text:
25 March 2009

NEW REPORT~Israeli White Phosphorus War Crimes

Reports of Israeli war crimes are coming out fast and furious now. Today, a new 71 page report just issued on Israeli war crimes regarding the use of White Phosphorous in Gaza.. The sheer number of cases and the sheer volume of evidence is staggering. I cannot see how Israel can squirm their way out of this one. Even using all their hasbara techniques, their online troll groups and their Jewish Lobby, it won’t work this time. Thanks to the internet the world has now seen for themselves, and no matter how hard Israel tries to re-paint the picture, we all remember what we saw, and those images will never leave us! We want and expect justice for all those innocent people murdered and burned alive.

Israel accused of indiscriminate phosphorus use in Gaza

Israel's military fired white phosphorus over crowded areas of Gaza repeatedly and indiscriminately in its three-week war, killing and injuring civilians and committing war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

In a 71-page report, the rights group said the repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells in populated areas of Gaza was not incidental or accidental, but revealed "a pattern or policy of conduct".

It said the Israeli military used white phosphorus in a "deliberate or reckless" way. The report says:

• Israel was aware of the dangers of white phosphorus.

• It chose not to use alternative and less dangerous smoke shells.

• In one case, Israel even ignored repeated warnings from UN staff before hitting
the main UN compound in Gaza with white phosphorus shells on 15 January.

"In Gaza, the Israeli military didn't just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops," said Fred Abrahams, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher. "It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren't in the area and safe smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died." He said senior commanders should be held to account.

The Israeli military has defended its conduct in Gaza in the face of mounting allegations of serious violations of international law and said its soldiers did not intentionally target civilians. When Israel's use of white phosphorus emerged during the war, the military at first denied using the weapon, then said it only used weapons in accordance with international law.

White phosphorus burns in contact with oxygen and causes deep burns when it touches human skin, sometimes reaching to the bone. The weapon is not illegal itself and can be used to provide a smokescreen on the battlefield or as an incendiary weapon against a military target. However, its use is regulated even by customary international law. It must be used in a way that distinguishes between combatants and civilians and cannot be used to target civilians.

Most of the Israeli military's white phosphorus in Gaza was fired in 155mm artillery shells, each containing 116 wedges soaked with the chemical.

In January, the Guardian found one such shell still smoking several days after it was fired, outside the home of the Abu Halima family in Atatra. One white phosphorous shell hit the house directly, killing a father and four of his children. His wife was severely burnt.

Human Rights Watch also reported the same case.
Human Rights Watch found 24 spent white phosphorus shells in Gaza, all from the same batch made in a US ammunition factory in 1989 by Thiokol Aerospace. Other shells were photographed during the war with markings showing they were made in the Pine Bluff Arsenal, also in America, in 1991.

The group said it found no evidence that Hamas fighters used Palestinian civilians as human shields - a key Israeli claim - in the area at the time of the attacks it researched.

The rights group studied six cases in detail in which 12 civilians were killed and dozens more were injured.

In one case, witnesses described how a white phosphorus shell hit a car in Tel al-Hawa, in south-eastern Gaza City, killing a bank manager, his wife and two of their children on 15 January.

On the same day, at about 7.30am, Israeli artillery shells began falling near the main compound of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza City, where 700 civilians were sheltering. UN staff made repeated telephone calls to the Israeli military asking them to stop but, at about 10am, six shells hit the compound, three of which contained white phosphorus.The warehouse was hit, causing at least $10m of damage, and it continued to burn for 12 days.

In another case, on 17 January, an artillery shell that had already discharged its white phosphorus hit a UN school in Beit Lahiya, where 1,600 civilians were sheltering. It killed two brothers in a classroom and severely injured their mother and cousin.

eretz said...

eat a dick you arab cocksucking faggot. Israel belongs to us the Jews, not to the Arab occupiers. Gaza, Samaria, and Judea belong to us, not the "Filastines" who have a claim on nothing. Ooh Phosphorous, so "deadly" g_d's sake its a damn chemical powder, not a weapon, its for illuminating night strikes and obscuring bombs and missles. The UN is a bunch of faggots, I wouldn't leave them alone with my kid and the neighborhood bully they'd keep saying my kid was causing mental trauma to the bully when he defended himself and bloodied the fucker's nose in. got it dumbass? probly not, cause u irish faggots drink too much.

eretz said...

You motherfucking arab sucking Irish faggot. Phosphorous is for smokescreens and illuminating night time battlefields. And so what if it kills some Arab invader terrorists? Screw them, the Arabs occupying Gaza, Samaria, Judea. Its our Jewish homeland, not theirs. The UN is a bunch of pussies and faggots. I wouldn't let them handle a neighborhood bully beating up my son. They'd fucking blame the son for "traumatizing" the bully when my son hit him back. Just like you brainwashed dumbass idiot who writes a retarded blog of lies to cover more Arab lies. What about the 850,000 Jews kicked out of their homes in the now Arab world in 1948? Where is their compensation? Where is their returned land? Oh there is none, and the "filastine" occupiers have a country - Jordan. later ya bitch

BanSidhe said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
BanSidhe said...

@ eretz IP

thank you for proving my point

Post a Comment

1. Comments accepted for one week only, posts older than one week, comments will be rejected.

2. We welcome your comments, but we operate on Dublin Ireland time and are 5 hours ahead of the US East Coast, hence comments may not appear immediately

3. Comments are moderated by the blog owners and writers


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Type: response

text:
Loading Prices..

ISBN10: 0814209386 ISBN13: 9780814209387 DDC: 328.73 LCC: JK2488 Edition: (cloth : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-192) and index. Introduction -- The lineage of American legislatures -- Fundamental structures -- Institutional characteristics -- Organizational characteristics -- Legislators and legislative careers -- Concluding thoughts on American legislatures in comparison.

  • LCC: JK2488
  • Dewey Decimal: 328.73

Book Details

  • Language: eng
  • Physical Description: x, 209 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
  • Edition Info: (cloth : alk. paper)

Buying This Book

We query many merchants so that you can instantly compare prices and availability. You can even check historic prices and subscribe for notifications. For a manual check, clicking on a link will open a new window with a search for this book on the merchant's site of your choice.

  • Amazon.com by title or by ISBN - widest selection, reliable service, good prices
  • Abebooks.com by title or by ISBN - good source for rare and out-of-print books
  • Textbooks.com by title or by ISBN - large inventory of new & used textbooks
  • Alibris.com by title or by ISBN - their slogan is "books you thought you'd never find"
  • eCampus.com by title or by ISBN - they specialize in textbooks, used and new
  • BN.com by title or by ISBN - Barnes & Noble has a wide selection of new and used books

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-04
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


text:
Sunday, March 6, 2016

Is there a peace treaty with Egypt? - Benny Tocker

by Benny Tocker

Ex-ambassador says huge majority that voted to dismiss MP who met Israeli shows 'the basic enmity in Arab states towards Israel.'

A full 467 out of the 595 Egyptian members of parliament voted on Wednesday to dismiss MP Tawfik Okasha, who was ousted for the "crime" of meeting with Israel's ambassador to the Nile state, again raising doubts about the 1979 peace treaty.

Okasha even had a shoe thrown at his head by another MP in a traditional Arabic insult as he was berated for meeting Israel's Ambassador to Egypt Haim Koren, who on Thursday tried to play down the tensions with Egypt.

In order to better understand the situation, Arutz Sheva spoke with former Israeli Ambassador to Egypt Tzvi Mazel, who said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi wants to preserve the peace treaty but doesn't want to clash with Egypt's parliament now.

"Those in the parliament are the elite who have boycotted Israel since 1980," said Mazel. "It's clear that if the parliament voted to cancel the peace treaties, al-Sisi would get involved."

According to the ex-ambassador, "there is security cooperation and the government of Egypt needs it. But al-Sisi will not fight the parliament because he wants to preserve the stability in Egypt, and he doesn't want to stand the legislature and the elite against him."

"But there's no doubt we received a slap in the face, after 37 years that there's such a large majority in favor of getting rid of someone who dared to meet with an ambassador of Israel - that teaches about the basic enmity that exists in Arab states towards Israel."

Aside from Okasha's dismissal, that hostility was recently shown again Wednesday when Egypt's soccer association rejected a friendly match against Israel.

A recent poll found that Egyptians see Israel as the "most hostile" of their neighbors, despite the peace treaty, and back in 2013, the movement that led opposition to former Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi said it would work to cancel the peace treaty.

Mazel said that al-Sisi has done a lot in order to rehabilitate Egypt, saying, "a year ago he said that the Islam of today is not appropriate for the 21st century."

"Al-Sisi is doing incredible things, he launched a campaign of economic investments, and he invites countries like China, Saudi Arabia and lands of the East to invest, he opened Egypt to those searching for oil and gas, he's building agricultural territories and establishing a new capital east of Cairo that all of the governmental institutions will move to."

"It's hard for him because the West and America betrayed him, even the European Union is renouncing him because he ousted President Morsi, even though he's the one who basically saved Egypt from a dictator," said Mazel.

Indicating how ties with Israel have improved under al-Sisi, just last week President Reuven Rivlin accepted the credentials of Egypt's new Ambassador to Israel, Hazem Ahdy Khairat, marking the end of a more than three-year period without any Egyptian Ambassador to Israel.

