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A Night-Stay at Hotel Nikko
If you're following my Twitter all along, you would've known that I was in Kuala Lumpur last week. Well, firstly to attend Shell Recruitment Day (SRD) and then INTI Ball 2010 at Crowne Plaza.
The thing is, Shell was generous to provide me a one night-stay at this 5-star luxury hotel located at Jalan Ampang, which is just steps away from Petronas Twin Towers, one of the world's tallest buildings.
Hotel Nikko!
Frankly, I wasn't expecting much at first, but once I opened my room door.
I kinda went "Wowwww!" in my mind. Just look at the room! So spacious, and just for me – alone!
The bed is so huge, can fit like 4 people. Or 2 really fat people?
Anyway, if I'm not wrong, this is actually a Deluxe Room with King Size Bed. The bed doesn't look like a King Size to me, more of an Army Size.
There's a work area with Internet connection provided. Must be for those rich business man to sit down and count money.
Oh, the Macbook isn't provided ya. That's mine actually. =)
A television provided as well. But I didn't turn it on at all.
At one corner, there's a long chair. Probably for those rich CEOs to sit down and think of money.
Here's another view of the room. Really spacious right?
And when a SRD candidate dude (me) is all alone in the room, with not much entertainment – what can he possibly do to have fun?
Sitting on the bed, so soft and comfortable. With no out around to disturb him. The only thing he could think of is none other than…
Okay hold on, before you dirty-minded peeps start to get wild…
It's just reading the Shell Saban case study for tomorrow's assessment!
What were you thinking? Tsk… tsk… Naughty, naughty!
By the way, in case you were wondering whether I was successful during my SRD or not – the answer is no, I wasn't successful. =(
Anyway, this is the light controller + dimmer + alarm clock beside the bed. I set the alarm at 5am the next morning but it wasn't of much help since I woke up earlier than that.
Next, the toilet.
Just look at that super large mirror! Totally perfect for the ladies to camwhore right?
The bath tub.
And another cubicle to shower.
But why got 2 places to shower wan? Maybe for those rich entrepreneurs to shower at the bath tub and his wife/girlfriend showering at the cubicle?
A weighing machine is available as well. Totally cool for the ladies, and some men too.
This toilet bowl has a unique feature which I've never encountered before. Definitely because I'm not rich enough to afford such a hotel room.
For your information, there are 2 triggers at the side of the seat. When you turn the trigger, something automatically moves out and starts spraying water out!
One is definitely for the asshole, while the other one is for.. err.. the front part lah.
So cool eh. It makes sure you're totally clean after doing your business.
No wonder it's called "Nais"!
Besides that, there's a safety box in the room. Certainly for the rich managers to store their money.
They have beverages in the refrigerator as well but I didn't take any. For sure can't afford the extra charges.
And since it was time for dinner and I was pretty hungry, I checked on the menu because I was kinda lazy to walk out.
But after looking at the menu… really expensive lah! Can't imagine what that RM270 Live Lobster would be like. =/
Well, that's all for now about Hotel Nikko. An expensive place to stay (the room actually costs RM552 a night!) but fortunately I didn't have to pay for it.
So yeah, that's me "sleeping" on the bed – with so much more space!


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Predicting when a complex system will go through a sudden change is hard — either you need vast swathes of information, or you make rather bad predictions. But we want to spot critical transitions before they happen, regardless of whether we're talking about irreversible damage to coral reefs, stock market crashes, or fishery collapses. It can be done if you know what to look for, but getting a sufficient amount of data be tough.
Enter a new proposal by Steven Lade from the Max-Planck-Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and Thilo Gross from the University of Bristol published yesterday in the journal PLoS Computational Biology (free online). In it, the scientists argue that there is a way to see these things in advance without needing quite as much data. Their "generalized model" allows the use of partial information, and allows for unknown and unmeasurable variables. Their idea is designed to be used in conjunction with existing models to provide extra warning before things go pear-shaped. Sure, it might not be quite as accurate, but it's easier and faster.
And it's possible that a model like this one could help us spot critical changes to any important system — financial, climate, or otherwise. Maybe one day we'll be able to prevent collapses before they start.

subset: commoncrawl


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I have visitors, but no earnings. What's wrong?
Your earnings carry over from month-to-month, which means you never lose your earnings.
Check your bounce rate. That is often the reason why some publishers believe they are missing earnings. The bounce rate indicates the percentage of users that are not completing the captcha when they click your links. You will only receive credit for an unique visitor that is authentic and views your paste.


text: Launched in 1970, Pulsar revolutionised watch-making through their innovation of the LED watch in 1972, becoming a worldwide institution after their acquisition under Seiko in 1978. Pulsar watches have carried through groundbreaking design to this day, creating timepieces divine in look incorporated with outstanding technology. With the brand caption being 'Tell it Your Way', Pulsar provides the message that individuality should be a key component in watch choice, to provide a look tailored to the user – whether sophisticated or extravagant. At Total Watches we have a wide-ranging collection of men's Pulsar watches to set your pulse racing. The Pulsar Watch PZ4003X1 is one of our best-sellers, containing a variety of features including a stainless steel bracelet strap, a stainless steel with blue top-ring case and has a black dial with multi-functional display dial combining analogue and digital technology.All Pulsar Watches


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GE Lighting Contributes to a Sustainable Olympics & Legacy for London
As a London 2012 Sustainability Partner and a Global Olympic 2012 sponsor, GE Lighting has worked alongside the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) to deliver a series of lighting projects. GE Lighting has provided energy efficient, low impact lighting solutions for permanent as well as temporary lighting installations that will either continue to deliver energy savings for years to come or allow lamps to be re-used in projects around the city after the Olympic & Paralympic Games end in September 2012.
Security is of paramount importance at such a high profile event. As such, GE Lighting has supplied its Odyssey luminaires and CMH Streetwise lamps to ensure the highest levels of security within the main visitor areas in the Olympic Parks. GE Lighting's Streetwise lamps deliver a brighter, safer light and high color rendering, help to promote feelings of safety within the parks and ensure footage gained through CCTV cameras is as clear as possible.
With GE Lighting's vast portfolio, the company also supplied a range of specialist sports floodlights for the Olympic Hockey Arena. An extremely powerful architectural floodlight, the Euroflood 2000 has been designed with an integrated ballast compartment for HPS and Metal Halide (MH) lamps up to 600W.
In addition, to mark the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games GE has transformed London's iconic Tower Bridge with a new state of-the-art lighting system – designed to enhance its architectural features and replace static lights with bulbs that can vary in intensity and color, while at the same time cutting energy consumption considerably.
The famous landmark will also feature giant suspended Olympic Rings and Paralympic Agitos for the 45 days of the Games. GE will be illuminating the rings, as well as smaller versions in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff using its powerful LED Floodlights and working in conjunction with all the major cities' councils to ensure that once again, the installations can be reused after the Olympic Games come to a close.


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Visual Studio Toolbox: DevExpress CodeRush
There are a number of third-party vendors providing tools you can use to enhance your productivity when developing with Visual Studio. Recently, Robert sat down with three of them: DevExpress (makers of CodeRush), JetBrains (makers of ReSharper), and Telerik (makers of JustCode). Each had 20 minutes to show how their product can help you write better code faster. In this episode, Mark Miller of DevExpress shows us CodeRush.
Right click or Alt+Enter to download this episode
- High Quality WMV (212.0 MB)
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- Low Quality MP4 (61.8 MB)
- Mid Quality MP4 (235.6 MB)
The Discussion
Oh great, more c# demos and look it doesn't say that in the title yet again.
How nice of you to create false hope and waste peoples time. Like priests selling forgiveness.
This series really should be renamed to "visual studio toolbox for c#" or "visual studio toolbox for microsoft owned languages".
I want my minutes back ! The time it took for me to swallow my hope and realize this was another c# video.
To your face i would call you a sorry excuse for developer using c# and douchebag for the incorrect titles and because you delete comments that are remotely negative, you're the cowardly type that get people killed in movies, but sadly that would be a waste of time too. Humans do not listen to constructive feedback, you work for microsoft so will definitely not listen.
Now that's a man/women with his hope crushed one too many times and with a serious withdrawal for videos with non-microsoft pimped content.
I've gotten that feeling too a few times too on c9 but never even bothered to comment about it for a reason he pretty much nailed.
@Robert Green
What did you do to him ? Psychic warfare ?
For fun, nudge him/her over the cliff. I want to watch the result.
Now if that were on the telly and i would watch it. I have a new telly but no good shows to watch.
Considering the point of the video is CodeRush and not the development language, I think the comment is highly inappropriate. Having cut my teeth on the road from Fortran to C, C++, VC++ to C# I take offense.
Fact is, it sounds like "oh the fork" is a one dimensional developer. Having worked on all of the above languages and more (including being MS certified in both C# and VB.NET), I realize that it doesn't matter what language is being demonstrate if you've been open to more than one, you can gain the same understanding. As an example, being a MS-developer has never stopped me from reading very good architecture and design books written using Java and I've never had one iota of trouble following along.
People in glass houses...
@oh the fork
Did you really expect to come to the microsoft developer network, to learn about java, ruby Go!!
So we have the Anti-C# group and the Anti-Microsoft group well represented by a couple of welfare cases. So your time is worth $0.00 and you really have no claim. As the rep from Dell said " buddy, you're too stupid to own a computer, put it back in the box and..".
Present day, there is more documentation and are more demonstrations, walk-throughs and videos than there has ever been - all thanks to Microsoft and their associated contributors. Perhaps a little cheese would go good with that whine!
It is like going to sports channel and ask for movies!!!!!!
didn't you notice "fork" that this is microsoft channel9
thanks robert,always great topics
Everything in DevExpress works the same (basically) in VB as well as C#
This excellent show is about tools to add to Visual Studio, it makes sense to pick one language stick with it. So of couse you would pick C#.
As someone else said most of the features are language independent anyway.
I think fork sounds like a frustrated VB developer that cant or wont make the move to C# either because they are too lazy or trapped in a legacy project. Either way, if you dont like the show's preference to C# then dont watch it. There are many others that love it either way and top marks to Robert for the effort he puts in and outstanding presentation.
Keep up the good work!
Trolls will be trolls, I use Telerik products and was interested in the competition and what they had to say..
If you can program in one language then you can program in just about any language, the mindset is the same. Take a big problem and break it down into manageable steps and then work on one step at a time. Some languages you have to use more steps, but once you figure out what you want all you have to do is figure out how do I do it. Familiarity with the language makes it faster.
@oh the fork:What did you want C++. VB or F#? remember it is Visual Studio Toolbox
opening this thread with a comment
how can i crack my ASP.NET DevExpress using Visual 2010
Conversation locked
This conversation has been locked by the site admins. No new comments can be made.


