days festival is under way.
On a wooded strip of land between the tracks and the river a 10-minute walk from town, the 2002 Dunsmuir Hobo Gathering has already begun. Only the old-timers have arrived, sitting in a clearing drinking beer until we trudge in and they all rise to greet us. North Bank Fred is here, an amiable local train-hopper and railroad nut who organized the Gathering, and who looks like a phys. ed. teacher gone slightly to seed - always in red track shorts and sneakers, usually shirtless with a liter of Gallo white port in one fist. We meet a quiet silver-bearded man named Buzz Blur, who turns out to be a legendary boxcar graffiti artist, and the intensely friendly New York Ron, who speaks in a mile-a-minute upstate accent of a variety you don't hear much anymore. "I just got outta jail!" he says by way of greeting, vigorously pumping my hand. "Congratulations," I say, unsure if that's the appropriate response. He tells me he got nabbed by the bull up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, after riding in all the way from Albany, and that he just finished an eight-year stint in a Montana prison (for what, exactly, I never learn).
We meet a tall, slender man with an easy smile who combs his long, yellow-gray hair with obsessive regularity ("I'm a platinum blond," he laughs) and looks a bit like Donald Sutherland left out in the sun. He sticks out his hand and says his name with a grin: "No-Nuts." Later, we'll argue about who gets to ask him how he came to be called that, but it turns out it's no secret: He earned his name the hard way in Vietnam. We meet a bearish fellow named Tennessee, and the voluble Silver Miner Larry, a fast-talking tramp with short gray hair, his eyes a little loose in their sockets. He introduces his old lady, whose name is either Kimberly or Bert or Whistle Britches, depending on whom you ask, and who, before the weekend is over, will somehow manage to break her leg in three places while squatting to pee.
That night we bring a pint of whiskey over to the clearing, expecting to find a crew of beer-happy tramps to share it with. Instead there's just Tennessee, sitting alone in the dark, working on one last 12-pack of Natural Ice. Over the next few days I will never see Tennessee sober, neither at 9 a.m. nor midnight. Nor will I ever witness him being anything but gentlemanly, regardless of his condition - he will one afternoon rouse himself unsolicited from what looks like a near-comatose state to help me lug a couple bulky 25-pound packs a quarter-mile down the tracks. He's bearded and a little shaggy, like Santa's wayward younger brother, with fists large enough to make the beer cans they continually clutch look like they belong in a dollhouse, and a North Florida drawl as thick as his forearms.
He complains of a Siskiyou County sheriff's deputy named Stuart, who lives around the bend and will prove to be no end of trouble. "Excuse my language," Tennessee says, "but he's a real fuckin' prick." Just the other day, he says, he was walking over the bridge to the Texaco on a beer run, when Stuart stopped him. He ran his ID for warrants and found none. ("I'm unwanted," Tennessee says.) "He said, 'Why don't you get out of here?' I said, 'Where you want me to go?' He said, 'Just go. I don't care where. Go to Roseville, Klamath Falls, Eugene, Reno, Elko, I don't care, just get outta here.' I said, 'I been to those places, and they all told me the same thing. Except they said come here.'"
Tennessee sips the whiskey gratefully, chases it with beer, then holds forth on the nemesis of West Coast tramps, the bull in Klamath Falls, a certain Roger the Dodger.
Roger the Dodger
Every world and every era needs its myths, its saints and its demons, and this one is no exception. Meet Roger the Dodger, a trickster-devil for the epoch of the corporatized rails. Not that he's not real - even those who doubt his omnipresence and scoff at his legendary powers affirm that Roger does exist. Like Lucifer, he stood among the angels once. Back before Union Pacific bought out Southern Pacific, Roger was a friend to the tramp. He was hard but kind, and made only two demands: "Stay off of my money, stay off of my power." So long as he didn't catch you riding a hotshot (a high-priority train towing particularly valuable freight) or stowing away in one of the rear locomotives, you could count on a smooth ride through K-Falls. If you abided by his rules, he'd let you be, and might even tell you when your train was leaving, and on which track.
But after the buyout, legend has it, the corporate powers put the screws on - if Roger wanted his job and his pension, he'd have to bust some tramps. He took to his task with all the zeal of the converted. If you can believe the stories, Roger the Dodger never sleeps. He works no fixed hours and knows the tracks like the veins in his arms. You've got a slim chance passing through K-Falls under cover of night, but in daylight it's near impossible, says Tennessee: "He'll get you, Roger will." It was Roger who got New York Ron, fresh from the Montana pen, and kept him in the tank for two days with the snoring drunks and, Ron says scornfully, "no shitter, just a piss hole." Roger keeps a book two inches thick containing the name of every tramp he's ever come across, says Ron. Their only other encounter was 10 years ago, but Roger remembered the name and flipped straight to the tattered page. So if you choose to ride the rails, take Tennessee's advice, and "Watch out for old Roger" - no matter where you are. "I've even seen him right here," Tennessee swears, "under that bridge."
Tennessee is not joking, but Roger's not there now, and won't be tomorrow either, though a steady stream of tramps will be coming up the tracks all day long. Save for a few stragglers, everyone will be here by afternoon, and before they all arrive, some introductions are in order.
The Tramps
Today's old-timers, of course, are not the old-timers of yesteryear. Even a decade ago, there were still a few left who'd been tramping since the hobo glory days of the Depression. Most of them are now dead or indoors, and a generational shift has occurred. The romantic hobo of kitsch and legend can be safely buried.
The old-timers of today hit the rails in the '60s and early '70s, most after coming back from Vietnam to a country into which they no longer quite fit. Others were casualties of the '60s drug culture who either lost everything or decided after some consideration that Main Street America was worth avoiding. As harmless as most of them now seem - usually blind drunk, and pretty damned rickety even when they're not - they're a gristly bunch. More than a couple of those present are members of the aforementioned organization, the FTRA, the object of a storm of media hype in the 1990s, when they were blamed for a string of murders. Most of these turned out to be committed by one man, Robert "Sidetrack" Silveria, who confessed in 1996 to killing 28 tramps. It's not even clear that Silveria ever claimed to be in the FTRA, but the reputation stuck, and whenever a newspaper or tabloid-news show wants to warn kids to stay in their cars and in their bedrooms, they trot out "the killers of the rails."
You've met a few of the old tramps already. There's also New York Slim, a 6-and-a-half-foot black man with an enormous laugh and a tiny, cockeyed dog. Only the white hairs in his beard give away his age - without them he could pass for 40. He survived a POW camp, but stays sober and radiates calm. Slim's generosity and easy regality win him the instant loyalty of almost all the younger tramps. He complicates the common assertion that the FTRA is a white-supremacist group: A couple of members do have swastikas tattooed on their arms, but Slim is not only accepted, he's treated with more respect and deference than anyone else around. These days he's rubber-tramping, getting around in an old blue pickup rather than by rail.
Then there's Magoo, who, like Tennessee, is never without a beer in one hand, sometimes with a pint of whiskey in the other - even shortly after sunrise, still sitting on his bedroll. "They call me Magoo," he tells me, "because I can't see past..." he pauses for a good 10 seconds before coming up with " ...dusk." It's often hard to figure out what Magoo is saying, not only because of the drunken circuitousness of his conversation, but because he laughs his way through most everything he says. There's also Longhaired Donnie, not a vet ("I got a wing-nut pass," he explains, "but I can't get a wing-nut check. Figure that out.") and not an FTRA member, "just an old hippie." With his long brown beard and crumpled face, he looks like a wrinkled elf, though his eyes don't start twinkling until he's had a few beers.
Finally, Crazy Angel is only 29, and thus hardly an old-timer. But he's been riding the rails since he was 14 ("I don't know," he shrugs when I ask him why he started, "I got tired of all the bullshit"), and mainly hangs with the older tramps. When I first see him it's like a vision out of The Road Warrior - he's tall, lanky and long-limbed, and walks down the tracks a stride behind his pit bull, Meathead. The dog wears a collar studded with 2-inch steel spikes, carries his own food and water in woven-leather saddle bags, and is so well-trained he might as well speak English. Crazy Angel's muscled arms are tattooed with grinning skulls, the letters FTRA, and a big red swastika. His nose and lip are pierced with hoops, a metal spike protrudes from his brow, and he has puzzle pieces tattooed on his shaved skull. Behind his glasses, though, Crazy Angel's eyes are shy and questioning. He speaks in soft, gentle tones, and laughs a goofy stoner's giggle. When asked how he got his name, he blushes a little and says sincerely, "I guess it's 'cause I'm a nice guy." And he is.
If the old-time tramps are the past, fading as fast as their overworked livers, train-hopping's future likely lies with crusty punks - street kids so named for both a frequent disregard for hygiene and a bristly punk-rock attitude. There are plenty of others taking to the rails these days, but most of them do it part-time. The crusties, who at this particular gathering are rather slimly represented, are more often homeless, and if they can get as romantic about trains as anyone else, they also ride them out of sheer practicality.
Take Rocco and Ben, who've been traveling together for more than two years. Rocco, 23 and the more voluble of the two, hails originally from Virginia and most recently from San Diego. He's got short black hair, hated is tattooed on his neck (it was hate originally, before he added the d), and he dresses in standard crusty fashion: faded black Slayer T-shirt, cut-off Carharts patched and repatched, so well-worn they look like leather. "Why I started," he says, "is because I got kicked out of my house." He was 17, using a lot of crystal, living on Ocean Beach and looking to get straight. "I never thought about being on the streets," he says. "I was like, 'What the fuck? How do you sustain? How do you eat? What do you do?'" He met a kid who told him he'd just come in on a freight train. "It was like Ding! - the light bulb - 'Why did I not think of this?'"
He left with no goal in mind except "to get the hell out of there." His first ride took him to Mexico by mistake, the next one to Barstow, where he stayed in a mission for a while. "I don't do homeless missions anymore," he says. "I can depend on myself more." He Dumpster-dives for food, panhandles, works when he can. "If you're starving in America, you're a fool."
Despite the anarchist tattoo on Rocco's arm, he doesn't see train-hopping in any explicitly political context, except as rejection and flight. "The way we live is not acceptable to society." The distaste is mutual: "I don't care for greed," he says. "That's why society's so filthy and shitlike."
Rocco tries to downplay his love of trains - he rides because, he says, "I don't want to be bound by anything. I don't want to be tied down." But he has a boyish enthusiasm for big machines, and a hard time keeping it from showing. "For me it's to escape. And it is my transportation, like people use their cars. I really love it," he concludes, waving his hands in frustration, unable to express the depth of his feeling.
His partner, Ben, taller and more reserved, will later open up over a few beers and put it like this: "Sometimes I feel like I'm the richest guy in the world. I could've set out to make a million dollars and never seen the things I've seen. But I didn't. I decided to be poor."
They arrive in groups of 10 or 12 at a time, around 40 of them altogether. Most are in their early 20s and look a lot more prosperous and middle-class than the crusties: Their faces are rounder; they wear Tevas rather than combat boots and carry expensive camping gear instead of battered army-surplus packs. Despite the road dirt and the long trip, they glow with youthful exuberance and hardly rest before they begin sorting lentils and chopping potatoes for a big vegan mulligan stew. Enough came from Santa Cruz that they had to meet before they left and divide into three shifts to prevent dozens from descending on the train yards all at once. Many of them haven't hopped before, or have done so only rarely, and most, when asked what got them interested in hopping, say the same thing: "Lee."
Lee Desaux, 47, is a sort of Pied Piper of Santa Cruz, where he's been living in well-appointed squats in the woods for more than a decade. Invariably dressed in torn cutoff black sweatpants and boots, his neck and arms bejeweled with aluminum hose clamps, Lee's been riding since 1986, and introducing the barefoot and besandaled, eco-radical, neo-hippie set to the rails for almost as long. For Lee, and most of the Santa Cruz crew, train-hopping is a beautiful way to see the country, a source of community and, he says, with trademark squinty smile, "a natural extension of our visions and lifestyles." It's a way to get around without buying into the money economy, a way of consuming without waste, of living off the leftovers of American abundance in the same spirit as squatting unused land and subsisting on food that grocery stores and restaurants discard. Freight trains are like a communal garden that moves.
Last come the yuppie hobos, in which category I include not just the ones whose cell phones wake them up on boxcars, but all those folks with homes and jobs somewhere who could afford Amtrak but ride the rails because they love it. Some make occasional long-weekend excursions, others organize their lives around trains. Take Clare, who rode with Virginia and me up from L.A., but fell ill shortly after arriving in Dunsmuir and left for home. She does freelance work in what's left of the Bay Area's e-economy and has taken a handful of freight journeys over the last few years, once as far as Iowa. She likes the adventure, she tells me on the phone a couple of weeks later, and the fact that "When you're traveling by freight train there's no advertising pointing at you. You go through the back yard of America" without a billboard in sight.
Or take a hobo couple, one member of which will later e-mail me to ask that their names not be printed here. He lives in the Midwest and reviews grant proposals for a living; she's an ornithologist based in California. They met in a rail yard three years ago. Both work freelance, and work just enough to be able to devote about half of their time to train-hopping, riding back and forth across the West to see each other.
Or take SocX, pronounced socks - it's a complicated pun decipherable only by train freaks, but yes, it does refer to his hosiery, which is enviably colorful. The 25-year-old sound engineer with an apartment and a girlfriend back in Nashville took two weeks to get here. He started riding short hops with a friend when he was 17 and was thrilled to learn later that "This isn't just a mode of transportation, there's a culture here." He rides as often as he can and absorbs the minutiae of railroad history and lore like a sponge soaking up diesel. "I'm one of the complete nutcases," he says. "If you would take a microscope to me, you'd see there's trains running in my veins."
