text:
Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Sick day Musing

I'm sick. I've caught a bug of some sort, so I'm home with my computer, dog, cat, and my thoughts. (I could be sick from the wifi in my house, the electric lines leading to my house, the cell phones, the microwave, the nuclear power plant about four miles away, the toxic chocolate smell that I breathe when walking Bernie, or I could just have that bug that's been going around the office.)

Anyway, I recently was reading the latest "Skeptical Inquirer." In the latest issue there is a retort to Stanton Friedman's (the pro UFOlogist) response to an article published earlier this year in the magazine regarding Unidentified Flying Objects. It reminded me of the first, and currently the only time I decided to do some modest investigation of one of the mysteries of our day.

The year is 1990. Iraq had just invaded Kuwait, and I was a freshman at a well regarded small liberal arts college in the Northeast. The school looked the part down to the tree lined pathways and earnest smiling or hungover middle class youth. It was probably the best place for a geek like me to attend college, and it cost my parents a pretty penny to send me there. So, I did what any red blooded American male would do at this stage in his life at an expensive school, I decided to read everything I could on the UFO phenomenon, and come to some conclusions.

I blew through the six or seven books our library had on the topic. It is a liberal arts school, so what can you expect? I then went through the reference guide to periodicals, and delved into the microfilm readers and the bound book sets of magazines and periodicals in the library basement. (Yes, the days when the internet was usenet lists and before web browsers, its how we did it old school, when it was just school.) I remember reading about twenty to thirty articles. I also went to the local used book stores in the area (We had quite a few and I had a car. Yes, I lived like a rockstar.) and read about another five or six books. Some of the books and articles were recent late 80's, others were vintage early 50's. Some were clearly written by the mentally delusional, some were written from a Christian perspective, others tried to be even handed, but very few came down against the existence of ships from other worlds (or other dimensions.) I cannot say I did more than a respectable survey of all the material out there, but I believe I made a good effort.

At the end of my first year at college, I did not write a paper or give a lecture. I just reflected upon the topic. To be fair, at the start of the great UFO read of 1990-1, I was not a hardcore believer in UFOs. I really think I wanted them to be real, but I had my doubts. The conclusion I was forced to come to was that there was no good evidence for UFOs being anything other than misidentification of natural phenomenon or man made activity. I did not read a thing that made me think "ah-ha" there is the silver bullet to prove nothing extraordinary is or has occurred. You cannot prove the negative.

However, all the evidence for UFOs came down to pictures that were either fuzzy, clearly a hub cap tossed in the air, or a possible real saucer that in an article printed ten years later turned out to be a fake. There was no good or reliable physical evidence. Some of the best eye witness testimony either turned out to be so vague as to be anything, or very specific descriptions from some poor delusional person, or a person who turned out to have some secondary gain. I am not saying seeing a UFO makes someone delusional. However, when a person can look up at the sky at almost any random time and see spaceships, you have to wonder. This was the case in a few articles. Also, it struck me as fishy that the look of the ETs and their spacecraft never seemed to be consistent. There was lots of evidence, lots of noise, but none of it convincing unless you want it to be convincing. Almost all the clearly pro-UFO books had a prediction that within a few short years the aliens would make themselves known for all to see, but it never happened. I wanted to be convinced, but I what is available came up very short. It was time for summer break.

It was an educational experience, and I am glad I did it. For the record, I performed quite well my first two semesters of undergrad making the Dean's list both times. All that time I spent on this little effort did not cause me to drop out of school, and join the merchant marine. Parents money was well spent.

One more reflection before I take nap number three for the day. When I was growing in the 80's from mid-night to 1am on early Sunday morning the local christian channel aired "E.T. Monitor" with Robert D. Berry. When SNL was boring, you could always flip over to E.T. Monitor and be entertained until you drifted off to sleep. Here's a taste of my childhood.

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Sheryl Sandberg option B

Sheryl Sandberg by Matt Albiani

Words and Ideas

Sheryl Sandberg—Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy

In Conversation with Davis Guggenheim
Book Soup at the Skirball

Sunday, April 30, 5:30 p.m.

About the Program

Join Sheryl Sandberg, coauthor with Adam Grant, of Option B, in conversation with Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for “Superman”), as they talk about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are steps people can take to recover and even rebound. Option B combines Sandberg’s emotional insights and Grant’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity.

Sandberg will share what she and Grant learned together about helping others in crisis, developing compassion for ourselves, raising strong children, and creating resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to ordinary struggles, allowing us to build resilience for whatever lies ahead. They will discuss the capacity of the human spirit to persevere … and to rediscover joy.

About Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg is chief operating officer at Facebook and coauthor of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy with Wharton professor and best-selling author Adam Grant, which will be released April 24, 2017. She is also the international best-selling author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Prior to Facebook, she was vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She previously served as chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department and began her career as an economist with the World Bank. She received BA and MBA degrees from Harvard University. Sandberg serves on the boards of Facebook, The Walt Disney Company, Survey Monkey, ONE, and Women for Women International, and chairs the board of the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation.


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Marcus Wicker’s Maybe the Saddest Thing: Poetry reviewed.

Love Letters to Kenny G, Dave Chappelle, and RuPaul

Love Letters to Kenny G, Dave Chappelle, and RuPaul

Reading between the lines.
Jan. 4 2013 11:34 PM

Love Letters to Kenny G, Dave Chappelle, and RuPaul

Marcus Wicker’s poetry buzzes with the energy, and loneliness, of pop culture.

Maybe The Saddest Thing

Illustration By Nicole Georges

Because poetry’s medium is a single human voice, it’s an ideal vehicle for human mastery, a source of awe at the almost athletic ingenuity of saying something rhythmically and well. Or: Because poetry’s medium is a single human voice, it’s an ideal image of our human frailty—its serrated right margin pointing out that the page is still mostly blank, that a larger silence surrounds our speech. And: Sometimes a poet manages both, suggesting that even the most unmanageable truths are amenable to our activity, making even absence shapely, present, shareable, right.

Marcus Wicker’s debut collection, Maybe the Saddest Thing, falls into that final category. It's hip-deep in pop culture’s energy, but it’s also, and often at the same time, a reminder of the loneliness all our culture, pop and not, has in trust. You can hear that combination in the conclusion of his poem “Love Letter to RuPaul,” one of several love letters to pop icons, all of them emphasizing race and masculinity, most of them flat-out amazing. Here, Wicker is describing “one of my earliest memories,” a burger ad starring RuPaul. Notice how bare the last two incomplete sentences seem:

…that commercial
ravished me. How hard, to be sandwiched
between what and who you are, tickled
by every cruel wind, critic-voyeur
playing rough beneath your skirt. How
raw you must be. To sit before a camera,
legs uncrossed.

"Raw" is right. In both sound and sense, Wicker nails the terrible courage of standing out and dignifies it with an abrupt austerity.

That's not to say that Maybe the Saddest Thing is perfect. The book—which D.A. Powell chose for the National Poetry Series, an annual contest in which five prominent poets choose books for five presses—includes some poems that seem to exhibit too much faith that writing a poem is inherently worthwhile and others that too readily take up an opposite position: Interrupting himself with skepticism about what he’s up to, Wicker sets up an artistic cul-de-sac that’s frustratingly prevalent in contemporary verse.

But those are small sins, and common ones as well. It’s Maybe the Saddest Thing's strengths that are uncommon, and they define the majority of this book. Wicker captures pop culture’s abundance—in particular the hurry and wit of hip-hop and slam—without pop’s blind timeliness. He also fuses hip-hop’s restless dexterity, its as-if-improvised fusion of amazement and momentum and force, with an ability to reward the less purely propulsive experience of reading on the page.

That double value shows up in another of Wicker's love letters, this one to Dave Chappelle:

This isn't a poem
about some cowboy cracking up
over a blackface skit. How his cackle
sounded like a bigot's brain
lodged inside a beating heart, thinking
out loud.

You can hear the same rhythmic extravagance that shows up in some hip-hop, the eagerness to almost overwhelm an audience with ingenuity. Imagine drawing lines between all the words that seem to be echoing each other through, for instance, alliteration (cowboy, cracking, blackface, skit, cackle, like, thinking; blackface, bigot, brain, beating; etc.), and imagine trying to account for all the overlaps and variations in those. Listen to the places where the stressed syllables pile up, loosen, then pile up again. Notice the way he establishes a pattern of "a," followed by a descriptor beginning with b, and then a noun (and the way that "bigot's brain" throws in an extra b).

Listening to something this agile, you're meant to feel your mind racing to keep up. You're meant to marvel, humbled and amazed. And yet Wicker's own humility leaves plenty of room for intimacy and contemplation, too—including, in this poem, contemplation of the ways that black culture gets used in the larger, whiter world (a subject Wicker will later take up in regards to his own standing as a poet). And if the almost-too-much of the excerpt's rhythm foreshadows Chappelle's eventual breakdown, the poem's thinking also foregrounds a compassion that takes that person more seriously than the cultural chaos that overwhelms him.

