text:
(CNN) - Accused Arizona gunman Jared Lee Loughner was not registered to any political party, and in fact hand wrote "independent" on two separate voter forms, county officials said Monday.
Pima County, Arizona, Registrar of Voters Chris Roads said Loughner registered to vote on September 26, 2006. Voters are not required to list a political party, but are instructed to write at least the first three letters of any party they want to be affiliated with. The state of Arizona recognizes dozens of affiliations.
Records obtained by CNN show Loughner chose to write IND on one form, and independent (misspelled) on the second form.
Roads said Loughner voted in the general elections in 2006 and 2008, but did not vote in 2010. The county lists his voter status as inactive after mail sent to his address was twice returned as undeliverable.
Does this piece of out dated evidence suggest that the rhetoric of the republicans and tea party (established post this document) had no influence on the gunman?
Wow! The literary genius made a spelling error! Or maybe the rest of us got it wrong because of mind control.
Voters are not required to list a political party, but are instructed to write at least the first three letters of any party they want to be affiliated with.
Required? Not true. When I registered to vote 4 years ago I left the political party box blank.
The fact that this guy had no party affiliation is irrelevant. I do think he was your workaday nutjob who happened to find encouragement or motivation in sources we may never know. The big story here is that 9 people were senseless murdered by someone who probably would not have been prevented. If he didn't buy the gun, he would have stolen it. As his own blogs show, he has been planning this for some time. The ensuing discussion about the toxicity of politics today is nonetheless a good one to have. I don't think it is appropriate for any politician to use symbols of violence to demonstrate his or her political point or ideology. Although I think that the prevalence of Fox news, Glenn Beck and all the rest has inspired a lot of the anger and vitriol in this country, this behavior is by no means exclusive. I did not hear Obermann yesterday (I don't normally listen to him anyway) but was just sickened to hear the bits of Limbaugh's broadcast that I could stand. It's his job, I know; but he is about as repugnant a human being as they come and you'd think, you'd think, that just for one day he could tone it down.
. The ensuing discussion about the toxicity of politics today is nonetheless a good one to have.
You don't have to be a member of a political party to not get caught up on the hate and second amendment remedies (angle) and we need to start a revolution (bachman on the steps of our Capitol!) or crosshair maps that have been up for months or radio and TV haters telling us how those who don't agree with us are evil and nazis and socialists!! All you need is one individual mentally unstable to get it into their heads that the only solution is to go out and kill those who don't agree with us or have "done us wrong". Olberman might be a little bit off but I have never heard him call for anyone to go out and kill we leave that to faux news and their minions.
I don't care what party affiliation this guy has, what he did was morally incomprehensible. His family must be ashamed.
You've established an interesting precedent – the implication being that those of a similar voting pattern all become "accessories to murder". while you're at it, you want to look up the registrations for the Ft. Hood shooter, the Discovery Channel hostage taker, and the Unabomber? How about serial murderers? How about obtaining his religious affiliation or tax records. That would create some interesting talking points about how anyone of the same religion or income, chariable giving, etc. should probably be watched.
So will the NY Times, the Washington Post and other MSM outlets be writing retractions that they published articles pointing fingers erroneously before gathering the facts and that the tragic shootings were the act of a insane person and were not a politically motivated rampage.? Why let facts get in the way of more angry rhetoric? Why not publish hateful articles with no factual data accusing other people of being hateful and inciting violence. Are journalists still required to have ethics? Where were the journalists when a movie came out about the assassination of GWB and a how to book for assassinating GWB? But I guess that is ok and gets a free pass when its your side slinging the hate.
The Constitution should be amended. No civilian, under any circumstamces should be able to own deadly weapons.
Drug dealing is punished so harshly (automatically) – the same should apply for catching somebody possessing firearms. Crminals would probably still get their hands on guns, but ordinary people wouldn't be playing around with them.
Guns are too easy to get, are too easy to use to kill people (the suspect in the Arizona massacre would not have gone too far with a knife!!).
The American people (the sane ones) should fight for the right to safety and should do away with the NRA lobby. It's a ridiculous notion that anybody can have the most sophisticated firearms in the 21th century. Thank you
The assassins of our public figures are rarely members of a party or group that explicitly benefits from the shooting. They are typically loners who do not readily join organizations nor do they even have a well thought out political position.
They do surface, however, during times of angry divisiveness when the media is full of extreme statements. The public anger gives them the blessing to execute their own private vengeance - one that has meaning only in the warped mind of that individual.
The call to "tone down the rhetoric" is to deny the wackos the fuel. No one expects that this shooter was acting on explicit instructions from anyone but the rhetoric was feeding the beast.
You can disagree and propose alternate theories and argue that yours is better but none of this requires us to insult each other, disrespect each other (Libertards and Repuglias), tie the other side to hated groups (Nazis, Jihadists), or create lies.
No political affiliation? Who did he shoot and who did he vote for? Many tea party supporters might call themselves indepenndent, but how many of them vote for democratic or left leaning candidates? How many left wing politicians put cross hairs on political districts, and how many preach about reloading and citizen revolts as a way to justify attempted murder or murder? Not jumping to conclusions is one thing but this hateful rhetoric paints the picture by itself, all we have to do is look at the picture.
How do we prepare ourselves for something so tradgec? Prayers go out to all the lives lost and to the congress woman.
So what, I am an independent. I registered as an independent because I wanted the right to vote is whichever primary election I want to vote in, not the one of a specific party. This notion that this guy was driven, if only through verbal directive, by people like Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, O'Reilly and members of the House and Senate who used words like, illiterate and illegal immigrants, treason, socialist, along with phrases such as "Selling out of America" and "Government Death Committees" for the new healthcare bill, has merit. When you have someone who is unstable, and you pound the person with hate messages 24/7, you are pouring gasoline on a burning fire. Where did he get the money to purchase a Glock-19? Why did he purchase extension clips for 31 rounds of ammunition? Why did he go to Walmart to buy boxes of ammunition, and not the store where he purchased the gun? Why did he target a Democrat Congresswoman? You are going to find out that his father helped stoke the fire of hatred in this guy. Now go find out what his father was thinking and saying everyday.
Awesome, now that they got the important stuff out of the way, they can convict him.
This goes to show once again that some small town single, young WHITE male goes off on killing spree,"in the name of some Voice in his head told him to do so. Now here come the gun lobbiest with there increase the gun laws. WAKE UP CALL. This will not do any good for a criminal who does follow the laws of the land any way. Those poor people have my deepest prayers.
Yes, that's the point. The Tea Party catered to Independent voters!
Oh well, he's an "Independent"...they never have any political leanings and are never susceptible to a toxic political atmosphere created by right-wing lunatics. (sarc)
It really was disgusting to see the left trying to make political hay out of this event. How many more times have they got to be wrong before they can wait and see what the evidence shows?
The fact that people are even trying to tie him to a certain political party, and the fact that people are even concerned about what political party he associates himself with is sickening. Is THAT what the state of our politics is? Which party to blame for a senseless act of violence? That's a shame.
His declared political leaning means very little... I'm a registered Republican who voted for Congresswoman Giffords.
Why is his handwriting and signature so different on each form? As an adult, your handwriting doesn't change that much in a two-year span.
The spin will continue though. Some will claim Independents are the Tea Party. And others will claim that his claim to be Independent underscores is loner mentality.
Bottom line is that he is a a free agent to be pinned onto any group or movement that is being spun as undesirable.
Funny how its so important to discredit the guy. Dont ask what he was thinking lets use our powers to read his mind and tell everyone. Typical of our country. We bash everyone and don't really try to solve problems. We hide them.
It is obvious that no political affiliation is the cause of his heinous actions. but public personas need to realize that disturbed individuals will latch on to irresponsible rhetoric and publications of violent verbage. Also notable, the shooter's friends stated the abused substances on a daily basis. They mentioned pot and the shooter also almost dying from ETOH poisoning...at, or close by the H.S.during school hrs. From my exp. as a nurse, ppl admit to less than what they ACTUALLY consume. What else was the shooter using for yrs and how much did yrs of substance abuse contribute to his paranoia?