Train-hopping is uncomfortable and dangerous enough that it's rarely just a recreational activity: Most of the yuppie hobos are seriously obsessed. They can talk trains for hours, which is good, because the tramps and the more experienced crusties and hippies can as well, so everyone gets along, more or less. And the yuppie hobos often carry espresso pots, which everyone appreciates.
The Law
Our first morning in Dunsmuir, the espresso pots have not yet emerged from the rucksacks, so we head into town for eggs and bacon. On our way back, a mopey young man who calls himself Papa Dalek tells us that Siskiyou County sheriff's deputies have shown up at the campsite and, with shaky legal reasoning, ordered everyone to clear out. People were trespassing on private land, they were drinking in public, it didn't matter what they were doing, they had to leave.
At a bend in the tracks, we meet Rocco and Ben, who are waiting there to give new arrivals the options. The old-timers are heading off to a place called Black Butte, they tell us, about a 15-minute drive away. The rest are camping at another site downriver, a little farther from town and, we hope, from the consciousness of the sheriffs.
We head for the latter, a high, sloping field on the other side of the tracks, thick with poison oak. It's not long before Ben and Rocco turn up - they were just chased off by four sheriffs toting shotguns and a dog. Eight kids from Santa Cruz, their faces still blackened with freight-train grit, arrive looking shaken - they too were greeted by the sheriff's impromptu welcoming committee. Later, another group of Santa Cruzians who left their packs at the original camp and hiked off to the waterfall upstream to frolic and bathe will return and find the site abandoned, their packs emptied and the contents strewn about the woods. They will find their sleeping bags hanging from trees, bags of food and spices emptied in the dirt, $20 of food stamps torn apart. A tall, skinny 21-year-old with short blond hair who goes by Buffalo Alice will find "all my personal possessions - passport, pictures, letters, everything - scattered and in the bushes." An earnest, bearded substitute teacher named Doug (hobo name: D-Rail) will search for one of his boots but never find it. Though no one will have seen the culprits, no one will doubt their identities.
Campfire Symphonics
Nor does anyone want to let the police spoil a good time, so once the sun goes down and the lentils are gone, the beer starts flowing. A few Santa Cruz kids break out guitars and begin singing songs about friendship, multinational corporations and pollution. Rocco tells me about his father, who was once in the military, assigned to some highly secret unit trained to kill people quietly in foreign lands. Now he's a cop, and sounds like a real piece of work. Rocco's clearly pretty broken up over the guy. He's also concerned about my motivations, concerned I'll write something sensationalistic and exploitative. He says he doesn't think society deserves to know about this world, that people haven't earned it. Maybe he's an elitist asshole to think that, he says, but that's how he feels.
Some kids from Portland start playing old bluegrassy hobo favorites on fiddle and guitar, and as I retreat to my sleeping bag I hear the whoops and stomping feet of the dancing pixies drifting up through the trees. Lying there in the dark, I consider what Rocco has said, what everyone else has told me, and I understand that this is about community, about finding a group of like-minded folks outside the usual channels, but also about creating a realm of skill, of secret knowledge, virtue and style, that the scared and intolerant residents of comfortable straight society cannot touch or understand. And Rocco does not want them to understand. They have their own culture, and it's because that culture is so insipid and corrupt that he sleeps out of doors. Hobohemia, to borrow a term coined by the anarchist Ben Reitman in the '30s, is a separate world, and defiantly so. It has its own rules and rewards, even if the rules are rarely followed and the rewards frequently fail to materialize. It's a secondary track off the American mainline in which courage and independence still matter, in which freedom is not abstract but palpable, and easily distinguishable from its opposites - work, stasis, jail.
This is true for the idealistic Santa Cruz kids as much as it is for homeless punks like Rocco, though for many of the former the risks are smaller. And it's certainly true for the old tramps. All share a disappointment, to varying degrees and in divergent ways, a nostalgia for an America that's failed to become, the one we were promised in grade school, allegedly passed down to us by vision-rattled heretics and daring claustrophobes, an America already lost by the time Whitman and Thoreau claimed to have found it, still a sustaining memory for the Beats and the hippies and even the fuck-off-and-leave-me-alone punk rockers.
Turning on my side, I can see Rocco standing by the fire looking glum while the Santa Cruz kids go on singing about being free, treading softly on the earth and loving one another. Then a train goes by on the tracks below and silences them with its wails, and the train's song seems to have lyrics this time, to sing of all that yearning, all the failed dreams left to hang immaterial on the edges of cities, beneath cement overpasses, in riverside jungles and hard urban squats, all that space and longing squeezed into this rhythmic yowl and clang. Everyone falls silent. The guitar and the fiddles stop, and maybe I'm drunk and sentimental and imagining things, maybe it's just late and everyone is tired, but it seems the train sang for them better than they knew how, and when it passed there was nothing left to do but stumble off into the woods and search out a piece of ground flat enough to sleep on.
Railroad Daze
It's a hot and cloudless day. Tourists and locals line the street in lawn chairs to wait for the Railroad Days parade. First come the VFW, old men marching stiffly in uniform, guns and flags on their shoulders. They're followed by a little girl dressed as the Statue of Liberty; some Boy Scouts; two kids cruelly encumbered with sandwich boards advertising Better Home Realty; seven vintage Corvettes; a few shiny fire trucks; a grinning boy in a go-cart labeled the "Osama yo mama Payback mobile"; a truck painted camouflage topped with waving children and a banner advertising Bullseye Tactical Firearms Training ("Protect Your Family and Yourself"). An old Ford tows a covered wagon, manned by a family in pioneer drag. The wagon is sponsored by the Dunsmuir Church of Christ, emblazoned with flags and painted "All Aboard America, One Nation Under God."
Finally, amid this panoply of patriotism, claiming another branch of Americana, the Hobo Marching Band arrives - though this year their sign, in honor of the sheriff's shenanigans, reads "Hobo Marching Banned." An old tramp named Tex, who lives in a munitions dump outside of town, heads the group, hobbling along with a cane. Beside him is Banjo Fred, a ghostly codger who leads the ragtag, sunburned group in a rousing version of "This Land Is Your Land." Barefoot, dreadlocked kids skip and dance and beat away at frying pans, empty water bottles and upturned buckets. The onlookers seem torn: Some laugh and cheer, others watch silently, sullen and suspicious. "Well," says Banjo Fred when it's all over, addressing no one in particular, "if we didn't make an impression, I don't know what would."
There's a stage set up on a side street, nestled among crowded booths selling tri-tip sandwiches and "Protected by Smith & Wesson" T-shirts. The kids from Portland who played at the camp last night take their seats. They're the Old Timey String Band, and they play their old-timey music to appreciative hobos, who dance and stomp and whoop it up in the hot sun without any sign of tiring. No locals join in. Rocco and Ben look on in baffled silence. Half an hour goes by, and Rocco shakes his head: "Man, these kids must eat better than I do." Another hour passes. It only gets hotter, but the kids are still clapping and twirling, dousing themselves with water to keep cool. "We need to have a country all our own," Rocco decides. "It would be like this, all the time."
Black Butte
The band's set ends at last. A couple of hours later, to avoid further run-ins with the sheriff, everyone packs up and moves out to Black Butte, an idyllic meadow of wildflowers and fragrant grasses a few miles up the tracks, between Mount Shasta and the tower of rock that gives it its name. For two days, train talk echoes around that meadow, pausing only when a train goes by. Debates rage over which is the longest tunnel in the country, which the highest pass. Most of the stories are tales of hardship, told now with a laugh, of frigid nights going through the Donner Pass by mistake without even cardboard to keep you warm, or of trains that stop and sit for days in the Mojave in midsummer. Ben tells of being so cold one Wyoming winter he had to stand all night because the soles of his shoes were the only part of him that wouldn't freeze instantly to the boxcar's steel floor. New York Slim tells about the guy whose face froze to just such a boxcar floor, and how they had to heat the metal with torches from beneath to melt him free. The stories dissolve into a sea of place names - Marysville, Eugene, Pocatello, Livingston, Ogden, Evanston, Sparks, Colton, Whitefish, Green River, La Crosse - an atlas of laughter and survival.
Crazy Angel keeps an eye on Meathead to make sure he doesn't get too close to New York Slim's dog Babys, a snaggle-toothed little puff of white and brown fur that Meathead would barely have to open his jaws to swallow. Meathead's fine with people, Crazy Angel tells me, but he's "kind of antisocial" when it comes to animals. In other words, "he likes to kill them." Meathead would prefer a world stripped of all non-human fauna, and does what he can to push things in that direction. So whenever he gets within 10 yards of Slim's pet, Crazy Angel issues a string of commands, each one more or less instantly obeyed: "Meathead, go over there. By the gear. Not there. Over on the other side. A little farther. To the right a little. Farther. Now lie down. Good dog."
Sitting on his bedroll, old Magoo calls Meathead over. He hugs him and kisses his brindled nose. No-Nuts laughs and suggests that the two look alike. "Only difference is Meathead combs his hair better," he says.
Later, Magoo sits perched on an overturned bucket with a couple of drunken crusty punks and a pensive-looking Ben. He talks about Vietnam. He was there early on, from '61 to '63, sent not to fight but to "teach." He gestures with his beer can, marveling at the word. "They killed a lot of my friends," Magoo says. "And I got good at killing them. And I got to like it." His eyes are wide with residual wonder, still shocked by this strange fact: "I got to like it a lot." Ben is silent. The drunk punks talk about hitching into town to do some panhandling. "I was there two years without even getting athlete's foot," Magoo goes on. "I wanted to get shot, I just wanted to get out of there, but I couldn't."
Magoo starts in on a story about a reconnaissance mission. It's a bit hard to follow. "They told me to find 'em. 'Find 'em or kill 'em?' I said. 'Find 'em,' they said. 'Okay,' I said. And I found 'em." Ben gazes sadly at the ground; the punks aren't listening at all. Magoo is "four clicks up the crik" when he loses track of the story entirely and gives up.
Catching Out (2)
After two days of lazing about at Black Butte, eating pancakes cooked over a barrel fire on a greased-up sheet of scrap metal, drinking around that same fire beneath a sky perilously heavy with stars, we say our goodbyes. New York Slim gives us a lift back to Dunsmuir in the back of his truck, a tarp pulled over our heads so the police won't have cause to stop him. Seven of us are heading south: Virginia, myself and a schoolteacher from Topanga named Jacob; Steve and Jodie, recently arrived from Portland; Longhaired Donnie and Crazy Angel. Meathead the Dog makes eight.
We miss one train just as we get into the yard, and run up to the Texaco to buy food and water for ourselves and beer for Donnie. This will be, he tells us, his last ride. He's got an appointment in Roseville for an operation on his eye ("a floater"). His liver is bad, and he has a hard time keeping up. "I'm just an old sore, I guess you could call me, one that never healed," Donnie smiles sadly. He started riding in the early '60s, and has done so ever since, sometimes staying put for a while, working, even owning a business, losing everything to drugs and prison. Riding the rails is the only thing he ever found that could keep him off heroin, he says, and thereby out of trouble. "I called my grandma before she died. I said I finally found my niche."
Walking along the tracks through the town with Crazy Angel, I note how quiet it is. "It's nice," he says. "There's no people around. I hope they stay in their houses." He tells me he travels to keep sane, that he doesn't like being around people too often and never learned the skills necessary to rent an apartment, pay the bills and get by in one place. He refers to the house-bound populace as "citizens," and regards them not with hatred ("Hate's a bad thing") but with the mistrust one reserves for unfamiliar beasts, as if they belong to a different species entirely, one possessed of wood and drywall exoskeletons, which they shed occasionally to crawl out and make trouble for tramps. With a sheepish smile he tells me his name for the scent a tramp develops after a few weeks on the road without bathing: "citizen repellent."
Donnie and Crazy Angel reminisce about the old days, before intense corporate security made tramping so difficult, when you could ride from New York to California without a hassle, when you could hop into any town in the country and find 15 of your friends. Even a decade ago, Angel says, you could camp in the yards without trouble from the bull. You could leave all your gear in the jungle without fearing it would be stolen, says Donnie, and you didn't have to worry about young punks wanting to fight you to give themselves a name. They talk about old friends who've died, others locked away for good. Donnie shakes his head. "It ain't nothin' like it used to be. Nothin' at all."
No trains come through that night, and we sleep in a clearing beneath the tracks. Meathead has his own sleep sack, and a hooded sweat shirt for the cold. I wake at dawn to the sound of a whistle blowing. Crazy Angel is up and out of his bag, and by the time he says, "Wake up, Donnie - southbound's coming!" everyone else is awake too. We pack hastily, and climb the embankment to the tracks. Angel spots an open boxcar, and we all hoist ourselves up and in. "Jump, dog," orders Angel, and Meathead jumps in too.
The train sits. After an hour the sun rises over the hills, the light angling softly into the car. Donnie rolls a cigarette, and the smoke rises in the sunlight in little curling dragons. Another hour passes. Jodie reads a book. Steve stands on the track and juggles stones. Angel sews a leather pouch. Donnie tags the wall of the car with a Sharpie. He writes his name, and then "To Love/Is to Sacrifice/To be Loved/Is to Cherish!" After another hour a southbound hotshot speeds past. The air brakes on our train hiss, then click and squeak. The boxcar shivers. Its walls moan, and the green world glides slowly by outside the door.
Note to the curious: Like driving automobiles, falling in love, and speaking your mind in public, train-hopping is dangerous. Really.


