text:
Statement of Historians Against the War
- Click here for the developments at the OAH annual meeting 4-4-03.
- Click here for the news release 1-22-03.
- Click here for a list of signers.
- Click here for details about the circumstances that led to the circulation of the petition.
We historians call for a halt to the march towards war against Iraq. We are deeply concerned about the needless destruction of human life, the undermining of constitutional government in the U.S., the egregious curtailment of civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad, and the obstruction of world peace for the indefinite future.Any historian can endorse and circulate this statement. All signatures collected on Saturday, January 4, at the AHA Meeting should be turned into the Radical History Review table near the Message Center in the Southwest Exhibition Hall, before 1 PM, or between 5 and 6 PM. Signatures collected later should be mailed to Van Gosse, Department of History, Franklin & Marshall College, PO Box 3003, Lancaster, PA 17604, or emailed to email@example.com.
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More Comments:
Homer Simpson - 5/6/2003
Yet another idiot!!
I still say that it's not possible for so many idiots to actually be historians.
Edith, you don't really exist. It just some guy in the back room banging away on his word processor.
I stand against Edith the Dumb, commie suck-up and laughable jerk.
Homer Simpson - 5/6/2003
How surprised will you idiots be when George Bush is re-elected?
Are all historians are dumb as the ones that visit this site?
Does anybody out there have a brain?
Bill Maher - 3/25/2003
This is one historian who will not gladly become a useful idiot. There seem to be more then enough to go around. Indeed, if I understand Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell, much of the current problem is very much connected to those who resisted American involvement in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. Diplomacy for the sake of diplomacy is not always a virtue. It can be sheer stupidity passing itself off as idealism.
Vote Democratic to rid our country of a coming facist police state by the bush cartel.
Ronald Kinum - 2/4/2003
Subject: Re: ###WHY ARE DUMBOCRATS BLAMING BUSH?
Date: 2/2/2003 7:45 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: Apt Opinion
++Subject: ###WHY ARE DUMBOCRATS BLAMING BUSH?
++Date: 2/1/2003 9:48 PM Pacific Standard Time
++From: Rick0109
++The Dumbocrats seem to be blaming our President for EVERYTHING bad, including
++the weather. Why is this so?
Why? After all the crap Republicans have posted in AOL political boards you ask why? Are you blind????
It's interesting how the religiously-brainwashed / politically indoctrinated
Republican communists berate Democrats, but isn't it interesting how, if
you re-write just some of the parts in the history of the French Revolution,
it parallels very closely to the past and present Republican administrations'
Read this:
Legal divisions among social groups that had existed for hundreds of years,
between the Federalists and the troublesome constitutional Democrats,
created much discontent. According to law, US society consisted of three
groups called political parties. Members of the minority Republicans
gradually came to make it up to the the top first party by late 1979,
Democrats the second, and the rest of the people as the various upstart
independent third parties.
The peasants formed the largest group and supported the second party. A
lot of them were in unions, but after the War on Trade Unions was won in
the 1980s, by the 1990s the peasants earned so little after corporate
downsizing and computer automation and relocating most of the big US
businesses overseas and creating NAFTA, that the peasants could barely
afford to send their children to colleges and universities, where the nation
educates its political, government and business leaders. This was planned
in a first party conspiracy, wherein almost all of the Republican states'
governors cut their state's higher education funding during the early to
mid-1990s. The California Republican governor scoffed, "The peasants
are starving for education and equal opportunity? Well, let them eat
trade school cake, they don't need college degrees!" But the first party
also included the working people of the cities and a large and prosperous
middle class made up chiefly of merchants, lawyers, and government
employees who also sent their children to state colleges, and since they
begrudgingly were part of the first party, the first party designed a way
to keep them brainwashed by religious and political indoctrination by
separating them from the peasants with education vouchers.
The second and third parties individually resented certain advantages of
the elite members of the first party, and the third party resented certain
popularity advantages for the two other parties. The Republican nobles did
not have to pay as many taxes, as they hid their income behind huge trusts
and by hedging money into corporations, and used the privacy-invading
Internal Revenue Service's establishment-prejudice to conceal those
profits through special corporate tax deductions and subsidies that the
rich somehow profited from, but wasn't obvious to the peasants due to
the overly complexly invasive burden of the tax system they struggled
under. The second and third parties, especially the second one with the
peasants, had to provide almost all the country's tax revenue that the
first party's "Trickle Down Economics" passed on to them through doubled
annual store prices, and yet were accused of being given huge privileges
and tax deductions, which of course were scams that were aimed to make
the common people betray their private financial matters to the huge
government spy called the Internal Revenue Service, which was the chief
government means of owning and controlling the common people.
However, many members of the middle class, who thought they were also
priviliged for being anti-conservative conservatives, were also troubled by
their social status. They were among the most important people in US
society but were not recognized as such because, although most of them
belonged to the first party, the real upper-class and corporate conpirators
of the Republican machine were prejudiced against the danger of those
insubordinate upstarts. For that reason, the corporations and upper class
conspired to infiltrate the major religious organizations of the USA, and
began a program of brainwashing followers into believing that their
religion supported the first party, and that the only way to be right with
god was to be a Republican. "Be hateful and vile about those damn liberal
democrap constitution-lovers, you don't have to be honest, just be loyal
believers so even the peasants won't want to be liberals any more! We'll
blacklist the liberals from jobs and make them so sorry they're democraps!"
The first party was amazed that no one noticed they had violated the
Separation of Church and State, and so they were confident no one would
promote the needed idea of a Separation of Business and State to protect
the US Constitution from subversion.
During much of the 1900's, anti-war protesters called on philosophers
from the US and from other countries to enlighten the common peasants
about how their government ruled over the people in anti-democratic,
unConstitutional fashion to colonize and conduct wars in absurdly-oriented
politics, and they raised new ideas about freedom. Some of these thinkers,
including some members of the Democrats, suggested that the right to
govern came from the people. The Republicans reacted with angst and
called the Democrats "communists", even though in recorded history, the
religions had invented social communism probably 6,000 years ago, and
the British corporations invented commercial communism in the 1400s after
the British King invented the corporation to control capitalists who were
making too much wealth and gaining too much world-wide power through
oceanic trade. The ignorant King's plan backfired, the corporate
structure just made the captains of capitalism smarter and richer and
immensely more powerful over entire realms, which is why they replaced
the monarchies' tyranny to end all of the monarchies in Europe and Africa,
resulting in only a handful of true monarchies to reamin in the Middle East
and tiny parts of Asia by the turn of the 21st century.
But a 20th Century financial crisis had developed because the nation had
gone deeply into debt with two World Wars, only to end up financing the
cold war (1946 to 1991), fighting for the second time since World War II
both in Korea (1950 to 1954) and Viet Nam (1964 - 1976), and due to the
immoral and costly conspiracy of perpetually supporting the illegal territory
created by England and the USA between 1946 and 1948, after in 1948,
Isreal was promoted and recognized internationally as a "real" nation
under the name "Is Real". A further huge cost was added to the debt by
the Desert Storm operation to save Kuwait and even possibly Saudi Arabia
from the first party-armed Iraqis, who had been heavily armed with
biological weapons of mass distruction by King Reagan.
By 1992, the US government was almost bankrupt. But the newly
Republican-dominated Congress in Washington, DC insisted that King
Bush 1 could borrow more money by selling US government debt bonds
to the rich, use the Social Security fund to pay some of the more
immediate debts, or raise taxes to hide that nearing bankruptcy and
encourage the common people to place their pension funds in the stock
market to bolster sagging stock prices. What an all-encompassing remedy;
but since people were very reluctant to gamble in the stock market, a
nation-wide clandestine government approval of lotteries in most of the
populous states was enacted to "teach" the public of the lucrative
"chances" they have to become "rich" by giving most of their grocery
money and savings to state run gambling schemes, knowing gamblers
rarely have more than a planned one-in-one-and-a-half million chance of
a payoff default, which they propagandistically called "winning" to
discourage the people's mentality and judgement. Then the Republican
party also promoted the ideas of countering the Democratic party's
"spend-spend-spend" mentality by emplacing a new Republican policy of
cutting taxes and increasing government spending, to make a smaller,
more ineffective government that would become powerless to counter
huge international corporate abuses of the nation's laws and avoidance
of the free market and anti-trust regulations, and called the Democratic
party traitors "to America" for protesting, not realizing that America is
almost 300 years older than the USA, and that other American nations
may not think like the US Republican cult; but the Democrats retaliated
bravely by saying this preposterous "Reaganesque" strategy could only be
adopted by calling a meeting of the Parties-General, in a body known as
the US Congress. This body after World War II was originally made up
of nearly equal numbers of representatives from the first two of the
three parties. Unwillingly, the king called the meeting, but he figured
enough people in the USA had been brainwashed to Republicanism so
that it didn't matter.
The revolution begins.
The Parties-General opened in the Congressional building in Washington
DC, near the White House. Most members of the first two parties wanted
the members of the third parties to take a hike, while the other two parties
took up matters in a series of continuing, heated conflicting arguments,
because the Democrats wanted to vote on items separately issue-by-issue
and bill-by-bill, using the bi-party system they had created to keep out any
emerging third parties. Though the second party had more followers than
the other two parties combined, most Democrats will sign petitions and
picket but don't vote, whereas indoctrinated Republicans are brainwashed
to vote Republican for god, and so they do vote as often as possible.
The first party wanted the second party to give up and disband itself for
the "good of the Republican Party", and it insisted that all the parties be
merged into one national assembly, and that each representative have
one vote regardless of what the public wants. The second party, however,
wanted the Parties-General to follow something nebulous that was only
partially represented in school text books called a US Constitution, an
allegedly important national legal document that few common people
understand and that parents rarely teach to their children as being the
second most important document, the first being the anti-tyranny
Declaration of Independence, both of which are subversive to the
Republican idealism of representative, undemocratic government.
The king and the first two parties refused the demands of the third parties
to be recognized as valid conduits of public opinion. In previous recent
elections, several prominent representatives of the third parties lost major
national elections, but surprisingly, had made an impressive showing when
they declared themselves the National Spokesman of the USA's unrepresented
and ignored population. The third parties thus gathered at a bathroom in a bar
near the Supreme Court and pledged not to disband until they had been elected
to the US Presidency and had enough members in Congress to re-write the
Constitution. This vow became known as the Oath of the Bathroom. Seeing
the insignificant public support for the third parties, King Bush then allowed
the three parties to debate together on television. But he began to gather
police to break up the debate.
The National Emergency.
In September 2001, the USA found itself being punished for the public
decree by King Bush II, made immediately upon his innauguration wherein he
stated to the world that the USA would no longer take an interest in the
peace process of the Middle East, a move that was designed to allow Isreal
to inhumanly attack any Palestinian they chose in the overt annexation of
all the remaining Palestinian territory outside of Isreal. King Bush II
quickly unilaterally enacted, and the Republican party approved, the
Decrees of War Against Terrorism and the Declaration of the Suspension
of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The decrees abolished some
useless feudal privileges that the peasants were Constitutionally endowed
with and bothered the first party's overlords, increased the tax advantages
of the clergy and nobles, and gave regional privileges to all the state
governments to abuse foreigners' rights. The declaration guaranteed the
same basic rights to all citizens, including "suspended liberty, blindly
disregarded propriety, falsely-claimed security by the first two provisions,
and resistance to aggression from other peoples who have been caused
distress by the US's and the US corporations' arrogant invasion and
mistreatment in the prejudiciously so-called "third world", as well as
installing a representative government wherein the government and courts
represent themselves in a new "world order monarchy", one wherein the
public must obey for the common patriotic good.
The largely Republican Congress had often drafted many congressional
laws with hidden bills tacked onto the bottom of innocent-looking legislation,
and King Bush II was pleased that the first party did the same in his reign,
thinking to fool liberal legislative constitutionalists by a slick-Georgie move
that made the USA a limited Republican monarchy with a one-house
legislature. Wherein the USA was divided into 50 regions called states,
each with elected state congresses for local government, the state
governments were increasingly becoming one-party governments. But the
right to vote and hold public offices in the local, state and federal
government offices were limited to citizens who earned a certain
substantial income and who paid a certain lower amount of taxes. The
first party was assured of a "pure" congress in the very near term, for
nobody else could afford to become an elected political prostitute.
The first party also reformed the Supreme Court by implanting Republican
judges and rewriting the US Constitution into 65 volumes of interpretations,
and by requiring the US Supreme Court presidential election of 2001 to
be free of Constitutional mental rationality, saying that the court can too
decide the vote count without being scientific and honest about it, because
after all, didn't the Super Bowl administration get away with sending the
Denver Broncos to the Super Bowl twice with impunity, when the Broncos
couldn't beat the same teams the first time earlier in the season? What
better state than Florida, the state ruled by Prince Bush, the King's brother
and son to King Bush 1, to stage a phony ballot conflict to discredit the
most verifiable voting system in the world? They won't have such problems
when they bring on Electronic voting, where nobody can prove what is or
is not the real vote tally, and they add cheerfully, "It's the count that
counts, not whether it's genuine or not! Don't you BELIEVE? Trust in
the lord, we know the votes will be true!"
And so the people "believed", no longer able to mentally recognize the
difference between "belief" and knowledge, and the King of the Republic
saw that it was good and said that it was good. And it was good.
By Spring 2003, the National Congress of Republicans believed that
the revolution to eliminate the Democrats was over. It disbanded the
Democrat's forum in Congress at the end of the January, saying Democrats
are just a bunch of commie loud mouths who don't believe god ordained
the Republican cult and the party they also should blindly follow, and
Democrats should stop bringing up that outdated Constitution that they
keep yelling about with regard to people's representation, and the patriotic
Republican priests gave encouragement to the "believers" to make ready
for the newly declaired War on Terror, so that their King "Boy George"
Bush II, a.k.a. "Howdy Doody" and "Dubya", could secure a place in the
history books for himself like his daddy did, before it would be too late
for him to do so, by making the US go back to Iraq for the purpose of
blasting the nation into heeding their compliance with UN resolutions,
concealing the real purpose of gaining immortal fame for King Bush II
in a military training exercise and as a test for new advanced weapons,
even though the UN has not formally given final "new world order"
approval for an attack.
That damn UN, such a bother to deal with those kinds of legal details,
it only holds the US back from King Bush II's destiny with history!
Tammy Ballard - 2/3/2003
He is marching America into an unjust war.
He has threatened Iraq with nuclear weapons.
He is destroying our global environment and endangering earths inhabitants.
He has trashed Americas economy.
rj tyler - 2/3/2003
I would like to see the country back in the peoples hands with fair representation of the people. The sooner this appointed administration is hold accountable the better.
Rod McCaslin - 1/14/2003
My problem is when a sub-group within a historical discipline pretends(either overtly or by inference) to speak for the entire profession. This would be true pro-war/anti-war, conservative or liberal. Histiorians are shaped by their ideology, but they should be up front about it.
Ralph E. Luker - 1/13/2003
Several commentators here seem to have trouble reading. The petition does not claim to be a statement by the American Historical Association nor do those who signed it claim to speak for all professional historians. Why bother to comment on something you haven't bothered to read?
Van Gosse - 1/12/2003
Nope, I have never had a problem with students, including conservatives. Maybe because in a classroom setting, the kind of cheap macho invective heard on this string--"absurd," "sissy" etc. is not permitted. And yes, I do think that someone who has the nerve to post on this list that there's something "radical" and unprofessional about historians being engaged in current US politics is an ignoramus. Ditto the comment re "don't you think the President of the US knows more than you do?" There's a good 40 years plus going back to the early days of Vietnam when then-little-known "radical" academics had a much better understanding of the political-military quagmire ahead than the President, the National Security Adviser and most of the other civilians (e.g., thsoe who willfully ignored General Matthew Ridgway's 1961 recommendation to avoid at all costs another "land war in Asia"). In my personal experience, working on El Salvador from 1982 to 1995, grassroots activists from the US traveling there, as I did five times, had a much better understanding of what was going on than the State or CIA types. So for that matter did the best mainstream journalists. Official Washington is addicted to triumphalism, and no one wants to be the bearer of bad news, or contrary assessments.
Peter Jackson - 1/12/2003
Van Gosse writes "All of this pales, in a sense, besides the 70 years of practicing scholarship and politics in tandam by Dr. Du Bois. Or do you not even know what that means?"
In other words, Van Gosse is letting us know, that if you disagree with him, you must be a complete ignoramus.
I've been reading a lot of complaints by conservatives on this list that academics on the left assume every one on the right is an idiot. I was inclined to dismiss them. But Dr. Van Gosse gives us one example.
Are you this condescending to your students when they disagree with you?
Van Gosse - 1/10/2003
It's always amusing to see how outnumbered, disgruntled conservatives moan about "radicals" politicizing things. First, we are a formally affiliated society (MARHO/The Radical History Review) and had every right to participate in that fashion. Second, if you didn't like it, why not organize a pro-war petition, and see how many signatures you can get? Of course, the really telling thing is that some people think that teaching and historical scholarship are "neutral" activities and that we, or for that matter doctors and lawyers, should not take any position on social and political issues. How peculiar, and a-historical. I, for one, am happy to contribute in a small way to the tradition of engagement established by AHA leaders Charles Beard, Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Schlesinger, and more recently, John Hope Franklin. If women historians like Gerda Lerner and Joan Kelly had not gotten "involved" politically to change the profession and the larger society we would still be studying the history of the male minority of Americans exclusively. All of this pales, in a sense, besides the 70 years of practicing scholarship and politics in tandam by Dr. Du Bois. Or do you not even know what that means?
Van Gosse - 1/10/2003
Wrong. You may claim to have had many opportunities, but I've had dozens of emails from people who were there and didn't see it. We had a handful of volunteers standing around the book exhibit for a good part of Saturday asking people as they walked in but self-evidently we didn't buttonhole 3000 people in a few hours. A very large majority of those asked did sign.
Dave Livingston - 1/9/2003
These petitions are nothing but Leftist feel-good blather that accomplish nada positive.
Haven't these jokers paid any attention to what happened to the people of the Republic of Viet-Nam once the Communists were let by the Teddy Kennedy's amongst us to conquer their land? The murders of the innocent, the concentration camps, the pure evil aided & abetted by the anti-war movement here in the States?
Isn't it a bit arrogant for soft, chair-polishers safely ensconced in comfortable quarters here in the States to think they know more about the situation, the threat,than the President of the U.S., he with all the intelligence resources he has?
Where were your protests when Chicken Willie, the Bastard from Hope, was commiting American boys to combat in his Monica Wars for no better reason than to distract attention from his personal domestic and political scandals? What a disgusting bunch of soft, hide-at-home loud-mouthed sissies these joker
The largest Vietnamese community outside Viet-Nam is in Westminster, California. Recently, last year, the Viets of Westminster established a plaza that contains a huge bronze statue of an American G.I. and an ARVN, Army of the Republic of Viet-Nam soldier standing together. In the plaza are kiosks listing the U.S. KIAs, Killed in Action, in the Viet-Nam War & the ARVNs KIA defending their nation
Big surprise, Jane Fonda and other anti-war types of her ilk are unwelcome in Westminster.
Suetonius - 1/8/2003
as a petition by 2000 barbers.
Suetonius - 1/8/2003
U.S. presence in Venzeula? What are you talking about? We don't have any involvement in the Venezuela crisis.
Rod McCaslin - 1/8/2003
This is an old tactic. The Jesus Seminar also was exposed by Timothy Luke Johnson for doing exactly the same thing- a minority within the profession claiming (or infering) that their numbers speak for the profession's entirety.
Walter Hearne - 1/8/2003
One needn't be liberal to recognize the insipidity of this resolution. My guess is that most of the historians realized that the AHA has no business with this.
Of course, the AHA is hardly the only professional organization that has had a problem with radical members trying to use the group's name to push their own agendas. The National Education Association, for example, is notorious for this kind of thing.
john fillipovich - 1/8/2003
3300 historians attended the AHA (according to one source). So far, 667 historians have signed the antiwar petition. There were plenty of opportunities for historians to sign the petition (I was there, had multiple opportunities and did not sign). We don't know how many of the signatories were not at the conference but signed after receiving it via email, but we can assume it is some number less than 667. So the overwhelming majority of attendees at the AHA had opportunity to sign, but did not. Maybe the history profession is not so liberal as it is being portrayed by its conservative critics?
Edith P. Young - 1/7/2003
Hurrah! 700 historians stand against war. I stand with you.
Walter Hearne - 1/7/2003
I find it very hard to take seriously the occasionall professor's complaint about anti-intellectualism in American Society when intellectuals are so often issuing pronouncements that sound like the ruminations of a high school sophomore in social studies class.
Walter Hearne - 1/7/2003
Memo to "we historians" of the AHA: nobody cares.
Randall Besch - 1/7/2003
To "one historian here" it seems that the use of the unsubstantiated adjective "ridiculous" by Mr.Lenk to the petition against aggresive war without reason does not shine brightly upon his point of view or his veracity as a historian.
You sir do have space to elucidate,please do.
Don McArthur-Self - 1/7/2003
are due to the 3300 or so attendees in Chicago (myself among them) who did NOT sign. Please stop making the profession look ridiculous.
Claire M. Stern - 1/6/2003
Good start, but the leaders of the petition drive should consider joining with other organizations who are working to reduce the threats of war for oil in Iraq, and containment of North Korea, and US presence in Venezuela. the main issue appears to be safeguarding oil, not protecting human life.
H. Russell Cort - 1/6/2003
I am not a historian, but I strongly support AHA's efforts to oppose Mr.Bush's unilateral determination to carry out a war against Iraq. There has been no offer of evidence to support Mr. Bush's claims about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors have not reported finding stockpiles of any such weapons. There is no question about Saddam Hussein's barbarous behavior toward his own people, but that is different from Bush's claims about Hussein's military capabilities and adamant intentions.
I appaud AHA's efforts to stop Mr. Bush from casting our country into a disastrous military engagement.
Dave Lenk - 1/6/2003
Who did not sign the ridiculous petition.
- Chair of Florida Charter School Board on Firing of Principal: About Policy, Not David Statue
- Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity
- When Right Wingers Struggle with Defining "Woke" it Shows they Oppose Pursuing Equality
- Strangelove on the Square: Secret USAF Films Showed Airmen What to Expect if Nuclear War Broke Out
- The Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- New Books Force Consideration of Reconstruction's End from Black Perspective
- Excerpt: How Apartheid South Africa Tried to Create a Libertarian Utopia
- Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly
- Kendi: "Anti-woke" Part of Backlash Against Antiracist Protest Movements
- Monica Muñoz Martinez Honored for Truth-Telling in Texas History


