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The corona of light is wrapped in cellophane. Initially hard to touch, it relents then, crumbly and dissolving like great sex – orgasmic like the tremble of white snow. My wind pipe that is coated with craving, fibres of yearning like hairs of anemones in water, waving and alert to touch, goes breathless with pinches of snuff. Obsessively I rub the sin of sensation on my palms and pass my tongue over the grains, they grate at my throat like cluster of consonants, choke and give me a high at the same time: sins always do it and so does lust. I do not have to pick every sound that floats in the air, tune every vibration to music, and frame in my vision a lamp waiting to be lit.

Day 11 – NaPoWriMo
Write a poem of five senses: “Pick an experience that is very sensory, and of which you have a strong sense memory — like hearing a train whistle, jumping into a rain puddle, catching that first whiff of lilac on a spring day, eating ice cream at the beach. One of those might work for you, or you might have one from your own past (eating jelly sandwiches in the woods springs to my particular mind). Then try to bring all five senses into it. What do you see, smell, feel, taste, and hear?”

A crystal of camphor can be a dynamite of sensory experience!

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I Want To Date A Hipster Boy

I want to date a hipster boy
Who takes me to underground cafes
Educates me on music I’ve never heard of
Who plays at least three instruments
One of them made out of repurposed oak
I want to share kale salads and art cinema
With a guy
Who whispers secrets through his kisses
Measures love in instagrams
Takes me sailing past the mainstream
A sweater collared shirt combo
Who likes his glasses and polaroids in thick frame
I’m looking for someone who listens to the same spoken word as me
Who can write ballads on his harmonica
And love me
Because it will never be cool
I want to date leftover scruff
And irony under eyelids
The only thing skinnier than his lattes are his jeans
You see I’m trying to typecast my lovelife
Make a role for someone to fill
When really I’m just trying to replace you
Stuff the void with a similar vibe
But the truth is you weren’t really a hipster
You were not an archetype
A cliche or fantasy
You were a person
My person
But ever since we connected every call I’ve received sounds foggy
The words slurred
As if every conversation is a drunken mistake
I wonder if you are searching for me
Trying to find a poet girl
Who wears flowers in her hair
And her heart on her sleeve?
Does she sell her life story
trade her flesh for lines?
Maybe you’re looking for someone different
Prescribing yourself a new chaos
Because you’d rather drink wine than arsenic
I know that I shouldn’t be chasing your eyes on different faces
But you are the blueprint for my love, my dear
The only foundation I have to construct a relationship
So I’m going to keep using it
Even though it only let ours fall down.

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I have three favorite days of the year: Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, and the first Thursday of March Madness. I love college basketball because I love the style of the game, the amazing fan bases, and the rich program histories. However, I recognize there is a major problem with college basketball and college sports in general: when I buy a jersey with an athlete’s name on it, he (or she) gets none of the profits. When I attend a game at Michigan Stadium or Breslin Arena, the athlete gets none of the profits. What is great about college sports is that these athletes are amateurs. They aren’t narcissistic prima donnas in the way that their professional counterparts sometimescome across. But there is a huge difference between maintaining a culture of amateurs and exploiting “student” athletes.

This week’s long-form segment on This Week Tonight with John Oliver examines the problematic nature of Division I college athletics. Under the guise of maintaining a meaningless title of “student athlete,” major college athletic programs make billions of dollars without paying the athletes a single dime. You might say “Hey! They get a free education! That is paying them something.” This, however, is ridiculous. Yes, they get a free education as long as they don’t get hurt and have time to study. If an athlete falls behind in a class because they have a full load in the middle of a basketball season and they can’t balance both, they get suspended. If an athlete gets hurt resulting in their inability to play, they get their scholarship taken away. Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, crafted the term “student athlete” with a legal eye. When Kent Waldrep, a running back for Texas Christian University, was paralyzed during a game against University of Alabama in 1974, an attempt to receive worker’s compensation for his injuries was rejected by an Appeals court. The court ruled that “he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football.”

Last year, following the NCAA Basketball Tournament Championship, Shabazz Napier of University of Connecticut told the press,

“Sometimes there are hungry nights when I am not able to eat, but I still have to play up to my capabilities. There are hungry nights when I go to bed starving.”

That is despicable. According to the NCAA rules and regulations, a player can get suspended or even have his scholarship revoked for accepting anything, even if it is a free meal from his coach. The NCAA has since softened a bit on food regulations, but this rule affected athletes for decades. Napier played his four years, won two national championships, and now plays for the Miami Heat where he does get paid for an activity to which he devotes all of his time; less than 2% of student athletes will see that light at the end of the tunnel.

So when you are sitting down to watch March Madness this weekend, keep in mind that the tournament makes over a billion dollars in ad revenue. When you see branding for every aspect of the games, remember the superior athletes you are watching get none of it. I will keeping watching and fill out my bracket as I do every year, but I hate  knowing that I am taking part in the exploitation of these athletes. As Oliver says,

“No one is saying they need to be paid millions. Or Hundreds of thousands. Or the same amount. Or every school needs to pay every athlete. But to pay everyone zero when the kid selling their jersey at the campus bookstore gets $10 an hour seems a little bit strange.”


text:
Sarah S.

Tour Guide at University of New Haven

Hometown: River Vale, NJ

Major: Criminal Justice - Forensic Psychology

Secondary Major: General Psychology

What is your favorite class at UNH?

My favorite class would have to be my Theories of Personality class. We spent the entire semester learning about the different personality disorders and for our final project, we had to write an essay applying these theories to people in our everyday lives. It was crazy to see how easy it was to apply things I learned in class to a real life situation.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I am in the process of applying for jobs in the mental health and law enforcement fields. I plan on taking this next year to save up money and gain experience before going back to graduate school. I hope to study Forensic Mental Health Counseling.

What is your favorite place on campus?

My favorite place on campus is the residential quad. When it's really nice out, everyone hangs out there. There's always music playing, people playing yard games, and it's just a great way to take a mental break from the chaos of class and extracurricular activities.

I chose UNH because...

The second I stepped on campus, I knew it was my home away from home. I came for a Criminal Justice Enhanced visit where I met with faculty, students, and Henry Lee. I was already interested in the school for the well-known criminal justice program, but getting a feel for the campus and seeing what it had to offer sealed the deal for me.

I'm involved with...

American Criminal Justice Association Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society Phi Sigma Sigma
View all team members for University of New Haven


text:
Introducing Allé Boutique By Alysa Baker

Introducing Allé Boutique By Alysa Baker

Allé Boutique is a new online boutique where women can purchase the hottest accessories. There are a variety of earrings, bracelets, rings, and necklace to choose from which we here at PMA have below.

Alysa Baker, Owner of Allé Boutique, says: “I have always wanted my own business and wanted to work for myself. I love fashion and the mix of the two gives you Allé Boutique.” It was her unwavering dreams that led to the launch of this boutique. How many of you have a dream, but are afraid to go for it? Alysa was not afraid. She launched her boutique and we are loving the individual pieces. We have here some of our personal favorites.

Double Trouble Triangle Necklace for $25.00
Long double triangle pendant goes a long way with a cute long sleeve shirt, jeans, and boots.

Multiple Mesh Chain Set for $16.50
Comes in three different colors; gold,rhodium, or mesh black. It’s a cute pairing for a day at work–black slacks, cute blouse, and black pumps.

“I want my business that has a purpose. I want to help young ladies understand that they can follow their dreams and to have confidence and love themselves at all times. Today, female are too busy trying to be somebody else and not respecting themselves. That’s how I came up with the slogan: “Own Your Pretty. Own Your Style. Be you.””

Metal Bar Drop Earrings for $7.00
These are perfect for a pencil skirt, boots, blouse, and long sweater.

Feather and Leaf Midi Ring Set for $12.00
Hello, who doesn’t love midi rings? This goes with any style. Accessorizing is the best to express how you feel with your choices pieces.

 Ladies, here you go, a place to accessorize from home or the privacy of your work desk with reasonable prices. We are urging you all to visit the site and make sure you choose wisely plus Christmas is coming up and we are loving the presentation.

 It’s no thing when it comes to bringing you some artistic, creative, and incredible scoops because   Pardon My Audacity always brings the dopest news to you!Like what you read here: Subscribe to the blog! Follow us on Twitter: @PardnMyAudacity. Like our Facebook page. Follow us on IG: @PardonMyAudacity.

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b1674b0c-dd21-4312-85cd-3639b0d16a3eNAZARÉ, Portugal (Tuesday, December 20, 2016) – Jamie Mitchell (AUS) has claimed the World Surf League (WSL) Big Wave Tour (BWT) Nazaré Challenge today in historic fashion with the iconic Portuguese underwater canyon delivering massive 35-foot-plus waves for the world’s best big wave surfers.

“I have never made a final before today so to win is unreal, I knew I was close to doing well in a whole event,” Mitchell stated. “To put together a whole contest from start to finish is actually more exciting than just the win today. I felt comfortable out there, my board felt amazing and that gave me a bunch of confidence.”