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During the Cold War, the CIA hired a master magician to teach them deceptive maneuvers. Here are a handful of tricks, recovered from a super secret manual the government thought it had destroyed over 30 years ago.
Our spooky spy friends Bob Wallace and Keith Melton—the guys behind the amazing spy-gadget bible Spycraft— uncovered one of the supposedly incinerated "magic" journals. Their new book, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, is in part a verbatim reproduction of that manual, but, thrillingly, it also shares the (declassified) history of CIA trickery from the beginning, including the formation of the double top-secret and sometimes sinister MKULTRA division. MKULTRA was supposed to have been erased from history in 1973, but—in true spy fashion—the few shreds of paperwork that remained ended up telling its whole story.
The discovered manual was penned by John Mulholland, the David Copperfield and/or Blaine of his day. Though Mulholland knew more than anybody since Houdini about pulling fast ones, his challenge was to teach people who were not necessarily pros to pull off tricks in front of an audience that didn't know it was an audience. Perform a lousy trick, and you don't get booed—you get beheaded.
Here Wallace and Melton have kindly shared some newly created illustrations of tricks from the book, CIA sleights you could employ to escape from a water-bottling plant, poison a friend, send messages with your shoelaces, steal single sheets of paper, look dumb, and of course, kill Castro. Not all of the tricks below come from Mulholland's original manual, but they were all devised at Langley, and are all lovingly described in the book—a $16 thrill of a read for anyone with even a passing interest in spyology:
Thanks to Bob Wallace and Keith Melton for sharing their book's illustrations with us. If you'd like to know more about the book, check out its sales page on Amazon (there's a Kindle version too), or visit the authors' new website, CIA Magic.


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A Meditation
Being is eternal;
Becoming is temporal.
What we love is what we become!
I resolve not to live in collusion with my delusions;
I resolve to live as a Loving be-ing.
Herb K. was given the gift of freedom from alcohol February 21, 1984. As a result of the application of the Twelve Steps as contained precisely in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, he experienced a profound spiritual awakening in 1988. Since then he has been very involved in carrying the message of recovery through presentations, facilitating workshops, and leading retreats.
He has authored three books to help people access the instructions and confirm the actual process contained in the Big Book for experiencing a spiritual awakening: Practicing the Here and Now: Being Intentional with Step 11 (2017), Twelve-Step Guide to Using the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book (2004) and Twelve Steps to Spiritual Awakening: Enlightenment for Everyone (2010). His books are available on Amazon and other locations.


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Daily Archives: September 3, 2009
Celebrating the small things
I just got back from a wonderful yoga class at my new gym! I've only ever done Iyengar classes before, so I was curious as to what it would be like. It was a class unique to our gym (rather than the pre-choreographed "Bodyflow" class). It was mostly Hatha style. Very light with a few tough holds and pretzel poses ;) Our instructor was awesome, very real and not intimidating in any way. We've got another winner at the new gym! :D
This was the view of the river from my new place when I got out of bed this morning:
Just the inspiration I needed to make Belgian waffles. Yup! I splurged on a Belgian waffle press. Not one of the fancy spinning ones, but it gets the job done ;)
I used my protein pancake recipe. In the blender went:
- 1/2 cup rolled oats
- 1/2 cup cottage cheese
- 1/2 cup egg whites
- 1 tbsp ground flax
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- cinnamon
I topped them with fresh blueberries and a fake syrup/maple syrup mix.
They came out so fluffy! The belgian press also works much faster than the small rectangular one my old roommie had. Makes having these on a workday much easier :)
I had more delicious food for supper…
Another reason why I love my new place! Unlike my old top-floor apartment, it's in a basement. So even though it was 28 C today, I could still use the oven! Those aren't fries, but an Yves veggie chicken burger cut into slices for fun dipping into plum sauce. That corn you see up there was the best I've had all season. I baked it in the husk for close to 30 minutes. I don't have any salt or pepper (got lost in the move somewhere) so I just ate it straight up. So good! Corn is so sweet and juicy, there's no reason to dress it up. I've learned my lesson.
I'm also all out of dark chocolate, so dessert was another great bite-sized sweet.
Dates! Stuffed with almond butter. I buy small soft dates because they're cheaper. The big medjool ones are $12 a carton!!!
And look what the lovely (hilarious, inspiring, smarty pants, etc) Janetha sent me!!!
Made. My. Day Week. It should come as no surprise that the way to my heart is with food. Especially when that food is protein packed ;)
Most excited to try the cinnamon flavour!!
Thanks JB!! You're the bestest!! :D
You may notice a huge chunk of my workday is missing from this post. That's because I was busy as hell. My boss had me covering four events between 9am and noon. Sometimes I get the feeling he does this just to see if I can actually get to them all. Instead of being annoyed by this though, I get inspired. I am totally up to the challenge.
Taking on challenges and stepping out of comfort zones is something I talk about a lot. I've been very open about my history with social anxiety and agoraphobia. I truly believe that what has allowed me to overcome my anxiety disorder is learning to challenge it on a daily basis. If I haven't done something that sends a surge of panic through my body, then I haven't tried hard enough for the day.
My love for exercise definitely stems from this desire to challenge myself. I love putting my body through the wringer and seeing exactly what it can do.
Part of challenging yourself though, is recognizing your accomplishments. You have to remember to celebrate the small things. Today, I made it to all four events before noon, and ended up with a million great stories for my radio station. I was proud that I accomplished something that almost seemed impossible.
So how did I celebrate? I went to a yoga class and challenged myself in a room full of strangers. For the record, people with social anxiety disorders do not tangle their bodies up while surrounded by people they don't know. But this is just one of the many things I force myself to do on a regular basis, because in the end, I never regret it.
So in celebration of my small accomplishments today, I'm asking you to do the same! Tell me one thing you're proud of that you've done recently. Something that challenged you and you overcame, no matter how big or small!
And to finish it all off, I want to give a shout-out to Brie. She's one of the many wonderful people I've met on the internet through my weight loss process. She just started her own blog: The Fit Bride. She's planning her wedding and loves weight lifting as much as I do! :D (and is damn strong to boot)
Okay, I'm off to get all my stuff ready before my long run tomorrow. Seventy minutes planned! Night night!


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The Swedish drama over rape allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shows no sign of dying down.
Swedish Public Prosecutions Director Marianne Ny overruled Stockholm's top prosecutor and decided to reopen the investigation into the charges. They are based on allegations by two women who are are represented by Claes Borgstrom, a well-respected attorney and a spokesman for the liberal Social Democratic party.
While exactly what is alleged is confidential, a Swedish newspaper reported that one women said she was raped, the other molested, in situations that began as consensual sex and gave police similar accounts.
Borgstrom's involvement perhaps makes it more difficult for Assange supporters to argue that the allegations are part of a campaign of dirty tricks by the Pentagon, which has been steaming since WikiLeaks in July published 76,000 documents about the Afghanistan war, and is believed to be planning to publish more.
The World Socialist Web Site argues that U.S. and British media are pushing a smear of the WikiLeaks founder to curry favor with Washington.
But Borgstrom counters that his clients have been "dragged through the mud through the Internet for making things up or trying to frame Assange." The women are supposed to have met Assange through their involvement with the leftist Pirate Party, which agreed last month to provide servers to host WikiLeaks content.
Assange, an Australian-born physicist, has been seeking residency in Sweden, which has tough laws protecting whistle-blowers.


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Mom-of-two Jennifer Meyer was flying solo in LA yesterday. This is the first we've seen of Jennifer since she and her husband Tobey Maguire welcomed their second baby, a boy, on May 8. She looks great! Last weekend Tobey and big sister Ruby Sweetheart, 2 1/2, were spotted enjoying some daddy-daughter time together.
Jennifer Meyer Out & About In LA
Posted by Alisa on Saturday, June 20, 2009


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Review the checklist below to make your senior year as smooth as possible.
How and Where
|Prior to your senior year
|Verify your major and minor are accurate on university system (for audit purposes)
|Through your adviser, department secretary or MyNMU
|You've earned 86 credits
|Initial degree audit received
|Schedule appointment with your adviser to review your audit. Audit Information
|During your final two semesters
|Develop and finalize resume and references
|Career Services
|Prior to beginning of your final semester
|Review final degree audit
|Audit Information
|One semester prior
to graduation
|Register for graduation
|Online when you register for classes
|One semester prior
to graduation
|Attend job fair
|Career Services
|Two months prior
to graduation
|Reserve your cap and gown (after 10th week of the semester a late fee is charged)
|University Bookstore
|Week 15 of the semester
|Financial aid exit meeting
|Financial Aid
|Finals Week
|Pick up cap and gown
|University Bookstore
|By Friday prior
to commencement
|Return mobile device (if not purchasing)
|Micro Repair 114 Harden Hall
|Friday prior
to commencement
|Commencement rehearsal
|Superior Dome
Commencement information
|Saturday of finals week
|Commencement ceremony--celebrate!
|Superior Dome
Commencement information


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Schools & Colleges
A-Z Index | Find a Health Care Provider
Contact Us | Maps and Parking
Alpha Omega Alpha - This link will take you to the Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) homepage.
American Medical Association Seed Grant Program - This link will take you to the AMA page for the seed grant program. $2500 will help junior investigators conduct basic science or clinical research projects in the following four categories: Cardiovascular/Pulmonary Dieseases, HIV/AIDS, Leukemia, and Neoplastic Diseases. APPLICATIONS ARE DUE BY DECEMBER 6, 2010.
Health Sciences Library- This link will take you to the 'Search' page for the University of Colorado Health Sciences Library located at the Anschutz Medical Campus.
NIH Year Off- This link will take you to the National Institute of Health homepage. Information about internships, research and scholarships for all degree levels can be found here.
Sarnoff Cardiovascular Research Foundation - The Sarnoff Fellowship Program offers research opportunities for outstanding medical students to explore careers in cardiovascular research. Applicants must be enrolled in accredited U.S. medical schools. Sarnoff Fellows conduct intensive work in a research laboratory, located in the United States, for one year. Prior research experience is not a prerequisite.Western Student Medical Research Forum- This link will take you to the WSMRF homepage. Information about the conference, abstract registration and conference registration can be found here.
© The Regents of the University of Colorado, a body corporate. All rights reserved.
Accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. All trademarks are registered property of the University. Used by permission only.