Wicker's style and success serve as a reminder that we don't need to reject world and world's delights to think about both critically. Here, for example, is another ending, this one from “Everything I Know About Jazz I Learned from Kenny G.” The prose poem opens with Wicker’s father discovering his eighth-grade son listening to the poem’s titular lightweight, then dragging him downstairs to the father’s collection of real jazz. Wicker concludes the scene many hours later:

It sounds like a welted voice wincing at the basement’s night. A voice my father hears too.

He does not cave the basement door. He walks a dirge down those steps. Gently strokes my neck. Asks, Why are you crying, son? Dad, I ache. Because I’ve been down here forever.

Author Marcus Wicker
Author Marcus Wicker

Photo by Donald Adiska.

Clearly, Wicker’s putting on a show—“a welted voice wincing at the basement’s night” almost winks with pleasure, even as it describes a wounded state—but it’s a damned good show, and one that, in numerous poems, pushes us to stay aware of the ways our shows are manufactured and what they ask us to believe. Wicker does this without ever suggesting superiority to showmen, though. His writing is full of love for the songs and artists he invokes.

And that’s another thing that makes Maybe the Saddest Thing so worthwhile: In spite of its title, it seeks (and finds) real delight, giddy with the joy of making language mean and sing, sound and sense and allusion all but falling over each other as they run. Take "The Break Beat Break," which riffs on the joys of being deluded (and delighted) by music:

                        It happens on a deserted island

of a song, when a funky-ass fault line rips through
your bass-induced Buddhist empty state and you
start thinking, Damn. What breed of human am I?

What type of man walks around with rhythm rattling
the trunk of his dome?
 And wherever you are you run
to the closest piece of light-reflecting glass, say Oh,

that’s right, I do.

                        … think Yeah, that’s me.
My walk alone could make tight pants fit.

But delight, all by itself, rarely seems wide enough for the persistent emptiness of a page. Wicker writes poems whose timely pleasures keep verging on timeless sorrows, and where the social issues of our time persistently evoke enduring human need. In the process, he captures the odd ways that our larger-than-life moment lives inside our pending irrelevance—and the compassion such knowledge allows. "I'm wondering if a face on fire/ looks the same in any city. In any hue," he writes, watching the inferno after a meth lab explodes. And, earlier in that same poem,

                                                       A fist
of ash like nail polish scorched with salt blasts

me to my knees. Everything disintegrates
from this angle….

                               From this point of view
soot cloaks stars."

Maybe the Saddest Thing by Marcus Wicker. Harper Perennial.


text:
“Declaration to a Shade” by Brian Culhane.

“Declaration to a Shade”

“Declaration to a Shade”

A weekly poem, read by the author.
Sept. 18 2012 6:15 AM

“Declaration to a Shade”

Farm gate in winter.

Photograph by Kevin Eaves/iStockphoto.

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Brian Culhane read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

In 1397, Carlo Malatesta defeated Mantua and ordered the statue of Virgil destroyed; in 1936, Hitler ordered Mendelssohn’s statue in Leipzig destroyed.

What little I have to declare I do
Before the statue of Mendelssohn tipped over
Before the statue of Virgil also tipped over
For whatever reason proffered—racial laws,
The enmity of the victors for the losers, etc.—
What little baggage I have I now hand over
To the ministers in the Ministry
Gazing down on the snowy public square,
Its toppled statuary and bewildered pigeons.
Surely the weather is miserable, they say.
Still, kindergarteners lark about in parks
As hatless mothers chat in the market stalls,
As denounced painters composers poets
Dream of a sudden reprieve from on high.
Instead, always the walk to the guillotine:
They paint the sky with broken fingers,
Hymning sunlight to a pocketful of fleas.
What little I have to declare I do so,
What little knowledge of their sorrows
I have, what little of their trials I know:
Such I shall bear beyond these gates
To the hills, beyond any ring of fire,
Where the tomb of the unknowns is found
In the spoor of a fox, a huddle of brackish ferns,
The purgatorial plumage of ash-grey storks;
Where, according to local legend, the dead
Muster along a gritty ditch, still muttering
About the things that used to matter most—
And should one surface to take my arm,
I’ll step down and cross the marish waste
And turn toward the brittle winter wind
And stand listening to the rustle of oblivion,
Offering this least resplendent of tributes,
Breathing the musk of desecrated names.

For Slate's poetry submission guidelines, click here. Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.


text:
Training wheels don’t work: Balance bikes teach children how to ride.

Why Training Wheels Don’t Work

Why Training Wheels Don’t Work

Snapshots of life at home.
May 11 2012 12:33 PM

Down With Training Wheels

They train kids how not to ride a bike! Why balance bikes are better.

father teaching son how to ride a bicycle
For generations, training wheels have been the standard way of not teaching children how to ride a bike

Photograph by Stockbyte.

Gentle reader, let your mind wander back to the day you first learned how to ride a bike. Who can forget such a magnificent moment?

It’s an iconic scene: The child is nervous on his shiny new Schwinn, but he trusts his father—and his training wheels. On the sun-dappled day they are finally removed, the child is confident that his training wheels have prepared him to ride a bike—that they have trained him. His father runs beside the bicycle, holding onto the seat, and then lets go. The child triumphantly sails forth—face down, into the pavement.

Oh, the memories!

For generations, training wheels have been the standard way of not teaching children how to ride a bike. It’s a time-honored childhood ritual: fumble with wrench, remove tiny wheels, watch child fall on face, repeat.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Compared to the rub-some-dirt-on-it old-timeyness of training wheels, balance bikes—those wooden, pedalless bikes you’ve definitely seen if you live in Portland or Brooklyn, and you’ve maybe seen if you live somewhere else—look like a newfangled waste of money, a meta-bike, a parody of the kinds of crap consumer-culture parents will buy. (They will buy a bike that literally doesn’t work!) But the balance bike isn’t newfangled at all. It is a direct descendant of the first proto-bicycle. And its popularity is growing for very good reason: It corrects the tragic historical error of training wheels.

Kid on a balance bike
Balance bikes are better

Photograph by David Morgan/iStockphoto.

It’s unclear when training wheels became popular, although historians suggest the early 1900s seem most likely. But it’s apparent why they became popular. They were an obvious solution to an obvious problem: How do you convince someone to climb onto something that is obviously going to fall over?

It’s easy to forget how counterintuitive the act of bicycling is. For starters, to steady a bicycle, you have to turn in the direction that the bike is leaning. This is so unconscious that when you’re riding a bike you don’t know you’re doing it. Children know they’re doing it, though, which is why they have such trouble. It just feels wrong. The intellect, as Mark Twain wrote after learning to ride a bicycle, “has to teach the limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.”

To make matters worse, in order to ride a bike, you have to be willing to embrace its precariousness. As Archibald Sharp, an English engineer, wrote in a seminal book on bicycling in 1896, “If the bicycle and rider be at rest, the position is thus one of unstable equilibrium, and no amount of gymnastic dexterity will enable the position to be maintained for more than a few seconds.” To lose your nerve is to lose your balance.

So it isn’t surprising that aspiring riders wanted some greater stability, especially when bicycles were still a wondrous sight. “We can't imagine today how huge the fear of balancing was among the adult population,” the German historian of technology Hans-Erhard Lessing explained in an interview. “People would hardly dare to take their feet off safe ground.”

The impulse to solve this problem by adding extra wheels predates training wheels. “No sooner was a practicable bicycle made than attention was turned to the three-wheeler as being the safer of the two machines,” Sharpe noted. In the 1880s, there were tricycles that look like today’s bicycles—except instead of a having a single back wheel, they have a pair of wheels, evenly spaced. The problem, as the early innovators learned, was that the extra wheel made matters worse. Any kid who’s tried to corner on a tricycle or training wheels knows this.

To learn to bike, you must solve two problems: the pedaling problem and the balance problem. Training wheels only solve the pedaling problem—that is, the easy one. Learning to balance on a bike is much more difficult, and a “training” tool that eliminates the need to balance is worse than beside the point. Training wheels only train you to ride a bike with training wheels. It’s no wonder your first experience riding a bike with no training wheels was terrifying! You’d never done anything like it before.

In his classic Bicycling Science, the MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson dismissed the whole concept of training wheels in a single memorable sentence: “It’s hard to see how training wheels can inculcate any of the desired balancing habits, unless they are off the ground.” Instead, Wilson proposed, try “the commonsense idea of having those learning to ride a bicycle adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down gentle, grassy slopes.”

Wilson’s advice wasn’t new. A century before, young bicyclists were being told the same thing: “Another plan that may be adopted with advantage, is to remove the pedals and place the saddle so low that the feet can easily reach the ground, and then push the machine along in the way the old hobby-horse was propelled, taking care to begin on a level surface.” Do this and you have made a balance bike. But you have also made the first proto-bicycle: the Draisine.

