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Asheville, North Carolina (CNN) - Mitt Romney's campaign seized on what Republicans called a "stunning admission" made Tuesday by Vice President Joe Biden when he said the middle class "has been buried" the last four years, putting the Obama campaign on defense.
During a campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina, the vice president reiterated recent attacks against his Republican opponents: claiming that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's economic plans would raise taxes on middle class families.
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"This is deadly earnest," Biden said. "How they can justify, how they can justify raising taxes on the middle class that has been buried the last four years? How in the Lord's name can they justify raising their taxes? We've seen this movie before."
At a separate event hours later, Biden used slightly different language to make his point. While he argued middle income earners have been "buried," he attributed their struggles to Republican policies.
"The middle class was buried by the polices of Romney and that Ryan supported," Biden said. "What they're proposing is Bush economic policies on steroids- that's what this is. But folks, the middle class is coming back. It's coming back like Americans always do."
Republicans, however, took off on part of Biden's original comments.
A tweet from Romney's account read: "Agree with @JoeBiden, the middle class has been buried the last 4 years, which is why we need a change in November."
A spokesman for his campaign went further.
"Vice President Biden made a stunning admission today and we couldn't agree more: the middle class has been 'buried' under the last four years of this President's policies," wrote Curt Cashour, the Virginia Communications Director for the Romney campaign.
"Under President Obama, the middle class has suffered from crushing unemployment, rising prices and falling incomes. They can't afford to be 'buried' for four more years. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will take our nation in a new direction and are offering exactly what hardworking families need – real reforms for a real recovery."
At a campaign event in Iowa, Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, also pounced on his counterpart's comments.
"Of course the middle class has been buried. They are being buried by regulations, they are being buried by taxes…they are being buried by borrowing, they are being buried by the Obama administration's economic failures," Ryan said. "You see the Obama economic agenda failed not because it was stopped, it failed because it was passed."
Though Biden's comments seemed intended to echo past comments – that middle class families have been hit hard in the trouble economy – they nonetheless forced the Obama campaign to go on defense.
"As the Vice President has been saying all year and again in his remarks today, the middle class was punished by the failed Bush policies that crashed our economy - and a vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan is a return to those failed policies," an Obama campaign official said. "With more than five million private-sector jobs created since 2010, the Vice President and President Obama will continue to help the middle class recover and move the nation forward."
- CNN Political Producer Shawna Shepherd contributed to this report.
Spin, Republicans, Spin.
The middle class *is* buried by Republican policies that brought on the recession. And the traction we had going to dig it out was thwarted by Republicans' who took office in 2010.
We do need a change in November. We need to get those Republicans removed from the House so the recovery can get back on track.
I will proudly NOT vote for Hussein Obama
The GOP is pathetic. This is what they do, sit around waiting for someone to say ANYTHING that they can use. The middle class has been buried thanks to the treasonous, traitorous GOP Congress. They are the ones that decided making President Obama a one term POTUS was their main priority. Not the jobs they promised. Do they really think Americans are that dumb? We know who put us in this mess, and we know who is working diligently to get us out and none of those names has an R behind it.
oh PLEASE!! Of course Biden was being truthful, but he was talking about the RECESSION!! I'd rather have a VP that recognizes the plight of the middle class than someone who would deny the suffering.
This is not an insult like the 47% comment!! not even close.
Biden tells audience middle class has been 'buried' last four years
By Amie Parnes – 10/02/12 01:33 PM ET
Keep telling the truth Biden. Obamacare alone killed the middle class.
Gordon Jones–Hey idiot..Obama's first two years he controlled the house and senate..R U that STUPID.. Go play dungeons and dragons some more..
gop care about the middle class yea right trying to use this to score points is there only thing they have
Yes...he said exactly how the Bush policies buried middle America and why it will take a decade of digging ourselves out of his mess....of two unfunded wars, tax breaks for the 2%, the unfunded drug benefit, and TARP signed in October 2008.
Obama-Biden 2012!
Forward not back to the failed policies of trickle down under Bush!
A Romney/ Ryan administration will be the best thing that can happen for the American middle class. The 12 million new jobs will not be for millionaires. Millionaires are not who will eventually have to pay off the huge national debt or the interest burden until it is paid down. High national debt absolutely falls on the middle class in several different ways. Certainly you will not hear this from Obama/ Biden 2012 but their objective is not to be forthright and honest... they are doing whatever they can to be reelected. The only hope they have is to mislead the middle class. Or try, anyway.
Vice President Biden said today (Tuesday Oct 2, 2012) that the middle class has been "buried the last four years". Biden made the remark at a campaign stop in Charlotte, N.C.
LOL, bite me Biden can't open his mouth without sticking his foot in it.
I'm sick and tired of this Administration blaming everyone else. They had control for 2 years and could have done anything that they wanted. The proof is in their actions – not their words.... During those 2 years – they could have passed whatever immigration reform they wanted, they could have passed anything relating to LGBT rights – anything. But they didn't.... Doesn't that tell you something – they never supported any of it to begin with. Now – latinos, gay/lesbians are just political pawns – this Administration just tells you want you want to hear so you'll vote for them. This Administration mishandled the economy, foreign policy and healthcare. They were irresponsible and do not care 1 iota for the American citizen. They have the classic victim mentality – it's not me, it's everyone else.
And the kicker – now this Administration is telling our defense contractors not to follow the WARN law and give 60 day notification to the thousands of employees that are going to be laid off. And in exchange for not following the law – our WH has offered to cover any legal costs that result from this failure. Wow – the layoffs are expected on January 2 – the 60 day notification would be right around Nov 2 or 3. Gee, right before the election...? And for those of you who question whether the WARN law is applicable or not – why would the WH agree to cover the legal costs for compliance if it wasn't? The Administration knows this is wrong. Yet – they are putting their own political agenda ahead of thousands of Americans who are going to lose their jobs. And this Administration is all about the Middle Class. Give me a break.
And now – it's all Romney and Ryan's fault. Wonderful words from our VP plagurist.
And gostriter – do your homework. Salaries have absolutely not been stagnant since the 80's. No Republicans are supporting ending minimum wage.
Under Bush The Dems controlled the house and the senate.. You cant have it both ways..You blame congress now what happened under the Bush years.. One word, Democrats
Bush left half of TARP to Hussein Obama ($350 Billion).
Nice cover for Biden CNN: "Though Biden's comments seemed intended to echo past comments – that middle class families have been hit hard in the trouble economy – they nonetheless forced the Obama campaign to go on defense."
It takes 3-5 years for any government law or legislative policy to be implemented so decisions made and enacted in 2002-2005 kicked in 2007-2009 when the economy went off the cliff. Those years 2001-2005 are when the Republicans ran the House and Senate.


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A caregiver and the society that contracted her have been charged in connection to the 2018 death of a 54-year-old woman with developmental disabilities, Coquitlam RCMP said Wednesday.
Police said Astrid Charlotte Dahl, 51, has been charged with criminal negligence causing death following a 15-month investigation into the woman's death in a private home on Oct. 13, 2018.
At the time of the woman's death, Dahl was in a residential home sharing agreement with Kinsight Community Society. The society and Dahl were both charged with failing to perform a legal duty to provide necessaries.
Police said their probe determined that the woman did not receive the "necessities of life," which include food, shelter, medical attention and protection from harm.
Cpl. Michael McLaughlin called the case a "very sad situation."
"We know these charges can't bring the victim back, but perhaps they give a voice to a vulnerable person who couldn't speak for herself," he said.
Both Dahl and the director of Kinsight are scheduled to appear in court on March 9.
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

subset: commoncrawl


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Generating fresh, engaging content several times a day can be difficult. A daily content calendar can help prevent you from getting social media 'writers block' and keep your followers engaged. After all, content is king!
In my previous post, I discussed the importance of putting together a daily content calendar to help with generating ideas for engaging posts. While long-term strategy is always important, it is equally important to have short-term strategy in place. With short-term strategy, we are generally talking about smaller marketing campaigns within the larger campaign such as online contests, event/sales promotions, etc. However, with any social media campaign, there is bound to be times when there is simply not any pertinent messages to post.
As I mentioned in my previous article however, it is important to continually have fresh, engaging content posted on your main social media sites (typically Facebook and Twitter). This can especially be a challenge for the small business owner who may not always have company news or upcoming events to promote. Also, it is important to maintain a lighthearted stream across all social media platforms and to constantly have fresh content that people will want to share and comment on. It's all about keeping the conversation going!
For anyone looking for ideas on keeping up fresh content across various social networking sites, read my blog post "30 Ideas for Providing Fresh Content in #SocialMedia." The image below contains my daily content calendar at KVSC-FM. I do not follow it religously, for I usually have several different promotions going on with the station each week, but I do pretty much stick with some of the regular postings our listeners look forward to. Those include Music Monday, From the KVSC Archives (Tuesdays) and Trivia Thursday. The rest on the calendar is just filler and can easily be substituted for other content. Also included in the document are more content ideas and tips for running a successful Facebook page I retrieved from an article on PR Daily by Kamila Hankiewicz titled "14 Tips for a Successful Facebook Page."
Click image to view the full PDF or click here: Social Media Daily Content Calendar
As you can see, the calendar is not too detailed–just enough to help you generate fresh content and hopefully not bore your followers. I included the additional tips and resources as a reminder to myself and also to ensure an easy transition for my successor. Thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions for my daily content calendar or have an example of your own, please share in the comment section below or send me an email at email@example.com.


