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The farther upriver we went, the friendlier the natives. One day we enjoyed a northerly and sailed 60 miles. Over 100 miles up , I went ashore in a canoe and met an old man, a chief. About 40 men and 17 woman gathered there. They killed some doves and a fat dog and skinned it with shells out of the water.
The land is the finest for cultivation that I have ever set foot upon, and it abounds in trees of every description: a great many handsome oak, walnut, chestnut, yew. In addition, there is much slate and other good stone for houses. The natives are a very good people. When they supposed I was afraid, they took their arrows, broke them in pieces, and threw them into the fire. But our intentions of peace . . . our self-restraint, our tolerance of misunderstood difference, these things were not to last.
And when we failed as ship-borne explorers and discoverers, we had to turn south. Either that or dredge and then dig a trench through dry valleys to Cathay. Failures as of that moment. A botched, bungled bumping into the bankruptcy of our ideas. Bankrupted myself, as well, given the ire I face from officers of the VOC.
And as ambassadors, we didn't manage things so well either. A few days south into our retreat from finding Cathay, we witnessed a person of the mountains jump from his canoe into the stern cabin window. As he left with clothing and bandoliers, a hot-headed member of my crew shot and killed him. This precipitated an attack by men in two canoes, one on either side. We returned fire with muskets and killed two or three of them. They continued to assault us, so we killed more of them with the cannon. And this was to be a voyage of exploration, one I imagined would result in communing with the people of Cathay. Communing, not massacring.
Near Manna-hata we anchored in a safe place. A cliff close by has a white-green color as though it were a copper or silver mine. No people there came to trouble us and we rode quietly all night, although with much wind and rain.
I confess it troubles me that our relations with the native people have not been what I imagined we'd have with those of Cathay. It troubles me even more deeply that I seem alone in my distress. I've seen this river leads nowhere toward Cathay; I am fearful for the path we have blazed between the Algonquins and our people.
A postscript: our ship's Cat . . . Cathay seems to have gone missing. I loved that cat, but after searching from the bilges to the mastheads, I'm certain Cathay has not been spotted since the attacks upriver.
(Painting: retouched image of Sanford R. Gifford's Sunset on the Hudson, 1876)


text: The Cosmo Series 10 Pin Bowling is a fantastic award that is available in 3 different heights – 6″, 7″, and 8″. Perfect for awarding individual recipients on a wide variety of bowling achievements. Find the perfect height for your team or player and customize the front plate with your text or logo (included in cost of award)

subset: commoncrawl


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WEDNESDAYS WORDS is a new weekly installment that ranks the most interesting, intriguing books of the week (old, new, reissues, digital, etc). Contributors represent a variety of genres and sources. Each book includes Title and publisher blurb.
I looked at both the Amazon Bestseller List for the week and the New York Times Bestseller list for the week.
While I found the NY list more interesting than the Amazon list, both were a bit more miss than hit for me. The majority of their items wouldn't be on my purchase list. What would be?
Glad you asked. Behold:
Dogsbody[Paperback] – Book Description
Publication Date: April 12, 2012
The Dog Star, Sirius, is tried – and found guilty – by his heavenly peers for a murder he did not commit. His sentence: to live on the planet Earth until he can carry out a seemingly impossible mission – the recovery of a deadly weapon known as the Zoi. The first lesson Sirius learns in his lowly earthly form is that humans have all the power. The second is that even though his young mistress loves him, she can't protect either of them. The third – and worst – is that someone out there will do anything to keep Sirius from finding the Zoi. Even if it means destroying Earth itself. This funny, heartbreaking, stunning book features an introduction by Neil Gaiman, an avid fan of Diana Wynne Jones.
Fire and Hemlock [Paperback] Publication Date: April 12, 2012
Polly Whittacker has two sets of memories. In the first, things are boringly normal; in the second, her life is entangled with the mysterious, complicated cellist Thomas Lynn. One day, the second set of memories overpowers the first, and Polly knows something is very wrong. Someone has been trying to make her forget Tom – whose life, she realizes, is at supernatural risk. Fire and Hemlock is a fantasy filled with sorcery and intrigue, magic and mystery – and a most unusual and satisfying love story.
Widely considered to be one of Diana Wynne Jones's best novels, the Firebird edition of Fire and Hemlock features an introduction by the acclaimed Garth Nix – and an essay about the writing of the book by Jones herself.
About the Author
Diana Wynne Jones was the multiple award-winning author of many fantasy novels for children, teenagers, and adults. Her book Howl's Moving Castle was made into an Academy Award-nominated major animated feature by Hayao Miyazaki. She received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. Married to the medievalist J. A. Burrow, with whom she had three sons, she lived for many years in Bristol, the setting for many of her books. Diana Wynne Jones passed away in March 2011, after a long illness.
The Incredible Adventures of Doc Atlas: The Doc Atlas Omnibus (Doc Atlas Omnibus) – Publication Date: October 7, 2011 | Series: Doc Atlas Onmibus
Set in the era of the 1940s and 50s, this collection of pulp-style novellas follows the adventures of the mighty Doc Atlas and crew from the jungles of Central America to the frozen tundra of the North Pole. Whether they're prowling the streets of Manhattan, investigating reports of a killer gorilla (with the purported brain of an executed criminal) or a crashed flying saucer in a small town named Roswell, New Mexico, Doc and company always see the investigation through to the end. Written with historical hindsight, these tales combine the best elements of the pulp era with actual historical figures and events.
– I'm not a Doc Savage fan. So a Doc Savage homage, is generally not something that is going to get my attention. I would never even have stopped on the page, accept the cover. It had a striking Geoff Darrow cover. So that got me to stop, read the description and decide… yeah it sounds worth a look. And that would neveer have happened without a great cover. I can't stress this enough, with ebooks and print on demand and specialty presses there is a lot of product and competition out there, make it easy and attractive for your book to stand out and get picked up… pay the money, get a great cover. I see so many books, and I'n a cover guy, so if you send me a book, and the cover looks like a two year old drew it, I don't care how good the book is purported to be…, I'm just not going to take the time to read it. An awful cover, to me, shows a lack of concern on the writer's part, for their product, not to package it as pleasingly as possible. And if the writer doesn't care… why should I? So people, if you spend months or years on a book, don't short-change yourself… spend the money and have a nice cover drawn up. And that's exactly what writer Black and Lovato do with this book, and as you can see by me highlighting their title… having a good cover helps. It won't make up for bad writing, but it will at least get people to open the book and judge for themselves the quality of the writing.
Tales from the Deed Box of John H. Watson, MD: Three Untold Tales of Sherlock Holmes– Publication Date: January 20, 2012
Three previously unknown accounts in the case files of Sherlock Holmes, discovered and transcribed by Hugh Ashton: The Odessa Business, the Case of the Missing Matchbox and The Case of the Cormorant.- I like these theme books, and Hugh Ashton's stories are getting good reviews.
For other writers who do a fantastic job of writing original Holmes stories, some superior to the originals, I have to direct you to the fantastic audio dramas by the folks at IMAGINATION THEATRE. Jim French with wife Pat French since 1952 have been working in radio drama, and since 1995 with Transmedia have been producing and broadcasting IMAGINATION THEATRE.
Starring John Patrick Lowrie and John Gilbert as Holmes with Lawrence Albert as Dr. Watson, their long running Sherlock Holmes radio series is not just good Holmes, it's one of the best adaptation of Holmes… period. Better than the BBC productions, better than the Downey movies, better than the new Sherlock tv series (SACRILEGE!!!).
In fact there are only two other adaptations I rate as highly, the Jeremy Brett television series… which is seminal entertainment, and (not the Rathbone radio series) the John Shirley 1940s radio series when written by two particular writers whose names are escaping me at the moment. But that's it, those two and French's adaptations, a Californian, An American production, are the tops.
French's IMAGINATION THEATRE, for hundreds of weeks, producing quietly without the attention it deserves the best Holmes Original stories and Adaptations, of our time.
I wish however they would put together thematic sets of their Holmes audio dramas. They have a fantastic 3 or 4 episodes with a villain, that transcends Moriarty in terms of craziness, but it is spread over multiple seasons. They need to make that trilogy/quadrilogy a boxed collection onto itself, and that would make a fantastic introduction to IMAGINATION THEATRE and their Holmes dramas.
But do they listen to me… no. Oh well, until such time as they do, make do with the following:
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Volume 1
The WEDNESDAYS WORDS column is a new blog feature, appearing (you guessed it!) every Wednesday. Come back next week to see which books make the list!
If you're a publisher, writer, or other creative representative looking to submit items for WEDNESDAYS WORDS, just leave a comment on this post with your email/contact info, comments don't get posted they come right to me, and I'll reach out to you with the snail mail details.
And as far as readers, if you see items on WEDNESDAYS WORDS you're considering purchasing then, if you are able and would like to support this blog, please utilize the attached links.
Your helpful purchases through those links, generates much appreciated pennies to keep this blog running. Your feedback and support… just way cool, and way appreciated. Thanks!
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Super filmi week: Indradhanush was our Stranger Things!
Sridevi, Karan Johar, Tabu… my week was all about time travel and pleasant encounters with the super young avatars of Bollywood's famous folk. Monday Only a couple of days ago, I shared a random list of Hindi film songs that make … Continue reading
Posted in Columns & Reviews Tagged aap ki kasam, ashutosh gowariker, bazaar, indradhanush, karan johar, krishna, mala sinha, mash up meme, meera, miley cyrus, mumtaz, rajesh khanna, shahenshah, sridevi, star kids, stranger things, tabu, urmila matondkar 1 Comment