Benny Tocker

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

No comments:

Post a Comment


text:
Log In
E-mail or User ID
  Keep me signed in
Recover Password
Create an Account

Linda Lloyd

New Zealand
Member since 1/19/2010
Q&A, Blogs, Research & More
  • Get the answers you want from industry experts
  • Stay informed about the latest industry developments
  • Share your expertise with millions of professionals

PCMag Digital Group AdChoices

TRUSTe Privacy Certification


text:
Log In
E-mail or User ID
  Keep me signed in
Recover Password
Create an Account

Marianne Schillings

Herndon, Virginia , United States
Member since 12/3/2007

Employment Status

Company: Unisys
Role: IT Professional - Development, Development/Software Engineering
Focus: Consulting
Company Size: Larger than 10,000

Q&A, Blogs, Research & More
  • Get the answers you want from industry experts
  • Stay informed about the latest industry developments
  • Share your expertise with millions of professionals
1 Members, 1 Total

PCMag Digital Group AdChoices

TRUSTe Privacy Certification


text:
Monday, July 15, 2013

2013 Tour de France: The Joy of Winning a Stage

Davide Bramati reaction after Matteo Trentin's Tour de France stage 14 win:

Follow on Twitter: ITALIANCYCJOURN or receive an email when new content is added using the "Follow by Email" button on the right side column. With more than 2,900 stories in this blog the custom search feature (right column) works best for finding subjects in the blog. There is also a translate button underneath the search button.

Stories for the Italian Cycling Journal about rides, granfondos, touring, having a good time cycling in Italy, Italian cycling history, racing, etc. are always welcome. Contact me at

No comments:

Post a Comment


text:
Item Database

Rainbow Swirly Potion

Rainbow Swirly Potion

  • Rarity

    r99 (Super Rare)

  • Release Date

    March 8, 2002

  • Status

    Active ?

Report an Error

Your Neopet will feel like a different pet once they drink this bubbling brew!

Price History

800,000 NP (+100,000 NP) on December 2, 2016
700,000 NP (-300,000 NP) on August 29, 2016
1,000,000 NP (-500,000 NP) on April 18, 2016

Full Price History TPTrading Post History Suggest Price Change

  • Magic Item - This is the official type for this item on Neopets.

When used, this item will change the colour of your pet to a Blue, Red, Yellow, or Green, and raise its level by 2.

Add to Wishlist

Register today!

Want to create your own wishlists for Neopets? Log into your jnAccount, or create an account, now! It's fast and free!

Suggest Price Data Update

Rainbow Swirly Potion

Thanks for helping out! You can suggest the following:

New Price

Add a False Inflation Alert

Update Trading Post History


text:
Brent Hansen – Software Consultant Manager

Brent Hansen is currently a Manager of Software Consulting, Education, and Partner Services for Embarcadero Technologies.  Brent has been in the IT Industry for 12+ years.  He is an architecture expert and focuses on Embarcadero solutions centered on Meta Data Management, Enterprise Architecture, and Application Design.  Prior to joining Embarcadero Technologies, Brent was an Architecture Specialist with Unisys Corporation holding MCSE + Internet and holds Citrix Certified Administrator certifications. He earned a dual degree from Kansas State University in Accounting and Management Information Systems.

Forgot Password

No problem! Submit your e-mail address below. We'll send you an e-mail containing your password.

Your password has been sent to:


WARC-Truncated: length

text:
Word of the Day: Tech Definitions from WhatIs.com

Oct 25 2007   3:50PM GMT

Overheard – Why aren’t there any Google jokes?

Margaret Rouse Margaret Rouse Profile: Margaret Rouse

me.jpg Why aren’t there any Google jokes?

— Margaret Rouse

I just finished reading Robert Scoble’s blog post about Google’s page rank being dead and bloggers needlessly obsessing about their Google page rank (PR) numbers — and it reminded me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask somebody for awhile. How come there aren’t any Google jokes?

You can do a search and come up with literally hundreds of Microsoft jokes. There are Linux jokes. There are Unix jokes. There are Cisco jokes. IBM jokes. There are even jokes about bloggers.So how come there aren’t any jokes about Google?

Is Google’s power so formidable that it’s not funny? Are we afraid that if we joke about Google we’ll be punished and sent to SEO hell? Isn’t there anything funny about Google?

Or are there lots of great Google jokes floating around out there and I’m just the last one to know?

Back to work now.

— Margaret Rouse

 Comment on this Post

There was an error processing your information. Please try again later.
Thanks. We'll let you know when a new response is added.
Send me notifications when other members comment.

Forgot Password

No problem! Submit your e-mail address below. We'll send you an e-mail containing your password.

Your password has been sent to:

Share this item with your network:


text:
Windows Enterprise Desktop

Jul 8 2009   4:32PM GMT

Blog Gets New Name

Ed Tittel Ed Tittel Profile: Ed Tittel

In case you didn’t notice, I’ve retitled this blog with TechTarget’s blessing. Whereas it used to be called the Vista Enterprise Desktop blog, what with the looming release of Windows 7 and continuing interest in Windox XP on enterprise desktops, I thought it made sense to broaden the scope to include Windows and bring in all those various versions. I was taking that license anyway, so now it’s “official.”

Interestingly, the scope for this blog may need to go beyond Windows. I heard a news story on NPR this morning entitled “Google Operating System to Challenge Microsoft,” wherein the long-standing rumor that Google was planning to release an operating system for netbook use finally became news. Apparently, the work is based on the Chrome Web browser, and is going to be called the Google Chrome OS according to the announcement posted last evening on the Google Blog. Here’s a brief snippet from same that lays things out:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

This should be pretty interesting. And now that I own a couple of netbooks — a Dell Mini 9 and an Asus Eee PC 1000HE — I can hardly wait to try this out when it becomes more broadly available.

 Comment on this Post

There was an error processing your information. Please try again later.
Thanks. We'll let you know when a new response is added.
Send me notifications when other members comment.

Forgot Password

No problem! Submit your e-mail address below. We'll send you an e-mail containing your password.

Your password has been sent to:

Share this item with your network:


text:
Sound of waves in channel

Stephen Ratcliffe with Jonathan Skinner

Photo by Jonathan Skinner.

NoteThis lengthy conversation between Jonathan Skinner and Stephen Ratcliffe took place in Bolinas, California, on March 22, 2011. Photographs throughout are by Jonathan Skinner.

On progression

Jonathan Skinner: Given that you’ve just finished these two trilogies, do you see a progression through the series?

Stephen Ratcliffe: Oh, yeah. Yeah there is.

Skinner: Was there an intentional progression and is there eventual progression?

Ratcliffe: No. It’s more of a happenstance. An evolution of things. I see in some way what I’m doing now. I began, you know, making incursions toward doing that years ago, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Things I’m doing now are more consciously set, but they actually started a long time ago.

Skinner: What’s the biggest thing you’ve noticed, looking back over it, that’s changed or progressed or happened?

Ratcliffe: Well, you know, there are a lot of changes, really, a lot. For one thing, CLOUD / RIDGE is full of people saying and doing things. But not in these, not in Temporality, nor in this one that’s going on now, it’s up to about seventy-five pages. It started I think January 5th. Although in the first few pages, Johnny [Ratcliffe’s six-year old son] began to appear in there sometime, in early January. Which seemed like, oh, this is really nice … But now he’s not appearing anymore.

I’m still making use of these readings that I do with quotation. You know, finding language in the middle two pairs of lines. It just seems to be getting more honed, and it’s very interesting to do it. I’m pleased with it. I really like these latest ones. But the reference to person A or B … in CLOUD / RIDGE the people are often identified, as “man in black sweatshirt,” “silver haired man,” “man in red truck,” “blond haired woman.” You know. There are these people sort of with epithets. Bob [Grenier] one time commented, years ago, he said, it’s kind of like in Homer: “grey-eyed Athena …”

Skinner: Are these literal people?

Ratcliffe: Oh yeah.

Skinner: So they’re people that are around you. And that’s overheard dialogue?

Ratcliffe: I used to carry these little notebooks around. If something happened, I wrote these things down. And then I would go back and find them and make use of them, but now …

Skinner: Now you’re writing down things that you read.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, at night. Like tonight or tomorrow night, I have to go sit down again. And there are maybe seven or eight books. I go through one at a time.

Skinner: Each night you go through each book.

Ratcliffe: No, not every night. But about every five nights, I have to get back to the stuff … I use up all the material.

Skinner: You have to go through all seven of them.

Ratcliffe: Yeah.

Skinner: Pull something from each one.

Ratcliffe: I find a passage somewhere. I go to where I left off and I start reading. I find some words, and I construct them into two lines and I type them on the computer. I put them on the screen so I get the length of the line to be set. And then, when it’s set, then I write it down into the notebook. So, the next day, when I go to compose, to write the poem …

Skinner: Oh, so these are pre-measured units.

Ratcliffe: They’re pre-measured. It used to be that I would just write them down and then I would have to do them on the screen, and it was very hard. CLOUD / RIDGE was very hard to do, because those lines are always shifting.

Skinner: What’s the measure? What determines the measure? Is it a visual …

Ratcliffe: It’s visual, yeah. In CLOUD / RIDGE each poem looks different on the page. It has probably the same number of lines, but arranged in different stanza units. And it’s measured here on the screen but not in the book, so … it was very hard to do, actually. It’s time consuming.

Skinner: You’ve moved from overhearings to a series of readings. But it seems like the practice of observing meteorological phenomena, events in the environment has continued.

Ratcliffe: Weather, ah … yeah.

Skinner: So the surfing is still a part of the constraint, the daily surfing.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, the last lines on the poems now are things written down or seen when I go out in the water.

Skinner: So what are the constraints for Temporality?

Ratcliffe: OK, so I wake up, then I open my eyes, and then I write the poems down in my bedroom. I don’t even get out of bed anymore.

Skinner: Oh you just write them in bed.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, so it’s like what I see out that window. You know, I used to write the poems down here in the kitchen, and there was a lot more stuff to see. But from upstairs, from that higher vantage point, it’s funny, it’s more sky, and less other things going on. So there’s something that’s kind of interesting to me about, ah, moving toward less and less detail.

Skinner: Why?

Ratcliffe: I don’t know.

Skinner: So you open your eyes, and then you look out the window.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, and, ah … here was “The whiteness of moon next to branch,” so that was over, up … [pointing to bedroom window]: “light coming into the sky above still black/ ridge, whiteness of moon next to branch/ in foreground.” That was out there …

it wasn’t exactly at the same time, but it was, basically. And, another curious thing is that there’s this really insistent repeating of the “wave sounding in the channel” …

Skinner: This is what I was going to ask you about!