A capacity crowd of big-wave enthusiasts gathered by the landmark lighthouse on the point looking down at the biggest waves ever paddled in Portugal.

The 2016-2017 Big Wave season continues to deliver exciting action for the third event in Nazaré following the Puerto Escondido Challenge (won by Grant Baker) and the Pe’ahi Challenge (won by Billy Kemper) earlier this year. Big Wave Tour commissioner Peter Mel, alongside the judging panel, allocated today’s conditions a “Silver Rating” with wave faces in the 35-to-45-foot category.

Jamie Mitchell (AUS°.BWT Nazare Challenge.

Jamie Mitchell (AUS°.BWT Nazare Challenge.

Today’s Final opened with an exciting first exchange between tour veteran Carlos Burle (BRA) and newcomer Pedro Calado (BRA), Burle taking the nod and an early lead with a clean lefthander on his backhand and a 6.50.

Nic Lamb (USA) followed in dramatic fashion with two of the most horrific wipeouts seen all all season. Local wildcard Joao De Macedo (PRT) struggled as well, air-dropping unsuccessfully into a monstrous set wave.

Halfway through the Final, Jamie Mitchell (AUS) committed to an incredibly late drop on a lefthander, grabbing the rail of his board to engage into a bottom turn before being eaten by the mountain of white water behind him. Mitchell later surfaced with his equipment and was rewarded an excellent 8.67 for his effort, stealing the lead from Burle. The Australian quickly put a second score on the board to cement his lead and hold throughout the remainder of the Final.

The Australian walked away with his maiden Big Wave Tour victory at the Nazaré Challenge, a result earning 12,500 ranking points and rocketing him from 13th to 5th on the tour rankings.

“I got into a good rhythm at other events but lost it at some point, but this one I managed to keep it and it feels amazing,” he continued. “I’m going to be here until Friday and it looks like there will be more giant waves coming, so I might just take a day to recover from today and try my luck again out there.”

Long-time competitor and 2009 Big Wave Tour Champion Carlos Burle (BRA) placed Runner-Up in this inaugural Nazare Challenge, courtesy of his early efforts in the final this afternoon. Burle managed to fence off numerous assaults from the new guard on his way to the final and will flew the Brazilian flag high in Portugal.

“I’m super proud of my body, it was a tough event all-around in this cold weather, dropping huge waves and getting pounded all-day long,” an emotional Burle said. “I made the final and came close to winning, against the best guys in the world. This is my last season as a competitor but I will keep this great memory and hopefully leave a legacy for the next generation, and I hope they will do their best like I did every day of my life. Nazare is an amazing wave and it was just a matter of time before people recognized that. I’m super happy to have been part of this event as I feel there will be much more to come.”

Making waves among the big wave community were local wildcards today, with Portugal’s Joao De Macedo and Antonio Silva reaching the final in Nazare. De Macedo was the giant killer of this event, eliminating reigning Big Wave Tour Champion Greg Long (USA) in the first round, as well as current BWT leader Grant Baker (ZAF) and Aaron Gold (HAW) in the semis. De Macedo’s amazing run culminated with a third place in the final.

“It feels amazing, just the camaraderie in the water and the way all of us were really pushing our limits today,” De Macedo explained. “The amount of preparation that goes into paddling and surfing this size out there is huge, I’ve been training for months and it feels great. I hope everyone’s really stoked about this event and that we keep coming back, the performance levels were really inspiring. Those were some of the biggest waves that have been paddled into here I think, and to do a contest in those conditions is great. The water patrol guys are so great, they make us feel so confident and allow us push ourselves further.”

Recent winner of the Pe’ahi Challenge, Billy Kemper (HAW) suffered a shock elimination in the opening round of competition, narrowly defeated by local wildcard Silva in a tight battle for third place alongside Kai Lenny (HAW).

Highlights available at WorldSurfLeague.com and on the WSL app.

Nazaré Challenge Final Results:
1- Jamie Mitchell (AUS) 23.94
2- Carlos Burle (BRA) 13.00
3- Joao De Macedo (PRT) 10.84
4- Pedro Calado (BRA) 9.34
5- Nic Lamb (USA) 3.00
6- Antonio Silva (PRT) 0.20

Nazaré Challenge Semifinal Results:
SF 1: Pedro Calado (BRA) 21.27, Nic Lamb (USA) 17.34, Joao De Macedo (PRT) 14.83, Grant Baker (ZAF) 10.30, Aaron Gold (HAW) 9.67, Damien Hobgood (USA) 0.20
SF 2: Jamie Mitchell (AUS) 22.16, Carlos Burle (BRA) 15.33, Antonio Silva (PRT) 10.44, Trevor Carlson (HAW) 6.20, Christian Merello (CHL) 0.20, Hugo Vau (PRT) 0.20

Nazaré Challenge Round 1 Results:
Heat 1: Joao De Macedo (PRT) 22.13, Damien Hobgood (USA) 19.00, Aaron Gold (HAW) 11.66, Greg Long (USA) 11.29, Kealii Mamala (HAW) 11.26, Gabriel Villaran (PER) 10.67
Heat 2: Nic Lamb (USA) 14.27, Grant Baker (ZAF) 13.67, Pedro Calado (BRA) 10.49, Alex Botelho (PRT) 9.00, Andrew Cotton (GBR) 6.40, Koa Rothman (HAW) 0.00
Heat 3: Cristian Merello (CHL) 20.83, Trevor Carlson (HAW) 14.36, Antonio Silva (PRT) 12.14, Kai Lenny (HAW) 11.67, Billy Kemper (HAW) 11.39, Nic Von Rupp (PRT) 8.37
Heat 4: Jamie Mitchell (AUS) 25.24, Hugo Vau (PRT) 24.93, Carlos Burle (BRA) 19.81, Will Skudin (USA) 11.73, Ramon Navarro (CHL), 11.66, Tom Butler (GBR) 3.54

WSL BWT Rankings Top Five (following Nazare Challenge):
1 – Grant Baker (ZAF) – 25,018 points
2 – Pedro Calado (BRA) – 21,943 points
3 – Greg Long (USA) – 21,921 points
4 – Carlos Burle (BRA) – 18,175 points
5 – Jamie Mitchell (AUS) – 15,690 points

One event in the Northern hemisphere remains scheduled for the season, the Todos Santos Challenge in Mexico, and could potentially run before the season ends on February 28, 2017.

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Friday, September 28, 2007

No second helpings in Second Life

I tried out Second Life for the first time recently. Couldn't get the hang of it. I got bored in the tutorial island and set off to explore the real world before I really understood the commands. I went to a Reggae club, and stood around awkwardly until somebody nearby finally explained how to make my avatar dance. It wasn't as fun as it would have been if I could have figured out how to turn on the audio.

Then, because I had heard that Second Life had become an interesting forum for building political communities, I searched for some political sites. I started with the Hillary Clinton campaign island (no endorsement or non-endorsement implied). Unfortunately, my avatar was still dancing like a fool to an inaudible Reggae beat. I logged out. For all I know, my automaton is still there at the Clinton headquarters silently dancing.

Meanwhile, the adrants blog has faint praise for Second Life in its review of this anti-obesity ad. I'm not holding my breath that this campaign will cure our nation's eating problems.

The Dust Bowl

My colleague Willie Lockeretz is in his final pre-retirement year as a much loved and admired professor in the program on Agriculture, Food, and the Environment at the Friedman School at Tufts. This week, following an annual tradition, he presented his eloquent multimedia yet PowerPoint-free presentation about American agriculture and rural life in the 1930s. Willie uses the songs of Woody Guthrie and other country musicians, and the priceless yet copyright free images of the Farm Security Administration, to bring to life the dreadful and inspiring story of America's passage through the Great Depression.

In the dark lecture hall, I see Willie's slide of Walker Evans' famous photograph of the graveyard near the steel mills in Bethlehem, PA, and remember my final high school years spent there in the midst of the city's economic depression of the 1980s as the last factories were closing. I see the slide of a hobo and remember my great uncle's story, told to me from his hospital bed near the end of his life, about riding the freight trains for free to get home to the Midwest from college in the 1930s. I see a slide from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and remember my hot sweaty summer as a 14-year-old working on my grandparents' farm there, before the farm was sold and they passed on. I think of my other grandfather, who escaped from Russia to the prairies of Canada in the late 1920s, just in time to live through the Depression here in the Americas. Where will we be if, in our privileged lives so far removed from the soil, we forget these things in years to come?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Food Karma Alert

A blog from the only Ph.D. food chemist turned Jivamukti yogi who ever wrote out of the blue to the U.S. Food Policy email address. I wrote back to encourage him to post the tell-all story of his experiences in the food industry.

Consuming more and more green

The enviroblog linked to this YouTube ad.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The Salted Cod

I enjoyed this New England food blog, after following a link to it from a comment at U.S. Food Policy. It resonated with what my family has been exploring in the very same fields, forests, and farms.