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About "Sysec Launcher.exe"
Sysec Launcher.exe is a .exe file which is easy and free to download via updown.link. It was written in the TXT format which is just wonderful for storing data of any kind. It was shared via updown.link, a site to up- and download files to share with your friends or social media followers, or even work colleagues, utilising modern web technology to get a file to its recepant.


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BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk Step Down
Electronic Arts said today that long-time BioWare executives Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk are stepping down from the company. Muzyka says he focusing on a brand new entrepreneurial challenge while Zeschuk is spending time with his family.
The duo originally co-founded BioWare back in 1995 and most notably created the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series on PC. The Edmonton-based studio later created two popular hits with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. In 2005, BioWare and Pandemic Studios entered into a partnership with private equity firm Elevation Partners. The group was later purchased by Electronic Arts two years later.
Over the past five years, BioWare develop key franchises Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The studio, which has since grown to six locations worldwide, also created Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Here's the official statement from EA:
BioWare Co-Founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have announced their retirement today. To hear more from each of them, please read a post from Ray and Greg here:
BioWare Edmonton & Montreal GM Aaryn Flynn also has issued his thoughts on both Ray and Greg and the future of BioWare.


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Journalist Shawn Gaynor and artist Andrew Goldfarb teamed up to create this visual account of the history and politics behind sit/lie in San Francisco. Their illustration of the issue begins off well enough, illustrating a previous SF sit/lie law which targeted hippies but was used against homosexuals (smells like an equal protection argument).
But then the entire thing devolves into a slippery slope argument: to support sit/lie is to support the Arizona Immigration Law (SB 1070). Sticking to San Francisco would have taken their position a little further than likening sit/lie proponents to anti-immigrant Arizonians.
— Update — Upon further consideration, the doomsday scenario posed in the comic (local cops would have to enforce the I.C.E. regulation requiring handing over the identities of undocumented workers arrested for violating the sit/lie law) is unlikely as it is unconstitutional under the commandeering doctrine — the federal government cannot tell state government to enforce federal law as doing so would be violative of dual sovereignty. — End Update —
The point is (well, not the point of the comic) the supervisors screwed up big when they decided to reject the policy outright rather than working with the Mayor to craft something a little more manageable and palatable than a city-wide sit/lie ban. Now, the SF voters are being offered the chance to clean up their streets (although, in the least ideal way) and they're going to do it. Maybe the supes will take this as a lesson that even they can be too liberal for San Francisco.
Sample frames and a downloadable pdf of the entire comic are available on the SF Public Press website. Get the whole thing in print copies of the debut issue of SF Public Press, available at the Booksmith in the Haight and other locations.
See more StandAgainstSitLie.org.


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Transportation Management Office
The Transportation Management Office works with the Regional Transportation Management Center coordinators and other TDOT staff to provide the training and resources for incident scene clearance on access controlled facilities in a safe and quick manner. The Office works to build relationships with law, fire EMS and other agencies responding to incident scenes. The Transportation Management Office can be reached at 615-253-1122.
Interagency Quick Clearance Memorandum of Understanding Between TDOT & TDOSHS (pdf)
Tennessee Traffic Operations and Safety Conference
Senior Drivers
Decisions for Tennessee's Senior Driver (pdf) is a resource for senior drivers.
Driver Safety for Tennessee Seniors (pdf) is a resource for family members and caregivers.
Senior Drivers Training Toolkit (pdf) is a manual for Law Enforcement Officers and Driver Licensing Supervisors to assist them in training efforts for senior drivers.
Move It brochure (pdf) In Tennessee, state law requires that motorists must make every reasonable effort to move disabled vehicles so as not to obstruct the regular flow of traffic, as long as the vehicle is drivable and there are no injuries.
Cable Median Barrier for Responders
Cable Median Barrier - Information forFirst Responder Activities (PowerPoint)
SmartWay Reports
Reports and Plans
Strategic Plan for Highway Incident Management in Tennessee (pdf)


