text:
'She's not like other people," Mike Nichols e-mailed me when I first approached him about being interviewed with his legendary partner in comedy, the soulfully offbeat and intensely private Elaine May. "As you know she ignores publicity but we'll see." John Lahr profiled Nichols for The New Yorker in 2000, but May declined Lahr's offer to do a similar profile of her. The last in-depth interview she gave was to Life magazine in 1967, six years after her and Nichols's professional breakup. She has mostly held her silence ever since.
But there it was in an e-mail from Nichols later that night: "Elaine says Yes. So sharpen your pencils and your tongue and we will commence."
Judd Apatow, the guest editor of this issue, who yields to no one in his admiration of Nichols and May, reminded me that it's been 51 years since the pair walked away from their comedy act at the height of their popularity, in 1961—Nichols to become a stage and film director, and May to become a playwright, screenwriter, director, and occasional actress. Their partnership lasted just four years, beginning at the University of Chicago, moving to nightclubs, then to television and radio, and culminating in a Broadway run and three top-selling comedy LP albums, all of which established Nichols and May as the freshest, most inventive, and most influential social satirists of their day. And then—we're still scratching our heads about this—it was over.
They first worked together as members of an improvisation group called the Compass Players, founded by Paul Sills and David Shepherd. Shelley Berman and Ed Asner were early members of the troupe, which later evolved into Chicago's Second City, the launchpad for, among others, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Harold Ramis.
When Nichols first met Elaine, he was dazzled—and intimidated—by her sheer inventiveness and dangerous wit. Their first improvisation happened offstage, at a chance meeting in the waiting room of Illinois Central's Randolph Street Station. Mike, pretending to be some kind of Russian spy, sidled up to Elaine: "May I seeet down, plis?" Elaine instantly went into character: "If you veesh." Nichols: "Do you haff a light?" May: "Yes, zertainly." Nichols: "I had a lighter, but … I lost eet on Fifty-seventh Street." May: "Oh, of course, zen you are … Agent X-9?"
Both were primarily actors at first. Nichols would leave Chicago to study the Method with Lee Strasberg in New York; May studied acting with the Russian character actress and teacher Maria Ouspenskaya. But their improvised skits for the Compass were so outside the box and so hilarious that they soon attracted an enthusiastic audience of students, faculty, and other intellectuals who hung around the University of Chicago.
Before then, comics had just stood up and told jokes—jokes that were usually written for them by gag writers. Think of Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Milton Berle. But a new generation was taking comedy to the edge: Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Nichols and May combined the political and social satire of Sahl and Bruce with the inspired comic skits of Caesar and Coca. "Individually, each one is a genius," says Woody Allen. "And when they worked together, the sum was even greater than the combination of the parts—the two of them came along and elevated comedy to a brand-new level." You might say there would be no Steve Martin, no Lily Tomlin, no Martin Short, no Saturday Night Live without them.
Soon a national audience was listening to Nichols and May on the radio, television, and rec ord albums, their voices nasal, earnest, and full of intimations of mortal, adult absurdities. Their skits mined everyday situations and mundane characters, stretching them to the breaking point of comic possibility: the woman psychologist left frustrated and weeping when her favorite patient announces his decision to spend Christmas with his family ("Merry Christmas, Doctor"); the officious operator in "Telephone," who drains valuable seconds from the desperate caller's last dime trying to spell his party's name ("K as in knife P as in pneumonia … "); the jealous doctor who asks his nurse in the middle of an operation, "Is there somebody else? … It's Pinsky, isn't it?" ("A Little More Gauze"); the Cape Canaveral rocket scientist whose phone call from his overbearing, guilt-tripping mother leaves him regressed and babbling ("Mother and Son").
I grew up listening to them on the radio from the backseat of my parents' car and on shiny LPs, which my parents played for friends after they'd all come back from dinner out and the babysitter had been sent home. My parents thought I was asleep in bed, but in fact I was hiding behind the door in the next room relishing the forbidden adult sophistication of it all. So it was incredible for me to see Nichols and May more than 50 years later, together in the same room, at Nichols's Manhattan apartment, like one of their album covers come to life. I could easily see why men have fallen like bowling pins for Elaine. For our meeting she was dressed in a black-and-white-striped shirt and skinny black pants, her dark hair still worn long. The first words out of her mouth were "Your name is Sam. Can I assume we're all atheists here?" We first had a lunch of mushroom risotto, but Mike noticed that Elaine wasn't eating much. "You didn't eat anything, Elaine. Don't you like your lunch?" he asked.
"It's absolutely tasteless. It's good for us." She then handed me the salt, explaining, "We can't have salt. You might need this."
"I'm worried about Jewish narcissism, Elaine" was Mike's opening gambit. She assured him that he had nothing to worry about. He then asked her which recent movies she'd seen, but she couldn't think of any. What about TV? Nichols asked. He thought the best work was being done there, in such shows as Breaking Bad.
Elaine hadn't seen it. "With my addictive personality," she said, "I'm afraid to start watching a TV series, but I love Law & Order—it's so straightforward and has no plot. It's a real pleasure."
Mike mentioned Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, giving it a thumbs-up. "I'm a pariah at dinner parties," Elaine responded, "because I don't get all this about Lincoln. It's not like he wanted to free all the slaves right away. And all that death. Why didn't we just stop buying cotton?"
But when we moved into the living room to sit in big comfortable armchairs at either end of a large coffee table, Elaine looked as if she were about to flee. "We had so much fun at lunch," she said. "Now look at us. I'm nervous and terrible at this."
"That makes two of us," I told her. "Would you like to see my questions?"
She took my List of Questions—a number of them supplied by Mr. Apatow—and proceeded to take over the interview. Holding onto the list for dear life, she read the first question: "Did you have any ground rules for improvisations at the Compass Players?"
Nichols answered, "The greatest rule was yours, Elaine: when in doubt, seduce. That became the rule for the whole group. And looking back, because I did teach acting for a while, we figured out over a long time that there only were three kinds of scenes in the world—fights, seductions, and negotiations. Do you remember this?"
"But we also discovered that the scene that always works is a blind date," May said.
One of their most famous sketches, "Teenagers," is not so much a blind date as a look at two high-school kids parking by a lake. She is shy and vulnerable and giggly, taking occasional nervous stabs at intellectual profundity: "Have you noticed the lake at all? It's just suicidally beautiful tonight You look at that lake out there and you think, what is it? … And it's just a lot of little water, and then you put it all together, and it's this entire lake, you know? That just knocks me out." He's a callow jock trying desperately to make out with her. When she demurs, he says, "I know exactly what you're going to say. You're going to say that I wouldn't respect you, right? Look … I want to tell you right here and now that I would respect you like crazy!"
Locked in a long kiss, Elaine exhales smoke out of the side of her mouth. You can see the same inspired moment in The Graduate, directed, of course, by Mike Nichols, who reprised the joke with Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson.
"The second scene that always works is a card game," May continued. "And the scene that never works is a scene about divorce."
She moved on to the next question: "What do each of you bring to the partnership?" She answered it. "Well, I brought a kind of rough, cowboy-like attitude, and Mike was very attractive and groomed and … "
Nichols laughed.
"What you brought," he explained, "is that you always knew the character that would not be the theater choice, but the real-life choice, and therefore the comedy choice. Do you remember when we did the whorehouse scene and you were the madam? And you were like somebody's aunt When the guys were through with the girls, you would say, 'It was lovely to see you. Please say hello to [your wife] Edith.' You did a clubwoman for the madam and you did a madam for a clubwoman."
Elaine jumped in. "We were very similar. I mean, he was a Method actor, and I was Method. One of the big strengths was that we really, actually, worked the same way. We found the same things funny; we were both mean and Method. So that was the strength. Also, I found him hilarious."
"I found her hilarious."
One of the delights of their performances was how often the two broke each other up—you can hear it in their recordings. "Once during 'Teenagers'—I still remember it—during the kissing, we either hit teeth or something, and we began to break [into laughter]," recalled May. "And we stayed together in the kiss until we could pull ourselves together, and then we parted and something happened, and we broke up again, and we couldn't stop. At first the audience laughed with us, and then they began to get a little annoyed. I remember during intermission, Mike said we had to pull ourselves together—these people have paid an enormous amount of money to see us, and we have to be professional. So we went back onstage and just fucked the second act. We laughed, and we couldn't stop."
Nichols remembered that when Forbidden Broadway, a New York satirical revue of current and classic theater, did a send-up of Nichols and May all they had to show was "the two of us walking onstage, beginning to speak, and then breaking up. And then we would try to say something else and break up again. And then, after the third time, one of us turned to the audience and said, 'You'd laugh too if you knew what we were laughing at.' It was brilliant."