In the beginning, there was Mount Tambora. (Stay with me.) When the Indonesian volcano exploded in April 1816, it blew ash into the outer atmosphere, altering the weather worldwide for months. Harvests failed across Europe; 1816 would be known as the Year Without a Summer. As the price of oats for horses soared, the mind of a young German baron named Karl Drais turned to the idea of a mechanical horse.

His Draisine was a wooden contraption with no pedals or chain. Instead, the rider would walk along the ground and push himself forward, moving faster than a pedestrian could. The invention swiftly spread across Europe and the Atlantic, inspiring numerous knock-offs. But the novelty wore off within a couple of years: The roads were too rough; the ride was exhausting; there were accidents. The bicycle historian David Herlihy has written that early riders of the Draisine soon discovered that “every journey cost a pair of boots.” Drais died in poverty.

This image of a child on a draisine is taken from an 1857 agricultural machinery catalog of Anton Burg & Sohn, published in Vienna.
A 1857 agricultural machinery catalog of Anton Burg & Sohn shows a child on a draisine

Courtesy Hans-Erhard Lessing.

To a remarkable degree, the modern balance bike is a copy of the Draisine. Both are made mostly of wood (although not all balance bikes are). Draisine riders leaned forward against a board, not unlike the way children do today, pushed off the ground and sped away. Today, it is easy to see a bicycle in a balance bike. In 1816, no one could: The bicycle wouldn’t achieve anything close to its modern form for decades. Children who hop off a balance bike and onto a bicycle are taking a half-century shortcut.

There are more and more parents who are taking that shortcut. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition runs a popular event that’s explicitly about junking the training wheels. (They also have a good handout about how to do so.) Balance bike models are proliferating and, according to bicycle dealers, sales are rising.

And they should. Children learning to ride on a balance bike solve the balancing problem first. And they solve it easily: Kids on balance bikes are faster and steadier than the contraptions would seem to permit. (Yield the sidewalk.) They have the same confidence as a child on training wheels, but the confidence is justified: They actually do know how to balance themselves on a bicycle. Once on a real bicycle, these kids only have to learn how to make the pedals work. Learning to pedal while balancing is still tricky, of course, but it is far simpler than learning to balance while pedaling.

So skip the training wheels and get rid of the pedals instead. The longstanding popularity of training wheels is a historical headache; no one knows why anyone ever thought they’d be good at what they’re meant to do. Instead, they are a paradigmatic case of a learning tool that teaches the wrong lesson.  Once they disappear, only the makers of Band-Aids will feel the pain.

Previously in Slate, Nicholas Day said that you should let your preschoolers cook dinner with you, and explained why his son would not be wearing a sledding helmet. See all of Slate's coverage of family and parenting.


text:
Longform.org's Guide to Michael Lewis: His best stories about money and/or balls.

Longform.org's Guide to Michael Lewis: His best stories about money and/or balls.

Longform.org's Guide to Michael Lewis: His best stories about money and/or balls.

Longform.org's guide to the greatest long articles ever written.
Sept. 23 2011 11:21 AM

The Longform.org Guide to Michael Lewis

His best magazine pieces about money and/or balls.

Every weekend, Longform.org shares a collection of great stories from its archive with Slate. For a daily selection of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform.org or follow @longformorg on Twitter.

Michael Lewis. Click image to expand.
Michael Lewis

It's apparently Moneyball week here on the Internet, so we've put together a collection of classic journalism by Moneyball author/ erstwhile Slate columnist Michael Lewis. In keeping with the week's theme, we've picked four stories about economics and four on sports, plus one piece that bridges the two: "The Trading Desk," Lewis' original article on Billy Beane and the Oakland A's..

Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis—and 15 Michael Lewis • New York Times Magazine • February 2001

Using different email addresses and a lot of exclamation points, teenager Jonathan Lebed worked finance message boards in the morning before school and made nearly a million bucks. Then he made the head of the S.E.C. look like a fool:

"I finally came clean with a thought: the S.E.C. let Jonathan Lebed walk away with 500 grand in his pocket because it feared that if it didn't, it would wind up in court and it would lose. And if the law ever declared formally that Jonathan Lebed didn't break it, the S.E.C. would be faced with an impossible situation: millions of small investors plugging their portfolios with abandon, becoming in essence professional financial analysts, generating embarrassing little explosions of unreality in every corner of the capital markets. No central authority could sustain the illusion that stock prices were somehow 'real' or that the market wasn't, for most people, a site of not terribly productive leisure activity. The red dog would be off his leash.

"I might as well have strolled into the office of the drug czar and lit up a joint.

" 'The kid himself said he set out to manipulate the market,' Walker virtually shrieked.

"But, of course, that is not all the kid said. The kid said everybody in the market was out to manipulate the market."

Betting on the Blind Side Michael Lewis • Vanity Fair • April 2010

Sitting alone in his San Jose office, Michael Burry saw the subprime bubble before anyone else. So he convinced Wall Street to let him bet on it, even though few were betting on him (a story excerpted from  The Big Short):

"The market made no sense, but that didn't stop other Wall Street firms from jumping into it, in part because Mike Burry was pestering them. For weeks he hounded Bank of America until they agreed to sell him $5 million in credit-default swaps. Twenty minutes after they sent their e-mail confirming the trade, they received another back from Burry: 'So can we do another?' In a few weeks Mike Burry bought several hundred million dollars in credit-default swaps from half a dozen banks, in chunks of $5 million. None of the sellers appeared to care very much which bonds they were insuring. He found one mortgage pool that was 100 percent floating-rate negative-amortizing mortgages—where the borrowers could choose the option of not paying any interest at all and simply accumulate a bigger and bigger debt until, presumably, they defaulted on it. Goldman Sachs not only sold him insurance on the pool but sent him a little note congratulating him on being the first person, on Wall Street or off, ever to buy insurance on that particular item. 'I'm educating the experts here,' Burry crowed in an e-mail."

The Search Engine Michael Lewis • New York Times Magazine • October 1999 On Jim Clark and the culture of Silicon Valley before the dot-com crash (the story that lead to The New New Thing):

"The United States obviously occupies a strange place in the world. It is the capital of innovation, of material prosperity, of a certain kind of energy, of certain kinds of freedom and of transience. Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world. It is one of those places, unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but like Las Vegas, that is unimaginable anyplace but in the United States. It is distinctively us. Within this unusual place some people have clearly been more unusual than others. Many of those who sought and found fortune in Silicon Valley in the 1990's could just as easily have found it on Wall Street in the 1980's or in London in the 1860's. But a certain type of person who has made it big in Silicon Valley could have made it big at no other time in history. He was built to work on the frontier of economic life when the frontier was once again up for grabs. He was designed for rapid social and technological change. He was the starter of new things."

Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds Michael Lewis • Vanity Fair • October 2010

Riots in Athens, the shadowy Vatopaidi monastery, and a quarter million dollars in debt for every citizen. Welcome to Greece:

"As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn't take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece's rail passengers into taxicabs: it's still true. … The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as 'arduous' is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets."

The Trading Desk Michael Lewis • New York Times Magazine • March 2003

The original article on Billy Beane and the Oakland A's, published a month before the release of Moneyball:

"A leading independent authority on baseball finance, a Manhattan lawyer named Doug Pappas, pointed out a quantifiable distinction between Oakland and the rest of baseball. The least you could spend on a 25-man team, if everyone was paid the minimum salary, was $5 million, plus $2 million more for players on the disabled list and the remainder of the 40-man roster. The huge role of luck in any baseball game, and the relatively small difference in ability between most major leaguers and the rookies who might work for the minimum wage, meant that the fewest games a minimum-wage baseball team would win during a 162-game season was something like 49. The Pappas measure of financial efficiency was this: How many dollars over the minimum $7 million does each team pay for each win over its 49th? How many marginal dollars does a team spend for each marginal win? Over the past three years Oakland has paid about half a million dollars per win. The only other team in six figures has been the Minnesota Twins, at $675,000 per win. The most profligate rich franchises -- the Baltimore Orioles, for instance, or the Texas Rangers -- have paid nearly $3 million for each win, or more than six times what Oakland paid. Oakland seemed to be playing a different game from everyone else."