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You want to share the links you discover ? Shaarli is a minimalist delicious clone you can install on your own website. It is designed to be personal (single-user), fast and handy.
Requires php 5.1
My own instance: https://sebsauvage.net/links/
(Note that the admin interface is not available.)
Shaarli is under the zlib/libpng OSI licence.
Done ! Now you can login and start sharing links.
.htaccess in the directory where Shaarli is located containing:
php 1 SetEnv PHP_VER 5
Please note that free uses php 5.1 and thus you will not have autocomplete in tag editing.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '=', expecting '(' in /links/index.php on line 54
is means that your host is using php4, not php5.
This bookmarklet button in compatible with Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Under Opera, you can't drag'n drop the button: You have to right-click on it and add a bookmark to your personal toolbar.
You are reading an interesting page you want to share ?
You can also check the "Private" box so that the link is saved but only visible to you.
I was a StumblUpon user. Then I got fed up with they big toolbar. I switched to delicious, which was lighter, faster and more beautiful. Until Yahoo bought it. Then the export API broke all the time, delicious became slow and was ditched by Yahoo. I switched to Diigo, which is not bad, but does too much. And Diigo is sslllooooowww and their Firefox extension a bit buggy. And… oh… their Firefox addon sends to Diigo every single URL you visit (Don't believe me ? Use "Tamper Data" and open any page).
Enough is enough. Saving simple links should not be a complicated heavy thing. I ditched them all and wrote my own: Shaarli. It's simple, but it does the job and does it well. And my data is not hosted on a foreign server, but on my server.
With Shaarli:
If you export your bookmark from Diigo, make sure you use the Delicious export, not the Netscape export. (Their Netscape export is broken, and they don't seem to be interested in fixing it.)
Delete all files and directories except the
data directory, then unzip the new version of Shaarli.
You will not lose your links and you will not have to reconfigure it.
You have two ways of backing up your database:
data/datastore.php (by FTP or ssh). (Restore by putting the file back in place.)
This can be caused by several things:
ini_set('session.save_path', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/../sessions');. Make sure this directory is not browsable !)
If you want to disable the session cookie hijacking protection, change the following line:
if (empty($_SESSION['uid']) || $_SESSION['ip']!=allIPs() || time()>=$_SESSION['expires_on'])
if (empty($_SESSION['uid']) || time()>=$_SESSION['expires_on'])
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting '{' in /links/index.php on line xxx", you are probably running php4. Shaarli required php 5.1. Try to rename the file with extension .php5
Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /…/index.php on line xxx, it means that your host has disabled the ability to fetch a file by HTTP in the php config (Typically in 1and1 hosting). Bad host. Change host. Or comment the following lines:
//list($status,$headers,$data) = getHTTP($url,4); // Short timeout to keep the application responsive. // FIXME: Decode charset according to charset specified in either 1) HTTP response headers or 2) <head> in html //if (strpos($status,'200 OK')) $title=html_extract_title($data);
Shaarli tries to sniff the language of the browser (using HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE headers) and choose a date format accordingly. But Shaarli can only use the date formats (and more generaly speaking, the locales) provided by the webserver. So even if you have a browser in French, you may end up with dates in US format (it's the case on sebsauvage.net )
Delete the file
data/config.php and display the page again. You will be asked for a new login/password.
Shaarli is for shaaring your link.
Do browsing this page feel slow ? Try browsing older pages, too.
It's not slow at all, is it ? And don't forget the database contains more than 16000 links, and it's on a shared host, with 32000 visitors/day for my website alone. And it's still damn fast. Why ?
The data file is only 3.7 Mb. It's read 99% of the time, and is probably already in the operation system disk cache. So generating a page involves no I/O at all most of the time.
data/log.txt shows all logins (successful or failed) and bans/lifted bans.
<?php /* zP1ZjxxJtiYIvvevEPJ2lDOaLrZv7o... ...ka7gaco/Z+TFXM2i7BlfMf8qxpaSSYfKlvqv/x8= */ ?>
magic_quotes is a horrible option of php which is often activated on servers. No serious developer should rely on this horror to secure their code against SQL injections. You should disable it (and Shaarli expects this option to be disabled). Nevertheless, I have added code to cope with magic_quotes on, so you should not be bothered even on crappy hosts.
Some parameters can be configured by creating a .php file. Change at your own risks.
To change the configuration, create the file
data/options.php, example:
<?php $GLOBALS['config']['LINKS_PER_PAGE'] = 30; $GLOBALS['config']['HIDE_TIMESTAMPS'] = true; $GLOBALS['config']['ENABLE_THUMBNAILS'] = false; ?>
The following parameters are available (parameters (default value)):
false: Shaarli will not generate thumbnails which need to be cached locally (vimeo, flickr, etc.). Thumbnails will still be visible for the services which do not use the local cache (youtube.com, imgur.com, dailymotion.com, imageshack.us)
Here is the directory structure of Shaarli and the purpose of the different files:
See the history of versions in this page.
The list of ideas and bugs are listed in this page.
If you want to signal a bug or propose a feature, please do it in the discussion below.
If you have a bug report or a new feature suggestion, please add them in the GitHub issue tracker.
Alternatively, you can find older discussions about Shaarli in this page (This discussion is closed.)


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Tuition waivers available to dislocated mine employees
Evergreen responds to Centralia mine closure
In the wake of the closure of the Centralia coal mine by TransAlta Corp., The Evergreen State College is making tuition waivers of variable amounts up to $1200 and academic support available to displaced mine employees, the college announced.
"The closure of the mine in Centralia impacts thousands of people, and we're here to assist in any way we can," said Thomas L. Purce, Evergreen's president. "We are committed to being responsive to the needs of our community and the state," he said.
Tuition waivers from $300 to $1200 a quarter will be made available, along with academic guidance. Evergreen is also working with Centralia College to create an agreement for the Associate in Technical Arts in Power Operations, allowing students who graduate with that degree at Centralia and who meet the program's criteria, to make a seamless transition to Evergreen with junior standing and 90 credits.
The mine's closure was announced Monday, Nov. 27.
For more information about tuition waivers, transferring community college credit, or for general information about enrolling at The Evergreen State College call 360-867-6310 or e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com.
The Evergreen State College is Washington's nationally acclaimed public baccalaureate liberal arts and sciences college located in Olympia. For more information, go to www.evergreen.edu.


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New daily flights from SFO to India via Shanghai
If your job has been outsourced to Mumbai and you want to go retain it in India, there's a new option for you…
SFO will soon have Jet Airways as a new tenant, becoming the first Indian airline to fly from San Francisco to Mumbai and only the second airline worldwide to fly nonstop from San Francisco to Shanghai. The airline which also has codesharing with American Airlines, will begin SFO flights in May, and previously launched daily service from New York's JFK and Newark airports, as well as Toronto within the past year.
The airline, which won an award for 'Best Full Service Airline in India' for the year 2007, touts it's luxury class offerings ranging from First Class suites with private closets, dining tables for two, and 23″ flat-screens. The Premiere business class features "pods" with 73″-long totally flat beds. Even the Economy seats supposedly divy up more legroom than average and all customers can fiddle with hi-tech personal entertainment systems, complete with 200+ movies, games and Bose noise-canceling headphones.
The Indian airline which was founded in 1993, also runs flights to and from Brussels, London, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Colombo, Bangkok, Kathmandu, Dhaka, Kuwait, Bahrain, Muscat and Doha.
For more information, please visit: http://www.jetairways.com


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Ron White to host CMT's artist of year special
Comedian Ron White will host CMT's celebration of 2013's top country music stars, making this year's show something of a boys club.
"CMT Artists of the Year" honoring Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line, Hunter Hayes and Tim McGraw airs live for the first time this year.
John Hamlin, a senior vice president at CMT, says in a Tuesday news release the network is taking "a bit of a risk" signing on White, who's known for off-color comments.
The fourth annual artist of the year show will be held Dec. 3 in Nashville, Tenn., and will feature performances by and for the night's honorees.


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Teen sentenced for attack on elderly couple
KANSAS CITY (AP) — A Kansas City man has been sentenced to life in prison for raping an 84-year-old woman during a break-in at the home she shared with her 93-year-old husband.
The sentence imposed yesterday on 19-year-old Tony Putman also includes a total of 10 years for kidnapping and robbery.
The Jackson County prosecutor says in all, Putman is expected to spend more than 34 years behind bars.
Putman pleaded guilty in March to charges linked to the July 2012 attack.
The woman told police she came home from running errands, heard her husband moaning and confronted an intruder who demanded money. The woman gave the intruder $400, after which he raped her and drove off in the couple's vehicle with some jewelry.
Putman was arrested about 30 minutes later.