Breastfeeding promotion and formula marketing

Formula companies sometimes attempt to use the past tense to describe their heavy-handed marketing campaigns at the expense of breastfeeding. "Sure, we used to do wrong," they might say, "but now we promote breastfeeding."

A breastfeeding advocacy website has an interesting series of reports about industry-sponsored websites that promote formula under the guise of simply offering motherly advice. I read at PR Watch, for example, that Mothering Magazine reports that the Moms Feeding Freedom blog is linked to the International Formula Council. The advocacy website reports that the Moms Feeding Freedom blog has started deleting comments critical of formula industry marketing. Fortunately, archived copies of the original comments are available here.

The site reminds me to link to the Washington Post's excellent coverage last month of a formula industry coup, convincing a federal breastfeeding promotion campaign to tone down its most potent print ads.

The original proposed ad graphically emphasized the association between formula feeding and risk of respiratory disease (click for larger image).

The final ad offered a pointlessly bland graphic, and required close reading to understand the same message.

I imagine some readers may find the original proposed ad too blunt. Addressing that question puts me in a bind as a writer. I can write truthfully: "Some women cannot breastfeed, for medical or employment reasons. Formula is a satisfactory replacement, at least in the United States." But my fingers cringe hovering over my keyboard, because those same true sentences are also industry talking points that are used to exaggerate the hardships of breastfeeding and the quality of formula. You have to read those sentences in the same context with this one: "Almost all women can breastfeed, and breastfeeding is best."

Regardless of which ad you prefer, at least two things are clear as day: the formula industry should not have been given the opportunity to sway the choice of ad, and hospitals should stop routinely giving out bags of formula to new mothers.

Monday, September 17, 2007

A handful of links

"Food for Thought," an interdisciplinary program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, dedicated to "food information, food consumerism, nutrition, and health."

McMichael, Powles, and colleagues in the Lancet this week: "To prevent increased greenhouse-gas emissions from this production sector, both the average worldwide consumption level of animal products and the intensity of emissions from livestock production must be reduced."

U.S. News and World Report last month covered the painfully difficult policy dilemmas at stake in recommendations about folate fortification. Folate, of course, is protective against birth defects and it may also be protective against the formation of some types of cancer. At the same time, Joel Mason at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts has been exploring whether folate may promote the growth of cancerous cells in the colon after they have begun to reproduce improperly. From the newsmagazine: "What we've discovered," says Joel Mason, a Tufts University gastroenterologist, "is that folate seems to have a paradoxical effect."

A discussion on NPR about a proposed restriction on fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles.

A new website on ending childhood hunger around the world, with plenty of video content.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Federal government's pork board developed McDonald's McRib Sandwich?

The most surprising thing about the McDonald's McRib boneless pork sandwich is not its McFrankensteinian ingredient list.
McRib Patty: Boneless pork (Pork, water, salt, dextrose, citric acid, BHA, TBHQ).

McRib Bun: Flour (wheat flour bleached and enriched with thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, iron, folic acid, malted barley flour), water, high fructose corn syrup, yeast, vegetable oil (partially hydrogenated soybean oil, cottonseed oil). Contains 2 percent or less of dextrose, fumaric acid, calcium sulphate, salt, acetic acid, soy flour, monocalcium phosphate, ammonium sulphate, cornstarch, fungal protease, natural culture, ammonium chloride, ascorbic acid, azodicarbomide, mono- and diglycerides, propionic acid, phosphoric acid, corn flour, calcium peroxide, calcium propionate, dicetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides.

McRib Sauce: Water, high fructose corn syrup, tomato paste, distilled vinegar, molasses, natural smoke flavor, modified food starch, salt, sugar, soybean oil, spices, onion*, mustard flour, garlic *, xanthan gum, caramel color, sodium benzoate (preservative), natural flavor (vegetable source), corn oil. *Dehydrated Pickle Slices, Cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, calcium chloride, alum, natural flavorings (vegetable source), polysorbate 80, turmeric (color).
The most surprising thing about the McRib is not its manipulative on-line marketing to youth.

The most surprising thing about the McRib is not even its outrageous satire site featuring the "Boneless Pig Farmers Association of America" and their teary-eyed petition to save their farming way of life (though I was a little surprised that the first featured video's veiled borderline racist insinuation about city living and rap music was approved by McDonald's).

No. The most surprising thing about the McRib is that the federal government's National Pork Board, whose every marketing message must be approved by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, proudly claims to be its creator. See the first page of the Pork Board's most recent annual report for 2006.

What a pinnacle of hypocrisy for USDA to support this marketing at the same time that other federal government agencies struggle to address the obesity epidemic in the United States, including particularly wrestling with issues such as online food marketing to children and youth and the rise of high-fat fast food meals at the expense of home cooking.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Ah, this is the life

Item 1 in today's local food blogging is our summer meal a couple weeks ago, with striped bass caught by a family friend off Cape Cod, breaded and fried by my wife, tomatoes from a gardener in the neighborhood, New England wine, and home-made bread I made with a bread machine (hey, we're making little steps here).

Item 2 is a quick report from the bicycle tour my family of four took for Labor Day weekend. My kids, aged five (on a trail-a-bike) and seven (on his own bike) pedaled the 11-mile length of the Minuteman rail-to-trail, and enjoyed a visit to their grandparents in the suburbs. My wife and I also biked over to visit the weekend and evening garden business of Jennifer Hashley, whose day job is directing the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts.

At their home just west of Boston, Jennifer and her fiance Pete, who were featured in a great article in the Boston Globe this summer, raise chicken for eggs and meat and are starting up some hogs. Ever since reading about Polyface Farm in Omnivore's Dilemma, I had wanted to see in person these mobile chicken coops that are moved each day to deposit fertilizer in a new part of the pasture. The pigs' joyful meal of tomatoes, similarly, highlights the synergies from traditional diversified farms that get lost in monoculture. My wife and I left with our bicycle pannier full of wonderful produce and eggs and our heads spinning with ideas we look forward to trying.

What we wanted to do with the Farm Bill... 17 years ago

In July 1990, I was starting my first job out of college as associate editor and writer for the advocacy newsletter Nutrition Week, published by the Community Nutrition Institute (CNI). I recently reacquired my long-lost file of issues from that period. The front page gives me deja vu.
House and Senate Defeat Challenges to Committee Proposals for '90 Farm Bill

Both houses of Congress this week defeated major ammendments [sic, how embarrassing] to the 1990 Farm Bill. Family farm advocates failed to win higher commodity price supports, and farm program detractors lost some important bids to reduce supports and restrict farm subsidies.

"It's totally agribusiness as usual," summarized Brian Ahlberg of the National Family Farm Coalition.

This week's political struggles were mostly victories for the recommendations from the two agricultural committees, under E. "Kika" de la Garza (D-TX) in the House of Representatives and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) in the Senate....

A side box on the front page quoted from a recent article in Rolling Stone by ex-liberal humorist P.J. O'Rourke.

If it were up to him, how would O'Rourke deal with the 1990 Farm Bill? "Drag the thing behind the barn and kill it with an ax."

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Hentges leaves USDA for ILSI's North American branch

Nutrition Today (no free link) this month reports that Eric Hentges, formerly head of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the federal government center that oversees the Dietary Guidelines, has a new executive position with the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), an important scientific institute for the field of nutrition.
Eric Hentges, PhD, is the new executive director of the North American branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (North America). In this capacity, Dr Hentges will work closely with International Life Sciences Institute North America members, trustees, science advisors, and staff to enhance the organization programs and the impact of its scientific output. He brings over 25 years of experience in nutrition education, research, planning, and administration to the job. Since 2003, he has been the executive director of the US Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, which is well known for its Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Food Guidance System. Dr Hentges holds degrees from Iowa State University, Auburn University, and Oklahoma University. He and Susan Borra, vice president of the International Food Information Council Foundation and a past president of the American Dietetic Association, were married in early July. Congratulations, Eric! And best wishes to the Nutrition Couple of the Year!
In addition to the experience mentioned in Nutrition Today's news brief, Hentges was previously a vice president of the National Pork Board, the semi-governmental USDA-sponsored board that funds advertising with the slogan "Pork. The Other White Meat" (see previous posts, and this one about the Other White Meat campaign).

Petition to USDA to end the government's fad diet advertising for pork

The explicit fad diet weight-loss advertising has been removed from the federal government's fluid milk and dairy checkoff program websites, following a successful citizen petition from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. However, fad diet weight-loss promotions based on low carb claims are still found on the web pages of the federal government's National Pork Board.

The semi-governmental checkoff programs are established by Congress and administered by boards that are appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture from names nominated by the respective industries. All advertising and other messages must be approved as "government speech" by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service. The money for their mandatory campaigns come from a tax on producers and importers, and collection of the tax is enforced by the Department of Justice.