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DUBLIN, N.C. — In a low-slung, aging commercial strip across the street from an online-gaming parlor here, a local operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless ran his command center for Republican Mark Harris in the 9th Congressional District primary this spring.
Smith provided his account about the primary campaign to state investigators, who are examining whether Dowless's activities then and in the general election violated North Carolina's election laws, which allow only individual voters or designated close relatives to mail a ballot.
Dowless is now at the center of a burgeoning fraud investigation that has delayed the certification of Harris's narrow victory and could prompt officials to call for a new election between him and Democrat Dan McCready, who are separated by 905 votes, according to unofficial returns.
Dowless, who has denied any wrongdoing to the Charlotte Observer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The possibility that November's vote will be tossed out has prompted an eruption of partisan accusations. The case is politically fraught for Republicans, who in North Carolina and across the country have pushed for voter-identification laws and other restrictions while warning without evidence about the threat of rampant voter fraud, particularly by immigrants in the country illegally.
Now, amid Democratic calls for investigations of a different kind of election fraud — one that allegedly benefited the GOP — Republicans have stayed largely silent about the allegations, instead accusing the state elections board of trying to steal the race.
On Monday, the board issued a subpoena to the Harris campaign, according to campaign attorney John Branch. The board is expected to issue one soon to Red Dome Group, a GOP consulting firm based in the suburbs of Charlotte that hired Dowless, according to two people familiar with the probe.
The elections board has collected information suggesting that high-level officials in the campaign may have been aware of Dowless's activities, according to the two people.
In statements to The Washington Post, Branch and Harris's chief consultant, Andy Yates, confirmed that Dowless was hired by Red Dome to work on the campaign but denied that officials were aware of any illegal activity.
The campaign "at all times believed he was working within the confines of North Carolina law," Branch said. "The campaign is now aware that the State Board of Elections is conducting an investigation, and media reports have identified Mr. Dowless as part of that investigation. We are awaiting the outcome of that investigation like everybody else."
Yates said that Harris, a pastor from the suburbs of Charlotte, "was aware of Red Dome's relationship with Mr. Dowless and believes like I do that Mr. Dowless operated within the bounds of the law." Yates said Dowless assured him he was not illegally collecting ballots.
Wayne Goodwin, chair of the state Democratic Party, said Monday that the legislature's newly proposed voter-ID law would do nothing to stop the kind of acts alleged in Bladen County. He said Republicans have repeatedly ignored absentee fraud and, in the face of the new allegations, have "gone silent, both here and nationally."
Some Republicans have argued that irregularities in the absentee vote in the 9th District were not widespread enough to make a difference in the outcome and have called on the board to certify Harris's win.
Absent that, "hundreds of thousands of legal voters would be disenfranchised and 750,000 people would be denied representation in Congress," said Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the state GOP.
Two officials close to the investigation said it remains unclear how many mail-in absentee ballots were allegedly diverted.
Investigators with the bipartisan state elections board — which last week voted unanimously to delay certifying the race — have identified hundreds of potential witnesses to interview, many of them voters whose absentee ballots were never turned in, according to the people familiar with the probe. That raises the possibility of a weeks-long investigation and an uncertain start date for the next congressman from the 9th District.
Josh Lawson, general counsel for the board, declined to comment on the investigation, saying it was ongoing.
Separately, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman (D) told The Post on Monday that her office in Raleigh and the State Bureau of Investigation are also pursuing criminal investigations related to irregularities in mail-in ballots.
"We are not yet at the point of having connected all of the dots," Freeman said, adding, "Certainly part of any investigation into these voting irregularities will include who may have knowledge and involvement."
State elections officials said they have been working with the FBI and the office of Robert Higdon, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Higdon's office did not respond to requests for comment.
Harris's 28-year-old son, John, is an assistant U.S. attorney in Higdon's office, according to the North Carolina State Bar.
The state elections board's probe is homing in on irregularities in mail-in balloting in the 9th District general election — most of them in Bladen County, a rural swath about 20 miles south of Fayetteville where the largest employer is a Smithfield Foods pork-processing plant bought by a Chinese conglomerate in 2013.
Unusually high numbers of mail-in ballots were requested in the county — and unusually high numbers of those requested ballots were never returned, according to state records.
A disproportionate number of unreturned ballots had been sent to voters of color, who tend to vote Democratic. Nearly 55 percent of ballots mailed to Native American voters and 36 percent mailed to African American voters were not returned, while the non-return rate among white voters in the district was just 18 percent, according to state records.
In one subsidized apartment complex in Bladenboro, called Village Oak, half a dozen voters interviewed by The Post on Sunday said they were approached this fall by a woman who asked them to hand over their absentee ballots. Two other voters in other parts of the county told The Post similar stories.
"I had it for like four days," said Datesha Montgomery, 27, who lives in a subsidized complex in Elizabethtown called Twisted Hickory. "And then she showed up and asked could she get my ballot. I still hadn't filled it out. I stood on the porch and I filled it out. I put two names down and she told me the rest wasn't important and she would fill it out herself."
Later, Montgomery said, Democratic activists warned her about rumors of ballot fraud, so she canceled her mail-in ballot and voted in person.
This fall, state election officials were so alarmed by the spike in ballot requests from Bladen County that they sent a flier in October to every voter in the 9th District's share of the county, warning them not to turn over their ballots to others.
"At one point, Bladen had 12 percent of its voters requesting absentee ballots," said one official with knowledge of the investigation who requested anonymity because of the ongoing probe. "You know, that's ridiculously high as a percentage. And so once we saw that, we knew immediately, like, okay, either they just became really enthused about the prospect of voting absentee or we have a massive effort underway."
State elections board investigators have spoken with witnesses who link Dowless to the irregularities, according to the two people familiar with the probe.
Dowless, 62, who serves as vice chairman of the Bladen Soil and Water Conservation District, has a criminal record. Court records show he was convicted of fraud, perjury and passing a worthless check in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
He first came under scrutiny from the state elections board in 2016, when officials began investigating similar ballot irregularities, leading to a public hearing.
That year, in the 9th District primary election, Dowless was on the campaign payroll of Todd Johnson, a Union County insurance salesman who also won a curious number of the mail-in ballots in Bladen County: 211, compared with four for Harris, who was also a candidate that year, and just one for the incumbent, Rep. Robert Pittenger (R), records show. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.
The state elections board referred the case to the U.S. attorney, as well as the Wake County prosecutor, who is continuing to investigate, officials said.
Yates, Harris's consultant, said that Dowless was hired by the campaign this year to contact absentee voters and urge them to vote for Harris on their mail-in ballots.
Before the May primary, Dowless set up his operation inside an empty storefront that Smith said he allowed him to use. With an office next door, Smith said he visited regularly and got a good view of Dowless's operation.
He said Dowless told him he had a crew of about a dozen workers — many of whom he saw at the office — who moved from one precinct to the next, knocking on voters' doors and offering them ballot request forms.
Once the absentee ballots were mailed to voters, Dowless used public lists of mail-in ballot recipients and sent his crew to collect them and promise to turn them in, Smith said.
"He would report to the campaign every day, 'We got 50 today' or 'We turned in 60 today,' " said Smith, who fell out with Dowless after this year's primary, when they supported different candidates for sheriff.
Yates, the campaign consultant, confirmed that another contractor for Red Dome gave Dowless electronic lists of voters who had been sent ballots.
The sole purpose, he said, was for Dowless to follow up with those voters to encourage them to cast their ballots for Harris.
"To be clear, I instructed Mr. Dowless on a number of occasions that neither he nor anyone working with him or volunteering with him could collect ballots," Yates said, adding that if he knew Dowless or his staff were taking ballots, he would have severed ties with the operative.
Smith said that in the primary, Dowless focused on three Bladen County precincts in particular: Bladenboro 1, Bladenboro 2 and Bethel, places that had high numbers of mail-in votes, according to state records.
Smith said he never saw Dowless destroy a ballot.
Yates said that Dowless called him regularly to give him updates on the number of absentee-ballot requests he had collected but that they did not discuss numbers of absentee votes he was delivering for Harris.
In the spring primary, Harris defeated the incumbent, Pittenger, by fewer than 1,000 votes — thanks in part to winning an overwhelming 96 percent of Bladen County's absentee mail-in ballots.
Smith said it was after the primary that he and Dowless had the falling out. Dowless moved his office after Smith learned that Dowless was helping the reelection campaign of Sheriff James McVicker (R), Smith said.
Smith, 48, who owns an online sweepstakes parlor across the street from his commercial strip in Dublin, was charged with running an illegal gambling operation after McVicker's office raided the parlor in 2015. He disputes the allegations, saying his business is legal.
Smith said Dowless bragged about his ability to deliver as many as 900 absentee ballots in Bladen County, and Smith said he talked excitedly of expanding his operation beyond Bladen in his work for Harris in the 9th District, which stretches more than 100 miles from Charlotte to the Fayetteville area in the east.
Smith said Dowless also spoke of running the absentee-ballot programs for multiple candidates. Campaign records show that he was paid this year by a failed Charlotte City Council candidate, Pete Givens (R), as well as McVicker.
Smith was in the middle of an interview with The Post on Saturday when an investigator with the State Board of Elections called him. In front of a reporter, he told the investigator the story again, from the beginning.
In the primary and general elections, a large number of returned mail-in ballots came from a single street in Bladenboro, according to state records — Pecan Street, where the Village Oak Apartments, a cluster of public-housing units built around a giant oak tree, are located.
In the spring, 60 ballots for the Republican primary were mailed from that precinct on March 19 — 23 of them to Village Oak. All 23 were returned to the board on the same day — March 26, records show.
Seven residents of Village Oak interviewed Sunday recounted seeing the operation in action. Jeneva Legions, 30, who works at the Family Dollar store down the road, said several women came to her apartment in October right after her absentee ballot had arrived in the mail.
Legions said one of the women urged her to fill out her name, Social Security number and signature. When that woman came back, "she just said, 'I'll take it,' and I gave it to her." The ballot wasn't sealed, Legions said. Legions said she does not remember filling out the ballot but would have voted a straight Democratic ticket. State records show that her mail-in ballot was never returned to county elections officials.
Asked why she turned over the ballot, Legions said: "You know, I'm thinking, she's with, you know, the voting people. So I'm thinking she's coming by to get my ballot."
Beverly Tyler, 45, also a resident of Village Oak, said a woman came to her as well, asking for her absentee ballot. Tyler said she remembers seeing a truck parked in front of her door with a Mark Harris logo on it. Tyler, who is unemployed and seeking disability benefits for a back injury, said she turned her ballot over as well. She said she does not remember whom she voted for. Her ballot was turned in to the county, records show.
"I didn't know what was going on," she said, to explain why she turned over her ballot. "I thought everything was okay."
Stacy Holcomb, 57, another resident who is on disability for a knee injury, described much the same — though he said the woman came by twice, first to prompt him to fill out a ballot request form and then, after the ballot had arrived in the mail, to collect it.
"I filled it out and gave it to her," he said. Holcomb said he recalls sealing the ballot before he handed it over. He said he does not remember whom he voted for. His ballot was turned in.
All of the voters described the woman as young with long, straight blond hair. The woman sometimes stays with her mother in the Village Oak complex, they said.
When The Post knocked on the door of that apartment Sunday, a woman fitting her description came to the door.
"I've got nothing to say," she said, two toddlers visible behind her, before shutting the door.
Alice Crites, Joe Fox and Reuben Fischer-Baum in Washington and Justin Kase Conder in Dublin, Elizabethtown and Bladenboro contributed to this report.


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My Mac's screensaver shows an eagle in mid-flight between a waterfall and a cliff. I stare at the image often. The eagle can either head toward the waterfall where he will be plunged violently into a stream or he can turn toward the top of the cliff and go on with his life. The choice between wrong and right seems so obvious.
That comes to mind when I think about the Tujague's situation. As the rumors have it, the historic restaurant is facing two options; being sold to a man who will turn it into a T-shirt and souvenir shop including a fried chicken stand, or being sold to Chef John Besh's group. If the building becomes a T-shirt shop, it will have lost its historic significance; the entire block will be less important and those who come to New Orleans to experience the culture will experience instead just one more place trying to make trinkets out of that culture. The city will be less special, plunging into its own whirlpool.
If, instead, the building is sold to the Besh group, then the last of the Creole restaurants will be in the hands of a distinguished restaurateur who will no doubt upgrade the property and maintain the restaurant's reputation. The Tujague name will live on. New generations will be able to sample the classic Creole dishes; the legacy of the late Steven Latter will have survived.
I am told that there was plenty of social media chatter last week urging Besh to get involved and begging Stanford Latter, Steven Latter's brother who owns the building, to sell to Besh.
There's a lot that we don't know including who is talking to whom, how much money is being talked about and how much good will there is. If there is any of the latter, the restaurant should go to Besh.
We understand that this is business and that business can sometimes be ruthless, but the businessses that are remembered are those that have grace and originality. Also there are times when circumstances call on business leaders to make decisions based on the civic good.
For the sake of the city, we wish Mr. Latter a good landing.