text:
More than a dozen Newtown parents directly and tragically linked to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, candidly recalled the December day that changed their lives in an emotional "60 Minutes" segment that aired Sunday night.
They spoke of frantic phone calls and fraying nerves as the day wore on and parents gathered at the local firehouse had still not located their children.
"There were people everywhere ... and you really had to push to get through," said Nicole Hockley, the mother of one of the first-graders in Victoria Soto's class, killed in the attack. "We were all just jostling because we were trying to find our kids."
The interview aired on the eve of a big lobbying day for gun control supporters, which brought President Barack Obama to the University of Hartford and will send 11 relatives of Sandy Hook victims, including Hockley, to Washington where they will push for federal gun control legislation. In the "60 Minutes" segment, parents and relatives made an emotional plea for more stringent background checks and limits to the size of ammunition magazines.
"You can have a million bullets but if you have to put them in one at a time, the ability to do any kind of real damage is significantly reduced," said Bill Sherlock, the husband of Sandy Hook school psychologist Mary Sherlock, who died confronting shooter Adam Lanza. "It's simple arithmetic. If you have to change magazines 15 times instead of five times you have three more instances where something could jam," something could go wrong and potential victims can escape as 11 students did during a lull in Lanza's shooting rampage, he added.
While the gun control debate was certainly the backdrop of the interview and what called the victims' relatives to the studio, the focus, more than anything, remained fixed on the memory of their children and loved ones, and their experiences on and since Dec. 14.
Hockley remembered the relief of finding her son Jake, suddenly shattered by the uncomfortable reminder that her other son Dylan, who had not yet been found, may not have survived.
"A woman asked me, 'what classroom was your other child in?' And I said, Miss Soto's. And she said, 'I heard she got shot.' And I got really angry at her and I remember very clearly saying, 'don't you dare say that to me if you don't know it's true.'" Hockley said. Teacher Victoria Soto did in fact die in the attack.
"I just pushed by her but I couldn't find Dylan's classroom or anyone from his class anywhere," said Hockley.
It was Gov. Dannel Malloy who finally, hours after the last shots were fired, broke the news to parents gathered in a back room at the firehouse.
"[He] had the duty to stand in front of the room and tell us that if we were in that room then our child or adult wasn't coming back to us," Hockley recalled.
Jimmy Greene, the father of Ana Marquez-Greene, who also died in the shooting, spoke about finding his other child, who also attended Sandy Hook, safe and terrified.
"I saw my son's teacher in a living room area ... Isaiah popped up and I just went and grabbed him and held him and he was crying, 'Daddy, you know, there were so many gunshots. I saw this and I saw that,'" Greene recalled. "So I just took my son in my arms—he's a big kid, but I took him like he was two years old again and held him on my shoulder and was just running and running from room to room trying to locate Ana's class."
His wife, Nelba Marquez-Greene, who is also among the group flying to Washington Monday evening, was driving to Sandy Hook when she learned that their son was okay.
"I was texting [Jimmy] every ten or fifteen seconds," she said. "Ana, question mark. And then Ana, exclamation point. Because we had Isaiah. I didn't understand why we didn't have Ana."
When she arrived at the school and later the firehouse and was eventually told to head into a back room, she didn't want to go.
"I knew what the back room meant. In my heart, as a mother, I knew what the back room meant."
Some of the most touching testimony regarded how the parents are coping with the absence of the quirky kids who were at the center of their lives.
Francine Wheeler said she dreams of her son Benjamin all the time. "And we talk," she said. "And he and I talk when I take my walks. And I just feel him. If I ask him to be present he is. And I know he'll always be there."
Jackie Barden said she feels distance growing between her and her son Daniel, who died in the shooting. "Sometimes it's too painful to think about him. And then I feel guilty because I need to think about him and keep him alive, but it's so hard because we miss him so much."
Nicole Hockley said that she keeps Dylan's cremated remains next to his photo in her bedroom. "Every morning I kiss him good morning and say hi. And he's the last thing I kiss before I go to bed at night. And every night I beg for him to come to me in my dreams so I can see him again. And during the day, I just focus on what I can do to honor him and make change."
Hockley and 10 other members of the Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit pushing for federal gun control legislation, will fly aboard Air Force 1 with the president to Washington Monday night, where they will spend the week lobbying Congress for change. They represent nine victims killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Lars Iyer's first novel Spurious (Melville House) is by turns, witty, sad, and profound, and garnered serious acclaim on its release earlier this year. Spurious originated in a blog of the same name. There are two sequels on the way—Dogma should be on shelves in early 2012, and Exodus the year after. Lars teaches philosophy at Newcastle University (so it's no wonder that Spurious reads like a discursive philosophy course by way of the Marx brothers). Lars was kind enough to talk to Biblioklept in depth about his work and writing. In addition to his teaching, writing, and blogging, you will also find Lars on Twitter.
Biblioklept: Your novel Spurious began as a blog and then was published by Melville House, a thriving indie publisher that also began life as a blog. At a recent talk you gave at the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy and music festival, you discuss the freedom blogging allows for writers to develop their "legitimate strangeness." Why is "legitimate strangeness" important for writers, and how does blogging help facilitate it?
Lars Iyer: Sometimes it is necessary to depart. Sometimes it is necessary to leave it all behind. That's how I understood the act of blogging, back when I started Spurious, the blog which shares the same name as the novel.
As someone who had made some progress as an academic – a journey which implies valuable training as well as compromise and despair – I thought a kind of exodus was necessary, from existing forms of published writing. Leave it all behind!, I told myself. Leave the Egypt of introductory books and academic journals and edited collections behind. Leave the slave-drivers behind, and the sense you have of being a slave. Leave capitalism and capitalist relations behind. Leave behind any sense of the importance of career and advancement. Leave behind those relationships that are modelled on investment and return.
Sometimes a kind of solitude is necessary. You need to be alone, to regather your forces, to marshall your strength. But what is really necessary is a solitude in community. You're on your own, depending on your own resources. But your solitude is lightened: because you know that there are others like you, who have likewise expelled themselves from captivity; because you know that others share your sense of disgust and self-disgust, that they too have gone out to the desert to do battle with the demons sent by capitalism into each of our souls; because there are others, like you, who see writing as both scourge and liberation, others who see it as a spiritual trial, others looking to destroy who they were and be reborn, and to keep themselves in rebirth.
In the end, the desert is paradise, and the world the blogger has left behind, with its whips and fleshpots, is the real desert.
Cultivate your legitimate strangeness: that was my mantra. 'Cultivate', because it is a struggle, a kind of asceticism. To drive the demons out, you have to know that they are there. A kind of self-knowledge is necessary – not the petty narcissism we find in the 'misery memoir', but a growing awareness of those forces that have constituted you, that have made you what you are. 'Your legitimate strangeness': 'Your', because it is yours, your space, the person you are, that you have become, even as you might alter this space, remake it. 'Legitimate' – that part of you that is not yet subsumed by capitalism, that free part of yourself that is not a slave. 'Strangeness' – because it must appear strange to the slaves and their masters, to everyone around you.
Why is this important to the writer? Some of us write because of our alienation. We have had no one to speak to, no friends, no conversations. There was no one around. Thoreau went to the woods to find himself. We went to our rooms. We went to literature, and philosophy, without knowing anything of literature and philosophy. We worked on our own.
There is something pathetic about this. Shouldn't we have been fighting the world instead? Shouldn't we have been ready on the barricades? But there were no barricades. There was no solidarity. We belonged to nothing, and had gone a little mad, a little reclusive, from belonging to nothing.
In one sense, since we lacked education, lacked culture, since our world was not one which valued the ideas and writers that we came to, our exodus was pathetic. We were imitators, play-pretending at being what we are not. We'd come too late; the party was over. We stood in the ruins, and the ruins mocked us. What could we have achieved, that had not been achieved to a much higher level before? What could we have made, that had not already been made, and much more competently, much more measuredly? We lacked the basic skills. We lacked the ability to write – even that. We lacked the breadth of culture, the breadth of scholarship.
But seen in another light, we discovered ourselves as outsiders, like those outsider artists who practiced their vocation outside of institutions. What we made was crude and simple, true — especially when compared to what went before – but it did have a certain power to affect. It had an urgency, a desperation, which might, perhaps, appeal to others. We were capable of only scraps and fragments, to be sure – dreck – but dreck marked by a moving sincerity.
I wondered – and this was the beginning of Spurious, the novel, and of its sequels – whether there was a way of folding this sense of posthumousness, of coming too late and lacking the old skills, into the practice of writing. Maybe it was time to come back from the desert, which had taught me only the extent and depth of my stupidity. Maybe it was time to write with a new kind of writing . . .
Biblioklept: That "sense of posthumousness, of coming too late" figures heavily in Spurious. Is Spurious the "new kind of writing" you are aiming for? While the book has a fragmentary, even elliptical quality, it also reminds me of novels in the picaresque tradition. What form does this new kind of writing you invoke take?
LI: Spurious is a book on its hands and knees. For me, it feels like the last book, the last burst of laughter before the world ends. But it also feels like the first one, because it has loosened the hold of the past. It says: a whole form of literary pretence is over.
Writing to a friend, in 1916, before the composition and publication of the work that would make him famous, the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig wrote, 'My true book will appear only as an opus posthumum: I do not want to have to defend it or know about its "influence"'. He writes something similar, a year later, in another letter: 'I will only truly speak after my death …, I place my entire life beneath the sign of that "posthumousness"'. Rosenzweig was confident that there would be a culture to evaluate his work. He was confident that there would be a place for his posthumous work among the greats – that there would still be greats, such that he might find his place among them. He was sure, in other words, that the old world would continue as it was; that there would still be master-works, still be the geniuses who wrote them, and still be the critics whose evaluations would be trusted by a general public.
A similar confidence in an author today would be a sign of delusion. Literature is one strand among many in our multi-braided culture. True, it retains something of its prestige; it is studied at universities, reviewed in serious newspapers — but it occupies an increasingly marginal role. The 'great names' are, for the most part, only cultural markers, ready for commercialisation (Kafka oven gloves in the tourist shop in Prague; the Brontë Balti House in Haworth; the Pride and Prejudice fully immersive interactive environment). But it is not only marginalisation that should be feared; recognition, too, should be. I think of the stupidity of documentary 'infotainment' on writers and artists, and rise of the vast, say-everything biography, that says nothing at all (as Mark Fisher has written, the biography is an end of history form, making the reassuring claim that 'it was all about people').
Literature continues. But it does so, in contemporary literary fiction, as a kind of empty form. As the anonymous blogger of Life Unfurnished has put it: contemporary literary fiction gives 'the appearance alone of literature'; it is a genre 'in which, for the writer, the sense of Writing Literature is dominant, and, for the reader, the sense of Reading Literature is dominant'.
Reviewing Jean-Luc Godard's film Every Man For Himself, Pauline Kael writes, 'I got the feeling that Godard doesn't believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn't really believe in movies anymore, either'. Without agreeing with Kael's assessment of Godard, I'd like to paraphrase her formulation: I think literary writers want to write literary fiction without believing in literature – without, indeed, believing in anything at all.
It seems to me that the literary gestures are worn out – the creation of character, plot, the contrivance of high-literary language and style as much as the avoidance of high-literary language and style, and the abandonment of most elements of the creation of character and plot. The 'short, elliptical sentences' of which the blogger of Life Unfurnished writes, the 'absence of fulsome description', the 'signs of iconoclastic casualness', the 'colloquialisms', the 'lack of trajectory', the 'air of the incidental': all are likewise exhausted.
What, then, is to be done? As writers, as readers, we are posthumous. We've come too late. We no longer believe in literature. Once you accept this non-belief, once you affirm it in a particular way, then something may be possible.
Witold Gombrowicz seems to advocating a return to older forms of literary insouciance: 'Where are the good old days, when Rabelais wrote as a child might pee against a tree, to relieve himself? The old days when literature took a deep breath and created itself freely, among people, for people!' But we cannot simply return to Rabelais, as Gombrowicz knew. Too much has happened! If a kind of self-consciousness is a distinguishing mark of the contemporary literary novelist, this is not something that can be relinquished altogether. The role of centuries of writing – of the rise of the nineteenth century bourgeois novel, of modernism and so on – must be marked.
But it can be marked by portraying our distance now from the conditions in which the great works of literature and philosophy were written. W. and Lars, the characters in Spurious, revere Rosenzweig. But this is also reverence for a culture that would deem Rosenzweig and his work important – a culture that is completely different from the one which W. and Lars occupy. True, they revere contemporary masters, too – the filmmaker Béla Tarr, for example – but Tarr lives far away, in very different conditions. W. and Lars occupy the world of the present, and the world that valued the ideas they value, the world that sustained those ideas and nurtured their production, has disappeared. Much of the humour of the book comes from the fact that its characters are men out of time – gasping in awe at Rosenzweig's work at one moment, leafing through gossip magazines at another; proclaiming a great love of Kafka one minute, playing Doom on a mobile phone the next.
It is in this sense that there might appear to be an overlap between Spurious and novels in the picaresque tradition, which extends from sixteenth century Spain to the present day. Picaresque, it has been argued, appears as a result of a tension between an old world and a new one. The Spain of the first picaresque novels was in a period of difficult transition, from the stability of the medieval order to the age of a new, self-assertive individuality. Poverty and war were all around. The picaresque is produced in a world where human solidarity is lacking, and the individual no longer has a place in the world. The episodic journeys of the picaresque novel reflect the lack of coherence of its central characters, the lack of secure identity – a kind of cosmic loneliness.
Some picaresque features can be found in Spurious. The novel is episodic, and its characters lack a place in the world, even a place in history. W. and Lars play-pretend at various roles, trying on the mantle of the religious person or the philosophical thinker. W., in particular, yearns after friendship. But the characters are not roguish, as the picaro of a picaresque novel is supposed to be. W. is perfectly sincere. And picaros do not usually come in pairs.
Biblioklept: Speaking of your pair Lars and W., there's a strong friendship there that strikes me as very realistic and actually quite moving. Reading Spurious I was reminded strongly of one of my own friendships, which is perhaps based on equal parts degradation and love. Lars and W. evoke both extreme pathos and a kind of deep existential anxiety that manifests in humor. Parts of Spurious read almost like verbal slapstick (if that metaphor can hold any water). How important is humor—what do you think the humor in Spurious is "doing"?
LI: Humour? I'm with Gilbert Sorrentino: 'In a country such as ours we have reached a point at which there is hardly anything left to do but laugh or cry. It's a kind of hysterical laughter, it's strained and unreasoning laughter, or it is a morbid, bleak sobbing. I don't think that anything is going to get changed in this country except that it's going to become grimmer'.
Sorrentino's referring to the USA, but he could just as well be referring to the UK. We lack the grounds for belief, for hope, for a future. There's economic disaster — not simply the credit crunch, but neoliberalism in general: corporatisation, unemployment, job insecurity, casualisation, the privatisation of public utilities. Beyond this, there are the effects of climate change: drought and hunger, failure of whole nations, wars, migrants. The temptation of 'morbid, bleak sobbing' is extreme, as is the desire to drink oneself into oblivion like the barflies in Béla Tarr films.
Sometimes, it feels that there is an imposture in the very fact of being alive. It is as though getting out of bed in these terrible conditions were already an imposture, let alone trying to think or write. What can we do, really do, about the disaster? 'To hope is to contradict the future', Cioran says somewhere. Better to lie down and wait for the end. Better to give up before you begin.
'I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves', Andrei Tarkovsky says, with marvellous ill-temper. And, on another occasion: 'I accept happiness only in children and the elderly, with all others I am intolerant'. It's true that joy and happiness seem ill-suited to our times, all the more in that joy and happiness are promoted in that ideology of positivity which is everywhere today. But perhaps there is a sense in which one might legitimately laugh at the apocalypse, albeit with what Sorrentino calls a 'hysterical laughter'.
A sage in the Ramayana tells us that there are three things which are real: god, human folly, and laughter. 'Since the first two surpass human comprehension', he says, 'we must do what we can with the third'. So we must laugh at folly, laugh at greed and smugness, opportunism and corruption, as eternal flaws in the human condition; laugh, and dream of a better world, knowing that it won't come.
But this kind of laughter is too genial for me. It treats human folly as eternal, which I'm sure in many ways it is, but ignores suffering, dying, the real hell of our globalised world. And I worry that it also spares the one who laughs. True, you can laugh retrospectively at your own stupidities. What an idiot I was when I young!, you might say. But there is a broader sense in which we are, each of us, implicated in the present state of the world. It is our responsibility, in some important way. For me, to laugh sagely at one's own foolishness is still too little.
What is the humour of Spurious doing, then? As many reviews of the novel have shown, the 'verbal slapstick' of the characters is part of a whole tradition of double acts and comic routines. I wanted W.'s insults of Lars to exhibit the same virtuosity as the physical humour of the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton. I think there is a whole art of the insult. But I think something else is going in the novel, too.
Alenka Zupančič argues that comedies are never truly intersubjective. '[C]omedy is above all a dialogical genre', she grants; but comic heroes are 'extracted, by their passion, from the world of the normal intersubjective communication'. What they are really doing is seeking 'to converse solely with their 'it/id"'. Dialogues, in comedy, are really monologues; the hero is really only obsessed with his basic, chaos-ridden drives. As Zupančič suggests, 'The comedy of such dialogues does not come from witty and clever exchanges between two subjects, or from local misunderstandings that make (comic) sense on another level of dialogue, but from the fact that the character is not really present in the dialogue he is engaged in'. On this account, the cruelty of the 'verbal slapstick' of the friendship in Spurious, which sees W. continually berating his poor friend, would actually be directed at W. himself. W., the only candidate for being the 'comic hero' of Spurious, would use Lars as merely the occasion for the continuation of his monologue.
But this interpretation doesn't quite work for me, either. The 'it' that drives the exchanges of the characters is not only a feature of W.'s psychic makeup, of the chaos of his drives. Both characters are mesmerised by a real disaster. And both — particularly W. — are mesmerised by their partial responsibility for this disaster. The 'strained and unreasoning' laughter of Spurious is a response to the grimness of the world that is of our making.
Biblioklept: For me, that "strained and unreasoning" laughter is a big part of why I enjoyed the book—I identified with the characters. Spurious isn't really, to borrow a phrase from David Shields, a "novelly-novel," but it does have elements of a "novelly-novel" (including characters with whom some readers will strongly identify). At the same time, its short sections, fragmentary nature, and willingness to cite entire paragraphs of other texts point to a new kind of writing, one perhaps anchored in its origins as a blog. How did you compose Spurious? How does the novel differ from the blog?
LI: 'A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along …', says one of Calvino's characters in Our Ancestors. I hope that's what a reader can find in Spurious: life urging along. I hope readers recognise something of their own friendships in that of W. and Lars. Spurious is not, I think, a 'novelly-novel'. It's new in some way – it has characters, some elements of plot, but it doesn't resemble other books. And I think this is due to its origins. Blogging, and then combining different categories of posts, allowed me to discover, through editing, a new kind of novel.
Blogging demands immediacy. Telling the story of W. and Lars, I couldn't rely on readers having followed it from the start. Every day, with my blog posts, I had to present these characters and their situation anew, and in a manner vivid enough to engage any potential reader. In doing so, I felt rather like the writer of a strip cartoon. Charles Schultz's Peanuts had longer narrative arcs, but each sequence he published in daily newspapers had to stand on its own. Likewise with the posts at the blog. Each post had to have its own internal drama, a kind of 'verbal slapstick', even as it could be contained within a larger narrative arc.
My loyalty was, for a long time, to the readers of my blog, and I produced new material for them daily. But I thought some of the thematic strands developing at the blog – the trips to Freiburg and Dundee, for example, or the reflections on Kafka and on the Messiah – were being obscured by the quantity and disparateness of W. and Lars material. A selection had to be made. This is where the work of editing began, of the practice of literary montage that would lead to Spurious.
Tarkovsky, in his book about film, narrates the long process of assembling the various fragments that comprise the finished film, Mirror. 'I am seeking a principle of montage which would permit me to show the subjective logic — the thought, the dream, the memory — instead of the logic of the subject', he said. He was looking for a way to combine various elements – short narrative sequences, pieces of music and poetry, etc. – into a living whole.
I was doing the same thing, in my own way. Spurious is a hybrid of many elements of the blog. There was a story about W. and Lars, but also one about damp –– a real story, which I wrote about at the blog. I added quotations, too, as well as incorporating the narratives of the lives of various thinkers. And I edited until I felt that life was urging along.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?
LI: I have thousands of pages of photocopies, which I made, full of ardour, during my first jobs as an academic. I thought I'd never get a permanent job, and wanted to make my own library of knock-off books in my rented room. Perse, Trakl, Tsvetayeva, Duras, and so many others: no printed book could mean as much to me as my annotated duplicates.