"When Mike did break up," May recalled, "he would say this terrific line to get me off the hook. He would say, 'Go on without me.' "
May described Nichols as "an amazingly good actor, really good, who constantly says he isn't." This is a conversation they seem to have had often over the years. Nichols countered that there were "a couple of parts I'm really good at, but—remember when I quit The Sopranos? I was [supposed to be] the shrink [Dr. Krakower] that [Carmela Soprano] goes to. And there was a reading with about 40 people sitting around many tables put together, with a lot of spaghetti behind us, and we read that week's script. I was the only person at the table who had to act. Everybody else was their character. And already I loved it. [Show creator] David Chase and I got to be friends after that, but I said, 'I'm sorry to tell you, I'm the wrong Jew. You need a whole other kind of Jew for this doctor. I'm miscast, forgive me.' And I took myself away. I can only do certain parts. I see the words and I say, 'Oh, this I can say, no problem.' But when I can't, I'm no good, because I'm not an actor. It's a fluke, I'm telling you."
"It doesn't mean you're an actor if you can act," Elaine corrected.
"Oh, I thought it did."
Nichols was once offered the role of Hamlet to open the Guthrie Theater, in Minneapolis. "I said, 'I don't have the speech for Hamlet, I don't have the carriage for Hamlet, I can't fence, I don't look like Hamlet, I can't possibly do it.' "
"But here's the thing," Elaine explained. "One of the reasons that it would be easy for you to do Hamlet was that you would by the second week see how hilarious Hamlet is—30 years old, still in college, obviously drinking a little bit, hanging out with those two other guys, doesn't really do anything. Pretty soon, as you delved into him—even maybe a little potbelly—you would start finding out what it was really like."
Elaine moved on to another question from the list: "Your improv comedy that came out of the University of Chicago has been credited, blamed, in parentheses, for changing comedy from stand-up comics telling jokes to actors creating satiric skits. Yes?"
"Yes," Mike said, "with some others. We were not alone. There was also ... "
"Oh, don't babble on."
"I'm sorry."
Elaine read the next question: "Who are your comic or satiric heroes?"
Mike answered, "Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca … and Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce opened for us for six months in that nightclub that we were in."
"I thought we opened for him?"
"He opened for us, Elaine. And I watched him every night, and he was more than a genius. He was a great spirit, and he was, for want of a better word, very innocent and sweet. Every time he made things up, which was every show, it was the best. He changed the face of comedy by saying the unsayable, and it was hilarious. And then many people began to do that, and it goes further and further, and it gets more and more elegant. For instance, Chris Rock isn't more shocking, but he has more style while doing the same thing. He's taking it to a new place."
"But I think the guy closest to the satire that is being performed now," Elaine said, "was Mort Sahl. He was really sort of like Jon Stewart, but he made it up every day all by himself, without writers, from the newspapers."
I asked Nichols if there was anything he missed about doing comedy. "I miss terribly the ability to get revenge instantly," he answered.
Elaine read the next question, "Is The Daily Show really satire or just revenge?," and immediately answered it: "It's satire, but satire is revenge. Lewis Black is less satirical; Jon Stewart can really put a jab in, as can Stephen Colbert, but oddly enough Lewis Black, because he's so angry, can't. I mean, that doesn't mean that he's less; it just means that his anger means 'I'm helpless.' "
She shrugged.
"I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define," said Mike.
Elaine asked, "Do you remember the show Omnibus? It was that English guy, whose name I don't remember … "
"Alistair Cooke?" I interjected. It's one of the few times I spoke up: just saying his name made me feel smart.
"Yes, Alistair Cooke," Elaine answered. "He was having a discussion about humor—what was funny—on Steve Allen's show. And while they were speaking Alistair Cooke took a pie and smashed Steve Allen in the face with it, and the audience fell to fucking pieces, and I thought, This is an amazing demonstration of humor. I don't know if it would have been funny had it not been Alistair Cooke."
"Yes. The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it—that's why it's funny," added Mike.
Elaine returned to the list: "Did I ask you what the point of humor in society is?"
"What is the point of humor in society?"
"Well, it's not hard to answer."
"Oh. Of course not. Go on, Mike."
"It's the expression of freedom. The only way I know that this is still a free country is when I watch Jon Stewart's show, and Stephen Colbert, where you can say anything you damn please."
Elaine with the next question: "What have you learned, Mike?"
"I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things. For instance, if you grow up odd and—what is it when you're left out? You're not an extrovert—"
"No, when you grow up—"
"Peculiar. Different," Mike continued. "The degree to which you're peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity? If you survive, because you've gotten lucky—and there's no other reason ever to survive except luck—you will find that the ability to hear people thinking is incredibly useful, especially in the theater."
The film critic David Thomson observed of Elaine May, "The air of Jewish fatalism is always there in her work." Born in Philadelphia, she spent her childhood traveling with her father, Jack Berlin, who performed in a Yiddish theater company, where she sometimes played a little boy named Benny. Around the age of 10, when her father died, she gave up the role. ("I developed breasts, and our people do not believe in breast-binding," she told Life in 1967.) At 14 she dropped out of high school in Los Angeles—where she had moved with her mother after having attended something like 50 schools during her itinerant youth—and at 16 she married Marvin May, and had a daughter, Jeannie, who, as an actress-screenwriter, would take the family name of Berlin. The marriage broke up, and after a string of odd jobs (private eye, roofing saleswoman), Elaine looked for a college that would take her without a high-school diploma. The University of Chicago apparently said it would, so, with $7 in her pocket, she hitchhiked to Chicago, where instead of enrolling she just showed up at classes and attended theater productions on campus, where she met Mike.
In A New Leaf, one of the films Elaine later co-wrote, directed, and starred in, the character of the painfully shy botanist Henrietta Lowell comes close to self-parody. Like Henrietta, Elaine was famously disheveled, wearing mismatched clothes generously sprinkled with the ashes from her cigarettes. Like Henrietta, she was brilliant in some academic and artistic fields, but clueless in others. As one wag pointed out, "She knew about theater and psychoanalysis. She didn't know about anything else. She didn't know if Eisenhower was a Republican or a Democrat."
As for Mike's outsider status, when he and his brother, Robert, first arrived in New York in 1939 on the Bremen and saw a delicatessen with Hebrew letters on the window, Mike, then seven, turned to his father and asked, "Is that allowed here?" His family had just escaped Nazi Germany, where Jewish culture was being decimated. One of Mike's grandfathers, a prominent writer and a leader of the Social Democratic Party named Gustav Landauer, was close friends with Martin Buber and was killed by German soldiers in 1919. Mike's grandmother Hedwig Lachmann also established herself in society circles, having translated into German Oscar Wilde's play Salomé, which Richard Strauss later adapted as a libretto for his opera of the same name.
"American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise," recalled Nichols. "We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in the old country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast."
His father, a physician, died when Mike was 12; Mike lived with his brother and his mother, Brigitte, in a kind of dreary poverty in Manhattan's West 70s, in "one of those tiny apartment houses with podiatrists on the first floor," as he told John Lahr.
It was Paul Sills who introduced the two outsiders to each other. Elaine remembers that Sills said, " 'I want you to meet the only other person on the campus of the University of Chicago who is as hostile as you are.' And I think we were that hostile because we could hear people's thoughts. But also, the other thing is, let's face it, we were peculiar and geeky—but we got much nicer. But we're also richer and more successful. I don't know what we'd be like if we weren't."
Elaine went back to reading the list: "What is important in life and art?"
"Love and babies," Mike shot back. "That's my answer. What's yours?"
"I can give you Freud's answer."
"What's that?"
"Love and work."
"Yes, I love his answer, always did. What's yours?"
"Money and success."
"In life and art?"
"Oh, sorry," Elaine continued. "My mind wandered. I just read the word 'important.' What is important in life and art? You know, when I was very young, I thought it didn't matter what happened to me when I died, so long as my work was immortal. As I age, I think, Well, perhaps if I had to trade dying right now and being immortal with just living on, I would choose living on. I never thought I would say that. I feel it's so unethical and wrong."
Mike jumped in. "I'm very weird about survival because the older I get, the more I think that the life that I started with—I was insanely, unfairly, ridiculously lucky. All Jews went to the camps, but we not only didn't go to camps, we were allowed to leave the country. We got to America, and everything that happened was luckier and luckier. I didn't finish college. I just stopped going to class, and I got a job on the radio. I didn't know anything. I couldn't get a diploma in anything! Over and over I was luckier than I had any right to be. I found the love of my life [Nichols is married to broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer]. How many people do that?"
"Luck is very strange," Elaine answered, moving to the edge of her chair. "I'm lucky in that I met the guy who said, Go to the University of Chicago, and I hitchhiked there. Then I met Paul Sills, and then I met you. My few pieces of luck."
"No, there are others—it goes on and on," Mike said.
"One piece of luck spikes to another piece of luck, spikes to another piece of luck. I don't want to embarrass you—I think you know you're so intelligent and you're so talented that, without those things, what the fuck good would your luck have done you? Do you think Diane would have married you if you were some putz?"
While at the University of Chicago, Nichols not only acted in plays but also found work and a measure of celebrity as a daytime radio announcer at WFMT, an eclectic FM station that played mainly classical music. He eventually dropped out of school and moved back to New York to study with Strasberg, while May stayed in Chicago, where she was acting and trying to develop a film treatment based on Plato's Symposium in which everyone was drunk. ("That's the only way it makes sense," she explained.)