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Our Mission Statement
Pretty In Pink Foundation's mission is to provide uninsured and under-insured breast cancer patients in North Carolina with financial assistance for quality, life-saving medical treatment. We make this happen with financial commitments through sponsorships, fundraising, donations and pledge drives that support our Champions throughout North Carolina.
How Your Donation Helps
Projected North Carolinians that will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year
Breast cancer patients that will qualify for our services
$6 Million
Funds needed to support those patients


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Mystery meat thing of past in school lunches
As students head into another school year, more schools are deciding to offer healthier school lunches. Mystery meat is gone and better quality foods are moving in.
La Follette High School will have a new variety bar where they will offer options that include a baked potato bar or a burger bar.
Steve Youngbauer, Madison Metropolitan School District food services coordinator, is responsible for lunch options for more than 20,000 students in the district.
This year, the district is aiming to get garden bars into 25 of their schools, but it's going to take work.
"It's a combination of upgrading washing facilities, and making some additions to the amount of refrigeration so that we could adequately store the produce from the garden bar," said Youngbauer.
Changing up school lunches it the theme in many areas, even in smaller places like Sauk Prairie.
"We got them to try kale chips, which were a huge hit," Lauren Spoke, food services director for the Sauk Prairie School District.
New this year is the return of the district's partnership with local apple orchard. Their chicken patty option and local organic lettuce can be costly but Spoke said a lot of it is finding a good price when buying for a lot of people.
Trying new, healthy options doesn't always work well. Like when workers tried hiding beans in the mac and cheese, and it was a "complete failure."
But when they find something the kids love, it is a win for everyone.


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Bordeaux Basin Set Brushed Bronze
More Info On Bathroom Taps and Tapware
If you want to make a statement in your bathroom, and you'd like to wrap up the style and the efficiency of the bathroom, nothing finishes it off like bathroom taps. Bathroom tapware makes the final statement, adds that finishing touch that you have been looking for. With dozens of styles from which to choose, we've got bathroom tapware for every taste, every style and every budget.
Tapware may seem like a small part of your bathroom but it not only helps to provide a finished look, it is also very important from the utility point of view. A relatively recent innovation is the introduction of ceramic disc cartridges. Ceramic disc tapware do away with the washer of standard "plunger" taps, which require periodic replacement. The rate of wear will be dependent on the frequency of use and the quality of water.
Whether you're looking for trendy or traditional bathroom tapware and no matter what kind of materials you're seeking, from chrome to brass to brushed metal, we've got what you're looking for. Every style and decorative element that you want can be found at Bathroomware House.
Every tap that is sold at Bathroomware House is created with the utmost care and selected specifically for inclusion in our inventory. Each mixer is quality merchandise that you can depend on to give you great performance and peace of mind for years to come. They have top quality parts and looks that will go the distance. What's more, Bathroomware House stands behind what we sell with quality warranties.
Tips For Choosing Bathroom Taps
When choosing tapware, take into consideration whether they will be mounted directly to the basin, sink or bath, in the wall, or counter top. Their mounting position will have a huge impact in terms of size and style. It is important to consider height of tapware, as this can affect normal operation of overhead cabinetry.
While it is important to choose tapware based on the ease of use, you would also want them to complement the style of your bathroom. Basins and baths that have curved designs tend to look better with with mixers that have rounded spouts and handles.
Also keep in mind that your tapware should carry a W.E.L.S. rating to comply with government regulations. For more information about W.E.L.S. rating you can visit the Australian government website: http://www.waterrating.gov.au/.
Please note - when tapware is installed, all standards and regulations governing sewerage, plumbing, water supply and gas applicable to the location of the particular plumbing installation must be observed. This includes the Australian Standards (AS/NZ 3500.1-2003, Clause 3.3.4) which specify that water pressure must be limited to 500kpa on any new home, extension or renovation. The recommended continuous operating pressure for tapware is between 150-500kpa (maximum static pressure must not exceed 500kpa).
Types of Bathroom Tapware
Basin Tapware
Basin taps can include mixer taps and pillar taps. Mixers are becoming increasingly popular and are available in a wide range of brands and styles. They come with temperature and flow adjustable cartridges and allow maximum water flow and temperature to be set for single lever mixers. You can also regulate water usage and reduce wastage. It is important to pair your basin mixer with your basin - above counter basins may require "high-rise" basin mixers to clear the lip of the bowl.
Shower Tapware
You can choose from shower tapware that is both stylish and functional. Available in mixer or tap set configurations, you can choose between different designs, from traditional through to mordern styles. Ceramic disc units are a popular option as they don't require any maintenance. You can consider Phoneix tapware which has a great warranty and a life expectancy of over 15 years.
Bath Tapware
If you are renovating your bathroom then the finishing touch will come from beautiful bath tapware. While there is a complete range of bath tapware available, the Minimalist range is much in demand for its chic and sleek design. Boasting an Italian inspiration, the Minimalist range features ceramic cartridge technology for reliability and performance.
Kitchen & Laundry Tapware
Most kitchen and laundry tapware is designed to be positioned on the sink or benchtop. However, the situation may arise where the tapware needs to come out of a wall or splashback. In this case, wall stops (hot and cold taps) can be used with a spout.
If a double sink is in place, a swivel spout is normally used to swing from one sink to the other. Keep in mind a spout should not get in the way when washing dishes or handwashing clothes. Pull-out mixer spouts are also an option. They give added reach when cleaning dirty pots & pans, which can sometimes be awkard with a fixed spout


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Last year marked a season of intense recruiting for Sarasota Crew's varsity men's squad, resulting in commitments to Columbia, Northeastern and Princeton.
This year, the girls take the honors.
Carli Goldberg of Osprey, a senior at Riverview High in Sarasota, has announced her commitment to row for the University of Virginia next year. Westanna Carleton of Venice, a senior at The Out of Door Academy, has signed with Boston University, and Christina Niffenegger of Sarasota, a senior at Pine View High School, will row for the University of California, San Diego.
The three girls have rowed as a team since 2006 and claimed top honors at the 2009 Southeastern Regional Championship women's youth sculling event. Four other female rowers also are considering invitations from colleges and universities.
"These three girls represent Sarasota Crew extremely well," said Casey Galvanek, Sarasota Crew head coach. "They have put in the hard work, they have felt the pain of training, they have felt the pleasure in achieving their individual and team goals and they have kept focus with their academic workload. Keeping such a balance has offered each athlete a greater scope of collegiate opportunities, and these young ladies did not hesitate to take full advantage."
Contact Loren Mayo at [email protected].


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American Councils students placed in Edwardsville, IL for the 2016-17 school year recently spoke with their local newspaper about their exchange experience. This article was originally puslished
Fri, 05/12/2017 - 9:05am
Fri, 05/05/2017 - 2:02pm
Each year, American Councils holds an essay contest called "My American Experience." We asked our FLEX, YES, and Cultural Bridges students to reflect on the value of exchange programs for both
Mon, 02/27/2017 - 11:05am
Jumana, an American Councils student from Bahrain placed in Iowa for the 2016-17 school year, reflects on the decision to apply for the YES program and how this has impacted her life so far.


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Alexander Skarsgard just can't keep his damn shirt on. The True Blood star takes it (mostly) all off for the new Cut Copy video for "Free Your Mind." The six-minute clip finds Skarsgard playing a cult leader, complete with robe and terrible wig. In time with the track's tribal dance beats, Skarsgard struts around his compound, playing air basketball with an old, bearded man and interrupting some of the fellow cult members' romantic endeavors. One note: It's a little NSFW, especially if you work somewhere that hates abs.
Cut Copy's new record, Free Your Mind, is out Nov. 5 in the U.S.


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Congratulations to Musician Kevin Jonas and Danielle, his wife of three years! Kevin Jonas exclusively told E! News, "I was overjoyed. It's been the most exciting thing in my life so far. I'm excited and I'm nervous."
Kevin already has taken to his Twitter page to share his joy at becoming a parent and promote the story on E! News. He tweeted: "@daniellejonas & I feel so blessed to be parents-to-be. Happy 2 be sharing this news! Tune into E! News for official announcement @ 7pm"


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Doo.Ri Fall 2011 Collection Fashion Week Review
2011 Fall New York Fashion Week: Doo.Ri
2011 Fall New York Fashion Week: Doo.Ri
Doo-Ri Chung is known for her signature draping skills but for her Fall 2011 collection seen earlier this evening at Eyebeam Gallery in Chelsea, the designer mixed things up. In addition to showing languid jersey gowns, some slit high to the thigh, the designer introduced a new category to her repertoire: slick tailored pieces comprised of felted wool coats, nylon jackets, and trousers. Dresses, embellished with cool cord macrame also played an integral role in the storyboard inspired by artist Beverly Semmes. This concept, described by Doo-Ri as "linear structure," adds a sharp touch without looking too severe — perfect for that city girl wanting to add a little edge to her look.
- Trends: Long silhouettes, mohair trim, high-slit gowns and long skirts, dolman sleeves, sheer and leather inserts, cord macrame detailing.
- Colors: Gray, sapphire blue, navy, beige.
- Key Looks: A heather gray racerback gown with sheer inserts.
- Accessories: Chunky leather woven booties, simple leather bracelets, oversized wool scarves, thigh-high lace-up boots.
- Who Would Wear It: Urban nomads, art types.