text:
Back Glass Repair for Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Back Glass Repair
- Cracked Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Back Repair. Is your back glass cracked or shattered?
- Our certified experienced technicians will replace your back glass in under 30 minute or less and make your phone look new again.
- 6 month warranty on all repairs.
- All parts in stock.
Local customers please visit the Fayetteville or Camp Creek location for same day repair service.
Camp Creek: 404-786-9187
Fayetteville: 404-889-5524
Out-of-state customers that wish to mail the device in for repair, please print & fill out the mail-in repair form. Mail your device with the form after purchasing this service. Please contact us for questions or assistance.
We Also Recommend


text:
FAQ How do I turn off autobuilding of Java code?
JDT uses the autobuild facilities provided by the platform. If a resource changes, the platform checks the project description file (see .project in your projects). When the file contains a reference to the Java builder, the builder gets notified of the change and will then compile the Java source file and its dependents. The following project description file snippet shows that the Java builder is associated with the project:
<buildSpec> <buildCommand> <name>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javabuilder</name> <arguments> </arguments> </buildCommand> </buildSpec>
If a workspace gets large—say, tens of thousands of files—the process of checking each project, activating all registered builders, and discovering whether anything needs to be rebuilt owing to a single resource save may have a considerable impact on the responsiveness of the workbench. In these situations, autobuild can be turned off through Window > Preferences > General > Workspace > Build automatically.
Even for smaller workspaces, turning off autobuilding may be a useful feature. For instance, when importing a large number of plug-ins from CVS, it may make sense to turn off autobuilding first. After all files are checked out, autobuilding is turned on again, and all pending builds are run in one swoop.
See Also:
This FAQ was originally published in Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs. Copyright 2004, Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. This text is made available here under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0.