The Kick Is Up and It's ... a Career Killer Michael Lewis • Play Magazine • October 2007

A look at the precarious existence of NFL place-kickers:

"This is what kickers do to define themselves: choke under pressure. After the Cowboys acquire Vanderjagt the next season to solve their own kicking problems, their coach, Bill Parcells, makes it clear from the start that he considers him damaged goods. He wonders out loud if anyone could ever recover his manhood after missing such a kick. No one asks whether this is the best way to encourage a kicker's performance; no one wonders if it is perhaps even a bit cruel. Even before the season ends, Vanderjagt has himself a new life story: less than a year after being hailed as the most accurate kicker ever to play the game, and being regarded as an extremely valuable commodity, he is working out by himself on an island off the coast of Florida, wondering if a team might offer him a job. 'Next to the quarterback, a coach's confidence wavers so much with who the kicker is,' the executive with the N.F.C. team says. 'If a linebacker or a running back or a wide receiver has a bad game it's 'Keep him in there. He'll be fine.' If a coach loses just a little bit of confidence in a kicker, you're making a change.' "

The No-Stats All-Star Michael Lewis • New York Times Magazine • February 2009

Can Moneyball be adapted to the NBA? The Houston Rockets are trying:

"Having watched [Shane] Battier play for the past two and a half years, Morey has come to think of him as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests. 'Our last coach dragged him into a meeting and told him he needed to shoot more,' Morey says. 'I'm not sure that that ever happened.' Last season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. 'No one in the N.B.A. does that,' Morey says. 'No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.' "

Commie Ball: A Journey to the End of a Revolution Michael Lewis • Vanity Fair • July 2008

Guz Dominguez says he was trying to help baseball players from Cuba. The U.S. government says he was smuggling athletes:

"But why had he done it? The more you looked at the numbers, the less sense they made. At the time, Dominguez kept no more than 5 percent of a player's signing bonus and 4 percent of his contract as long as it was above the league minimum. Simply to recoup his investment Dominguez would have needed the players to be worth something more than $5 million to big-league teams. There was never much hope that these players would ever make that kind of money. The U.S. government needed the jury to believe that the American best informed about Cuban ballplayers didn't know which ones were worth stealing; that he'd refinance his house to smuggle the wrong guys; that Cuba was a mysterious black hole, about which this sort of ignorance was plausible. And it did! After listening for seven days the jury quickly reached its verdict: guilty."

The Ballad of Big Mike Michael Lewis • New York Times Magazine • September 2006

On the importance of left tackles and a prodigy in Memphis named Michael Oher (the story that became The Blind Side):

"She turned around in time to see 19 football players running down one side of the field after the Briarcrest running back with the ball. On the other side of the field Briarcrest's No. 74, Big Mike, was racing at full speed in the opposite direction, with a defensive end in his arms.

"From his place on the sideline, Sean watched in amazement. Freeze had called a running play, around the right end, away from Michael's side. Michael's job was simply to take the defender who had been jabbering at him and wall him off. Just keep him away from the ball carrier. Instead, he had fired off the line of scrimmage and gotten fit — which is to say, gotten his hands inside the defender's shoulder pads — and then lifted the Munford player off the ground. It was a perfectly legal block, with unusual consequences. He drove the Munford player straight down the middle of the field for 15 yards, then took a hard left, toward the Munford sidelines. 'The Munford kid's feet were hitting the ground every four steps, like a cartoon character,' Sean says. As the kid strained to get his feet back on the ground, Michael ran him the next 25 or so yards to the Munford bench. When he got there, he didn't stop but piled right through it, knocking over the bench, several more Munford players and scattering the team. He didn't skip a beat. Encircling the football field was a cinder track. He blocked the kid across the track and then across the grass on the other side of the cinder track. And kept going — right to the chain link fence on the far side of the grass.

"Flags flew, grown men cursed and Sean called Michael over to the sidelines.

" 'Michael,' said Sean, 'where were you taking him anyway?'

" 'I was gonna put him on the bus,' Michael said."

Have a favorite piece that we missed? Leave the link in the comments or tweet it to @ longformorg. For more great science and nature writing, check out Longform.org's complete archive.


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Editing the infamous Gordon Lish.

Editing the infamous Gordon Lish.

Editing the infamous Gordon Lish.

All about fiction.
Oct. 31 2007 6:12 PM

I Was Gordon Lish's Editor

Not that he let me do any editing.

Click here  to read more from Slate's Fall Fiction Week.

Gordon Lish.
Gordon Lish

A recent article in the New York Times about the desire of Tess Gallagher, Raymond Carver's widow, to have Carver's stories published in their original, unedited form, has ignited a controversy over the slash-and-burn handiwork of his first editor, Gordon Lish. This contretemps has brought back memories of my own brief stint as Lish's editor.

It was Don DeLillo's fault. I was working for W.W. Norton in 1991 when he gave me a call. I'd had the privilege of being his editor on Libra, and we'd stayed friends. Lish had also been Don's editor at Esquire, and DeLillo had dedicated one of his novels to him. After some pleasantries, Don came to the point:

"Gordon Lish is looking for a new publisher."

"He's finished a novel, and I think he's broken through into new territory."

I had reasons to be both intrigued and extremely wary. As a college student all hot for literature I'd had my brain waves rearranged and my taste in fiction formed by the amazingly odd and disturbing stories Gordon Lish had published in Esquire as its fiction editor from 1969 to 1976. I still vividly remember the wave of existential disquiet that swept over me when I read Carver's "Neighbors" in those pages. What was that?There, and later at Knopf, Lish brought forth a new kind of American fiction—gnomic, stripped-down, psychologically charged but jagged and resistant to explanation—that would come to be known variously as "Minimalism" and "Kmart Realism." In addition to Raymond Carver, he'd published such striking talents as Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Joy Williams, Mary Robison, Cynthia Ozick, and, his maximalist odd man out, Harold Brodkey, while appointing himself "Captain Fiction"—a faintly ridiculous sobriquet that nonetheless captured with some accuracy his standing in the literary world.

Concurrently, Lish had gained notoriety as a teacher of creative writing, one whose classes bore more than a passing resemblance to such '70s-era phenomena as primal scream therapy (feel the pain!) and EST (no peeing!). In the foreword to his anthology All Our Secrets Are the Same, he defined his taste this way: "My principal concerns are paralysis, death, home, the things people live with, the violence that is in us, flight from all those concerns, a piece of brisk whistling in the long-toothed dark, and God, I just can't get enough of that wonderful stuff …" In the strict Lishian aesthetic, where silences often spoke more clearly than words, characters gave voice to their traumas with a kind of mute, cracked eloquence and off-slant detailing. "He did like kidneys, that was one thing," a young divorcee remembers of her ex-husband in a Joy Williams story. "He loved kidneys for the weekend lunch." Who knew that organ meats could have an emotional valence? This style spread through America's creative writing programs and literary magazines like measles through an elementary school, sweeping the conventional well-made story into the dustbin of literary history, or so it seemed. And that was all right with me.

Lish had also developed into a fiction writer of note, a calculating provocateur and something of a tummler. His first novel, Dear Mr. Capote (1983), took the form of letters from a serial killer inviting the author of In Cold Blood to write his story next. The book virtually invented a genre of novels featuring hyper-literary mass murderers. And Lish's short stories, first collected in What I Know So Far (1984), were, well, quite Lishian; one, "To Jerome, With Love and Kisses," was sheer genius, a hectoring lecture to J.D. Salinger from his estranged father demanding that Salinger stay more in touch, the way Phil Roth and Bernie Malamud did with their fathers.

My wariness had to do, however, with Lish's reputation as a bit of a madman, of the sort publishing houses no longer welcome. I was at Viking in 1988 when we published his second short story collection Mourner at the Door, and I'd seen his antics up close. He'd bulldozed his editor into allowing him to write his own over-the top flap copy which ends in this way: " … no reader will go away from these pages unshaken by the force of his sentences, nor will any reader not know why it is that Gordon Lish has so powerfully and indelibly entered the literary history of this century." Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back! An office wag dropped a dime on Lish's authorship to Harper's, and they ran the jacket copy verbatim in their "Readings" section, under the heading "Enough About You." It was mean and it was funny and Lish went ballistic, stopping just short of suing.

So in a distinctly ambivalent mood I asked Lish's agent if I could see his new novel, and what arrived was a slim, subversive, mind-bending volume titled My Romance. Forget Rodgers and Hart; the presiding influences were more Spalding Gray and, perhaps, Dostoyevksy's The Underground Man. *It pretended to be (and, in part, was) a monologue that Lish himself had delivered at a writers conference, a brilliant impromptu (or was it?) disquisition on such matters as his psoriasis, his medications, his drinking, his wife's terminal illness, his office hanky-panky, the value of the vintage Audemars Piguet watch that he'd inherited from his father (which he proposed to auction off right there), and the possibility that he may have accidentally killed his father in the process of trying to save him from an attack of esophageal dilation. It was a real high-wire act that erased the barrier between fact and fabrication and dared the reader to think the worst of its creator. Not unlike, come to think of it, Curb Your Enthusiasm—Larry David and Gordon Lish are brothers under the (itchy) skin.

Well, I thought, this is great. And I somehow got my employer to agree to publish it. At this point it would make a great ironic story if I told you that I proposed to do to Lish's novel something similar to what he'd done to Carver and doubtless many others. But I didn't, because I thought that My Romance could not be improved upon nor could I see any way one could improve it. In my jacket copy, I was to write with complete sincerity: "Lish uses his voice the way another virtuoso, Charlie Parker, used his saxophone." How in hell do you "edit" a Charlie Parker solo, a construct so dependent on its moment-to-moment immediacy? You don't—and I thought that Lish's work had something of the same riveting this-only-happens-this-way-once quality.