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WADSWORTH — A school bus carrying children to their elementary school this morning crashed into a Jeep, spun around and then hit another vehicle before flipping onto its side, killing one adult and sending dozens of children to hospitals, authorities said.
WADSWORTH — A school bus carrying children to their elementary school this morning crashed into a Jeep, spun around and then hit another vehicle before flipping onto its side, killing one adult and sending dozens of children to hospitals, authorities said.
All 35 people aboard the bus survived the crash that happened around 8 a.m. in Wadsworth, 45 miles north of Chicago, Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran Jr. said. Authorities said the driver of a Jeep Wrangler that collided with the bus died of traumatic injuries.
Although authorities at first said the bus driver may have run a red light, they said later that witnesses gave conflicting accounts and it was not yet clear who was at fault.
Curran said the bus driver was speaking with authorities as part of their investigation, and toxicology tests were being performed on both drivers. No charges had been filed as of late this afternoon.
Barbara Taylor, who lives nearby, said she heard the collision from her home.
"I heard a thud and the ground shook a little bit and I looked out the bedroom window and saw the bus on its side," Taylor said.
By the time she looked from another window, other drivers were rushing to the scene to help, she said. The accident happened about a mile from Newport Elementary School.
Lake County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Sara Balmes said Smith's vehicle was southbound and the bus was traveling west, about a mile from Newport Elementary School.
After the first collision with the Jeep Wrangler, the bus spun around and hit a Jeep Cherokee before flipping onto its side. The front roll bar of the Wrangler was completely removed by the force of the crash, the hood flattened and squashed into the front seats. Debris lay scattered in adjacent farm fields. Authorities identified the person who died as Philip Smith, 62, of Beach Park, Ill.
Schools Superintendent Bob DiVirgilio said 34 students were on the bus, which was not equipped with seatbelts. He said the high seat backs probably prevented more serious injuries.
"We are very thankful that they were all OK and that the emergency response was there," DiVirgilio said at a news conference.
At Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan, spokesman John Griffin said an 11-year-old girl who was in fair condition with a skull fracture was transferred to Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago. Five other students were treated and released.
Sarah Toomey, a spokeswoman for Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, said 25 children were taken to the hospital and 24 had been released by late afternoon. The remaining child remained in observation in good condition, she said.
She said the children had "very minor injuries," including bruises, bumps and scrapes. Some children had broken bones, particularly in their hands as they braced themselves and fell from their seats when the bus tipped over, said Charles Nozicka, the medical director of hospital's pediatric emergency department.
"Luckily, most of them were just shaken up," he said.
Most of the children climbed out of the bus through the back exit.
"Some of the kids were upbeat, jovial as if they just got off a ride at Great America," Lake County Sheriff Chief Brian Keller said. "Other kids were asking for their mother or father and wanted to go home."


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SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Snatching a draw from the jaws of defeat.
It doesn't exactly roll right off the tongue, but come October, if the Earthquakes are playing postseason soccer, they may look back to Wednesday night's game against Columbus as a big, big turning point.
A tired Quakes unit was 11 minutes away from a second straight home loss and probably having to answer questions about whether their remarkable 5-2-1 start was for real. Columbus pulled ahead late on Chad Marshall's header in the 69th minute, and it appeared the Eastern Conference leaders were poised to avenge their first loss of the season last weekend.
But then the Quakes showed why they're a different team now than the doormat they've been for the last two seasons. They kept pushing and finally found the equalizer through – who else? – the very symbol of their turnaround. Chris Wondolowski headed in his sixth goal of the year in the 79th to snatch a 2-2 draw for San Jose.
"My eyes were pretty big," said Wondolowski of the ball heading his way in the goalmouth. "I'm sure the people in the crowd could see how big [my eyes] were."
On the fixture list, it was still just a draw. But it was also a draw against one of the best teams in the league, one that was highly motivated for a rebound of its own. And the Quakes responded with aplomb.
"We would have lost that last year, definitely," said head coach Frank Yallop. "They'd have beat us 3-2, 2-1. But the team doesn't want to lose."
The difference in San Jose this season is palpable: They don't put their heads down after a loss and they believe they've got the ability to pull out results. That's led to some hard-fought points so far this season, like a crusher over New York or a tight 1-0 win in Seattle. That mentality is what proves they're maturing every game.
Even this past weekend, when Toronto came into Buck Shaw and ran out 3-1 winners, the Quakes looked around the locker room and knew they could do better. They didn't get the win Wednesday night against Columbus, but fighting back against a motivated opponent – who dominated stretches of the game – and earning a point says an awful lot about their character.
"That's a huge point for us," said goalkeeper Joe Cannon. "[Columbus are] a really good team; give them a lot of credit. I can't say enough about the fight that our guys brought. We easily could have dropped our heads like we did the other night [against Toronto]."
Of course, October is a long, long way away. But as we've seen in recent years, mere points make the difference in making the playoffs or watching them on TV. And the Quakes are still very much a work in progress in their transformation into a contender.
"We have a lot of veterans on this team," said Wondolowski. "But that being said, we have a lot to learn. We try to learn each week from our mistakes and our positives."
When the Quakes look back at their season, they know this was a game that could be a difference-maker. They're not playing terrific soccer right now, but you don't have the same old Quakes to push around anymore.


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Reviewed By Dalton H (Fox Lake, IL) Reviewed for a 2006 GMC Envoy —1/2/2017 10:45 PM
This is the best thing I have had in awhile and makes a huge difference.
There are no customer reviews for this product
Reviewed By James M (Muskegon, MI) Reviewed for a 2005 GMC Envoy —12/9/2015 5:10 AM
Expectid to be able to take the old air system out and just hook up the new k&n system and done. Sadly it was not that easy. The holes for the grommets were to small making the hole in the grommet to small for the air sensor. I had to open up the hole with a die grinder to get it to work. Also there id no hole for the air injection tube. Lucky i already had a 1-1/4 hole saw or i would of had to go buy that too. Sill love the product and the brand