Ratcliffe: Man! How can that go on …

Skinner: “Insistent” isn’t the right word for it. It’s just … affixed. “Wave sounds in channel!” [Laughs.] I was at the channel today with Donald [Guravich] and I was like, “well, there is the channel in which Stephen Ratcliffe’s wave sounds.” [Laughs.] What’s up with that?

Ratcliffe: I don’t know. I don’t know what it is …

Skinner: I mean I thought that you maybe just decided very consciously that you were going to have one element that would just stay put, like the nail through the note to the wall.

Ratcliffe: No, it’s kind of evolved. You know, years ago there was this “sound of jet passing overhead” that appeared in one of the works, and it appeared a lot. And I remember reading it once in the city. We were doing a reading somewhere … it was actually with some musicians. And one of the guys was a singer: he had a falsetto voice. He was from the music department at Mills, I think. He had an amazing voice, and he kept singing this, in a very high falsetto, or countertenor voice or something: “sound of jet passing over.” It was really striking. And he commented about it.

On performance

Skinner: You did a performance, you did like a fourteen-hour, or somebody did a fourteen-hour performance, of Temporality.

Ratcliffe: Oh, I did. No, Remarks on Color. At Marin Headlands, last May. With some of these same musicians. Not that guy.

Skinner: It lasted fourteen hours?

Ratcliffe: Yes. From sunrise to sunset, on May 16th. Close to the Solstice. It’s about a fourteen-hour day. And there was no sun ever visible. It went from 6 a.m. to after 8 p.m. And we never saw the sun come in. It was totally foggy, and it was freezing in this big gymnasium with the windows open. And most of the time no people there except us doing it.

Skinner: Did people wander in and out?

Ratcliffe: People wandered in.

Skinner: How long did people stay on average?

Ratcliffe: Some might have stayed an hour. Some stayed a little longer. And we did another one, at UC Davis, of HUMAN / NATURE, that was also fourteen hours. It went from 4 p.m. to 6 a.m. Johnny was there, sitting on my lap. In the middle of the night, I was the only person awake, in the whole place. The musicians had stopped playing and they were snoring.

Skinner: And you were just reading.

Ratcliffe: I was reading with one spotlight coming down from the ceiling onto my table.

On process

Skinner: But continuing with the constraints. I’m just curious to get those down. So, you wake up, you look out the window …

Ratcliffe: Yeah, so, the first three lines are written “on location,” in the present.

Skinner: In bed.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, I have this little book, and I write it down. And then I have this other book and I write it down there and then I open up the screen …

Skinner: Oh, wait, so you have two. The first book is just the lines and the second book is the poems?

Ratcliffe: I just started this new notebook. This is what I write the notes in, everything. And then, here’s the whole poem. And these lines have been premeasured, as you say.

Skinner: So the first three lines in the morning. And then the middle part comes from the reading?

Ratcliffe: Comes out of previous readings which have been transcribed into my notebook.

Skinner: Do you do that in a particular time of the day … when you do the middle lines? I mean as far as putting them into the poem.

Ratcliffe: The last time I went into the readings was on the sixteenth. And this morning I did these two sets so I would cross these out tomorrow morning.

Skinner: Ok, so you put those in in the morning.

Ratcliffe: I put ’em in in the morning. And they’re in here. So I just open this book and I transcribe.

Skinner: So what are the last two lines? What’s the constraint for the last two lines?

Ratcliffe: This is what I saw when I was out in the water: “grey-white of fog against invisible ridge, / circular green pine on tip of sandspit”

Skinner: I see. Do you write that in the car immediately after surfing or when you come back?

Ratcliffe: No, when I come back here I remember. Years ago I started doing this when I’d go out maybe at RCA surfing, and sometimes I’d take my little notebook, and as soon as I got up [the cliff] I’d have to write it down. And now I realize, oh, I can remember what it was! So now I don’t actually even compose it. I just sort of see it, I know what it’s going to be and then when I get back I write it down. It sort of has become like second nature.

On surfing

Skinner: Did you surf the tsunami?

Ratcliffe: I did!

Skinner: You did, yeah?

Ratcliffe: Yeah! It was odd. I had to go over the hill for an appointment. So I couldn’t go down there normally in the morning. And I had to take Johnny to school. And it turned out school [which is right on Bolinas Lagoon] was canceled. And I didn’t know it. ’Cause I hadn’t gotten the word.

Skinner: It was canceled because of the tsunami, right?

Ratcliffe: Yes it was. So we came back and about five o’clock we finally went down to the channel. I just wanted to see what it was doing. Actually, I said, we’ll go down and jump in the water. But, the surge … you know, it looked like the tide was going out a little bit, even though it was at just before high tide. And all of a sudden it started to come in, right before our eyes it was going out, and then it started coming in slowly, and then pretty soon it was like a river, racing in. It seemed like it was going twenty knots. But maybe it wasn’t, I don’t know.

Skinner: It was fast, though. It was a lot of volume.

Ratcliffe: Huge, yeah. Anyway, I just ran down the beach and jumped in the water and paddled in.

Skinner: Oh, so you had your board with you?

Ratcliffe: Yeah, yeah, I, ha ha! Some of my friends were out surfing that day and they say it was pretty wild, just the surge going back and forth.

Skinner: A surfer spoke at the symposium on water I just attended in Point Reyes [Geography of Hope: Reflections on Water] about his daily practice of surfing. In the context of the conference, and threats to the world’s water supply, he noted that he wasn’t really doing anything out there and that he sometimes wondered, well, what good is this doing? My immediate thought was: doing nothing might be the best thing to “do,” right now.

Ratcliffe: Ah, that’s interesting.

Skinner: But I was wondering if for you there is a poetics of the practice of time, if surfing is a certain sort of practice of temporality on the board?

Ratcliffe: Yeah. It’s probably hard to put your finger on it, but there is something about … I actually can’t quite explain it, because my desire in writing these lines … you know, if I’m not near the water, if I’m walking around in the city, I can still see clouds, and ridges. I can still sort of find these elements. But there’s something about going out in the water and getting onto the board where your eye is at water level, not walking on your feet, that really shifts …

Skinner: Oh, you mean, when you’re on your belly on the board.

Ratcliffe: Yeah. When I suddenly get onto the board, and I paddle out and I’m just here. It really changes your view of things … there’s something that, ah, shifts. For me now, it’s, you know, no doubt a bit obsessive. [Laughs.]

Last year I got into the water three hundred and fifty-five days. Now this year maybe won’t be as much, because I think I’m going to travel. But here I am on a sabbatical, and I’m hardly traveling. So, I don’t know. But that was my new personal best. Another record set. Most of the time I go out there now, I just paddle. ’Cause I have a bad shoulder.

Skinner: You don’t stand up and surf the waves?

Ratcliffe: No … often I’m just down in the channel. If the waves are good, I’ll go out and try to find them if I have time. Sometimes I don’t have time. But there’s something about getting down at water level, where you’re in the element. And, you know, the board’s going up and down. You get close to these things going on.

Skinner: Well that’s what this Point Reyes surfer talked about, being close to very large animals in the water. Do you become aware of the movement of animals up and down the coast? I mean, do you see animals in the water?

Ratcliffe: Yeah, I saw a seal out there today, you know. Of course you see animals. Birds. Mostly birds.

On the discrete

Skinner: Some readers seeing your poems and not knowing your constraint or location might see “wave sounds in channel,” and they might think it’s like Channel 7. Or, you know, the channel of the brain, like some sort of Jamesian nervous channel.

Ratcliffe: Oh, left channel, right channel. You think? They might just think it’s boring.

Skinner: No, “wave sounds in channel.” It’s fine. It’s definitive. It’s clipped. There’s something about discreteness there. You switch from one channel to the next.

Ratcliffe: I hadn’t thought about that, but, why not, yeah. “Sound of waves in channel.”

On scenery

Skinner: I was wondering about scenery. I was thinking of what you’ve written about Shakespeare, sound and the stage [in Reading the Unseen, Ratcliffe’s book “about offstage action in Hamlet, about words that describe action that isn't performed physically in the play, things we don't actually see”]. And then of SOUND / (system): James’s letters, as the scene of something. And of you on your board, and how what you see stages or frames the poem. What do you see in scenery?

Ratcliffe: Before we discuss Temporality, in this regard, let me say that CLOUD / RIDGE is more chaotic in some sense, although it still …

Skinner: CLOUD / RIDGE has a lot of interiors.

Ratcliffe: … has a lot of interiors and bounces around. In CLOUD / RIDGE there’s also Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that begins to come in early.

Skinner: Does it take over for the rest of the manuscript?

Ratcliffe: It does. As I’m going through the manuscript now, as much as time permits, adjusting it, it’s quite moving to me. I never had read that book before. In some way I didn’t really read it; I just kept reading bit by bit, and going through it. And I think then I went back when I got to the end and kept going, but, you know, there’s some beautiful passages in there, that somehow connect. They try to connect. In any case, there’s this framing of the beginning and the end with the other things taking place in there. It is a kind of … it’s the scene seen, the seen and heard scene. And the interior lines, the inner lines, are thinking about that, or considering the scene more in language.

Skinner: I was thinking that those insistent, fixed things in Temporality, the “waves sounding in channel,” happen in the frame. So that becomes very static, and then it’s almost like you could read through that series just reading the interior lines. Like, some readers might be tempted to skip through the outer lines the way you flip through a calendar. As though the action is happening in the interior.

Ratcliffe: In the middle … yeah. I find that too, myself.

