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By Sam Hananel
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court appeared likely last week to block a group of protesters from bringing free-speech claims against two Secret Service agents who were guarding President George W. Bush during a 2004 visit to Oregon.
The court's liberal justices seemed just as reluctant as the conservatives to find that the agents violated the protesters' First Amendment rights by moving them farther away from the president while allowing a separate group of pro-Bush demonstrators to stay a bit closer.
The protesters claim they were moved for loudly expressing their opinions while Bush was having dinner at an outdoor patio and not for any genuine security reasons.
Deputy Solicitor General Ian Gershengorn argued that agents who make on-the-spot judgments about the president's security should be shielded from liability.
"There are times when we don't want a reasonable official to hesitate before he acts and nowhere is that more important than when the specter of presidential assassination is in order," Gershengorn told the justices.
Justice Antonin Scalia said if there was any objective reason at all for the agents to move protesters to improve security, then "it doesn't matter whether there was any intent to suppress anti-Bush demonstrators."
But Steven Wilker, attorney for the protesters, said his clients were moved solely for expressing their opinions and not for valid security reasons. He said the protesters should be allowed to move ahead with their lawsuit because they presented a valid claim of "viewpoint discrimination" under the First Amendment.
At issue is whether the Secret Service agents should be granted qualified immunity from the lawsuit. Law enforcement agents are typically shielded from liability while performing their official duties. But lawsuits are allowed if the officials' conduct violates clearly established constitutional law.
The dispute began shortly after Bush made a campaign stop in Oregon in the final weeks of his 2004 re-election campaign. At the last minute, the president decided to have dinner in Jacksonville, Ore., at an outdoor patio at the Jacksonville Inn. Secret Service agents cleared the area immediately around the inn, but initially left the protesters in place.
Fifteen minutes after Bush's dinner began, however, the agents ordered police to move the anti-Bush protesters two blocks further away from the inn, placing them at a greater distance from the president than the pro-Bush demonstrators. The agents told police they did not want anyone "within handgun or explosive range of the President."
The protesters claim the difference in where the two groups were allowed to stand shows that they were moved for expressing their opinions in clear violation of their constitutional rights. They say the agents' explanation doesn't ring true because the pro-Bush demonstrators were not moved and other guests of the inn were not screened or removed for weapons.
A federal district court found enough evidence for the case to proceed and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, though eight judges on the appeals court issued a strong dissent.
Justice Elena Kagan asked Wilker if he would concede that a reasonable officer could look at a map of where the protesters were moved and say that it appeared to be a reasonable security measure. Wilker agreed that was "a possible conclusion."
"It seems to me there either is or isn't a valid security interest," Kagan said.
Chief Justice John Roberts suggested viewpoint discrimination could itself be a valid reason for taking security precautions. What if there were an emergency, Roberts asked, and agents had to rush the president out through the anti-Bush crowd or the pro-Bush crowd?
"You have to make a split-second decision," Roberts said. "Which way do you go?"
But other justices didn't seem willing to go that far.
Justice Stephen Breyer said the court wants to draw a line that defers to the need to protect the president, yet avoid giving law enforcement a blank check to run over constitutional rights.
"Everyone understands the danger. You can't run a risk. At the same time, no one wants a Praetorian Guard that is above the law," Breyer said, referring to bodyguards used by Roman emperors.
A decision in the case is expected by June.
The case is Wood v. Moss, 13-115.
Published: Mon, Mar 31, 2014


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I thought long and hard about which topic to tackle with this, my first blog. It's not so much an issue of first impressions and wanting to make this one count, as I think it's a safe bet that this first blog will find its readership only among those who have known me long and well. But this first blog is setting me on a path, and I want to make it a path worth my following.
So what is so important about the FamilySearch website's Family Tree that out of all the topics I could choose, this one so quickly floated to the top and stayed there? It has to do with why family history (and I prefer that term to genealogy) is so near and dear to my heart.