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Google is seeking a new trial on copyright claims in Oracle's intellectual-property lawsuit against it over the Android mobile OS, according to a filing made late Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Oracle sued Google in August 2010, claiming Android violated patents and copyrights that Oracle holds on the Java programming language, which it gained control of through the Sun Microsystems acquisition. Google has argued that Android is a "clean room" implementation of the open-source language, and doesn't violate Oracle's rights.
This week, a jury delivered a partial verdict on the copyright claims in the case, finding that Google had infringed the "overall structure, sequence and organization" of the code in 37 Java APIs (application programming interfaces). However, it did not answer the question of whether Google's infringement was protected under "fair use" of copyrighted works.
Google's move for a new trial was not unexpected, having been foreshadowed in court after the verdict by its attorney, Robert Van Nest.
"Under settled Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit law, the jury's failure to reach a verdict concerning both halves of this indivisible question requires a new trial concerning both questions," Google said in a brief accompanying its motion on Tuesday.
The court should declare a mistrial on both the copyright infringement and fair use questions, since doing so only regarding fair use would "violate the Seventh Amendment-both by threatening Google with a non-unanimous verdict on liability, and by having determination of the same factual question, or indivisible factual questions, made by two different juries," Google added.
Another layer of complexity lies in the fact that Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the case, has yet to rule on whether APIs can be copyrighted at all under U.S. law.
Oracle had not yet directly responded to Google's motion on Wednesday, but in another filing late Tuesday, lawyers for the company addressed the fair use issue.
The lack of a verdict on fair use "means that, without some action by the Court and/or the parties, the trial cannot proceed to a final verdict with this jury," Oracle said. "Presenting the case to a second jury would be expensive, time-consuming and duplicative, and may impose a substantial additional delay."
Oracle made a number of proposals in the filing, including that both it and Google stipulate that the court decide the issue of fair use regarding Google's infringement of the APIs.
Should Google agree to this, Oracle would drop its claim for infringer's profits in connection with rangeCheck, a small amount of Java code that the jury found Google had copied, Oracle said. The court could then set statutory damages for rangeCheck, it added.
As an alternative, the parties could wait until the court rules on Oracle's pending motion for a judgment as a matter of law on the fair use matter, the filing added.
The patent phase of the case began this week. Should the trial proceed as originally planned, that segment will be followed by a third phase to determine damages.
Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's email address is firstname.lastname@example.com


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Named after the first mission from Earth to send a rover to the surface of another planet, the goal of the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge is to find .NET developers who can help NASA classify the hundreds of thousands of images collected from the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Rover expeditions. This challenge provides developers with a unique opportunity to leverage their coding skills to help NASA, while also offering a chance to win some great prizes ranging from NASA swag and ZuneHDs to a trip to see the next Mars Rover launch.
The competition consists of four different Leagues; two, the Global Cooperation League and the Intelligence League are most relevant to .NET developers. The Global Cooperation League, uses Silverlight and NASA's Windows Azure-hosted APIs in Codename Dallas to build casual games designed to allow regular citizens to help classify images. Check out the counting craters application, Help Map Mars to see an example. The Intelligence League uses the power of the Windows Azure platform to create automated and efficient image-processing applications that can rapidly detect and label interesting objects within the Mars Expedition Rover images.
Full details about the competition can be found on the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge website. Be sure to check out the Learn How-Videos and Key Downloads page for additional information, official entry form and directions to acquire a token for accessing NASA APIs in Codename Dallas.


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May 6, 2008 — -- Success doesn't come without a cost. And nobody knows that better than Barbara Walters. She says her life has been a series of attempts "to be accepted."
"I've been auditioning all my life," Walters said. "Almost every aspect of my professional life was an audition."
Today, she released her revealing autobiography, "Audition," an intimate look at her personal life and her career, which has forever altered the workplace for women.
Walters, who admits to being "in my 70s," wasn't born with makeup in place and cameras jockeying for position. She had a relatively quiet childhood near Boston and her family later moved to Manhattan.
Show business was part of her life practically from the cradle: Walters' father, nightclub pioneer Lou Walters, founded the famed Latin Quarter, a cabaret on 48th Street and Broadway in New York City that later expanded to several other cities.
"It was for me the most glamorous place. This is where I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays and prom nights," Walters said. "Some people had a, I don't know, a doctor for a father. I had a producer."
The Latin Quarter was a precursor to Las Vegas, presenting the kind of nightclub glitter that's been perfected in the the blinding metropolis that Las Vegas is today.
"You could dance. Big, live orchestra and for about $8.50 you got a full-course dinner. And then came this huge show, all these girls with the costumes," Walters said.
Lou Walters was an impresario, but he was also a gambler and a risk taker who made several fortunes and lost several fortunes, taking the family from penthouse to penny-pinching. It had a profound effect on his younger daughter.
"I don't gamble," she said. "I've taken a lot of risks, I've realized when I look back, but they were very hard-made decisions" connected with her career, Walters added.
Walters has had her professional pratfalls. Her most publicized failure was as a co-anchor, with Harry Reasoner, of the "ABC Evening News" in the late 1970s. When ABC pulled the plug on the duo, Reasoner went back to CBS and Walters hit the road as a roving correspondent for ABC.
"The most important thing, almost, I think, is to fail at some point, so when you work your way back," she said, "you can say, "Hey, it wasn't all luck.'"
Some of it was looks. Walters maintains that her first job came about because of her legs.
"When I graduated from college, I went to an employment agency, and there was a man following me up the stairs and he hired me. I thought because I could do speed writing. He said he'd liked my legs," Walters said. "I think he ogled."
If someone made a pass, Walters said that was "par for the course." It was a time when women served as decorative objects within the media and little else.
She eventually landed a gig as a writer on "The Today Show," where she did occasional on-air appearances. She also met Hugh Downs, who would eventually become her co-anchor on "20/20."
Walters became an on-air regular, and later, a co-host of "The Today Show." But she wasn't always co-equal.
"Those were the days I can't believe it when I think about it now … when I could only come in for the fourth question when there was a serious interview," she said. "So I would sit there until the fourth question, but if I went outside of the studio, and got the interview, I could do it myself. So, pushy cookie did all of those interviews outside of the studio."
She was smart enough, and successful enough, to attract an industry-rattling offer from ABC in 1976: $1 million a year to do network specials and co-anchor with Reasoner.
"Since ABC News was doing so poorly with Harry Reasoner, it had no place to go, but up," she said.
As it turned out, the evening news did have another place to go -- further down.
Veteran ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson said the chemistry just wasn't right.
"The first night, of course, we had a big audience. Everyone came to see the million dollar baby," said Donaldson, who was at that time ABC's White House correspondent. "Barbara was a little stiff, but who wouldn't be? Harry was standoffish, and treated her as if 'Who is this dame' who he has to sit with."
Walters felt she was drowning without a life preserver.
"There was no reason to go to a therapist," she said. "I knew what was wrong."
She says she failed. But she kept showing up for work each day. Walters anchored the evening news at ABC for about a year and a half before she says the audience became "uncomfortable." ABC said it was over.
"The first thing I noticed was that when they took her off the program, here's this big star we paid a million dollars," Donaldson said.
"And it's six o'clock in the morning, she'd be out on the rope line with the rest of us. She was going to work hard, never mind that she had been demoted and it was all in the press. And she was going to demonstrate that she had the right stuff, as Tom Wolfe would say. And, for me, ever since that day, she's had the right stuff."
As a roving reporter Walters interviewed Fidel Castro in 1977, one of her most memorable.
"I would like to make it clear that we never had a romance," she said, referring to the frequent teasing she's endured after an interview some perceived as flirtatious. "One of the most charismatic people you can meet, but you also have to realize that he is a dictator, that he allows no freedom and he and I talked straight about that."
"That's when I did the best work I've done in the Middle East, with [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat and [Israeli Prime Minister Menachim] Begin, and all the peace treaties," she said. "That's when I did the most important stories."
Donaldson said she was more like one of the boys than a diva.
"She demonstrated that she wanted to be serious," Donaldson said. "And she was gonna prove that she could do it."
Walters seemed on her way to another anchor chair at "20/20" when Downs became an unexpected obstacle.
"The company came to me and said they'd like to make Barbara a co-anchor. And my reaction to that was, if it isn't broke, don't fix it. And I resisted it," he said. "I was able to tell Barbara very early on that I was glad I was wrong because it worked out well."
She stayed on "20/20" for nearly one quarter of a century, and during that time interviewed seven different presidents in addition to prime ministers, princes, movie stars and murderers.
Although Walters is often associated with sensitive, sometimes weepy, interviews, she wasn't afraid to ask the tough questions either. When she spoke to Vladimir Putin in 2001 she asked straight out, "Did you ever kill anybody?"
When interviewing Boris Yeltsin in 1991 she didn't shy away from the questions everyone wanted to know, regardless of how they might have been received.
"When you were visiting America there were reports that you drank too much. Did you drink too much?"
"Nyet," he responded.
"I'm very brave on camera. I'm a pussycat off camera," she said. "Surprising that I'm not still in Russia to this minute."
It took more than a year, but she finally earned enough trust for Monica Lewinsky to agree to an interview.
"When I finally met Monica, and thought that I had her trust, she had no money, and she was going to sell her story," Walters said. "And the biggest challenge was how to get her to do it with me free because I said, 'Your credibility is the most important thing.'"
During the March 3 interview in 1999 Walters didn't beat around the bush.
"You showed the president of the United States your thong underwear," Walters said to Lewinsky. "Where did you get the nerve? I mean, who does that?"
On the "The View," the daytime roundtable that Walters invented 11 years ago, they talk about hot topics that can erupt into firestorms. But this forum would have been unthinkable when Walters was growing up.
"View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg marvels at what Walters has accomplished.
"Every now and then I mess with her. I said, 'Have you got any idea how many women are in the media because you made it OK? Because you have all the scars on your back that they didn't have to get?' Then she'll say, 'Oh, Whoopi.'"
Correspondents Joan Lunden, Diane Sawyer and Connie Chung have all suggested that their careers wouldn't have existed had Walters not paved the way.
"Many of the things that happened, I guess over time would've happened anyway," Walters said. "I never set out to be a trailblazer. I never said, I'm gonna do this, you know, for women. I had no mentors."
Among Walters' fans is Oprah Winfrey, who said, "I don't think Barbara knows how enormous of an impact she's had on this industry, on women in particular. I don't think she'll ever really fully get it."
"I don't think we'd be here, if it weren't for Barbara., when I first auditioned for my first television job, I got through my entire audition pretending to be Barbara Walters," Winfrey said. "I mean, the spirit of Barbara, the image of Barbara, for the first year of my television career, I thought I was Barbara -- Black!"
After establishing her own legacy as one of the most influential black women on television, Winfrey agreed to an interview with Walters in 1988 where she described the horrific events of her childhood for the first time. In describing her conversation with Walters, Winfrey said it felt "safe."
"There was a veil of protection and sincerity that made me feel like it's OK to open up, that if you're gonna do it, if you're gonna do it, if you're ever gonna do it, this is the time to do it," Winfrey said.
What's the secret to her interview technique?
"I listen," Walters said. "That's the most important thing."