text:
Charlie Hunnam dropped out of Fifty Shades Of Grey just in time for Thanksgiving. The "official" reason according to the studio:
"The filmmakers of Fifty Shades of Grey and Charlie Hunnam have agreed to find another male lead given Hunnam's immersive TV schedule, which is not allowing him time to adequately prepare for the role of Christian Grey,"
Bullsh-t, right?
No one is believing this explanation, not even the reporters from outlets that have to be nice to the studios. Because the managing of his workload and those kinds of details would have been sorted out at the time he accepted the deal. And also…what preparation?
Make sure your ass looks good when you take off your pants and figure out how to f-ck convincingly on camera – we`re not expecting Chiwetel Ejiofor here in 12 Years A Slave, how hard could it be, no pun intended?
The Hollywood Reporter suggests that the real reason Charlie bailed is because he couldn't handle the pressure:
"Two sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Hunnam, 33, was overwhelmed with the attention he received from being cast in the movie and got cold feet about carrying such a high-profile project. Universal was forced to hire bodyguards for the actor at a recent Sons of Anarchy premiere, where questions about Fifty Shades dominated the red carpet.
The sources caution that Hunnam had no reservations about the role of Christian Grey, just the media and fan frenzy that came along with it, especially as he was transitioning from Sons to Fifty Shades so quickly."
So was he afraid of the Twi-Hards?
Was he nervous about the horny housewives and how they would suffocate the rest of his career?
These are legitimate concerns. Look what Robert Pattinson has to deal with.
It's worth noting though that THR's "sources" have to be coming from Universal, the studio behind the film. Because they made a point of stressing that Hunnam's personal anxiety was the problem and not the project itself which is their way of trying to convince people that the project isn't sh-t. You know how it works in this business though. If you're telling me that's NOT the reason, I'm more inclined to think it IS the reason.
What if it was less about Hunnam's personal anxiety than it was about his instincts about the quality of the film franchise that would have dominated his professional life for the next 3-5 years, minimum?
They keep trying to sell Christian Grey as the "most coveted role" in Hollywood. And all we've had so far is a series of B to C list actors campaigning for it. As I noted in my initial post when Hunnam was cast, "if, for example, Hunnam had beaten out a Jake Gyllenhaal or a Ryan Gosling to win the role, there could be some swagger here, no doubt. But this is a game the A List didn't want to play. Instead then, Hunnam was playing pick-up with lower-tier tv regulars like Ian Somerhalder and Joe Manganiello. It's not exactly knocking out Muhammad Ali".
Like George Clooney and Batman, Hunnam said yes to the wrong role for the wrong reason: he wanted to be a Movie Star. The difference here is that Hunnam had the balls to back away from a project that obviously didn't smell quite right to him. So perhaps it's not that he didn't have the balls to face the expectations but that he had enough of them to be able to say, yeah, I need to walk out of this sh-t and wait for something better. Is that integrity?
Whatever you want to call it, they have to keep looking now. And, really, who's left?
You know who's left?
Justin Timberlake.


text:
I shared with a few of my girlfriends that one of my prayers entering the dating scene was that I'd rather hear "crickets" than have another broken heart. But, I see now, that it's been in the broken hearts and relationships that I've learned the most about myself, what I need, what I can give, and what real love is and is not.
I don't think dating has ever been easy for me, but with social media, texting, dating sites, kids, and the divorced baggage, dating is HARD! As much as I wanted to remarry one day, I got to the point that I was willing to skip it altogether if it led to more pain, confusion, betrayal, or mistreatment. I wanted the girls to see healthy and if that meant mommy stayed single for the rest of my days, so be it.
It's not what I wanted, I got very lonely. I wanted to be held by physical arms. I cried out in this loneliness, similar to how I did in the loneliness of my marriage but this time without a ring or any potential prospects. The prospects that did come along left more of the same. No lasting connection or commitment. I believed their words, but they fell flat, unable to truly love through good and bad. Once again, try, split, work on forgiveness, and try again. Or should I?
I craved companionship, intimacy, honesty, and reciprocal love. But, this time it wasn't just about what I wanted, it's about what the girls and I needed and the example I wanted to set as their mom for their upcoming dating years. I needed a man to set a good example as their stepdad. This definitely raised the ante.
I couldn't risk falling for just anyone. Even though I still did in the process. God knows I'm prone to fall……..
We needed a patient man. A gentle man. A family man. A man who knows the meaning of and Supplier of biblical love. A man ready to love us all. For the long haul. Through thick and then. These would all take a strong man. If these characteristics weren't there, then we would be healthier and better off without. And, ultimately, I'd wish the same for them when they consider a husband. So, I asked God to remove if he didn't fit these qualities.
Hearing crickets on the dating scene isn't easy. It feels like a big bucket of rejection, but that's where my faith was tested. I bravely asked God to get all up in my business, so I trust that He did. Even when it hurt. Even when I didn't like it. Even when the text wasn't replied to. Even when they didn't call. Even when the ones I was warned about wouldn't stop texting or calling. Even when and even then.
I prayed for strength to endure the loneliness and what seemed to be a lack of interest or undesired interest. I reached out to my friends, I asked for prayer, I asked advice, I talked to my kids, I cried, and I learned each time. Deep down I trusted that God had my very best interests at heart. Because I only desired His will.
It never came naturally to me in any way, shape, or form to date casually. My heart is programmed to love and that makes dating (to figure it out) even more difficult….I asked God to guard my heart during the process. Keeping an open and guarded heart is a tough balance.
As I type this article, I'm looking down at a beautiful ring on the fourth finger of my left hand. Engaged to a man that I'm thrilled to have around my girls. A man that I know is super hard to come by in today's world.
I get to be a wife again. I loved being a wife. But, this time, it's to my best friend. A man who I can talk about anything with and he does the same. A man with similar interests which is wonderful, but most of all, is sacrificial. He wants to love me all the days of his life. He sees that as a gift. And that makes him the best gift for us! This is how I'd want my girls loved.
Thank you, Jesus, for the crickets. It was then, in the silence and wonder, that I learned the most about You, who I am to You, and who You want for us.


text:
DAYTON, Ohio — Tyrone Garland led La Salle's guard-driven offense with 22 points, and the Explorers wrapped up the NCAA tournament's First Four by getting the better of an old-fashioned shootout, beating Boise State 80-71 on Wednesday night.
The 13th-seeded Explorers (22-9) play fourth-seeded Kansas State on Friday in Kansas City.
Ramon Galloway, one of the Atlantic 10's top scorers, added 21 points in a fast-paced offense that did pretty much whatever it wanted. The Explorers shot a season-high 63 percent from the field — 16 of 22 in the second half.
Garland went 9 of 11 from the field — his best shooting game of the season — and the Explorers were 11 of 21 behind the arc.
"It's an unbelievable feeling," Garland said. "When I came here, coach (John Giannini) told me I could help him win games and get him to the next step."
Thirteenth-seeded Boise State (21-11) got its first at-large bid and was looking for the first NCAA tournament win in its history. The Broncos were up to it in a game of top-this shooting, falling to 0-6 in the tournament.
Anthony Drmic had a game-high 28 points for the Broncos, who shot 49 percent but trailed most of the way.
La Salle is back in the tournament for the first time since 1992, a 21-year span that included a rape scandal involving three players. The men's and women's basketball coaches were fired over it in 2004, and Giannini came in to dig out the program.
Giannini led the Explorers to back-to-back 20-win seasons for the first time since 1988-90. His first coaching appearance in the NCAA tournament completed the rebuilding and came 59 years after La Salle beat Bradley 92-76 for the 1954 NCAA title — in Kansas City, no less.
His guards led the way.
"I recruited Ty really, really hard out of high school, and I told him, 'This is why I chased you all over the place, to win NCAA tournament games and see if you could be a great player,'" Giannini said. "I knew he could do it."
Although the two teams had never played, they felt like they knew each other from somewhere. They saw mirror images of themselves as they watched videos in preparation for the game — two teams that use four guards, taking an uncommonly small approach to a big man's game.
La Salle's best is the 6-foot-3 Galloway, who was second in the Atlantic 10 with 17 points per game. He's taken on a bigger role since 6-foot-11 center Steve Zack sprained his left foot in early March, sidelining him indefinitely. Zack was on crutches Wednesday, towering over the rest of the Explorers during warmups.
Boise State follows the lead of Drmic (17.3 points) and Derrick Marks (16.3), who formed the highest-scoring guard tandem in the Mountain West. The Broncos will sometimes put five guards on the floor, opting for speed over size.
The Broncos' concession to size got them going early. Six-foot-9 forward Ryan Watkins scored their first three baskets, getting the ball inside. La Salle went with its slick guards, who quickly settled in behind the arc.
Sam Mills hit three 3s, Galloway scored his first points off a drive to the basket, and Garland and D.J. Peterson made layups for a 22-12 midway through the first half, prompting Boise State to call a timeout.
The Explorers would never be seriously threatened again.
Coming out of the timeout, Galloway took a charge from Watkins under the basket, then went down the court and hit a 3. Garland's alley-oop pass to Galloway for a dunk off a fast break gave La Salle its biggest lead, 31-17, with 5:24 left in the half. La Salle led 35-27 at the break.
Six-foot-8 forward Jerrell Wright — the Explorers' inside threat — scored four baskets in the first five minutes of the second half, keeping La Salle in control. Mills' 3-pointer extended the lead back to 14 points with 14 minutes to go.
Drmic kept the Broncos in the game, scoring 14 points in the first 10 minutes of the second half. But Boise State couldn't stop La Salle's balanced offense long enough to make a run until the closing minutes.
Marks' pull-up jumper cut it to 74-68 with 1:51 left, the closest the Broncos had been since the opening minute of the second half. The comeback ended there.
DAYTON, Ohio — Tyrone Garland led La Salle's guard-driven offense with 22 points, and the Explorers wrapped up the NCAA tournament's First Four by getting the better of an old-fashioned shootout, beating Boise State 80-71 on Wednesday night.