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TULARE COUNTY, Calif. -- Equipped with backpacks, binoculars, even life jackets, family members of Alondra Orozco on Thursday set out for a third straight day of searching. They are hoping to find the 21-year-old after she was swept away by the rushing currents of the Tule River on April 14.
Family members said the Cal State Bakersfield student tried to save her friend after she fell into the water.
"You help other people before you help yourself, and that's the first thing she did, she didn't think twice about it," said Daniel Orozco, Alondra Orozco's brother.
Orozco's cousin called for help, and Tulare County search-and-rescue crews recovered one of the bodies later that morning. More family members showed up and Orozco's brother Daniel said his uncle was the first to see pictures of that body, and believed it to be Alondra.
Daniel said while the pictures did resemble their sister, they had doubts about whether it was really her.
"We weren't sure, we didn't say, we didn't identify her or say yeah it is her, we just looked at it and broke down a little bit."
Daniel said he then asked to see the body and that a chaplain told him he could. But when they got closer, Daniel said he was told over and over again that he couldn't and would have to wait until his sister was brought to a funeral home in Delano.
So Orozco's family started planning a funeral.
"We had everything organized, we had services times, we had church times, cemetery times, and then Monday we find out none of this is true."
That's when Daniel said his family received a call from the family of the other woman who was swept away, Shreya Singh, who said they were informed that Singh was the one who was found last week, not Orozco.
The Tulare County Sheriff's Office released a statement Thursday that said:
"Our first responders initially relied solely on witness statements at the scene provided by family and friends. The only information obtained at that time was that the recovered decedent was Orozco, however, it was not definitive. Further investigation at the Coroner's Office was conducted to confirm the witness statements. While comparing the decedent to DMV thumbprints on file, it was learned that the decedent was misidentified by family members on scene. Both families were notified by our office once a definitive identification had been made by the thumbprint on Monday."
Family cancels funeral for CSU Bakersfield student after wrong victim identified
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Land Administration: Success for the Regional Event in Kampala
KAMPALA, Uganda, January 23, 2013/African Press Organization (APO)/ -- IGN France International (http://www.ignfi.com), the leader of the international consortium engaged in the Design, Supply, Installation, Implementation of the Lands Information System and Securing of Land Records (DeSIILISoR) project in Uganda organized a regional conference in Kampala, Uganda (January 17th and 18th) on the theme:
"Modernization of land administration and management systems Implementation of Land Information Systems (LIS): sharing experiences, innovations and good practices."
The official opening of the conference was attended by the Vice-President of the Republic of Uganda Edward Sekandi; the Minister of the Land, Housing and Urban Development (MLHUD) Daudi Migereko, three Ministers of State (secretaries of state), the Ambassador of France, and representatives from the World Bank. The participation of such prominent representatives clearly demonstrated the level of importance that Ugandan and the international authorities attribute to the issue of land in general and to the DeSILISoR project in particular.
Frank Byamugisha, the World Bank representative explained that the Bank had financed more than 60 land projects over the past 20 years to a total value of US$2.7 billion. He discussed the development benefits of these cross-cutting projects and explored the economic (natural resources management, urban planning) and sociological (gender issues) benefits to countries that initiate them. Byamugisha also highlighted the direct objectives of the World Banks interventions: improving tenure security over communal land, improving tenure security over individual land, increasing access and tenure for the poor and vulnerable, increasing efficiency and transparency in land administration services, developing capacity in land administration, resolving land disputes and managing expropriations, increasing scope and effectiveness of land use planning, improving public land management, developing post-conflict land administration and strengthening valuation functions and land tax policies.
More than 180 participants from over ten different African countries participated in the conference. Representatives from Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Togo, France, United Kingdom and the Netherlands attended the conference with full delegations from Ivory Coast, Chad and Libya. The strong participation in this conference clearly reflects the strong interest in West Africa and East to secure land and developing the potential of land and natural resources.
The consortium charged with the implementation of the DeSIILISoR project led by IGN France International brought together 10 companies involving 30 international experts to digitalize 16,000 cadastral maps and 500,000 and titles. The conference provided an opportunity for the people involved in the project to share experiences and the various components of the project including the establishment of a National Land Information Centre (NLIC), the design and implementation of a land information system (LIS) in Uganda, the conversion of land records, data integration, training and capacity building, and the implementation of a public information and awareness communication were all presented in detail.
Feedback from each member of the consortium on the different aspects and the main difficulties encountered during the 3 year project were an important element of the plenary session and presented a road map of the main issues to take into account when starting these ambitious and complex land projects. A presentation of regional issues was made by the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) and country specific presentations were made by land specialists from Burundi, Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi.
Throughout the two day conference, discussions focused on technical issues related to the choice of the solutions adopted, the methodologies to be implemented and the technical equipment installed. Other topics included issues of protection against hacking, the importance of training local people, the communication targeting administrative staff and the public, and the importance of measuring concrete benefits of such projects and their returns on investment. Several presentations focused on the use of aerial photography or satellite imagery in cadaster projects. As the cost of a geographic dataset depends heavily on its accuracy, it is essential to define the data sources that will be used for the establishment of the cadastral reference from the start.
Picking up a key point of discussion on the theme of the added value of NSDI projects for developing countries at the regional conference IGN France International held in April 2012 in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) the link between land projects and National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was also addressed. Land projects are sometimes considered the cornerstone of NSDI initiatives. However the situation varies considerably from one country to another. Clear links exist between LIS projects and NSDI initiatives; however, some countries initiated NSDI projects without systematic land initiatives, while others have taken advantage of LIS projects to develop national spatial data infrastructure.
Most agreed that the highest authorities must play a determining role in the definition of public policies legal frameworks and the way these projects move forward. Without this strategic vision, both LIS and NSDI projects encounter difficulties fail to get off the ground or are not become sustainable. The completion of a geographic data set appears to be an essential component for both LIS or NSDI projects and should be taken into account from the very beginning.
In her final intervention, the Minister of Lands insisted on the added value of the LI project led by IGN France International. Securing land titles will reduce poverty and enhance economic development in Uganda.
Distributed by the African Press Organization on behalf of IGN France International.
Logo IGNI: http://www.photos.apo-opa.com/plog-content/images/apo/logos/logo-ignfi.jpg
Logo DeSiLiSoR: http://www.photos.apo-opa.com/plog-content/images/apo/logos/desilisor.jpg
Screenshot Desilisor KLA parcels: http://www.photos.apo-opa.com/plog-content/images/apo/photos/desilisor_kla_parcels.jpg
Download "Implementation-land-information-system-Uganda-Land-Administration": http://www.apo-mail.org/ignien.pdf
More details on the regional conference and the programmes will be available at: http://www.lis-uganda.go.ug and at http://www.ignfi.com
For more information : Aude ARESTE LAMENDOUR - [email protected]
About the DeSILISoR project - Land insecurity presents an obstacle to economic and social development. In Uganda, a World Bank study revealed that the average delay for the registration of titles was 270 days. It is in this context that the Ugandan Government wished to modernise its procedures. IGN France International won a tender for the securing of property titles through the development of an unique land information system for the 6 departmental offices of the districts of Kampala, Mukono, Wakiso, Jinja, Masaka and Mbarara, as well as the establishment of a national land information centre.
About IGN France International - IGN France International (http://www.ignfi.com) was created in 1986 and is the international subsidiary of the French IGN (National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information). Over the years, the company has shown itself to be an indispensable player in both of its sectors of intervention: geographic information (acquisition, processing, modelling) and geographic information systems (implementation and integration). It works on all types of projects in the following fields: Cadastre and land administration, urban planning, energy, environment, risk management, water, security/precision work, agriculture.


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A collection of scholarly works about individual liberty and free markets. A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.
1759 - 1797
Historical Period:
The 18th Century
Wollstonecraft was an English author who rose to prominence with a very quick response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. She extended her analysis two years later to defend the idea of equal rights for women in one of the founding texts of modern feminism - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft lived in France during the Revolution and wrote an early history of that event. She also wrote travel letters and novels.


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Judge: Skakel can sue Nancy Grace for slander
The Kennedy cousin awaiting a new trial in the 1975 slaying of Greenwich teenager Martha Moxley chalked up another legal victory Friday, with a federal judge ruling that Michael Skakel can go forward with a slander lawsuit against television host Nancy Grace.
A U.S. District Court judge in Hartford denied a motion filed on behalf of Grace and three co-defendants seeking to dismiss the Oct. 2012 lawsuit.
Skakel, 54, sued the HLN host over a January 2012 interview that Grace conducted with fellow legal commentator Beth Karas in which the two made unsubstantiated claims that Skakel left DNA evidence near the scene of the crime.
Karas is also named as a defendant in the defamation suit, as well as HLN parents Turner Broadcasting System and Time Warner.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy and the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
"Michael Skakel has been railroaded in the media since his arrest, simply because he's related to the Kennedy family," Stamford lawyer Stephan Seeger, who is representing Skakel in the lawsuit, told Hearst Connecticut Media on Saturday.
Attorneys for the defendants had argued that Skakel had already been convicted of murder when the broadcast aired and that he is a public figure.
"We are aware of the ruling and we are evaluating next steps," Alison Rudnick, a Turner spokeswoman, said by email Saturday.
Turner is also the parent of truTV, which employs Karas as a legal commentator.
Released on $1.2 million bond after serving 11 years in prison, Skakel won a new trial last fall in the Haloween eve murder of his Belle Haven neighborhood. Both he and Moxley, who was bludgeoned with a golf club, were 15 at the time.
A state Superior Court judge granted Skakel a new trial on the basis that he received ineffective counsel from his former lawyer Michael "Mickey" Sherman during his 2002 criminal trial. Prosecutors are appealing the ruling to the Connecticut Supreme Court -- a blockbuster reversal of fortune for Skakel, who was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
During closing arguments of his criminal trial, prosecutors played portions of a taped interview between Skakel and a freelance writer hired by Skakel to write an autobiography.
In that interview, Skakel admitted to a peeping-Tom incident outside Moxley's window on the night of her murder.
Skakel's lawsuit alleges that Grace and Karas made damaging statements about the incident that not only coincided with Skakel's unsuccessful bid for parole at the time, but could taint a jury pool in the event he received a new trial.
"Isn't it true that the Kennedy cousin was up in a tree masturbating trying to look into (Moxley's) window?" Grace asked Karas on the show.
Karas answered, "Well his DNA was found yes...up in a tree." Skakel's lawsuit alleges that Grace failed to set the record straight.
"Beth, I love the way you put it so delicately, his DNA, you know it was sperm, there I said it, and so he places himself up there in a tree masturbating," Grace said.
Seeger, who was part of the defense team during Skakel's criminal trial, characterized Grace's and Karas' comments as irresponsible. A transcript of the show, which also appeared on YouTube, was also available on the Internet.
"They both know very well that there was no DNA at the scene," Seeger told Hearst. "You can't go making comments like that."
U.S. District Court Judge Vanessa Bryant paved the way for Skakel's lawsuit to go forward.
"In sum, the plaintiff has sufficiently alleged that the defendants' published statements were false," Bryant wrote in the 27-page decision. "The defendants' contention that their statements regarding DNA implied the same view as did Skakel's murder conviction generally is false."
Seeger said the mistruths that have been allowed to fester undermined Skakel's right to a fair adjudication of his case.
"I look forward to the day that this guy is vindicated," Seeger said.
firstname.lastname@example.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy


text: Hello and welcome to my photography art. I am a father of two boys. One is a young adult and the other in 1st grade. I share my home with my youngest son and lovely wife Becky. We hail from Southeastern Massachusetts and enjoy spending time together on "Family Days" (Saturday & Sunday) working in our garden, attending local events, and just hanging out.I have had an interest in photography since I was a kid. I remember the excitement of seeing my fist pictures taken with a pinhole camera I made myself.I am currently a stay at home dad. I spend my time playing with my son, watching movies and shows he enjoys, going for walks and going to playgrounds.When I get time for myself I enjoy taking pictures, listening to music and audiobooks. My wife and I enjoy working in our garden, spending evenings watching TV, movies and doing anything that involves family.