Because high-calcium and low carb fad weight loss diets are contrary to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are supposed to be the federal government's authoritative statement for nutrition communication, I recently wrote USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service to petition for the end of low carb marketing through all the federal government's checkoff programs, including the pork program.

Low carb marketing is past its prime in any case, so my best guess is they will comply with the petition and say they were planning to end that campaign anyway. I'll let you know how it goes.

[See next post for a related story].

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Foodways photographs in France

Tufts student Karina Picache's photographs from the neighborhood of the university's European Center in Talloires, France, include several fine images of food markets and restaurants. Sigh.


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Posts Tagged ‘children’

I would like to claim that I run my household with an iron fist and I keep my son in line. I would be lying if I did though and laugh at such a statement. The reason is that my son is so completely in charge. He determines most of our day. Don’t get me wrong, he takes naps and eats at designated times and usually complies without much complaint. However, he calls the shots in most other areas. A perfect example would be today. I was changing his diaper but he wanted nothing to do with laying down. My solution was to change his diaper with him standing up. I figure he needs a diaper change and it gets done without tears. I would love to hear your stories about your child(ren) showing you who is boss.

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Britax Boulevard Lauren Convertible SeatIs it me or shouldn’t car seats be placed behind the passenger’s seat in the car?  All traffic laws in the US require us to pull to the right when stopping unless on a one-way street.  And that would mean that the sidewalk would be on the right side of the car therefore the safe side to open to car door.  I have noticed a number of parents who have put their child’s car seat behind them in their car.  I have a few questions about this – 1) How do you see your child while you are driving?  2) How stupid is it to open a car door into traffic and take your child out and risk harm to him/her and yourself?  and 3) Do you all originally come from the UK?  I am not a parent yet but I can see that it is stupid as I have witnessed these car doors opening without any regard to oncoming traffic and have seen children nearly being missed by cars driving by.

I would be interested to hear people’s takes on this subject.  It is common sense to me that you would put your child in a place where you can see him/her.  It is also makes sense to me to put your child in a situation that would allow safe discharge to a sidewalk.

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Posts Tagged ‘sleep’

I am not one to really like getting “advice” from other parents so I am not going to give any advice in this post.  However, I will provide some insight from my personal experience so far.  I was savoring the newborn time in which Hunter would be awake for 6 hours straight and when I was getting like 3-4 hours sleep a day.  I felt like I was a hero for being so selfless.  I was living in the moment and not thinking that this was not going to last forever.  Now that we are at 7 weeks, I am now realizing that this moment and experience will change tomorrow or even later today.  Hunter is now sleeping for long(er) hours and eating much more at each sitting.  He is cooing and “talking”.  He tries to laugh and is much more active with this arms and legs.  It feels like just yesterday he was only smiling or “talking” when I coaxed him rather than him doing it on his own.  Just when I get used to one thing, Hunter has moved on to doing something new.  I have learned to savor every moment and cherish the time I have now with Hunter as an infant as it is fleeting.

Motherhood is the best job I have ever had and some days I feel like nothing else exists aside from Hunter and myself.

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Tom with positive testMy husband, Tom, is gathering as much information as he can from new fathers.  We had brunch with one of those newer fathers on Saturday and Tom was given a ton of information.  Thank you to our friends from NJ for their great advice.  One of Tom’s biggest concerns is the lack of sleep that all parents will suffer.  I told him that eventually the baby’s cries will become distinguishable and we will know whether s/he needs to be changed, fed or if s/he is just fussy.  Tom has come up with an idea of doing shifts.  I will do a 4 hour shift then he will stay up for the next 4 hours.  We have yet to really explore how this would or could work but it is something new that not one new parent has suggested to us.

A few things that have been suggested are:  Miracle Blanket, Sleep Sheep, mirrors to entertain Baby J, speak to Baby J in full sentences, not baby talk and these are just a few.  I think that Tom is getting more excited and less freaked out about pending fatherhood.  I hope that this continues.  What was the best advice you received?

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A Christmas Message From TACP

Holiday-GreetingsOn this blessed day off from work, dear friends, let us remember that first Christmas, so very long ago, when the Pilgrims and the Indians dressed in scary costumes and gathered together to witness the birth of our savior, Baby Allah, whilst eating turkey and stuffing under the shining metal Festivus pole at Macy’s Department Store in New York. Let us remember, too, how they hated, yet loved each other; how they kissed and bit each other, and how they all got naked in the end and fucked like rabbits on steroids until the cock crowed three times in the East and their mothers called them home to scold them for behaving like immoral heathens so near the crib of the anointed one, Baby Allah. Let us remember them, my friends and let us have a great day today, because tomorrow, when we wake up, the fucking Republicans will STILL be in complete control of the U.S. Government. Have a great and Merry Christmas everyone. And remember, don’t tell the authorities if Christian infant is on your holiday menu tonight. Eating infants is, unfortunately, still illegal in most, if not all, countries of the world. $Amen$

11 thoughts on “A Christmas Message From TACP

  1. Pingback: 20150413-Tweets – The Daily Pause

  2. Cheers,

  3. Had the misfortune to tune in to Fox News yesterday (why I don’t know). This is much better. Trust you had a good Christmas – maybe still are your side of said pond.

  4. Have a great one!

Comments are closed.


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A bit of streamlining?

Topics: Idea Requests
Aug 15, 2008 at 2:09 PM
Okay, maybe I'm missing something, but is there any way to change the Z-position of the mini toolbar? I Don't like using the "icon per desktop" option since it winds up adding so many tray icons, so I prefer to use the mini toolbar. However I can't stand that it seems permanently set to "always on top" with no way of changing it. No matter where I place it on the screen it always seems to be in the way of something. If it's not already there is there any chance you could add an "always on bottom" option for the mini toolbar?

Also is it possible to tweak the way hotkey switching works a bit. I'd like to see it work like alt-tab does: where you hold the alt key and each time you hit tab it selects another app, and when you release the alt key it automatically selects the one highlighted. I'd like to be able to use alt-space to bring up the switcher, then each time I tap space it highlights the next desktop, and when I release space have it select and jump to the highlighted desktop automoatically. It would be a lot more intuitive this way since it mimics an already exisiting and familiar Windows feature, and would also be a lot less cumbersome allowing for easier one handed switching as opposed to the current set-up where you have to hit enter every time you switch(I don't like using the arrow key switching since it requires removing one hand from the mouse, I'd like to be able to use only my left hand for better efficiency).

Aside from these gripes that I'd like to see fixed, I love the program, I've only been using it a couple days and it's fast becoming my favorite desktop manager that I've tried. Just a bit of interface streamlining and it'll be pretty much perfect for all intents and purposes.


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Veer Right Weblog

A Conservative View on Politics and the World

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  • The Freedom Our Forefathers fought for must be protected.

    "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - Ronald Reagan

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Senator Obama’s Lack of integrity

Posted by rightwinger on October 24, 2008

This is an awesome article and well researched article by baseball crank.

From Baseball crank:

POLITICS: The Integrity Gap, Part II of III: Sen. Barack Obama

In Part I of this series on the “Integrity Gap” between the two national tickets, I looked at Governor Sarah Palin’s record of integrity in public office – her battles against corruption and wasteful spending, even by the powers controlling her own party in her home state of Alaska – even when she was putting her career at risk. As I explained, integrity is not just about honesty – it’s also about one of the crucial presidential character traits, toughness. Palin has proven that she doesn’t back down no matter who she has to take on.

In Part II, I will look at Senator Barack Obama, who is easily contrasted to Palin because they have careers of similar length in both local and statewide office, in states controlled largely by their own party. I have previously explained here why Obama lacks every kind of experience that we usually rely upon to test the character of potential presidents and teach them the lessons they will need to govern, and I’ve explained here why the flurry of flip-flops at the outset of his general election campaign raises questions specifically about his toughness, his principles and his convictions. During the recent financial crisis we got a taste of Obama’s leadership style in crisis: do nothing and hope he can shift the blame to somebody else.

Nearly all of Obama’s appeal requires his supporters to take on faith that he will do things he has never done. But on the question of whether Obama will ever take a meaningful stand against corruption or waste in his own party or stand up to vested interests and ideological extremists on his own side, we have a certain answer: he has bypassed too many opportunities to do so already. To the contrary, Obama is so thoroughly marinated in extremism and corruption that it would be nearly impossibe to extricate himself and still have a meaningful identity left.

Given the length of this post – at over 21,000 words, it runs more than twice the length of Part I and 33% longer than my entire five-part series on Mitt Romney from the primaries – it was necessary to break the body of the post into six separate volumes that follow this introduction:

Obama’s Rootless Ambition looks at the influences that shaped Obama before he ran for office.

Obama and the Extremists looks at his relationships with left-wing radicals and how they were an integral part of his rise in politics.

Obama and ACORN looks at his intimate relationship with a network of community organizers with a pervasive record of voter fraud and deep involvement in the subprime housing crisis.