Nichols returned to Chicago in 1955 and joined the Compass Players, where his real collaboration with May began. The Compass later opened an outpost at the Crystal Palace, in St. Louis, and Nichols, by then married to his first wife, singer Patricia Scott, continued to perform there with Elaine. In his book Seriously Funny, Gerald Nachman quotes Jay Landesman, who ran the Crystal Palace, as saying Nichols and May "were so good, they eventually threw the company off balance." After a brief skirmish among the Compass actors, Mike and Elaine headed east in the fall of 1957 with $40 between them. In New York, they auditioned for the theatrical manager Jack Rollins.
Two months later, they were famous.
"Gentleman Jack" Rollins was a legend in New York, known as "The Dean," "The Guru," and "The Poet of Managers," according to Janet Coleman's The Compass. If he hadn't already existed, you could have found him in the pages of Damon Runyon: a cigar-smoking gambler given to $2 bets on the ponies who was also an intellectual and a devotee of fine wines. His career began almost by accident, after he met folksinger Harry Belafonte flipping hamburgers in New York. (Unbutton your shirt, Harry, and sing calypso!)
Rollins, whose clients would come to include Woody Allen, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Robert Klein, and Billy Crystal, met with Nichols and May among the samovars and year-round Christmas lights of the Russian Tea Room, near Carnegie Hall. Over borscht and beef Stroganoff, they manically ad-libbed skits that they "not only had never rehearsed but had never even thought of until that desperate minute," Nichols once recalled. The two were so broke at the time that they were as thrilled that Rollins paid the bill as when he offered to sign them. "I was stunned by how really good they were," Rollins remembered. "I'd never seen this technique before. I thought, My God, these are two people writing hilarious comedy on their feet!"
Rollins got his friend Max Gordon, who owned the Village Vanguard, in Greenwich Village, and co-owned the Blue Angel, on East 55th Street, to give them a chance. They went on at the Blue Angel as an afterthought to the Smothers Brothers, in their matching red jackets, and sultry singer Eartha Kitt. Their skits went over so well that Gordon let them open for Mort Sahl at the Vanguard.
Mike asked Elaine, "Do you remember that some nights [Mort Sahl] would feel the crowd was ready and say, 'They're not going on tonight. I'll go right on'? We were very pissed with him because we'd be ready to go and he'd say, 'No, no. Skip them—I'm ready.' But he was very funny."
A few days after they opened, they moved back to the Blue Angel, where The New Yorker caught "their little dialogues" and enthusiastically, if oddly, compared them to the famous theatrical couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Variety, more to the point, called them the "hipsters' hipsters."
If Rollins had worried that they were too intellectual for a mainstream audience, The New York Times wrote that they had "both snob and mob appeal," like Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Rollins booked them into Town Hall, and they filled it twice, to adoring reviews. The New York Post enthused, "Nichols and May have mastered what appears to be a new comedy form—improvisation … the way jazz musicians will throw a phrase at each other and 'make up the music' as they go along."
"The best [show] we did was in Town Hall," Mike said, looking a tad nostalgic. "Was there any record of it?" He turned to Elaine and asked, "Why didn't we stick with the act? It was your fault. You wanted to stop. We should still be doing this."
"We can do it again," she offered.
"It would be different."
"We'd have to drop 'Teenagers.' "
"No, don't," I protest.
"No, certainly not," Mike said. "It would be funnier."
Looking back, perhaps there was just too great a physical and emotional toll, such as the night their "Pirandello" sketch got out of hand. "We scared the shit out of everybody," Mike recalled. "You clawed my chest bloody. How can you not remember this? And somebody tried to save us by applauding."
"In Chicago?"
"No, it wasn't. It was in Westport [Connecticut]. We were on the way to Broadway."
"Thank God it was not on Broadway."
"I had you by the front of your shirt, and I had been slapping you back and forth for quite a while, and my chest was pouring blood. You don't remember this? And they brought down the curtain. They didn't wait for our announcement or anything. We fell into each other's arms sobbing. This is one of my strongest memories of all time."
"Well, I'd like to remember it. It's a great memory," Elaine said.
Their success in New York clubs and at Town Hall got the attention of television executives, and Nichols and May were invited to do their brand of improv on Jack Paar's Tonight show. They bombed.
"It was the first nightmare I ever experienced," Mike recalled. "We started and realized the audience had no idea what we were doing. And after not very long, Jack Paar said, 'Hurry it up, kids.' It was the worst experience in our lives, you remember? We were a catastrophe."
"It was awful."
Rollins realized they needed the luxury of time—which the Tonight show didn't give them—so he got them booked on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show, where they did "Disc Jockey," in which "the very wonderful, very talented Barbara Musk" is interviewed by radio D.J. Jack Ego. That got the attention of Omnibus, the Sunday-afternoon show hosted by Alistair Cooke. Omnibus gave them 15 unedited minutes, after which "the world broke open for them," Rollins's partner Charles Joffe recalled. There were lines around the block for their shows at the Blue Angel. Milton Berle couldn't get in, which symbolically marked the end of one comedic era and the beginning of something new. Even Jack Paar came around, telling people he had discovered them.
More TV shows followed: The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall, even a Ginger Rogers special. But their stint on a game show called Laugh Line, with Dick Van Dyke, proved a rare disappointment in their brief, shining television career.
"It was the absolute nadir," Mike recalled. "We were supposed to improvise captions from seeing cartoons. You cheated, Elaine. You read the captions. You always read from what you had prepared."
"Laugh Line was sort of the way I am at interviews. I could think of nothing."
"Did you guys do other game shows?" I asked.
"Well, we only did one," Mike answered. "We were mystery guests on What's My Line? and they didn't guess us. You remember?"
"It was disappointing."
(The tricks memory plays: as you can see on YouTube, Random House publisher and man-about-town Bennett Cerf had little difficulty guessing "Mike and Elaine.")
"Was it fun doing commercials?" I asked.
"It was the most fun doing commercials, I think, for us both," Elaine answered.
Their dozens of 10-second animated cartoons to advertise Jax beer still sound contemporary, with their offbeat, deadpan humor, such as the following:
ELAINE: I have something to tell you, darling.
MIKE: Fine, darling. Can I have a beer, please?
ELAINE: Of course, darling. Here is a glass of cold, extra-dry, sparkling Jax beer.
MIKE: Thank you.
ELAINE: You're welcome. Phyllis shaved the dog today.
TV was making Nichols and May famous, but it wasn't making them happy. Eventually, May said, "I have no sense of mission about our work. I have nothing to tell people." She hated giving interviews even then and sometimes teased her interlocutors: "I will tell you something," she told one reporter, "but I warn you, it is a lie." They quit Laugh Line after three weeks and turned down, in Nichols's words, at least 99 shows offered to them—"husband-and-wife situation comedies, brother-and-sister situation comedies … panel shows, quiz shows, musical comedies No one offered us a Western."
They crowned their career on television with an outrageous stunt on the 1959 Emmy Awards telecast, in which May presented an award for "the Most Total Mediocrity" in the industry, accepted by Mike Nichols as "Lionel Klutz," a flashy television producer who bounced onstage and gave her a big, wet kiss on the mouth.
"Oh, God. It was great," Mike recalled. "Mediocrity—it was the award for mediocrity, for 'year in and year out producing garbage'! I came out and I said, 'I'm very proud, but how we managed to do it is … no matter what suggestions the sponsor makes, I take them. And most important of all, I think I am trying to offend no one anywhere on earth. In 10 years of producing, we have received not one letter of any kind.' "
The apotheosis of Nichols and May's performing career was An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which opened on October 8, 1960, at the John Golden Theatre, on Broadway's West 45th Street. Opening night was a gala, preceded by a buffet at Sardi's. Carol Channing, a young, skinny Richard Avedon, Sidney Lumet, and Gloria Vanderbilt were among the guests. The producer, Alexander H. Cohen, arranged for an armada of Rolls-Royces to bring guests from Sardi's to the theater, a block away. A Ferris wheel was set up in front of the theater to celebrate the opening; fans danced in Shubert Alley after the curtain fell on the first night. Nichols and May presented their usual sketches and only one improv a night, but the audience went away feeling that everything was improv. When the audience threw out suggestions, Nichols and May were ready for every literary style—Faulkner, Beckett, Tennessee Williams. In one sketch, Nichols parodied Williams as "Alabama Glass," who drinks deeply while describing, in a honeysuckled southern accent, his new play (Pork Makes Me Sick in the Summer), complete with a Blanche-like heroine who "has taken to drink, prostitution, and puttin' on airs," and a husband who has committed suicide "on bein' unjustly accused of not bein' a homosexual."
An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May was a triumph. The duo had caught the Zeitgeist, and the public had fallen in love with them. Rollins was turning down something like eight TV offers a week. "It was amazing," Elaine said. "Our opening night was the worst performance I think we ever gave because our friends were there. And they were terribly nervous for us. And it only seemed to show how nervous we were."