text: Posted by Mike Burris on May 13, 2019 | Leave a Comment TweetFollow @cgrproducts Share Mike Burris Mike Burris is in Product Development at CGR Products. A member of the CGR team for over 19 years, Mike also holds a 3M certification from its Master Estimator program and a degree in Business Administration.Leave a Reply Cancel replyYour email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment *Name * Email * Δ


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TV Review: 4 funny guys make the best of bachelorhood on CBS sitcom 'We Are Men'
LOS ANGELES — We all know that men, in matters of love, are likely to be wounded warriors. So says "We Are Men," CBS' amusing new sitcom about four men making the best of their shared bachelorhood and...
LOS ANGELES — We all know that men, in matters of love, are likely to be wounded warriors.
So says "We Are Men," CBS' amusing new sitcom about four men making the best of their shared bachelorhood and the camaraderie that results. (It premieres Monday at 8:30 p.m. on ch. 12, 4)
The setting is an apartment complex (located "four exits from Hollywood, which means actresses!") that caters to the singles crowd, including this motley band of brothers: Frank, a four-time loser with a Casanova complex played by Tony Shalhoub ("Monk"); Stuart, an OB-GYN in the midst of his second divorce who embarrasses everyone with his hot-tub Speedos habit, played by Jerry O'Connell ("Crossing Jordan"); Gil, a small-business owner who feels constant remorse for his bungled affair, played by Kal Penn ("Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle"); and Carter, who was ditched by his fiancee at the altar, played by Chris Smith ("Enough Said").
During their first week shooting the series last August, the foursome are packed into Stuart's decade-old Buick (his fancy car is hidden so his estranged wife can't seize it) for a scene where the guys go for a late-night joyride.
Surrounded by three cameras, the car is mounted in front of a green screen on a soundstage at CBS Studio Center, with lights reflecting in the windshield to suggest the car is moving. Over and over — long enough for any actor to get saddle sore — these stars repeat a lively round of dialogue as Stuart makes an unplanned detour toward his ex-wife's house to holler out his window.
"I've got no other outlets for my anger," Stuart explains to his friends. "I'm tired of calling sports radio."
In the backseat beside Carter, Gil (or, more accurately, Kal Penn sporting a bottomless pit) is forced to keep scarfing down chicken taquitos from a paper plate, which a production assistant keeps replenishing take after take.
"I did it straight, sad and frustrated," says O'Connell after yelling innumerable times at the green screen.
"Give me more sinister," says the director.
After an hour or more, the scene is finished, and, while the cameras are reset, the four men remove themselves from the car for a break.
Plopping themselves into a nearby row of director's chairs, they agree that it's fun to play men with such comic flaws and to lampoon the Y chromosome.
"The other night," says O'Connell, "we were filming on location in a nice neighborhood with white picket fences, and I'm holding my fist out the car window and screaming at a house. That's really fun! I would never do this in my real life!" For one thing, he's happily married to actress Rebecca Romijn. "Even so, it'd be something I'd be too AFRAID to do."
This is Friday of their first week in production since they shot the pilot episode back in February. Five days in, they agree they still like each other.
"Everyone's real nice and grounded and hardworking and professional," says Smith. "Smart, creative, handsome, in good shape. Healthy eaters, straight teeth, good hair."
"Good hygiene," Shalhoub adds. "Excellent hygiene!"
"So no one's a real pain to be around," Smith sums up. "Unless I'm that guy, and they haven't told me yet."
The only issue so far: the Speedos. It seems that Stuart has a high opinion of his body and loves to display it in the skimpiest of swimwear. This kind of creeps out his pals.
It's a comic signature of the show, which O'Connell makes the most of.
But do his co-stars feel slighted that they weren't asked to wear Speedos, too?
Shalhoub: "Oh, I get to wear a Speedo. They just give me trunks to put over it."
Penn: "I show up for work and I leave work in a Speedo."
Smith: "I get Jerry's used Speedos. I got a nice collection going."
Then O'Connell announces, "Next year, we're going to give out calendars with all of us posing in Speedos."
"But I'm planning on releasing one with only pictures of me," says Penn. "I'm calling it a Kal-ender."


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I thought since I was away and these links will be at least a week out of date, I'd go back through my old bookmarks and see if I could find a few slightly older posts to mix in with ones that caught my eye recently.
RIFT's Summer Update makes every other game's producer letter seem slight and mean minded. They are going to do EVERYTHING. There is information about quality of life improvements, zone events, and how they try to balance putting effort into raids with other upcoming endgame activities. The guy knows his MMOs and knows his players, I defy anyone to read that post and not have even a minor yay moment.
I wrote about raid rifts in RIFT a couple of weeks ago, and apparently I'm not the only person who enjoys them.
The challenge there was to create an incentive for an activity that wasn't burdened by lockouts, such that more people could help out more than once a day if they choose. Those have worked out amazingly well for pickup raids of 10 to 20. Just about all of the servers have multiple pickup raids engaging more people in the shared world than we had ever hoped, every single day.
There are issues that haven't been explicitly addressed though. For example, PvP rifts sound fun, but what about issues around PvP gearing and how implacable it can be for newbies.
Having said that, their ideas about where to go with endgame and what sorts of activities different players might want to do are amongst the most interesting and exciting in the industry. I'm dipping into WoW at the moment again, but not likely to let my Rift sub drop any time soon. (Sorry to my guildies for not being around much.)
More links
- I haven't written much about Blizzard's new game (codenamed Titan) because we don't know much about it. But 'back' in June analysts were claiming that it was going to be a casual MMO. RPS reckon that means probably a FPS of some sort. Is MMOFPS the future of MMOs? If Blizzard does it, what does that mean for WoW? (and the many WoW players who may have been hoping for WoW #2.)
- If you are good at a game and good at playing your class/ role, do you feel any responsibility to pass tips on to newer players? Nope? Only if they're in your guild/ raid? Arthemystia argues here that experienced hunters in WoW should help newbie hunters. (Presumably they aren't interested in helping non-hunters.)
- I will miss Blacksen and I've enjoyed his blog a great deal, especially as it comes from a very different (and very hardcore) mindset. His goodbye post is well worth reading for anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of raid guilds. His comments on why the raiders names always rotate and how difficult it is to maintain a stable roster even as a competitive progression guild, ring very true. Anyhow, I wish him luck with the rest of his life 🙂
- The SWTOR developer blog post last week was about crafting the opening videos for each class. You may think "yeah, yeah, introductory video – will take about 5 mins out of a game I may play for hundreds of hours," but I defy anyone not to feel something when the screen goes dark, the star wars music starts to play, and text starts to scroll slowly up the screen a la A New Hope and it is about your character.
- There was a press release that hit the games press last week discussing whether female gamers liked games better than sex. This is the only post I've found discussing that survey which makes the obvious point that maybe this is because quite a lot of women actually don't enjoy sex all that much. They compare with a larger survey on US sexual activity in which 30% of female respondents said that their last experience of sex had been painful. Yup, Farmville is looking quite appealing in comparison to actual PAIN.
- And lastly, one from my social work blog list, in which Social Jerk discusses how she'd sort out Hogwarts. (Yes, of course I went to see the Harry Potter film and it was great. I am however gutted that we got shown the trailer for Twilight and not The Dark Knight Rises.)