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A government proposal that is being described as "anti-parent" is threatening to overwhelm a small team of parents in Scotland who are dedicated to fighting the "Children and Young People Bill," and they are asking for help from fellow homeschoolers worldwide.
According to a report from the Home School Legal Defense Association, the bill "would assign a government social worker to 'promote, support or safeguard the wellbeing' of every child from birth."
That "named person" would have great authority to order what the child – and parents – must do throughout life, regarding schooling, health, social activities and the like.
It's part of an initiative that calls for "Getting it Right for Every Child."
"The national homeschooling association in Scotland, 'Schoolhouse,' has told HSLDA that the proposed bill that would rewrite the Scottish child protection system is bad for all families but would certainly target of home educating families. The group is asking American home educators to help them oppose this Orwellian legislation."
TRENDING: America's power system leaves people paying more for fewer options
HSLDA Chairman Michael Farris said the bill is the most invasive and "anti-parent" that he's ever seen.
According to the HSLDA, Alison Preuss, secretary of Schoolhouse and longtime home educating parent, explains that the proposal as written is not only draconian but may be illegal, violating data protection laws in the United Kingdom and the European Union.
"Home educating families and others who make less conventional, but lawful, parenting choices are already being targeted under the current implementation of GIRFEC, and this bill would guarantee further intrusion," said Preuss. "We know of several home educating families who have had difficulties with the authorities simply because they choose not to use the school system. This new law would violate family privacy and civil liberties, result in the unfair targeting of home educating families and other minority groups, and is completely contrary to the values of a free society."
Critics say the bill shifts the fundamental concept of government. Instead of offering help to families if there's evidence of a need, it injects government as the controlling decision-maker in the family.
Preuss said, "The collection and sharing of personal data breaches both the UK Data Protection Act and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Furthermore, the 'named person' requirement of the bill should operate as an opt-in, similar to the current 'health visiting service' that the government provides. Unfortunately, many families in Scotland – not just those who home educate – have already experienced issues as officials are implementing policy related to this provision which isn't even legislation yet. Some have been hounded by professionals who refuse to go away, interfere into family life without legitimate reasons, and seek to mislead families about their parenting choices."
Will Estrada, director of federal relations for the HSLDA, notes the idea is just an outgrowth of the general belief at organizations such as the United Nations that government knows best for everyone, at all times.
"This is an example of why HSLDA opposes ratification of [various] U.N. treaties. The argument that these treaties are mere altruistic expressions melts away when you look at what is happening in the legislatures of countries who ratify the treaties and try to live up to their treaty obligations. A 'named-person' for every child and national databases? No thanks," Estrada said.
Michael Donnelly, HSLDA director for international relations, said, "There is a growing global battle that all homeschoolers must be aware of and fight together – the idea that the state should decide how children are educated, contrary to the decision of parents.
"This Scottish bill shows what form such oppression can take. We see the results of such oppression in countries like Germany and Sweden, where parents are fined, threatened and their children taken over their choice to homeschool. Free people must stand together to defend the rights of families to make educational and other decisions without government interference," he said.
When WND reported earlier on the issue, it was noted that while the number of child-abuse cases in Scotland has remained about the same over the last five years, the situations that do develop have gotten increasing attention in the media.
The result was the government plan, under a new bill that was praised by the Aileen Campbell, the nation's minister for Children and Young People.
"This government's vision for children and young people is clear: We want Scotland to be the best place in the world for them to grow up," she said.
The proposal outlines that a social worker will look after and monitor the child to be certain the child's rights are not being violated based upon the standards of the United Nations Conference on the Rights of the Child.
"A local authority is to make arrangements for the provision of a named person service in relation to each child residing in its area … " the new proposal explains.
The idea is based upon the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was adopted in 2008. Officials for a wide range of family and conservative groups in the United States have warned about the infringement on parental rights under the concept.
Parental rights groups in the U.S. warn that U.S. politicians could be walking the same course. The groups are proposing an amendment that specifically would guard parental rights and prevent the use of international laws to override liberties of families.
But they say parents need to be involved, suggesting families:
- Call lawmakers and urge them to preserve parental rights and family privacy. The Capitol Switchboard number is (202)-224-3121 or details are available at ParentalRights.org/States.
- Encourage members of Congress to become a cosponsor of the Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