"That's true."
"We were absolutely certain that we had failed totally."
The show ran for nearly a year, with 308 performances.
And then they just walked away.
Elaine read the next question: "Did you walk away from the partnership and your brand of satire because America was changing with the Kennedy White House, and it seemed less important to push back against a society that had loosened up a bit?
"Yes, that was it! That was it. Yes."
"No, we stopped because Elaine got sick of it. That's the truth. You didn't want to do it anymore."
"Don't you see, Mike, the opportunity this question gives us for a little depth?"
"Please let me give my answer. My answer is the truth for a change. I also think it's such a wonderful reason."
Elaine continued reading: "Or did you both just want to break out into wider spheres—acting, writing, directing?"
Mike jumped in. "Can I answer that? Well, there's two things: One is that Elaine, when I met her, was already a writer. You were forever writing and dropping your pages. I was this guy who did improvs, to my own surprise. I was going to start my life later. And we both had a plan—not to be in show business." As he told Gerald Nachman, "It was just a handy way to make some money until we grew up Everyone thought we were in show business, but we knew we weren't—we were snobs We kept thinking, How the fuck did we get here?"
Mike did go on to direct, and by 1965 he had three hit shows running concurrently on Broadway: Luv, The Odd Couple, and Barefoot in the Park. Elaine continued to write, creating a full-length play in 1961 for him to star in, A Matter of Position, which didn't get off the ground, closing at the Walnut Street Theatre, in Philadelphia, after 17 performances. It must have been strange for Mike alone onstage, with Elaine in the audience, watching and assessing his performance. In any case, their working relationship ceased after that, until 1996, when Elaine adapted The Birdcage, from the French film La Cage aux Folles, for Mike and, two years later, was nominated for an Oscar and Writers Guild Award for her screenplay adaptation of Joe Klein's Primary Colors, directed by Mike.
The Golden Theatre was near the Majestic Theater, where Richard Burton was starring in Camelot. "That's how I got my first job in movies, because I got friendly with Richard," Mike recalled. Burton and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, chose him to direct Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "So it's just opportunism. I got close to a star and I made it pay off. That's my advice to the young people, if you possibly can."
Nichols's directing career has never stopped: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, winning 5. Burton, who starred in the movie with Taylor, wrote in his diaries, "The last man to give me direction which I found interesting … and sometimes enthrallingly brilliant was Mike Nichols and that was in the comedy sequences of Woolf."
Nichols followed that up with The Graduate, in 1967, the iconic, generation-defining film of the decade, for which he won the Oscar for best director. (He cast Anne Bancroft to play Mrs. Robinson because, in part, she was the same kind of dark, sardonic beauty as Elaine.) Catch-22 followed, and since then he's worked with America's greatest actors in films such as Silkwood, Working Girl, Carnal Knowledge, Heartburn, Closer, Charlie Wilson's War, and, for television, Wit and Angels in America. Throughout it all, he's continued to return to the theater: in 1988 he directed Steve Martin and Robin Williams in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and most recently he did Death of a Salesman, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman. He has won seven Tony Awards for best director.
May continued to work on screenplays, most often as a script doctor. There was trouble with Paramount over her 1976 movie, Mikey and Nicky, starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, which she wrote and directed. (She secreted away a few reels of the film when the studio complained about how long it was taking her to edit the four-year-overdue final cut.) The industry began giving her the cold shoulder, until Warren Beatty, a friend and admirer, rescued her by giving her the chance to co-write Heaven Can Wait, in 1978, earning her an Oscar nomination and a Writers Guild Award.
What few people know is that she was also the co-author of Reds, Tootsie, Labyrinth, and Dangerous Minds—all uncredited.
Looking down at the sheet of questions, Elaine asked herself, "Don't you like credit?"
"What a brilliant fucking question," Mike shouted. "What is your answer?"
"Well, I didn't have any control."
"There you have it."
"Yes. You can make a deal if you're going to do the original writing. But if you're going to do the original re-writing, you can't. You're a hired gun. No matter how much you write, what you write, you're still a hired gun, and you have no control."
"That's a perfect answer."
"Well, it's sort of the truth. Not hilarious, but—"
"In a sense, the truth is the perfect answer."
"The only time I really ever took credit was when I worked with Mike."
"That's actually true."
"Because I knew him, and I thought probably he won't fuck it up."
"Or fuck you up. [As a re-writer] you have nothing at stake."
"It's like when the [studio] guard is bringing you coffee and glances at a sentence you wrote and laughs, then leaves. You change everything in the script but that one thing that the schmuck who brought coffee laughed at. It's sort of like that."
"But the best thing," said Mike, "after having total control, is having none. I think that's accurate about the movie business. You have more control as the schmuck that wanders in."
"But the other thing you have when you don't take the credit is great control because you can say your name isn't on this. I'm getting nothing out of this."
May did get credit for writing two original screenplays—A New Leaf and Mikey and Nicky—and the blame for Ishtar, the 1987 mega-bomb she wrote and directed. She directed the hilarious comedy The Heartbreak Kid—the first one, in 1972, co-starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd, in which Jeannie Berlin, her daughter, is funny and touching as the abandoned, sunburned bride with cold cream on her face.
Nichols has filed more than a few amicus briefs on behalf of Ishtar, which, although much critical ink has been spilled over it as a kind of cinematic bridge to nowhere, is in fact a charming, if not downright prescient Reagan-era Road to Morocco. ("If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today," Elaine said.)
In perhaps the most Pirandello-ish turn of their careers, in 1980 Nichols and May played George and Martha in a six-week run of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven. Frank Rich reviewed their reunion, noting that "this legendary pair … transform a Strindbergian duel of the sexes into a knockout battle of wits." Rich noticed that the two managed to find the play's biting humor. "We arrive expecting to watch two rusty stand-up comics do a novelty act," he wrote. "We leave having seen four thinking actors shed startling new light on one of the great dark plays of our time."
"Do you know my theory about Virginia Woolf, which I think I only developed lately?" said Mike. "It may be the only play—certainly the only play I can think of, including Shakespeare—in which every single thing that happens is in the present; even the beautiful reminiscences of the past are traps being set in the present, sprung in the present, having violent effect in the present. It's why you can't hurt it. It always, always works. It's now. It's the one thing plays have the hardest time with."
I still hadn't asked The Question, the one everyone wanted me to ask. (I was so shy about it, I'd even left it off The List.) Had they ever been romantically involved? People who knew them back in the days of the Compass believed that maybe, perhaps, for a few days, they had—but that they put it out of their lives fairly quickly.
In fact, Nichols and May have each been married repeatedly—to other people (Mike to Patricia Scott, Margo Callas, Annabel Davis-Goff, and Diane Sawyer; Elaine to Marvin May, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, her then psychiatrist, Dr. David L. Rubinfine, and her current partner, the great director Stanley Donen). "We both found the love of our lives," Mike said.
The two continue to have a long and deep friendship, and after 58 years they can still make each other laugh. So I apologize, first to Mr. Apatow, who, like me, always wanted to know. Not only did I lose my nerve, but sitting there between them I thought they were entitled to keep a secret like that.
"We were fools to give it up," Mike said of their partnership.
"We were," Elaine answered.
Mike leaned in to tell her, "Very slowly life gets better and you learn that there is another way to respond to people. You've changed more than anybody I've known in my entire life. You changed from a dangerous person to someone who is only benign."
"What a vicious thing to say!"
"But it's true! If you can't say anything nice, you don't say anything. You never ever attack people to their face, or behind their back. You're the most discreet person about other people that I have ever met in my life. I haven't heard you be unkind for 50 years. You have done a complete 180-degree turn—don't you know that?"
"That's such a horrible thing of you to say."
"I'm really sorry—"
"I feel exactly the same way about you, too."
They suddenly broke into laughter, just as they had in the Golden Theatre 50 years ago. Certainly one of the happier moments of the 20th century was the sound of Nichols and May laughing, and here they were, laughing again.


text:
Broward Everglades Working Group | Climate Change Task Force | Water Advisory Board | Water Resources Task Force | All Broward County Boards and Committees
Water Advisory Board
The Water Advisory Board advises the Broward County Board of County Commissioners on matters related to water management. This Board has two committees.
The Technical Advisory Committee provides technical guidance regarding water resource management issues.
The Surface Water Coordinating Committee is a group of drainage and water control district and government water managers that meet quarterly to discuss issues of mutual interest and concern. Two members also serve on the Technical Advisory Committee. The purpose of the Surface Water Coordinating Committee is to encourage all water control districts, municipalities and regional water managers to participate in surface water resources management and to assist in surface water efficiency for Broward County. Principle objectives are to:
The Broward County Water Resources Task Force was formed in September 2008. Participants include representatives from Broward County, municipalities, independent districts, the South Florida Water Management District and other state and county agencies. The mission of this task force is to work collaboratively to identify and evaluate potential regional and sub-regional water supply strategies and solutions of appropriate water quality to meet countywide future water resource needs and water conservation goals, and to meet the objectives of the enabling resolutions.