However, I can tell you this with complete certainty: Had I had any bright editorial ideas, Lish would have summarily rejected them. His control-freak obsessiveness redoubled itself when it came to his own work. He demanded that he get to pick the art director for the cover. We strategized over the sending out of galleys like Ike planning D-Day—"Howard, I have enemies everywhere," he said ominously, and he was right. And no author I have ever worked with concentrated more compulsively on the precise way each line of type fell on the page, driving me and the production department almost nuts. (This is a pattern of behavior, I have learned, that he's repeated with his other editors.) He wanted what he wanted, and that was that. He was a living no-editing zone. Except, of course, when it came to his author's work; then out came the pick and the shovel and the scalpel and the drill.

Publishing My Romance turned out to be a chastening act of critical and commercial futility for me and my employer. Between the jacket copy episode and the many press accounts of his writing-class shenanigans, by 1992 he had made himself into such a figure of controversy and a target for mockery that bookstores ordered the book in meager quantities and only a couple of critics allowed themselves to be captivated by what I felt—and still feel—was its nervy brilliance. That same year, Lish did sue Harper's, for libel and copyright infringement, for their publication of a private letter of instruction addressed to his students. As a result I got to read in the Village Voice that the net sale of My Romance amounted to slightly over 500 copies. (I had avoided learning the sales figures until then.)That is not just bad; that is pathetic. Five hundred copies means you sold about half that amount to friends, family members, and former students, maybe a few dozen to civilians, and the rest to libraries with standing orders for contemporary fiction by just about anybody.

Still, I don't regret publishing My Romance for a second. I grew very fond of Gordon and remain so, as do most people who come under his eccentric spell. The rights and wrongs of the Carver business will take years to sort out and will become part of American literary history, comparable in some ways to Pound's inspired editorial rolfing of Eliot's first draft of "The Wasteland." (Of course, Lish and Pound and Maxwell Perkins, at least in respect to his work with Thomas Wolfe, are the extreme outliers in the craft of editing. Most of us put ourselves at the service of helping the writer realize his or her particular vision with a mixture of nurturing and commercial calculation and, I suppose, passive aggression.) What I hope does not get lost in this dust-up is what an energizing figure, as mentor, cheerleader, trickster, and Svengali, on the literary scene that Lish was, how many invaluable talents in American fiction he brought to light, and how very interesting and influential a writer he himself is.

Correction, Nov. 2, 2007: This article originally misspelled the name of composer Richard Rodgers. (Return  to the corrected sentence.)


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The week's most interesting Slate stories.

The week's most interesting Slate stories.

The week's most interesting Slate stories.

The week's most intriguing stories.
July 10 2009 7:53 AM

Fireworks, Asian Babes, and Interviewing Jacko

The week's most interesting Slate stories.

1) "Fireworks Suck: They really do," by Troy Patterson. What is there to celebrate about simplistic, loud, inartful displays of airborne firepower? Nothing, unless you belong to the below-average masses enthralled simply by bright lights.

2) "Are All Civil Rights Special Privileges Now? Assessing the damage done by the Supreme Court in the New Haven firefighters case," by Richard Thompson Ford. In overruling the Connecticut city's decision to void a promotion test for the sake of racial diversity, the high court jeopardized all forms of assistance to disadvantaged minorities. Where does it stop?

3) "Steroids, Anyone? Tennis is one of the few sports that hasn't been tainted by doping scandals. Can any sport possibly be that clean?" by Bill Gifford. Considering that the sports most soaked in performance-enhancing drugs are also the ones most heavily policed, tennis might be protecting its reputation just by declining to look.

4) "China's Marlboro Country: The strange, underground world of counterfeit cigarettes," by Te-Ping Chen. It takes a big industry to feed the Chinese nicotine habit—more than 2 trillion cigarettes a year, most of them brand-name knockoffs. Our correspondent goes underground, literally, to take photos and video of the booming business.

5) "Caught on Tape: What the Nixon tapes tell us about the Republican Party," by Christopher Hitchens. As nauseatingly racist and egomaniacal as the latest batch of audiotapes released by the Nixon library may be, the Republican Party can't escape the fact that much of its modern appeal is based on Tricky Dick's example.

6) "Medical Errors: Why is polling about health care reform so unreliable?" by Christopher Beam. This subject might just be too complicated for your standard opinion poll—for every question about health care reform, there's another way to ask it that will yield a totally different result.

7) "The Birth, and Death, of the Asian Babe: The sordid history of the sexually exotic East," by Johann Hari. A book about how Western men have for centuries romanticized the alluring lady of the Orient tries to argue that women themselves were not simply passive victims—but patriarchy is a powerful thing, and it's wrong to say they were willing.

8) "Does Plastic Art Last Forever? Not even close. Can a generation of plastic objects be saved?" by Sam Kean. Turns out plastic is actually one of the materials most vulnerable to the effects of air and light. Objets d'art from dolls to mobiles are degenerating in museums around the world—and taking others with them

9) "Let Me Tell You About the Time I Interviewed Michael Jackson: Why reporters won't shut up about their encounters with the dead pop star," by Jack Shafer. Seems like anyone who ever had a brush with the Gloved One wants to share his story, but as newsworthy as the man's death may be, there's a limit to how much the public really needs to know.

10) "Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube? A Slate investigation reveals: not a chance," by Chris Wilson. Don't let the success of random home videos like "Charlie Bit Me" fool you. With the camcorder-carrying masses now posting their creations online, even breaking 10,000 is a feat.


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Time-lapse video of fireflies: Watch Vincent Brady’s gorgeous photos and video.

Watch a Gorgeous Time-lapse Video of Fireflies

Watch a Gorgeous Time-lapse Video of Fireflies

Wild Things
Slate’s animal blog.
March 27 2014 4:00 PM

Gorgeous Time-lapse Video of Fireflies

Photographer Vincent Brady’s most recent project uses an unusual light source: the mesmerizing glow of the firefly. His time-lapse photographs and videos are nothing short of stunning. The artist spent the summer of 2013 chasing the insects around Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri and his hometown of Grand Ledge, Mich. He exercised a diverse set of skills including long-exposure image stacking, meticulous editing, and steering a pontoon boat through narrow creeks on moonless nights.

The fireflies fill the frames with a frenzied movement that enables Brady to express a sense of transience against still ponds and starry skies. This romantic nod to non-permanence may recall a lost childhood pastime, but for the artist, the insects’ unpredictability sometimes created more practical challenges. The exact time and place of the firefly “disco,” he told me, often depended upon heat, humidity, and even the phase of the moon—they prefer to “throw down” in relative darkness, he says.

But it is in this erratic behavior that the artist most admires the insects. As he writes on his website, “Fireflies just bless you with their presence, light up, make love, and call it a life.” Brady captures the whole cycle in his frames.


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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Saturday, August 23, 2014

The Brekky Special at Jo's

It's a "special" so it isn't always available, but man is it good!

Potted Beef Hash with Fried Green Tomatoes, roasted peppers, a fried egg, and Goat Cheese

242 West 2nd Street
Austin, Texas

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The Houses of Seaside

If you've ever been to Seaside in Florida, you know it is a magical place.

And much of that starts with the houses, each unique in its own way. Seaside is a beach town, so the houses portray their environment with sturdy shutters and porches galore.

Each house is kept in such pristine condition, with colors so bright and beautiful.

 The houses are just one of the many reasons that it makes perfect sense to film a movie like The Truman Show in Seaside. Recognize the Truman house?

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Dockyard, BDA

A visit to the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda is a step back into history with all the splendors of the present.

Whether it be the shops, the food, or the ferry, whatever brings you to dockyard, the views will not disappoint.

Dockyard is filled with beautiful boats:

And a fine looking boat ramp:

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Beignets and Cafe au Lait

It's hard to match the coffee and French donuts at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans.

Consumption tip: Dip the beignets into your cafe au lait inclusive of the powdered sugar. It makes the drink that much more decadent and an overall experience that's hard to beat.

Talk about a good start to your morning!


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My boyfriend and I were suppose to be broken up because of religious difference. He is my best friend's older cousin and I grew up admiring him in a little girl sort of way. After graduating from college, I started teaching in his home town where we would meet from time to time. When my motorcycle broke down, I asked him, as a cousin-friend to give me a lift in his pickup, and that started a long 8 month friendship that was defined by hanging out and basically denying our feelings. The church I grew up in did not allow for members to couple up with/ marry none-members, so I never thought could or would fall in love with him. When our love for each grew too strong to deny, my boyfriend had tried to fit in the church. After a year he realized that that is not the church he wants to spend his more

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SMH Home
Home   >   Technology   >   IT News   >   Article

Putting you in the picture

By Rob Fixmer
October 3 2002

The digital camera is first and foremost a computer. In traditional photography, film captures light and simultaneously stores images. In a digital camera, light gathering and storage are divorced. Light is captured by an image-sensing mechanism - usually a charge-coupled device (CCD); in less-expensive cameras, a complementary metal oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, is used. Next, the captured image has to be converted to digital data by the camera's computer circuitry. Finally, the data has to be stored on a memory card.