subset: commoncrawl


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Merlin's weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Merlin's weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
"What's 43 Folders?"
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann's website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.
Amazon launches sale of DRM-free MP3s
Merlin Mann | Sep 25 2007
Daring Fireball: The Amazon MP3 Store and Amazon MP3 Downloader I'm with Gruber -- this is a welcome and fan-friendly addition to the marketplace. And, frankly, I'm glad there's finally somebody out there who can really give Apple some competition in this area. One thing: I'm surprised that MP3 sales links aren't yet mixed into regular CD sales pages. That must certainly be high on their TODO list. Because Amazon's Google juice is strong as hell, and on the day they put "Buy This Track Now" onto a few dozen thousand PR5+ music pages? Well. That may be the day Apple gets to really see what competition in this space looks like. POSTED IN:
About MerlinBio Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. He's best known for being the guy who created the website you're reading right now. He lives in San Francisco, does lots of public speaking, and helps make cool things like You Look Nice Today, Back to Work, and Kung Fu Grippe. Also? He's writing this book, he lives with this face, he suffers from this hair, he answers these questions, and he's had this life. So far. Merlin's favorite thing he's written in the past few years is an essay entitled, "Cranking." |
EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |


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Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more.
Please call Veolia Water Public Works 785-238-7142 to report a school zone warning light.
Show All Answers
Please call Veolia Water Public Works 785-238-7142 to report a missing or broken street sign.
Please call Public Works at 785-238-7142 to report a pothole. It will be scheduled for repair as soon as possible. Some potholes will not be repaired immediately if the City will be resurfacing that street in the near future.
Contact the Department of Public Works at 248-624-0141. Public Works will provide temporary mailboxes so that you can still receive mail. Permanent repairs to mailboxes and yards will be completed when weather allows.
By City Ordinance, it is the responsibility of the property owner to remove a fallen tree or tree limb. Public Works will remove tree limbs that fall on the street if it is blocking the roadway.
Please call the Junction City Police Department at 785-762-5912 during daytime hours and 911 if at night to report a stoplight not working.
By City Ordinance, the property owner is responsible for the repair or replacement of curbs and sidewalks on your property. The City will only replace curbs or sidewalks when it is part of a large street or improvement project.
Potholes develop because of water getting in between the road surfaces. The effect of freezing and thawing will push up the asphalt surface.
The Street Department responds to these emergencies based on public safety priority. The main "arterial" streets will be cleared first to allow ambulance, fire and police vehicles to travel throughout Junction City. The main business areas and schools are next. Residential streets are last to be cleaned or treated.