Climate Change Task Force
Founded by resolution of the Broward County Board of County Commissioners on June 24, 2008, the mission of this task force is to develop recommendations for a coordinated countywide strategy in mitigating the causes, and addressing the local implications, of global climate change. Task force members are appointed by the Board and supported by County staff. Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is an important component to Broward County's overall commitment to a healthy, sustainable environment. Broward County is already committed to reducing GHG emissions from County operations to seven percent below 1997 levels by the year 2015. This task force will assist residents, businesses and organizations in setting similar goals and strategies as the County faces the challenges of climate change.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
the film was written by Aaron Sorkin.
Quote from: modage on January 11, 2006, 11:46:25 AMthe film was written by Aaron Sorkin.I was doing a whole lot of cringing until I got to this part.
Julia Roberts Circling Charlie Wilson's War Source: Variety January 11, 2006In what would be her first onscreen role since 2004's Ocean's Twelve, Julia RobertsJulia Roberts is circling Universal Pictures' Charlie Wilson's War.Variety says Roberts is in early talks to board the project with her Closer director Mike Nichols. She would star with Tom Hanks, who is producing the film with Playtone partner Gary Goetzman.Hanks declared last year that he'd play Charlie Wilson, the rogue Texas congressman who oversaw the covert funding of the Afghan rebels in their battle against the Soviet Union.Roberts is in talks to play Joanne Herring, a big-haired and beautiful Texas socialite who influenced Wilson to support the rebel cause.Based on the book by 60 Minutes producer George Crile, the film was written by Aaron Sorkin. Production will begin later this year.
so it's like erin brokivich meets rambo 3?
the film was written by Aaron Sorkin
Quotethe film was written by Aaron SorkinSo there's a lot of walking and talking in the film?


text:
Member and Patient Resources
ROCKLEDGE, FL — Health First announced today that it will acquire Melbourne Internal Medicine Associates (MIMA), a multi-specialty physician group based in Melbourne. This acquisition will enable Health First to combine MIMA physicians with its existing multi-specialty physician group in order to improve the health and well-being of Brevard residents. This new entity will be called the Health First Medical Group.
"Health First is pleased to make this acquisition announcement," said Steve Johnson, President/CEO of Health First. "As Health First moves to enhance its Integrated Value Based Delivery Network in order to increase patient quality, safety, and the patient experience, this acquisition enables Health First to strategically align physicians who share the same vision and philosophies. By joining our physician groups, Health First will be able to reduce costs to those we serve."
According to James Ronaldson, MD and CEO of MIMA, this strategic alignment makes sense to better serve the patients in the community. "By combining our resources under one organization, patients will have access to a stronger, more unified network of primary care physicians, specialists, sub-specialists, and ancillary services that can address all levels of medical care for the patients we serve."
Once the acquisition has been approved by appropriate legal and governmental agencies, the Health First Medical Group, which will begin operation in mid-February 2013, will be comprised of approximately 250 physician providers. Locations of these physician offices will provide easy access and patient-focused health care. Once completed, Health First will employ more than 7,500 employees across Brevard.
"The decision to create the Health First Medical Group should signal to Brevard County residents that these physicians and their staffs are focused on providing them with excellent, compassionate, and high-quality care, and that we are prepared for the increasing obligation to improve the lives of those we serve in Brevard County," said Johnson
The integration of these two physician groups has begun, under the guidance of a strategic consulting firm that has expertise in specialized acquisitions, and is expected to take between 18 to 24 months. Communication will begin immediately to inform patients of the new physician alignment. The transition to Health First Medical Group is expected to be seamless to current and future patients.
# # #
About Health First
Health First is Central Florida's only fully integrated health system. With a Mission to positively change the health and wellness of the communities we serve, Health First offers the latest technological advances and quality care at our four hospitals and through our many Outpatient & Wellness Services, as well as the area's only Trauma and Heart Centers. Health First also offers multiple commercial and Medicare health plans, a multi-specialty physician group, and four fitness centers to help members of our community stay healthy.


text:
Your browser does not support iframes.
National recognition is nice and national recognition two straight years is, well, twice as nice.
That's what Springs Memorial Hospital earned from the Joint Commission – the leading accreditor of health-care organizations in America.
Most folks in our area know the importance of the University of South Carolina Lancaster in our community.
Palmetto State residents now know what we've known for years.
USCL, a regional campus of the University of South Carolina, was recently ranked as the most successful two-year campus in the Palmetto State.
A summary of college and university graduation rates prepared by the S.C. Commission on Higher Education scored USCL at a success rate of 66.9 percent.
It's almost show time for the seventh annual Indian Land Fall into Fun Festival and third annual S.C. Championship Chili Cookoff.
Saturday's festival promises to be a lot of fun for everyone from toddlers to teens and older folks, all for a good cause.
"This is the biggest fundraiser for the Indian Land Rotary Club, and what we do with the funds is give back, mostly to the local Indian Land community," Indian Land Rotary Club President Dr. Adam Cooper said.
Sometimes it's not all about the wins and losses.
Friday afternoon, Aug. 24, it was about a new start for the University of South Carolina Lancaster soccer program.
For the first time in the history of the school, the USCL Lancers teams were able to play matches on campus.
As Lancers' athletic director Rick Walters said, fans watching the matches were watching more than soccer, they were "watching history."
The Lancers' women's program is in its sixth season, while the USCL men are in their first campaign.
No school. No work. Yes, it's the Labor Day holiday. Time for that end-of-summer fling whether it's in the mountains, the beaches or just in the backyard with family, friends, a grill and even fireworks.
Monday, Sept. 3, is a federal holiday that celebrates the contributions of America's workers. Schools are closed, as well as government offices, banks and other businesses.
The origin of summer's final holiday dates back 130 years.
The first U.S. Labor Day was celebrated on Sept. 5, 1882 in New York City.
The last few weeks have been busy for teachers, students and their families as they scrambled to prepare for the school bells that rang Monday morning.
Many students and their parents took advantage of the recent sales-tax-free weekend to buy school supplies and clothes. And teachers have been busy preparing their classrooms for the return of students.
There's plenty of local football action on tap this weekend.
The ninth annual Founders Federal Credit Union Kickoff Classic is set for tonight, Aug. 17, at the Reservation at Indian Land High School.
The annual scrimmage at ILHS is the only place you can see all four county high school teams in action at one place.
Andrew Jackson High School kicks off the action as the Volunteers battle the McBee Panthers at 6 p.m.
The summer of 2012 has been one to remember for shining efforts on the diamond.
That's the glowing performances of four area teams – three banner baseball teams and a stellar softball squad.
Those teams include the Lancaster Post 31 American Legion team, the Lancaster Dixie Pre-Majors all-stars, the Lancaster Dixie Boys 13 all-stars and the Lancaster County Dixie Softball Darlings all-stars.
Each did well and produced their share of achievements.
Given recent, tragic events, we think it is time to take a look at some statistics. If these numbers don't grab your attention, nothing will.
More than 42,000 Americans were killed in 2006, more than 41,000 in 2007, 37,000 in 2008 and about 33,000 in 2009 and 2010. That totals out to more than 185,000 lost lives in a five-year period. That is enough national deaths to wipe out the entire population of Chester County six times over. It's understandable that people are outraged and want the government to take action, regardless of whatever rights people possess.
We don't endorse political candidates here (Chester News & Reporter and The Lancaster News), but we do endorse the idea of voters having choices.
Copyright © 2019
The Lancaster News is your source for local news, sports, events, and information in Lancaster County and Lancaster, South Carolina, and the surrounding area..


text:
We integrate and adapt technology for instructional use to
- Ensure access to digital tools, where appropriate, to enhance and transform daily learning
- Guide students in appropriately selecting and using digital tools for their own learning needs
- Provide opportunities for discussion and practice of digital literacy and digital citizenship principles
Contact Us
Daisy H. Steele (schoolwide technology mission, goals, and implementation)
Director of Technology
503-297-1894 x5555
Rob van Nood (academic software and hardware)
Educational Technology Coordinator
503-297-1894 x5520
Johny Nguyen (hardware and software deployment, Catlin Gabel user accounts)
Junior Systems Administrator
503-297-1894 x5503
Daniel Flores (general user technology support)
Technology Support Specialist
503-297-1894 x5555
Matt Woodard (general user technology support)
Support Technician
503-297-1894 x5555
Beginning School Technology
For our youngest learners, there is an intentional decision to limit digital device use in the Beehive. Our focus is on developing the whole child including character, creativity, intellect, physical skills, and ability to contribute as a community member. The relationships and experiences that are needed to develop these areas cannot be replaced digitally or in a virtual environment.
We do use digital technology to expand and document the students' experiences and thinking. Teachers use, present, and encourage discussion about digital content where developmentally appropriate. There will be many, many opportunities for your child to develop and engage in digital content and skills throughout his or her Catlin Gabel journey.