Skinner: So is there a theatricality to it? The scene …

Ratcliffe: That’s a nice thought. The scene is like a static — the scene is this ongoing, recurrent, apparently repeating … but it’s not really. For several reasons. One, every day is a new day. Every time the sound of the wave is heard, the next day it’s not the same thing. It’s this ongoing investigation of space and time, of course. Of place, space/place. But over a period of ongoing time, one day after another after another. So it’s never the same sound, although the words are the same. There’s this kind of failure of language to enact those things. The words point to things that are occurring, which the words have in some way to do with, but those things have nothing to do with the words. And the words don’t discriminate between this sound and that, or between this color green and that color green. It’s using the same words over and over again, to point toward things that are constantly shifting and are not really being grasped by that language.

On the event

Skinner: In terms of events, or things shifting … in the days following March 11th, I knew I was coming to talk to you, so of course I looked for the tsunami in the poems on your blog. And I couldn’t find it. What’s the scope of event? How does event function in your work?

Ratcliffe: Well that’s curious. That’s a good question. You know, earlier on, in CLOUD / RIDGE, it would have been in there, the tsunami, because there was a greater attempt at, or a closer sense of actual events being transferred, with more particularity. The particular was registered in the poem more closely.

Skinner: And then the nuclear catastrophe …

Ratcliffe: Yes, CLOUD / RIDGE begins on July 2nd, so when you get to September 11th, and then September 12th: “blond woman calling on phone to ask man to give / short-haired girl her cell phone number, plane / exploding into World Trade Center in New York.” So this then takes over. Oona’s in New York, my daughter, giving me these eyewitness accounts. The events come in, really in a big way. So … the question is why aren’t they there now?

Skinner: Well, I did find the line, in the poem for this March 11th …

Ratcliffe: Was that the date of the tsunami?

Skinner: … that was the date of the tsunami, and you had this line, “method that remains the same.” I think it was either 3.11 or 3.12.

Ratcliffe: Of course, that line was probably transcribed, you know, “found,” and written in this notebook, before 3.11. I pay a lot of attention to these events (Japan, tsunami, Libya, too). But they’re not getting in, you know, as concrete references. In the interior lines I’m pleased if I find something that to me resonates with events.

Skinner: I was almost thinking: “ok, the method remains, the song remains the same.”

Ratcliffe: Well, you know, it’s curious. I post them on the blog. And this poet who’s done a lot of translation from the Japanese, Eric Selland, wrote the other day, with a comment about one of the poems, saying, “it’s really nice to find this ongoing continuity of things here in the face of these human and natural disasters that we are facing.” I also post my poems on Tom Clark’s blog, and sometimes Tom or his readers find something in my interior lines that resonates … you know. Tom’s pieces are so full of current events, I mean they’re really striking. He’s got all these images that he pulls — he really follows things closely. But they find things in my poems that resonate with current events.

Skinner: Now are they catching allusion, are they catching some source, or are they scrying or divining — trying to interpret some sign in the frame?

Ratcliffe: I’m not sure. It’s some particular detail of the lines that resonates with what the topic, what the concern is in that thing.

On Campion

Skinner: I did want to ask you about Campion, about beginning with Campion, and what that means to you now …

Ratcliffe: I remember Auden. Auden had a beautiful — he edited a Selected Songs of Thomas Campion, published by David Godine. Back in the early 1970s I found that book.

Skinner: Beautiful publisher — still going.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, he does beautiful work. Bill Berkson did a night last spring at Books and Bookshelves, you know: what about Auden, does Auden matter anymore? A lot of poets came. About maybe a dozen people came to read selections or talk a little bit on Auden, so I thought, well, I’d like to read something from that Auden selection of Campion which was really formative to me when I found it. It’s a beautiful book, and his essay was great, his little preface about Campion. He talked about Campion as a minor poet. You know, I think C.S. Lewis might have put that term “major and minor poet” in his book, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. A “major” poet is Milton, or, of course, Shakespeare. A “minor” poet is Herrick, or Campion. Campion is praised as the greatest of the minor poets. It’s a matter of not taking on an epic subject — if you’re writing poems about love, or court ladies … Not so much CLOUD / RIDGE, because it’s full of political stuff and, you know, Picasso and François Gilot, Morton Feldman … But in this book the references are not identified, and they’re stripped from any sort of biographical loading.

Skinner: So what is it in Campion that you retain, at this point?

Ratcliffe: The way the language works.

Skinner: The measure? The number? Sound?

Ratcliffe: The measure … Yeah, all of that.

Skinner: There are two other questions that come out of Campion. One has to do with number, and one has to do with invisibility in the work.

On invisibility

Ratcliffe: Ah, that’s really important, actually. That could be a longer topic. Michael Cross articulated this a bit in a conversation we had. It was sort of in the back of my mind but he pounced on it. He wrote something about the Shakespeare, the offstage action, Reading the Unseen book — un-visibility, unseen, invisibility. I think that sometimes the ridge is invisible, if it’s covered with fog. I mean that word “invisible” shows up …

Skinner: That’s happened a lot this month.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, it happens a lot! So that’s one thing, but you know, in the notion of offstage action that’s talked about in words, it’s not seen. It’s invisible.

Skinner: Sound is not seen. Ronald Johnson calls sound the “invisible spire.”

Ratcliffe: Sound is not seen either. And the things that I see that I write down into the poems are not seen by the reader. They have to be imagined, if the reader can or wants to. Because the language in some way may appear to be generic: it just says “green,” you know. What kind of green? Oh, sunlit green. Well … there are all those different greens out there. It doesn’t discriminate. But there’s something about language making reference to or pointing toward or trying to bring to the page these things that don’t ever appear there except in the words. There’s this gap between the words and the thing.

Skinner: In the notion of listening to reading, I wonder if that includes Eigner’s sense — and this may be my idiosyncratic reading of Eigner — that there’s a way in which you can hear the world going on, as you read his poems. The poem itself as a frame for ambient attention. Listening to reading, in a dumbly literal sense, is like listening while reading, or listening to the experience of reading. And the poem is “ambient” in that it doesn’t capture your complete attention, it sort of allows you to listen while you’re reading.

Ratcliffe: I like that idea.

Skinner: Claude Royet-Journoud talked about this. You know his books with a couple of lines at the top of each page. He talked about enjoying the sounds that were happening while he writes and reads. It’s that blank page as the space where all the things can go on while the reader is thinking about those lines.

Ratcliffe: Absolutely. I find that when I get a chance to read pages at a time, ten pages, or twenty. That’s usually as long as you get to read. I think you hear some things, you follow, you drift off into your own thoughts, you pick it up again. It is like ambient noise. And there are these other noises going on.

Skinner: I know you use the phrase “listening to reading” in a somewhat different sense.

Ratcliffe: I have a class at Mills that I call Listening to Reading — and we spend a lot of time talking about the relations and differences between the poem on the page, as words, that you see with your eye, and the poem in the air, which is sounded when it’s read aloud, that you hear with your ear. Those are two vastly different experiences, but subtly different, and we don’t usually make a distinction between them.

Skinner: What about being … the other question coming out of Campion was number, being and number. I’d like to ask this rudimentary question: why for the first trilogy 474 pages, and why 1,000 for the second?

On number

Ratcliffe: Oh that’s simple, really. When I was writing Portraits & Repetition, it was getting quite long. [Laughs.] I’d written 100 page books before, works, projects. And then this was getting, oh this was really getting long, and what was going to happen? It really should stop. And then I went on a trip, I think I went to San Diego. And I thought, this would be a good time to stop. I like that number, 474, it has this sort of … it’s like 747, you know, the airplane.

Skinner: Symmetry.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, it has a certain numerological resonance.

Skinner: 4s and 7s.

Ratcliffe: So I stopped. And I actually didn’t start into doing REAL right away. About nine months went by, I think. And then I thought, gee, you know, I’d like to do another piece. Maybe I could do a trilogy of works that long. I’ll see if I can. So I started on REAL, and I aimed to get to 474. And then, you know, I was really into it. So I shifted and I did this one.

Skinner: CLOUD / RIDGE.

Ratcliffe: Yeah. And then I thought, ok, that’s the trilogy. But I don’t want to stop writing. I don’t know how to stop now.

Skinner: So you stopped and started again.

Ratcliffe: The next day.

Skinner: The next day!

Ratcliffe: Yes. As I say, after Portraits & Repetition, I stopped and I did other things. And then I started in again on these long things. So it’s been consecutive days ever since …

Skinner: It sounds like 474 in REAL is a “track mark,” basically, that you put in. As if you’re making a recording and you put in a track mark.

Ratcliffe: Yeah, except the form shifted from REAL to CLOUD / RIDGE.

Skinner: From one day to the next? You made a decision to shift the form?

Ratcliffe: Yeah. I invented a new form on the very next day.

Skinner: Had you been thinking about that before, or did you invent it on the spot?

Ratcliffe: I can’t remember. I’m not sure. You know, REAL is seventeen lines, five units. Portraits & Repetition also has five units, you know, five couplets. And it had five sentence structures. I think that this might also … [counting] 1, 2, 3, 4 … 5, 6, 7, 8 … 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. No, it’s different. I don’t know. I invented this one. And likewise, when I went into Portraits & Repetition, I invented a new form. And in Remarks on Color. But at the end of Remarks on Color, I was in Paris. I didn’t have the wherewithal to invent a new form. And so I thought, well, I don’t need to invent a new form, I’ll just keep going. So Temporality continues with the same number of lines. It shrinks in length, it gets more compressed. And that was another thousand pages. Now it’s still the same number of lines, but I don’t have a new title for this work.

Skinner: So what about number? Is there buried numerology in your work, numeric pattern? Is there a counting meter?

Ratcliffe: You know, for years I wrote fourteen line poems, in various ways, sonnets. That’s another thing coming out of Renaissance studies. Campion didn’t write sonnets, but Shakespeare did, and so on. And they’re various … I mean even these poems in CLOUD / RIDGE are fourteen line poems, if you count the indented, you know, broken line as a single line, which I do. I think they’re fourteen line poems. But, no, it’s just habit. There’s not a numerological significance that I know of.