Family history—the history of family. By extension, the history of community. Ultimately, the history of society and civilization. The history of human interaction, of distribution of opportunity, of collaboration and conflict. Until very, very recently, historians restricted themselves to the study of famous men and outstanding acts of vice or valor or creativity. Why? Well, the data management was just a lot easier. Think about it—how much data must one collect to understand the life of one man? Multiply that by a thousand, ten-thousand, a million…. Family history has simply been beyond the practical capabilities of historians. How can you amass, assemble, and analyze the quantity of data necessary to lay clear the patterns of interaction that shaped an entire community of individuals? Where do you store all that information while you're collecting it? How do you make it available to the number of research historians necessary to tackle a project like understanding family history at a global scale?
This project will need some organization really big, simply to have the space to store a vast amount of detailed information, about every individual that ever left his or her name in a record, manuscript, or oral history.
Collecting and organizing this database is going to take a long, long time. We need an organization that we can count on lasting not five or ten or fifty years, but centuries.
It needs to be an open database that allows an unlimited number of researchers to contribute data and to access that data for analysis. Given the scope of this project, the number of researchers involved will need to number in the thousands. Remember, we're not just talking about collecting vital statistics, but the raw details of everyday life that historians will need in order to understand every facet of a community's life. Think of all those manuscript collections that languish yet unindexed and undigitized: letters, journals, newspapers, business ledgers, agency reports…
Let's not talk about cost—but I'll simply say that I am grateful that someone has undertaken this venture without asking me to pay for it. (OK, indexing aside.)
Yes, I'm talking about the FamilySearch.org website's Family Tree.
I know, I know! I do know it's full of garbage. It is the New Jersey landfill of databases. You can't go three generations in any direction without finding enough nonsense to fill a volume of Lewis Carroll poetry.
But hold on a moment. You're all family historians, so let me take you back to a scene from our nation's early history:
William and Sarah Pilgrim have just topped the crest of the last hill. At the ridge line, William spreads his arms wide. "Sarah, dear, this is where we'll make our home."
Where would we be now if Sarah had taken one look and answered "For heaven's sake, Bill! You'll never get a crop on this—it's all trees!"

subset: commoncrawl


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Sophomore Seamus Power (Waterford, Ireland) fired a final round 4-under-par 67 during third round play Tuesday in the Jerry Pate National Intercollegiate at the Old Overton Club, finishing tied for the individual championship with host Alabama's Mark Harrell, as the two ended their day at 15-under 198 for the tournament. Power's efforts - which included rounds of 65-66-67 - bested the previous three-round record of 14-under 199 held by Davies, who enjoyed those three outstanding days in the 2004-05 NCAA East Regional.
"Coach reminded me of Rhys' record yesterday, and told me it was out there so I was glad to make some putts and get it," said Power, who now has two individual championships in his time at ETSU, including the 2007 Atlantic Sun Conference championship. "The conference tournament is not as strong a field, so it's good to do this against some strong teams. I was only 1-under with five to play but was able to birdie 14, 15 and 16 to get to 15-under."
ETSU head coach Fred Warren said the key to Power's efforts were his consistency throughout the tournament.
"Today, he played a really solid round and it was a very fine performance from start to finish in the tournament,"
In the team competition, the Bucs finished 10th at 2-under, while host
Along with Power's championship effort, the only other ETSU results of note included a tie for 40th by freshman Rhys Enoch (
First round play in the Bank of Tennessee Intercollegiate at The Ridges will begin Friday morning and continue throughout the weekend. Admission is free, and fans unable to attend the event can watch live scoring provided at Golfstat.com.


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Parlez-vous geek? Avez-vous nerd? Es-tu un dork?
Last year, GeekDad editor Ken Denmead and GeekDad contributor Ethan Gilsdorf were approached by French filmmakers to be interviewed for a comprehensive documentary about the history of geek culture, La revanche des Geeks. Translated: The Revenge of the Geeks.