text:
CHICAGO, May 22 (UPI) — Nutritionists are urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to reject a milk industry petition to drop artificial sweeteners from front labels on containers.
The International Dairy Foods Association and the National Milk Producers Federation submitted a petition to the federal government seeking to allow artificial sweeteners to be included in flavored milk and milk products as standard ingredients — meaning the sweeteners are not included in the front label.
If the FDA accepts the change, the front-of-package labels for flavored milk products would bear no indication artificial sweeteners have been added. Instead, consumers would have to read the ingredients list and recognize non-nutritive sweeteners by their scientific name to decipher if they are included in the product, the academy said.
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics submitted comments to the FDA stating the petition failed to cite "sound scientific or factual data showing the recommended standard of identity revisions will promote honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers" as required under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
"The petition largely focuses on the perceived benefits to children of revising milk's standard of identity, including the assertion that the proposed amendments would promote more healthful eating practices and reduce childhood obesity," Ethan A. Bergman, a registered dietitian nutritionist and academy president, said in a statement.
"However, there is a lack of evidence to substantiate those claims. In addition, flavored milk is not a major source of added sugar in children's diets."
The academy suggested the current standard of flavored milk is effective in encouraging milk consumption by school-age children to improve calcium intake and bone health.
Copyright 2013 United Press International, Inc. (UPI).