On document

Skinner: Is there a documentary impulse in your work?

Ratcliffe: I was going to say, thinking back to your question about the scene and the numbers, that there’s something about this work that wants to just mark the passage of time. Because I’m here, and I’m writing these poems from a very fixed … it’s kind of like Proust in his bedroom, you know; he goes inside, inside his mind. From what I understand about Proust.

Skinner: Marking the passage of what kind of time?

Ratcliffe: From one day to the next!

Skinner: I mean, are we talking absolute time, experienced time, durée, biological time?

Ratcliffe: Well, the ticking of the clock. You know, all of the above, because the poems are written at the same time, at daybreak. Bob was talking about these being like a prayer to the new day.

Skinner: To the dawn, yeah … saluting the sun.

Ratcliffe: I don’t think of it that way. But it’s a nice notion.


text:
Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Night Life in Jakarta

Jakarta is a strange juxtaposition of being the capital of the world’s largest Islamic country, but at the same time its nightlife is also one of the most vibrant in the Asia Pacific region. From hanging out with the “chi chi” in an upscale lounge, to exploring the seediest discos, or just grabbing a beer at the local sports bar, Jakarta offers a wide selection of over 200 bars, clubs, pubs and lounges scattered across the entire city to cater to every whim and preference.

Bars in the Central Business District
To hang out with Jakarta's young, rich and beautiful, try the Red Square in the Plaza Senayan Arcadia annex, reported to be Jakarta’s first vodka bar and restaurant and which is very popular with expats in the city. X2 Club nearby is also a place to see and be seen, although some say that it has lost some of its luster recently, but still the music and cocktails are excellent.

The Hard Rock Café in Plaza Indonesia is an old favorite for burgers and fries, with a live music band on most weekends. Cazbar in Mega Kuningan, just behind the Ritz Carlton Hotel, also offers a local sports bar like atmosphere that is a nice, relatively quiet spot to hang out over a beer and on slow weekday evenings. Jaya Pub , probably the oldest pub in town, models itself after the old pubs in Amsterdam and is a great way to blend a little Batavian culture with a good beer.

If you are looking for a place for a good, quiet glass of wine, check out the Cork and Screw, a bistro and wine bar in Kuningan. Known for its good food and even better wine selection, Cork and Screw is arguably one of the most affordable wine bars in the city today.

Bars and Clubs in Kemang
The fashionable Kemang area in South Jakarta is popular with expats and locals alike. It has numerous places to explore for haute cuisine, excellent cocktails and to dance the night away. Casa, a small bar and restaurant in Kemang, is a haunt for creative types, and trendy in its own restrained way. Nu China is a club and bar that is currently popular with college types.

Clubs and Bars in Blok M
A nightlife district popular among single expats is Blok M in South Jakarta, or more specifically Jalan Palatehan 1, a single lane just north of the bus terminal which is packed full of pubs, bars and clubs geared almost squarely towards the single Western male expat.
Clubs and Bars in North Jakarta
Segarra is an outdoor lounge by the sea in the Ancol resort area of North Jakarta that is a world away from the grim of the city. With an amazingly unique beach bar atmosphere that you wouldn’t find anywhere else in Jakarta, you can relax while chilling on a sofa in the sea breeze or on one of the lounge chairs that dot the deck along the shore.

Be sure to avoid the Kota area in North Jakarta, considered to be the seediest part of town after midnight. If you must explore just for the sake of trying it once, we suggest you restrict yourself to the regular discos in Kota, such as Stadium and Crown , but, even so, these clubs have special areas designated for prostitutes.

Some Tips
To address some practicalities, night life in Jakarta does tend towards the pricey end, for local living standards at least. In general, dress codes are strictly enforced in most bars and clubs in the city: dress sharply, or at the very least smart casual and definitely no shorts or slippers. During Ramadan, the holy Muslim fasting month, all nightlife ends at midnight and some operations close for the entire month

When going out in Jakarta, be aware that a fairly high number of working girls, known in local parlance as “ayam”, congregate in nightspots, so much so that many female clientele often get mistaken for being on the take. So be careful when going out as a female in the city; it's always go in groups.


text:
This image was lost some time after publication.

Volkswagen's Chinese automotive venture, FAW-Volkswagen, announced it will sell the new Audi A6 in China in an attempt to dislodge BMW from its grip on that country's high-end car market. The A6, which will hit showrooms in mid-2005, will be offered only with the 4.2-liter V8, in front- or all-wheel drive. VW officials indicated the move will finally show Audi's "kung-fu is more advanced than BMW's," and promise to avenge the death of its Shaolin master, Fan-lin, whom BMW had dispatched with the "mesmerizing eye of doom" many years ago.

Volkswagen JV to launch new Audi A6 [Xinhua Online]

China Automakers in Geneva: Portent of Things to Come [internal]


text: We had a chance this morning to be one of the first to drive the GTbyCITROEN Concept on Gran Turismo 5: Prologue at the Paris Auto Show. The car, easily the hottest concept here at the show, was designed as a joint venture between Citroen and Polyphony Digital, the makers of Gran Turismo. We'll gladly admit we are not virtuosos of GT5, as we should be, but once we figured out what everything did, it was off to the races. By our uncalibrated estimates, the GTbyCITROEN has a tendency to understeer more than we expected, but it is fast, and it'll handle high speeds pretty well. Oh, and after we took a look inside the concept, we were interested to see that dash provides a sweet heads-up unit displaying current velocity. We totally need to get a PS3.


text:
The first three-quarters of the video is pavement, and thus not very dramatic. The last quarter is dirt. Arm-over-arm opposite lock. The howly whine of the gearbox. Zwart being all manly and Zwart-like. (In person, he's a cool, relaxed, down-to-earth sort of guy, the kind of dude that you immediately want to buy a beer and make tell you stories. I like Jeff Zwart a lot, and I've only met him once. But I digress.)

Gah! Porsche dirt!

Pikes Peak 2010 - Jeff Zwart In Car from Will Roegge on Vimeo.

[via CarDomain]


text:
Most of us know the story of Preston Tucker and his Tucker Torpedo. This amazingly advanced car was scuttled by the Big Three and their friends in the Senate and SEC in an attempt to fight off potential new competition. Tucker was investigated out of business (at considerable taxpayer expense) and the Big Three went on to an easy couple decades of success and stagnation.

But what if that didn't happen?

Welcome to Altern-auto-ve Universe, our semi-regular feature taking a look at the "What If?" of the automotive world. We start with a hypothetical car suggested by you, I draw it, and then try and think through the world it would be in. It's fun.

The really important factor about the survival of the Tucker Motor Company would have been the man, not the car. Sure, the Tucker Torpedo was full of technical and safety innovations way ahead of its time, but the reason for that is Preston Tucker himself was looking that far ahead. Tucker was more than a visionary– he was a loud, charismatic visionary, and had the same sort of public presence we know about today, with industry personalities like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and, say, Richard Branson.

In our boring reality, the biggest innovations in the 1950s were about styling and planned obsolescence*. American cars were huge, thirsty machines, with relatively primitive (if generally reliable) mechanicals when compared to what was happening in, for example, Europe. Just compare a 1957 Citroën DS to a 1957 Chevy Bel-Air.

With Tucker in the picture, though, everything is different. America would have had a very innovative company pushing the technical limits of what was possible with cars, and a very outspoken and visible head of that company to keep the public interested. If there were Tuckers in 1957, with pop-out safety glass, lightweight aluminum boxer engines, disc brakes, steerable headlights, padded dashboards, and all the other Tucker innovations, there's no way Ford or GM or Chrysler could have just sat back and cranked out the same old barges with bigger and bigger tailfins. Tucker would have brought the whole industry's state-of-the-art up.

That also means by the time the Japanese cars started to arrive in the US in the late 60s, they would not have found a stagnating US car industry, so ripe for attack. They would have found four major companies in heated competition, with real innovations. When the oil crisis of the mid-late 70s hit, US firms would be ready for it, adapting the Tucker-style lightweight opposed engines to four-cylinder models with less displacement, in aerodynamic bodies. The Japanese (or Germans, or whomever) would have found much more formidable home-team adversaries.

That means less of a recession in the 1980s, and an overall stronger America. I mean like moonbase-level stronger. All this, if only Preston Tucker had more friends on the SEC.

The alternative-universe car I illustrated for this came from a comment from Autojunkie, in the first Altern-auto-ve Universe post way back when:

What if Tucker had actually thrived and survived and made it into the throws of the muscle car era?

With that in mind, at the top is the Tucker muscle car from 1971, the Tornado. The Tornado (the name is a nod to the Toronado, which inspired some of the look) has a rear-mounted aluminum flat-8, of about 4 liters displacement, and I'll say making about, oh, 325 hp. Why not? This is the pre-oil crisis muscle car era. There's still the three headlights in the front (center one steers with the wheel), on a grille-less panel, and for that extra safety effort Tucker was known for is an integrated roll bar, which also houses air intakes for the radiator, mounted just aft of the passenger compartment, in front of the engine. It's also fed by the Tucker-traditional rear fender-mounted intakes.

I'm a big rear-engine fetishist, and I really do wish Tucker had survived to produce a long line of American ass-engined machines, like this one. I bet it would be awesome off the line, as the acceleration would just put more grip on the drive wheels, but probably a hoon-slaughtering, oversteering nightmare in the corners. Though I bet old Preston would have figured out a way around that, too.

As always, give some suggestions for more cars from alternative universes, and we'll pick one to explore further.

* As some commenters have pointed out, this isn't really fair. There were plenty of US innovations, like a really workable automatic transmission, among others, that deserve mention. So here's a mention.

Image Credits: Illustration — Jason Torchinsky; Preston Tucker portrait courtesy The Tucker Historical Collection and Library, retouched by W. Guy Finley; Blueprint courtesy of


text:
If the gates are down at a railroad crossing, don't drive under those gates. See, if you do that, you might hit a train or get hit by a train. Or, like this case, both.