Obama and the Machine looks at Obama’s long, deep and multifacted partnership with machine politicians in Chicago and Springfield.

Obama and the Favor Factory looks at Obama’s routine practice of trading favors with his political benefactors.

Obama, “New Politics” and Principles looks at the illusory nature of Obama’s “new politics,” his absence of a record of fighting tough battles on principle, and wraps up and concludes the series.

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: Rootless Ambition

Chapter two of seven.

II. Barack Obama: The Greasy Pole

Note on sources: You can follow the links here, as I’ve linked to sources for nearly all the factual assertions, and mark additional sources with an asterisk *. Where appropriate I’ve indicated sources whose credibility I was uncertain of, but have generally tried to avoid citing much in the way of rumor. Fairly late in the game in assembling this post, I picked up David Freddoso’s book The Case Against Barack Obama, which examines a lot of these same issues in more depth and with copious footnotes. I’m indebted to Freddoso’s book for pointing me to additional sources in a handful of places, and for stories I’d missed like the Stroger saga, although in most cases I’ve cited additional web-based sources besides the book. I’d recommend the book and I refer the reader where possible to stories Freddoso has written up at more length.

Barack Obama talks a good game about being a reformer, a good government, “new politics” guy. But somehow his priorities never extended to actually doing anything that would rock the boat in Chicago politics or get in the way of his climb up the greasy pole of the Chicago machine. Instead, his rise has depended on the exchange of favors with crooked patrons and extremist friends and on the forebearance of the machine.

You will often hear Obama’s defenders argue that his ties to this or that extremist or corrupt figure is an isolated aberration, an example of “guilt by association”; that the various favors he dispensed with public money and private charitable foundation funds are nothing unusual in politics. But when you look at Obama’s record and biography taken together, what you see is that the favors, the extremists and the machine ties are all inextricably intertwined, and that far from being isolated incidents, Obama’s modus operandi of mutual back-scratching with radicals and crooks extends to nearly every aspect of his life and career – his family, his faith, his home, his jobs and education, his significant election victories and legislative “accomplishments,” his closest advisors and most important mentors, the money and organization that made up his campaigns.

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: The Extremists

Chapter three of seven.

B. The Extremists

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our setereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce [a former girlfriend] or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, describing his choice of friends as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, which he attended for two years. He also wrote about “socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union” after transferring to Columbia, and “went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Black Power fame, speak at Columbia.” Carmichael, of course, was a famous Sixties radical, a subject that apparently interested Obama as early as his college years.

If Obama was going to pursue his dreams of political activism, he wasn’t going to follow the route of Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in relying on his roots to his home town, nor did he have John McCain’s advantage of a famous war record. He was going to need a political base that would accept an outsider, and needed to bring something to the table. And this is how he built one. The groundwork for Obama’s entree into Chicago politics was laid through networking in the very same radical chic circles he described in the passage above. There’s not adequate space here to revisit in full the left-wing radicalism of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, the New Party, Alice Palmer, Rashid Khalidi, Khalid al-Mansour, and others in Obama’s circle, but the thumbnail sketches and links below should clue you in to the common theme – Obama carefully cultivated an image as a friend of Sixties radicals, race-baiters, Marxists and worse. Maybe this was due to the same romantic impulse of his college years and maybe it was craven political opportunism, but the record shows how firmly he ingratiated himself with these people, with the result that he gets endorsements to this day from avowed Communists. * Even as a presidential candidate, Obama is willing to lend his appearance and good name to the operations of wholly disreputable far-left figures like Al Sharpton. *

Yet while Obama was adept at showing one face to the hard left, he and the organizations he worked with were also acutely aware of the need to present a more respectable face to the broader community, as the Woods Fund noted in a report on its grant to ACORN (more on which below):

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “nonideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: ACORN

Chapter four of seven.

Obama & ACORN

The left-wing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national umbrella group of, well, community organizers, sits at the intersection of Obama’s ties to extremists and his ties to machine politics. ACORN is indisputably Sixties-style “New Left” in its orientation, pursuing what Sol Stern describes as an agenda of “undisguised authoritarian socialism.” The group has both money and foot soldiers, as it “uses banking regulations to pressure financial institutions into massive ‘donations’ that it uses to finance supposedly non-partisan voter turn-out drives.” See here for a more thorough description of the mischief ACORN plays in forcing banks to make subprime loans. And:

In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group… as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists…the only truly radical community organization.”

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: The Machine

Chapter five of seven.

D. The Machine

Chicago politics, of course, have been famously corrupt and totally dominated by the Democratic machine since beyond living memory. (In Illinois at the state level, corruption is endemic and bipartisan: “four of the last nine governors have been indicted on charges of corruption, and three were convicted”). This is the city where top aides to Mayor Daley were convicted in May 2006 of federal felonies for rigging hiring in city jobs. It’s a city where an alderman who pleaded guilty in August to a “general practice” of shaking down real estate developers was caught on tape saying “Most aldermen, most politicians are hos.”. (A Rezko-linked alderman, in fact, who is the daughter of a Rezko-linked housing developer once represented by Obama’s law firm * * – small world, indeed). It’s not an uncommon sentiment (several aldermen found it necessary to hold a press conference stating that they were not, in fact, hos).

The Chicago machine is nothing if not an equal opportunity honeypot; machine corruption and its close cousin, racial/ethnic politics, has endured over decades as different ethnic and racial groups have taken their turns running the city, all the while doling out favors within their wards. The current machine is topped by Mayor Daley, two decades in office and the son of the city’s most notorious mayor; at the state level, it envelops Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich.

To all appearances, Barack Obama’s home neighborhood of Hyde Park – affluent, academic, ethnically diverse – should be a natural base for that rare breed in Chicago, the real reformer, with the independence to not only stand aloof from the politics of the greased palm and the dead voter, but actually make that politics more difficult:

The neighborhood invariably elects a goo-goo alderman who pulls killjoy stunts like, you know, asking to see what’s in the mayor’s budget before voting on it. The most famous, Leon Despres, who just turned 100, once spent five days at Trotsky’s place in Mexico City.

Of course, as noted above, Obama’s original district also extended to what Salon calls “the weary black neighborhoods to the west, with threadbare street corners that might hold a liquor store, or a chicken shack. (It did not include Trinity United.).” (Todd Spivak, who covered Obama in 2000, says Obama’s district “spanned a large swath of the city’s poor, black, crime-ridden South Side”)

Certainly Obama frequently postured as a political reformer in Illinois (“My reputation in Springfield was as an independent”), as well as in the U.S. Senate. Was that posture any more, or any less, genuine than his posture as a friend of left-wing radicals? I don’t know the answer to that either; I only know that Obama, with his sights set beyond Hyde Park, made sure never to get in the machine’s way. “Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, notes that, while Mr. Obama supported ethics reforms as a state senator, he has “‘been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state, including at this point, mostly Democratic.'” The Chicago Sun-Times isn’t fooled either:

Obama friend Tony Rezko was convicted of corrupting state government, but Obama was never implicated and has returned contributions Rezko made to his Senate campaign. Obama did run as an independent Democrat but worked closely with state Senate President Emil Jones, an old-school organization Democrat. Obama runs for president with the full blessing of Mayor Daley.

As we shall see, this is not the half of it.

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: The Favor Factory

Chapter six of seven.

E. The Favor Factory

With the expansion of federal intervention in the economy that will inevitably follow the current financial crisis – ranging from the $700 billion financial industry bailout to the $25 billion auto industry bailout to the federal government investing billions directly in major banks – there will be even more opportunities than usual for the next Administration to use federal dollars to reward friends and cronies instead of serving the taxpayers. Indeed, House Democrats tried in the bailout package to earmark proceeds to go to Obama’s old friends at ACORN, and succeeded in subsidizing ACORN in the housing bill that passed in July. It’s important that the next White House be resistant to opening the favor factory for business.

Senator Obama now claims that he will be a good steward of federal taxpayer money – such a good steward, in fact, that he’ll be able to cut spending enough to offset every dollar of his many hundreds of billions of dollars of planned new spending programs. But his record throughout his career shows him to be a man who has always been quite liberal in every sense of the word in using public money and private charitable money to reward his friends, and who is wholly disinclined to saying “no.” Obama knows how the favor factory works, and he isn’t shy about using it.

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: “New Politics,” Principled Positions, and Conclusion

Chapter seven of seven.