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SOFIA, Bulgaria – A prehistoric town unearthed in eastern Bulgaria is the oldest urban settlement found to date in Europe, a Bulgarian archaeologist said Thursday.
Vasil Nikolov, a professor from Bulgaria's National Institute of Archaeology, said the stone walls excavated by his team near the town of Provadia are estimated to date between 4,700 and 4,200 B.C. He said the walls, which are 6 feet high and 4 ½ feet thick, are believed to be the earliest and most massive fortifications from Europe's prehistory.
"We started excavation work in 2005, but only after this archaeological season did we gather enough evidence to back up this claim," Nikolov told The Associated Press.
The team has so far unearthed remains of a settlement of two-story houses with a diameter of about 100 meters (328 feet) encircled by a fortified wall .
Excavations have also uncovered a series of pits used for rituals as well as parts of a gate. Carbon analysis has dated them to the Chalcolithic age to between 4,700 and 4,200 B.C., he said — more than a millennium before the start of the ancient Greek civilization.
"New samples of the excavations have been sent to the University of Cologne, Germany, for further evaluation," Nikolov said.
Bulgaria, a Balkan country of 7.3 million, hosts numerous Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age settlement mounds as well as significant remains of Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine urban centers.
Nikolov said the settlement near Provadia was home to some 350 people who likely produced salt from the nearby rock-salt deposits.
"They boiled brine from salt springs in kilns, baked it into bricks, which were then exchanged for other commodities with neighboring tribes," Nikolov said, citing as possible evidence the gold and copper jewelry and artifacts that have been unearthed in the region.
The most valuable is a collection of 3,000 gold pieces unearthed 40 years ago near the Black Sea city of Varna. It is believed to be the oldest gold treasure in the world.
"For millenniums, salt was one of the most valued commodities, salt was the money," Nikolov said adding that this explained the massive stone walls meant to keep the salt safe.
The two-story houses, as well as the copper needles and pottery found in graves at the site, suggest a community of wealthy people whose likely work was the once-lucrative production of salt.
Nikolov expects more finds next summer when his team will return but complained about inadequate government funding.
"We wouldn't be able to continue without private donations," Nikolov said, naming the New York-based Gipson foundation, which provided most of the funds for this year's excavation.


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I've been trying to think of something to blog about and not doing too good. Winter means staying indoors as much as possible. I've pottered online a lot, I've done several jigsaw puzzles and sorted out files and folders on my computer, general maintenance and "spring cleaning", and I've watched TV.
Beyond that... the only thing we all do too much of over Christmas is... eat! And this year eating was even more exciting than usual because several gifts given were food. Hubby and I gave fancy ice cream and soup to my brother-in-law, dad got spreads, crackers and chutneys and hubby got assorted cheeses. We also bought a few joint family gift food items, so everyone could enjoy.
The result was the discovery of the most awesome sandwich ever. So good family here have demanded that I write about it, so that it is passed down through history. ;-)
The sandwich owes a big debt of gratitude to to one of the places we bought Christmas food gifts from - Rannoch Smokery.
They are based in Perthshire, but most of their meats, venison, lamb and beef, come from our area. They have a great online shop to order from. They do post worldwide, but you need to email them for details on your specific country postage, etc. They also have a recipe section, which is where hubby and I found inspiration to create our own perfect sandwich. I used their smoked beef with mozzarella and beetroot chutney as my inspiration...
Our version was with Rannoch's smoked venison. It was:
White bread (farmhouse style), thin sliced red onion, lettuce, smoked venison and then hubby had Rannoch's Game sauce while I had some of Rannoch's beetroot and horseradish chutney (dad's Christmas gift!).
Hubby had his with brie cheese, but dad and I preferred it without cheese.
It was delicious; so good we had the exact same sandwiches the next day, and the day after that... until all the venison was gone. *sniffle* :( It really was the perfect sandwich.


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Michael Dell has raised his offer to take Dell private by $0.10 per share, to about $24.7 billion, after the company was forced to delay a vote because stockholders seemed inclined to reject the bid.
The new bid of $13.75 per share from Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners prompted the company to adjourn the special stockholder meeting for a second time while a special committee of the board of directors evaluates the new bid. The meeting will be reconvened at 9am Central Time on August 2, the special committee said Wednesday.
However, the new bid comes with strings attached: The company must modify the voting requirements for its acceptance, Denali Holding, the acquisition vehicle Michael Dell and Silver Lake are using for their bid, wrote in a letter to the board's special committee.
Denali wants to modify the merger agreement to require the approval of "a majority of the outstanding shares held by the unaffiliated stockholders that are present in person or by proxy and voting for or against approval of the merger agreement at the stockholder meeting."
The existing merger agreement counts shares not voted, or abstentions, as votes against the proposal
The bidders gave Dell until 6pm Eastern Time Wednesday to accept the proposal.
Stockholders were due to vote on Michael Dell's original bid, first made in February, on July 18, but the board adjourned that meeting, postponing it to this Wednesday, after it appeared that many stockholders were against the proposal.
One person who will not be happy about the new adjournment is activitist investor Carl Icahn, who backs a rival proposal to recapitalize the firm.
On Tuesday Icahn wrote an open letter to stockholders calling for an end to the delays, saying, "We think that – after six months – the time for soliciting is over. It's time to vote. Do not move election day again. This is not a banana republic."


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(CNN) -- You eat right. You exercise. You get an annual physical. You probably think you're doing everything you can to stay healthy.
But here's one more thing you need to do: Learn how to argue well with your spouse.
A new study from Ohio State University shows just how physically harmful it can be to argue the wrong way. In the study, 37 married couples were brought into a hospital research lab, and a tiny vacuum device gave them eight 8-mm blisters on their forearms. Each couple was then videotaped while having conversations, and researchers graded them on their communication skills, noting who had distressing or hostile styles of communicating.
After 12 days, the researchers noticed that the blisters healed faster on the couples who had more positive communication styles, and the blisters healed the slowest on the couples with more negative styles.
Why would physical wounds heal more quickly among the better communicators? The researchers at Ohio State who did the study think it might have something to do with oxytocin.
"Oxytocin is a protective hormone," says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, the lead author of the study, who noted that the better communicators in her study -- the ones whose wounds healed the fastest -- had the highest levels of oxytocin in their blood.
The study was recently published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
There are certainly many examples of high-profile troubled marriages. For example, actor Charlie Sheen was arrested in connection with an argument he had with his wife last Christmas Day; a court hearing on the case was delayed Monday. But husbands and wives don't always make the connection that stressful marriages can actually harm your physical health.
"People get very surprised when they hear that marital stress is actually worse for your health than workplace stress," says Tara Parker-Pope, author of "For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage."
Overall, couples with more marital stress have worse immune function and higher blood pressure and heart rates, according to Debra Umberson, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas, who studies couples and stress.
"Marital stress is so pernicious because it's chronic, long-term, and you can't get away from it," she says "You're having these problems day in and day out year after year, decade after decade."
While both sexes suffer, some, but not all, studies show women suffer more physical effects from a bad marriage than men, Umberson adds.
Of course, having a happy marriage or relationship is easier said than done. Here are some tips for limiting marital stress to make you happier and physically healthier.
1. Argue well
"We tend to focus on how often we fight -- as in, 'we've been fighting a lot lately' or 'we've haven't fought much lately,'" Parker-Pope says. "But that's actually pretty meaningless. What really matters is the quality of your arguments."
Let's say, for example, your house is messy. You have a choice: you could say something like "This house such a mess, and you never help me clean it up" or you could say "I want us to learn how to be neater." The latter, marriage experts say, is better not just for your marriage but for your and your partner's physical health.
"Any elements of criticism or demand make your words stressful," Umberson says.
Here's another example. Let's say your partner has just baked cookies and the kitchen looks like a hurricane hit it.
"You could walk into the kitchen and notice the mess but not the cookies," she says. "Or you could say, 'It smells great in here, and I can't wait to have one of those cookies, but wow, it's messy in here."
If you think style doesn't matter, think back to that Ohio State study, Parker-Pope adds.
"Think about those blisters, and how slow they were to heal after a nasty comment," she says. "This should make everyone stop and realize, 'I need to think about what I'm doing to my health and my partner's health and make sure I'm fighting well to stay well.'"
2. Your spouse is annoying -- accept it!
Umberson noticed something interesting in her studies of happy couples.
"It's always been striking to me that when people get along, they just accept something annoying about their partner. They don't try to alter it," she says.
Case in point: The wife in one of her happy couples had the habit of stacking up books in various places around the house, including doorways. Her husband wasn't thrilled with it, but he learned to live with it -- and more.
"He saw her as a creative, interesting, quirky person," she says. "He just saw it as a reflection of why he'd fallen in love with her in the first place."
Here are more tips on how to have a happy marriage from the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center.
3. Don't yell at a yeller
If you're married to a yeller, don't yell right back, advises William Doherty, a marriage and family therapist and professor in the Family Social Science Department at the University of Minnesota.
"Be strong without shouting," he says. For example, if you're dealing with a chronic yeller, you could respond by saying in a calm voice: "This behavior that you're doing now I will not accept in this relationship, and if you continue it, I'm leaving."
4. Limit the Greek chorus
Doherty says he's noticed that women who are unhappy in their marriages will often confide in their girlfriends, and the typical response tends to be, "What a jerk!"
While it's fine to seek support from your social circle, it's also important to go to a counselor, who will do more than commiserate, and actually help you find a solution to your problems, which might include identifying the role you've played in your marital difficulties.
The website for the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy can help you find a therapist near you.
5. Recall the happy times
Even in stressed-out marriage, there are often moments of happiness. Tracy Todd, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Virginia, and spokesperson for the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, recommends analyzing them.
"Think of some recent times that were OK to positive. How did they occur? What did you do to help create the situation? What can you do to recreate a more positive environment?" he says. "Recall exceptions to the bitterness."
CNN's Sabriya Rice contributed to this report.