It takes three steps to accomplish with electronics what film does in the time it takes to snap the shutter. The final two steps account for the often annoying lag time between shots.

In the digital context, "speed" has nothing to do with light sensitivity. It is a measure of how quickly data can be written to a memory card and is in no way analogous to film speed. High-speed memory cards can help reduce the lag time between shots. Resolution - the level of detail in an image - can be manipulated, manually or automatically, through a best-guess technology known as interpolation.

The image is captured by the CCD, not as a single image but as 2.1 million pieces, the picture elements known as pixels. It would take six million or more pixels to match the resolution of a quality 35-millimetre single-lens-reflex camera. A 2.1-megapixel digital camera can produce suitable rich colour images, at 6 by 8 inches or even larger, due to interpolation, a sort of digital trompe l'oeil employed by the electronics. Interpolation amounts to examining the image data in a group of pixels, then filling the gaps with a best guess as to what part of the image fell through the cracks. Colour accuracy is complicated by the different ways digital cameras, computer monitors and printers produce colour. For one thing, the camera and monitor resolve an image in pixels, which the printer translates into dots per inch.Even more important is how different devices produce white and black.While your monitor uses the physics of light, your inkjet printer relies on the chemistry of pigmentation, and equal parts of red, green and blue ink produce a dark-brown mud. So the printer adds a fourth ink to produce black, and to render white it employs a colour-subtractive process - not printing anything at all. This means that the brightness of the white in a print depends entirely on the colour of the paper on which it is printed.

Digital cameras depend on light sensors called charge-coupling devices. The analogue output of a CCD chip, with the information needed for the image, is converted into binary signals.

Inside a digital camera
Light passes through the lens, which focuses it on the surface of the charge-coupled device. In the CCD, light energy is converted into electrical signals.

Seeing the colours
Each pixel has a colour filter (red, green, blue) to make the pixels colour sensitive.

Sensing the light

When the shutter opens, light falls on the CCD, and electrons are released in the semiconductive silicon layer. The more intense the light, the more electrons are released and the bigger the charge.

Storing the pictures
Removable cards are used to store and transport image files. Each high-resolution picture takes up about 6MB of disk space.

- New York Times

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Online game groups promote real life values, study claims

Bob The Builder Web site withdraws game

Victoria announces more funding for ICT

New telco industry code for mobile towers

Major RAM theft from warehouse near Heathrow

Microsoft backs down on copyright scheme

RSA Security signs deal with Microsoft

Melbourne IT firm wins Web award in New York

Telstra subsidiary says it will cut 300 jobs

Qld parliament receives first petitions via the Net

Korean man dies after computer games binge

IT worker faces sack for taking prayer break

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Strike could tie Casino to neighbours

By Jane Counsel
November 6 2002

Strike Oil and Santos are reviewing options for the early development of their Casino gas discovery, including the possibility of sharing infrastructure with nearby gas projects.

Perilya, the majority owner of Strike, said yesterday that the review would examine the possibility of tying the Casino gasfield in with nearby discoveries in the offshore Otway Basin. Santos is involved in several other small but commercial discoveries in the onshore sector of the Otway Basin.

The venture partners have concluded the Casino-1 well does not contain enough gas to support a stand-alone development.

Indicative gas reserves at Casino have been calculated at 140 billion cubic feet, which is modest when benchmarked against other recent discoveries in the Otway, such as Woodside's Thylacine and Geographe gas discoveries, which together are estimated to contain 0.8 trillion cubic feet of gas.

However, the dry quality of the gas at Casino will minimise its development and processing costs.

Perilya shares closed 1c lower at 48.5c while Santos was down 5c to $6.12.

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Democrats scuttle media ownership changes

Moody's ditches Telstra dream

Treasury shows options to safeguard policyholders

Funds flowing in wrong direction

Sharemarket dips as traders turn attention to Cup

Telecom NZ hit for six after warning

MIM stumbles before it rounds corner

Aussie capital's US trip undercuts dollar

WorldCom lent Ebbers $US400m

British Airways cost cutting lifts quarter to $423m

BP buys Eastern Creek credits

Investors swarm on Wesfarmers

Biota raider says bid doesn't breach law

PanBio licensed to spot disease

US launches two probes into Vivendi

Strike could tie Casino to neighbours

Punters piling into listed trust 'haven'


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V8 champ Jamie Whincup regains series lead in Ipswich

He has completed a remarkable comeback in three rounds to regain the V8 Supercars championship lead but Jamie Whincup says nothing has been decided yet.

The Holden ace, chasing a record sixth championship, made the most of a horror day at Queensland Raceway for rival Mark Winterbottom to snatch the series lead for the first time since February.

Whincup's sixth-place finish in Sunday's 200 kilometre race, won by Holden's James Courtney, was enough for him to end the weekend with a 15-point lead over Winterbottom.

It is a stunning turnaround which has included six wins in nine races and a climb from fifth position heading into June's Darwin event to being top of the tree ahead of this month's Sydney Motorsport Park 400.

Despite his red-hot run and a shocker for Winterbottom, who limped home in 22nd position following a mid-race puncture on Sunday, Whincup claims he has not left a psychological scar on his rival.

''Happy to be leading the championship, I'd rather be there than second or behind,'' he said.

''It's a good place to be but there's still a long, long way to go.

''He [Winterbottom] was competitive, no doubt, in that race ... we're going to have to do a good job come the later part of the year.''

Whincup may be talking down his opponent's fumble but there's no doubt the challengers are closing in on Winterbottom.

Apart from a relentless Whincup, veteran Craig Lowndes is now 147 points behind the Ford Performance Racing star in third after picking up his three second-place finishes from three starts at Ipswich.

Champion of the 2010 series Courtney is also closing in after a clever tyre strategy and much improved car speed gave him his second win of the year.

The victory means the Holden Racing Team ace is less than 200 points off the championship lead in fourth position with the decisive endurance season looming.

''As a team we're just getting stronger and stronger,'' Courtney said.

''It's becoming easier for us to qualify up the front and race up the front.

''There's a long way to go in the championship.''

It was not all doom and gloom for Ford Performance Racing, with young gun Chaz Mostert picking up his second third-place finish of the weekend on Sunday despite a late battle with Nissan's James Moffat, who had earlier in the day secured a career-first pole position.

The next stop in the V8s season will be the Sydney Motorsport Park 400 from August 22.


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A 'Clerks: The Animated Series' Reboot?

When you think about television series that have been deemed "ahead of their time," you probably imagine cult classics like "Freaks and Geeks," "Twin Peaks" and "Arrested Development." All daring television shows that were given at least a season's chance to make it and have since lived on past their cancelation because of the streaming age we live in. But how would we view* these series if they were only able to air two episodes and never put on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon? *pun intended

Yahoo TV writer Ethan Alter recently wrote about "Clerks: The Animated Series" -- which only had two episodes originally air and has yet to be streamed -- as a TV series that was not only ahead of its time, but one that is in prime position for a reboot!

The title card for "Clerks: The Animated Series"

The title card for "Clerks: The Animated Series"

"Clerks: TAS" aired on ABC in 2000 and was developed by Kevin Smith and "Seinfeld" writer David Mandel. "The Simpsons was our model," Smith told Yahoo TV. “From the jump, the Clerks cartoon was never going to be the movie. Dave was the one who was like, 'Since it’s animation, let’s go crazy.'"

Alter explains that, "the animated Clerks did some pretty crazy things for primetime network television at the time ... the kind of cavalcade of crazy that would be right at home on Adult Swim today, but when 'Clerks: TAS' debuted in 2000, that haven for adult-oriented animation was still a year away from launching."

ABC aired the episodes out of order, a devastating move since the second episode which aired first, played heavily on clips and flashbacks to the pilot. "We were supposed to launch in March, but they didn’t debut us until May," Smith told Yahoo TV. "I think 7 million people watched the first episode, and they were like 'That’s not good enough.'"

While the series has aired in its entirety twice (once on Comedy Central and once on Adult Swim), it is currently only available in its entirety on DVD. But unlike the fourth season of "Arrested Development," an animated series wouldn't have to plot around the characters having aged. "The nice thing about a Clerks animated show is that the characters are ageless," said Smith. "It’s not like 'These f–kers are old now.'"

"Netflix would seem to be a natural berth," wrote Alter, "given the fact that it’s home to the acclaimed animated Hollywood satire BoJack Horseman, as well as select titles from Smith’s own filmography, including the live-action 'Clerks.'"

So why not just pitch it to Netflix and get the ball rolling? Because nothing is that easy. "I’ve got to imagine there’s someone at some network out there who would pick it up," said Smith. "I can’t do it, because I don’t own it. The new Miramax consortium owns it."

So what's it going to take to get more animated adventures for the dynamic duos of Dante/Randal and Jay/ Silent bob? "You just need that one person in power to go, 'Oh my god, I got laid to that show once." said Smith. "And that would have to have been one of the two times that Clerks aired!"