F. “New Politics” In Old Wineskin

Obama’s supporters like to shift the conversation away from his record at all costs and focus on his campaign. One of the principal themes of that campaign has been his commitment to “a ‘new politics for a new time’ shorn of partisanship and division,” exemplified by a higher standard of integrity in campaigning, what John Dickerson of Slate called “a national seminar for 16 months on changing politics and shedding the old insider way of doing things.” Frankly, I pity anyone who was ever foolish enough to believe in that, but at any rate, even if you leave aside the traditional “who lied more and said meaner things about who,” you can see that Obama’s campaign has repeatedly broken the very promises that underpinned the “new politics” theme:

October 12, 2008
POLITICS: Beldar on the Branchflower Report

I’ll have more detail on this later in the week after I’ve finished with the big Obama post. In the meantime, here’s Beldar, who has actually followed this story from the outset and has read the whole thing.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 10:09 AM | Politics 2008 | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

<!– –>

POLITICS: Obama Rumor Mill

If you go out on the web you will find with Barack Obama, as with any national political figure, a broad spectrum of charges ranging from the indisputably true to the undeniably crackpot, and plenty in between. Here’s two of the hot recent ones that fall in the gray area, as well as one example of how the mainstream media can follow up on stuff like this.

This essay by Jack Cashill argues somewhat convincingly that Dreams of My Father had the assistance of a ghostwriter, and more speculatively that the ghostwriter was Bill Ayers. I don’t know a lot about Cashill but the essay is basically in the category of “plausible but unproven speculation.” On the upside, Cashill doesn’t make any really uncheckable assertions of fact other than his linguistic analyses (which could presumably be rechecked by MSM sources), so you can apply your own judgment.

Then we have this report sourced out of the Daily Mail in London suggesting an extramarital affair by Obama. (H/T Ace, who applies the Andrew Sullivan standard). Aside from Clinton and Gary Hart, we’ve had rumors of this kind in the past with Kerry, McCain (aside from the known affairs on his first wife, that is), George H.W. Bush, Palin and John Edwards, and only the Edwards one panned out. I don’t put much stock in this or think the media should report it without investigating and getting the facts right. But I would hope they do seriously investigate stuff like this even when it’s about Obama.

Then we have this September 29 report from Ken Timmerman of Newsmax about Obama’s lack of financial controls and resulting receipt of large numbers of shady and quite likely illegal campaign contributions, including from foreign sources. Newsmax is not the most credible of sources – I generally don’t cite their work unless it can be corroborated – but Timmerman, too, made clear what his sources were (FEC records) and you had to wonder why no major media outlets had tried the same thing. Shamed by Newsmax, which the IHT version of this credits, the New York Times ran basically the same investigation and seems to have come to basically the same conclusion, albeit without bringing themselves to address the more problematic foreign-donor angle. But it’s a key example of the major media lacking the initiative to do basic due diligence on Obama until a fringe-y right-wing source delivers them a completed story on a platter.

October 10, 2008

Obama & ACORNI’ll cover this in more detail in a few days in Part II of my series on the Integrity Gap between the two tickets, but as the evidence mounts* of the involvement of the left-wing community organizer group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in extensive voter fraud across multiple states, Barack Obama has tried to minimize his involvement with ACORN and the critical role it played in his rise in the world of the Chicago political machine.

Obama’s “Fight the Smears” campaign website denies any ties to ACORN other than his representation of the group in a 1995 lawsuit:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

As the Cleveland Leader points out, this is flatly contradicted by an article written by ACORN head Toni Foulkes, which was conveniently removed from the internet (a common practice in the drive to scrub all evidence of Obama’s career prior to 2004) after it was quoted by Stanley Kurtz of the National Review and other sources, while the rest of the articles on the same site remain up:

Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”

This stuff has been out there in plain sight, yet still Obama denies it:

As recently as March 2008, the Los Angeles Times also made reference to Barack Obama’s involvement with ACORN:

“At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff.” (LA Times, March 2, 2008)

It was also reported contemporaneously by the left-wing Chicago press:

A 1995 Chicago Reader article on Obama stated “Obama continues his work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons.”

During the 2008 Democrat primary, the Obama campaign paid Citizen Services Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, more than $800,000, a payment that Obama’s campaign somehow managed to misreport to the FEC

As of yet, we can only speculate about why Obama is lying about his involvement with ACORN, what other aspects of that relationship he has failed to disclose, and what other things have been conveniently “disappeared” from his Chicago past.

2 Responses to “Senator Obama’s Lack of integrity”

  1. SRM said

    Go to

    and write to the Gov of MO and thank him, see if he knows others who will follow suit…

  2. It’s hard to find well-informed people in this particular subject, but
    you seem like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks

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text:
Teaching and Learning in a Net-Centric World

Slides for Change Mooc – May 2012

In these slides I go over two ideas- one old and still growing – one new (for me) and evolving. The first part previews my ‘Interaction Equivalency Theorem” and the second talk about Unbundling the services of traditional university Education in order to decrease cost and increase access.

Unbundling Universities

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1 Comment

  1. Michael Hotrum Michael Hotrum
    May 16, 2012

    The same argument can be made re training department in a business – there has always been a continuous devaluation of the services that the training department offers – and with the opportunity afforded by informal, social learning there is considerable attention paid to redefine and reorganize the traditional “university” style training department – again the argument ensues – is SS and SC most important (or let’s rephrase as worker in place of student) – is WW and WC most important; but in training’ case the W can also be an Expert, coach or mentor or a person most sought after for answers – a “redefintion” of formal trainer/professor – and I would also suggest that the design of the learning environment becomes more important as the trainer/professor loses prominence – how to build and maintain and drive an informal, social learning space. So does that mean we now have student to environment or wiorker to environment? Or worker to learning design – Certainly in training the learning space and the designed affordance for learning within it is important.

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text:
Horizon View & vGPU – Part 1 – Intro

Well some time has certainly passed since writing about vSGA & vDGA! I think everyone knew that the technology would finally come where we could dynamically allocate graphics hardware to our virtual machines, beyond direct mapping. VMware and NVIDIA announced vGPU several months ago, to be honest Citrix has had this technology for a few years (thanks exclusivity contracts), and it has been making some major waves in the AEC and OGE industries. Since my day job focuses mostly on VMware and their product offering, I felt it was appropriate to write a few articles about vGPU and how it is configured with VDI.

vSGA and vDGA

Let’s run through a quick overview on Shared Graphics and Direct Graphics allocation, as it will help to understand how vGPU is so groundbreaking of a graphics technology for virtualization.

horizon view vsga

vSGA gives you the ability to provision multiple VM’s (Linked-Clones or Full VM’s) to single or multiple GPU’s. Graphics cards are presented to the VM as a software video driver and the graphics processes are handled by an ESXi driver (VIB). Graphics resources are reserved on a first come first serve basis so sizing and capacity is important to consider.

horizon view vdga

vDGA differs from vSGA in that the Physical GPU is assigned to the VM using DirectPath I/O so the full GPU is assigned to a specific machine. vSGA allows multiple VM’s to provision resources from the GPU, with vDGA you install the full NVIDIA GPU Driver Package to the VM and the Graphics Card shows up as hardware in Device Manager. In Horizon View 5.3.X and 6.X it is now out of Technical Preview and fully supported. vDGA has increased its support for Graphics Boards including the GRID K1, K2 & newly announced GRID 2.0 graphics boards.

What is vGPU?

With vSGA we had shared allocation from a single/multiple graphics board for multiple virtual machines and vDGA was direct mapping of a physical graphics board, now let’s talk about vGPU. vGPU is a technology that has multiple layers, a ESXi VIB Driver that acts a GPU Manager for ESXi, Certified NVIDIA vGPU Profiles for virtual machines, and NVIDIA GRID Software Driver packages for the Windows Operating System inside the virtual machine. Each layer serves a specific function that will create a valid and certified driver experience for several Windows applications like AutoCAD, Revit, SolidWorks, and other 3D rendering applications. So let’s dive into the technology that gives us the rich experience for VDI.

As opposed to direct allocation in vDGA, vGPU allows each desktop to be assigned a specific amount of Graphics RAM based on a certified vGPU profile, those profiles can be of various sizes based on common use cases. The benefit of this profile based graphics allocation is that there is no translation of graphics like in vSGA, the GPU are sent directly to the graphics board using the NVIDIA vGPU manager inside the hypervisor. It is similar to the technology that is used with physical network adapters, but obviously carving up graphics RAM is different than carving up IP traffic. The amount of RAM ranges from 512MB – 4GB depending on the graphics board(s) installed in your servers. I have listed the profiles for GRID 1.0 below, I will talk about GRID 2.0 profiles later on (yup it is different).

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 10.37.20 PM

As you can see there is a ton of potential profiles that you can assign to users, you need to take careful consideration into these profiles as the max number of users per board will add up. I have worked with several customers establishing baselines from existing physical workstations to determine the proper vGPU profile to use.

NVIDIA announced at VMworld 2015 the release of their new line of GRID graphics boards (PCIe and MXM) called…..you guessed it GRID 2.0. With GRID 1.0 we had 2 board options K1 & K2 for PCIe but GRID 2.0 has 2 graphics board, the Tesla M60 for PCIe lanes and Tesla M6 for MXM blade servers (vendor specific). The Tesla M60 on paper compares more to the K2 card with the density of the K1. The new Tesla M60 has the ability to server up to 32 vGPU users on a single card but there is a catch to all that awesomeness…..licensing.