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Review: Sherman Alexie's Blasphemy
Sherman Alexie is one of the country's most celebrated writers (three-time PEN award winner, 86-weeks-and-counting on the New York Times bestseller list, crowned by indie Hollywood), a star in his native Pacific Northwest, and probably needs little introduction. That he is both a Spokane Indian tribesman and a successful writer who grew up on a reservation in eastern Washington are facts he will never let you forget. Throughout his published work (now inching into the double-digits) and in his disarmingly hysterical book readings and live appearances, Alexie returns to "the rez" again and again for its linguistic tics, the enormous blank canvas of its domestic isolationism, and, like many other writers before him, a setting to explore the peaks and valleys of our continual coming of age.
Alexie visited Portland in late October in support of his latest book, Blasphemy, sitting in on OPB's Think Out Loud radio program at lunchtime (and possibly causing listeners to spit Kombucha through their nose) and later appearing before his adoring audience at Powell's big-ticket literary outpost, the Badgad Theater, to indulge us all in a little "colonial S&M," some routine reading, and more than a few hilarious anecdotes from his life normally reserved for private sessions with his therapist. Extended, barbed razzing of Portland culture—from generic hipster hate to the over-saturation of Thai food cart options to "Portland reminds me of Seattle 15 years ago: sooooo full of itself!"—was met with some quizzical head-scratching. Not sure whether to laugh, clap, or get angry, the audience seemed genuinely alarmed that someone actually attempted to puncture the bubble and interrogate our infallible city (wink wink).
Blasphemy, a hefty hardcover story collection out now that spans the full length of his twenty-plus year career, is a convenient compendium for new readers and old fans alike. Not merely a "greatest hits," it also features recent and previously unpublished work to savor, and for the most part, despite his newfound success as a YA author, it is a polite reminder that we should be taking this writer seriously. Like the best storytellers, Alexie can toss off heartbreakingly expressive and profound sentiments with a humor and nonchalance that cleverly conceal their gravity. It's these deceptively poignant moments that drive Alexie's work and provide an earthly backdrop to the cosmic swap meets of our souls. His style mirrors the gruff poetics embodied in the archetypal caricature of the Indian Chief—speaking of worldly matters in descriptive fragments and showing rather than telling—a device Alexie mines for everything it's worth, translating the beauty of his forbears' straightforward philosophy into a jarring and transcendent literary experience.
A scene in "The Toughest Indian in the World" is particularly indicative of the thematic impulses underlying Alexie's most affecting work. The story finds a hitchhiker and the narrator in a motel after a long drive finding tragicomic irony in an unexceptional watercolor hanging over the bed that depicts the US Cavalry defeating a pack of Indian warriors. An exchange between the two men effortlessly illuminates the condition of displacement in the Native American experience: "'What tribe do you think they are,' I asked the fighter. 'All of them,' he said." And later, after an abrupt and unexpected homosexual encounter between the two strangers, their brief union becomes as meaningless and insignificant as the painting above their heads, and we see again the alignment of the various manifestations of separate but equal pain, realizing that one cannot exist without the other.
"War Dances," the centerpiece of this volume, is in many ways a triumphant convergence of Alexie's approaches to uncovering the tragically quarantined Native experience throughout history. Touching on grief, identity, and compassion through experimental narrative techniques and told with his hallmark wit and candor, it captures the splendors of this writer's considerable talent when let loose to wander the confines of his own thoughts.
During the Q&A following his reading at the Bagdad, an indigenous Mexican woman solicited Alexie's thoughts on immigration in light of the recent crackdowns in Arizona. Before addressing the question, Alexie focused on his visceral response to the inquisitor's honeyed voice, saying, "she could talk about genocide," and he'd still only be captivated by her voice alone. It was a real-time display of his ability to candy-coat difficult matters in a layer of humor so that we, as free agents on this earth bound together uncomfortably, can begin to understand the omnipresent Other—whoever it may be.


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Informatica has been integrating on-premises and cloud-based data sources since 2006, so it has a long list of prebuilt connectors for databases and applications from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAP. Informatica Cloud Summer 2012 fills out the vendor's Cloud Connector Toolkit list with prebuilt, application-native integrations for the Eloqua cloud-based marketing platform, and NetSuite and Workday cloud-based ERP suites. The release also delivers a prebuilt Web services connector, a beta connector to the Google Big Query service, and deeper data modeling capabilities for complex data-integration scenarios.
Looking beyond popular connection scenarios, Summer 2012 introduces cloud integration templates that provide building blocks for common data-integration tasks such as extraction, merging, aggregation, routing, and format conversion. The idea is to speed and simplify the development of integration applications. Those might be disposable apps used for one-time projects, such as application migrations, or they might be custom integrations used by OEM partners or customers with home-grown or legacy applications.
[ Need insight on big data integration? Read eHarmony Matches Informatica HParser With Hadoop. ]
The Cloud Connector Toolkit, integration templates, code samples, documentation, and best-practices recommendations are being made available through a new developer's site within the online Informatica Cloud Community. Informatica is also introducing a free developer's toolkit with a Java-based API for building custom connectors, and a template designer for building integration applications from its ready-made building blocks.
"We've built a lot of our own native connectors, but we're never going to get to all the new apps that are coming online and niche apps that are out there," said Darren Cunningham, Informatica's VP of cloud marketing, in an interview with InformationWeek. "We're giving the community access to the tools so they can build them and offer them through our marketplace."
Informatica is the largest independent data-integration software vendor with $784 million in revenue last year, and Informatica Cloud is its fastest-growing source of business. The vendor reports that its cloud-integration volume has doubled from an average of about 118,000 integration jobs per day in July 2011 to about 230,000 jobs per day in July 2012. Application-to-application scenarios, both on-premises-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud, are driving most of the demand, according to Cunningham, but interest in extract-transform-and-load jobs, from cloud apps to on-premises data warehouses, is also growing.
Competitors in the cloud-based data-integration arena include Dell Boomi, IBM CastIron, MuleSoft, SnapLogic, and Talend.
Informatica has long seeded demand for its cloud capabilities by giving away a free data loader for Salesforce.com and the Force.com platform. With the Summer 2012 release, Informatica has added data loaders for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and NetSuite. The free tool lets users upload to or download data from the app, and you can upgrade to the paid Informatica Cloud service if you need deeper integration capabilities, such as real-time integration, or want the convenience of stored, repeatable jobs.


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In one of the country's most appealingly remote and beautiful areas, the Coyle family's famous Lutyens-esque house has a romantic and fascinating history, having been home to people as diverse as a Gaelic chieftain and Oliver St John Gogarty - and it became one of Ireland's earliest country house hotels, in 1883. Since then it has seen many changes, culminating with major refurbishment in 2015 that saw the hotel achieve four star grading.
In good weather, it is best approached via a stunning scenic drive along a mountain road with views down into a blue-green sea of unparalleled clarity.
Once reached, the hotel seems to be snuggling down for shelter and, although it has limited views, there is a shift of emphasis to the comforts within, a feeling reinforced by the cosy atmosphere of the original building, with its dark beams, rug strewn floors and open fires - and a snug conservatory where guests can comfortably survey the garden, and the landscape beyond.
Photographs and mementos recording visits from the many famous people who have stayed here - Augustus John, Lady Gregory, Yeats and Churchill among them - keep guests happily occupied for hours, but there is plenty to distract you from this enjoyable activity, including a heated outdoor swimming pool, tennis, trout fishing, golf (9 hole), and croquet - while the surrounding area offers more challenging activities including archaeological expeditions, horse riding, hill walking, scuba diving and sea fishing.
Just loafing around is perhaps what guests are best at here, however, and there's little need to do much else. The hotel's bar food is excellent too - all this, plus the scent of a turf fire and a comfortable armchair, can be magic.
The grounds and gardens around the hotel are a special point of interest at Renvyle, and come as a delightful contrast to the magnificently rugged surrounding scenery.
As is usual in old houses, the bedrooms vary in size and style, but all are in keeping with the Arts & Crafts origins of this historic house, which has the simple, clean lines of the era and solid Irish oak and furniture featured throughout. The fabrics and furnishings are true to the spirit of the old house too, being made and woven by skilled local craftsmen whenever possible.
Special breaks (midweek, weekend and bank holiday) are very good value and, with so much to do and good facilities, it is an excellent choice for a family break, especially with older children. Renvyle also makes an excellent conference venue.
*Renvyle House was selected for the one-off 'Spirit of Ireland Award' to celebrate the Guide's 10th anniversary in 2008, and was our Family Friendly Hotel of the Year in 2009.
Roisin Dubh Restaurant:
Whilst bar lunches and light meals in the conservatory are very enjoyable during the day (and this is a great place to plan a break when touring the area), dinner at Renyle is an occasion to be relished.
The large dining room - which is cannily organised with a window along one side where parents can see their children in the supervised playroom next door - is formally appointed and there is a pianist at Count John McCormack's concert Steinway every night, adding to the sense of occasion.
Restaurant Manager, Philip Counihan, is always on hand to chat with guests, and head chef Tim O'Sullivan looks after the inner man admirably.
An active member of Euro-Toques, Tim has promoted the food of the area for many years - and the excellent meals he produces are among the key attractions of the hotel. His menus feature local seafood and the best of Connemara's seasonal produce, including Renvyle rack of lamb, local lobster, game and vegetables in season - and not only is his cooking spot on, but he has written a cookery book, so you can try out his recipes at home.
Tim has also recently launched a range of food products, including the house salad dressing, three-fruit marmalade, the picnic chutney used for their fishing and walking packed lunches - and Oliver St John Gogarty's favourite condiment, apple & rosemary preserve, which is made with apples and rosemary from the garden and makes a great accompaniment to roasts and cold meats or terrines.
Roisin Dubh Restaurant was the winner of a Féile Bia Award in 2006.