Ken was interviewed as he drove around the Bay Area in his car, reminiscing about his geeky past. Ethan was filmed in a Parisian game shop nattering on about playing Dungeons & Dragons and obsessing about Tolkien. Other American geek experts appeared on camera, including writer, designer, and researcher Jason Tocci and American Nerd author Ben Nugent, as well as French commentators.
Written a directed by French filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Péretié, the show finally aired last fall on the French TV network Arte. The French/German co-production also aired on German TV. In a weird distribution deal, the film also appeared on some U.S. flights as inflight entertainment for a few weeks.
Alas, the movie never aired in U.S. Until now. Sort of.
Now the movie, which covers the history of geek culture from pocket protector-wearing engineering nerds of the 1960s through D&D, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings fandom, can be viewed on Vimeo for free. The only bummer: It's only in French, and the English-speakers are dubbed in French. But if you listen closely, you can hear what Ken and Ethan have to say, as well as the other américains, behind all that French blah-de-blah.
Still, you can get the gist, in and around the clips of holy relics from the history of our peoples, including Freaks and Geeks, Tron, Revenge of the Nerds, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and Weird Al's song White & Nerdy.
Bonus nerd content: the filmmakers were able to get as the narrator of La revanche des Geeks one Pierre Hatet, the French voice of Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future.
Très cool, non? Again, here's the link on Vimeo.


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Eugene Robinson: Ranting Republicans
Apparently there's a contest among Republicans to see who can be more shameless and irresponsible in criticizing President Obama's foreign policy. So far, Chris Christie is winning.
The New Jersey governor alleged Saturday that "the unrest you see in the Middle East is caused in some measure — not completely, but in some measure — by the fact that this president has not acted in a decisive, consistent way."
If you disregard the rantings of unserious provocateurs such as Sarah Palin, Christie's attack represents a new low. He accuses the president of the United States of actually being responsible "in some measure" for violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Sunnis and Shiites, dictators and rebels — conflicts and antagonisms that began well before Obama took office in January 2009.
One might assume that Christie offered specific ideas about what Obama should be doing differently. Nope.
The president should be "trying to bring stability to that region by having America be a forceful voice in favor of a democracy like Israel and be condemning, in the strongest terms and in actions, the things that are being done by Hamas against Israel." All of which Obama has already done.
Asked whether Obama should take some kind of military action in the region, Christie answered, "I'm not going to give opinions on that. I'm not the president."
Very helpful, Governor.
Other Republicans who, like Christie, are running for president offer equally vague and useless criticisms of Obama's policies in the Middle East and around the world. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who's going for the bookish intellectual look these days — he has started wearing glasses — wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post accusing Obama of "confused leadership and passivity" that "enabled groups such as the Islamic State to grow."
What exactly, in Perry's view, did Obama do wrong? We'll never know, I guess, because "the window to shape events for the better passed years ago." It would have been helpful had Perry let us know at the time he saw that window passing, or perhaps closing, or something.
Perry does suggest there is still time for the United States to provide "meaningful assistance" in Iraq and Syria, including "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sharing and airstrikes." But he neglects to specify whom we should meaningfully assist.
In fairness, Perry's prime target wasn't Obama. He was aiming at Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose "isolationist" policies Perry sees as a potentially grave threat to our national security. The fact that Paul also poses a potentially grave threat to Perry's presidential ambitions — he leads most polls for the GOP nomination — is pure coincidence, I'm sure.
Paul responded with an op-ed in Politico, saying of Perry that "apparently his new glasses haven't altered his perception of the world, or allowed him to see it any more clearly." He notes that during the 2012 campaign, Perry advocated sending troops "back into Iraq" to counter the growing influence of Iran, but now seems to advocate helping Iran against the Islamic State extremists.
In the Politico piece, Paul refrains from gratuitous criticism of Obama. But in a National Review essay earlier this month, Paul blasted the White House for urging Israel to show "restraint" in responding to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers.
Paul called for a cutoff of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority. He should be smart enough to understand that this would only strengthen the position of Hamas. But perhaps his real aim is to dispel the notion that he is insufficiently pro-Israel.