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Multiple Characters per Player/Session
Evennia has for a long time enforced a clean separation between the Player and the Character. It's a much appreciated feature among our users. The Player is "you", the human playing the game. It knows your password, eventual user profile etc. The Character is your avatar in-game. This setup makes it easy for a Player to have many characters, and to "puppet" characters - all you need to do is "disconnect" the Player object from the Character object, then connect to another Character object (assuming you are allowed to puppet that object, obviously). So far so good.
What Evennia currently doesn't support is being logged in with different client sessions to the same Player/account while puppeting multiple characters at the same time. Currently multiple client sessions may log into the same Player account, but they will then all just act as separate views of the same action (all will see the same output, you can send commands from each but they will end up with the same Character).
Allowing each session to control a separate Character suggests changing the way the session is tracked by the player and Character. This turns out to be more work than I originally envisioned when seeing the feature request in the issue tracker. But if my plan works out it will indeed become quite easy to use Evennia to both allow multi-play or not as you please, without having to remember separate passwords for each Character/account.
Webserver change to Server level
Evennia consists of two main processes, the Portal and the Server. The details of those were covered in an earlier blog post here. Evennia comes with a Twisted-based webserver which is currently operating on the Portal level. This has the advantage of not being affected by Server-reboots. The drawback is however that being in a different process from the main Server, accessing the database and notably its server-side caches becomes a problem - changing the database from the Portal side does not automatically update the caches on the Server side, telling them that the database has changed. Also writing to the database from two processes may introduce race conditions.
For our simple default setup (like a website just listing some database statistics) this is not a terrible problem, but as more users start to use Evennia, there is a growing interest in more advanced uses of the webserver. Several developers want to use the webserver to build game-related rich website experiences for their games - online character generation, tie-in forums and things like that. Out-of-sync caches then becomes a real concern.
One way around this could be to implement a framework (such as memcached) for homogenizing caches across all Evennia processes. After lots of IRC discussions I'm going with what seems to be the more elegant and clean solution though - moving the webserver into the Server process altogether. The Portal side will thus only hold a web proxy and the webclient protocol. This way all database access will happen from the same process simplifying things a lot. It will make it much easier for users to use django to create rich web experiences without having to worry about pesky behind the scenes things like caches and the like.
Out-of-band communicationThis has been "brewing" for quite some time, I've been strangely unmotivated to finalize it. Out of band communication means the MUD client can send and receive data to/from the server directly, without the player having to necessesarily enter an active command or see any immediate effect. This could be things like updating a health bar in a client-side GUI, redirect text to a specific client window but also potentially more advanced stuff. I created the Evennia-side oob-handler over Christmas; it allows for client sessions to "sign up" for "listening" to attribute updates, do scheduled checks and so on. It's already in the codebase but is not activated nor tested yet.
On the protocol side (for serializing data to the client) I have a MSDP implementation ready for telnet subnegotiation, it should be simple to add also GMCP once everything is tested. A JSON-based side channel for the webclient is already in place since a long time if I remember correctly, it just need to be connected to the server-side oob-handler once that's finished.


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By Lynda Walsh
Nobody questions Carl Sagan's charisma. He was television's first science rock star. He made appearances on the Tonight Show; he drove a Porsche with a vanity plate that read "PHOBOS," one of Mars's moons; journalists enthused over his "velour" voice. Over 700 million people have viewed Sagan's groundbreaking public-television series, Cosmos, and about one in three Amazon commenters on the DVD set indicates that the show inspired him/her to pursue science.
Obviously, there has to be a lot more to Sagan's success than just his personal magnetism. Yet until recently, even hard-nosed scholars have not seemed to be able to get past it. If we can better understand the cultural structures that enabled Sagan's meteoric rise to fame—not just his, but also the trajectories of science stars such as Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris, and Neil deGrasse Tyson—we can better understand the enormous authority science wields in public life. To begin, I would argue Sagan benefited from a sort of bully pulpit that was cemented into place by 3,000 years of civic practice in the West. That bully pulpit, ironically, used to belong to the prophet.
I say "ironically" because Sagan was an avowed agnostic, although it would be hard to find an agnostic who talked more openly, often, and positively to the public about god and spirituality. Sagan claimed in Demon-Haunted World, "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality" (p. 29). This argument echoed throughout the narrative of Cosmos, which Sagan navigated in his chapel-like "Ship of the Imagination," complete with a glowing altar and a hymnal by Vangelis.
But Sagan's public rhetoric was more than vaguely religious; it was specifically prophetic. Sagan boasted in Demon-Haunted World, "Not every branch of science can foretell the future—paleontology can't—but many can and with stunning accuracy. If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians or mystics, but you'll do much better with scientists" (p. 30). The final episode of Cosmos opens with Sagan reading from the book of Deuteronomy: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live…" (30:15). In Sagan's bible, death was nuclear winter, a cause he pushed on- and off-screen with the zeal of Jeremiah.
While Sagan was the first public scientist to leverage television as his bully pulpit, he did not invent the stance of the scientist-prophet. That honor goes to the founders of the Royal Society in the mid-seventeenth century. Robert Boyle and his colleagues hybridized Protestant prophecy and natural magic (a forerunner of our sciences) to make "experimental philosophy"—and to establish it as England's new civic oracle, its certainty factory. In the end, what a prophet does isn't to tell the future; a prophet engages the public in an evaluative dialogue that manufactures certainty out of crisis. When the gears of our democracies grind to an impasse, our prophets step forth from the wilderness and remind us who we are, what we really value. With our dilemma cast in this new light, we can at last move off its horns and into civic action.
This was what Jeremiah did for the nation of Judah; this was what the Delphic oracle did for Athens as it faced down Xerxes. But after the precedent set by the Royal Society—who confirmed their prophetic calling with resurrected birds, glowing phosphorus, and other signs and wonders never before seen on the face of this earth—scientists became the new prophets of democracy. In this way, Charles Darwin helped Victorian England build and justify its new industrial society; and Louis Agassis bolstered American manifest destiny. In the twentieth century, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer helped usher in the nuclear age. Then Rachel Carson helped mothers and physicians push it back for a slim chance at returning to a bucolic, pre-industrial America.
So when Carl Sagan strode out onto the California seashore in the first episode of Cosmos, the stage was set for him in more ways than one. His viewers, disciplined by generations of cultural practice, immediately recognized Sagan's prophetic stance. Along with the objective cosmological research he presented, they listened to his admonitions about mutually assured destruction and nuclear winter as if these were totally normal things for a scientist to say—which in fact they are not: a considerable body of research has found that scientists strongly discourage each other from making moral pronouncements in technical settings. Whether Sagan precipitated or followed public will against nuclear stockpiling is impossible to say, but he was certainly in the flow of his times. By the time Sagan recorded his new preface to Cosmos in 1991, he was able to announce that widespread fear of nuclear holocaust was a thing of the past.
Since Sagan's groundbreaking television performance, the media venues for scientist-prophets have proliferated; so have the number of celebrity and public scientists. Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sam Harris, Stephen Schneider, Richard Dawkins, Olivia Judson, James Hansen, and other scientists regularly get up in their bully pulpits to tell us not just what they've learned but also how they think we should live as a result. Whether we think this is a good thing or not is up to our personal politics. The fact remains that as long as our public crises turn on technological, medical, or environmental issues (as nearly all of them do), we will turn to science for answers; and as long as science is our dominant channel to civic truth, scientists will remain our prophets.
Lynda Walsh is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She specializes in the rhetoric of science and reception theory. Her new book Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy traces the historical evolution of the science adviser's cultural authority in public life.
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How to manage dystocia calves
Dystocia is defined as delayed or difficult parturition. General causes are fetal-maternal size mismatch, fetal malpresentation and maternal-related causes.
Meyers et al reported that 50% of stillbirths were a direct result of dystocia. A slight calving problem increased the odds of stillbirth by 2.91 in heifers and 4.67 in multiparous cows. More difficult calvings caused a stillborn in heifers to be 6.76 times more likely and 11.36 times more likely in multiparous cows. In 1996, Wells et al reported that a dystocia requiring forced extraction, compared with unassisted calving, was 4.22 times more likely to result in heifer-calf death within the first 21 days of life.
Frank Garry, DVM, MS, Colorado State University, says physiological effects of dystocia on the calf include postnatal metabolic and respiratory acidosis, hypoxemia, failure of passive transfer and hypothermia, all of which can be immediately fatal or reduce long-term survival.
"Severe dystocia has been associated with reduced body temperature, decreased concentrations of blood cortisol and increased blood glucose," Garry explains. "Hypoxic calves are often weak and slow to stand and suckle, and this negatively affects absorption of colostral immunoglobulins."
Dystocia by the numbers
Jason Lombard, DVM, MS and Garry completed a dystocia study (Journal of Dairy Science, 2007) and found over 35% of calves required assistance during birthing, accounting for 75.5% of stillborn calves. Only 10.8% of calves had severe dystocia, but they accounted for 49.1% of all stillbirths. Dystocias were scored with 1 = no assistance, 2 = slight problem and 3+ = needed assistance.
"The odds of a heifer calf having any morbidity event were significantly increased for dystocia scores 2 and 3," Garry says. "The odds of having a respiratory event were significantly increased for dystocia scores 2 and 3." The odds of a digestive event increased for those with mild or severe dystocia. Calves born to cows having a severe dystocia had an increased risk of death after 24 hours of age than calves born unassisted.
Calves having mild dystocia were less likely to survive to 30 days than calves born unassisted. "Severe dystocia affects calf survival even more negatively beyond the first 24 hours of life," Garry notes.
Minimizing dystocia
Garry says veterinarians can play a part in helping their clients perform the three steps to minimizing the impact of dystocia. Those steps are:
- Decrease its occurrence. "This is a complex management issue and not easy to accomplish," he says.
- Decrease the impact of dystocia by good calving management practices. "This requires employee training and can be very effective in decreasing the negative impact of dystocia on dam and new-born."
- Increase the level and quality of newborn calf care. "This also requires employee training and can help compromised calves to survive and thrive."
Garry says the impacts of dystocia can be minimized with:
- Appropriate delivery methods.
- Identifying compromised calves.
- Administering fluids and oxygen to calves with acidosis.
- Warming chilled calves.
- Delivering high-quality colostrum immediately after birth.
- Treating every calf that was exposed to dystocia as a compromised calf.
Appropriate delivery methods
The first part of "intervention" is always examination of the cow and calf. "This evaluation is what determines whether the next step is performing some manipulation of the calf, assisting the delivery, or calling for more help," Garry explains. "The cow should be examined with care and attention should be paid to cleanliness and lubrication."
The employee should intervene with close examination if the cow has been in stage 1 of labor for over six hours. Some abnormal deliveries, like uterine torsion, do not allow the cow to progress into a normal stage 2 of labor. In other cases, the cow may be in a state of uterine inertia and will not go into stage 2 of labor.
Once the cow enters stage 2 of delivery -- meaning the water bag appears and she begins to strain -- intervention is indicated if any of the following conditions exist:
- If the water sac is visible for two hours and the cow is not trying.
- If the cow has been trying for over 30 minutes and making no progress.
- If the cow has quit trying for over a 15-20 minute period of time after a period of progress.
- If the cow or calf is showing signs of fatigue and stress such as a swollen tongue of the calf or severe bleeding from the rectum of the cow.
- If it appears that the delivery is abnormal, for example, a backwards calf, only one leg, etc.
"The most difficult thing to teach is judgment about the best approach and timing of intervention," Garry says. "It is common for workers who have been asked to watch the calving and assist deliveries to act hastily and to assist too soon. The birthing process takes time, especially for heifers, and patience is needed. Progress can be slow as the calving canal stretches to accommodate a large calf."
Identify compromised calves
Any calf from a dystocia delivery should be considered compromised. "Even if the calf looks OK right after the delivery, it is common for these calves to do more poorly if not given extra care," Garry ex-plains. "The observable signs of a compromised calf are delayed time to stand, delayed or weak suckle, reduced vigor and strength, or low body temperature at any time after an hour post-delivery.
Scoring dystocias is simple and is one of the key pieces of information that should be kept for calf records. This information is very useful for monitoring and management purposes.
Dystocia greatly increases risk of calf stillbirth and later calf health problems, so monitoring its occurrence is very help-ful in assessing potential causes of poor calf performance. Dystocia records can help management evaluate performance and consider whether changes are necessary in protocols and procedures.
Administer fluids and oxygen to calves with acidosis
The signs of acidosis are the same signs as for a compromised calf. Calves suffering dystocia delivery should be assumed to have a higher than average level of metabolic and respiratory acidosis. Acidosis makes calves weak and depressed.
"Having employees capable of IV fluid administration is helpful for a variety of reasons, including treatment of sick newborns," Garry suggests.
Warm chilled calves
There are three ways for a calf to increase body heat generation necessary to maintain body temperature in a cool or cold environment. These are brown fat metabolism, shivering and physical activity. "Compromised and dystocia-affected calves are typically less active and tend to have poor cardio-respiratory function, so they don't deliver oxygen well to body tissues," Garry explains. "This negatively affects all three sources of heat generation."
Chilled calves become less active and breathe poorly, exacerbating all of the problems associated with dystocia and calf compromise. "Like any preventive medical practice, avoiding chilling is better for the calf than waiting to see if it gets chilled and then trying to rescue it later."
Deliver high-quality colostrum immediately after birth
Compromised calves have poor suckling and so don't consume as much colostrum. If the calf is tubed, this problem can be avoided. But calves with poor respiratory function and low oxygen also tend to have poor gut function and appear to have less ability to absorb the immunoglobulins even if they are tubed to supply sufficient colostral volume.
Since compromised calves tend to have lower oxygen delivery to tissues, they tend to absorb immunoglobulins poorly, but often can absorb the immunoglobulins over a longer time period; so it is worth providing an extra colostrum feeding to assure the calf has the best chance of good colostral immunoglobulin transfer. "Besides that, colostrum is a great nutritional supplement, and providing a compromised calf with more nutritional support is a good idea," Garry says.
Treat every calf that was exposed to dystocia as a compromised calf
Garry says in his dystocia study, "Perhaps some of the calves that were born alive, but died within 24 hours, could have been saved by implementing simple interventions."
Help prevent dystocia by:
- Ensuring heifers are inseminated at the proper age and bodyweight.
- Selecting potential sires on the basis of known calving ease.
- Improving personnel training regarding proper timing and methods of intervention during calving, plus appropriate methods to care for compromised newborn calves.
TLC for the compromised calf
Good supportive care can go a long way for a compromised calf. Sheila McGuirk, DVM, PhD, says calves with difficult deliveries are high-risk calves and everything about their post-natal management is difficult. "Attentive, well-trained people who care make a difference," McGuirk says.
Stimulation, clearing an airway, stopping navel bleeding and warming up that calf will make a difference, McGuirk notes. She suggests sitting the calf in sternal recumbency, changing body positions and towel drying. Giving oxygen by mask is also useful.
Give the calf some time. "Delay colostrum feeding for the compromised calf for four hours, but if the nose and mucous membranes don't turn pink, have your clients call a veterinarian for assistance," McGuirk suggests. "There is no magic medication to make calves breathe or quick tricks that turn these calves around. Keep them sitting, warm and stimulated to breathe. Give warm colostrum and get assistance if needed."