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Gary Harrington of Oregon Jailed for Illegal Rainwater Reservoirs on His Property
An Eagle Point, Ore., man has begun serving a 30-day jail sentence after he built three reservoirs on his property to collect rainwater -- an apparent violation of a state law that says all water is publicly owned.
Gary Harrington (pictured above) has collected nearly 13 million gallons of water in his reservoirs (one of which is pictured below). That's enough to fill 20 Olympic-size swimming pools. But two weeks ago, he was found guilty of breaking the 1925 Oregon law against private water collection. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and issued a $1,500 fine.
Oregon's Water Resources Department said that though it is legal to set up rainwater collection barrels on roofs or other artificial surfaces, Harrington's reservoirs go way beyond that and required permits.
"Mr. Harrington has operated these three reservoirs in flagrant violation of Oregon law for more than a decade," the department's deputy director, Tom Paul, told the MedfordMail Tribune.
The state initially approved permits for Harrington's reservoirs in 2003, but reversed its decision.
"They issued me my permits. I had my permits in hand and they retracted them just arbitrarily, basically," Harrington told CNSNews.com. "They took them back and said, 'No, you can't have them.' So I've been fighting it ever since."
Harrington has been ordered to drain his three reservoirs, something that he vows to continue fighting. He said that he is only using the rainwater for personal use and fire suppression and that the state is infringing on his rights.
"The government is bullying," he told CNSNews.com. "They've just gotten to be big bullies and if you just lay over and die and give up, that just makes them bigger bullies."
Harrington has set up a website, www.empoweringthejury.org, to appeal to the public for support. The site includes videos defending his reservoirs and a petition that asks for signatures and donations.
But that doesn't sway state officials.
"What we're after is compliance with Oregon water law, regardless of what the public thinks of Mr. Harrington," Paul told the Mail Tribune.
See also:
Oregon Couple Faces Tsunami-Size Fine for Pool
Michigan Man Buys County's Entire Foreclosure Stock
High-End Homeowners Racing to Sell Before Tax Cuts End
More on AOL Real Estate:
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text:
About this Business
Drawing on half a century of automotive service, Midas helps drivers to prolong vehicle vigour with factory-recommended maintenance services. Mechanics pop car hoods to perform oil changes with standard and temperature-durable synthetic solutions, taking time to inspect belts, hoses, fluids, and the air conditioner's resident penguin. Armed with efficient catalytic converters built to U.S. EPA standards, the staff helps to shrink harmful emissions during muffler and exhaust-system checks. Trained technicians augment brake services with lifetime guarantees and curate healthy, evenly worn tires with rotations or replacements from Goodyear, Michelin, Firestone, and Bridgestone.


text:
Grow Easy, Delectable Portuguese Kale
If you're a gardener in the Pacific Northwest, there's a good chance you've grown Scotch kale, Russian kale and even choice, delectable Tuscan kale, with those thick, crumpled, nearly black-green leaves. But few gardeners know about Portuguese kale - yet!
In Renee's Garden seed catalog, Portuguese kale is described as tender, sweet and more heat tolerant than other kale varieties. It has huge, paddle-shaped, blue-green leaves with thick, white ribs and grows 1-2' tall and wide. It is described as a robust grower, and I can personally attest to that based on its performance in my garden this past winter.
I received a free seed sample of Portuguese kale from Renee's Garden last year and planted it in my garden late last summer. I had been hunting for the kinds of greens I enjoyed in caldo Gallego, a classic soup of the northern Spanish region of Galicia. I hoped that greens originating from the Iberian Peninsula would help me recapture the special character of this traditional dish.
Earlier this month, I heard Lynn Rosetto Kasper's Splendid Table interview with Renee Shepherd of Renee's Garden in which she discussed her ten favorite new garden seed varieties. To my delight, one of Renee's 2013 picks was Tronchuda Beira, or Portuguese kale, and I remembered that I'd planted a whole mess of them in my own garden. When I went out to take a closer look, I saw that they were growing like gangbusters.
I don't know for sure if this is the same green that I saw so often over the tops of fences passing through Galicia (if you do know, please comment!) but if it isn't exactly the same, it's close enough for me. The flavor is mild, sweet and richly nutritious-tasting. It is perfect for raw salads and is a cinch to clean, unlike some of the ruffled kale varieties.It is also productive enough to harvest in quantity for soups and raw salads. Six large, tender leaves provided enough greens for an entire pot of soup!
Kale is quite easy to grow, requiring fertile, well-drained soil and plenty of sunshine. Since our native soil is on the acidic side, sweeten the soil slightly by scratching some lime into the soil - this is good for kale and all its brassica kin. Fertilize kale with organic, all-purpose fertilizer during the growing season, from February through August. (Avoid fertilizing from September through early February to protect plants from frost.) Kale, like other brassicas, is a cool-season crop and grows best during the "shoulder seasons" of spring and fall. The flavor improves with frost, turning nuttier and sweeter. In summer's heat, plants often bolt - plus the flavor turns bitter and the fibers toughen.
For a spring harvest, sow seed February through April - and if you sow as late as May, cross your fingers for cooler weather in June. For a late fall-winter-early spring crop, sow another crop in August or September.
Portuguese kale will definitely be a staple in my fall to spring vegetable garden. Move over, lacinato kale - there's a new kale in town!
Order Tronchuda Beira (Portuguese kale) directly from Renee's Garden or check with your favorite local nursery for the Renee's Garden seed display.