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5 truths about the Brad Stevens hire
The Celtics hired former Butler coach Brad Stevens to be their head coach Wednesday, eschewing an experienced NBA hire for one without professional experience but with NCAA success and tremendous promise. The Stevens hire was shocking, the stealth of the move particularly surprising given the public nature of the Doc Rivers negotiations.
Celtics fans haven't had much time to dissect Stevens. Here are five things we know about his hiring:
-- He's a whiz kid
You'll see this number thrown around a lot in the coming days, so let's get it out of the way. In six seasons at Butler (located in Indianapolis), Stevens was 166-49, the most wins for any Division I coach in the first six years of his career. Stevens's teams never struggled when he was a head coach, which is why UCLA came calling this offseason.
During Stevens's tenure, Butler started in the Horizon League, moving to the Atlantic 10 in 2012-2013. That means many of those wins were against the likes of Cleveland State, Detroit, and Green Bay Phoenix. Butler made it to the final game of the NCAA tournament in 2010 and 2011 but did not win a national championship.
-- He's unproven
Despite his impressive college resume, Stevens could not be more unproven at the NBA level. He's never coached there. To put that into perspective, Stevens is the first Celtics coach hired from college with no NBA experience since Doggie Julian was hired from Holy Cross in 1948. Julian went 47-81. The Celtics are starting with a clean slate.
-- He's already popular
In an unscientific poll of Boston.com readers, more than 80 percent had voted in support of the Stevens hire late Wednesday night. The natural tendency for fans in general is to support the unknown. Think of Stevens as a Red Sox prospect. Fans are more likely to be excited about Jackie Bradley Jr., whom they've heard could turn into a stud, than Shane Victorino, who is a proven commodity with less upside. This Celtics writer gets more questions about Fab Melo than almost any other player, but Shavlik Randolph is the more effective NBA center now and is likely to be for the foreseeable future.
-- He's a numbers guy
Search "Brad Stevens metrics" and you'll turn up a slew of articles about the coach's use of advanced statistics. At Butler Stevens hired Drew Cannon, formerly of Basketball Prospectus, to help his team better utilize advanced stats. Lineup analysis is one of Cannon's strengths, according to a story by SI's Pete Thamel.
Another thing Stevens is very good at is in-game management. My friend Nicole Auerbach, who covers college basketball for USA Today, says Stevens is one of the best in the game at this. Watch the play-calling below as Butler upset Indiana this past season despite Butler's top players fouling out late in regulation. Rivers was known to draw up a few late-game plays himself, so this seems like a good fit.
-- He's not a band aid
The Herald's Steve Bulpett is reporting that Stevens's deal is for six years. That's one more year than Doc got, which may or may not be significant. What it does mean, is that Stevens is not a temporary patch. He didn't get a two-or-three-year deal to correspond roughly with the period the Celtics are expected to be in transition. The length of the contract makes sense, because there had to be an incentive for Stevens to leave Butler. It makes sense because Stevens may lack experience, but he's got more promise than just about any young coach out there. The Celtics may view Stevens as the choice for now, but they may also keep him around a few years down the road.
- Gary Washburn, NBA writer
- Baxter Holmes, Celtics beat writer
- Gary Dzen, Boston.com senior sports producer


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A Long Island family is reeling after discovering the wrong headstone on the grave of a 9-year-old girl.
The family of Amiyah Dunston found someone else's headstone when they visited her grave on Valentine's Day in Uniondale, according to Newsday.
Amiyah was mauled by a dog in November 2015. Her family had ordered a headstone, but that one hadn't arrived yet.
Amiyah's grandmother, Marlena West, says the child's mother relived the tragedy because of the error.
It's not clear whether the other family has been informed of the mix-up.
Greenfield Cemetery is owned by the Town of Hempstead. A sympathetic commissioner had the monument company remove the incorrect headstone.
Town spokesman Mike Deery extended "heartfelt apologies" on the monument company's behalf.


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chalcedony kălsĕd´ənē [key] [from Chalcedon], form of quartz the crystals of which are so minute that its crystalline structure cannot be seen except with the aid of a microscope. Chalcedony has a waxy luster and is translucent to transparent. The name chalcedony is applied more specifically to white, gray, blue, and brown varieties. Some varieties, differing in color because of the presence of impurities, are agate, bloodstone, carnelian, chrysoprase, jasper, onyx, sard, and sardonyx.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Mineralogy and Crystallography


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Meteorite thefts: 1 arrested, 1 wanted; meteorties recovered
Officials at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute said the irreplaceable meteorites that were stolen on Christmas Eve have been recovered.
David Clavier, vice president of administration at PARI, said the institute was burglarized in the early morning hours of Dec. 24 and 100 one-of-a-kind meteorites on display were stolen.
Clavier said the value of the meteorites is at least $80,000 and some of them weighed up to 80 pounds.
He said large-screen TV monitors, Blu-ray players, overhead projectors, microscopes and other scientific equipment were also taken.
Transylvania County deputies have arrested Brian Thomas Koontz, 29, of Balsam Grove, N.C. and deputies are still searching for Robin Morris Baldwin Jr. of Hendersonville, N.C.The suspects have been charged with felony breaking and entering, felony larceny, conspiring to commit larceny, misdemeanor injury to personal property.
Deputies also said that most of the stolen property, including the meteorites, have been recovered.
If you can help deputies find Baldwin, you are asked to call the Transylvania County Sheriff's Office.


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More Menlo Park memories get dusted off
Our post from Laura Pitchford who shared memories of downtown Menlo Park "back in the day" prompted a number of readers to email us. Here's a sampling:
From Tricia Young:
"The first Round Table Pizza opened right there on El Camino where it is today, and an Italian man with thinning white hair would throw the pizza dough high over his head in the large front window!
"A & W Root Beer was where Jason's is today on El Camino…Madam Marla Palm Reader next to the Red Carpet Car Wash (now Duckys)…Johnny's Smoke Shop next to Fosters Freeze…Rosanne's Dance Studio on El Camino.
"Alec's, the first discount store ever on the Peninsula, is where the old Safeway used to be ( now a variety of shops since they put the new Safeway in). After school I would work at Alec's in the wig department for a lady named Rena."
From Mary Kuechler:
"Remember Don's Hobby Shop and Ingersoll Photography? Building where Keplers/Cafe Borrone now stands. And of course, the old Keplers.
"How about the Menlo Cinema, which I think then became Su Hongs first location, now Left Bank?
"Nice that Ann's Coffee Shop is still there. Menlo Florist across from Preuss. Children's Bootery, later that became that Swiss Bakery, now LB Steakhouse.
"Ah, thanks for the mentions of Menlo Camera and Toy & Party and the Pink Pastry. Stevens the fabric store was pretty awesome, and your story starter, Prein's. Wow! Was Preins' also the electronics store that sold the RCA TVs?
"The Hippo became the Gap, now the mattress store.
"Oh, and there was a great sporting good store over near the post office, where we used to get our swim team suits each year (now that physical therapy place)
"Draegers and the Wells Fargo seem to still anchor it all. Oh, and when Applewood was Village Host Pizza. Mmmm.
"Thanks for the memories! What a GREAT little city."
From Carol Jorgenson Mince:
"My strongest [Menlo Park memory] on was when Joe Priens Record store tossed wooden nickels all over town. You found the right one and you got a free 45! Then there were the great listening booths with the holey acoustical board on the walls.
"[Still remember] the polka dot paper from all the presents wrapped at Toy and Party… Anderson's shoes, and of course Duca and Hanley groceries.. carnival in downtown Santa Cruz Ave. Don's Hobby shop near Menlo Station was where I bought my rubber spongy trees for my 'mission'."
Photos of downtown Menlo Park, Menlo Camera (top) and parade on Santa Cruz (middle), Santa Cruz Ave in the 1960s (bottom) courtesy of Menlo Park Historical Association