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Featured News - Current News - Archived News - News Categories
The Niagara Military Affairs Council held a special luncheon honoring World War II veterans on Sept. 28 at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station. The guest speaker was Rita Cosby, pictured, Emmy Award winner, special correspondent for the CBS program "Special Edition," and best selling author. She talked about her book, "Quiet Hero: Secrets From My Father's Past," which brought many attendees to tears as she described the former Polish resistance fighter.
World War II veterans, some shown, enjoyed lunch, a presentation of a NIMAC coin and a chance to share memories with each other. (photos by Susan Mikula Campbell)


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This chapter describes the support for TopLink provided by Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, and the Eclipse and NetBeans development environments.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Oracle JDeveloper is a Java EE development environment with end-to-end support to develop, debug, and deploy e-business applications and web services.
For JDeveloper information and downloads, see:
JDeveloper includes a number of features to aid in the development of applications that use TopLink. These features include wizards to reverse engineer JPA entities from database tables and to generate EJB 3.0 Session Beans with EntityManager
injection. It also includes methods for querying JPA entities and to test client generation.
Oracle JDeveloper's TopLink Editor enables you to quickly and easily configure and map your Java classes, EJB, and JPA entities to different data sources, including relational databases and XML schemas without using code. The TopLink editor supports multiple standards, including JPA and EJB 3.0.
The DBWSBuilder design-time utility enables you to generate a TopLink DBWS service descriptor and accompanying files. The utility automatically generates these files from database metadata to derive element-tag names and types. The utility also assembles the files into deployable archives.
For more information on Oracle JDeveloper's TopLink editor and DBWSBuilder, see JDeveloper online help.
Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) is a set of plug-ins designed to support Java EE development, where Eclipse is your preferred IDE.
For OEPE information and downloads, see:
OEPE helps you complete the following tasks to create a persistence layer that uses TopLink JPA:
Configure the Persistence Provider for JPA Projects.
OEPE provides an EclipseLink project facet that you can use in your Eclipse JPA project. Selecting the EclipseLink project facet makes the following changes to your project:
The project build path is automatically configured to include EclipseLink persistence provider JAR files shipped with Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1. Note that, even though the library files are not shipped with earlier versions of Oracle WebLogic Server, you can download them using the facet configuration wizard.
The database connection properties specific to EclipseLink can be automatically configured in the persistence.xml
file of your Eclipse JPA project.
Generate JPA Entities.
OEPE enables you to generate JPA entities using the OEPE JPA Entity Generation Wizard.
Annotate Java Classes.
Using OEPE, you can annotate existing Java classes (POJOs) with JPA annotations based on a database schema. When you do, Eclipse adds JPA annotations to the appropriate accessors.
Use a JPA Entity Diagram Editor.
OEPE provides graphical user interfaces for viewing entity relationship within a JPA project. Using the Entity Diagram Editor, you can view and modify relationships between entities, get easy access to the entity source code, and create additional object-relational mappings. Note that the editor lets you edit properties of both entities and their fields. You can also edit the persistence.xml
file that describes the persistence context.
Use SQL Schema Viewer.
OEPE enables you to examine your database schema using the SQL Schema Viewer that displays tables and relationships between them. The viewer displays tables as table nodes. Each node lists all the columns in a table and shows column data types. The node also provides primary and foreign key indicators in the form of icons. Foreign key relationships between tables are represented by links in a form of arrows.
The Eclipse IDE provides a number of features and utilities to help you create, run, and maintain applications that use JPA. These capabilities are extended if you install OEPE.
For Eclipse IDE information and downloads, see:
The Dali Java Persistence Tools Project provides extensible frameworks and tools for defining and editing object-relational mappings for JPA entities. JPA mapping support focuses on minimizing the complexity of mapping by providing entity generation wizards, design-time validation, and a robust UI for entity and persistence unit configuration.
For Dali information and downloads, see:
Other tools and utilities from the Oracle, open source, and third party vendor communities are available from the Eclipse Marketplace.
NetBeans IDE bundles Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1.1, which includes Oracle TopLink. The IDE provides full support for JPA-based code development. This support includes entity class wizards for constructing entities and editor hints to ensure that entities conform to the JPA specification. NetBeans also provides a persistence unit editor for constructing a persistence.xml
For NetBeans information and downloads, see:


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Floods, mudslides as storm wallops Southern California
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The second storm in a week brought record-breaking rainfall to parched Los Angeles on Thursday, jamming traffic on Southern California highways and prompting evacuations in wildfire-scarred areas.
A mudslide shut down Pacific Coast Highway and surrounding roads in and around Malibu neighborhoods charred by last month's massive fire that destroyed hundreds of homes.
Kirby Kotler and his neighbors spent days before the storm stacking 18,000 sandbags behind their homes along the highway. But when heavy rains arrived, mud, water and rocks blasted through the bags and across their properties.
Kotler, who wielded water hoses to beat back the flames in November, used a tractor to keep the debris from entering his home.
"Saving my house once again," said Kotler, 57, a lifelong Malibu resident. "I'm more than a little concerned. If we get another blast of heavy rain there'll be no stopping the hill from coming down."
Malibu officials reported no injuries and no major property damage.
At Hollywood Burbank Airport, about 15 miles (33 kilometers) north of downtown Los Angeles, nobody was hurt when a Southwest Airlines plane from Oakland skidded off a wet runway as it landed. The plane came to a stop in a graded area designed to slow aircraft that overshoot the runway, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
"As we landed, you could feel the brakes," passenger Grant Palmer told KABC-TV. "Then I started noticing the plane going sideways."
Palmer said he was prepared to tuck into an emergency posture while his unflappable co-worker continued writing emails during the rough landing.
Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California sorely need rainfall. Virtually the entire region is experiencing drought conditions, with portions of Los Angeles and Ventura counties and areas along the Mexican border in extreme drought.
The storm provided a big boost in and around Los Angeles. The downtown area set a new rainfall record for the day with 1.9 inches (4.8 centimeters) of rain, nearly double the previous record set in 1997, the National Weather Service reported. Normal monthly rainfall for December is only a bit more — 2.33 inches.
While rain caused numerous accidents and backups on LA-area freeways, heavy snow forced the closure of Interstate 5 in the Grapevine area between Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley. The hours-long shutdown along the key north-south route caused backups for miles.
Motorists were urged to use caution on mountain passes, where up to 6 feet (1.8 meters) of snow was predicted at higher elevations.
Mandatory evacuations were ordered for hundreds of homes in Trabuco Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains south of Los Angeles and Lake Elsinore neighborhoods in Riverside County. Both were burned in another massive wildfire earlier this year. Video showed a churning, muddy torrent full of tree trunks smashing down a bridge guardrail.
In Orange County, flooding closed several schools. Floodwaters also submerged several cars in Costa Mesa and rain partially collapsed the roof of a commercial building in Irvine but no injuries were reported.
A portion of southbound State Route 170 in Los Angeles was shut down after mud flowed onto the roadway. Firefighters rescued motorists from cars stuck in a flooded intersection in the city's North Hollywood area.
East of Los Angeles, a 13-car crash snarled the morning commute for several hours on a rainy freeway near Moreno Valley but caused only one minor injury, authorities said.
Firefighters also rescued a man from the flood-swollen Los Angeles River in suburban La Habra. Storm waters in the concrete flood-control channel have swept away people in previous years.
Follow Weber at https://twitter.com/WeberCM
The Western Journal has not reviewed this Associated Press story prior to publication. Therefore, it may contain editorial bias or may in some other way not meet our normal editorial standards. It is provided to our readers as a service from The Western Journal.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.