Lower School Technology
1st & 2nd Grades
Lower School students are gradually introduced to technology in age- and developmentally appropriate lesson plans. In 1st and 2nd grades, this primarily takes the form of student self-assessment as they demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of their own learning through the creation of videos and digital portfolios. Discussion of good digital citizenship principles including applying our own Lower School rules of "Be Safe and Be Kind" online are discussed and practiced frequently.
3rd Grade
In 3rd grade, in addition to self-assessments, students begin skill-based learning. This includes keyboarding with laptops using Typing Pal and increasing math automaticity using FasttMath. A set of iPads allows students to explore and record their learning both on campus and off. Students are also introduced to Google Apps for Education for writing and classroom projects.
4th Grade
In the 4th grade, students receive their Catlin Gabel email account. They also begin to access the school's learning management system, Haiku, for daily coursework and homework assignments. Developing digital literacy and digital citizenship continues in full force as students begin to more deeply explore the online world. Skills continue to be reinforced with the use of Typing Pal, FasttMath and IXL in addition to Google Apps for Education. A set of laptops and iPads are available as needed and provide the opportunities for differentiation in instruction.
5th Grade
By 5th grade, students are fully immersed in using technology for many aspects of their coursework. Laptops and iPads are available on an as-needed basis for blogging, research projects, writing and story creation projects, and curating portfolio content. Critical assessment and selection of digital resources and online content, along with appropriate copyright use, are emphasized.
Laptop requirements
Students are not required to purchase a laptop in the Lower School. By the 3rd grade it may be necessary for a student to have access to a computer to reinforce keyboarding and math skills.
In 4th and 5th grades, access to a computer for homework completion is required. If you feel the need to purchase a laptop for your child, we suggest a Dell Chromebook or Netbook. Please contact Daisy Steele if you would like assistance with laptop selection. The school does not purchase hardware for students.
Middle School Technology
In the Middle School, emphasis is placed on guiding students through the intricacies of what it means to create a digital footprint. Digital citizenship and digital literacy skills are repeatedly practiced in a wide variety of environments.
The Middle School Apple laptops and iPads, Chromebooks, and other mobile devices are available to students. Providing this assortment of hardware allows teachers and students to select the right tool based on the learning goals of the curriculum.
Students are not required to have a laptop in the Middle School. Laptops and other mobile devices are provided for in-classroom and after school use. Students are required to have access to a computer to complete homework. This does not have to be a laptop. A desktop computer is perfectly fine. If you feel your child would work better with a laptop, we recommend the inexpensive Chromebook as an option. Please contact Daniel Flores if you have additional questions about laptop selection. Please contact Mary Yacob if providing your child access to a computer at home creates a financial hardship.
Upper School Laptop Program
All Upper School students are required to have a laptop.
Laptops are used throughout the curriculum for research, writing, working on complex math problems, design, modern language acquisition, and collaboration in a wide variety of ways.
The school's learning management system is called Haiku and provides students in 5th through 12th grades with online access to syllabi, coursework, a homework dropbox, and numerous academic resources. Students should plan on checking Haiku multiple times a day for academic updates.
Laptops should be brought to school daily in good working order and fully charged. If your child is having hardware or software difficulties he or she should stop by the technology office in the Vollum building for technology support.
Students are expected to check their school-provided email account regularly throughout the day for the most up-to-date information.
Laptop models: The recommended models for the Upper School laptop program are either Apple or Microsoft Surface Laptops.
Apple: We recommend MacBook Air or MacBook Pro Retina. We recommend no larger than a 13" model for weight and portability.
Microsoft: We recommend the Microsoft Surface Laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a 256GB Solid State Drive.
We are happy to assist you in selecting a laptop that will meet your child's needs. The school does not purchase hardware for students. Please contact Daniel Flores if you need assistance with laptop selection. Please contact Mary Yacob to inquire about laptop financial aid.
Digital Safety
As our children more time in the virtual world, it can be challenging to ensure that they are navigating safely. Below are some resources to help you have conversations with your child about digital safety and security.
Children and Social Media: A Collection of blogs from KQED's Mind/Shift website
Preventing Technology Addiction, an article from Freedom from Chemical Dependency
Online Security, a tip sheet from Common Sense Media
Digital Relationships, a tip sheet from Common Sense Media
Family Media agreements from Common Sense Media parents and children can discuss and sign
Customizable device contracts from Common Sense Media
Privacy and Digital Footprints, a tip sheet from Common Sense Media
National Education and Technology Standards for Students from the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE)
Considering the relationship between adoloescence and their parents. A New York Magazine article
Technology Security
Many students bring at least one mobile device to school every day—most commonly a cell phone but also laptops and tablets.
Label your device
We encourage you to label all devices so they can be promptly returned to the owner. At a minimum use a sticker. Engraving is even more permanent.
Do not leave devices unattended
Laptops and cell phones might go missing if they are left unattended. Please do not leave your device alone and unattended for even a minute. Put it in a locker, keep it with you, or ask if you can put it in a locked classroom or closet.
Theft Tracking Software
We strongly recommend that you activate the "Find My Phone" feature or install theft tracking software. Adding a password to the mobile device and enabling restrictions can help prevent loss of data should the device be lost or stolen. Additional information regarding security software can be found in the parent portal here.


text:
Vasquez Peak Wilderness
IntroductionThe United States Congress designated the Vasquez Peak Wilderness (map) in 1993 and it now has a total of 13,000 acres. All of this wilderness is located in Colorado and is managed by the Forest Service.
DescriptionAlong the southern boundary of the relatively small Vasquez Peak Wilderness and over Vasquez Peak itself, you'll find that seven miles of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail offer two distinct and worthy opportunities. First, you'll encounter less crowded conditions than most Colorado Wildernesses, and second, you'll be blessed with extravagant views over a dramatic area, two-thirds of which lie above timberline. Below timberline sits a region of krummholz (or twisted wood), the result of icy temperatures and fierce winds that keep the spruce and fir dwarfed and confined into low-lying mats. Healthy spruce, fir, and pine cloak the lower mountainsides. Vasquez Creek flows heavily off Vasquez Peak to form the main drainage of the area. A deep indentation in the Wilderness boundary from the north maintains Vasquez Creek as non-Wilderness to allow for a collection system that sends much of the water toward Denver. With much of the 17-mile-long trail system above timberline, sudden summer thunderstorms can make exposure to lightning in the Vasquez Mountains a dangerous risk. Vasquez Pass on the Divide can be reached after three miles of hiking on the Vasquez Peak Trail off Vasquez Creek. You should plan on hiking early and dropping into the trees before afternoon storms break. In winter, avalanches are common. Vasquez lies near Byers Peak, Ptarmigan Peak, and Eagles Nest Wildernesses to form a vast, largely roadless region.
Planning to Visit the Vasquez Peak Wilderness?
- Print a fact sheet
- General things to consider when visiting any wilderness
- Regulations
- Contact the Forest Service
- Visit the National Forest wilderness website
Leave No TraceHow to follow the seven standard Leave No Trace principles differs in different parts of the country (desert vs. Rocky Mountains). Click on any of the principles listed below to learn more about how they apply in the Vasquez Peak Wilderness.
- Plan Ahead and Prepare
- Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
- Dispose of Waste Properly
- Leave What You Find
- Minimize Campfire Impacts
- Respect Wildlife
- Be Considerate of Other Visitors


text:
Search over 400 airlines and more than 700,000 hotels worldwide
Save on your next flight from LFT to ANI when you book through Travelocity. Need a last-minute flight to Aniak? Travelocity offers discount airfare no matter when you book, even on popular routes such as Lafayette Regional Airport to Aniak Airport. Whether you need a direct or indirect flight, you can trust Travelocity to provide you with the best prices for LFT to ANI flights.
Explore Aniak with Travelocity's Travel Guides to find the best flights, cars, vacation packages and more!
Fare, taxes & fees: Fares include all taxes and fees, except baggage fees. Rates shown reflect fares found by other Travelocity users over the 7 days. Due to rapidly changing airline prices & seat availability, these fares may no longer be available.
Refunds/changes/cancellations: Itinerary changes, if permitted for the fare, will have a $30 service fee charged by Travelocity. Additional airline charges may apply.
Other conditions: Schedules, fares and rules are subject to change without notice. Seats are limited and may not be available on all flights/dates or in all markets. Lower fares may be available. Fares will not be honored retroactively or in exchange for any wholly/partially unused ticket. Tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable. Fare rules are provided for the selected itinerary before booking.


text:
The future of Earth is in question when a strange reaction deep beneath its surface causes a massive rupture in the planet's inner structure.
Release notes:
Please help share and feel free to post it on other sites/forums and spread it to other networks if you want. Please don't remove or replace the tags. Add if you must, but keep the filenames as they are.