The Republican critique of Obama's foreign policy that has achieved the most traction — undeservedly so, in my view — comes from a non-candidate: Mitt Romney. The basic thrust: "I told you so."
But what was Romney so right about, except the blindingly obvious? That a large, permanent U.S. residual force in Iraq could have prevented the gains by the Islamic State? Of course, but the American public didn't support keeping troops there and the Iraqi government said no. That it would be better if the "moderate" rebels were winning in Syria? Certainly, but shaping the outcome of that multi-sided civil war would require a robust intervention.
People who see easy options really should have their eyes checked.
Email Robinson at email@example.com.


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Distracted Driving Charge Paralegal Serving Richmond Hill, Durham Region, Pickering, Markham, and morePage last modified: January 08 2022
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What Is Distracted Driving?
Distracted Driving Is a Commonly Misunderstood Phrase That Is Actually Not Found Within the Highway Traffic Act and Refers to Improper Handling of Electronics While Driving.
Understanding What Distracted Driving Actually Means Per the Highway Traffic Act
The phrase "distracted driving" when referring to a traffic ticket is technically improper as the term fails to exist in law and is completely absent from the Highway Traffic Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8. Also, contrary to urban myths, what is meant by "distracted driving" is the use of a hand held communication device rather than common conduct such as eating, drinking, changing the radio station, lighting a cigarette, or other behaviours that may be perceived as a temporary distraction. Of course, these temporary distracting behaviours may involve a moment of inattention; however, in law, such a moment of inattention is defined without use of the word "distraction".
The Law
The confusion appears to arise from the common use of the term distracted driving in the context of summarizing various concerns that are actually specified and defined within the Highway Traffic Act; however, many people subsequently perceive that any distraction therefore qualifies within the non-existent law of "distracted driving". Here is what the law actually says:
Hand-Held Devices Prohibited
Wireless Communication Devices
78.1 (1) No person shall drive a motor vehicle on a highway while holding or using a hand-held wireless communication device or other prescribed device that is capable of receiving or transmitting telephone communications, electronic data, mail or text messages.
Entertainment Devices
(2) No person shall drive a motor vehicle on a highway while holding or using a hand-held electronic entertainment device or other prescribed device the primary use of which is unrelated to the safe operation of the motor vehicle.
Hands-Free Mode Allowed
(3) Despite subsections (1) and (2), a person may drive a motor vehicle on a highway while using a device described in those subsections in hands-free mode.
(a) the driver of an ambulance, fire department vehicle or police department vehicle;
(b) any other prescribed person or class of persons;
(c) a person holding or using a device prescribed for the purpose of this subsection; or
(d) a person engaged in a prescribed activity or in prescribed conditions or circumstances.
(5) Subsection (1) does not apply in respect of the use of a device to contact ambulance, police or fire department emergency services.
(6) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply if all of the following conditions are met:
1. The motor vehicle is off the roadway or is lawfully parked on the roadway.
2. The motor vehicle is not in motion.
3. The motor vehicle is not impeding traffic.
(6.1) Every person who contravenes this section is guilty of an offence and on conviction is liable,
(a) for a first offence, to a fine of not less than $500 and not more than $1,000;
(b) for a first subsequent offence, to a fine of not less than $500 and not more than $2,000; and
(c) for a second subsequent or an additional subsequent offence, to a fine of not less than $500 and not more than $3,000.
(6.2) If a person is convicted of an offence under this section, the Registrar shall suspend his or her driver's licence,
(a) for a first offence, for three days;
(b) for a first subsequent offence, for seven days; and
(c) for a second subsequent or an additional subsequent offence, for 30 days.
(6.3) An offence under this section committed more than five years after a previous conviction for an offence under this section is not a subsequent offence for the purposes of subsection (6.1) or (6.2).
(7) The Minister may make regulations,
(a) prescribing devices for the purpose of subsections (1) and (2);
(b) prescribing persons, classes of persons, devices, activities, conditions and circumstances for the purpose of subsection (4).