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Photo by Black And White Design
Five guys from Majdal Shams, their instruments, lots of energy and their own unique style: that's what Green Shoe is all about. From the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, the band unites old and new, and east and west in the covers they bring.
"We combine Elvis Presley, rock 'n roll, Balkan, old Arabic songs, Tunisian and Algerian rai music and add our own touch to it," guitarist Alaa Alshaer explains. "We like to mix old songs with new influences and combine traditional instruments with alternative ones, because it's good to hear familiar things in a new way."
Green Shoe consists of Basel Mfarij on the drums, Alaa Alshaer on guitar, Basm Safadi on bass guitar, saxophonist Amr Mdah and Hosam Alshaer on the oud.
It's the melody that counts
Green Shoe started in October 2012. "A bar in Majdal Shams asked us if we wanted to prepare a few songs and play for the customers one night. Two hours beforehand we rehearsed a little bit and the audience ended up loving it," Alaa recounts.
"After the performance someone asked us the name of our band and one of the guys replied 'Green Shoe.' Ever since we've been receiving invitations to play in bars all over the place: in the Golan, Ramallah, Nazareth, Haifa… There are only a few alternative bands in the region, so we get a lot of requests."
The melody is central to Green mens shoes performance, not the lyrics. "There's no lead singer. The five of us sing, but we consider the vocals to be just another instrument," Alaa relates. "We don't focus on bringing a political message. Our message is musical and can be found in the melody. We like to play in small bars and make people dance to our groovy beats."
Paving the road
All five musicians have a history of experience in the music scene. "When we started our rock band The Redline in Majdal Shams ten years ago, everyone thought 'what are you doing? This isn't our traditional music.' But today there are five or six rock bands around, so we opened up the road for others," Alaa says. "I hope that in the future more of these kinds of cultural projects will arise. I would love to welcome more artists here to share their work."
"In the Golan, we have no international organizations, so we have to do everything ourselves," Alaa explains. "Growing up here has taught us to take initiative and that we can do a lot when working together, which makes us a close-knit society."
Israeli occupation: water and settlements
Before Israel occupied the Golan Heights in 1967, there were 137 Arab villages and 2 Arab cities in the area, housing around 130,000 people. After the Six-Day War, the Arab population had been reduced to roughly 7000, as most had been driven away to Syria. Today only five Arab villages remain—Majdal Shams, Masade, Ein Qinniye, Buq'ata and Ghajar—according to Arab Human Rights Centre Al-Marsad and Golan for Development. The villages have been under Israeli control ever since 1967, and former residents who fled to Syria are not allowed to return.
Soon after the Six-Day War, Israel started settlement construction in the Golan and confiscated large amounts of land for military use. It also allocated a large percentage of the local water resources to the settlements, while restricting the water use of the neighboring Arab communities.
Syrians under Israeli occupation
Though they share the same occupying power, the Syrian Arabs in the Golan and Palestinians experience the occupation differently. The Golan has been under Israeli civil law since 1981, whereas Palestinians are under Israeli military law.
"Israel treats us differently than the Palestinians," Alaa explains. "They consider the Golan a part of Israel and are trying to make us forget that we are Arabs. They want us to believe that we are better than Arabs and that we're better off being a part of Israel than a part of Syria. Economically this may be true, but we feel connected to the Arab world, to Syria, Palestine, Lebanon. To the language and traditions. The living standards may be higher in Israel, but we don't feel connected to the Israeli society."
The Golan has seen different Israeli strategies of occupation over the course of the years. "The first ten years we were under military rule. Hundreds of people were taken to jail for political resistance in the 1970s and 1980s," Taiseer Maray, from Golan for Development accounts in an interview with The Electronic Intifada. "After the annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981, we resisted and had clashes with the Israeli military forces. They tried to suppress and break us. We resisted."
Yet nowadays Israel has adopted an assimilation policy when it comes to the Golan. "We don't face hard Israeli policies like in the 1970s and 1980s," Maray continues. "They are trying to destroy our cultural heritage by forcing us to assimilate."
"I've never been able to go to Syria, the borders are closed and Israel says they are full of landmines," Alaa relates. "I'm supposed to be Syrian, but I don't really feel Syrian. I feel more Palestinian, because I've been to the West Bank many times and I am occupied by the same power. In the past we were all united, however. Up until Syria and Lebanon became a French Mandate after World War I, present-day Jordan, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and Syria were all called Greater Syria."
The Arabs in the Golan do not own passports, but laissez-passer documents. "Where our nationality is supposed to be, it simply says 'nationality undefined.'" When Israel forced Israeli citizenship on the inhabitants of the Golan Heights in 1981, the community went on strike for 19 weeks. "Most people burnt their Israeli passports. Some took the Israeli identity, but they were shunned by the community," Alaa explains.
"I was born under the occupation. I hope it ends tomorrow, but if we were to be a part of Syria again, we will face totally different problems," Alaa concludes. "Hopefully one day Syria will be a good place to live again and we'll be one country. I'd love to see a world without wars, borders, racism and hate, where people can be united and live in peace."
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This is pretty much the best thing ever. Two scientists have figured out what it truly means to be cool, following a disagreement over whether actor Steve Buscemi is cool or not. (As if that were even up for debate.)
Coolness: an empirical investigation is "the first systematic quantitative investigation of coolness", and the work of Ilan Dar-Nimrod, a psychology researcher at Rochester Medical Center in New York, and Ian Hansen, an assistant professor of psychology at York College.
Go cross-eyed like I did trying to read its dense, uncool sentences, or keep reading:
Nimrod and Hansen picked the savvy brains of 1000 Canadian university students, who played some word-association games and ranked the coolness of various personality traits. Special attention was also paid to the difference between niceness and coolness - in case the two were confused - but actually there was no need, because it turns out today's version of cool is all about niceness anyway.
Here is what they advise if you would like to be cool right now, and simultaneously annoy the hell out of anyone over the age of 25:
* Be friendly. Small talk and inane, time-wasting interactions with absolutely everyone is the go.
* Be hot. Self-explanatory.
* Be successful. Academic success, a secure career, a decent paycheck = cool.
* Be pro-social. At this point, cool is sounding way less cool than I ever thought possible. Basically, if you volunteer or recycle or join in socially responsible activities, you're on the right track also.
Thanks to the above, citing rebel figures like Jack Kerouac and James Dean as cool will now show your age. In fact, forget them, or you may as well wear your age on a badge like when you turned five. Nimrod calls their type "contrarian cool," and says that brand of cool does still exist, but only just: "There is a smaller and different facet... which is the dark, historical coolness, revolving around counterculture, risky behavior, irony. Going into the project, it is what I perceived as coolness. [But it is] much less dominant."
Beautiful tree-huggers with steady jobs and many friends: today is your day.
Follow Rebecca Kamm on Twitter.
Debate on this article is now closed.


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California's population was at about 37,691,912 profoundly weird human beings as of last July, meaning it makes up roughly 12% of the entire population of the United States. If you're one of these 12% you can buy yourself a Fiat 500E electric car. The rest of you can fuggedaboutit because Fiat won't sell you one anywhere else.
In an attempt to move the U.S. to a larger proportion of electric vehicles, California mandates
that automakers sell a certain number of EVs. These are "compliance cars" like the RAV4 EV and Smart EV, which tend to get dumped into fleet programs.
The Fiat 500E is a compliance car, but it least it's a somewhat interesting one, producing a decent 111 horsepower and 147 lb-ft of electronically instantaneous torque. This helps propel the like car to 60 MPH in the low nine-second range, besting the non-Abarth models. Range is 80 miles standard, but it can travel more than 100 miles during city driving.
Charge time (these are the stats we care about with electric cars) is down to four hours with a Level 2 charger, so expect the typical 8 hours if you're doing it the old-fashioned way.
The images you see above are of the "e-Sport package" which adds Abarth-like touches including blacked-out lamps, staggered 15-inch aluminum wheels, and larger brakes.
Fiat says this will be the first EV that will fun to drive (excluding all those Teslas, we suppose) and that it'll carry over the tossable characteristics of the regular 500 despite what we expect is added weight. It could be fun, but there's a good chance you're not getting it even if you wanted one.


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Shedding light on both sides of the shale story
A photographic exhibit of Marcellus Shale drilling is making at stop at the Gershman Y in Center City Philadelphia. Six accomplished and award-winning photo journalists have spent several years traveling across the state to document the shale gas boom.
Cows grazing beside a pipeline, picturesque farmhouse landscapes framed by drill rigs lighting up the night sky, and the portrait of a pig-tailed toddler wearing a patriotic T-shirt are just a few of the pieces on display.
Each photographer aims his or her lens at the natural gas rush in a unique way. But the project's leader, Brian Cohen, says they all wanted to shoot the highly polarized subject objectively.
"There's a lot of heat generated by this subject but not a lot of light. And I wanted this project to shed some light. It's a very complex story," he said. "It's very nuanced. It's not black or white."
The exhibit includes shots of residents who have benefited from gas drilling as well as those who have suffered.
"Anybody who tells you that natural gas drilling is all good, all the time, is not telling you the whole story," he says. "And anybody who tells you it's all bad all the time is not telling you the whole story either."
Cohen says those on opposite sides of the natural gas drilling debate could interpret the same photograph in two different ways.
One perspective, however, is missing from the show — intimate shots of the gas industry.
Despite repeated attempts, Cohen says, gas drillers would not participate in the project.
The show will continue through mid-February.


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"Fast Five" starts out as yet another "Fast" film, and quickly turns into "Ocean's 14: Gearheads" before turning into "Vice City: Rio de Janeiro." Along the way, it's an eye-popping spectacle of shootouts and high speed chases so exhilarating that the moments of brutal dialogue almost come as a welcome respite for your brain.
You've probably seen by now the interview the Onion News Network did with 5-year-old screenwriter "Chris Morgan," in which the lovable towhead gleefully expresses his love of fast cars and explosions. All kidding aside, fast cars and explosions, when done properly on the big screen are a blast, and director Justin Lin was at the top of his game shooting "Fast Five."
During the film's first heist, when Dominic Teretto (Vin Diesel), his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) and Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) help some shady characters steal three cars from a freight train, Lin makes clear that you must set aside everything you know about physics. Pulling a GT40 sideways out of a train, onto the flatbed of a speeding buggy and racing off across the dessert? No problem. Drive off a 100-foot+cliff and hop out the top of the convertible to the safety of the water below? Sure. Pull a safe out of a wall using to Dodge Chargers? Done.
Lin's direction through it all is crisp, clear and fast-paced, though during the film's calmer moments it's unclear whether he's feeling lazy or making a joke—honestly, how many more shots of Christ the Redeemer do we need in each move set in Rio?
Franchise regulars Walker, Diesel and Brewster remain as talented and charming as ever—take that as you will, but the film does receive a bit of a lift from the crew assembled for your classic "one last job." Ludacris proves once again that he can handle more than most directors are willing to throw at him, while Tego Calderon and Don Omar do a nice job as the Casey Affleck-Scott Caan bickering duo of the crew.
"Fast Five" also finally lays to rest the age-old question, Who would win in a fight, The Tooth Fairy or The Pacifier? Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is on the scene as Hobbs, the FBI's top manhunter, who's been sent to Rio to bring Dom home. Watching them stand nose-to-nose, panting with rage, you can't help but wish they'd just give into their carnal urges, but alas, this isn't that film.
Say what you will about the film--too long, terrible acting, a cynically squishy sense of morality and justice, an unnecessary epilogue--but for a good 70 or minutes (out of 120), Justin Lin takes you hurtling through the streets and favelas of Rio at a breakneck pace, leaving in his wake an impressive pile of wrecked cars and dead bodies.
And if by the end of the film you're at all inclined to see "Fast Six" or whatever they end up calling it, stick around for the credits, during which you'll be treated to a Marvel-esque tease of what's (possibly) to come.
"Fast Five" is also playing at select IMAX theaters


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KANO, Nigeria - Witnesses in northern Nigeria's largest city say gunmen suspected to belong to a radical Islamic sect have opened fire on polio vaccine drives in the city, killing at least 12 people.
The attacks on two different locations happened Friday morning in Kano. Witnesses said the gunmen arrived on three-wheel taxis and opened fire, killing polio vaccine drive workers and others.
The witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of angering the radical sect known as Boko Haram.
Officials with Nigeria's police and military did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nigeria remains one of the few countries left in the world where polio remains endemic. Several years ago religious clerics had some of their followers stop receiving the vaccines saying that it would sterilize their children.