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I recently bought a Korg KP3 hoping that I could use my YAMAHA PSR E403 as input to the KP3, to play with effects, and then record the sound on my computer.
I also use Reason 5 to compose my electronic music.
Being new to producing audio, I guess that you can imagine my surprise as I got home trying to connect the devices and nothing worked. I realized that I was lacking a proper audio interface, and the proper way to connect these devices.
- Do I need an audio interface to use the above items, or something else?
- If so, is it possible to connect the items in such a way that Reason 5 can use the output? How would I connect them, what other software might I need?
Just to specify, I wish to
- compose electronic music in Reason 5
- sample, or modify, the output from the MIDI controller using the KP3 and use it in Reason 5 (in some way)


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To make use of encapsulation, the encapsulating protocol must be open-ended, allowing for arbitrary data to placed in its messages. Another protocol can then be used to define the format of that data.
For example, consider an Internet host that requests a hypertext page over a dialup serial connection. The following scenario is likely:
First, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used to construct a message requesting the page. The message, the exact format of which is unimportant at this time, is represented as follows:
Next, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used to provide the connection management and reliable delivery that HTTP requires, but does not provide itself. TCP defines a message header format, which can be followed by arbitrary data. So, a TCP message is constructed by attaching a TCP header to the HTTP message, as follows:
Now TCP does not provide any facilities for actually relaying a message from one machine to another in order to reach its destination. This feature is provided by the Internet Protocol (IP), which defines its own message header format. An IP message is constructed by attaching an IP header to the combined TCP/HTTP message:
Finally, although IP can direct messages between machines, it can not actually transmit the message from one machine to the next. This function is dependent on the actual communications hardware. In this example, we're using a dialup modem connection, so it's likely that the first step in transmitting the message will involve the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP):
Note that I've drawn the PPP encapsulation a little differently, by enclosing the entire message, not just attaching a header. This is because PPP may modify the message if it includes bytes that can't be transmitted across the link. The receiving PPP reverses these changes, and the message emerges intact. The point to remember is that the encapsulating protocol can do anything it wants to the message - expand it, encrypt it, compress it - so long as the original message is extracted at the other end.


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Your competition will be puzzled at your marketing success when you use our custom printed promotional puzzles to advertise your brand. When you give away any of our custom promotional puzzles, you will help your customers build problem solving skills and realize how much brain power they really have. Your organization will look great when you hand out personalized puzzles because you will encourage recipients to build their skills, and maybe work together to solve the customized puzzle! When clients or colleagues finish their promotional puzzle, they will realize that all of that work was worth the effort.
When personalized with your company name, logo and contact information, these custom promotional puzzles make great gifts and giveaways at events, or for use in child-related businesses' waiting rooms. We have a wide variety of styles suitable for all ages! Recipients will proudly show their completed custom puzzles and your brand to everyone.


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You have to give it to Bryan Singer for realizes his mistake in abandoning the X-Men franchise, then taking the first available opportunity to COMPLETELY ERASE the one X-Men movie he didn't direct from continuity. There were parts of Days Of Future Past that felt like he was just course correcting the damage done to the story, and there were other times that seemed like a giant middle finger, or Adamantium/bone claw to Brett Ratner.
Tuesday June 3rd is my birthday (I'm almost positive I'm turning 33). If you like to help me celebrate, please feel free to check out my Patreon campaign, my donation page or my Amazon wish list. The Patreon is honestly the greatest thing you can do for me in terms of making sure I am still able to do HijiNKS ENSUE as my full time job. Otherwise, I'll happily take an Internet high five via Twitter or Facebook.
It's still a relatively new film, so I won't get into spoilers or specifics, but Days Of Future Past is now probably my favorite X-Men movie. In it, you finally get to see some things (mutant powers, character traits, relationships, etc) that have been hinted at, but somehow left out of all of the previous films. It just feels like a more complete X-Men movie.
For those that HAVE seen it: don't you, like me, want to see an ENTIRE MOVIE set in that apocalyptic future? It was very intriguing and visually/stylistically quite cool. I've read that some of the original cast might make an appearance in Age Of Apocalypse (probably Wolverine, if I had to guess), but it seems like they are moving the franchise forward with the First Class crew from here on out. Age Of Apocalypse is supposed to take place in the 80's, but I wonder if Singer (assuming he sticks with it) will keep them from every butting up to the first X-Men movie which was set in 2000. In that film, Professor X was already in his 60's. I doubt James McAvoy is going to be able to pull that look off. Maybe they'll do 2 or 3 more movies set in the 80's to early 90's, then close the book on this cast as well.
I am still holding out hope for a Magneto movie starring Fassbender. He really does step into Magneto's skin and become that character fully. All of the conflict, the drive, the righteous indignation, the barely suppressed rage just flows out of his ever glance and carefully spoken word. I suppose I feel the same way about James Marsden's portrayal of Cyclops, in that I give zero shits about Scott Summers as a character and I give the same number of shits (which is holding steady at zero) about Marsden's portrayal of (to be clear) THE MOST BORING PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO CAN SHOOT A NUCLEAR CANNON OUT OF HIS FACE.
COMMENTERS: Feel free to discuss your thoughts on Days Of Future Past (without getting into spoiler territory), or X-Men movies in general (and the sliding/shifting/disappearing continuity). What X-Men storyline would you most like to see brought to life in film? What characters would you like to see solo films for?


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The highlight of this sneaker is the new tooling with a slightly elevated platform sole. These '80s-inspired shoes easily fit today's laid-back sneaker look of Californian beach towns. The premium leather upper and subtle PUMA branding give the sneakers a deserved an air of class.
- SoftFoam: PUMA's dual-density insole provides two unique layers of cushioning for customised comfort, fit and long-lasting durability
- Recycled Content: The upper of this shoe is made with at least 20% recycled materials as a step toward a better future
- Tennis-inspired silhouette
- Bootie construction
- Premium leather upper
- Cushioned footbed for optimum comfort
- Rubber outsole for grip
- Lace closure for a snug fit
- PUMA Formstrip at medial and lateral sides
- PUMA Logo at lateral side and tongue
- PUMA Cat Logo at heel


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Peter Rolufs, our friend in Tokyo, writes to propose, only half in jest, that an American orchestra commission an Ivory-billed Woodpecker Symphony. He sends a link to the captivating song of the Ivory-bill, which starts off sounding a bit like Giacinto Scelsi and then morphs into pure Louis Armstrong.
By way of addendum, Benjamin Weiss of Cambridge, MA writes: "As it happens, there already is a piece built around a recording of the song of the Ivory-bill Woodpecker. Lee Hyla's 'Wilson's Ivory-bill,' for baritone, piano, and tape, intersperses the recording, original composition, and bits of text from Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology, in which Wilson discusses the havoc wreaked on his hotel room by a captive Ivory-bill." Did not know. You can hear the piece here.