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2" wide X 3.2" tall. This handsome Pewter Shed Whitetail Deer Antler Drawer Pull (facing right) is ready to serve as both cabinet hardware and sculpture. The Harris collection of Drawer Pulls is a distinctive line of wildlife and outdoor accents for the kitchen, shop, cabin or workplace.
Whether you call them knobs, drawer pulls or handles - please mix and match them as you like! These especially detailed pieces are cast in lead-free Fine Pewter with two threaded Brass Posts for extra durability (approx 1 9/16" on centers). Comes with washers and 1" Phillips head screws. See hardware shown above.
Most Drawer Pulls are made to order and ship in 3 - 5 business days. All designs © GG Harris, Handcrafted in the USA since 1984.


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South Shore to celebrate Independence Day with fireworks, events
The South Shore celebrates Independence Day with a bang. Here is a list of fireworks and family friendly events.
Braintree: "Stars And Stripes Parade" at 11:45 a.m., high school; fair starts at 2 p.m., fireworks at 10 p.m.
Hingham: Fireworks at dusk over harbor.
Randolph: Parade at 7 p.m., fireworks at 9, high school.
Stoughton: Parade at 2 p.m., fireworks at 9 p.m., high school.
Sharon: Bicycle and doll carriage parade, 4 p.m., fireworks at 9:30 p.m., Lake Massapog
Weymouth: Fireworks, 9 p.m., George Lane Beach.
Hingham: Road race, 7 a.m., parade at 10 a.m., high school.
Plymouth: Parade, 9:30 a.m., beginning at Mayflower Business Park; fireworks at dusk over waterfront
Canton: Fireworks, 9 p.m., near Irish Cultural Center.
Brockton Fair: Fireworks at dusk at the fairgrounds on Belmont Street (Route 123).


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Tuesday, August 28, 2018
5:30 am - 10:00 pm
Students, faculty and staff have the opportunity to help reduce plastic waste and win prizes by participating in the Office of Sustainability's #UHBYOBottle social media campaign. Participants who post a photo of themselves using a reusable water bottle on Instagram or Twitter with #UHBYOBottle and @UHSustain will be entered to win a variety of cool prizes. See more details.
- Location
- online
- Cost
- Free
- Sponsor
- Office of Sustainability
- Contact
- 1


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Hubby and I started playing Pathfinder once a week shortly after we lost Eevee. I think it was the only thing our friends knew to do to keep us from completely retreating into ourselves and it worked well, all things considered. We've gotten to the point where there are four campaigns going and each one involves different members of our larger friend circle, and we play at least twice a week. Last weekend, we added a single module to that list…and I DM'd.
Despite having created several characters and grasping the basics from a player side, I knew going into DM'ing that I was really lacking the know-how to guide a party through the story. The only thing I had going for me was my ability to roleplay all the NPCs and make the material fairly animated and interesting. It helped that my three players are all long-time Pathfinder players and two of them are the DMs for all of our other in-progress campaigns. Anyway, I read through the first chapter of my module, loved the story, got started… and totally fell in love with being the dungeon master.
Since then I've spent a fair amount of time trying to learn the finer points of playing god in a pre-constructed story, and I was surprised to realize that I don't know a lot of the terms. Not just Pathfinder specific terms, either, but general, real world and fiction-writing-applicable words. So I'm going to start a list! These are words taken from the GameMastery Guide (page 55) that I didn't know. Someone please tell me that at least a few of these words are new to you too.
Abstemious – not self-indulgent, especially when eating and drinking. E.g. "We only had a bottle." "Very abstemious of you."
Nugatory – of no value or importance. E.g. "a nugatory and pointless observation"
Lapidary – (of language) engraved on or suitable for engraving on stone and therefore elegant and concise. E.g. "a lapidary statement"
Beshrew – make wicked; deprave, or invoke evil upon; curse; blame for a misfortune.
Alluvium – a deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta, typically producing fertile soil.
Xanthous – having yellowish, red, auburn, or brown hair.
Convivial – (of an atmosphere or event) friendly, lively, and enjoyable. (of a person) cheerful and friendly; jovial.
Cyclopean – denoting a type of ancient masonry made with massive irregular blocks.
Hecatomb – (in ancient Greece or Rome) a great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen or an extensive loss of life for some cause
[Related: Want a second pair of eyes? Check out our proofreading service.]
Coxcomb – a vain and conceited man; a dandy.
Elan – energy, style, and enthusiasm. E.g. "a rousing march, played with great elan"
Duffer – an incompetent or stupid person, especially an elderly one. E.g. "he's the most worthless old duffer"
Rigmarole – a lengthy and complicated procedure. E.g. "he went through the rigmarole of securing the front door"
Bilbo – a sword used in former times, noted for the temper and elasticity of its blade
Halidom – a holy place, as a church or sanctuary
Mordant – (especially of humor) having or showing a sharp or critical quality; biting. E.g. "a mordant sense of humor"
Hirsute – hairy. E.g. "their hirsute chests"
Lampoon – publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule, irony, or sarcasm. E.g. "the senator made himself famous as a pinch-penny watchdog of public spending, lampooning dubious federal projects"
Fustigate – to criticize severely
Madrigal – a part-song for several voices, especially one of the Renaissance period, typically arranged in elaborate counterpoint and without instrumental accompaniment. Originally used of a genre of 14th-century Italian songs, the term now usually refers to English or Italian songs of the late 16th and early 17th c., in a free style strongly influenced by the text
Hagiography – the writing of the lives of saints
Foozle – a clumsy or botched attempt at something, especially a shot in golf
Jeremiad – a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes
Truncate – shorten (something) by cutting off the top or the end
Dross – something regarded as worthless; rubbish. E.g. "there are bargains if you have the patience to sift through the dross"
Cuspidor – a spittoon
and because I had to then Google that one:
Spittoon – a metal or earthenware pot typically having a funnel-shaped top, used for spitting into.
This guest post was contributed by Whitney Carter. Whitney is an avid fantasy writer and blogger currently working on her debut novel, Alpha Female. When not writing, she can be found either under a large pile of purring cats or amid collapsed bookshelves.


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Irans One-Stop Shop For U.S. Army Gear
April 14, 2014
Every type of equipment the U.S. military has at its disposal is on sale at the Gomrok bazaar in south Tehrans Razi Square, the merchants say, and The Daily Star has found evidence that they could be telling the truth.
We can get anything that the U.S. Army has now from a supplier in Afghanistan within two weeks, one trader said.
Weve sold every U.S. Army product from womens underwear to arms in this bazaar, he said.
Another merchant said he was trying to sell a Boeing Apache helicopter, while a third laid out night-vision equipment.
The merchants who spoke about illicit trade in weapons said they did not want to be identified for fear of arrest by the Iranian police. They said such arms were usually only shown and sold to representatives of the Iranian military. The traders would not allow any items whose sale is illegal in Iran to be photographed.
But they allowed The Daily Star to photograph products that were more innocuous and on public display and for sale in their shops.
The items bear American brand labels that together read like a list of U.S. Department of Defense basic equipment and apparel contractors.
The contract numbers and other information on the packaging and labels match up with public government records, and representatives of two manufacturers said photographs appeared to show that the items were authentic.
Sharon Ward, the director of public and media relations at Pelican Products, said one photograph showed what was certainly a tool case manufactured by her firm, and released in August 2011.
Several merchants at the bazaar had around 30 of such cases for sale, each containing an Armstrong General Mechanics Tool Kit.
Similar tool kits retail brand new at Armstrongs website for more than $5,000, but the asking price at the bazaar was consistently around $1,000.
One trader allowed The Daily Star to photograph kits that were still wrapped in orange rice bags, saying his supplier used such ruses to smuggle items over the border into Iran.
A representative of Danner said a pair of boots also looked genuine.
The Danner boots pictured here appear to be authentic, but without having them in hand it is difficult to verify, Will Pennartz, senior marketing manager at Danner, said of photographs from the bazaar.
The labels of the supposed Danner combat hiker boots on sale at the bazaar bear the CAGE code number 63887. A CAGE code, or Commercial and Government Entity code, is a unique five-digit number issued by the Defense Logistics Information Service to firms doing business with the Department of Defense.
The number 63887 matches the CAGE code assigned to Danner.
The shoes are also stamped with the contract number GS-07F-0077H.
That contract number is the same as one listed on several orders that Danner delivered for the Department of Defense.
The Daily Star confirmed that dozens of identifying numbers on items being sold at the bazaar match up with information on actual contracts that are viewable in U.S. government databases.
Other matching numbers can be found on documents or press releases on the websites of the U.S. Army and Department of Defense.
For example, the Manufacturers Part Number and National Stock Number on Revision Sawfly eyewear kits are the same as those listed on a 2011 fact sheet on authorized spectacles posted at the U.S. Armys official website.
The Daily Star sent photographs of the eyewear at the bazaar to Revision Military and got the following response from Gregory Maguire, the companys senior director of legal and government affairs: We do not permit our products to be sold in Iran, as this would violate U.S. law. We cannot confirm that what is pictured is our product, much less who may have brought such product into Iran. However, in light of the allegations, which we take seriously, we have forwarded your email to the U.S. Department of State. We would appreciate any other information you may have regarding the source, as this would be material to such an investigation.
It is unclear whether Revision Military would take the matter so seriously if the packages, each of which is also stamped with two bar codes, appeared to be obvious fakes.
At the bazaar near Razi Square, which is more commonly referred to as Gomrok or Customs Square, around 50 shops are selling what they say are American military items, alongside an array of other products imported from around the world.
Throughout the market, Iranian hawkers extoll the value of products they say were made in the USA, including Altama boots, CamelBak gloves and hydration packs, Picket Hosiery Mills socks, Eureka! tents, Soffe T-shirts and Surefire flashlights.
Anyone who buys these American Army products is so satisfied because theyre of such high quality and at such a good price, one trader said.
Government records show that all of the same American companies have fulfilled contracts with the Department of Defense as early as 2003 and as recently as 2013.
Many of the contracts were awarded by the Defense Logistics Agency, which handles the acquisition and distribution of supplies to troops for the U.S. Department of Defense.
When sent the photographs of the items, the DLAs spokesperson, Michelle McCaskill issued the following statement to The Daily Star: The Defense Logistics Agency would need additional information in order to properly comment.
George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, also said he could not comment on what may allegedly be taking place in Iran.
The Iranian military could not be reached for comment.
Despite efforts to trace the items, it remains unclear how they could have ended up in the Gomrok bazaar.
Some of the older merchandise could have been among the billions of dollars worth of equipment that U.S. troops left behind when they withdrew from Iraq, while newer products might be items that the Army is unloading as it pulls out of Afghanistan.
The merchants say they have suppliers in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait.
One trader said some items were part of the booty captured by militants in Afghanistan and brought into Iran.
Some parties, such as Taliban in Afghanistan, are capturing containers and selling the goods, he said.
The trader who claimed he was selling an Apache would not reveal where it came from, but he did offer the following clue: I can get it to the border with Iraqi Kurdistan, but after that its the buyers responsibility to get it out.