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Catching Christmas
- Lori Borgman Author, Catching Christmas
- 2008 24 Dec
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is an extract from Catching Christmas, by Lori Borgman (Good Cheer Press, 2008).
Walter Hawkins had taken his eyes off the road for two seconds, maybe three, when his front right tire glanced off the curb. He jerked the steering wheel hard to the left, and in the process sent an adrenalin rush through the driver in the car next to him, who instinctively laid on her horn.
Walter glanced at the driver. Spiked hair, multiple piercings, and a bobble-head Santa shaking on the dashboard. Looked like the type that might or might not have a small handgun on the seat beside her. Walter was about to make one of those apologetic nods drivers make when they know they've done something stupid and are profoundly grateful it didn't result in an accident, when the driver smacked her thumb and index finger, shaped like the letter L, to her forehead and mouthed a word Walter could clearly make out as "LOSER!" She surged ahead with Santa's oversized head bobbing wildly and leaving Walter in a putrid cloud of exhaust.
He began searching again, but this time keeping one hand on the wheel and both eyes on the road. He rummaged through a pile on the passenger seat — loose papers, file folders and an empty sack from Freddy's Fried Chicken. He stretched his arm, reached into the glove box and gave it a good ransacking, but no go. He popped open the console between the driver's seat and the passenger seat and dug around in there. Christmas CDs, straws, gloves, salt and ketchup packets, napkins — bingo — sunglasses.
No wonder he had a hard time finding them. It had been ages since he'd needed his sunglasses. Ever since Thanksgiving it had been the Twelve Days of Darkness. For nearly two weeks, people had plodded through their daily routines beneath low-lying clouds that looked like dryer lint suspended from the sky. Today, all that had changed. This morning the sun burst through the clouds, turning the sky a glorious pink and orange. The glare of the sun was nearly blinding. It was hard going for Friday morning commuters headed east.
Walter enjoyed the drive to the Cypress Academy. He had been a commuter in D.C. before his recent move. He and his family had lived in one of those satellite suburban communities that ring the capital. It was a newer neighborhood where all the houses on all the streets in the entire subdivision looked exactly alike, were it not for two small details. One, each homeowner expressed individuality in the choice of color for the shutters, and secondly, the builder had flipped the floor plan on every third house. Each and every house sat on a postage-size lot and sold for three times what it would have in the rest of the country, California excluded.
In D.C., Walter would have driven ten minutes to the train station, parked the car, taken a twenty-five minute inbound train, then walked another ten minutes from the station to the office. Roughly fifty-five minutes one way; nearly two hours round trip; ten hours a week, forty hours a month, 480 hours a year. Walter had a thing for numbers. Numbers and efficiency.
Walter's work in D.C. had involved appropriating monies to organizations across the country, from day care centers to homeless shelters, and assorted groups that served as putty in the cracks through which the lost and forgotten often slipped. His specialty, however, was schools — urban partnerships hammered out between faith-based groups, private organizations and corporate sponsors. All in all, it was a rewarding job. Or at least he told people it was.
In reality, Walter Hawkins found himself morphing into the dreaded policy wonk, tending decimal points, flipping through computer printouts, reciting boring statistics on education and philanthropy that nobody gave a blast about, all in an isolated four-by-six basement cubicle under the ghastly green cast of fluorescent lights.
When Walter got a call from an old friend about a faith-based K-through-12 school in the Midwest needing a headmaster, he knocked over his desk chair, two computer monitors, and a trash can to lunge at the opportunity. He couldn't wait to roll up his sleeves and actually do something hands on. This would be dealing with people, not paper, and real-time as opposed to distant projections.
The timing for the job offer had been perfect. Both Walter and his wife, Claire, had never seen themselves in D.C. for the long haul. They'd hoped to get back to the Midwest eventually. Their oldest boy was in grade school and the youngest hadn't started, so the trauma of changing schools would be minimal. Walter and Claire Hawkins didn't need any more trauma with the boys. Some days the two Hawkins boys were a trauma unit in themselves.
Just this morning the boys had attempted to launch themselves from the top bunk bed after wrapping one another in bubble wrap and mailing tape they "borrowed" from the packing supplies Claire had on hand for shipping out-of-town gifts. Walter heard the crash from the kitchen and knew immediately it had come from the boys' bedroom.
"What going on up there?" he yelled.
"Nuttin'!" a voice answered.
It always spelled trouble when the boys were engaged in "nuttin'." Walter slammed the coffee pot back on the warmer and raced up the stairs. Claire bolted out of the bathroom with toothpaste still foaming in her mouth, grabbing a hand towel on her way.
Griffin, the older of the two boys, was sprawled on the floor, momentarily stunned. Quinn was oblivious, stomping on a sheet of bubble wrap that had ripped loose from his projectile brother. No serious collateral damage, other than one sore bottom belonging to Griffin and a blue wad of Crest that had dripped on Claire's white sweater.
Claire had been ready for the move back to the heartland and family roots as well. They sold the cookie-cutter house, packed a moving truck, and headed for The Cypress Academy. The founders had thought that a good name when they began the school twelve years ago. Cypress is the wood Noah used when he built the ark. Jim Ross, one of the original founders and still a board member, noted that in some translations the wood is called gopher wood, but Gopher Academy hardly seemed fitting for a school committed to academics. The founders shared a common belief that a school is like an ark, a place of safety and refuge from turbulent waters, so they settled on Cypress.
The Cypress was only a fifteen-minute drive from the Hawkins' home. That was a commute time savings of forty minutes a day, three and a third hours a week, thirteen hours a month, 156 hours a year. The first month or so at Cypress, Walter recited those statistics almost daily, puffed up and pleased with his efficiency. Then one day Claire asked if he planned on using any of those extra 156 hours a year to help around the house a little more and he stopped mentioning it.
A wide grassy median separated northbound and southbound traffic on the parkway. Old-money mansions lined both sides. There were grand Italianate manses with second floor porticos, and magnificent Tudors with heavy wooden doors. The mercury had plunged below freezing last night, leaving a heavy frost glistening on the lawns. From just the right angle, prisms of color flashed in the sun's rays. Many of the homes had enormous wreaths and boughs of evergreens accented with artificial fruit hanging on their front doors. When Walter had mentioned to Claire that, other than the Harry and David Fruit of the Month Club, he didn't grasp the new fruit trend that accompanied Christmas this year, Claire just smiled and told him that sometimes he thought too hard.
Walter and Claire's house was nowhere as grand as these. Nor did it have any fruit on it. They had found a comfortable three-bedroom, two-story traditional red brick home with white trim and green shutters in an older neighborhood adjacent to the parkway. The mailbox, attached to the front of the house, was dark red with a flip top lid and large white letters that said POST. The mailbox, like the chimney with the ivy crawling up the sides, had a warm and friendly aura about it. The house had hardwood floors, paned windows, pocket doors and a stone fireplace.
As of this morning, the Hawkins family had been in the house one year, six months and four days. Walter didn't know how he did it, but he remembered numbers in detailed ways. This would be the Hawkins' second Christmas in the charming house and Walter's second Christmas as headmaster at Cypress Academy. For any school administrator, private, public or charter, the month of December was second in activity level and energy demands only to the month of May, when students graduated. Walter knew this from experience and, of course, he had statistics to back it up as well.
Even without his Blackberry in view, Walter had a clear idea of how the day would unfold. It was Friday, his final chance to catch up on a growing mound of paper before the weekend. At 8:10 there would be announcements, followed by an 8:25 meeting with the director of development, followed by a nine o'clock meeting with the counseling staff, followed by an open window of time to put out assorted brush fires, followed by time allotted to work on the accreditation forms. At noon he would meet several of the Parent Teacher Fellowship board members for a working lunch. In the afternoon he would answer e-mails, return phone calls and clarify guidelines for the upcoming, and much ballyhooed, senior class trip. The high school principal had informed Walter that there were going to be some changes this time around. Last year, several students had gotten a little too friendly at the back of one of the charter buses late at night. This year the high school principal wanted guidelines requiring girls and guys to return to their separate sides of the bus by midnight.
Walter wheeled into the parking lot and was delighted to see that vehicles were sparse. He'd have time to get a few steps ahead of the crowd. The basketball coach's SUV was parked by the gym and there was a truck by the maintenance office. The only other vehicle he recognized was a maroon minivan belonging to his administrative assistant, Peggy Valentine.
"What in blazes?" Walter muttered, as he eased into parking spot No. 112.
Either Peggy had decorated her minivan for the holidays, or her vehicle had been car jacked and vandalized by craft maniacs armed with glue guns and garlands. Silver aluminum garland, the kind that went out of style in the '60s, and giant, plastic red bows had been wrapped the entire length of the luggage rack on top of the minivan. There was a big silver wreath with a white dove attached to the grillwork on the front of the minivan.
He peered inside and saw Christmas lights wrapped around the interior, with some sort of adapter dangling from the cigarette lighter. A Christmas tree shaped deodorizer that said "Wise Men Still Seek Him," hung from the rear view mirror.
Walter liked his assistant Peggy, he really did. The students did, too. They were all fond of her. She was bubbly, enthusiastic, a regular Old Faithful when it came to creative ideas. He couldn't do his job half as well without her. She kept her ear to the ground, he could trust her to keep private information private, and her energy was infectious. But Peggy had become an empty nester this year. Her last one had gone off to college and Peggy's extra energy seemed to carry over to the job. Often it was welcome, but sometimes it was simply over the top.