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Tulsa, OK [March 20, 2017]—D.C. McGannon, Co-Founder and Publisher for Wyvern's Peak Publishing, announced today that acclaimed young adult author Lauren Lynne has joined the Wyvern's Peak Publishing family. Her young adult dystopian novel, The Recalcitrant Project, will be published late Spring 2017.
"We are thrilled to have Lauren as part of our publishing family, and excited to further share her unique talents with young adult fiction fans everywhere," said McGannon. "Lauren is an amazing human being, and a spectacular storyteller. We have supported each other over the past many years, and I believe she truly represents what we are trying to accomplish here at Wyvern's Peak Publishing. Readers are going to love her new novel, and her fans, I think, are going to be pleasantly surprised as Lauren just keeps getting better with each new book she writes."
The Recalcitrant Project, which will be available in both paperback and ebook formats, is Lauren's first venture into the young adult dystopian genre. She has previously self-published The Secret Watchers series for young adults to great success.
About Lauren Lynne
Lauren Lynne is the author of the young adult fantasy, action-adventure series, The Secret Watchers. She graduated from both Oregon State and Portland State universities with degrees in education. Lauren focused her Secret Watchers series toward teen reluctant readers but has drawn in enthusiasts of all ages. She's passionate about sharing her love of reading and writing with everyone.
The Pacific Northwest, with its vivid and varied panoramas, is where Lauren makes her home. When she's not writing, she can be found spending time with her family, working with students, reading, gardening, or hiking around Mt. Hood, the Columbia River Gorge, or the Oregon Coast.
Her next book, The Recalcitrant Project, is her first dystopian young adult novel. To learn more about Lauren and her current and past work, visit LaurenLynneAuthor.com.
About Wyvern's Peak Publishing
Wyvern's Peak Publishing is a publisher of fine young adult and middle-grade fantasy, science fiction, and adventure books. Born in Orlando, Florida, Wyvern's Peak Publishing is now based in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is actively involved with causes supporting libraries, bullying prevention programs, reading programs, and encouraging young authors to find their voice. For more information, please visit WyvernsPeak.com.


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Thanks to the good people at Grapevine Video for digging up YOU'D BE SURPRISED, a silent romp which stars Shadowplay favourite Raymond Griffith as comedy coroner in a vigorous deconstruction of the whodunnit genre. Jules Furthman, later collaborator with both Hawks and Sternberg (he and Ben Hecht account for the odd congruence between the two otherwise contrasting filmmakers), wrote the story, displaying the genre-busting contempt for formula and cheerfully black sense of humour later displayed in THUNDERBOLT's death row skits. Intertitles are by Ralph Spence ("highest-paid title writer in the world at $5/word") and Robert Benchley.
Ray utilizes the famous EXTERMINATING ANGEL maneuver.
Weirdly, in a generally sympathetic section about Raymond Griffith in his The Great Movie Comedians, Leonard Maltin complains that the film's titles aren't funny enough. On the contrary, I find them hilarious, my only complaint being that they perhaps carry too much of the film's humour, although as ever, Griffith's reactions are hysterical.
Griffith plays the coroner, Mr Green, in a Tarantino-like colour-coded dramatis personae featuring Mr White, Mr Black, Inspector Brown — confirming his tendency to play cheerful ciphers in fine clothes. And he plays him like an easy-going, simple fellow who's just been handed the job, for no reason, and is trying whatever he can think of to make a go of it.
"Which of you spoiled the gentleman's evening?"
"Won't he stay murdered until after the theatre?"
"Well, which of you murdered him first?"
A Columbo-like finish shows this to have been, perhaps, all an act, but I was reminded of Benchley's essay about being suddenly saddled with the job of building the Hoover Dam. Only in a dream could such an ill-prepared character suddenly find himself in charge of a murder inquiry.
Picking up my battered copy of Benchley's One Moment Please I found a couple of pieces under the heading Fascinating Crimes, continuing his oneiric approach to tales of detection. The Missing Floor begins with the immortal lines "It has often been pointed out that murderers are given to revisiting the scene of their crimes. The case of Edny Pastelle is the only one on record where the scene of the crime revisited the murderer." The Strange Case of the Vermont Judiciary caused me to make startling and involuntary noises, with its deceptively gentle opening: "Residents of Water Street, Bellows Falls (Vt.), are not naturally sound sleepers, owing to the proximity of the Bellows Falls Light and Power Co. and its attendant thumpings, but fifteen years before the erection of the light-and-power plant there was nothing to disturb the slumbers of Water Streetites, with the possible exception of the bestial activities of Roscoe Erkle."
I'll leave you to rush out and buy a copy so you can find out what happens after those opening lines.
At any rate, I'd say Benchley's surreal vein is much more congenial to me than his observational comedy, and this feeling of strangeness informs the action of YOU'D BE SURPRISED in a persistent way.
There's only one Griffith in the movies, and his initials ain't D.W.
UK: The Benchley Roundup: A Selection
US: The Benchley Roundup: A Selection by Nathaniel Benchley of his Favorites (See all Satire Books)