(8) In this section,
"motor vehicle" includes a street car, motorized snow vehicle, farm tractor, self-propelled implement of husbandry and road-building machine.
Summary Comment
From a legally technical viewpoint, the term "distracted driving" fails to exist and is unmentioned within the Highway Traffic Act; however, what is generally meant by "distracted driving" is the use of communication devices or other electronic devices specified within the Highway Traffic Act. Conduct such as reading a book, eating a cheeseburger, changing the radio station (built-in radio), among many other things, fail to constitute as "distracted driving"; however, such activities may constitute as "careless driving". For more information, click here for what the Ontario government similarly says.


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text:
West Chester University (610-436-3500, wcupa.edu/cvpa): Emily Bullock, voice (Jan. 28), Kimberly Reighley, flute (Feb. 4), New Music Concert (Feb. 7), Randall Scariata, voice (Feb. 11), Chamber Winds & Concert Band (Feb. 14)
The Note, 142 E. Market St., West Chester (www.thenotewc.com): Shovelhook with Honor, Evolv and Soraia (Jan. 26), Dada 20th Anniversary Tour (Feb. 15), Bad Rabbits (Feb. 23), Aaron Carter (March 8)
Colonial Theatre, 227 Bridge St., Phoenixville (www.colonialtheatre.com): Live at the Fillmore: Countdown to Ecstasy Allman Brothers Tribute (Jan. 25), Johnny Winter and Magic Slim & the Teardrops (Jan. 26), John Mayall (Feb. 8), Tom Papa (Feb. 9), Two Funny Philly Guys (March 9), Steve Forbert / Paul Thorn (March 22), David Bromberg Quintet & Tom Rush (March 24)
American Music Theatre, 2425 Lincoln Highway East, Lancaster (717-397-7700, www.amtshows.com): Olivia Newton John (Feb. 22), Irish Tenors (March 10), Don Williams (May 19)
Arden Gild Hall, 2126 The Highway, Arden, Del. (www.ardenclub.org/concerts.htm): School of Seven Bells (Feb. 2), Brown Bird (Feb. 9), Ballake Sissoke & Vincent Segal (March 2)
Blockley, 3801 Chestnut St., Philadelphia (www.theblockley.com, 215-222-1234): Tommy Conwell (Jan. 25), Double D & Friends (Jan. 29), Musiq Soulchild (Jan. 30), Nolafunk Mardi Gras Ball Tour with Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers (Feb. 6)
DuPont Theatre, 1007 N. Market St., Wilmington (302-656-4401,www.duponttheatre.com): Ralphie May (April 19)
Electric Factory, 421 N. 7th Street, Philadelphia: Hot Water Music (Jan 26), Imagine Dragons with Atlas Genius and Royal Concept (Feb. 18), Dropkick Murphys (March 8,9), Black Crowes (April 12)
The Grand, 818 N. Market St., Wilmington, Del. (302-652-5577, 800-37-GRAND, thegrandwilmington.org): Delaware Symphony Orchestra Humperdinck, Prelude to Hansel and Gretel, Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-Sharp Minor, Dvorak, Symphony No. 9, Op. 95, E Minor, 'From the New World', (Jan. 25&27), Seldom Scene (Feb. 1), Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. (Feb. 8), John Waters: This Filthy World (Feb. 9), Carolina Chocolate Drops (April 5), Diana Krall (April 16)
Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Ave. (610-896-1011 or www.haverford.edu/music/events): all-male a cappella group CANTUS! 'On the Shoulders of Giants' (Feb. 3)
Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave, Philadelphia: Spinto Band (Feb. 16), Jim James (Feb. 18), Kate Nash (March 24)