text:
Internet companies have run amok with our personal data, and people aren't entirely sure what to do about it, judging from the results of a new survey.
More than 90 percent of Americans feel they've lost control over how their personal information is collected and used by companies, particularly for advertising purposes, according to the results of a survey by the Pew Research Center, published Wednesday.
Eighty percent expressed concern over how third parties like advertisers accessed the data they share on social media sites. Pew did not gather the names of which sites specifically respondents meant.
The survey, which polled 607 adults online, was the Washington, D.C.-based think tank's first in a series to tackle Americans' views toward privacy after the leaks around government surveillance made by Edward Snowden last year.
The majority of respondents said people should be concerned about whether the government is listening in on their phone calls or viewing their online communications and other sensitive data.
But beyond government surveillance, the findings also reflect people's attitudes amid the increasing sophistication by which Internet companies leverage people's data for advertising.
"It's a bundle of concerns," said Lee Rainie, one of Pew's lead researchers on the project, in an interview. "It's partly surveillance, it's partly tracking, and this generalized sense that I'm losing control of my identity and my data," he said.
The constant flood of stories related to data breaches, whether it's at Target, Snapchat, or P.F. Chang's, don't help either.
But voicing concern about the level of access companies, governments and other groups have to data is one thing; taking action in response is another.
Some respondents said they have taken actions to protect their privacy, such as using a pseudonym, but a majority of respondents agreed that achieving anonymity online is not possible.
People's concerns around privacy might be part of the trade-off in using a free service. Some 55 percent of respondents said they were willing to share "some information about myself with companies in order to use online services for free."
Fewer people might be willing to make that trade-off, however, if they understood how bits of information about them is pulled together and sold to companies through complex processes, said Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies digital marketing and online privacy.
"These findings reflect a major tension at the core of people's relationship with the Internet," he said in an interview.
It's a tension that goes back many years. In a 1999 survey conducted by Turow, parents characterized the Internet as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he said, because they were both afraid of it, and considered it an important and useful service.
But companies are now getting smarter in tracking people's online behavior across devices. Google and Facebook are refining their techniques for connecting the ads people see online to whether they bought items in a physical store. Facebook's recently relaunched Atlas system lets partnered advertisers leverage Facebook members' data across the wider Internet.
To preserve privacy, the recommendation to delete cookie files doesn't really apply anymore, because more tracking is being done on mobile where cookies don't work.
Perhaps instead people should contact companies like Google and Facebook, and ask them to be more transparent about exactly what data they sell, and to whom, Turow said.
Government agencies like the U.S. Federal Trade Commission can help to preserve privacy too, or at least help companies become more transparent. Snapchat entered into an agreement earlier this year with the FTC to settle charges that it deceived users about the amount of personal data it collects.
Pew's Rainie said the nonprofit would explore more of the responses people say they can take in the group's upcoming surveys.
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com


text: Is it possible to use this with 2 USB memory stick? More specifically, I am try to copy files from USB stick A to USB stick B. I connect the USB 2 GO cable to a POWERed USB hub. I have previously tried (and successfully) use a USB keyboard + USB mouse + a USB stick at the same time. So I know the USB hub is working.


text:
Always together, rice and beans are the staple of Brazilian home-cooking. As a child growing up, I had them many times every week, alongside beef, chicken, pork, or even seafood. In Rio de Janeiro black beans are more common, whereas in Sao Paulo you'll see a more reddish variety. I'm from Sao Paulo, but my Mom was born and raised in Rio, so in our home you never knew what kind of beans to expect. Indeed, cooking beans is a weekly endeavor in Brazil: you make enough to last the whole week, then you make it again. And again. And again. It sits in the fridge, waiting, getting better each day.
I'm not talking about "feijoada", Brazil's national dish "par excellence", made exclusively with black beans. I'll post a feijoada recipe in the future, but for now here's a much simpler preparation that you can adapt in many ways to suit your tastes. The only thing that I won't endorse (or forgive) are canned beans. If you go that route, you're on your own. 😉
2 cups dried black beans, picked
2 bay leaves
1/2 T vegetable oil
2 very thick slices of bacon, diced
1 yellow onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 t ground cumin
red pepper flakes
ground black pepper
fresh cilantro (optional)
Place the beans in a bowl and cover them with two inches of water. Allow them to soak overnight (I normally do that early in the morning and cook the beans in the evening). Drain, discarding the water. Place the soaked beans in a pressure cooker, add cold water to cover by 1 inch, add the bay leaves, and bring it to a boil. Cook under pressure for 15 minutes, then release the pressure. If you don't have a pressure cooker, help the economy and buy one right away! 😉 Actually, you can cook them in a normal pan, but it will take 1 to 2 hours. Cook until the beans become tender (they can be prepared up to this point and then kept in the fridge overnight).
Heat the oil in a small frying pan. Sautee the bacon pieces until they are golden, add the onion and sautee more, until dark golden. You do want some color here. When the onion is getting dark, add the garlic and cumin and sautee for a couple of minutes. Season lightly with salt and pepper, add red pepper flakes.
If you made the beans the day before, heat them until boiling, then add the bacon/onion mixture plus all the oil accumulated in the pan. Mix it all well and allow the beans to simmer for a while (10 to 30 minutes), uncovered. Remove some of the beans into a small bowl and smash the grains with a fork, forming a paste. Return the paste to the simmering pan and cook everything for 5 or 10 more minutes. Add salt to your taste; add more pepper and cilantro if you desire. Remove the bay leaves.
Serve over white rice with the meat of your choice. We had it with pulled pork and arugula salad, served on the same plate, the way my family likes to do it…
to print the recipe, click here.
Grill or fry some hot sausages, cut them in thick slices and add to the beans together with the onion mixture. In this case, no need to use bacon.
Use pancetta (about 6 thin slices, diced) instead of bacon, add celery to the onion mixture, and some flat leaf parsley at the end instead of cilantro.
Add some hot pepper sauce for extra heat…
Comments: Cooking time for beans vary a lot. With a pressure cooker, it is possible to overcook, therefore, check them out after 15 minutes, and continue simmering off-pressure. Buy different brands, experiment, and decide which is your favorite. Personally, I think nothing compares to Brazilian beans, but here in the US I go for Mexican.
Play with the amount of liquid, some people like their beans very soupy, some prefer a thicker version. All you have to do is gently cook it down, uncovered. Do not add any thickening agent, such as a roux, or cornstarch. Those have no place in this dish.
These photos give you an idea of the amount of beans to use when making the paste, no need to worry about precise measurements:
Finally, I should add that each Brazilian family has its own way to cook beans, just like Italian families won't ever agree on a single bolognese sauce. 😉
This is my Mom's recipe, an 86 year old lady who still makes THE BEST black beans in the world…