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There are no reviews yet.
There are no reviews yet.
I don't know looks kinda boring. Good Buds Stick Together Weed. I'm sure it won't be terrible obviously, but judging from that sneak peek, I'd say it pales in comparison to the other coaster it's replacing.
Depends on who it is. I feel Lupin was the best teacher, but also, Mad-Eye didn't get a shot as it was robbed by Barty Crouch Jr., and unfortunately, while Snape wanted the job, I feel Potions suits him better. Probably the most circumstansel question ive heard in the past 5 minutes. ushually hyped since from the first, they oddly get cooler for the first 4. How about a movie about Voldemort. A dark movie about Voldemort and the Death Eaters. How he came to power, etc. Just make sure to go with the cool creepy look of the Death Eaters from Goblet of Fire not the cheesy look after that. And for god sakes get a different director than David Yates. I dont get the phrase from fearful to fearless. Neville is courageous right from the first book. As Albus said it there are all kinds of courage. It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. He pertains to what Neville did to stop Harry, Hermione and Ron. That bravery right there wasnt a fruit of any encouragements from anyone. Its just pure courage deep from within. Hes a brave little one right from the start. His most courageous moment is when he alone confronted the Death Eaters and Voldemort alone. Good Buds Stick Together Weed. Standing up to bullies, and no one was more bullied than Neville, is probably the most courageous of all.


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Awesome Bill from Dawsonville: My Life in NASCAR (Paperback)
In this long-awaited autobiography, the legendary Bill Elliott details his childhood in rural North Georgia, building cars from scratch, struggling on the anonymous small-time tracks of the South to his against-the-odds rise to the pinnacle of NASCAR stardom: Winston Cup Champion.
From Daytona to Talladega, from Bristol to Sonoma, ride shoulder to shoulder with Elliott as he battles Dale Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip, Ricky Rudd, Rusty Wallace, and Alan Kulwicki for NASCAR's ultimate prize. Through Elliott's eyes we meet the colorful cast of old-school characters who built NASCAR: Cale Yarborough, Junior Johnson, the Allisons, Carl Kiekhaefer, and, of course, the France family. We join Bill in the car (and under it) as he sets the all-time record for the fastest official speed ever recorded in a stock car (a record he still holds today).
Learn the secret—revealed for the first time—behind the Elliott family's unquestioned mastery of the sport's super speedways. Watch NASCAR grow from a southern diversion into a national phenomenon, and see Bill Elliott grow with it, ultimately becoming one of the sport's most popular heroes. In 1985 Elliott captured the inaugural Winston Million and became the first NASCAR driver ever to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Three years later he captured the Winston Cup Championship. He went on to be voted NASCAR Driver of the Decade for the 1980s by NASCAR fans. He was also voted Most Popular Driver sixteen times.
Elliott also shares his thoughts on the dark side of the racing life: the stresses it can place on relationships, the ever-present physical risks, and the weight of fame. He addresses the racing-related deaths of competitors and friends. He is candid and critical in discussing the intense rivalry between him and the late Dale Earnhardt, and he sheds new light on their storied relationship as well as on Earnhardt's shocking death. Elliott discusses the future of NASCAR with critiques of its management and restrictor plates, and he takes on the controversial issues of track and driver safety.
A window into the compelling personality of Bill Elliott, as well as a primer on the ascent of America's fastestgrowing sport, this is the definitive insider's view of the rising NASCAR nation.
Bill Elliott and his wife, Cindy, split their time between Georgia and Colorado.
Chris Millard has authored and coauthored several books, including Golf's 100 Toughest Holes and Nicklaus by Design. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.


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Oregon Libraries
Oregon Library Directory
The State Library of Oregon maintains the Oregon Library Directory as a service to provide contact information about Oregon libraries. Use it to download and print mailing labels, contact library directors, create lists, and more. A directory for K-12 school libraries can be found on the Oregon Department of Education website. Information about special libraries is submitted voluntarily; thus, their listings are not comprehensive.
Please note that data about Oregon public libraries can be found on the library statistics page. You can also view a map of Oregon libraries based on the directory data.
Library directors, please keep your library's directory information current. Click on the 'edit' button next to your library to upate information.
NOTE: the "System Membership" field reflects public library district affiliation (i.e., county service district or service district). This field is not editable. To request an addition or correction, please contact Library Support (503-378-2525, email@example.com ).
Oregon Libraries


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Copywriting Tip #1: Love the Study
In Freelance Copywriting (Eng3316) we've started producing work in earnest and every week (including tomorrow) another student piece moves into their portfolio. All the students have signed up for work they've never tried before—ad concepts, radio scripts instructional booklets, and many other forms. All according to where their writing passions are leading them.
One thing I love about copywriting is learning new stuff. Whether it's asking a doctor questions during brain surgery or watching a silicon wafer get doped and fired or learning about the medicines Lewis and Clark used (forced marches and blood-letting seemed to resolve a lot of their ailments). There is no end to fascination with how the world works. Putting what I learned into words (and images) electrifies the whole task: spooling out my argument and helping show why anyone would care what the patient said while the doctor probed his frontal lobe, or why ramping quickly to 900 degrees centigrade matters when firing a wafer or why Dr. Rush's bilious pills had such a strong…(ahem) purging effect—it's a puzzle that rewards more as I attend to it. Words and ideas are the puzzle pieces. The goal is to engage very particular audiences (with much shorter sentences than I've used here). James W. Young would call this the gather and masticating stages of the process. How could you not love this work?
Part of the research is figuring out what makes a good print ad. Or what makes a radio spot compelling. In other words, what forms have people used to tell these stories in the past and how do we use these forms today? Or do we pick a new form (which typically means recycling another older form)? These are questions we answer again and again as we look at what's being done today and revisit the best of the best.
But love of learning is the engine. And putting things into words is the transmission. These are the bare bones vehicle of a copywriter.
Image via Copyranter
2 Responses
[…] This very moment—long before you have a clue what you are doing. This sounds different from what Young said. Young said go slow, gather your material and masticate. Chew it over. And keep chewing. I […]


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In short, we provide emotional family encouragement during the relocation and integration process of moving our area. We maintain our relationship, establishing positive and long-lasting friendships. Through this connection, we enrich our community and the lives of those who choose to call the Cedar Rapids, Corridor and Iowa City areas home.
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April 7, 2007
G5: Rangers 8, Red Sox 4
Tavarez retired the first five Rangers -- three grounders and two strikeouts -- but then imploded. Nine of the next 12 Texas batters reached base; four of them scored, wiping out a 2-0 Red Sox lead.
In the top of the sixth, Jason Varitek's RBI double made it 4-3 (scoring JD Drew, who had two more hits), but in the bottom half, Kyle Snyder allowed a double, then JC Romero -- pitching for the 4th time in five games -- allowed five hits to five batters, including a first-pitch two-run home run to Sammy Sosa. And it was 8-3.
Everyone in the bullpen not named Papelbon pitched. Eric Hinske took over at first base in the seventh and singled in the ninth.
And we drop to 4th with a 2-3 record. Tampa Bay, Toronto and New York are all 2-2.
Julian Tavarez (with snake oil smeared on his arm) / Kevin Millwood, 8 PM
David Ortiz -- only 2-for-15 so far this year -- is 5-for-9 with three homers and seven RBIs against Millwood.
Millwood pitched five innings against the Angels on Opening Day, allowing three runs on five hits and two walks. Texas lost 4-1.
6 comments:
- s1c said...
The question is will we see Hinske at first? Eric is 4 for 8 against Millwood while Youkilis is 1 for 4. Surprisingly Varitek is 7 for 18 against Millwood. More at the usual places.
- April 7, 2007 at 1:30 PM
- allan said...
Yanks trail O's 7-3 after 7 innings.
Then Giambi hits a 3-run HR in the bottom of the 8th. 7-6.
Slappy hits a walk-off grand slam -- into the black -- in the bottom of the 9th. 10-9 win.
I guess he's a True Yankee now.
- April 7, 2007 at 2:39 PM
- allan said...
The GS was also with 2 outs in bottom of the 9th.
- April 7, 2007 at 2:41 PM
- allan said...
No Hinske.
1. Julio Lugo, SS
2. Kevin Youkilis, 1B
3. David Ortiz, DH
4. Manny Ramirez, LF
5. J.D. Drew, RF
6. Mike Lowell, 3B
7. Jason Varitek, C
8. Coco Crisp, CF
9. Dustin Pedroia, 2B
1. Kenny Lofton, CF
2. Jerry Hairston, 2B
3. Michael Young, SS
4. Mark Teixeira, 1B
5. Sammy Sosa, DH
6. Hank Blalock, 3B
7. Brad Wilkerson, LF
8. Nelson Cruz, RF
9. Gerald Laird, C
Cora may start tomrrow, though.
- April 7, 2007 at 3:42 PM
- Unknown said...
Snake Oil.. 2007's bloody sock?
- April 7, 2007 at 3:43 PM
- s1c said...
was working on my preveiw for tomorrow nights game and had that Cora should start. He is batting .385 against Padilla. Also, a lot of times I have noticed that Tito likes to rest at least one starter on night games leaving a city so am not really surprised that Cora will probably start.
- April 7, 2007 at 5:05 PM