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The Descent of Man
WE'VE ALL had that moment: when the last straw threatens to break the superego's frail spine, and some sort of Cro-Magnon man explodes to the surface. For Jim Sandusky, the protagonist in Portland journalist Kevin Desinger's harrowing first novel, it arrives when he impulsively preempts a pair of thieves in the middle of the night, nabbing their truck and setting in motion an uncontrollable chain of events that alters every aspect of his quiet suburban existence. Besieged from all sides by a suspicious cop, a furious wife, and murderous thieves, Jim reverts to his animal defenses, spending his nights prowling the city streets and sleeping in strangers' cars.
Desinger's tale not only charts the dark turmoil of a suburbanite turned killer; it offers a meditation on the struggle between thought and action. Jim's single autonomous act is followed by hesitation, doubt, regret, and an exhausting string of reactions. Desinger's fumbling hero is swept along by the same pensive indecision that carried Hamlet to his grisly end. But in the end, unlike Hamlet, Jim emerges from the shadows changed. "You weave a patch of bright color into the muted pattern of your life and it's the only thing you look at. Believe me," he marvels, "you can't tear your eyes away." Desinger's own dive into the recesses of the readers' mind shows us not only the terrifying consequences but perhaps also the sobering necessity of indulging our inner darkness.


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Richardson, William Adams
Richardson, William Adams, 1821–96, American jurist and U.S. secretary of the Treasury, b. Tyngsboro, Mass. Admitted to the bar in 1846, he helped to codify the statute law of Massachusetts in 1855. Appointed assistant secretary of the Treasury (1869), he became secretary in 1873. Following an investigation into contracts awarded for tax collections by which the Treasury was defrauded, Richardson was censured and forced to resign (1874). President Grant then appointed him to the U.S. Court of Claims, of which he became chief justice in 1885.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: U.S. History: Biographies


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Windows Azure Infrastructure Services - Virtual Machines and Virtual Network - provide on-demand infrastructure that scales and adapts to your changing business needs. Whether you are creating new applications or running existing applications in Virtual Machines, we provide the best cloud economics through per-minute billing with no minimum usage requirements. A great example of an existing workload benefitting from cloud scale and economics is Dynamics. Microsoft Dynamics team has today announced a new way for customers to consume Dynamics GP 2013 and Dynamics NAV 2013. Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 are now available hosted in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, offered and serviced through the Dynamics partner ecosystem.
You can read more at the Dynamics team's blog and find about early adapter customers and partners.


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Wolf Blitzer delivers the most important breaking news and political, international, and national security stories of the day. Tune to The Situation Room weekdays 5-7pm ET on CNN.
CNN's Brian Todd reports Shelly Sterling is accepting bids from potential buyers for the Los Angeles Clippers. Who should get the team?
You must be logged in to post a comment.


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Rasmussen follows up its head-to-head polling of last week for the presidential race to add one more late entrant to the list, Donald Trump. As in the previous poll, Barack Obama can't get a majority to support him for re-election, not even against a publicity stunt — although he does better against Trump than everyone else in the Republican field:
President Obama leads Donald Trump by 15 percentage points in a hypothetical 2012 match-up, but the president is unable to top the 50% level of support even against an opponent some are deriding as a joke.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that the president earns support from 49% of Likely Voters nationwide, while Trump attracts the vote from 34%. Given that choice, 12% would vote for some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided.
Trump does even worse among independents, but Obama doesn't pick any of them up, either:
Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 48% prefer Obama, 25% Trump, and 20% would opt for some other candidate.
This doesn't exactly give a lot of life to the idea of The Donald as a GOP savior. At 34%, Trump scored lower than most of the established Republican field in last week's poll, with only Mitch Daniels, Jon Huntsman, and Herman Cain scoring lower. Obama scored higher against Trump than any other Republican except Newt Gingrich, where he also got 49% of the vote. Obama actually did worst against Mike Huckabee in Rasmussen's survey, tying at 43%.
Independents in both surveys break for Obama, with a couple of exceptions. Huckabee wins in that demographic 43/35, as does Ron Paul at a lower level (37/32). Three other Republicans are within a point of Obama among indies: Mitch Daniels (32/32), Herman Cain (24/25), and Haley Barbour (33/32). None of these numbers indicate a great deal of enthusiasm one way or the other among independents, but Trump's 25/48 is the worst performance of all.
The enthusiasm for Trump won't increase much as other Republicans challenge his record — and there is plenty to challenge, according to the Club for Growth. The pro-free market organization blasted Trump today in a press release, calling him a liberal with a long track record of supporting tax hikes and universal government coverage for health care:
Trump: "We must have universal healthcare": We must have universal healthcare. Our objective [should be] to make reforms for the moment and, longer term, to find an equivalent of the single-payer plan that is affordable, well-administered, and provides freedom of choice. (Source: The America We Deserve, by Donald Trump, p.206-208 & 218)
Donald Trump favors a massive tax hike on Americans that would kill jobs and investment: I would impose a one-time, 14.25% tax on individuals and trusts with a net worth over $10 million. For individuals, net worth would be calculated minus the value of their principal residence. That would raise $5.7 trillion in new revenue, which we would use to pay off the entire national debt [and shore up the Social Security Trust Fund].
(Source: The America We Deserve, by Donald Trump, p.170-74)
Still, it says something about Obama's standing that he can't even clear 50% against a sideshow like Trump.


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Import CommSec tradesContent also available for tax entities or on our global site.
Import historical trades
Import your historical buy and sell trades to Sharesight directly from your CommSec account.
Note: This only imports your trade history, once you have imported your history, set up the Trade Confirmation Emails feature to automatically import future trades.
You will require a CSV file export out of Commsec to import your trading history into Sharesight. You can do this by following the below steps.
1 - Log into your Commsec Account.
2 - Visit the Trading tab and select Confirmations from the menu on the left
3 - Select the account that you'd like to import into Sharesight from the dropdown list
4 - Make sure that both Buy and Sell order types are selected
5 - Select your desired date range and click the search button
6 - Click the Download CSV link
Once your file is downloaded, you can import it into Sharesight through the below steps
1 – Login to Sharesight.
2 - On the 'Let's get you started with Sharesight' page, select the 'Import from a Broker' tile.
3 - Click on the 'CommSec' tile on the 'Import from a Broker' page.
4 - From the 'Import your CommSec trade account with Sharesight' click the 'import from a file' button
5 – Select the 'Confirmations' file downloaded to import
6 - Click import.
Note: If you have changed brokers and transferred the holdings to CommSec these trades will not be imported into Sharesight. Due to a chess transfer.
7 – The 'Trades to import into Portfolio:' page will show an itemised list of all trades imported from your CommSec trading account. Verify and edit the trade data as required.
If trades appear in red, this means that Sharesight can't upload the trade or the trade will cause errors in your portfolio.
A common error issue when importing from a Broker is:
'Saving this trade would result in a negative number of Shares being held'
This means you are importing more sell shares of a stock than bought shares. It happens if you have transferred stock from another broker or have any off-market trades.
Click 'Import anyway' for each of these stocks. Then handle them later in Sharesight.
The solutions to other common errors can be found here.
8 – Once you have verified the trade data, click 'Save all transactions'.
9 - Once the trades are saved, your Sharesight portfolio will be populated and the Portfolio Overview Page will load.
Your holdings will be calculated by Sharesight's performance calculation methodology which is a money-weighted return methodology, meaning the investment performance takes account of the size and timing of cash flows.
Sharesight will automatically create dividends and corporate actions for the holdings you have imported.
Now that you have populated your portfolio we recommend you:
1 - Review the trades imported:
a – Handle any negative holdings - Holdings with less buy trades than sell trades (occurs when transferred stocks from another broker).
b - Check fractional share trades for rounding differences.
c - Exchange rates are generated by Sharesight using the end of day exchange rate, these can be edited within the trade.
d - Handle any non automated corporate actions, such as mergers etc.
2 - Verify and confirm automatically generated data (dividends and corporate actions).
3 - Set up the Trade Confirmation Emails feature to automatically import future trades.
4 - Share access of your portfolio with your accountant.
5 - Add your other investments to Sharesight.
6 - Use Sharesight to help you complete your tax return.
## Automatically keep your portfolio up-to-date
Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfo6AwuMUDE
Please refer to Commsec support for more information.
In Sharesight, from any page click on the Settings tab.
Under Connection, click the Trade Confirmation Emails side tab.
Select Copy next to the email address.
Log in to your CommSec account
Go to Settings
Click on View or edit details and follow the security prompts
Scroll down to the "Contact details" section and select "Edit"
Click +Add new email
Paste email address > Select Add email > Save updates
Go to Portfolio
Select Accounts and then use the dropdown to choose the relevant account
Click on View or edit account details
Scroll down to the Trade confirmations section and click Edit
Select the portfolio email address under Copy to
Click "Save"
Commsec will send a copy of all future buy or sell to your portfolio going forward.
Note: Keep in mind Commsec only send trade confirmation for market buy & sell. If you have any off-market trade or corporate action i.e SPP, IPO, right issue, M&A, demerger etc, you need to manually update your portfolio.
Last modified on December 30, 2022 UTC