text:
Documentary producer Hillary Heath took a camera crew to Atmore, Alabama to get a look at life inside a prison where some of America's most violent inmates are housed.
The Doc Block staff asked documentary producer Hillary Heath via e-mail about filming "LOCKUP: Holman Correctional Facility."
Doc Block: Over the years Holman has made a name for itself as a dangerous place to serve time. How do the inmates describe the prison?
Hillary Heath, LOCKUP Inside producer: Since it opened in the late 1960's, Holman has had a reputation for being the most violent prison in the state. When I asked inmates to describe the place they used names like "The Slaughterhouse," "Slaughter Pen of the South" and "House of Pain," which all refer to the frequent stabbings that used to occur there. "The Bottom" and "The Pit" speak to its geographical location in the southernmost part of the state. As one inmate described it, in Alabama "you can't get any lower than this."
According to both staff and inmates Holman is not nearly as dangerous as it used to be. Since Warden Grantt Culliver's arrival, violence among inmates is down. But within the prison community reputations die hard. Holman's deeply southern locale only adds to its mystique. The fact is many of the inmates there are serving lengthy sentences for violent crimes including murder. The potential for violence is still very real.
Today Holman is grossly overcrowded. Originally built to house 500 inmates, the facility now holds 1000 men. The warden told me his biggest challenge is finding enough qualified people willing to work in what is perhaps Alabama's most notorious prison.
Doc Block: The inmates talked about the heat in the prison, mostly in the summer. You were there in mid to late June. How did it seem to you?
Heath: Warden Culliver invited us to a weekly staff meeting where the main topic of discussion was whether there was adequate ventilation throughout the prison. It was late June, and southern Alabama's 100-degree temperatures had begun to set in. Air conditioning is a luxury the prison cannot afford. Hundreds of industrial fans run constantly as a means of cooling down the facility. The hum of these fans is clearly audible throughout the documentary.
The hottest place by far was the kitchen where inmate workers sweat it out for hours each day. The kitchen felt like a sauna. Within minutes, we were all covered in sweat. While the 30-cent-an-hour jobs at Holman are highly coveted, I spoke to one kitchen worker who told us he couldn't wait to transfer out.
Doc Block: What were your impressions of the inmates who are members of the Aryan Brotherhood and other hate groups talking about "being able to take over the prison" if they wanted to? Warden Culliver seems to take it in stride.
Heath: As Warden Culliver pointed out in his interview, white supremacy is far less influential at Holman than at other prisons. This is clearly due to the fact that nearly 70% of the population is African American.
As with most correctional facilities across the U.S., these kinds of groups are an undeniable fact of prison life. I met Steven Parker in segregation where he was serving time for assaulting another prisoner. According to his account, he slit the inmate's jugular vein after a deal over a tattoo went awry. Steven had hoped to add another swastika to his already budding collection. He used racist, anti-Semitic language in our interview. MSNBC chose to bleep one of his more offensive phrases.
Steven went on to reveal that he'd recently become a "ranking" member of the Southern Brotherhood. He refused to explain his rank or much of anything about the group itself, but confirmed his belief in white supremacy. Steven's back story is important. He is serving life without parole for murdering his stepmother and almost killing his father. In his interview he spoke a lot about violence. Like most of the guys in segregation, he also expressed frustration over his current situation. When I asked Steven what he thought his biggest problem was, he answered, "I guess I hate too much."
I also asked him how he remains an active and ranking member of this group from a segregation cell in a predominantly black prison? Steven told me it was simple: through the mail.
Doc Block: There's a scene in the documentary where a staff member describes what is and isn't allowed to go through the mail. Some of it can get pretty risqué. Can you tell us a little more about the rules, and some of the crazy things she sees?
Heath: The mailroom serves as the main communication artery for the entire prison. Anything and everything you can imagine passes though there from greeting cards and letters to legal documents, magazines, newspapers, care packages and other items. There is also plenty of contraband.
Kyra Guyton showed us some of the items in the "reject" pile. Among them was a letter from Steven Parker addressed to another inmate. The letter contained hateful language and made threats against Warden Culliver and the prison administration.
We watched as Guyton screened hundreds of pieces of incoming mail. She told us that it is not uncommon to find money, drugs and what the prison defines as pornography. While "Playboy" and "Hustler" are banned, other seemingly racy men's magazines like "Maxim" are approved as long as the images don't reveal a breast's nipple or the outline of genitals. Guyton also explained that even though the June issue of "Maxim" might be approved, July's edition might just as easily be rejected.
Doc Block: What did you learn about julep, the prison whiskey? How do inmates make it and how do officers track it down? What did it smell like and how strong is it?
Heath: On our last day at Holman we followed several officers as they searched for julep. The 4th of July is a notorious party weekend at Holman and the staff was pretty confident they would find some. After a 30-minute search an officer found a gallon of the stuff inside one inmate's locker. The mixture resembled raw sewage; brown liquid, with dark chunks floating in. But the smell was not as vile as I'd imagined. It had an aroma of a combination of prunes and sourdough bread.
Several of the men accused the administration of planting the contraband for the purposes of our camera. But there is no denying that julep is among the many forms of contraband that can be found at Holman. The recipe for this prison brew is simple: sugar, fruit, yeast and water- all items that can be found within the facility. Let the liquid sit for a few days in the stifling Alabama heat and voila! Julep.
Doc Block: You've produced documentaries in many prisons and so, as a woman, a certain amount of "mouthing off" from male inmates is to be expected. But you had a particularly icky experience when talking to one man taking a required sex addiction class for violating "Rule 38." What happened?
Heath: According to nearly everyone I spoke with, both staff and inmates, rule violation #38 for indecent exposure (simply called a "38") is a major problem at Holman. And it's not just a problem for female officers and visitors but even for male prisoners who are sometimes flashed by fellow inmates. During my two weeks at Holman I never witnessed "38" with my own eyes. I should also mention that I was never alone inside the gates and was always accompanied by either a male officer or a two-man camera crew.
Any inmate caught committing "38" is required to complete a course on sex addiction. We attended a session where we met several inmates who had recently spent up to 45 days in segregation for committing "38." All were on probation. One man we spoke with was accused of exposing himself to members of a tour group. During class, he openly admitted to having a problem. In an interview later that day, he changed his story, saying he only admitted guilt in order to get off probation.
The conversation took a surreal turn when I asked the inmate to put himself in a woman's position. My question to him was: How would you feel if a man exposed himself to you? Rather than answer the question, he spoke about his right to fantasize about women from afar as long as it didn't involve indecent exposure. He then proceeded to describe one of those fantasies, using me as an example. That was one question I wish I'd never asked.
Doc Block: You spoke to a couple of inmates who had been on death row. Their sentences were recently commuted to life without parole. Why?
Heath: Kenney Loggins is one of many inmates in the state of Alabama to be sentenced to death for a murder he committed as a juvenile. Due to a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, these sentences have been ruled to be unconstitutional. In January, 2006 Kenney's death sentence was commuted to life without parole.
I met Kenney in segregation shortly after his release from Death Row. Before a Death Row inmate can be released into general population, he must first spend roughly 90 days in segregation to determine if he is a threat to himself or others. At first Kenney refused to speak on camera. Several days later, Kenney finally agreed to an interview, but only on the condition that we not discuss his case. He is now appealing his sentence of life without parole. The facts behind his murder conviction are heinous. In 1995, a court found him and three other teens guilty in the death of a 36-year-old woman. She was tortured and her body badly mutilated. Several of her fingers were cut off and kept as souvenirs.
Because of Kenney's refusal to talk about the murder, we instead discussed his time on Death Row. He talked about the difficulty of leaving his fellow Death Row inmates behind and even began to cry as he described the loss of a friend who'd been executed. Kenney explained that in some ways he actually preferred being on Death Row to facing the reality of serving life without parole. He went on to speak about his fear, and ambivalence of growing old in prison.
Doc Block: If you watch enough "LOCKUP" you know that inmates, especially the ones with life sentences, don't seem to have trouble getting dates. Kenney Loggins is no different. What's his story? And do you have any sense of what these women see in these guys?
Heath: Kenney made mention of a friend who was coming to visit him the following day, and that she may be willing to speak with us. The next morning, we stood by in the visiting room as a young woman named Nadia arrived. She had come all the way from Montreal just to spend a few hours with Kenney. This was apparently not her first visit to Holman. She told me they met through the mail as pen pals and from that a friendship developed.
Like Kenney, she refused to speak about the murder conviction. She also wanted to make it very clear that she was not Kenney's girlfriend. She said the two were just very close friends. Nadia went on to describe television shows she'd seen about women who'd fallen in love with men in prison. This was not how she wanted to be portrayed in our documentary. To my surprise, Nadia finally agreed to let us videotape her.
In the visiting room, or indoor "visiting yard," rules are strict. Inmates and visitors are allowed a kiss and a hug at the beginning and end of each visit. We shot their initial embrace and conversation, but Nadia and Kenney were clearly uncomfortable with our camera. We decided to give them some privacy and moved on to another part of the prison. Hours later, as the visiting period came to an end, we returned to find them holding hands and staring into each other's eyes.
Doc Block: Obviously homosexuality is a reality behind bars even with the straight inmates who are looking for a sexual connection or outlet. You got to see firsthand an unusual pair -- Precious and Marquise, a "husband and wife" couple. Marquise said he prefers women but he's in prison and this is how he deals with it. How did this scenario affect you? What surprised you the most?
Heath: One area we focused on was dorm life. As we entered Dorm Two, I noticed an inmate sewing a hem into a pair of shorts. His bunk and surrounding area were exceptionally tidy; shoes were neatly lined up and fresh laundry hung from the bed frame. He introduced himself to me as Precious.
As I began to interview Precious about domestic life at Holman, I realized that this bunk was, in fact, not his but that of another inmate. Enter Marquise. Marquise sat back and listened as Precious explained their relationship. Precious is the "wife" and Marquise is the "husband" and for the past five years they've shared just about everything. Precious is in charge of all things domestic. He does the laundry, makes coffee and puts together makeshift meals in the dorm microwave. When I asked about Marquise's role and whether he provided protection, Precious said he had no problem defending himself. Precious is nine years older than Marquise, and by his account, it was love at first sight when he first spotted the younger inmate.
When I asked Marquise if he was gay, he told me no, that, in fact, he likes women. But he also explained to me that in prison, Precious is a woman. He added that he would eventually like to get married to a real woman and become a father. They both went on to speak candidly about sex, love and relationships. It began to feel like we were taping a segment for a daytime talk show. Several times during our conversation I had to remind myself that I was on the inside of a maximum-security prison. Salacious details aside, it was easy to tell that these two men care a great deal for each other. I'm not sure what will happen with their relationship; Marquise's release date is 2010, and he may even be eligible for parole before then. Precious is serving a life sentence.


text:
We totally fell in love withRachel CrowThe X Factor
when she was on . This summer, she's back and better than ever with her debut album — and performing on tour with Big Time Rush! We got to know the little girl with the BIG voice!
Teen Mag: What inspired your new album, Rachel Crow?
Rachel Crow: I really wanted this EP to be about me and who I am. The first song is "Mean Girls," and I wanted to get across the message to bullies to stop what they're doing. Stand up for who you are, just be yourself, and I promise everyone will love you.
More From Seventeen
TM: It's so true. So what else are you loving about this album?
RC: There's this song called "Rock With U," that's upbeat and makes you want to dance! It's got this sick guitar in it, which I love. The final song on the album, "What A Song Can Do," is one of my favorites. It means a lot to me because it says how I feel about music—about picking your head up and not letting anything get you down, and about being happy with who you are.
TM: So what was the most memorable part of making this album?
RC: I think just the amazing people I got to work on it. I wrote "Mean Girls" with Toby Gad—the man who wrote, "If I Were a Boy" and "Big Girls Don't Cry." Those are amazing songs and I got the honor to write with him! I'll never forget all the experiences I shared with these people.
TM: That sounds amazing! What are you up to this summer?
RC: I'm going on tour! It's going to be exciting. I'm looking forward to the tour bus and getting to perform again. I think it's going to be cool going from city to city.
TM: What are you going to do in each of the cities?
RC: I'm thinking about buying t-shirts in each place. I want to take pictures of me in each t-shirt in every city for my Twitter followers!
TM: That would be really cool! Let's talk about fashion: What trends are you loving?
RC: I. Love. Shoes! I have shoes in my room and in my closet—baskets everywhere! I have these heels that look like Converse in white, pink, and green. They're so cool! And then there are some Steve Madden shoes that I have just fallen in love with.
TM: Can you perform in those heels?
RC: I probably will. I'm sure!
TM: We'll stay tuned. Any style advice for girls?
RC: My style is kind of funky. I think girls should always try and be unique in their style. I wear pink pants with a bright green shirt—I don't care!
TM: So you're loving the neon trend for summer?
RC: I do. I'm trying to be bright and cheery! I'll wear black lace over my bright colors to change it up.
TM: Tell us about your beauty loves?
RC: Makeup is my favorite thing ever! When I was on The X Factor, they taught me tricks for my hair and makeup, so I've actually become good at it myself!
TM: Any tricks you can share?
RC: Well, I don't have long eyelashes, but I learned if you wear eyeliner on just the rim of your eyes, it makes them look longer!
TM: Very cool. Is there one thing you can't live without?
RC: Lip gloss—honestly, it's on right now. I love Beauty Mint. It's super shiny and smells really good!
Check out Rachel's self-titled EP on Columbia Records/Syco available June 26th!
Are you going to see Big Time Rush and Rachel Crow on tour this summer? Let us know in the comments section!