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WASHINGTON — The new head of the country's leading LGBT military organization is Allyson Robinson, a former commissioned officer in the Army who most recently worked at the Human Rights Campaign on workplace issues.
Robinson also is transgender — and her selection represents a huge breakthrough for a community that has received a level of respect in recent years but still faces overwhelming discrimination and high rates of violence, according to recent surveys by LGBT organizations. Following the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," however, she now faces the unusual challenge of persuading activist and donors that, in spite of that victory, the cause still needs their help.
"We disentangled America from this legalized discrimination against gay and lesbian servicemembers," Robinson said, acknowledging that the key aim of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network since its founding in 1993 was reached with the September 2011 repeal of the law.
The case she will make is the one that SLDN and OutServe, formed in 2010, have been making since the repeal: Troubling issues remain when it comes to LGBT military service. In addition to benefits issues for same-sex couples, open service for transgender people, whose own sense of their gender does not match the sex with which they were born, was not addressed in the repeal of the 1993 ban on open service and remains a reason to be discharged from the military today.
"We have not achieved full equality for LGBT servicemembers, and I think that's something that Americans care about. I think they care about the way that our troops and their families are treated," she said.
Robinson will take the helm of both SLDN and OutServe, as the groups complete their merger as OutServe-SLDN this weekend at the combined group's first board meeting in Florida.
A 1994 West Point graduate who was a commissioned Army officer and served overseas before resigning her commission to become a pastor-teacher to churches in the Portuguese Azores and central Texas, Robinson will be the first executive director of the combined organization. Robinson, who lives in Maryland with her wife and four children, most recently was the deputy director for employee programs with the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's Workplace Project, where she worked to establish the LGBT organization's corporate training curriculum to promote LGBT equality in the workplace.
Robinson also appears to be the first out transgender leader of a national organization representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Other prominent national organization leaders who are transgender, such as Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality and Masen Davis at the Transgender Law Center, work for organizations whose primary focus is transgender equality.
Transgender people have made significant advancements in recent years, most notably when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled six months ago that the Civil Rights Act's prohibition of sex discrimination in employment includes discrimination against transgender people. Nonetheless, transgender issues often get less attention in public LGBT discussions, which have focused on marriage for same-sex couples and, as Robinson mentioned, ending the ban on gay, lesbian and bisexual service known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
But, now, Robinson will be leading OutServe-SLDN as it works to advance several goals to benefit lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. SLDN's executive director since 2007, Aubrey Sarvis, announced in January his intention to step down.
"This fight is not over," Robinson told BuzzFeed in an extensive interview after 5 p.m. Oct. 22 at the offices of SLDN. Robinson and SLDN communications director Zeke Stokes talked with BuzzFeed for an hour, with Robinson already at ease discussing the groups' aims. "We're in the middle of a fight, just as certainly as we were before 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' was ever repealed. There have been some, many perhaps, who have been under this notion, 'What's left to do?' There is so much left to do."
The five priorities that Robinson discussed for the organization are: same-sex partner benefits for servicemembers and veterans, both those that could be offered by the Pentagon now and those that would first require the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act; out transgender service; inclusion of sexual orientation and, eventually, gender identity, in the military's nondiscrimination policy; veterans' equal treatment, including removing less-than-honorable discharge notations for those discharged under DADT; and growth of the organization as an association of LGBT servicemembers, which was OutServe's primary purpose before the groups merged.
Noting her father's service, her service academy days and her own service, Robinson added, "This is a fight that for me, is a very personal one. It's an opportunity for me to give back to a family that gave me so much."
Robinson's appointment won immediate praise from other advocates. Sue Fulton, another West Point graduate and a leader in both OutServe and Knights Out, a group of West Point graduates who fought DADT, called Robinson "the perfect choice" for the job.
"I've been fortunate to know and work with Allyson for the last several years, as a fellow West Point grad working for LGBT military rights, and she is one of my personal heroes," Fulton, who will serve on the board of OutServe-SLDN, told BuzzFeed. "She is an inspiring and compassionate leader with military experience, movement credibility, and political savvy."
She also cited Robinson's status as a transgender leader in the community.
"It's an important moment for the LGBT movement because it reinforces our value that qualifications and character are what matter: a core value we share with the United States Armed Forces."
Robinson, too, pressed that point when asked about her selection.
"I think it says a lot about these two organizations that are coming together now. I think it says that OutServe-SLDN is an organization that puts its money where its mouth is. That it believes in and that it practices full equality for the community," she said. "Honestly though, to me, I think it's more than even that. I think it's an acknowledgement that there's a fight that still needs to be fought, and that what I bring to this organization, as a veteran and as a veteran of this movement, is something that the organization needs to help lead it forward."
Just how hard to press transgender equality has divided the LGBT community in the past. Just five years ago, the community faced one of its most difficult internal struggles when congressional leaders, with the eventual support of the Human Rights Campaign, allowed a vote on a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the bill to ban private employers from discriminating, that only included sexual orientation — leaving out transgender protections based on gender identity. Although those who pushed the vote gave reasons, including that the vote was really a head-counting measure because then-President George W. Bush would have vetoed either version of the bill, the fallout from the vote created significant soul-searching within the leadership of the LGBT community on its approach to such issues moving forward.
Now, HRC's new president, Chad Griffin, praised the selection of his former employee for the to job at OutServe-SLDN, telling BuzzFeed, "The LGBT rights movement is made stronger by the inspired appointment of Allyson Robinson as head of a critically important organization."
Robinson acknowledged the changed landscape.
"I think that what has changed is awareness and understanding. Awareness gives transgender people a seat at the table; understanding gives us a voice in the conversation. We need a whole lot more of both, but this movement is very different today from what it was five years ago. I'm proud of that," she said.
Of her selection, she said, "I'm proud of what that says about OutServe-SLDN, I'm proud of what it says about us as a movement. I'm grateful for the accomplishments, not just of trans people and allies of the past five years who have helped get us here, but for people for the 35 or 40 years before that who got us just to that point."
She added, "It's amazing to be a part of a movement that is growing to embody its most deeply held values."
One of the first movement issues in which Robinson will now play a key role is the way the military handles benefits for same-sex couples in the military. Although the Defense of Marriage Act bans some benefits, SLDN has been pushing since before DADT repeal to get the Pentagon to extend those benefits now that could be extended to same-sex couples and their families without violating DOMA.
"DOD has been sitting on [those issues] for some time," Robinson said. "We will continue — this organization has pressed hard for these changes and we will continue to do so. The great thing about our merger is I think it amplifies our voice. It allows me, as a leader, to walk into those meetings and say, 'I'm speaking here today on behalf of 6,000 gay and lesbian servicemembers and their families, and they need these benefits. They need them now.'"
SLDN also has a pending lawsuit challenging DOMA's application to same-sex couples' military benefits, as well as two laws limiting veterans' benefits on a similar basis.
Robinson declined to detail her new organization's strategy for winning out trans service, but suggested that the visibility of active duty trans servicemembers and former servicemembers like her would be a part of that push, just as the public faces of gay and lesbian veterans and war heroes and those still serving played a key role in winning public support for the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
"I think a crucial part of that strategy is ensuring that the stories of transgender servicemembers and veterans are being told," Robinson said. "Trans people have served from our nation's founding, just as LGB people have. Because of the state of medical and readiness regulations, they continue to be forced into silence. Having an organization like ours, that can help to elevate those stories and make them a part of the conversation, is very, very important. The more we tell those stories, the closer we are to winning that fight."
As Air Force First Lt. Josh Seefried, a co-founder of OutServe and board member of the combined OutServe-SLDN, told BuzzFeed, "Allyson gets what this next phase of the LGBT military movement. The military is the United States' largest employer. That means we can't just focus on what's going on in Washington, D.C. — we have to focus what's happening across our military bases worldwide, including on the battlefield. She understands this and will connect with our actively serving members like no one else could."
Talking about how her selection itself is a marker in the rapidly moving story of the fight for LGBT equality, Robinson, well aware of the difficulties inherent in leading an LGBT organization, acknowledged that marker but was — days before starting the job — already focused on the task ahead.
"I've learned not to think too much about that," she said. "I've got a lot of other things to think about right now. I have a lot of people, a lot of very specific concerns to think about, and they're people who mean a lot to me. I've used this word before: They're my family. That's really where my thoughts are and where my heart is right now. And I know that if I can keep the focus there, then a lot of the rest of the stuff takes care of itself."


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MILLERSBURG, Ohio – An Ohio boy admitted he fatally shot his mother in the head with a rifle when he was 10 after what a relative described as an argument over chores.
The boy, now 13, entered the equivalent of a guilty plea Monday in juvenile court.
In January 2011, the boy went to a neighbor's house, called 911 and told the dispatcher he had shot his mother at their home in rural Holmes County, about 70 miles northeast of Columbus. "I shot my mom. I shot her with a gun," he said.
At the time, his uncle said the boy and his mother had argued over carrying firewood.
Defense attorney Andy Hyde said the boy lived in an emotionally abusive environment, was provoked by his mother's screaming and "just snapped."
The boy "is one of those that I just feel sorry for," Hyde said. "He had a lot dumped on him at a young age and responded inappropriately, but the spur-of-the-moment decision now will affect the rest of his life."
The boy will be sentenced later and could be held in a youth facility until he's 21. Hyde said Wednesday that the judge can consider a range of placement options, and he'll ask that the boy go to a residential treatment facility with access to counseling.
County Prosecutor Steve Knowling told The Repository in Canton the plea deal avoids a trial that benefits no one.
"It's obviously a very difficult situation because of his age, but it's still a murder case," Knowing told the newspaper. He didn't immediately respond to a message seeking further comment Wednesday.
The boy said he understood his plea agreement during the Monday hearing attended by his father and other relatives, The Repository reported.
The issue of a trial had been on hold because the boy initially was found not competent for that. The court then found him competent earlier this year.
The boy has received counseling for anxiety and depression and can't bring himself to talk about the shooting, Hyde said.


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By Mario Crucini and Mototsugu Shintani
We propose a simple saving-based measure of the cyclical component in GDP. The measure is motivated by the prediction that the representative consumer changes savings in response to temporary deviations of income from its stochastic trend, while satisfying a present-value budget constraint. To evaluate our procedure, we employ the bivariate error correction model of Cochrane (1994) to the member countries of the G-7 and Australia. Our estimates reveal, that to a close approximation, the stochastic trend component of GDP is consumption and the transitory component is the error correction term, which justifies the use of our saving-based measure.
The HP-filter is a largely atheoretic way to measure cyclical components in the data. The choice of the penalty parameter is somewhat arbitrary, which makes that the cyclical component may include fluctuations that households consider to be permanent or miss fluctuations that are cyclical. Using realized consumption as a yardstick for what the households consider to be permanent fluctuations, this paper may give us a better measure of cyclical components, based on some minimal theory.


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The surest sign that propaganda is working is when people start repeating it verbatim as though it were an established fact. "Fair and balanced" is exactly that kind of propaganda – short and sweet, and tuned to the ear of the loyalist. And all of this would still be true if Fox never told a single lie, never once blurred the lines between news and opinion. Even if they were completely straight as a truth-telling news organization, the slogan constitutes a corruption of the relationship between the press and the public. We've all been told the phrase at one time or another, "nobody ever said life was fair." And real journalists understand that and go after it, because injustice is the red meat of the news business. But Fox pretends life can be fair, butonly on Fox. So while they sell a fantasy of fairness in their slogan, they simultaneously dismiss its existence everywhere else. And while this is a common marketing technique in advertising circles, it's always based on hyperbole and rarely taken seriously by consumers. Everyone knows that the contents inside the box never look half as good as the picture on the front.
Update, 6/09/13: The following is an example of Westlake's claim from Neil Cavuto who is supposed to be one of the straight news hosts on Fox:
Corruption is… Part I: "We Report, You Decide"
Corruption is...Part III: Beck and Murdoch – the Terrible Two
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Daily DC Item: Burritos & Books
I am always a fan when California Tortilla puts on a great promo, and it looks like they have another great one going on today.
For today only, Wednesday July 22nd, if you stop by any one of their many locations you and buy a burrito- you get a free burrito coupon that you can use on the spot or later (you never know when the craving will return!)
All you have to do is hand the cashier a piece of paper with the password: "Crock Pot."
The BOGO free deal is in recognition of California Tortilla earning top ranks in Washingtonian Magazine. To me a free Burrito with purchase beats a free pastry with coffee any day!
Also tomorrow next Thursday trendy fashion boutique Ginger is holding a "Books, Jewels, & Cocktails" event at their Bethesda location from 6 -8. You can preview their latest collection and check out Cathy Alter and her new book, "Up For Renewal" which launches in paperback.