Despite the show's broadcast history, and the uncertainty of its future, it's a work that Smith can be proud of and a TV series that is worth seeing -- even if it's on DVD.

Always wish we’d gotten to do more than 6 episodes of the #clerkscartoon but I’m more happy they happened at all!

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News Releases

November 27, 2002

Heather Crowe asks Labour Ministers to ban smoking in all Canadian workplaces

 “I want to be the last person to die from second-hand smoke at work.” – Heather Crowe

(Ottawa).  - A former waitress in Ottawa, Heather Crowe, this week wrote to all fourteen federal, provincial and territorial Ministers responsible for workplace health and safety asking them to ban smoking in all workplaces, with no exceptions.

Ms. Crowe, who never smoked, has inoperable lung cancer due to second-hand smoke. The Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board recently accepted her insurance claim in compensation for workplace exposure to second-hand smoke during her 40 years as a waitress. Ms. Crowe is featured in a current Health Canada advertising campaign against the dangers of second-hand smoke.

 “I am the canary in the coal mine for the hospitality industry,” remarked Ms. Crowe ruefully. If Labour Ministers do not move quickly to ban smoking in all workplaces, then waiters, waitresses and other workers will continue to die from second-hand smoke.

Continuing her remarks, Ms. Crowe said, “It would be like ignoring the fact that the canary in the restaurant has stopped singing, and sending the workers in anyway to certain danger, and perhaps death.” All federal, provincial, and territorial occupational health and safety laws oblige employers to provide a safe and healthy workplace.

“The scientific evidence is now clear – any exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke is dangerous and workplace smoking should be banned,” said Neil Collishaw, Research Director for Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. Yet Ministers of Labour have failed to give employers the tools they need to meet their legal obligations. “Not one of these jurisdictions has regulations that provide 100% protection to workers from second-hand smoke. But Labour Ministers have both the power and the authority to adopt such regulations, and they should do so without delay,” urged Mr. Collishaw.

Roy Romanow has been reminding us that not only is prevention better than cure, but it is also much cheaper for Canada’s health care system. What better way to save lives and save money than get rid of smoking in the workplace! Second-hand smoke causes an estimated 1,000 to 8,000 deaths a year in Canada. Workplace smoking bans that apply nation-wide would cost nothing; they would prevent a great many of those deaths, and reduce the burden on our health care system.

Failure to act to protect the blood supply has resulted in charges of criminal negligence against officials. Mr. Collishaw asks, “Could the same thing happen to Labour Ministers and their officials who fail to create regulations that protect workers from a known workplace hazard – second-hand smoke?”

For information: Neil Collishaw
Research Director
613 233 4878

Heather's letter
List of Ministers of Labour


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› Forums › Smoking Supplies & Equipment › Smoker Builds › 60 gallon air tank - looking for suggestions
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60 gallon air tank - looking for suggestions

post #1 of 4
Thread Starter

OK, so I found a 60 gallon air compressor tank in a junk pile, and I was wondering if it might be a good tank to use for a smoker build.  If so, what would be the best/optimal use for it - vertical or horizontal reverse flow?

Its about 20" in diameter and 36" tall - not including the ends.  I was originally looking for a 100 to 120 gallon propane tank for a build, but I decided that might be overkill for what I do.  Once I started thinking about a more modest build, the air tank kinda stood out.  I'm a relatively new smoker, and totally new to building (but I am fairly handy with a torch and welder) so I'd really like to hear what you guys would be the best use of the tank.  Thanks!

post #2 of 4

Were it me, first choice would have to be a horizontal pit with reverse flow. The grate size is capable of placing very large cuts of meats, such as whole beef brisket. Vertical smokers have their own set of benefits, so it really depends on what you're cooking and how much you will load up the rig. Depending on how you set-up internal configurations in a vertical, you can actually have different temp zones, which can be beneficial when smoking different foods such as chickens (hot & fast) and pork butts (low & slow), simultaneously.

Here's the Reverse Flow forums. You should be able to find tons of info on flow-plate design and dimensions, fire box sizing calculations, etc. Take your time reading and come up with a viable plan for your skill-level and available resources. Lastly, enjoy the build/conversion and especially the resulting great eats!!!

post #3 of 4

I actually have that same tank sitting in my yard for use in my trailer rig. I was going to make a warming oven with it, but I'm worried it's too thin. It's now slated for an open top grill on the front of the trailer. I figure it's a good way to quickly make burgers/hot dogs, get the sauce on wings sticky, grill up some little necks, you name it.

Definitely curious to see what you do with yours!

post #4 of 4
This is a 70gal tank. Started it a year ago and got busy. Hoping to finish it in the next few weekes.

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National--SNAP Fact Sheet: Bishops posting predator priests’ names

National--SNAP Fact Sheet: Bishops posting predator priests’ names

Why is it important that predator priests’ names are exposed?

First, because it’s the quickest, easiest, cheapest and most effective way to protect kids now. If a chemical company CEO knows of 20 or 30 places in a city where toxic chemicals have been dumped, her first duty is to warn the public. (Then, she must of course fence in the properties, put up ‘DANGER’ signs and take other remedial steps.)

Since bishops recruited, educated, ordained, hired, trained, transferred and shielded these predators – often until criminal statutes of limitations expired so prosecution wasn’t possible – the LEAST bishops can do is make it easier for police, prosecutors, parents, parishioners and the public to learn who these predators are so they can keep their loved ones away from them.

Second, because it helps heal the wounded. Somewhere, there’s an elderly Catholic mom on her knees praying “God forgive me for being a bad parent. Sally has an eating disorder and Bill is an alcoholic. I’ve obviously done something wrong.” When she sees Fr. John Smith exposed as a predator, she calls her kids and they acknowledge “Yes, he molested me,” and the whole family begins to stop blaming themselves and start their recovery. (“The truth,” the Bible says, “shall set us free.”)

Third, because it helps reassure Catholics. Until bishops “come clean” about all predator priests, parishioners must look up from the pews at their pastor and wonder “Has he committed or concealed child sex crimes?” They must wonder “Is the priest who baptized our kids or performed our wedding a predator?” and “Did Fr. Jack really retire or did they take him out of the parish because he’s an abuser?”

Fourth, because it’s what bishops have repeatedly pledged, for decade, to do: be “open and transparent about clergy sex crimes and abuse.” In fact, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ national abuse policy, adopted in 2002, mandates “openness.”

Has this been done before?

Yes. About 30 US bishops have posted predators’ names.

Why are you asking bishops to do this now?

Because there’s a slow trend in this direction already. Last month, the Seattle Catholic archdiocese released a list of 77 child molesting clerics who worked there. Over the last year or two, seven Minnesota-based church institutions did likewise. Next month, Yakima’ bishop may do the same.

And because while we’re very grateful for the attention to the film “Spotlight,” we fear any have fallen prey to the tempting myth, so aggressively peddled by bishops, that “this is mostly in the past.” It’s not.

And because every day the identities and whereabouts of these priests stay hidden, more kids are needlessly being put in harm’s way.

When were predators priests’ names posted by a diocese first?

Bishops in Tucson and Baltimore posted predators’ names in 2002.

Aren’t many predator priests dead?

Yes. But many are alive too. Exposing the living predators helps safeguard kids. Exposing the deceased predators helps victims heal. Exposing any predators helps Catholics move forward and helps make the church a healthier place and helps deter future cover ups.

Has any bishop posted names but said later “I wish I hadn’t done it?”

Nope, not that we’ve seen.

How can bishops declare priests guilty of abuse without criminal or civil trials?

Church officials routinely suspend priests when they deem child sex abuse accusations against them “credible.” Most times, they announce this publicly. Many times, there are other, previous allegations of abuse in the priests’ personnel files. Often, when confronted by their church supervisors, pedophile priests admit their crimes.

Our view is that if a priest is too dangerous to have working in a parish, then he’s too dangerous to have living among unsuspecting neighbors. And it’s the duty of that predator priest’s bishop to warn the public about him.

CONTACT – David Clohessy 314 645 5915 home, 314 566 9790 cell,, Barbara Dorris 314 503 0003,, Barbara Blaine 312 399

Please check your e-mail for a link to activate your account.

  • commented 2016-03-02 09:27:40 -0600
    So many very good points. My only suggestion would be to include nuns and other clergy. It’s all about the healing process of those who have been abused and prevention of more abuse. To the victim it says: Yes, you were harmed. Yes, abuse has caused profound differences in your life. Yes, someone is being held accountable. Yes, you don’t have to consider suicide to find a way out of the torment. Yes, there is help to get you to a better place. Yes, the Catholic Church really cares about you and other potential victims…..
  • @ tweeted this page. 2016-02-27 19:16:53 -0600


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Wednesday, June 1, 2016

What Happens When Laundry Goes Odd Even

You might have heard a lot on Odd & Even in recent times. But you will be surprised to know that the laundry is also going to be Odd-Even.  What happens when laundry goes odd even? Excited or worried? Then let’s take a look at my post & you will understand what I am talking about.