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Security researchers have taken down a major spam offender, though the dip in spam levels may be only temporary. Members of the FireEye security team coordinated an attack on the Mega-D botnet (also known as Ozdok) last week by preemptively registering domains meant for the botnet's command and control channels (CnCs) and shutting down others. Spam coming from Mega-D stopped almost instantly, proving that David really can take down Goliath every once in a while.
Ever since the shut-down of McColo in 2008, the brains behind spam botnets have been much smarter about diversifying their CnCs. As pointed out by a FireEye blog post, they're no longer relying on a single net of domains to control the botnet—instead, many current botnets have mechanisms in place that randomly generate the next block of domains that the zombie machines will look for once the current set is shut down, and the people controlling the CnCs just register those domains on the fly as needed.
Such is the case with Mega-D/Ozdok, which has not one, but two fallback mechanisms for when the original CnCs go down. Not only can it use its own list of DNS servers to access its CnCs, it can generate new domains based on the current date and time. "Unless someone is committed enough to pre-register those domains, the bot herders can always come forward and register those domains and take botnet control back," the FireEye team wrote.
FireEye's move against Mega-D started with abuse notifications to the ISPs being used as hosts—all but four were taken down immediately. The firm then worked with numerous domain registrars to take down the primary CnC domains in order to throw a wrench into the botnet's workings. Then, the researchers registered a number of domains that were on Mega-D's permanent CnC list but were mysteriously unregistered; this move essentially gave FireEye CnC control of the botnet, which they pointed to a sinkhole server where data was collected on victim machines in order to help users recover control of their PCs.
Finally, FireEye began registering in advance some of the soon-to-be-generated domains based on date and time for the next three days, anticipating that the botnet would begin looking for those domains once it realized the current ones were out of commission. This, apparently, was the nail in the coffin, as the firm wrote in a new blog post (via Slashdot) that "everything went right according to plan."
Spam coming out of Mega-D has stopped altogether (at least for the time being), but it's not all good news from here on out. For one, much of Mega-D's spam was caught by server-side spam filters, meaning that users may not even notice much of a difference in spam levels on the client end. Additionally, in order to keep Mega-D offline forever, the firm would have to continue registering future domains before Mega-D's controllers get ahead. Still, even a temporary victory in this case is notable—all it took was swift action (it all happened within a period of 24 hours) with a coordinated plan from all angles to seriously disable Mega-D, and all thanks to a relatively small security team.


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Hornitos Plata Tequila
Review: Hornitos Plata Tequila 81.5/100
a Review by Chip Dykstra (Aka Arctic Wolf)
Original Posting Aug 09, 2011
(Revised and Re-scored May 05, 2015)
Hornitos Plata Tequila is a 100 % Agave Tequila produced by the Sauza Tequila Import Company. The Plata Tequila is said to be the creation of Don Francisco Havier Sauza (Don Franco), who is a third generation member of the Sauza family which founded the La Preseverancia, distillery. Incidentally, Don Franco is credited with helping the Mexican Government to establish the Jalisco region of Mexico as the exclusive origin of genuine tequila in 1974.
According to the Hornitos Tequila website, their Plata is constructed to be a pure expression of the natural agave flavour of Tequila, and is made with no aging or contact with wood at all. The spirit is bottled at 40 % alcohol by volume.
Note: I identified the NOM on the back label of the bottle as 1102. This NOM identifier is required by the Mexican Government to be placed on the label of each bottle of tequila to verify that it is produced legally from agave sourced in the Tequila region of Mexico. Each distillery has its own NOM, and thus we can verify the distillery of origin. In this case it is TEQUILA SAUZA which is of course the distillery which produces all Sauza tequila brands.
In the Bottle 4/5
When I did my review of Hornitos Reposado Tequila, I likened the shape of the bottle to the image of an ancient horned altar. I was making the point that the marketing gurus who selected the bottle shape may have been playing a subliminal game with their consumers. Horned altars were common in ancient Mesopotamian culture and played an important role in fertility rites (which were believed to increase virility and sexual prowess). The advertising which I originally saw on television also seemed to be playing with similar themes where the Plata Tequila is featured in humorous commercial as a Tequila with purer intentions than its consumer. The sexual implications in the television commercial were obvious to me, and it is quite safe to say that sexual innuendo is part of the overall presentation of the spirit to the North American public.
I have no quibbles with the marketing plan. I think that both the television marketing and the bottle presentation are witty and serve to catch a person's attention. I do however wish that the Hornitos bottle would be sealed with a nice cork rather than the flimsy metal cap.
In the Glass 8.5/10
I poured out a small sample of the Hornitos Plata into my glass and began with a good look at the tequila spirit before I began to nose it. It is a clear spirit, and I could detect no hint of colour. This is consistent with a blanco spirit which has had no contact with wood. I gave my glass a light tilt and a slow swirl and discovered a light sheen of tequila was left on the inside of the glass which slowly disappeared but gave up no legs. Again this is consistent with my expectations, and I am happy with my observations.
When I brought the glass to my nose, I discovered a moderately punky/earthy agave aroma with a mild white pepper scent rising from the glass. There is a light vegetal earthiness in the aroma and some very light hints of citrus (I am thinking lime and lime zest).
In the Mouth 49/60
The entry into the mouth is spicy with more heated citrus zest than I noticed on the nose. In addition to citrus zest, the spicy flavour also carries black pepper, a touch of cloves and perhaps a little ginger across the palate as well. A vegetal earthiness of the Agave fruit lies under the spices accenting them with its punky agave taste which sort of resembles broiled zucchini and pumpkin; however, the earthy flavours take a backseat to the peppery heat which becomes even spicier as you sip some more.
As with the aroma, I am finding the taste clean and crisp. The Hornitos Plata is perhaps a spicier than my own personal preference would lean; but I can certainly understand another Tequila aficionado appreciating this spiciness more than I.
When my tasting group, the Rum Chums sampled the agave spirit as part of our deliberations for the 2015 Rum Howler Margarita Challenge, our perceptions during the blind tasting were very consistent. (For this competition, I designed a standard cocktail (see recipe here).) What we discovered was that Hornitos Plata pushes its heat into the cocktail experience to some degree, and in fact, the spice it carries can dominate the mixed drink. However, if an allowance for that heat is made and we add a splash of soda to the cocktail, the resulting Margarita cocktail (shown below) is much nicer.
In the Throat 12/15
We have a very traditional finish as the Hornitos Plata Tequila has a spicy exit filled with white pepper. The earthy agave is apparent as well, but the spiciness of the finish is definitely much more apparent than the earthiness. Although the exit was spicy, I did not notice any undo burn. The tequila will knock your tonsils for a loop, but it will not char your esophagus.
An interesting aspect of the finish is the lasting impression of dryness (or it may be more correct to say the lack of sweetness).
The Afterburn 8/10
The centerpiece of the Hornitos Plata's flavour is the heated agave with all of its spiciness on display. In fact, the Plata is perhaps just a bit too spicy for me to enjoy sipping neat. However, when mixed with a forethought to accommodate the spiciness, I am found the tequila quite satisfactory.
You may read some of my other Tequila Reviews (click the link) if you wish to have some comparative reviews.
Suggested Recipe
The Margarita Cocktail (A Traditional Recipe)
1 1/2 oz Hornitos Plata Tequila
3/4 oz Triple Sec
3/4 oz fresh lime juice
1 tsp simple syrup (optional)
Splash of soda
lime slice for garnish
Chill a cocktail glass and rim the outside with coarse salt
Place the tequila, lime, Triple Sec, and simple syrup into a metal shaker
Shake until the outside of the shaker frosts
Strain into the chilled cocktail glass
Add a splash of soda
Garnish with Lime
I am also going to suggest a recipe of my construction called The Green Ripper which is part of my ongoing series of Tequila cocktails which are named after the Travis McGee novels of American author John D. MacDonald. I have always like the Travis McGee novels, and the titles of these novels just seem to me to be particularly well suited to be also the names of great tequila cocktails.
The Green Ripper
1 1/2 oz Hornitos Plata Tequila
3/4 oz Bols Blue Curacao
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
Orange and Mango Soda (Koala Brand)
Place the tequila, the Blue Curacao, and the fresh juice into a metal shaker
Shake until the outside of the shaker frosts
Strain into the chilled wine glass
Add Orange and Mango Soda slowly stirring until the desired shade of green is achieved
Garnish with Lime if desired
Enjoy Responsibly!
Note: If you are interested in more of my original cocktail recipes, please click this link (Cocktails and Recipes) for more of my mixed drink recipes!
You may (loosely) interpret the scores as follows.
0-25 A spirit with a rating this low would actually kill you.
26-49 Depending upon your fortitude you might actually survive this.
50 -59 You are safe to drink this…but you shouldn't.
60-69 Substandard swill which you may offer to people you do not want to see again.
70-74 Now we have a fair mixing Tequila. Accept this but make sure it is mixed into a cocktail.
75-79 You may begin to serve this to friends, (we are probably still cocktail in territory).
80-84 We begin to enjoy this spirit neat or on the rocks. (I will still primarily mix cocktails)
85-89 Excellent for sipping or for mixing delicious cocktails!
90-94 Definitely a primary sipping spirit, in fact you may want to hoard this for yourself.
95-97.5 The Cream of the Crop
98+ I haven't met this bottle yet…but I want to.
Very loosely we may put my scores into terms that you may be familiar with on a Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal scale as follows:
70 – 79.5 Bronze Medal (Recommended only as a mixer)
80 – 89.5 Silver Medal (Recommended for sipping and or a high quality mixer)
90 – 95 Gold Medal (Highly recommended for sipping and for sublime cocktails.)
95.5+ Platinum Award (Highest Recommendation)