text: Miami's DJ Irie is the industry standard for what arena DJs are supposed to sound like, and he's the NBA's official DJ, which puts a lot of pressure on our other arena DJs to step their game up. One local jock stands out above the rest of Irie's competition. When the Florida Panthers brought in music director Brian Lenihan two years ago, they thought hiring a house music DJ would be the key to getting fans on their feet. Last year, Lenihan DJ'd and mixed tracks during Panther home games, but fans wanted a more traditional sound. Instead of staying the course, Lenihan has found middle ground and brought back the old-school organ rock. What he still brings from his days as a house DJ is being able to read the energy of the crowd and cue up different rock tunes depending on the situation. Of course you'll hear "Rock, n' Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter after goals are scored, and Zombie Nation's "Kernkraft 400," the annoying club anthem that's only appreciated in a hockey setting. But he's not afraid to throw in some Tool or Soulja Boy, or some Top 40, which is unheard of in most hockey arenas. He's relatively new to the field but as he stays on top of cutting edge music, Lenihan is already developing a sound that's making him one of the top DJs in hockey.


text:
287 members
168 members
hava has not received any gifts yet
Hello hava,
My interest in writing you today is to share Brooklyn's greatest architectural public artwork.
Why it is unknown is a mystery. But it is threatened. And nobody knows it exists.
The Tower of the Empire State Building bisects the Arch in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza.
Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux created the framework for this continuing work-in-progress as the Civil War ended, 25 years before the Arch, 65 years before the Tower, 105 years before the Mirador, and 145 years before I stumbled across it.
In starting the "Grand Army Plaza" group here at Brooklyn Arts Project, I hope to share ideas on how to raise public awareness to protect and promote this View as an historic visual corridor. Development threatens to eclipse the view.
Please forward the links to friends, artists, architects, bloggers, politicos, media and civilians.
Your friend, Richard


text:
I'm working with several installations of one content management system on one server. Therefore I often have to open two equal files with the same name lying in almost the same directory, for instance:
cms1/admin/main.php and
Before I lately updated Cyberduck, I always just opened a new browser window for each of both directories, and could then open both files at the same time in my editor.
Now, if I'm opening the main.php from cms2 while still having the main.php from cms1 open, Cyberduck will just close the opened one, allowing only one of the files to be open at the same time.
I'm assuming this is a new feature to avoid having open multiple instances of the same file, however I really need to turn it off somehow. Is there any way I can do so?
Thanks in advance
Cyberduck won't open two almost similar files
The Cyberduck forums have moved to Google Groups, this forum is read only.
1 post • Page 1 of 1
1 post • Page 1 of 1


text:
The momentum shifts from preventing climate change to mitigating its effects.
by Dana Milbank, Washington Post
The National Mall has monuments to heroism, freedom and sacrifice. Pretty soon, it will also have a monument to failure.
Drive on 17th Street NW, just south of Constitution Avenue, and you'll see concrete footings, a mound of dirt and Jersey barriers â all part of an oft-delayed project to build a flood wall to protect downtown Washington from a rising Potomac River.
The flood wall, and similar initiatives elsewhere, amount to tacit acknowledgments that the fight against climate change, the cause celebre of the environmental movement for more than a decade, has failed in its primary purpose. In the race to prevent disaster, it's already too late.
Among climate-change activists, the realization is spreading that the combination of political inaction on greenhouse gases, plentiful new petroleum supplies and accelerating changes in weather patterns means there is no escaping more life-altering floods, droughts and fires. Although ongoing efforts to reduce carbon emissions could mitigate even worse catastrophe, momentum has shifted in part to preparing for the inevitable consequences of a warmer planet.
Perhaps the most vivid example of this came Tuesday afternoon, when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg rolled out his $19.5 billion plan to "prepare for the impacts of a changing climate," with proposals ranging from coastal levees to the protection of hospitals.
Last year, Bloomberg cited climate change as his main reason for endorsing President Obama's re-election, praising Obama's "major steps to reduce our carbon consumption." But speaking Tuesday from a Brooklyn greenhouse damaged last fall by Hurricane Sandy, Bloomberg addressed the inevitability that rising temperatures and sea levels would bring even worse.
"By mid-century, up to a quarter of all New York City's land area, where 800,000 residents live today, will be in the flood plain," he said, and "40 miles of our waterfront could see flooding on a regular basis just during normal high tides." We no longer have the luxury of ideological debate, he said. "The bottom line is we can't run the risk."
Andrew Light, a global-warming specialist at the liberal Center for American Progress, explained to me the recent shift toward efforts to adapt to climate change rather than merely seeking to prevent it. "We're starting to see very strong evidence of climate-related extreme events happening sooner than we thought with only a 1-degree (Celsius) rise in temperature," he said, "and a more refined science saying now that we will more than likely edge up to or cross the 2-degree threshold."
Climate activists had long sought to limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees, but this now seems both impractical and insufficient. "Our best-case scenario now is we could delay by a couple of decades the point at which we cross the threshold," Light said. This means that cutting carbon emissions is still important but that it's also time to prepare for what's coming.
Among the needed adaptations: flood walls and expanded coastal wetlands, fortified subway systems, buried power lines, houses with detachable foundations, roads rebuilt on higher ground, drought-resistant crops and changes to hydroelectric facilities and nuclear power-plant cooling systems. States in the Southwest may need pipelines and desalinization plants for drinking water.
Low-lying and poorer parts of the world will have it much worse. But even in the United States, vast coastal areas â New Orleans, the Florida Keys and elsewhere along the Gulf of Mexico, North Carolina's Outer Banks, parts of Long Island â eventually may need to be abandoned to higher seas. As a start toward depopulating those areas, the federal government may need to cut off disaster insurance.
Obama created an "Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force" in 2009 to examine everything from agriculture to sewer system failures and public-health consequences, but much of the work remains theoretical. Bloomberg's new plan, with 250 specific recommendations and a hefty price tag, puts climate-change adaptation into a more concrete realm.
The businessman-mayor called it "a battle that may well define our future for generations to come" and outlined changes to building standards, telecommunications, transportation and a dozen other areas.
"Waves that do reach our shore will find a strong line of coastal defenses, reinforced dunes and widened beaches, levees, flood walls and bulkheads, and tide gates and surge barriers," Bloomberg said. "New grade infrastructure will absorb water, it will divert it into higher-capacity sewers, and our critical systems will operate with less interruption throughout the storm and bounce back quicker if they do go down."
Bloomberg spoke confidently, as if he were a general laying out a military plan. But he was really talking about limiting casualties
Dana Milbank is a columnist for The Washington Post.


text:
The Office's Fictional Paper Company Dunder Mifflin Now Making Actual Paper
NBC, the shadow puppet and pantomime show discount emporium, needed a way to make some money since only seven Community fans now watch the network. What did they do? They went and sold their fake paper company, Dunder Miflin, to Staples. This sounds like a plot from The Office.
Staples website Quill.com, which has nothing to do with DeclarationOfIndependence.com, will be launching a Dunder Mifflin brand of copy paper, so the copy room of your office will feel even more like The Office. This is the most recent stunt of "reverse product placement" where things like Kwik-E-Mart and Bubba Gump's Shrimp Company come out of the movies and into real life. Yeah, I'd love to ride Back to the Future's hovering skateboard or Crazy Stupid Love's Ryan Gosling, but some things are best left in the funny pages.
Anyway, NBC will get 6% of the profits from the paper, which means they'll be able to afford Christina Aguillera's sequin budget for the next season of The Voice. Phew.