Recently a set of lifestyle bloggers were invited to do the #LaundryGoesOddEven challenge.
In which each blogger has to try the Ariel Matic washing powder specially made for automatic washing machines with a member of opposite sex in his family. I always support gender equality, so I accepted the challenge with my Mom.

As a mollycoddled kid, it’s our habit that we want everything in our hands. I started recollecting my childhood memories where my morning was like mom where is toothpaste?  Mom my towel, please? Mom I can’t find my uniform? No mom today white uniform? Mom, what is this my uniform is not iron?  Mom breakfast? What mom aloo ka Parata, today I want Gobhi ka Parata. Etc etc. my list of dependencies were huge but my mom was like, OK baby just 2 mins and everything ready.

All moms are like this & you all must have felt the same during your childhood. She had never argued with us whether  we come with all dirty clothes after playing all day out on the playground or we come with all blue marks of ink on our pure white shirts. We never thought how much efforts she made to remove all the dirt of our uniform or other our favorite dresses to keep clean and shine so that we can wear again and shine like stars. She always tries to provide each and every comfort of life to us.

I realized all her efforts when I moved to Bhopal for my Bachelors of engineering degree.  The first time I realized that how much effort my mom or almost all the moms in this world gives to make her family happy. They start the day with cleaning, cooking and non-stop works for the full day without resting for single minutes.

As a token of appreciation & to thank her for all the hard work and determination she had shown till today for me & my family,  I decided to do my laundry by myself. Now whenever I go home and I help her on each odd day for laundry which also includes other household activities as well. I must say the Ariel Matic has made the job easy for me.
So if you want to share the load, take the #LaundryGoesOddEven challenge & watch this video why the Laundry is not only a mother’s job?

I really enjoyed a lot while participating in this campaign and also felt very proud for helping my mom by sharing her laundry work.

'I am taking part in the #LaundryGoesOddEven Challenge by Ariel India at BlogAdda.'

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The Sober In The Sun Website has moved, Click Here

TheSober In The Sun Labor Day Festival features:

“Sober In The Sun is a non-profit event staffed entirely by a volunteer staff.  The festival is a very expensive undertaking, and we depend on money from advance ticket sales for much of our funding. Thanks to all of you who buy your tickets early.


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Nike launch special Tiempo Legend V Premium for Francesco Totti

Releasing their special Rare Gold Superfly boots last week, Nike are set to launch 3,000 pairs of Francesco Totti’s customised Nike Tiempo Legend V Premium silo.
Made exclusively for one of Nike’s most loyal players Francesco Totti, the Cheap Nike Tiempo Legend V Premium silo is an example of a timeless football boot product that stands the test of time. The Tiempo was originally launched in 1985 and has remained today as one of best selling football boot ranges of all time and is headlined by the likes of Sergio Ramos, Gerard Pique and Chris Smalling.
The new Nike Legend V Premium boot retains the iconic fold-over tongue last seen on the Tiempo Legend III by Nike. The 38 year old Italian prefers the tongue over the standard tongue-less New Nike Tiempo Legend V. The original purpose of the tongue was to provide a cleaner striking surface on top of your laces.
Totti mentioned, “I have always played with boots that had a tongue and for me, this detail on the product is very important. I wear the Tiempo because it is a comfortable boot with a soft leather upper that adapts well to the foot’s shape and grants a great touch of the ball. It’s a classic boot that helps me perform at my best when I’m on the pitch.”
This new football boot by Nike emits class and heritage boasting a classic black upper with silver details on the fold-over tongue, Swoosh logos and sockliner design. The Tiempo uses hand crafted Alegria leather and uses it’s trademark Hypershield technology on the upper to retain the shape and feel of the boot.
Totti added, “This specific version of the Tiempo has a beautiful color since it’s a perfect mix between classic elements like the black upper and more innovative ones like the chrome details on the Swoosh and the tongue. The tongue itself makes this boot really unique and is a key element for me in a football boot.”
Inspired by a warrior the Black/Silver Nike Tiempo Legend V Premium installs a special logo on the sockliner which incorporates his number ten. The metallic silver fold-over tongue and Swoosh logos are inspired by a warrior’s armour.
Juts 3,000 pairs will be available from the 5th of March from selected retailers.

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Latest News

#StarWars #TheForceAwakens #Trailer Recreated Using Nothing but #Snapchat #Art

Evening Standard
Snapchat's drawing/painting function might seem like it's only really meant for doodling over pre-existing pictures, but as with any creative resource, it can work wonders in the right hands. In this instance, that creativity has found an ideal partner in the most hyped thing of the year: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Using nothing but Snapchat art, 18 artists were able to piece together a shot-for-shot recreation of the film's theatrical trailer. You would think that such a thing would end up being laughably crude, but you'd be wrong.

Some of the shots match the colour and shading of their live-action counterparts so perfectly it almost looks like rotoscoping, and none of the majesty of the original piece is lost in the translation. The whole thing was co-ordinated through the YouTube channel Yoda Didn't Die, a Snapchat-based haven for all things Star Wars. It was released on December 17th to coincide with the theatrical release of the film itself, cannily.

As well as being a prime example of how much you can really get out of Snapchat when the motivation is present and correct, it comes as part of a rich, widespread tapestry of tribute material that has emerged in support of the landmark film, from models to painting to just about anything else your mind can conjure.

The thing it most directly reminds me of, however, is something more related to Star Wars as a whole than this film specifically - Star Wars: Uncut. This ambitious 2009 project saw over 2000 fans banding together to each create a short segment of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Most are only a few seconds long, but when combined the entire film is recreated, beat for beat. Full disclosure, I've never watched the whole thing from beginning to end, but from what I've seen, it's a beautifully bizarre tour of numerous different art styles, tones and production values, with more than enough appeal for everyone, not just die hard fans of the franchise.

The new film, meanwhile, is fairing excellently, having smashed the opening day box office records in the UK and Ireland. It's also raking in reams of positive reviews. For someone like me, who grew up on the original films, it's unbelievably exciting, and seeing something with as much of a milennial fanbase as Snapchat being used as a conduit for fan appreciation more or less assures me that the film is succeeding at one, crucial goal: it's introducing a new generation to a galaxy far far away. Pass the corn.

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF

Contact us on Twitter, on Facebook, or leave your comments below. To find out about social media training or management why not take a look at our website for more info:
#StarWars #TheForceAwakens #Trailer Recreated Using Nothing but #Snapchat #Art Reviewed by Callum Davies on Thursday, December 24, 2015 Rating: 5

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Sickhouse - The Film That Premiered on Snapchat

Ingenious Media clearly live up to their name from time to time. The small film company recently produced a horror/thriller by the name of Sickhouse, and rather than doing something normal and bland like releasing it on a streaming service, they very quietly put it up on Snapchat. Yes, you read that right. Snap. Chat.

The film does have thematic ties to the sort-of-but-not-really photo messaging app. It involves a group of teens (shocker) who head into the woods to fuel their social media obsession with a slew of live posts about a creepy house out in the woods called, you guessed it, the 'sickhouse'. It doesn't go very well, it never goes very well.

The film was shot in real time, and designed for mobile viewing from the ground up. It will be out on other platforms, obviously, but initially it was very quietly put out on Snapchat literally as it was happening. It was shot from April 29th to May 3rd, so people could follow the narrative as it was going on, effectively. The full release or 'director's cut' will feature new footage and probably much sharper editing.

The project pulled in millions of views, and can now forever declare itself as the first 'made for mobile' feature film. The plot may not be the most original, even the idea of a narrative focus on social media addicts is fairly common in contemporary horror, but the format and execution is groundbreaking. The full feature will drop on June 1st, according to Mashable.

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @Songbird_Callum

Contact us on Twitter, on Facebook, or leave your comments below. To find out about social media training or management why not take a look at our website for more info:
Sickhouse - The Film That Premiered on Snapchat Reviewed by Callum Davies on Tuesday, May 10, 2016 Rating: 5

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Electrition Masturbation

Posted by: Author: Age: Then 15 Posted on: 0 comments
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I just learned how to masturbate real good at 15. When the homeowner's association sent their electrition to fix our wall plugs, I asked him outright if he jacked off. He wasn't surprised that I asked him 'cause his boy asked him the same question. He was 31, he said. I didn't know if older guys jacked off and he said he did it every day. Boy was I ever glad to hear that! I did it every day myself. I asked to see is cock and he showed me his hardon. He asked me if I wanted to feel his 7-1/2-incher. I sure did. and he felt mine at 6-1/2. We kinda masturbated each other but we jacked off ourselves holding each other's cock. Wasn't until 3 months later when he came back for some more work that he told me he was leaving to start his own business. We took out our cocks and we jacked each other off. That was a 'first' for me, but not for him. He was ex Navy. When he orgasmed, me, I damned near fainted from the pleasure. After that I never saw him again. Rats!

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