text:
The new economic scenario increases the importance of the "innovative capacity" of the agents as crucial competitive instrument in order to attain the differentiating element required by the competitive process. Innovative capacity refers to the agents' capability to transform general knowledge into specific one using their stock of competencies and dynamic assets, including formal and informal –both codified and tacit- learning. In this paper we recognize that the economic, social and institutional environment of firms becomes increasingly important. The new competitive situation and the uncertainties generated by the economic globalization process intensify the role of institutional and social agents in strengthening the innovative capacity of firms. This, in turn, results in the generation of technological, organizational and market knowledge and in the development of formal and informal mechanisms to facilitate its diffusion through the productive internal network. In the framework defined by the new production and market conditions, innovative processes change from an individual (and often incremental) phenomenon to a collective one where both the capacity to collaborate and interact and the adequate institutional structure, fostering innovative activities on the part of economic agents, become crucial. The main objective of this paper is to present a proxy indicator of the agents' potentiality to learn, create "competencies", transform generic knowledge into specific knowledge and, therefore, innovate. It aims at analyzing the knowledge of firms, specially, the way they acquire, organize, memorize and transfer information (technical, organizational, etc.) thus contributing to increase the knowledge base itself. For that purpose, this paper analyze the application of such indicator to a sample of 245 firms in Argentina, most of them small and medium sized firms, located in different areas with heterogeneous incidence of externalities. In that sense, we will try to determine the importance of the agent's size and environment to understand the existing differences in innovative capacities. Finally, the paper will evaluate whether those firms with larger innovative capacity have had a more dynamic performance in the market as from the start of the trade openness and structural reforms processes.
|Original language
|Place of Publication
|DRUID - Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics
|Number of pages
|ISBN (Print)
|Publication status
|Published - 2000
|DRUID Working Paper
- Learning
- Systems of Innovation
- Competences knowledge