Police in Woods Cross, Utah were responding to a domestic dispute when they saw a car believed to be involved speed by them. The police took off in pursuit, but the chase came to an end shortly after when the driver ignored the gates at a rail crossing and hit a train.

The cops got out of their car to check on her, but as they did, the ominous sound of a horn started bellowing in the background. The police jump out of the way and the car gets hit by a train that just couldn't stop.

Amazingly, the driver of the car wasn't killed and is expected to recover from her injuries.

Hat Tip to Ersin!


text:
Buy Tadacip Online Mastercard Overnight

Looking for a tadacip? Not a problem! Click Here
To read more in regards to tadacip look into Pharmacy Lookup.
Guaranteed Worldwide Shipping Discreet Package Low Prices 24/7/365 Customer Support 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed.

  • order cheapest tadacip in wells
  • buyin online for genertile herpies pharmacy group tadacip 20mg south carolina
  • otc tadacip order luton
  • 5 tadacip 20mg buy mg much does 500 cost bestellen schweiz
  • purchase tadacip alternative no insurance at arlington
  • i want tadacip canadian pharmacy check
  • low price tadacip amex pharmaceutical alaska
  • pharmacy tadacip wakefield
  • best price tadacip amex buy
  • can i buy tadacip priority mail saturday delivery pharmacy
  • without prescription tadacip online without script
  • tadacip overseas pills with check
  • can i purchase tadacip 20mg buy
  • where to buy tadacip bristol
  • buy tadacip online mastercard overnight
  • no script tadacip erectile dysfunction delivery
  • generic tadacip us buy tadacip without a prescription
  • euro otc sicherheitsdatenblatt tadacip baccidal is 20mg
  • rpsgb otc orlando under tadacip shop
  • tadacip sales otc
  • money order worldwide tadacip mastercard
  • delivery capital federal tadacip russland kaufen idaho
  • tadacip kobe nu
  • discount tadacip erectile dysfunction paypal
  • cheap tadacip western union wire transfer
  • online tadacip 20mg ratings tucson philippines buy sell
  • tadacip comprar online siparis hospital cost otc ttc
  • kaufen tadacip glutenfrei
  • generic tadacip without script
  • manaufacturer generic tadacip
  • safe order tadacip online
  • without prescription tadacip no doctors cheapest overnight delivery
  • tadacip no doctors medicine
  • i want to buy tadacip fast delivery
  • buy tadacip wire transfer no script pharmaceutical
  • purchase tadacip find st
  • apotheken tadacip preisvergleich von apotheke 20mg find us retail cost
  • tadacip western union without prescription
  • tadacip cost in us georgia morning after pill price 20mgonline buy
  • without prescription tadacip overnight sale medicine
  • buy tadacip from a us pharmacy
  • otc tadacip pill
  • tadacip pill purchase
  • without prescription tadacip priority mail ach
  • to buy tadacip otc
  • cost tadacip find discount york
  • tadacip 600 rezeptfrei amazon store under 20mg 200mg kaufen buy canada natural
  • prescription tadacipno kaufen tadacip pferd online 25mg
  • overseas pharmacy tadacip no prescription
  • buy tadacip order scabies online tadacip-750 street price tucson
  • #tadacip
  • tadacip price comparison canada cheapest price tadacip newport
  • generic tadacip with free shipping
  • can i buy tadacip without prescription wire transfer
  • tadacip phosphate cells for sale 20mg
  • Many small entrepreneurs hire consultants to achieve this market research, however, it is possible to do this on your individual for free. You can look at the details in the company name, kind of drug, price, expiry date along with the dosages. It can probably be said as the easiest method of buying medicine.

    At age 18, her brother married one in the children of a recognised bookstore owner in Manila; hence, she was capable of land a job like a salesgirl in a of its stalls. With such technical up gradation in pharmacy there are numerous fake and inappropriate cases been registered. This is really a national certification exam, high are two main options.

    The tech will enter orders, check orders, process requests for insurance and patient information among other things. Many require math and science coursework, and prospective students ought to know what those prerequisites are and whether they meet them. Meadow's Pharmacy is additionally a great shopping spot year-round.

    It is very important to note that not every pharmacy technician receives such a low wage knowning that when employed in private pharmacies, it is probably that one gets to be a wage of $17 each hour minimum. When I asked the tech about this new action she stated that yes, it is a fresh policy understanding that it can be a "law" that all pharmacies must adhere to. If you will get prescriptions from month to month make sure your pharmacy has your most current prescription insurance information.

    A reputable company such as Canada Drug Center will never divulge your private information to anyone else. I was paying $10 to get a thirty day supply through my dog's vet's office. There is an exception on the pharmacist tech training program.

    Jambo Aircon Kft. © 2008.

    A weboldalt készítte: Mátyás Miklós


text:
Monday, January 19, 2015

Jumbo's R.I.P. Liberty City, Miami

Jumbo’s, in business from 1955 to 2014, was considered a soul-food landmark. In the 1960s it was the first white-owned restaurant to employ and serve blacks. The Flam family bought the diner in 1955. The Civil Rights Act had passed three years earlier, but Miami was still part of the Deep South. Discrimination was officially illegal, but many restaurants and other businesses did not comply. A developer has purchased the property.

No comments:

Post a Comment


text:
Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Closer and closer to frost/freeze

Temperatures continue to drop as the fall season continues (as we would expect) and while some areas of the state have now experienced their first, fall freeze, many areas are still waiting. A hard freeze is usually defined by temperatures falling to 28 degrees or colder for several hours. Frost can happen with temperatures ranging from 30-36 degrees. Here are some average first freeze information for areas around Kansas.

The pattern is showing more cold air coming our way for the middle of next week. It's a real possibility for widespread frost or a hard freeze either Tuesday or Wednesday morning (October 22 or 23). It's amazing to me how fast the weather begins to change at this time of the year, but the jet stream winds strengthen and the storm systems continue getting stronger. I'm posting a snapshot from one of the computer models showing the cold air coming this way next week. Could there be some changes to this? Absolutely! But for now, confidence is growing our first killing frost could be coming very soon.
Temperatures at 5,000 feet for 7 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 23

No comments:

Blog History


text:
Thursday, February 10, 2011

The Russ Kassoff Big Band w/ Catherine Dupuis @ Gillespie Auditorium, Feb 15

Join us for another spectacular evening of swinging jazz you’ll never forget when the Russ Kassoff Big Band with vocalist Catherine Dupuis returns to Jazz Tuesdays in the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium on Tuesday, February 15. Located in the New York City Baha'i Center at 53 East 11th Street (between University Place & Broadway) and dedicated to the late great Dizzy Gillespie, this magnificent, yet cozy theater with its glorious acoustics is fast becoming the favorite venue of the world class musicians who play there, as well as jazz fans who return week after week to enjoy this comfortable and exhilarating experience, soaking up great sounds in the warm and welcoming environment of this beautiful theater. There will be two shows: 8:00 and 9:30 pm. Call 212-222-5159 for reservations and information.

The Russ Kassoff Big Band is comprised of top New York recording and Broadway musicians who all get a chance to play Kassoff's new hard-swinging charts. It was was formed in 2003 after a successful run of concerts featuring Russ as featured composer, arranger, orchestrator, and piano soloist. The vituosity of the great musicians in the band contributes to the new fresh sound of these hard-swinging original charts. Russ's repertoire is eclectic and diverse, including many new and innovative arrangements of his original compositions in addition to such classics as Ellington's "Perdido," Fats Waller's "The Joint Is Jumpin'," and Tori Amos' "Winter."

Russ toured extensively with legends Frank Sinatra ('80-'91) and Liza Minnelli ('82-'01). As a writer, Russ counts among his major influences Rob McConnell, Thad Jones, Nelson Riddle, Don Costa and Don Sebesky to name a few. As a pianist his influences include Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. All members of the Russ Kassoff Big Band are among a small group of the best free lance musicians in the world. Together they form a vast bio of many worlds of performing experience. Russ - with Sinatra, Minnelli, Rita Moreno, Mimi Hines, Susannah McCorkle, Carol Sloan, Rod Stewart, Carly Simon, Chris Connor, Bucky Pizzarelli, and countless others - is joined by his band members who also bring their experience - with Count Basie, Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Lionel Hampton, Gerry Mulligan, Sting, Natalie Cole - just about everyone in the traditions of American jazz and show business - not to mention the Broadway shows currently being played by these marvelous players.

This 16-piece band has performed regularly at the Bahai Center in NYC as part of the wonderful Tuesday night jazz series in the Dizzy Gillespie auditorium produced by jazz great Mike Longo, and has backed Tony Award Winner Debbie Gravitte in a show/concert created by Russ and Debbie called "Big Band Broadway" at the Ridgefield Playhouse in Ct., and at Birdland in NYC, has been the featured performer at the 2nd annual Milford, PA Music Festival under the coordination of Martha Lorin, and has been heard on the 1010 WINS Radio Jingle promoting Live Music in the NY Metropolitan area sponsored by LOCAL 802 AFM, NY's musicians union!

Kassoff was a recent guest on NPR with Marion McPartland's Piano Jazz celebrating his critically acclaimed solo/trio CD, "Somewhere," considered one of the top releases of the year in the 2007 Jazz Station Poll. Now he has a new album out, "Bird Fly By," which got a rave review in the January/February 2011 issue of Cadence magazine.
Vocalist Catherine Dupuis has been the featured vocalist with the RKBB since its inception. Her style is soulful, innovative, and fresh and she is a consummate artist. With the RKBB she performs a repertoire of original RK arrangements that she and Russ have worked on as musical partners for several years. Dupuis' three CDs recorded for Bearheart Records have received rave reviews. About "Rules of the Road" (2005, arranged and conducted by Russ Kassoff, featuring the Russ Kassoff Trio, Bucky Pizzarelli, Ted Nash, Marvin Stamm and Joe Cohn), Scott Yanow (All Music Guide) wrote: "Although not overly famous, Catherine Dupuis shows on this CD that she is one of the most interesting jazz singers of the early 21st century. Her song selection is particularly strong, with a few standards performed in fresh ways and joined by vintage obscurities and newer material. "I've Never Been in Love Before" and "Lonesome Road" are reinvented. The Rules of the Road is highly recommended and a perfect introduction to the singing of Catherine Dupuis."
Admission is 15.00, $10.00 for students.
Tickets will be sold at the door, or call 212-222-5159 for reservations and information.