- Code: Select all
Total Runtime...: 1:30:15
Language........: English
File Size............: 1.45 Gb (1/3 DVD)
Video Codec .........: XviD 1.3
Video Frame Size.....: 640 x 480
Video Bitrate........: 1857
Video Framerate......: 23.976
Audio Codec..........: AC3
Audio Bitrate........: 448 kb/s (5.1)
Audio Framerate......: 48000Hz
Interleaving.........: 96/96 aligned
Packed Bitstream.....: No
CQM..................: heini_mr
B-Vob/Qpel/GMC.......: Yes/No/No
ed2k: Deep.Core.2000.DVDRip.XviD-Rogue.avi [1.46 Gb] [Stats]
Subs: English, Spanish
ed2k: Deep.Core.2000.DVDRip.XviD-Rogue.Subs.rar [1.37 Mb] [Stats]
[ Add all 2 links to your ed2k client ]


text:
NBA Capsules
CHICAGO (AP) The Philadelphia 76ers' long losing streak continued and so did their march toward the wrong kind of record.
Joakim Noah finished with 20 points, Jimmy Butler scored 17, and the Chicago Bulls handed Philadelphia its 24th straight loss, winning 91-81 Saturday night and sending the 76ers within two of the NBA record.
The Sixers moved ahead of the Vancouver Grizzlies (1995-96), Denver Nuggets (1997-98) and Charlotte Bobcats (2011-12) for the second-longest, single-season losing streak.
The Cleveland Cavaliers dropped 26 during the 2010-11 season, and Philadelphia would have to pull off an upset to avoid tying that.
The next two games are at San Antonio and Houston. Drop them, and the Sixers could set the record at home against Detroit on March 29, particularly if they continue to shoot like this from the outside.
They missed their first 18 3-pointers before Byron Mullens made one early in the fourth and were 1 of 20 in the game.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Anthony Davis had 30 points, 11 rebounds and three steals, and New Orleans handed struggling Miami its seventh loss in 11 games.
LeBron James twisted his right ankle while stepping on Pelicans guard Tyreke Evans' foot during a drive to the hoop late in the third quarter, but remained in the game and finished with 25 points, nine assists and eight rebounds. It was not enough for Miami, which gave guard Dwyane Wade and center Greg Oden the night off following Friday's victory at Memphis.
Pelicans guard Eric Gordon also sat out with a sore left knee, but New Orleans got 14 points from Evans, 12 from Al-Farouq Aminu and 11 from Luke Babbitt.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – Mike Conley scored 21 points, Zach Randolph added 18 points and 13 rebounds, and Memphis held Indiana to its lowest point total of the season.
Mike Miller added 13 points as Memphis won for the seventh time in nine games and maintained its hold on the final playoff spot in the Western Conference. Marc Gasol, returning after spraining his ankle Friday night, had 10 points and nine rebounds.
Lance Stephenson led the Pacers with 15 points and eight rebounds, while David West added 10 points, but was 5 of 15 from the field.
Paul George, the Pacers' leading scorer at 22.1 points per game, was held to eight points, missing eight of his 10 shots, and Indiana shot 37 percent for the game.
CLEVELAND (AP) – James Harden scored 37 points, including 17 in the third quarter, and Houston led from wire-to-wire in a victory over Cleveland.
Harden was 9 of 15 from the field, hit five 3-pointers, made all 14 of his free throws and had 11 assists without playing the fourth quarter after Houston built a 29-point lead late in the third.
Rockets center Dwight Howard missed his third straight game with a sore left ankle, but Houston is undefeated in the eight-time All-Star's absence.
Cleveland has lost four straight and played again without point guard Kyrie Irving, who has been sidelined for three games with a strained left biceps.
Dion Waiters led Cleveland with 26 points. Tyler Zeller added a career-high 23 points for the Cavaliers, who also played without forward Luol Deng (sprained left ankle).
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) – Al Jefferson scored 28 points and two others finished with more than 20 as Charlotte routed Portland.
Kemba Walker added 26 points, Gerald Henderson had 23 and Chris Douglas-Roberts 11 for the Bobcats, who finished with their highest-scoring game and most-lopsided victory in snapping a two-game losing streak.
Damian Lillard scored 20 points, Dorell Wright added 17 and Wesley Matthews 15 for the Trail Blazers, who trailed by as many as 34 points late in the second half in their worst loss this season.
Charlotte shot 52 percent from the field (49 of 94), outscored Portland in the paint 54-32 and held a 50-36 rebounding advantage over the Trail Blazers, who had won their last four games against the Bobcats.
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Chris Paul had 28 points and 15 assists, Blake Griffin added 25 points, and Los Angeles beat Detroit to extend the Pistons' losing streak to five games.
The Clippers, coming off a 110-100 loss at Denver that ended their 11-game overall winning streak, shot 54 percent from the field and improved to 24-1 when finishing at 50 percent or better.
DeAndre Jordan had 12 rebounds for the Pacific Division leaders, who have had at least one player with double-digit rebounds in a franchise-record 46 consecutive games. The previous mark was 44, by the 1977 Buffalo Braves.
Jonas Jerebko had 22 points and nine rebounds off the bench for the Pistons.
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) – Tony Parker had 20 points and five assists, Danny Green scored 18 points and short-handed San Antonio outlasted Golden State for its 13th straight victory.
Tiago Splitter added 17 points and 14 rebounds as the NBA-leading Spurs (53-16) pulled away with an 11-0 run early in the fourth quarter. San Antonio, riding its longest winning streak in six years, is two games ahead of Oklahoma City for the top playoff seed in the Western Conference.
The Spurs did it even while resting stars Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. They are 3-0 against Golden State this season, including two wins in Oakland without their regulars, after eliminating the Warriors in the second round of the playoffs last year.
Stephen Curry scored 20 points to go with six assists and six rebounds, and Andrew Bogut grabbed 17 boards as the Warriors head into a five-day break on a sour note.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – Trey Burke scored 17 points, including a high-arcing 3-pointer with 1.6 seconds remaining, to push Utah past Orlando.
With the Jazz trailing 88-86, Gordon Hayward dribbled through the center of the Magic defense and found Burke in the corner. The big shot snapped Utah's six-game losing streak and extended Orlando's skid to eight games.
Down the stretch, the game turned into a battle between Burke and Victor Oladipo, two rookies drafted in the top 10 of last summer's draft.
Oladipo, the second selection, scored 19 points for the Magic. He made a jumper and then added two free throws with 21 seconds to play to give Orlando an 85-82 lead.


text:
Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'decay source'.
Found 1 result
black mesa source
CharlieHadron posted a topic in General DiscussionHello everyone, just wondering if I can interest anyone in Decay Source Revival Team, which as you can probably tell is a team dedicated to remaking Half-Life: Decay into the Source engine. We've already got some really top-notch team members in (including the inimitable Rassmoosen, RaraCerberus, MisterDigitalGuy, and Jackathan of Half-Life: In Deep fame) but I don't see any problem in looking to add a few more to the family. Currently we have 12 team members, which coincidentally is also the number of maps we have to remake. I've decided to make a start by using the original GoldSrc maps as a base and working around those by porting them into the Source engine and replacing parts as I go along before giving them over to the team to apply the "fine strokes" of the piece. So if anyone's interested in giving us a hand finishing off the final expansion in the original Half-Life series and giving it a fresh lease of life (with a few upgrades obviously), you know where to call.


text:
Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings posted an 11-page document on the company's website articulating his view of the future of television and Netflix's place in this evolution.
In short, traditional TV is toast.
"People love TV content and we watch over a billion hours a day of linear TV," Hastings wrote in a post Wednesday night. "But people don't love the linear TV experience where channels present programs at particular times on non-portable screens with complicated remote controls."
Over the coming decades, Hastings wrote, Internet TV will replace linear television. Applications will take the place of traditional channels. Remote controls will disappear, to be supplanted by tablets and smartphones with touch screens.
For the moment, Internet TV accounts for a small percentage of video viewing today. But that'll change, Hastings predicted, as Internet speeds continue to get faster and more reliable, the number of "smart TVs" -- those with Web connections -- proliferate, and a number of other factors reshape consumer behavior.
The major TV networks, including HBO and ESPN, are racing toward this future, with applications such as HBO Go and WatchESPN, which provide subscribers with on-demand access to programming on their computers and portable devices.
"Existing networks, such as ESPN and HBO, that offer amazing apps will get more viewing than in the past and be more valuable," Hastings wrote. "Existing networks that fail to develop first-class apps will lose viewing and revenue."
The cable industry-backed TV Everywhere initiative, which gives subscribers expanded access to the shows they pay for every month, will help ease this transition by preserving the existing business model that underwrites the cost of prime-time programming, Hastings wrote.
Hastings drew parallels between the evolution of the cellular phone -- from clunky, expensive bricks that were limited to voice transmission to today's ubiquitous communication devices -- and the mainstream adoption of Internet TV over the next 20 years.
"In addition to creating opportunity for linear networks, the emergence of Internet TV also enables new apps like Netflix, YouTube, MLB.tv and iTunes to build large-scale, direct-to-consumer services that are independent of the traditional (pay TV) bundle," Hastings wrote.
Hastings wrote that Netflix invests more than $2 billion a year licensing movies and TV shows and creating original content. The Internet allows Netflix to offer a wide selection of entertainment offerings, while its software quickly learns about a subscriber's tastes and makes personalized recommendations. The majority of Netflix's spending is on movies and prior seasons of television shows, though Reed talked about the company's high-profile embrace of original programming.