Yes, he thought to himself, surveying the vehicle, Peggy has become the X in Xmas. X for excess.
He could hear Claire's voice in his head telling him he was being critical again. He didn't mean to be critical. It was just that Christmas seemed like it was getting further and further away from Christmas. And, now, he was having a hard time reconciling the Son of God leaving the heavens to take on the flesh of humanity with a gaudy minivan wrapped in garland and outlined with twinkle lights powered by a cigarette lighter.
Maybe he did have a critical side. Maybe Claire was right. His critical vein had been bulging. Bulging nothing, it had gone varicose. Lately, when he had felt his critical spirit rising to the surface, he had begun praying the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. The classic prayer helped him focus on being a servant meeting needs, as opposed to being a critic delivering commentary. He prayed silently as he walked to the building, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred; let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope: Where there is darkness, light; And where there is sadness, joy."
He finished the prayer and felt considerably more charitable in spirit. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Peggy had also painted a large icthus fish on her back windshield with artificial snow. He prayed once more, "And, Lord, where there is excessive ornamentation, let me sow simplicity."
For a man who rarely took time to smell the roses, and often barreled right past the more tender moments of life, Walter counted it a small pleasure to walk into the main building on the Cypress campus. He liked the pull of the big wooden doors, the smell of polished wood, and the three-step jaunt up the stairs in the foyer and through a second set of double doors that opened into the main hall. In its heyday, this campus had once boasted the largest high school in the greater metropolitan area. There wasn't just one building to the school, there were three buildings on the campus in all. One was now used for the elementary school, another for the middle school, and the third for the high school. This campus had once been a major hub of the city. Everybody who was anybody had gone to school here in the '40s and '50s.
The school had borne witness to fashion changes from poodle skirts and Bobbie sox to disco and pastel polyester prom tuxes with Bozo the Clown-size bow ties. The one change the school had not been able to weather was the exodus to the suburbs. Last one out, turn the lights off. The school closed and, with the exception of late-night visits from rats and cockroaches, every building on campus sat vacant for years. Finally, the district put them on the auction block.
In a huge step of faith, or a lapse of sanity, several couples with a vision for a faith-based school that would draw from urban and suburban communities alike offered a bid. This old campus and these large buildings had been an answer to prayer.
Today, Cypress contained kindergarten through high school, with thirteen hundred kids on one sprawling campus. Two-hundred seventy-six different churches were represented here. Talk about diversity. Cypress enjoyed a reputation for strong academics. Kindergartners studied the paintings of Georgia O'Keefe, third-grade students read Homer's "Iliad," and fourth-grade students learned Latin. Students came from all over the city, urban and suburban, a colorful mix of black, white, and brown.
In the elementary building, where Walter's office was, there were wide hallways and massive wooden staircases. At the back of every classroom was a cloak room with hooks for coats and a bench for taking off snow boots.
This morning, Walter was early enough that only the security lights were on in the entry way. He rounded the corner to his office and saw light spilling into the darkened hallway from an opened door. He was delighted to hear the whir of the copier. It meant his assistant Peggy with the wildly decorated minivan was already at work, and that the temperamental copier was still working.
He poked his head in the workroom. "Morning, Peggy."
"Good morning, Mr. H. Did you see my minivan?"
See it? He was nearly blinded by it. "I did," he said. "That's really something." It wasn't a lie. It wasn't even a half-lie. It was the truth. Her minivan really was something.
"Isn't it fun?" she said. "I got the idea when I was flipping channels between Christmas at the Biltmore and the Amy Grant and Vince Gill Christmas special! The idea hit me between the eyes."
He weighed his words carefully. "And what an idea it was," he said. He'd recently heard white lies described as "social tact." He had contemplated the concept briefly and decided a lie was still a lie. That was Walter in a nutshell, heavy on the black and white, skimpy on the shades of gray.
"Actually," she gushed, "what you saw is my plan B. My original plan was to write 'Jesus, the reason for the season' on the side windows with aerosol spray snow." She thrust her hands in the air like a film director framing a scene. "I tried it on the passenger side, but the letters went downhill and I ran out of room before I finished 'season.' I thought of taking some of the vowels out of season to make it fit. You know, just spell it s-e-s-n. I mean, the kids would get it, that's how they all do that instant messenger talk on the computers. No vowels, just a lot of consonants. But Carl said it was beginning to look more like a ransom note than a Christmas greeting."
Walter offered a silent prayer of thanks for Carl. Every pot has a lid, as Walter's mother would say, and thankfully Peggy found hers in Carl. Carl was the sensible voice of restraint to her often-unbridled enthusiasm.
Peggy continued chattering, "So I washed it off. Who knows, I still have some spray snow left. I may try some stenciling on the windows tonight. Anyway, I've got some garland left over if you'd like me to put a little holiday zip on your car." She clucked her tongue, did a little cha-cha-cha action with her shoulders, and waited for Walter's response.
"I don't think so. I was thinking of taking it through the car wash later this afternoon, but thanks for the offer." It was true. He had a mental picture of driving his car through the car wash the instant Peggy mentioned putting "zip" on his car.
"Oh, well that's fine," she said curtly, turning back to the copier. "I guess some have more spirit than others," she muttered.
"Pardon?" Walter said.
"I said, you have some more messages on your desk from late yesterday afternoon. Some man called twice. Wouldn't leave a name, but said he has something that belongs to you. Sounded gruff, if I might make an observation."
Peggy was long on making observations. Sometimes her observations were mildly annoying, but more often than not they were spot on.
Walter strode down the hall and turned into the reception area of the main office. Peggy's desk was the hub of the main office. During December, she always kept a holiday sweater either draped over her desk chair or draped over her shoulders. Today's sweater, presently resting on the back of her chair, was dark blue with snowflakes covered in pearl white sequins. Peggy had more holiday sweaters than all the kindergarten teachers combined.
Red and white striped candy canes filled a big glass apothecary jar sitting on the corner of Peggy's desk next to a small plastic crèche with glitter on the roof of the manger. All of the candy canes had been turned upside down to remind kids that they were "J" for Jesus. Peggy was also quick to point out that the cheap plastic nativity was made in China, although the Chinese had no real freedom to worship Christ. Though Peggy was not a certified teacher, she was of the firm belief that every moment was a teachable moment.
Walter strode into his office, shook off his coat and hung it on the coat rack. He did a double take. A sprig of artificial holly and red plaid ribbon now adorned the top of the coat rack. Was there no escape? He sat down at the desk, glanced out the window and saw two cars pulling into the lot. Time. There was never enough. He leafed through papers to sign and sorted phone messages. The phone rang. He ignored it and let it ring over to voice mail. Technically, the office phones weren't open for another thirty minutes.
Before too long, foot traffic began picking up in the hall. Locker doors were slamming and kids' voices filtered into his office. The background chatter steadily built momentum. He could hear Peggy at her office desk, laughing with some of the students and chatting with some of the moms.
"Live one on line three!" Peggy yelled. This was her cue that she was putting through a call to Walter. He wished she wouldn't refer to callers as "live ones," but in Peggy's words, that was just her way of "keeping it real."
He lifted the receiver and said, "Walter, here."
"Headmaster?" a gravely voice asked.
"Yes," Walter said, "how may I help you?"
"This is Walter Hawkins?"
"Yes, Hawkins here."
"Walter Hawkins in the old P.S. building on Jackson Street?"
"Is something wrong with our connection?" Walter asked, mildly irritated.
"No, just making sure you're the right one."
The voice was rich and deep. Too old to be the parent of a student. Could be a grandparent or guardian though.
"Well, this is Cypress and I'm the only Walter Hawkins, so you have the right one." Get to it, man, Walter thought, I don't have all day.
"I have something you might be interested in. Something that belongs to that school of yours."
"Really?" Walter said detached, pulling open his middle desk drawer.
"Sure do." The man sounded confident.
"What is it?" Walter asked.
"I'd like to show it to you," the caller said.
"Sir, I have a school to tend to. Is this some kind of sales pitch?"
"No sales," the caller said.
"Sorry, I don't have time —" Walter was about to disconnect when the voice on the other end said something that drew him back.
"What was that?" Walter said. He froze.. "Go on, I'm listening."
A small group of upper elementary students filed into Peggy's office for morning announcements. This morning, Mrs. Moffat's after-school French Club would be singing "Ah! Quel Grand Mystere." That was, if they could contain themselves. They were giggly, squirrelly, and bouncing all over the place.
"Hold on, will you?" Walter asked the caller.
Walter dropped the phone, lunged for the door and swung it shut. He was back on the phone, pen in hand, taking notes.
"You're sure?" Walter asked with an air of disbelief. "Absolutely sure?"
He brushed stray crystals from a used Sweet 'n Low packet off his desk top, exhaled and said, "Sure, I'll be there.
"East on 28th Street, then north. I know right where it is. I've driven by before. I'll be there Saturday. Right. Ask for Ludwig. OK, see you then."
Lori Borgman is author of "I Was a Better Mother Before I Had Kids," "Pass the Faith, Please" and "All Stressed Up and No Place To Go." Her weekly column, distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service, covers family life issues, values and contemporary culture with insight and a touch of humor.
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