text:
Ice-cold cocktails, lemonades, and sodas taste good all year round, but they truly become a necessity right about now, when just making it through another day of obscene temperatures and sticky humidity is a victory worth celebrating. These cooling drinks relieve our thirst, yes, but more than that, it sometimes feels like they have the power to restore our sanity.
When choosing a summertime bracer, it's all too easy to fall in the same old ruts: I know that I, for one, tend to chug ice-laden seltzer like it's going out of style, opting for a chilled Negroni when I want to go the booze route. But this summer, I've vowed to branch out and explore some of the other refreshing drinks that are enjoyed around the world. From a Colombian beer-and-soda refresher brightened with citrus to a palate-cleansing South Indian yogurt drink, here are twelve lesser-known hot-weather libations from around the world.
Alcoholic Drinks
All around the globe, it's common to cut alcohol with soda: see tinto de verano from Spain (see below), a mixture of red wine and lemon soda, or think of a British shandy, which adds sparkling lemonade or ginger beer to the region's beloved beers. If you've never tasted such combos, the idea of diluting delicious beer with lowly soda might sound like anathema, but there's actually a very good reason why the practice is so common: all-day drinking. Summer's festivities often call for daylong imbibing: the multitude of BBQs, those days at the beach, and early evenings next to the campfire. Sipping straight beer or wine might do you in much too quickly, but cutting the booze with soda makes the drink less potent (and more cooling) so you can make a day of it.
Colombian refajo—a mixture of crisp, dry lager and Colombiana, the country's beloved pinkish-orangey cream soda—is a perfect example of this species of drink. Somehow, the cloying flavor of the bubblegum-tinged soda makes an ideal match for the pale, hoppy beer: together, they make a beverage that's sweet yet brisk and alarmingly easy-drinking.
Refajo is a customizable drink: some prefer it stronger and more beer-heavy, while others opt to tip in extra Colombiana, and still others might stir in a shot or two of Columbia's version of aguardiente, an anise-flavored liquor that's distilled from sugarcane.
No matter how you mix it, refajo is a wonderful accompaniment to grilled meats: in the drink's native country, refajos flow at casual barbecues called asados, but here in the U.S. the drink is just as good alongside burgers and dogs. If you want to stir up refajos at home, check your well-stocked liquor store for the aguardiente and look for Colombiana at your Latin grocer. If you can't find it, feel free to substitute cream sodas such as Kola Champagne or Barq's Red Creme.
Tinto de Verano
While we're on the subject of booze and soda combos, let's take a minute to discuss Spanish tinto de verano, a red wine and lemon soda drink that's a favorite summertime sipper on the Iberian Peninsula (can you get any more hot-weather appropriate than a drink whose name literally means 'red wine of summer'?). If you like sangria, then you'll love this cheat-sheet version: it achieves remarkably similar flavors—fruit and tannins from the wine, citrus brightness from the soda—but takes all of 10 seconds to mix up (30 if you add a slice of lemon for garnish).
Tinto de verano is usually made with a bright, fruity, and cheap red wine (often entry-level Tempranillo), cut with a lemony, not-too-sweet soda called gaseosa. At home, I like to make tinto de verano with Pellegrino Limonata; if you can't find that, feel free to use lemon-flavored Fanta or even Sprite or 7-Up, but be sure to dilute those sweeter sodas with a glug of plain seltzer. Like sangria, tinto de verano pairs well with a variety of easy summer foods, but it's most often sipped solo at bars and parties.
Alright, so an easy-drinking refajo or tinto de verano enables day-long imbibing without getting you too wasted. But when it's already evening and you're ready for something a little stronger, Brazil's national cocktail, the limey and ever-so-refreshing caipirinha, could be the way to go. Calling upon just three ingredients—cachaça, a hard liquor distilled from the sugarcane that has long been the country's top export; sugar; and plenty of muddled lime, a well-mixed caipirinha is tart and, loaded with ice, incredibly cooling.
For decades, the drink—which in its home country is available in even the tiniest dive bars—was all but unknown in the U.S., as very few cachaça producers exported their brew. But in recent years, a few good brands such as Avua Prata, Novo Fogo, and Leblon have started producing for the North American market, and the caipirinha's profile (and availability) has risen. The cocktail is wonderful sipped on its own or served with seafood dishes.
Agua Fresca
The epitome of refreshing—its name translates to "fresh water"—an icy-cold agua fresca encapsulates summer not only through its temperature but also via its ingredients: sweet, ripe, tropical fruits. Made with just three ingredients—water, fruit, and sugar—an agua fresca is pretty much as close as you can get to fruit in a liquid form. To make the drink, fruits such as mango, pineapple, watermelon, and guava are blitzed in a blender with water, strained, sweetened and occasionally balanced with an additional squeeze of lemon or lime. Thirst-quneching aguas frescas are also beautifully bold in their colors: the traditional streetside stands where the drinks are sold boast a rainbow of ice-filled tubs from which vendors ladle out bright pink, wine-red and pale yellow beverages.
Though most often prepared with fruit, aguas frescas are also sometimes made with flowers, herbs, and grains: a well-known example of the latter category is horchata, the creamy cinnamon-scented rice milk drink. Also worth a taste is agua de jamaica, the floral, deep red brew made from hibiscus flowers and often accented with lime. It's the ideal antidote to a too-spicy taco or torta.
Traveling across the Atlantic, it's time for some pastis, the anise-flavored apéritif that's a summertime favorite all over France but especially in Provencal capital of Marseilles, where in 1932 the young entrepreneur and Marseillaise native Paul Ricard first commercialized the liqueur. Aniseed liqueurs had always been popular in France: perhaps a little too popular, as in 1915 pastis's progenitor, absinthe—widely blamed for crime and licentiousness in the country—was banned. But the French didn't lose their taste for high-proof, licorice-y drinks, and when Ricard introduced his product it was an immediate hit.
Like absinthe, pastis is much too strong to drink straight, and is traditionally diluted with cold water at a ratio of about five parts water to one part pastis. When water is added to the dark yellow liqueur, it becomes cloudy and light creamy yellow, a process known as the ouzo effect. Like that well-known Greek aniseed liqueur, pastis, when diluted, is sweet and not too strong and is traditionally sipped prior to a meal, preferably languorously. I think author Peter Mayle put it best in his second book, Toujours Provence: "For me, the most powerful ingredient in pastis is not aniseed or alcohol but ambiance, and that dictates how and where it should be drunk. I cannot imagine drinking it in a hurry."
Pimm's Cup
Another European beverage with a loyal following and a history stretching back even farther than pastis is Pimm's No. 1, the dark red, gin-based liqueur invented in England in 1823. It's used as the base for the Pimm's Cup, a pitcher drink that adds lemon-lime soda ('lemonade' to Brits) or ginger ale, chopped fruit, and mint to the herbal, bittersweet and citrusy Pimm's (Kenji likes to add cucumbers to his, too). Other Pimm's formulas, based variously on Scotch, rum, and rye, were once produced too, but you'll just see No. 1 on shelves these days, unless you spot the brandy-based Winter Cup, or No. 6, a vodka-based liqueur available only in limited quantities.
The civilized, fruity Pimm's Cup one of the most popular options served at the Wimbledon tennis tournament and the Chelsea Flower Show. Even if your summertime party isn't quite that classy, it's a crowd-pleaser of a drink.
Non-Alcoholic Drinks
Neer More
So far, all of the drinks we've learned about lean toward sweetness: a few feature bitter elements, sure, but all include a significant proportion of sugar. But in regions of the world where temperatures get really high, salty sips can be much more refreshing than sweet. And when cooling dairy enters the equation, such beverages can be even better at quenching thirst.
This explains the popularity of salty yogurt beverages the world over, from the Middle East's ayran to India's lassi. But the latter country is so wild about cold dairy drinks that it produces several varieties, including neer more, a frothy spiced buttermilk that's especially common in south of the country, where temperatures regularly climb to 100° or more and the humidity makes it feel even hotter. In that kind of climate, a meal that's even slightly too heavy can feel like a gut-bomb: luckily, buttermilk's digestive properties are bolstered, in some variations of the drink, with the addition of stomach-calming flavorings such as mustard seeds and asafoetida. To give it a whirl at home, try Max's version, which gets added flavor from ginger and mint.
Sour Plum Soda
The savory side of drinks also comes into play with sour plum soda, a fizzy cooler popular all over southeast Asia. The drink couldn't be simpler: combine muddled salted preserved plums, sugar, and sparkling water. Similar to the salty lemonades and limeades using preserved fruit that are also common in Asian cuisines, the drink is savory, sweet, and fruity all at once: the longer the drink steeps, the more potent it becomes. To make the drink, check Asian specialty stores for plums cured with sugar and salt: in Chinese, they're called suanmeizi; in Japanese, umeboshi; and in Vietnamese, xí muội.
Nam Manao
It figures that Thailand, a country where limes are integral to the national cuisine, would make a killer limeade. Sometimes taken sweet but more often incorporating a hefty pinch of salt, nam manao is sold by street vendors all over Thailand, helping to provide at least a temporary respite from the country's hot and humid climate. As a bonus, it's easy to whip up at home: just substitute lime juice for the lemon in a typical lemonade, go easy on the sugar, and consider adding a pinch of salt.
Bandung is a candy-sweet, bright pink Malaysian drink made from evaporated milk, rose water, plenty of sugar and a drop or two of red food coloring, served over ice. An adaptation of an Indian drink called rose milk, it actually tastes remarkably similar to kheer, the Indian rice pudding typically flavored with rose water and pistachios. If you like to take your desserts in a glass, then bandung might be the drink for you.
Lime Rickey
The drinks we've learned about so far all have an international pedigree, but here in the U.S. plenty of lesser-known regional beverages abound. Bottled sodas—from Georgia's Nehi orange soda to Louisiana's Abita root beer—tend to inspire fierce local pride, but home-mixed or soda shop-served refreshers vary by state lines, too. In New England, the lime rickey rules. A simple combination of fresh lime juice, seltzer and sugar—it's basically a sparkling limeade—this sweet-tart summer refresher is a Northeast favorite, as are two variations, the raspberry lime rickey and the cherry lime rickey, made with flavored syrup. The rickey enjoyed widespread popularity in the '50s and '60s, when it was served by drugstore ice cream counters that were the after-school hangout, and accordingly we like to sip 'em alongside all-American picnic grub like sandwiches, potato salad, and potato chips.
Sweet Tea
If there's any regional American drink that inspires the longing caused by sweet tea, then I haven't heard of it yet. Integral to the sugar-loving diet of the south—this is the part of the country that calls Ambrosia "salad," after all—sweet tea is exactly what it sounds like: brewed black iced tea loaded to the gills with good ol' cane sugar.
I first encountered sweet tea on a road trip, and as our car passed through Virginia and Tennessee, it seemed as though every gas station, rest stop and drive-through advertised sweet tea to go in a cup or a gallon. Being an unsweetened iced tea gal myself, I was skeptical, but I have to say that upon trying my first ice-loaded cup, I was hooked. Somehow, the level of sweetness is so high that the drink tips back into refreshing territory. I don't know how it works, but I do know that the few southern transplants I've met over the years have all mourned the lack of sweet tea in northern cities. It's a syndrome so common that it's been recognized by McDonald's, which now offers sweet tea in a 30 ounce cup for the grand total of a buck.