Jazz Tuesdays
in the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium
The New York Baha'i Center
53 East 11th Street (between University Place & Broadway)
Two shows: 8:00 and 9:30 p.m. (Catherine Dupuis, Bucky Pizzarelli, Russ Kassoff and Ted Nash)

No comments:


text:
Dominican Republic Jazz Festival Scheduled for Oct. 31-Nov. 3

Bernie Williams, Rufus Reid, George Garzone and others to appear

The 17th annual Dominican Republic Jazz Festival will take place Oct. 31-Nov. 3 in the towns of Puerto Plata, Sosúa and Cabarete in the Dominican Republic. The longest-running jazz event in the country, the multi-day free festival combines culture, entertainment and music education, while featuring some of the world’s best Latin jazz groups and musicians.

Among the artists scheduled to appear this year are Bernie Williams (USA), Abraham Laboriel Sr. (Mexico), Marco Pignataro (Italy), Ramón Vázquez (Puerto Rico), Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez (Cuba), Rufus Reid (USA), George Garzone (USA), Billy Drummond (USA), Alex Acuña (Peru), Richie Flores (Puerto Rico), and the Latin Grammy Award winners Johnny Ventura (Dominican Republic) and Milly Quezada (Dominican Republic).

Dominican Republic Jazz Festival Dates

October 31, 2013 – Puerto Plata, Independence Park

November 1, 2013 – Sosua, Hotel Casa Marina Amphitheater

November 2-3, 2013 – Cabarete, Cabarete Beach

Further event information can be found at Dominican Republic Jazz Festival.


text:
[random-image attachmentids=”820,821,822,823,824,825,826,827,828,829,830,831,832,833,834,835,836,837,838,839,840,841,842,843,844,845,846,847,848,849,851,852,853,854,855,856,857,858,859,860,861,862,863,864,865,866,867,868,869,870,871,872,873″]

Two things that I’m enjoying right now:  Mass Effect 3 and Breaking Bad.  As for the former, I know to expect heartbreak at the end, but I’ll be enjoying it up until that point, I think.  It’s just nice to be back with the old gang again, and on an HDTV this time.  As for the latter, Jane and I are catching up on it on Netflix, and we just watched the very intense third episode, involving a tough choice the main character has to make.  Really top-notch storytelling.

6/15 Deeds
Edited Benjamin chapter — +1 Fin, 40 GP
Worked at paper — 60 GP
GP subtraction — -90 GP

6/16 Deeds
Edited Benjamin chapter — +1 Fin, 30 GP
Wrote 1000 words — +1 Inv, 50 GP
GP subtraction — -162 GP

Author: Jeff Deck

Author and administrator of this site.


text:
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The Peerless Prognosticator of Palm Beach

We have been asked in recent days why we don't join the chorus of investment advisors, CNBC pundits and just plain wise guys offering stock market/investment predictions for the New Year.

Our standard response has been similar to what James Thurber wrote in his introduction to “My Life and Hard Times” (look it up, kids), to the effect that he always carried the uneasy feeling that whatever he was writing had already been done better and more quickly by Robert Benchley (look him up, too).

Robert Benchley was a famous humorist, sort of the Will Farrell of his day—only literate and actually funny. And, in our book, the Robert Benchley of stock market prognostications has to be my old pal, Doug Kass, the so-called “Bear of Boca.”

Doug, who runs money, writes on the stock market and somehow managed to find time to appear on CNBC in years past whenever the hosts needed to find a lonely bear on housing, also publishes a list of predictions every year.

So with Kass on the case, who needs another batch from us?

Sure enough, Sunday night it hit our email: Doug’s fearless predictions for 2009. So fearless, in fact, that the number of predictions runs to twenty in all.

And these are not your Bryon Wien-variety, “The dollar will strengthen and then weaken”-type stuff.

Wien, who pioneered the annual Wall Street prediction phenomenon, tends towards the kind of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other statements employed by Wall Street strategists such as he used to be. Doug, however, minces no words. Whereas last year, for example, Wien (who to his credit accurately predicted recession and credit tightening) foresaw consumer spending being “lackluster” in 2008, Doug predicted a “retailing depression,” quote/unquote.

And Doug’s predictions for 2009 are, as usual, a mix of straightforwardly logical calls quite at variance with the emotional consensus (on housing, for example), along with some out-of-left-field notions, including musings on Madoff that are of such specificity that you wonder what, exactly, Doug has been hearing at temple.

Now, we will not attempt to repeat, refine, or review any of the 2009 predictions. You should read them yourself, as Doug wrote them:

But before you do, we want take issue with one aspect of Doug's new list.

Candor and lack of word-mincing aside, what also distinguishes Doug from other Wall Street “seers” is that Doug always prefaces his new predictions with a no-holds-barred look back at his prior lists.
Read carefully from this year's look-back:

Our surprise list for 2008 proved to be our most successful ever, with 60% of last year's "possible improbables" proving to be materially on target. Almost half of the prior year's predicted surprises actually came to pass, up from one-third in 2006 and from 20% in 2005. Nearly of one-half 2004's prognostications proved prescient and about one-third in the first year of our surprises for 2003.

What we want to take issue with is Doug’s note that 60% of the picks from his 2008 list were “materially on target.”

The fact is the 60% that Doug got right, in our view, were so out-there at the time he wrote about them, and turned out to be so dead-on-accurate in the way they unfolded—record market volatility, hedge fund outflow acceleration, job losses, “an unprecedented and abrupt drop in personal consumption expenditures,” not to mention Fed policy, Goldman Sachs miscues, private equity “at a standstill,” the value of the dollar falling and the price of oil breaking above $135—that to say Doug was “materially on target” is like saying Tiger Woods won a golf game last summer before his knee gave out.

If anybody came closer than Doug Kass to getting the guts of the 2008 financial crisis—and much of its ramifications—right, ahead of time, we’d like to know.

Indeed, so variant (to use one of his favorite terms), so out-there, so accurate and so timely were Doug’s 2008 predictions that we here at NotMakingThisUp herewith re-title the so-called “Bear of Boca” with something more appropriate than that one-dimensional sobriquet.

Since Doug’s Florida office is in Palm Beach these days, we’re going for the “Peerless Prognosticator of Palm Beach.”

And while we’re at it, we’ll mention something else. One other unfinished piece of business lurks here.

We think it only right that every guest on CNBC—the money managers and the so-called strategists who smirked, sneered, laughed, snorted, and talked over Doug during his Larry Kudlow appearances for the two or three years that the housing bubble was percolating into a worldwide economic crisis which not one of those prattering princes of positivism got right—ought to say on the air and into the camera, the next time Kudlow has them on, for whatever reason he might want them on, what Abraham Lincoln once wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant after that general's bloody march on Richmond:

“You were right and I was wrong.”

It won’t happen, of course. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t.

So, our hat is off to Doug Kass: The Peerless Prognosticator of Palm Beach.

Jeff Matthews
I Am Not Making This Up

© 2008 NotMakingThisUp, LLC

The content contained in this blog represents the opinions of Mr. Matthews.
Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice. It should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Nor are these comments meant to be a solicitation of business in any way: such inquiries will not be responded to. This content is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

Kass Fan said...

Doug handled himself like a consummate gentleman - cool/calm/collected -- on Kudlow's show during the rose-colored-glasses Dow 15000 days when the other guests ridiculed his bearishness. I was always impressed by his demeanor when the other guests (ostriches?) smugly attacked his ideas. Of course, Doug ended up being right, and he's got the scars and the dough to prove it. Way to go Dougie!

Mark said...

Kass made some good macro calls, but went on record (on "thestreet.com") with a lot of lousy trading calls, as he turned bullish again way too early, at one point recommending Citi in the $20s: http://www.thestreet.com/story/10398712/1/kass-buy-citigroup-for-a-rainy-day.html

Anyone following Doug's advice here (and a number of other times that he tried to short-term-time the market) would've wound up giving up a huge chunk of anything made earlier on the short side.

Kieran said...

I appreciate his comments, though I agree with some more than others. I'm anticipating a rally to S&P 1100, but I doubt it will last. I suspect he's also right that the new administration will create a significant housing credit that could help to stabilize the residential housing market. Though I suspect they'll have to make the housing credit permanent or phase it out over 20 years to keep housing propped up after 2009. One year won't be anywhere near enough. As for the CRE market rebounding shortly, that's a highly improbable improbable. If we get a rally from here, I'll gladly take the other side of that trade.

Josh Brown said...

great summation of Kass's 2009 Surprises Jeff...

did my own version over on The Reformed Broker blog this morning

I start every day with Doug Kass and I urge my readers to sping for the subscription as well

michael said...

A lot of his predictions can be summed up by "the Fed succeeds in reflating (most of) the bubble". I disagree.
And I miss any mention of continued "Deleveraging" effects in his outlook.

Anonymous said...

I listen closely to Kass, he's a very smart guy and I agree with some of his 2009 predictions, albeit far less than the 2008 ones. But reading through his 2009 list it seems like he's one of these people who are delerious about Obama and believe him to be The One. I guess it's just interesting to see someone who was bearish for so long think we're going to have an incredibly (unrealistically?) quick recovery.

FWIW, the only thing I think he's dead-wrong about is gold.

Aaron said...