text:
Last week, Ben Lindbergh let us all in on the secret treasure trove of 50- and 60-year old radio broadcasts that Craig Robinson at Flip Flop Fly Ballin' recently uncovered. It's a pretty fantastic find, with games ranging from the 1948 World Series to a late summer game between the White Sox and Red Sox in the Impossible Dream season.
While Ben had a few things to say about Game 5 of the 1948 World Series, I recently listened to the full two-hour broadcast of Game 1 of the same series, a tight pitcher's duel between Bob Feller and Johnny Sain. Even for a game played when Jackie Robinson was the reigning Rookie of the Year, the game, at one-hour and forty-two minutes long, was a speedy affair. By contrast, Game 1 of the 2012 World Series between Justin Verlander and Barry Zito lasted three-hours and 26-minutes.
Listening to a radio broadcast that my grandfather might have listened to as a teenager, there are a number of other things about this World Series game that strike my 21st century sensibilities as strange or different. Here then is a (kind-of, sort-of) running diary of Game 1 of the 1948 World Series, as broadcast by Mel Allen and Jim Britt. Brought to you by Gillette.
00:29 – "Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp. Use Gillette Blue Blades, for the sharpest edges ever honed." Read live by Mel Allen. The first of more than two dozen references to Gillette and their Blue Blades we'll hear tonight.
01:24 – After some brief introductions to the game, it doesn't take long for Allen to get into the swing of the "casual cultural insensitivity" Ben mentioned last week. (And remember, this is Game 1, meaning we're less than 90 seconds into the entire World Series before these remarks hit the nation's ears.)
"It's been said many times in jest that the country should be given back to the indians. Well, today that quip has taken on an aura of reality, for America truly has been taken by the redskins. The Cleveland Indians and the Boston Braves. Many times have these warriors been to the well these many years but it's been quite a long time since thirst-quenching pennant draughts. … The warriors from the Lake Erie reservation, the Cleveland Indians had gone hunting, but wanting, for an American League flag since 1920 … And today our wigwam is pitched on the bank of the Charles River in what has often been referred to as quaint or staid Boston…"
02:52 – The weather report is read. Forecasters had been warning of rain all week, but it looks like the clouds are scattered enough to squeeze in the game before anything might happen. I like Allen's description: "Not quite cool enough for football weather, but almost."
04:01 – Setting the scene, Allen describes the sightlines from his spot in the press box, beginning on the left-field foul line and working right. Braves Field sat in present-day Boston University, about a mile or so from Fenway Park (in fact, parts of Braves Field are still in existence in BU's Nickerson Field). According to Allen, fans at the stadium could see "Fair Harvard", the Charles River, Cambridge, and the skyline of downtown Boston.
04:40 – Allen refers to the starting pitchers as "Johnny Sain" and "Bobby Feller." It makes me think of a "Little Bobby Feller," which doesn't quite work for the 29-year old.
06:15 – The experts predict the Series will go anywhere from four-to-six games in either direction.
08:48 – The starting lineups are read. This is the first hint that this national radio broadcast will refer to nothing but batting average.
Batting fifth for the Braves is Marv Rickert, who was called up from Milwaukee very late in the year to replace the injured Jeff Heath. Rickert had to receive "full approval from the generous Cleveland Indians" in order to be on the squad. This story will be told every time Rickert's name is mentioned throughout the game.
11:15 – Allen cuts away to let the national anthem take over. In what many today would consider to be a blessing, the woman singing the anthem finishes in 59.13 seconds, including the final note on "home of the brave." In the 2012 Super Bowl, the over-under on Kelly Clarkson's performance of the national anthem was set at 94 seconds (she met it exactly). In 2013, the upcoming Alicia Keys national anthem has an over-under length of 130-135 seconds, depending on the bookmaker. Just another sign of how different things were in post-war America.
13:05 – Heading into the first inning, Allen hands off to Jim Britt (the Boston radio announcer for the Braves and Red Sox), who will call the first four-and-a-half innings.
13:40 – The home plate umpire begins dusting off home plate. He "is also erasing the parallel lines in the batter's box so that they will in no way interfere with the whiteness of the outside corners on which many a pitch may hang."
14:10 – The first pitch is thrown. Dale Mitchell takes a ball from Sain.
15:19 – Time is called on the field during Larry Doby's first at-bat. "And one of the ushers is being told by [first base umpire] Bill Summers to get off the playing field and get back into the confined area of the field boxes along the right field side."
17:33 – The top of the first inning ends with no one reaching base. A Gillette commercial begins, with Britt reading copy for 59 seconds straight. It's even more unpleasant than it sounds.
21:33 – This is something you definitely will not see in a World Series game anymore. Alvin Dark at the plate, before the second pitch of the at-bat: "Someone called the attention of [home plate umpire] George Farr to the fact that Dark's right foot was not in the batter's box but the umpire looked it over very carefully and indicated that it was. One of the Cleveland coaches."
31:05 – It's the middle of the second inning, which means it's time for another Gillette commercial. This one features Leo Durocher, who is introduced like this: "Anybody who grows as tough whiskers as Leo Durocher of the Giants does should know a thing or two about razor blades."
It's actually quite hard to find a picture of Durocher with a beard. I don't know if this is a good thing for Gillette or not.
32:46 – Britt describes Feller like so: "Feller is as always a deliberate workman. Baseball is his profession and he treats it like a business. He pays meticulous attention to detail."
Up to this point, Feller has been much more deliberate than Sain on the hill. The man known as "Rapid Robert" is actually a bit slow on the mound. His pitches are coming 25-30 seconds apart even when there is nothing to slow him down (a foul ball, runner on first, etc.). The time between the final pitch of one at-bat and the first pitch of the next approaches a full minute in some cases. Sain, however, is very quick. Most of his pitches seem to come 12-15 seconds apart, though there are many different circumstances that push it into the 20-second range (a foul ball, a conference with his second baseman, a timeout from the umpire, etc.). On a few pitches, Sain took only 10-11 seconds before throwing the next one. Sain can even keep the between-batter delay down to roughly 30 seconds.
The comparison between the two starting pitchers was stark enough on that chilly October day; comparing their between-pitch delays to today's pitchers is considerably sharper (though Feller might fit in much more than you would expect).
35:08 – Jim Britt is still calling the game, but that doesn't mean our casual cultural insensitivity is through. "As Mel Allen told you, this country has literally been given back to the indians, baseball-wise, because both the Indians and the Braves wear tribal insignia." Feller notches his second strikeout of the game on the next pitch, ending the inning and, thankfully, stopping Britt from taking his thought any further.
41:50 – Mike McCormick leads off the bottom of the third. His introduction by Britt is a prime example of how this game is called:
"Mike McCormick will be the leadoff batter for the Boston Braves going into the last half of the third inning. Mike was born in Angel's Camp, California, scene of the famous jumping frog derby and he lives in Ventura. His season batting average missed the .300 mark by just one point. He batted .299. He is the centerfielder, stands feet close together, and he crowds the plate a bit."
If you ever felt like you weren't learning enough about a player's home town or his batting stance, old time radio is definitely where you should be.
52:39 – Jim Britt cannot keep from praising Feller any chance he gets.
"Feller is an artist, a baseball pitching artist and the coordination with which he works is beautiful to watch. He's a magnificently conditioned athlete and he regards baseball as a highly successful profession."
54:25 – It is mentioned that Cleveland manager Lou Boudreau was "the originator of the Ted Williams shift." He is described as someone with the "knack for placing his infielders with an almost uncanny premonition for where the ball is hit."
56:35 – Earl Torgeson has reached base on a walk from Feller. We are told that he is a "very fast baserunner" who was thrown out only once all season. The official stats for Torgeson have the "CS" column blank in 1948, so that's one mystery we can solve.
1:04:25 – We have now reached the middle of the fifth inning, the halfway point for a standard nine-inning game. It has taken barely an hour to reach this point. Mel Allen comes in to call the rest of the game, as the umpires confer with Boudreau, Feller, and a few other Indians. Allen speculates that maybe the conference was about "the style of delivery that Bobby Feller is deploying."
1:14:30 – Another terrible Gillette commercial, this time featuring Joe DiMaggio. Making it even worse is that the commercial is scripted so that we're meant to think that Allen is having a conversation with Joltin' Joe. The only way it could be worse is if Frank Caliendo was doing a DiMaggio impression.
1:22:30 – It's the top of the seventh and the game is still tight as nails. The Indians have four hits and no runs while Boston has managed only a single knock. Eddie Robinson flies out, prompting Allen to quip "I don't know how long this can go on but as long as it goes on we'll be here."
1:28:01 – Two close plays in a row keep Cleveland in the game. The first is a smash down the first base line knocked down by Eddie Robinson, who underhands it to a charging Feller to beat the runner. The next batter punches a 2-1 pitch down the third base line. Feller charges in on that one too and fires it across the diamond to beat out the runner. The crowd loves it and the Indians really look like they're going to fight this game to the end.
1:30:15 – Allen describes the Braves Field scoreboard as "spectacular and gigantic … one of the finest you've ever seen anywhere, at any ballpark." The Braves Field scoreboard would have looked something like this that year.
Seven full innings have been played in an hour and twenty minutes. Allen describes it as a "very fast" game. It's safe to say that not all games in the 1940s moved at this blistering pace.
1:35:45 – Bottom of the eighth, Braves batting. After the first pitch to Bill Salkeld, the Cleveland bench gets riled up.
"Bill McKechnie and several of the Indians come to the front of the dugout and holler up at George Farr about the position assumed by Bill Salkeld in the batter's box. They claim his back foot is outside the restraining line, which, to put it simply, is against the law. But it's all straightened out."
That's the second time in the game that one team has asked the umpire to check if the batter was standing outside the batter's box. It's also the second time that the umpire hardly seemed to do much, allowing the game to continue as normal. It is still illegal for players to stand outside the batter's box today, but no one ever seems to care. You especially wouldn't see an appeal to the umpire over the rule late in a World Series game.
1:40:15 – Yet another situation that would never happen today. Pinch-runners on first and second with one out for the Braves. A walk to Salkeld was followed by a sacrifice bunt, moving him over to second. Feller was then asked to intentionally walk Eddie Stanky, bringing Johnny Sain up to the plate. He's a good hitter for a pitcher, but that doesn't mean much. Sain lines out on the first pitch.
1:43:52 – As one might expect, the game has slowed down considerably. In the nearly four minutes since Sain lined out, Feller has attempted one pickoff and thrown two pitches. He was slower than Sain all throughout the game, but nothing close to what he is showing in the bottom of the eighth with the game on the line. This is a very familiar situation to anyone watching baseball today, but, with the way our memories seem to skew the past, a full minute between pitches in the 1940s seems impossible. Feller proves that it was very much a reality.
Tommy Holmes laces a ball down the third base line and past Ken Keltner. Both runners score and Boston erupts as the Braves take a 2-0 lead. Allen makes sure to tell us that Phil Masi scored the go-ahead run "bareheaded." The inning ends on the next batter.
1:48:02 – The last commercial of the game. And by far the strangest.
"You know, bumper crops are always news, so I know you'll be glad to learn that more children were born last year than ever before. That means your local community chest agencies are busier than ever with pre-natal education…"
Bumper crops.
1:53:21 – With the crowd roaring so loud that Mel Allen's voice is nearly obscured, Sain fires in a strike to Wally Judnich to end the game. Allen spends the next 20 seconds completely silent, allowing the crowd to cheer wildly into the homes of radio listeners around the country. The game is called at one-hour and 42-minutes, with 40,135 fans in the stands.
1:55:05 – Along with the normal end-of-game stats, Britt reads off a total I've never heard before.
"Total receipts – a little more than $180,000, of which slightly more than $153,000 went into the players share. So with the players sharing in the receipts of the four games—two here and two in the Municipal Stadium in Cleveland—there may be an all time record cut as far as the winners and losers shares are concerned."
I get the feeling that number would be slightly larger today.
Britt finishes the broadcast by going over the game's highlights. Two hours after we began, Game 1 of the World Series is over. Much of the game's speed can be attributed to the strong pitching performances from Sain and Feller. No one was ever on base and batters rarely went deep into the count. It was such a speedy game that Mel Allen even made mention of it between innings. It wasn't just the great pitching, however, that kept the contest moving along. Sain was brutally quick between pitches all throughout the game and even Feller, who was much more modern in the length of time between each of his pitches, rarely waited an absurd amount of time. The time between innings was also quite short, typically taking less than 90 seconds. The longest inning break came in the middle of the eighth, when the two teams spent exactly two minutes switching sides. That would be the minimum length between innings in a game today. The shortest inning break (at one-minute ten-seconds) is barely enough time for Ryan Braun to knock the dirt off his shoes between pitches.
Beside all of that, it was quite a lot of fun to listen to a game from such a far off time. It's worth it just to hear what the great Bob Feller was like in his prime, but the other moments—the in-game commercials, the crowd taking over Mel Allen's microphone, the descriptions of the surrounding neighborhoods in these tiny ballparks—are worth experiencing too. If you have a chance, I highly recommend listening to any of the 14 games found in the Old Time Radio archives.
Thank you for reading
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text:
At last, Christmas is over, done and dusted for another year. It's a time of year that is hard to handle when you've lost your health so completely. Inside you want to have everything as perfect as those long past, but you know it's totally impossible to get anywhere close. For me, the hardest thing this year was the trail of relatives. Don't get me wrong, it was lovely to see them, especially as we seldom see them at any other time, but getting them to totally understand that limited energy, means limited ability to even just sit and listen to their chatter, is hard. My daughter Teressa and her husband John were here for two days and I got through their two five-hour visits tired but still feeling alive. Yet, having Adams Mother, sister, and his sister's girlfriend here for four hours, drained me totally. I don't know if it was the fact that I had never met Amy or that Alison and Jenifer rarely come round to call, but those four hours, in one fell swoop, took as much as the two visits from Teressa and John did, and more.
Both visits had been organised in advance, but despite that, I found myself confused and anxious about the finer details. I knew Teressa and John would be here for at least one meal, if not two and I didn't want to have the expense of their last visit when we landed up ordering Chinese. It was nice but I honestly can't afford another £80 bill. I don't know how many times I tweaked the Asda shopping list before time ran out and I had to go with what was there. I had gone for a simple array of cold meats, pates, smoked salmon, and pickles, to be served with bread and crackers. If they were to be here the next day as well, well toast and pate would have to do. I have never before gotten myself as wound up about people coming to visit as I did this time. I guess, I am more aware of my health these days than I have ever done before, especially when it comes to my memory.
It was so good to have my daughter here again. There is something about our bond, that nothing can get in the way of, not time, not distance, not anything. We as always were instantly connected and leaving the two boys trying to get a word in edgewise, and trying to work out, what we were finding quite so funny, or possibly so intense. It has often been said that we are two parts of the same person, not just as we look alike, but our sense of humor and inflections of voice are almost identical. She though has the luck of being both healthy and employed in a job that financially means life can be more than comfortably enjoyable. We did though have our silences, they always felt as though they were down to me, as my brain kept going blank and I could find nothing to say what so ever. It's not as though my life is filled with exciting things to talk about. No matter what I do or how I try, being housebound really does have it's limitations. Despite the silence those few hours passed with ease, my fatigue was limited, but clearly there. In some ways, I think the silence allowed me to recover, to recenter and move forwards at my pace.
The visit from Adams family was the total opposite for me. The hardest part was trying to listen to their chatter, well it was his turn to be at ease and mine to be the outsider, part of, but not truly connected. The four of them were totally connected and I was lost on the edges, occasionally connecting but then lost again. I could feel that Adam didn't want them to leave when I called it a day, but I had already gone past the three hours agreed on and I honestly couldn't take any more. If final proof were needed, it came that night when I slept for 14 hours and Adam still had problems waking me. My alarm had been sounding for 10 minutes when he decided that he too should join in. but not even shaking me or his voice found it's way through at first. When I did wake, all I wanted was to be left alone to sleep again. The three of them all together had drained me to a point I hadn't expected, especially as all we did was talk.
You don't really feel or notice your health changing. You can't really measure it when you have been ill for so many years, that ill, is quite simply our life. You forget when one day runs into another so seamlessly that even their identity is gone, just what normal life really is and just what it really does to us. Two simple family gatherings, the sort of thing most people do every week, not full blown parties, not huge cooking marathons, just people in my home sitting talking, yet they were enough to drain what energy I could find. It's days like these that show me just how ill I have really become. I never understood those stupid rules that hospitals have of just two visitors to every bed. They made no sense at all. How can it really make the slightest difference other than to the number of chairs that they have? Well, now I understand. Now I get the real reason. Now I see just how simply being surrounded by the healthy can truly impact on our health.
I wouldn't change those three days as they were both important and fun, but now I have a much deeper understanding of my health, of just where I am on that scale of healthy. I knew already that my ability to be amongst people was diminishing, thanks to my carer and the district nurses, As much as I need them and even to some extent enjoy being with them, I knew that time limits were very much needed. Now, I actually believe that a second rule is needed. the rule of two at a time may well be the way of the future. Adams family proved what I thought already, that my brain quite simply can't keep up and fatigue becomes a huge issue. We may love our families, but without trying to sound cruel or nasty, small doses has become a necessity.
Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – Right or wrong
I found myself in the middle of the night just sitting on the edge of my bed, I had woken up for no reason I could find and for equally no reason I decided I needed to sit up, I was sat there still wearing my earplugs…..