Based on its knowledge of subscriber viewing habits, and its experience licensing a broad range of content, Hastings noted, "we think we can do as good or better job than our linear TV peers in choosing projects and setting budgets." The investment in originals is expected to be less than 10% of the company's content spending.
And Netflix has an advantage over traditional TV networks when it comes to launching a show.
"They have to attract an audience for Sunday at 8 p.m.," Hatings wrote. "We can be much more flexible. Because we are not allocating scarce prime-time slots like linear TV does, a show that is taking a long time to find its audience is one we can keep nurturing."
Hastings laid out the competitive landscape, noting that the service competes with other forms of entertainment, including video games and sports, for subscribers' time. Meanwhile, rivals such as Amazon.com, Hulu and cable and broadcast networks, meanwhile, bid against Netflix for content.
Netflix's biggest competitor is HBO, Hastings noted, which competes with it for original projects and recently won long-term distribution deals from Universal and Fox.
"While we are passing HBO in domestic members in 2013, it will be several years before we are peers with them in terms of original programming, Emmy awards and international members," Hastings wrote. "It wouldn't be surprising to us if HBO does their best work and achieves their highest growth over the next decade, spurred on by the Netflix competition and the Internet TV opportunity."
Binge-viewing is transforming the television experience
Netflix stock soars on subscriber growth led by 'House of Cards'
Netflix push into original fare may be bad news for Hollywood
INTERACTIVE: TVs highest paid stars
ON LOCATION: People and places behind what's onscreen
PHOTOS: Hollywood back lot moments


text:
HAMILTON - Here we go again.
Adam Hadwin picked up where he left off at the RBC Canadian Open, shooting a 4-under 66 at Hamilton Golf and Country Club on Thursday to put himself in the mix. The native of Abbotsford, B.C., was four shots behind leader Scott Piercy and in good position to contend over the weekend for the second straight year.
About the only thing Hadwin didn't like about his opening round was the fact most of the spectators gravitated to the marquee groups rather than his own.
"It's a long week, so they'll have time," said Hadwin.
The 24-year-old is supremely confident — "It's a bit of a cockiness," he concedes — particularly when he gets on a stage like this one. Hadwin has been the top Canadian at this event for two years running, playing in the final group at Shaughnessy a year ago and finishing tied for fourth.
He's had an up-and-down season on the minor-league Web.com Tour this year but something clicked once he returned to the third-oldest championship in golf.
"It seems every time we hit the end of July, I kind of springboard my game back into shape," said Hadwin.
It was certainly the kind of day to make it happen as Hamilton was left almost defenceless by rain that fell overnight and throughout the round. Piercy's 62 matched the competitive course course record at Hamilton — Warren Sye shot that number in the third round of the 1991 Ontario Amateur — and included eagles on both of the par-5s.
The 33-year-old American finished third in his last start at the John Deere Classic and gave himself plenty of looks at birdie on Thursday.
"I hit it solid out there," he said. "I think I only missed a couple greens, and ball-striking around here with the rough being so penal is a must to shoot well."
Piercy held a one-shot lead over Greg Owen and William McGirt (63) and was two shots clear of Robert Garrigus (64). A group of seven players opened with 65, including 2011 Masters champion Charl Schwartzel and 2004 Canadian Open winner Vijay Singh.
The course was a soggy mess by the end of the first round. Players were allowed to lift, clean and place their balls on the fairway and 94 men were at par or better when the day ended.
"I woke up this morning and thought the British Open was a week too early looking out the window," said Schwartzel. "It wasn't very pleasant weather."
Piercy broke free of a crowded leaderboard with birdies on three of his final five holes, punctuated with a 10-foot putt at the last. Even though his only PGA Tour victory came at last year's Reno-Tahoe Open, he has high expectations for himself.
"I'm kind of a perfectionist in an imperfect game," said Piercy.
Hadwin can identify.
There's nothing he wants more than to earn a regular spot on the PGA Tour, where he's made the cut in all six events he's played over his career. Hadwin was one shot out of the lead entering the final round at last year's Canadian Open and would have earned a two-year tour exemption with a victory.
On Thursday, he rebounded from a double bogey at No. 11 with back-to-back birdies before making a disappointing bogey on the par-5 17th.
"I shot 4 under and I was 1 over on the par-5s today," said Hadwin. "So that's pretty good confidence going into tomorrow knowing that if I play those par-5s pretty well I'm going to play pretty well."
He's one of 23 players who entered this event looking to become the first homegrown player to win it since Pat Fletcher in 1954. A number of them got off to promising starts.
David Hearn of Brantford, Ont., and Brad Fritsch of Manotick, Ont., each had 68s while Graham DeLaet of Weyburn, Sask., amateur Albin Choi of Toronto and David Markle of Shelburne, Ont., posted 69s. The group at even par included Calgary's Stephen Ames, Matt Hill of Bright's Grove, Ont., Matt McQuillan of Kingston, Ont., and Victoria's Cory Renfrew.
"I think the Canadians really want to see the other Canadians do well," said Hearn. "This is a big deal for us, and I'd love to see more than one guy have a chance to win it. And who knows what's going to happen."
Notes: Mike Weir of Bright's Grove, Ont., shot 72 and is looking to make his first cut in a PGA Tour event this year ... Piercy has broken 70 in nine consecutive rounds ... Owen is bidding to become the first Englishman to win this event since Peter Oosterhuis in 1981 ... George McNeill withdrew after shooting a 75, citing a back injury ... Despite the rain, there was only one delay, lasting 20 minutes.


text:
Most Italian restaurants are a minefield for gluten-free diners, but now you can add Macaroni Grill to the list of Italian restaurants that are more than accomodating to gluten allergies. Not only does Macaroni Grill offer a gluten-free menu, they also have special menus for those who have Shellfish, Tree Nut, Soy, Egg, and Peanut allergies.
So what can you get at Macaroni Grill? If you are looking for something light, try one of their many Insalatas including the Warm Spinach Salad, Chicken Ceaser, and Parmesan-Crusted. And you can even enjoy many of the salad dressings Macaroni Grill offers which is an added bonus.
For entrees – the Beef, Lamb, Chicken and Shrimp Spiedinis are light and delicious, or for a heartier dish try the Grilled Halibut with Risotto.
And dessert! Macaroni Grill has an excellent Italian Sorbetto that is the perfect way to cleanse your palate after a nice meal. And of course you can always enjoy your entree with their many wine choices.
So raise a glass and say Salute! to another great Italian (and gluten-free) meal.
For more info: Macaroni Grill restaurants are located in LA and Orange County. To find the Macaroni Grill nearest to you, visit www.macaronigrill.com.
Author Information: Allison Hecht, Los Angeles, CA
My official title is: Los Angeles Gluten-Free Examiner
My website url is: http://www.examiner.com/x-3262-LA-GlutenFree-Food-Examiner
My email is: firstname.lastname@example.com
My twitter username is: @socaliallie


text:
Sisk Tactical Adaptive Rifle (STAR®) Sisk Gun Vault
See the STAR Rifle Complete Video.
The Sisk Tactical Adaptive Rifle (STAR) offers professional and competitive shooters something they've never experienced before – a take-down rifle with near-infinite adaptability featuring adjustment points at the butt, comb and wrist for customizable, ergonomic performance in any shooting situation imaginable.
Standard straight-stocked rifles aren't designed to fit a single shooter well; they're designed to fit every shooter just good enough. In truth, a stock should be adaptable – not only to the shooter's body, but also his shooting form and every field situation he finds himself in. No other rifle on the market has ever met such demanding criteria – until now.
Thanks to a unique, patent-pending STAR mechanism at the rifle's wrist, the stock rotates radially along a fixed axis. This finely adjustable joint allows the shooter to dial in a custom cast-on or cast-off fit for maximum cheek weld, or rotate the butt stock 360 degrees to clear obstacles or barriers.
Other adjustment points on the STAR include a height-adjustable comb with clearly defined index markings for easily repeatability when switching between shooters, and an adaptive butt pad that not only adjusts for length-of-pull, but also rotates 360 degrees to perfectly fit each individual shooter's shoulder pocket or preferred shooting form.
The STAR stock is milled from aircraft-grade aluminum for rigid strength, creating the most adaptive, most accurate shooting platform available. For easier portability and discrete transport, the buttstock and forend separate at the STAR joint.
Jeff Quinn at www.GUNBLAST.com.
This truly unique, fully customizable STAR stock is fitted with a milled Sisk Rifle receiver that's been hand-tuned by master riflemaker Charlie Sisk to deliver the tightest groups possible. Charlie prides himself in not only building the most accurate rifles available, but also building relationships with customers that last a lifetime.
Prices starting at $5600
STAR Stocks start at $1395
STAR® is a registered trademark of Sisk Rifles LLC.
The STAR® has the following patent: United States Patent 8720099.
The STAR® has several patents pending.