Wait what? NVIDIA is in the licensing business, unfortunately yes they are. The old GRID 1.0 model of choosing the various vGPU profiles depending on the card you have purchased is long gone. With GRID 2.0 you license based on the use case that you want to deliver. I have a picture of the 3 use case options with the associated vGPU profiles they offer below.

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 11.07.12 PM

So let’s talk about licensing now, NVIDIA will allocate certain vGPU profiles based on licensing one of three NVIDIA GRID experiences: Virtual PC, Virtual Workstation and Virtual Workstation Extended. Each experience can be licensed with a specific number of  users connected to various profiles at that level. With GRID 1.0 you had three aspects to implementing vGPU: the NVIDIA VIB driver, assign a vGPU Profile to a virtual machine, and installing the NVIDIA vGPU OS Driver package. Now with GRID 2.0 there are two more items to that list, the Licensing Manager and GPU Mode Change Utility. The licensing manager can be installed using Windows or Linux instance, this is where you will apply your purchased license file from NVIDIA’s choice of distributors. The GPU Mode Change Utility is used to change the mode of the Tesla M60/M6 from compute mode to graphics mode as the boards ship with graphics mode being restricted, this will allow you to provision vGPU profiles to virtual machines. Keep in mind that licensing the Linux OS is only available on the two higher experiences. I will go through setting up GRID 2.0 profiles in Part 3 of this vGPU blog series as there are some tweaks that have to happen to activate the licensing to get a vGPU profile.

Next up is Part 2 of the vGPU Series – GRID Installation & Configuration.

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text:
Entergy wants to take $1.2 million from trust fund for property taxes

VERNON – Entergy plans to dip into the Vermont Yankee decommissioning trust fund to pay a $1.2 million property tax bill, exacerbating tensions with Vermont officials who strongly oppose the withdrawal of funds.

Entergy declared this week that it intends to use $6.6 million from the fund for expenses at the shuttered nuclear plant, including emergency planning, insurance and property taxes. The disclosure was made in compliance with a new federal mandate to provide more detail in its trust fund withdrawal notices.

Entergy Vermont Yankee spokesman Martin Cohn said $1.2 million of that total will be used for tax payments, and he noted that the company is not required to disclose a specific figure.

“We’re committed to transparency,” Cohn said.

State officials may try to challenge the pending withdrawal. On Wednesday, Vermont Public Service Department Commissioner Chris Recchia said officials are “evaluating our options.”

Chris Recchia
Department of Public Service Commissioner Chris Recchia. File Photo by John Herrick/VTDigger
“We do not believe taxes are an appropriate withdrawal from the decommissioning trust fund,” Recchia said.

Vermont Yankee ceased producing power at the end of 2014 and is entering a period of extended dormancy called SAFSTOR. The $1.2 billion decommissioning process will take decades and completion depends in part on how quickly money accumulates in the Vernon plant’s decommissioning trust fund.

Entergy’s planned uses for the trust fund have been a source of an ongoing dispute with state officials. In the most high-profile example, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the fund’s use for management of spent nuclear fuel, but Vermont officials have challenged that decision in federal appeals court.

Entergy also sought elimination of its obligation to provide 30-day advance notices to the NRC before taking money from the trust fund. A regulatory battle with the state ensued, and Entergy eventually withdrew the request and agreed to continue providing the notifications.

One outcome of that proceeding, though, was a requirement that Entergy must be more specific when the company has plans to spend trust-fund money on certain items. That’s the reason for this line in Entergy’s latest 30-day notice, dated Oct. 27: “The disbursement request includes, among other things, expected site-specific decommissioning costs related to emergency-planning contractor costs, insurance and property taxes.”

Standard decommissioning expenses account for the bulk of the $6.6 million request, Cohn said. He added that emergency planning and insurance, taken together, make up less than $100,000 of the company’s planned fund expenditures for October. “I can’t tell you how much for each one, because that is proprietary information to our vendors,” Cohn said.

The bulk of Entergy’s withdrawals from the trust fund, roughly $5.3 million goes toward Vermont Yankee salaries for regular plant staff and security. As the plant no longer makes money by selling power, the trust fund covers those bills, Cohn said.

Also, the fund has covered some ongoing site work — getting the plant and grounds ready for SAFSTOR.

All told, from February to now, Entergy has issued notifications for a maximum of $76 million in withdrawals from the trust fund.

The big news is the planned $1.2 million tax payment. And it is news on two fronts.

First, there’s the fact that, according to Cohn, the tax payment includes money for the state’s education fund. The state just recently began billing Entergy for property taxes because the company had been paying an electric-generating tax before the plant’s shutdown in December.

Cohn was careful to say that Entergy’s decision to begin paying state property tax does not mean company administrators agree that such a tax is proper.

“We’re still exploring our legal options,” Cohn said. “But even when you’re exploring your legal options, the bill is due.”

Second, there’s the ongoing argument over whether any tax payments are a proper use of the Vermont Yankee trust fund. On that topic, Cohn maintains that Entergy is “compliant with NRC regulations.”

“There’s nothing new here. We’ve (previously) accounted for all these expenses,” Cohn said. “It was in our (Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report), and it was in our cost estimates.”

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan could not say whether the agency would object to any of Entergy’s proposed expenditures. Entergy cannot withdraw money from the trust fund if the NRC files “prior written notice of objection” to that withdrawal.

“The NRC staff’s reviews are ongoing with respect to Entergy’s use of money from Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning trust fund,” Sheehan said. “The NRC staff is also continuing to review the Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report (PSDAR) and the site-specific decommissioning cost estimate for the plant. We anticipate that the latter review will be concluded by the end of the year.”

But there’s no question about the state’s stance on Entergy’s trust-fund proposals. Recchia said the fund should pay only for decommissioning activities related to radiological contamination at Vermont Yankee.

“Taxes, emergency planning – these are things that were the result of an operating plant,” Recchia said. “It is not related to the decommissioning process.”

Recchia said the state could challenge Entergy’s new trust-fund notice by objecting to the NRC. He also said state officials could contact the fund’s trustee, Mellon Bank, or pursue a court appeal.

It’s not clear which path, if any, Vermont officials will follow.

“We’ll have to look at the categories of withdrawal and decide how to deal with them,” Recchia said.

He also reiterated his concern that the NRC is not giving fair consideration to state and local concerns when deciding on decommissioning matters – including the trust fund.

“They’re not protecting Vermonters’ interests the way they should be,” Recchia said.

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  • John Brabant

    There won’t be a dime left in the fund when it comes time to “decommission” the plant some 60 years from now. And no one hear today will be around to account for their part in this debacle. If this is how the plants across the country will be handled when their time comes, the planet and humankind is in great peril. The State needs to immediately file for emergency injunctive relief.

  • Rosemary Kean

    Entergy clearly thinks it doesn’t matter what the government says, they’ll do as they please with tax payers money. CEO Martin Cohn suggests tax payers should feel grateful that he is being “transparent”. As long as he’s polite, he thinks it’s fine to use Vermonters’ money to pay Entergy’s taxes. Will Vermont officials step up and represent tax payers? Stay tuned.

    • Jim Christiansen

      Entergy clearly thinks it doesn’t matter what the VERMONT government says, … and it doesn’t have to.

      No matter how much you wish it, the nuclear regulatory process is solely the purview of the Federal Government, not the State of Vermont.

      No matter how much you wish it, any/all expenses related to the cost of doing business at the shuttered VT Yankee plant will be taken out of the decommissioning fund as part of the ongoing decommissioning process. Paying taxes is part of the process and the Federal Government will allow this expense.

      • Ernie Hotchkiss

        So following that rhetoric, I guess the case could then be made that Entergy should pay it’s executives large bonuses, and take it out of the decommissioning fund too; you know, as just another “cost of doing business”.


text:
A Closeted Goth Girl Trying to Make it in the Professional World

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Valentine's Day Date Look *GAG*

So yeah, I guess it's Valentine's Day. I can never decide what to post so I am using Valentine's Day as and excuse to post a look I would wear to go out to a fancy restaurant. I usually tone my makeup down for this sort of occasion somewhat such that I do not get kicked out of said restaurant. One of my favourite lipsticks to wear with this sort of makeup is MAC New York Apple. It is a really pretty, frosty red that isn't IN YOUR FACE SEXY BOLD RED but rather a kind of a more toned-down classy red, in my opinion. If you're going to get all sappy and sh*t for Valentine's Day, I would recommend cracking out this shade if you have it!

FACE: MAC Prep and Prime, MAC Studio Fix Fluid Foundation in NC15, MAC Select Sheer Pressed Powder in NC15.

BROWS: MAC Eyebrow Pencil in Stud.

CHEEKS: A Hot Mess Cosmetics blush in Last Day on Earth.

LIPS: MAC New York Apple.