text:
This book from Shire Classics describes the 19th-Century servant class in Great Britain in satisfying detail. Combined with another book I purchased at the National Portrait Gallery of portraits taken of the servant class, my DVDs of Gosford Park and Upstairs/Downstairs, and my recent viewing of Edwardian House and Regency House, I think that I am getting a fairly good idea about how a great house operated in days of yore.
The Victorian Domestic Servant reveals that the Duke of Bedford (died 1839) employed 300 servants and the Duke of Portland employed 320. These were excessive amounts to be sure, but most respectable Victorian households employed servants. An income of 250 a year allowed a family to employ a maid of all work, but an income of 100 would barely pay the rent, much less pay for help. As an aside, Jane Austen, her mother and sister were able to afford a maid of all work and a male servant on their modest income. After moving to Barton Cottage, the Dashwood women employed two servants as well. Yet both the Austen and Dashwood women, while not destitute, had to count every penny. People like Mrs. Smith from Persuasion and the Bates women in Emma could afford no help at all.
In 1851 domestic service represented the second largest occupation in England after agriculture, although the servant class was in constant flux. People frequently moved positions looking for higher pay or for promotions or for a way out. Although many servants felt professional pride towards their work, they often left service because the deference their employers expected wore them down. For the lower servants, the constant need for showing respect was even worse. The servant hierarchy Below Stairs showed as many distinctions as Above Stairs, with lower and upper servants rarely commingling. Lower servants were expected to remain silent unless spoken to at the table when dining, for example. They were expected neither to be seen nor heard as they worked.
Most of the work that servants performed had to be done out of sight of the family that employed them. This meant they had to rise early to do their tasks, stopping when the family arose and restarting late in the evening. Tasks were repetitive and laborious, such as filling a tub with water, which meant heating pails and pails of water and trudging up and down the stairs, or bringing coal to fireplaces and stoves and removing ashes. Much time was spent removing coal ash from fireplaces, and then dusting rooms and sweeping floors clear of the substance.
The preferred servant was raised in the country, for these people tended to show more respect and deference than their urban counterparts. A symbol of status was the footman, who wore livery and had actually not much work to do other than to look handsome and open and close doors, help the butler serve food at table, and sleep in the Butler's Pantry to protect the family plate and silver from thieves.
While The Victorian Domestic Servant is only 32 pages long, I found so much information packed in its pages that I will have to read it again soon. For those who are curious about the servant class, or for writers of the Victorian Era, I cannot recommend this book enough. If this were a regency book, I would give it three regency fans. In this instance, I think I shall give it five out of five dust bins, broom sticks, and wash cloths.
More on the topic
- Read my posts about Regency servants in this link
- Victorian Domestic Servant Hierarchy and Wage Scale
- Domestic Servant
Paperback: 32 pages
Publisher: Shire; illustrated edition edition (March 4, 2008)
Language: English


text:
Coming Soon to Oregon
"Drinking is Believing"
PORTLAND, Ore. – March 26, 2012 – This spring, Craft Brew Alliance will launch Omission Beer, the first craft beer brand in the United States focused exclusively on brewing great-tasting craft beers with traditional beer ingredients, including malted barley, that are specially crafted to be gluten-free. Omission beers are brewed by Widmer Brothers Brewing in Portland, Ore., which uses a proprietary brewing process to reduce the gluten levels to well below the widely accepted international gluten-free standard of 20 parts per million (ppm) for food and beverages. (The international gluten-free standard was set forth by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which was created in 1963 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.) Omission Beer is expected to release the first beers in its portfolio, which will be available only in Oregon, on April 2.
"Developing great-tasting, authentic craft beers that happen to be gluten-free was a personal mission for our brewmaster and me, and it's a mission that our team really got behind. The launch of Omission Beer is a game changer for celiacs and the craft beer community," said Terry Michaelson, CEO of Craft Brew Alliance. "As a 12-year celiac and longtime craft beer enthusiast, I'm thrilled to introduce two delicious craft beers that can be enjoyed equally by those who are affected by gluten sensitivities and those who are not."
Unlike many other gluten-free beers currently available, Omission beers are not brewed with sorghum, rice, tapioca, buckwheat or quinoa; they are brewed using traditional beer ingredients: malted barley, hops, water and yeast.
"Omission Beer has been a work in progress for the last six years," said Joe Casey, brewmaster at Widmer Brothers Brewing. "My wife was diagnosed as a celiac in 2006, and since then, we've made it our mission to brew a great-tasting craft beer using traditional beer ingredients that everyone of legal drinking age could enjoy. After years of hard work, mission accomplished."
Gluten-Free Guarantee, Every Batch Tested:
Each batch of Omission Beer is tested by an independent lab to ensure that all Omission beers contain well below 20 ppm of gluten. Gluten levels in Omission beers are tested using the R5 competitive ELISA test. Beer will not be released to consumers until test results are received and after an extended quality assurance hold.
About Omission Beer
Omission Beer is a new brand of gluten-free craft beers, available only in Oregon. Brewed by Widmer Brothers Brewing in Portland, Ore., Omission is the first craft beer brand in the United States focused exclusively on brewing great-tasting craft beers with traditional beer ingredients, including malted barley, that are specially crafted to be gluten-free. Each batch of Omission Beer is tested using the R5 competitive ELISA test to ensure that it contains gluten levels that are well below the international standard for gluten-free of 20 ppm. Drinking is believing.
About Craft Brew Alliance
Craft Brew Alliance was formed with the merger of leading Pacific Northwest craft brewers Widmer Brothers Brewing and Redhook Ale Brewery in 2008. With an eye toward preserving and growing one-of-a-kind craft beers and brands, CBA was joined by Kona Brewing Company in 2010. For more information about CBA, visit craftbrew.com.


text:
Getting firsthand information from an actual car owner is one sure way to get an idea of car performance once it leaves the lot. Autobytel features real consumer reviews that give the unbiased experience of a car.
love my Tiguan!. Its loaded with everything possible and I love its economy and usefulness!why pay for an AUDI.....just buy a VW!!!!!
Decent little SUV
Pros: Seat comfort
Cons: Highway noiseOverall, very decent vehicle. The only downsides so far...1) very noisy highway driving, and 2) rides like a small car (previous car was 02 Passat)
Pros: handeling and performance and the overall feel of the road. and what a cool roof
Cons: excellent hi-tech features and hook ups on radio, but could sound better
Advice: 18' wheels for handeling, 4-motion for capability, roof for a great experience for all passengersmy first and last words on the test drive were, 'wow'. A real drivers vehicle.
Pros: I like the entire vehicle.
Cons: the radio knob.
Advice: Shop around and do your car homeworkThis vehicle has the same motor as the Volkswagen CC. The Tiguan was smooth as I punched the gas. Feeling that turbo kick in and assist in extra power raised my brow to a mmmmm. The motor runs like a very well oiled machine. The brakes have a good response and the thing will stop on a dime. The interior is very comfortable. The seats are easy to change positions. So I bought one...


text:
After running the Hot Chocolate 15k in and around the famous Golden Gate Park, my wife and I decided to leave confines of San Francisco and find a brunch spot that rivals those found in the growing exclusiveness of San Francisco without the 1+ hour wait. After a lengthy Google search, we discovered Portal in Oakland, shortly off the Lake Merritt BART station. And we were glad that we did!
Portal Restaurant
1611 2nd Ave
Oakland, CA 94606
There wasn't a lot of parking right around there, but there's a Lucky store nearby that has a large parking lot, in addition to street parking off of East 18th.
Although the restaurant isn't very large, the menu is quite expansive, capturing all of the sweet or savory taste buds that command you culinary decisions. Take a look at the brunch menu below, I challenge you to find something that you won't want to eat or drink….especially with bottomless mimosas and an expansive beer selection.
From the great beer selection, like the Iron Springs Brewery Casey Jones Imperial IPA to the salty, beefy goodness of the Corned Beef. All paths lead to a fantastic brunch. So kick the concern about your calorie and sodium intake and indulge. After all, you only live once.
Neal's Ratings:
- Atmosphere = B
- Service = A+
- Food = A+