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The Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption is costing the state of New York $300,000 in legal fees, according to The Wall Street Journal. This includes $550 per hour for the lead attorney who is representing the anticorruption commission during the investigation by federal prosecutors.
The firm involved is Hinckley, Allen & Snyder LLP. It has represented the commission in meetings with federal prosecutors "and any other law enforcement or regulatory body, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation," according to the contract.
The commission was created by Governor Andrew Cuomo last summer to find wrongdoing in Albany. The commission stopped operating in March following the passage of ethics reforms by lawmakers. The case files of the commission were taken over by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and he has been pursuing the cases and investigating issues surrounding the disbanding of the commission.
The state Attorney General's office approved the contract on July 30 and is was approved by the state Comptroller's Office afterwards. It is backdated to May 16, 2014 and it expires on December 31, 2014.
Criminal defense attorney Michael Koenig was the lawyer hired to represent the Moreland Commission. He will bill $550 per hour, per the contract, while other members of the law firm will bill anywhere from $125 per hour to $425 per hour. According to the contract, the firm "has agreed to discount its normal and customary fees for attorneys and paralegals."
The contract also states that New York will pay no more than $300,000 for the legal services of the firm, "unless otherwise amended in writing by all parties" and is approved by the attorney general and the office of the comptroller.
Cuomo defended the practice of the state paying the lawyer fees for the commission, saying the following:
"The commission is disbanded, but it still has work to do," he said. "It's in the process of referring cases to other offices and following up on those referrals—so that's an important part of the job, is closing down in the right way. So I think it's fine."


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In Scala, as in Java, C and many other languages, identifiers may contain a mix of lower and upper case characters. These identifiers are treated in a case sensitive manner. For example "index", "Index" and "INDEX" would be treated as three separate identifiers. You can define all three in the same scope. That goes for Scala, Java, and most if not all descendants of the C language. In most of these languages, although case is significant in distinguishing identifiers, and although various capitalization schemes are used by convention, case does not alter functionality. Whether you name a variable "index", "Index" or "INDEX", as long as you don't hide an identifier from an enclosing scope, the code will function in exactly the same way.
Scala, though, diverges slightly from this tradition. Here's an example. Say we have a Pair of two Ints. Say we also have two plain Int values and we want to know whether those two Ints are equal to the values inside the Pair. In the case that they do match, we also want to know in which order they appear in the Pair.
Operations on tuples (such as a Pair) can often be implemented neatly by pattern matching. Here's one solution to this problem:
def matchPair(x: (Int,Int), A: Int, b: Int): String = x match { case (A, b) => "Matches (A, b)" case (b, A) => "Matches (b, A)" case _ => "Matches neither" }
This is completely unsurprising code except for one little detail. One of the function parameters is upper case while the other two are lower case. Other than that, there's nothing unusual so far. So let's try out this code in the Scala interpreter.
scala> def matchPair(x: (Int,Int), A: Int, b: Int): String = | x match { | case (A, b) => "Matches (A, b)" | case (b, A) => "Matches (b, A)" | case _ => "Matches neither" | } matchPair: ((Int, Int),Int,Int)String scala> val pair = (5, 10) pair: (Int, Int) = (5,10) scala> matchPair( pair, 5, 10 ) res1: String = Matches (A, b) scala> matchPair( pair, 10, 5 ) res2: String = Matches (b, A) scala> matchPair( pair, 99, 99 ) res3: String = Matches neither
So far so good! It returns the expected value when the values match in order, in reverse order, and when both values don't match. Is this sufficient unit testing? What other tests would you run?
As you may well guess, no, this isn't sufficient unit testing. Let's try the case where one Int matches but not the other:
scala> matchPair( pair, 5, 99 ) res4: String = Matches (A, b) scala> matchPair( pair, 99, 10 ) res5: String = Matches (b, A)
That didn't work right. Is the matchPair function telling us that 'pair' (which is (5, 10) ) matches (5, 99) or (99 10)? That's what it look like, but no. Scala does something a little bit surprising here. Do you know why?
As I said before, you can have variable and constants in Scala with upper or lower case names. Both are legal, just as they are in Java. But Scala makes some distinctions that Java doesn't. Within a pattern (the part between 'case' and '=>') Scala treats simple lower case identifiers differently. It uses them as new variables into which matched data is stored, but this is not the case for identifiers that begin with an upper case letter!
If you want to capture results of a pattern match in Scala you must use a lower case identifier and that identifier will hide any identifiers with the same name from an enclosing scope. So in our example function, "case (A, b)" matches a Pair. The first element of the pair is "A" which start with an upper case letter, so pattern matching results can't be stored in it. It is used the way we intended, i.e. the pattern is matched if x._1 equals A.
The "b" in "case (A, b)", though, begins with a lower case letter so it is assigned the value of x._2 (assuming x._1 equals A). It is as if you had typed "val b = x._2" in the function body. Within the case line, the "b" from the pattern hides the parameter named "b".
So how can we make this function work the way we want? Here's one way:
def matchPair(x: (Int,Int), A: Int, B: Int): String = x match { case (A, B) => "Matches (A, B)" case (B, A) => "Matches (B, A)" case _ => "Matches neither" }
Now both the the Int parameters start with an upper case letter and are therefore tested against x._1 and x._2. This code passes our tests. Note that the code behaves differently simply based on the parameter names we choose. There's another way to prevent Scala from using the identifiers for storing pattern results.
def matchPair(x: (Int,Int), a: Int, b: Int): String = x match { case (`a`, `b`) => "Matches (a, b)" case (`b`, `a`) => "Matches (b, a)" case _ => "Matches neither" }
You can use the more traditional lower case parameter names if you quote them using the backquote character. That's the key to the left of the "1" on my keyboard. This matchPair is equivalent to the one that used capital "A" and "B".
Another quick example:
scala> val pair = (5, 10) pair: (Int, Int) = (5,10) scala> val (a,b) = pair a: Int = 10 b: Int = 5 scala> val (X,Y) = pair :5: error: not found: value X val (X,Y) = pair ^ :5: error: not found: value Y val (X,Y) = pair ^
You know that you can use the construct from line 4 above to declare and initialize multiple vals or vars using a tuple, right? And you know how that magic is done? Patterns, so the same principle applies here. The capitalized identifiers "X" and "Y" are taken to refer to existing identifiers because they can't be used to store pattern match results. Since no such identifiers had been defined, you get an error.
If we define these values beforehand then Scala tries to match their values:
scala> val pair = (5,10) pair: (Int, Int) = (5,10) scala> val I = 5 I: Int = 5 scala> val J = 10 J: Int = 10 scala> val (I,q) = pair q: Int = 10 scala> val (J,r) = pair scala.MatchError: (5,10) at .<init>(<console>:6) at .<clinit>(<console>) at RequestResult$.<init>(<console>:3) at RequestResult$.<clinit>(<console>) at RequestResult$result(<console>) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(... scala> val (I,J) = pair
In line 10, the value I has been declared and initialized to 5 so it matches the first part of the Pair. The identifier q becomes a new val initialized to the value in the second part of the Pair.
In line 13, we do the same thing but we try to match J to the first part of the Pair. This won't work since pair._1 is 5 and J is 10. A MatchError is thrown.
In line 24, we use both of the capitalized identifiers. They match, but there are no lower case identifiers to make new values out of, so the line does nothing except to confirm (by not throwing an Error) that I equals pair._1 and J equals pair._2.
Now you know how to match when you want to match and assign results when you want to assign results. I hope that being able to match against already-defined identifiers will make your matching code more powerful.


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Nokia Lumia 920 to have 8MP PureView camera and wireless charging
Wireless charging? Check. 32GB of storage? Check. PureView camera? Check.
Ahead of Nokia's big reveal on Wednesday, a few surprises have been unearthed about the hotly anticipated Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 920.
As Nokia's next flagship smartphone, set to be unveiled alongside the Lumia 820, we knew that the Lumia 920 was going to be a bit special – and The Verge has confirmed our suspicions ahead of the probably swanky New York launch event.
You'll reportedly be able to charge it wirelessly, saving you from digging out that elusive USB cable, and it's going to have a 32GB of storage, so you can download content until it's coming out of your ears.
But the cream of the crop is further confirmation that the Lumia 920 will feature a slice of that PureView camera cake revealed at Mobile World Congress. Granted, the Lumia 920's 8MP snapper isn't on par with the 41MP monster seen in Nokia's 808 PureView Symbian phone, but image stabilisation and some a dollop of oversampling should ensure photos look spiffing. Just how spiffing is the question we'll be answering when we get our hands on it – stay tuned.
[via The Verge]
Next Motorola smartphone could have an edge-to-edge display
Will we be saying goodbye to rubbish earphones with the iPhone 5?
Nokia to release Lumia Glory as successor to 610