EYES: Base: UDPP and MAC Paint Pot in Soft Ochre.
Eyeshadows: From UD Naked2: YDK, Suspect, Snakebite, and Busted.
Eyeliner: Mabyelline Black Liquid Eyeliner, Signature Series Truth or Dare Duo Eye Pencil.
Mascara: Lise Watier 24 Hours Glam.

Dress: Le Chateau
Cuff: Le Chateau
Purse: Gift from husband
Shoes: Spring

NOTE: I am wearing open-toed shoes with no toenail polish for some reason. My mother would kill me!!! (I didn't even bother to paint the three that are showing because I'm a busy girl on the go! A big thanks to Cassykins for bringing Willam's Beatdown to my attention!)

Alright, that's enough of the "proper" looks around here for awhile. For some reason, the whole V-Day type of thing makes me think of lace and stockings and corsets and the like........all those sorts of things that are involved in burlesque/cabaret goth style. Stay tuned for some burlesque/cabaret goth looks!

  1. Haha, Willam would not be proud. But you still look hot so it can slide. Happy Heartentines to you and your husband :)

  2. Gorg, I love the simple eye look...your outfit is just slamming...I love that dress, so sexy and classic!

  3. Hot mama! That lipstick is gorgeous on you, and I always love seeing what other bloggers do with the Naked palette; it's so versatile! I didn't do anything special with my makeup for Valentine's Day... I just had work and then (drumroll please) got dinner with a friend while my boyfriend went to bed early. SO ROMANTIC.

  4. You always crack me up. That dress is killer, and I love MAC NY Apple on you. I keep thinking of that shade every time I think of getting something new, but man, I do not need more reds.

    And omg, I would love to see some cabaret/burlesque things. We saw a Nutcracker burlesque during the holidays and it was amazing.

  5. You look awesome in that dress. And NY Apple is lovely, I keep meaning to pick it up but never get round to it.


text:
5 things i’ve learned since coming here

1. AC is for airconditioning and PI is for the Philippine Islands (We tried to teach my brother-in-law to say 'Pinas' instead but he couldn't say the word without sounding like a dirty lecher).
2. If the bus is late, 90% of the time you can blame it on a cyclist or the handicapped. No one cares if you miss your train by 30 seconds and have to wait an hour for the next one to come along.
3. Squirrels, in real-life, do not look like the ones we see in cartoons. They're skinnier, scrawnier and, well, just not as pretty.
4. If you don't have a car in the States, don't expect to go anywhere. Not to the ATM machine. Not to the grocery store. And definitely not to the theater. Which is why we can pretty much blame global warming on the Americans.
5. Spanish mass takes about 90 minutes to 2 hours. So if you're going to the 11:00 mass, eat before going.

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2 thoughts on “5 things i’ve learned since coming here

  1. Sadly Ging, no…it means I really have to commute 6 hours a day, Monday to Friday. Why? Well, there's a long explanation but I guess it'd be safe to say I'm not getting a car. At least not anytime soon. My sister, the eternal optimist, does want me to get my driver's license though (apparently, the longer you've had your license, the less insurance you have to pay once you have a car) so I promised her I'd study for the written driver's test (which you need to get a student permit) this December.

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text:
merch_am_hanes: Megalithical structure in Poulnabrone (pic#299240)
merch_am_hanes ([personal profile] merch_am_hanes) wrote in [community profile] walking_the_wall2011-02-24 11:26 am

our first attempts

On Sunday 9 January 2011 we made our first attempt at training for Walking the Wall. It was a beautiful day with plenty of sunshine and a balmy 3 degrees Celsius, so a short walk of 10 kilometers was presented to us. 10 km seemed like an insurmountable distance so we took our precautions and packed lunch and left at 11 am so as to make sure we would be home before dark (around 5 pm). We took a route that was in our friends neighbourhood so that we would be close to home if something was to go wrong. And ooh how it went wrong :). About 1 km into the walk we got ourselves lost and started taking short-cuts back to the main road only to be faced with one final obstacle: a creek :s. So jump it we did :). Somehow we managed to not break our necks and finally after an hour and a half of walking we arrived at the beautiful little commune of Gestel (about 1 km from where we started). So we decided that the little bench in front of the historical church would be ideal for our lunch. We sat down, called home to check in and asked if they would bring us some pastries and low and behold about 10 minutes later we were enjoying a gourmet lunch :) brought by our friends mother :). As soon as lunch was eaten we decided to bravely move on and hopefully we wouldn't get lost anymore (all we had to do was follow some arrows, how hard could that be right :)). 2 hours later we arrived back home, in wonderment that walking 10 kilometers only took us 2 hours and a half. We had survived our first attempt, but a few hours later we were all in misery as our muscles decided to be heard. They sure as hell didn't like this abuse yet!


text:
Trapped On My Tricycle!

When I was a four year old boy and still riding a tricycle, I found myself in a predicament one day. After riding my trike down a neighbor’s rather steeply sloped driveway (or so it seemed back then) I then began pedaling back up the driveway, to get back to the sidewalk that led to our house.

But halfway up the incline of the driveway, my little legs didn’t have the strength to pedal my trike any further up the slope, so I stopped with my legs and feet holding the pedals in place and not moving. But now my little four year old mind was afraid that I had a problem… I couldn’t push the pedals to move any higher up the driveway, and without any brakes, if I took my feet off the pedals, I was afraid that I would roll backwards down the driveway before I could stop by putting my feet down on the pavement. I was just a little kid, and I was afraid that my legs were too short for my feet to be able get down on the pavement in time, and stop me before it was too late!

Not really me, but close enough…

My imagination fearfully pictured me on my trike as it rolled backwards really fast down the driveway and out of control, then falling over at the bottom, and banging my head hard on the pavement, giving me a really big ouchie that would hurt real bad! So I was afraid to take my feet off the pedals and I was convinced that I was stuck there where I was halfway up the driveway, and I couldn’t move!

“HELP! HELP!! HELP!!!” my little boy voice yelled, hoping that a grownup would see me and come to my rescue. If someone had seen me, I would have seemed like a peculiar sight, stopped there on my tricycle on the driveway, and yelling for help! If someone had seen me, they probably would have wondered why I needed any help, when I was just sitting there stopped on my tricycle, and to their eyes, in no real distress or danger. (which may have been true)

This may be why no one came to help me for what seemed like forever! So my little legs continued to use all my little boy strength to keep those pedals stopped in place, so I wouldn’t race backwards down that hill, fall off my trike and fall on my head, and get that big ouchie, which would hurt a real lot and make me cry, and make me cry for my “Mommy!!!”.

“HELP! HELP!! HELP!!!” my little voice yelled again. And again… and again… and then again some more. But nobody came to save me.

Until finally someone did, a lady who asked me “What’s wrong, child?” My fearful and distressed little voice told her “I can’t go up this hill anymore and I don’t wanna go back down the wrong way real fast and fall off and bump my head! It’s gonna hurt and I’ll cry and I don’t want to!”

“But can’t you just put your feet down on the driveway and then get off your tricycle?” the lady asked me. “Noooo!!!” I wailed back at her! “I can’t do it! I can’t stop and I’ll go back down real fast and bang my head and I don’t wanna!!!”

The lady shook her head, but then she was nice to me, and she picked me up off my tricycle, put me back down and stood me up on my feet, and I was saved! I was so happy that I hugged her! She stayed with me while I pushed my trike up the driveway, and then she walked me home while I pedaled on the sidewalk. She rang our doorbell and gave me back to my Mom, then she and my Mom were talking, and also laughing too. I didn’t care, cause I was OK now – I didn’t bang my head real hard and get a big ouchie, and start crying cause it hurt real bad!

One week later, my Dad got me a brand new two wheeled bike with a coaster brake that I could use to stop by pushing the pedals backward. Dad also put a set of training wheels on the back of my bike, so I wouldn’t fall over, and it would be a while longer before I fell off my bike, when it was time for those training wheels to come off.

But best of all, never again did I ever get stuck halfway up a hill and unable to move, because I was afraid to take my feet off the pedals! :-) It wouldn’t be until around ten years later that I would start to move on to much worse and far more dangerous situations, that I eagerly looked for, and willingly got myself involved in. But those are stories for another time, and I’ve got more of them than you could ever imagine.

About Chris Sheridan

I’m a 56 year old guy who is young (and immature) at heart, and I love humor and laughter. Married for 22 years, but still enjoy all the glories of womanhood everywhere, even while dedicated to one woman only - and I hope my wife never finds out about her!
This entry was posted in Humor, Personal and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Trapped On My Tricycle!

  1. benzeknees says:

    Hi Chris, your link didn’t work so I couldn’t comment on your post today. It just kept telling it was not found any way I tried to get to it. Just thought you might want to know. Lynda

    • Thanks for the heads up Lynda. I put the Trike post back up last night. I read your own childhood bicycle post which I enjoyed, I just haven’t had time to get over and comment yet, but I will before today is over.

  2. Sana Bulgin says:

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