The most interesting part when reading Doug Kass' 20 Predictions For 2009 was when he describes the purpose of his predictions:

"The real purpose of this endeavor is to consider positioning a portion of my portfolio in accordance with outlier events, with the potential for large payoffs." (bold & italics mine)

I find it interesting that Mr Kass is thinking probablilistically, by "betting" on long shot events that potentially have positive financial outcomes should those long shot events come to fruition (i.e., betting on "black swans" according to Nasim Taleb).

I think it's a great way to think about how to invest in stocks, too (i.e., betting on stocks that are down 50%+ with the possibility of a comeback based on an unanticipated earnings surprise or two). But I could be wrong, though...

whydibuy said...

Oh, here we go. " Possible improbables". If it happens, well I said it was possible. If it doesn't, I did say it was improbable. Another version of the good old fashioned double speak. He'll be right either way. So Kass was allegedly a hot hand in '08. My instincts say to do the opposite the next year of whatever the former hot hand recommends. Yes, I said former hot hand because thats usually the way things work out.

Finn Kristiansen said...

I think on my own blog last January I accurately predicted the outcome of the election and pressure on state budgets (both rather obvious events). But was not actually trying to make predictions per se.

MattJ said...

My nomination for best predictions for 2008 is Karl Denninger (the Market Ticker blog)

Doug Kass has bee very good, but I think Denninger has been the most accurate (if a bit too hyperbolic) of the web commenters I read.

An aside - Kudlow gets a lot of criticism for his boosterism and rose-colored glasses, but it is from his show that I first heard Doug Kass, Peter Schiff, and many other bears over the last few years. He has done a great service to viewers who watch with an appropriate level of skepticism by providing a platform for people with viewpoints different than his.

Jeff Matthews said...

MattJ: I agree on Kudlow, and deliberately excluded Larry from the critique.

I've been on the show myself, and although Larry may disagree with your conclusions, he'll always ask why you think the way you do rather than criticize what you think just because it's different from his own conclusions.

(I recall fondly watching Larry interview Socialist Senator Bernie Saunders of Vermont during the TARP bailout debate last fall. Saunders gave Larry enormous grief over Larry's support for the bailout. Larry took it in stride, and let Saunders have his say. It was great television.)

The talking heads who owe Doug an apology are the perma-bullish guests--the strategists and economists--who tried to make Doug's life miserable when he appeared on the show while the Bubble was in full swing.

Not for nothing, those same permabulls probably made their investors' lives miserable, too, given their complete lack of intellectual honesty and inability to listen to guys like Doug Kass.

Anonymous said...

And yet the year of 2009 will be the year to prove Kass wrong on most of his predictions. Neither Obama, nor anyone else, including Mr. Printing Press, would be able to reverse the downward death spiral movement. The only thing that might are sustained efforts to rebuild the now almost completely outsourced US production capacity. As it concerns the US, which has turned out of the largest creditor nation into the largest debtor nation, all debt based solutions are non solutions at all.

Once the Obama rally fades away, the markets will set new lows, which won't be the lows. Eventually, when the bottom is reached, the market will trade at those levels similar to the Nasdaq trading after the dot.com collapse in 2000.

Jeff Matthews said...

Funny how fearless commentators can be--whether it's slamming a blog post, or cyberstalking, or making predictions like this one--so long as they can do it anonymously.

Doug Kass, at least, puts his name on it.

BlackLab said...

Mish has done good work. He doesn't compile prediction lists per se, but he did write some very clairvoyant columns in late 2007 and early 2008.

joelandsonia said...

itulip.com -- by far the most accurate prediction of this mess *way* before it started.

Bird said...

Oh Jeff, how little you understand of the genius that is Mr. Will Ferrell.

Jeff Matthews said...

Bird: Guilty as charged.

"DoctoRx" said...

In addition to the comments re Mish and ITulip, both of whom have been excellent, Nouriel Roubini at rgemonitor.com laid out the more-or-less precise course of this crisis a year ago and has been banging the drums for a long time.

Both Doug Kass and ITulip have had some bad calls. Roubini and Mish have been amazing.

Anonymous said...

"If anybody came closer than Doug Kass to getting the guts of the 2008 financial crisis—and much of its ramifications—right, ahead of time, we’d like to know."

Prem Watsa (Fairfax Financial)and John Paulson (Paulson & Co.) were not only dead-on about the crisis and its ramifications, but made absurd quantities of money by investing according to the way they saw things playing out.

ferdi said...

Question. If in 2008 he made 60% of the calls right he also made 40% of calls wrong. Which calls were wrong?
Comment. On the financial crisis, Doug Kass has not been the most accurate, as the blog reports. Has this guy ever heard of Meredith Whitney and Nouriel Roubini?


text:
Monday, May 18, 2009

Jones, Shavano, Tabeguache, Espirit Point

Jones Peak (13,604)
~9 miles
~4,500 vertical

After getting camp set up near the Blank Gulch TH around mid afternoon in preparation for Shavano and Tabeguache the following day, I had a few hours to kill before dinner and the weather was nearly perfect, so I figured I would go explore and see if I could fit in a climb up Jones Peak.

I started off heading North on the Colorado Trail, went about a mile past the junction of the Shavano Trail, crossed Squaw Creek and headed NW, over a ridge, crossed another small creek and began climbing the SE ridge of the SE ridge. The bushwhacking was relatively easy up to about 11,000 feet, then the hill got a little steeper, a little rockier and a lot more vegetated with plenty of deadfall up to about 12,000 feet.

Before long, I emerged from the trees as the clouds that were previously enshrouding the peaks were mostly dissipating. The day was relatively warm and there was hardly a breeze. Up I went over Pt. 12,985 and got my first real view of the true summit. There were several rollers that could be easily skirted with some painless side hilling, a steepish climb to the summit, then a bit of confusion. There were several similar height summits along the ridge, then a much higher point almost all the way to Shavano. A quick check of the GPS confirmed that I was on the summit of Jones, but what is that other peak? Unfortunately, I don’t have time to keep going and have to be content with just Jones.

I promised Allison that I would not be gone long, so I tried to get back fast, but the steep/rocky/deadfall section between 12,000 and 11,000 feet was very slow and tedious, resulting in lots of slips, trips and curse words. Keeping my same line going down also turned out to be a bit of a challenge, so I occasionally referred to my GPS just to streamline things. Once I hit the Colorado Trail, I jogged the remainder of the way back to camp, regretting the heavy pack I carried, as I only needed my glove liners, GPS, camera and a bottle of water. Oh well, better safe than sorry.

Shavano, Tabeguache, Espirit Point
~11 miles
~5,600 vertical
Angel of Shavano from Blank Gulch TH
Allison, Sierra and I

The Angel is one of our favorite easy snowclimbs/glissades, so when Allison suggested the trip and the weather forecast looked to be perfect for Sunday, I was eager to go. We camped in a nice meadow just beyond the Blank Gulch TH and enjoyed a quiet night.

We arose a bit past 5, but were slow to get going, which did not happen until 6:22am. We made good time up the trail, passing several other groups of 1’s and 2’s. The trail was free of snow all the way to the point at which we began the bushwhack toward the base of the Angel. In the woods, there was a short stretch where there were sporadic patches of snow (no snowshoes necessary), but they could easily be avoided or crossed without any difficulty. At the base of the Angel, we took about 30+ minute break to gear up/fuel up before engaging the snow.

Conditions were soft, as it was 8:30am before we started climbing the snow, but very easy as the angle of the slope is pretty laid back. We decided on the right arm, hoping for a more direct line toward the summit, but the snow was discontinuous and we eventually removed the crampons/axe and made the final grind toward the summit which always looks much closer than it is. Having climbed each arm and the head in the past, I have determined that it does not matter which way you pick, it is all about the same.

I topped out at 9:55 and Allison was 7 minutes behind. She was very happy with that since it was earlier than she topped out last time, we started 22 minutes later AND she passed and put time on all the guys we passed.

Once on the summit of Shavano though, she was reminded how far it was over to Tabeguache and decided to turn me loose and have at it while she and Sierra took a break. Not wanting to keep her waiting long, I boogied over there at a quick pace on the mostly dry ridgeline down to the saddle, avoided most of the snow on the ascent of Tabeguache, then retraced my steps back to Shavano. For some reason I thought it was 15 minutes each way, but it ended up taking me 25 over and 21 back going pretty hard. Oops.

Back on Shavano, I finally relaxed a bit, taking a long break and soaking in the scenery. It was so calm, warm and sunny, it felt as though summer had truly arrived. On the way out, we tagged Espirit Point for kicks, before the much anticipated glissade down the Angel. Lots of whoops and hollers as we sped down, Sierra sprinting and pouncing along side.

It was such a nice day, we took our sweet time walking out, finishing the day at 2:40pm and reluctantly drove home, wishing we could do it all over again.

1 comment:

  1. Sweet that you are getting many peaks in Jeff. You are a man with your priorities straight!


text:
Deconstructing Gender bias in the Pre-Service Teacher Diversity Education Course
Dr. Gheorghita M. Faitar

Nowadays, teacher training institutions feel compelled to introduce new strategies and practicum requirements for addressing the needs of teaching a student population coming from various economic, social, ethnical, religious, linguistic, gender orientations. The new requirements for graduating such institutions combine highly rigorous theoretical preparation schedules with a demanding practicum session. The new assessments’ requirements of the pre-service teachers and the importance of addressing student needs strongly correlates with multiple instructional factors in a classroom such as: female and male student instruction, implications of the course taking patterns for boys and girls in middle- and highschool years for students, and culminating with the importance of guided teaching and learning for most students. The paper reports results of an exploratory study examining factors that might be associated with achievement in school for both female and male students based on the training the pre-service teachers receive in the teacher-training institutions in the US. First-semester pre-service teachers at the conclusion of their course in multiculturalism and diversity are assessed on their knowledge of gender equity in education.

Full Text: PDF