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Last week, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz announced the 12 semi-finalists for its annual competition for young musicians, often seen as the most prestigious in jazz today. That sparked a rally of Internet responses, notably from pianist Ethan Iverson, who expressed reservations about the "dark side to getting judged for your art." Indeed, Iverson suggested that Monk wouldn't have played "correctly" enough to even qualify for his own competition.
The very nature of artistic competitions makes this claim plausible. Because judges of such competitions must seek some criteria for decision-making, and because standard-practice technical skill is an obvious choice for a criterion, "chops" are likely to be emphasized strongly — perhaps at the expense of overall artistic merit. This potentially works against musicians like Thelonious Monk; even though we now consider the a pianist a jazz legend, his remarkably distinct style was not well-received early in his career.
But how does this claim hold up to what actually transpires at competitions? Several winners of competitions were quick to declare that they did not betray their artistic visions.
Dan Tepfer, who won the American Pianists Association Cole Porter Fellowship in a 2007 competition, relayed his experience that jazz competition judges could be remarkably holistic, over the course of several Twitter updates:
Monk wouldn't have won, true, but do you really think judges who are great musicians (Blade?) want to hear "correct"? // it's something I realized early in my competition phase: judges, like most people, just wanna hear good music. // I've seen very talented musicians try to calculate their way into winning (showing prowess in different styles, eg) & fail. // yes, there's a premium on craft in a comp, but the person who's going to win has craft & a strong sense of self.#myExperience // At any rate, I definitely never compromised when I was doing comps back in the day, & I did pretty well (won 3, bought piano) // a comp isn't going to reward a true left-field radical, like Monk, true. But Downbeat didn't dig him either at 1st. Think of // ...comps as just another slightly boring gatekeeper. Radicals have always had to find their own way, comps or no comps.
The New York Times' Ben Ratliff described pianist Joshua White as using "provocative, chord-related clutter" and having "a sound worth returning to." White took second place last year at the Monk Competition and had this to say on Twitter:
@ethan_iverson yo man, i digg what you're saying - but for the '11 piano MONK, i did pretty well just being myself and playing what i heard.
And here's 2007 Monk winner Ambrose Akinmusire on Twitter:
@ethan_iverson Nice article - but I Must say that I played ME and won. Perhaps I'm an exception?! Also I entered to get money so I wouldn't
@ethan_iverson Have to continue taking horrible gigs where I was forced to play in ways that felt dishonest as opposed to career gains.
Akinmusire, a trumpet player, is certainly no automaton. His brilliant second album was among the critics' consensus best of 2011. Here's the remaining list of winners since 2000:
There's not a dud in this bunch, technically speaking, but many are also known for connecting their proficiency to a highly personal, even iconoclastic style. The full list of winners and high finishers, dating back to 1987, is archived online. It's still difficult to see Monk among that list of names, but his chances are certainly better than might be expected.
In any event, there is a much larger issue here than hypotheticals about long-dead musicians. Behind "would Monk have won?" is a referendum on the efficacy of jazz competitions. Iverson couched his thoughts in this bigger picture: "Do competitions grow our audience? Do they help innovation? Are schools that train the young to win competitions a vicious cycle?" he asked in a follow-up essay.
Certainly, the Monk Competition attracts a certain media buzz. It can be said to support innovation by offering its winners a Concord Jazz record deal — a relatively powerful label with a lot of funding and marketing reach — and $25,000 in scholarship funds, plus $10,000 to second place and $5,000 to third place. The accompanying press attention, networking opportunities and official-looking credential can also open doors. And I can't comment if music schools train their students specifically for competitions, but for a young musician, competitions must sound lucrative: Winning can boost a career with little risk of deflating it.
However, these gains come at a price. While friendly, informal "cutting contests" are a huge part of jazz history, formal award competitions are unsettling, at best. The imperative to rank performers is at odds with the premium on self-expression; you wouldn't say Coleman Hawkins was better or worse than Lester Young, but that they were different stylists. And rivalry — at least the kind with actual stakes — is to be discouraged within a field which draws strength from its collaboration and cross-pollination.
Even musicians who do well in competitions express doubts about the process. Guitarist Miles Okazaki, who finished second in the 2005 Monk Competition, offered a suggestion on Twitter for improving the format. But he prefaced it by acknowledging, "Given that the singling out of individuals is already antithetical to collective creative music..."
In a 2010 blog post, pianist Chris Donnelly praised certain aspects of the 2010 Nottingham International Jazz Piano Competition, notably the "feeling of belonging and community." In the same essay, Donnelly accepted competitions only as a Band-Aid solution:
But it's still a competition. It's still exclusive and divisive.
If the goal is ultimately pure music and pure experience, competitions should be used — if necessary — as stepping-stones towards something better; they should be set up temporarily to spark interest among music-minded people. After a few years, a dedicated community will hopefully come to realize that competitions impede musical experience. Thus the competition can be eliminated.
It's unlikely that the Monk Institute will soon eliminate its sponsor-heavy, star-studded, well-reported centerpiece ceremony. (This year, the accompanying gala honors Madeleine Albright.) To its credit, it can also boast a track record for identifying and supporting high-level, unique talent.
But before competitions, there were more working opportunities which accomplished the same things without the inequitable, unpleasant win-lose element. Though his road was long, Monk eventually found mainstream media attention. Perhaps, like Donnelly suggests, we can eventually find "something better"?
Instead of a "#jazzolympics," suggests trombonist Jacob Garchik, perhaps the Monk Institute could spend its money on a different enterprise? "[T]hey could start a NYC club devoted to 25 and under artists," he wrote on Twitter.
So a new question: How else could we think about redirecting the resources of music competitions to other sorts of career development?
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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This family contains 2 species placed in a single genus, Choloepus. Two-toed sloths are found in Central America, throughout northern South America and in the Amazon basin.
Two toed sloths are medium-sized animals, with a body slightly more than half a meter in length and weight up to around 9 kg. They are covered with long, usually pale gray-brown fur (paler on the head) that takes on a greenish hue due to symbiotic algae living on the hairs. Under the coarse outer fur, the pelage grades into a layer of finer, shorter underfur. External ears are much reduced in size. The forelimbs and hindlimbs are long, with the forelimbs somewhat longer than the hindlimbs (but the difference is not as extreme as it is in three-toed sloths, Bradypodidae). The forelimbs end in two large, curved claws; these are attached to digits that are enclosed in a web of skin (syndactylous). The hindlimbs have three claws and are also syndactylous. The tail is small or absent.
The skulls of these sloths are relatively short. The rostrum is distinctly convex in profile. True tympanic b u llae are lacking. There is, however, an ectotympanic, and the pterygoids and alisphenoids are swollen, forming a sort of inflated bullae. The mandible has a large coronoid process, and the condyloid process lies in the same plane as the toothrow. The zygomatic arch is incomplete, the jugal ending in flared dorsal and ventral processes. The premaxilla is small.
Megalonychids have 5/4-5 cheek teeth. Incisors and canines are absent, but the anterior cheek teeth are enlarged, triangular in cross section, and canine-like. They are separated from the rest of the cheek teeth by a diastema. The anterior surface of the lower canine-like tooth meets the posterior surface of the upper, wearing against each other and continually sharpening their edges.
These sloths feed mainly on leaves, but also include some fruits, buds, and even small vertebrates in their diets. Like three-toed sloths, they move in a very slow and deliberate fashion (but megalonychids are faster than bradypodids). Most of their lives are spent high up in trees, although they, like bradypodids, come to the ground to defecate. They swim well. Two-toed sloths are capable of vigorous self defense, using their foreclaws to slash a predator and biting with their enlarged, canine-like cheek teeth.
Two toed sloths are perhaps more heterothermic than any other mammal. Their body temperatures fluctuate from as low as 24 degrees C to as high as 33 degrees C. Unlike three-toed sloths, however, they do not thermoregulate by basking.
Megalonychids first appear in the fossil record in the Early Miocene. They were found in North America in the Pleistocene, becoming extinct as recently as 11,000 years BP (giant ground sloths).
Literature and references cited
Barlow, J. C. 1984. Xenarthrans and pholidotes. Pp. 219-239 in Anderson, S. and J. K. Jones, Jr. (eds). Orders and Families of Recent Mammals of the World. John Wiley and Sons, N.Y. xii+686 pp.
Paradiso, J. L. 1975. Walker's Mammals of the World, Third Edition. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Savage, R. J. G. and M. R. Long. 1986. Mammal Evolution, an Illustrated Guide. Facts of File Publications, New York. 259 pp.
Vaughan, T. A. 1986. Mammalogy. Third Edition. Saunders College Publishing, Fort Worth. vii+576 pp.
Wilson, D. E., and D. M. Reeder. 1993. Mammal Species of the World, A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference. 2nd edition. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington. xviii+1206 pp.
Phil Myers (author), Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
having body symmetry such that the animal can be divided in one plane into two mirror-image halves. Animals with bilateral symmetry have dorsal and ventral sides, as well as anterior and posterior ends. Synapomorphy of the Bilateria.
uses smells or other chemicals to communicate
animals that use metabolically generated heat to regulate body temperature independently of ambient temperature. Endothermy is a synapomorphy of the Mammalia, although it may have arisen in a (now extinct) synapsid ancestor; the fossil record does not distinguish these possibilities. Convergent in birds.
having the capacity to move from one place to another.
reproduction that includes combining the genetic contribution of two individuals, a male and a female
uses touch to communicate