text:
High-strength materials from the pressure cooker
A Surprise in Materials Chemistry: At Vienna University of Technology, materials for lightweight construction, protective clothing or sports equipment can be produced at high temperatures and high pressures. This process is faster, better and more eco-friendly than other techniques.
The earth's crust works like a pressure cooker. Minerals typically do not form under standard conditions, but at high temperatures and pressures. However, an environment of extreme heat and pressure has been considered to be absolutely unsuitable for organic molecules. Scientists at Vienna University of Technology found out that under such seemingly hostile conditions, organic materials with remarkable material properties can be synthesized – for instance Kevlar, an extremely versatile high-performance material. The new technique has now been published in the journal Polymer Chemistry.
Steam Instead of Toxins
It seems counterintuitive: one might expect large, complex organic molecules to be destroyed by heat and high pressure. But at 200 degrees Celsius and 17 bars, Miriam Unterlass and her team at TU Vienna have synthesized organic polymers, which are usually extremely hard to create and require highly toxic additives. Instead of hazardous solvents, the team at TU Vienna uses nothing but harmless water vapour, making the new method extremely eco-friendly.
The principle of so-called "hydrothermal synthesis" is well known from geology. Many gemstones only form deep down in the ground, in high-pressure water reservoirs. In contrast to these inorganic minerals, which are often mainly made up of silicon and metal ions, many high-performance materials are organic. They primarily consist of carbon and hydrogen.
Kevlar is an example of such a high-performance polymer. It is extraordinarily robust and it is used for protective clothing or for construction elements that are supposed to withstand extreme strain. Such materials also play an important role in aircraft construction, because they are much lighter than any metal parts with comparable properties. Organic high-performance polymers are huge organic molecules with a very stiff structure, kept in place by a multitude of bonds between the atoms.
Extremely Durable, but Hard to Synthesize
Such durable materials, however, are very hard to synthesize: "We have to deal with two contradictory requirements", Miriam Unterlass explains. "On the one hand, we want to have rigid materials which do not dissolve and do not melt even at high temperatures. On the other hand, this means that we cannot just dissolve and then crystalize them, as we would if we were dealing with simple rock salt, for example." The technique developed at TU Vienna works quite differently: the polymers are forming and are crystallizing simultaneously, uniquely supported by hydrothermal conditions.
There are many advantages to this procedure: no dangerous byproducts are created, the energy consumption is dramatically reduced, and the synthesis in the pressure reactor is much faster than it would be using any other techniques. Also, the final product is better: "Our method yields materials with higher crystallinity, which further improves the mechanical rigidity", says Miriam Unterlass.
Looking Inside with Infrared Light
Fine-tuning of the process is complicated, however. Mass and energy transport inside the reactor have to be very well known to understand exactly what is taking place. Of course the pressured rector cannot just by opened during the reaction to see what is happening. Therefore, a special infrared probe is used, which can easily withstand the extreme conditions inside the reactor. "When we put the probe inside the reactor, we can follow in real-time what happens inside, without having to draw any samples", Unterlass explains.
With the new high-temperature IR-probe – it is one of only two such devices worldwide – it will become easier to develop even more synthetic techniques. The team has plenty of ideas: "There is a plethora of organic molecules which promise great material properties if we manage to polymerize them", says Miriam Unterlass.
More information: Paper: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articl … y00263f#!divAbstract
Provided by Vienna University of Technology


text:
- Description
Microsoft Office 2016 Professional Plus Free Download. Download link: setup.office.com would let you download MS Office 16 just in a single click. Setup is for both 32 bit and 64 bit.
Office 2016 Professional Review:
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 is aimed primarily at companies and meets even the highest expectations. Containing the programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access and Skype for Business, Office Professional Plus 2016 meets all the requirements that are placed on an extensive office software. Whether you create form letters, manage figures and tables, design presentations, create databases or want to organize your eMails - your professional or private projects can be done with the Office applications in no time.
Office 2016 Professional Plus Salient Features:
- Easy file sharing.
- Improved user interface and products.
- Addition of new themes.
- Formatting even quicker.
- Grammar checker is also improved and quicker in comparison to the previous release.
- Higher DPI support up to 300% for your documents to look clearer.
- Catchy Theme.
- Reviews


text:
Shiba Inu Umbrella Auto Open Premium Quality Gold on Black w/ sleeve and shoulder strap
$ 37.00 $ 49.95
The San Francisco Umbrella Company and Gallery
The San Francisco Umbrella Company was founded in 2012 by Marc Alan Brown, our Rainmaker-in-Chief. Our goal is to make beautiful, high-quality umbrellas in the tradition of the finest European and Asian umbrella makers.
Our first collection included 11 dog breed themes and 1 cat each in stunning colors and simple designs. Adopted by animal lovers worldwide as soon as they appeared we have worked since then to improve the quality of our umbrellas, the materials and construction, and to refine the designs. Now with 40 animal themes we have created a powerful brand in the pet and zoo markets. The San Francisco animal theme umbrellas are the most popular decorated umbrellas in the world.
THE SUN AND RAIN PERSONAL UMBRELLAS with Sunbrella Fabric™
Since we are based on Russian Hill in San Francisco we are in the center of world changing innovation. We have always believed that people need truly effective sun-protective umbrellas (parasols). To that end, we have partnered with Sunbrella™, a brand of Glen Raven of North Carolina, to make the Blue Jean Sun and Rain Personal Umbrella and the Orange Sunset Sun and Rain Personal Umbrella. These "personal sized" umbrellas are 10 inches shorter than a standard stick umbrella and the canopy is 7 inches smaller in diameter which makes them more portable and lightweight. The Sunbrella™ fabric is approved by the American Skin Cancer Society as a 99% effective shield against the harmful rays of the sun. And yet they are also excellent rain umbrellas. We are very proud to offer these wonderful new products.
This super cool new red Shiba Inu Umbrella from The San Francisco Umbrella Company is a classic English stick style umbrella that features a handsome gold Shiba silkscreened across 8 panels of beautiful lush black fabric. Includes sleeve and shoulder strap. It is a very fine quality umbrella for which we offer guaranteed free replacement in case of defect or damage for 12 months after purchase. Since 2012 The San Francisco Umbrella Company has made very high quality rain umbrellas. Most feature stunning silhouettes of dogs, cats, and other animals on gorgeous colorful canopies.
- Includes sleeve and shoulder strap for easy carry and storage.
- Fiberglass ribs for great strength and flexibility.
- Steel shafts for durability.
- Auto-open and easy close for simple operation.
- 34.5" long, 40" wide canopy when open.
- 190T Pongee Polyester Canopy.
- These are some of the finest umbrellas in the world.


text:
That's what I'm listening to right now. Concerto 20 in D minor, K 466, Romance. It's lovely and a nice end to the day that started in the bureau of Vital Records in Philadelphia where I was lucky number 81. Why did I need to go to Vital Records you may ask?
Well, it turns out that my most recent employer would very much like to get rid of its pension obligations so it is offering us lucky duckies a once in a lifetime opportunity to receive a lump sum payment, which I may elect to use now and pay a hefty tax, or roll over into my IRA. It has taken me awhile to figure out what to do here. I could just pass up this once in a lifetime opportunity that will not be offered again under any circumstances or I can wait until I'm 67 and get the measly amount of the current value of the pension times four. I have elected to take the money and sock it away in my IRA, and rely on hope vs experience where the market is concerned. But to do it, I needed my birth certificate and despite the fact that I actually have a folder in my file cabinet clearly labeled "Vital Statistics", my birth certificate was not in it. Go figure.
So, I hopped on down to Philadelphia today to visit the closest Vital Records office for the state of Pennsylvania (I was born in County: Allegheny, City: Pittsburgh, Hospital: Pittsburgh Hospital, Year: MYOB). There I was given the opportunity to pay $18.00 for the privilege of parking for the hours I spent there and $10.00 for the certificate. In spite of the wait, the civil servants who processed my request were friendly and efficient and I had an opportunity to witness a dozen or so of them in a demonstration on the sidewalk at lunchtime while I waited. Whatever it was they were demonstrating about was getting a lot of support from the traffic that passed by. I found this to be reassuring because it meant that they would return from lunch in a good mood.
The friendly and efficient lady who took my check gave me my receipt and instructed me to return on Wednesday when I could pick up the certificate or I could choose to wait for snail mail. It would take 18-25 days. I opted to make a return trip. Besides, it would give me a chance to meet with some researchers I am collaborating with at a local university. Still, one has to wonder why printing a copy of the original document takes so long. Maybe hiring more civil servants or modernizing the technology would help.
Meeting with my collaborators was very pleasant. My brain gears are usually spinning without resistance and doing some work gives them a chance to engage. All good. But the trip home was long and I passed sections of New Jersey that still do not have power almost two weeks after Sandy. One of those areas was Lawrenceville where the famous Lawrenceville prep school is located. It's the one with it's own golf course on campus. And although the powerlessness of the area around the school must have bothered the residents, for some reason, it did not trouble me as much as the powerlessness of the people in Newark who don't have electricity.
The longest part was the section of road between Belle Mead and my turn, which was exactly 2.9 miles ahead, according to my navigator. Route 206 is one lane in each direction at that point, as it is along much of the way through New Jersey. I have lived in this town for 20 years and they are only now getting around to building a bypass. So, I waited patiently in my car listening to the Red State Blue State episode of This American Life while I remained calm and relaxed. However, I really think that if you're going to be in a traffic jam, it's much better to be in one 37 miles away than 2.9 miles away from your destination. This is my personal opinion based on my observations on how anzty I was to get out of the fricking car.
Ahhh, there goes the Mozart again. So soothing. I think I will sit here and drink my Trader Joe wine and dream of my next house where I can install the cast iron wood stove of my dreams, a Jotul F 370. It's sleek, it's modern, it swivels. It puts out 30,000 BTUs/hour, which sounds downright decadent after a hurricane. It is to die for…
Filed under: General | Tagged: IRA, Jotul wood stove, Mozart, pension, vital records | 1 Comment »