Keswick Theatre, Easton Road and Keswick Avenue, Glenside (215-572-7650 or www.keswicktheatre.com): Alfie Bow (Feb. 1), Elvis Birthday Bash (Feb. 2), John Denver: A Rocky Mountain High concert (Feb. 8), Popovich Comedy Pet Theater (Feb. 17), Living Colour (April 4), Bill Cosby (April 7), Ron White (April 13)
Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia (215-893-1999 or kimmelcenter.org):Bryan Adams (Merriam Theater) (Jan. 25), Jerry Blavat with the Divas of All Time (Verizon Hall) (Jan. 26), Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphi (Perelman Theaer) (Jan. 27&28), Peter Nero and the Philly Pops (Verizon Hall) (Feb. 9&10), Lewis Black Running on Empty (Academy of Music) (Feb. 22),
Kung Fu Necktie, 1248 N. Front St., Philadelphia (215-291-4919, www.kungfunecktie.com): Onuinu (Jan. 25), Palma Violets (Jan. 29)
Liacouras Center at Temple University – Green Day (April 3)
North Star Bar, 2639 Poplar St., Philadelphia (215-787-0488 www.northstarbar.com): Joe Deninzon & Stratospheerius (Jan. 31)
Sands Bethlehem: Rat Pack (Jan. 26), Chris Botti (March 3), Jewel Greatest Hits Tour (March 15)
Sellersville Theater 1894, 136 N. Main St., Sellersville (215-257-5808, st94.com/home): Steel Wheels and Red Molly (Feb. 15)
Sovereign Center, Reading: Miranda Lambert (Jan. 25)
Theater of the Living Arts, 334 South St., Philadelphia: One More Time – A Daft Punk Tribute (Jan. 26), For Today (Jan. 28), Feed Me (Jan. 30 & 31) Reel Big Fish (Feb. 2), Of Mice & Men (Feb. 3), Fiction Family (Feb. 12)
Tin Angel, 20 S. 2nd St, Philadelphia (215-928-0770, www.tinangel.com): Joe Miller (Feb. 8)
Tower Theater, Upper Darby: Yo Gabba Gabba (Jan. 25), Jim Gaffigan (Jan. 26)
Trocadero, Philadelphia: June Divided (Feb. 9), Lindsey Stirling (Feb. 12)
Union Transfer, 1026 Spring Garden St., Philadelphia (215-323-2100): Texas is the Reason (Feb. 16)
Wells Fargo Center: Rihanna (March 14), Fleetwood Mac (April 6), Rod Stewart (April 12)
World Cafe Live Philadelphia, 3025 Walnut St., Philadelphia (worldcafelive.com): Corey Smith (Jan. 25), Enter the Haggis (Jan. 26), Company of Thieves (Jan. 29), Kindred the Family Soul (Jan. 30), Stray Birds (Jan. 31), Stew and the Negro Problem (Feb. 2), Wakey Wakey (Feb. 7), Willy Mason (Feb. 8), Chris Smither (Feb. 8), Carrie Rodriguez (Feb. 9)
World Cafe Live at the Queen, 500 N. Market St., Wilmington, (302-994-1400, queen.worldcafelive.com): Back To The Eighties Show with Jessie's Girl (Jan. 25), Riley Road (Jan. 25), Sledgehammer, Fading Fear, Lowdown 302, The Source and Bodhilynn Acoustic (Jan. 26), Tracy Grammer (Jan. 26), Citizen Cope (Jan. 27), The Flamin' Caucasians (Jan. 31)
Tickets for most concerts are available through www.ticketmaster.com, www.livenation.com or www.comcasttix.com, or call 877-598-8696.


text:
by Athena Andreadis; originally posted at Starship Reckless.
Note: This 2-part article is an expanded version of the talk I gave at Readercon 2011. It appeared at the same time as overlapping discussions by Cora Buhlert and Aliette de Bodard. Perhaps this means the time is ripe for change.
Recently, I read a round table discussion at the World SF blog whose participants were international women SF/F writers. The focus was, shall we say, intersectional invisibility. One item that came up was the persistence of normalizing to Anglo standards.
Also recently I started Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani travelogue. In the prologue I ran into the following sentence: "There is not much here about his wartime service in Crete, where for two years in the mountains he organized the resistance to the Nazi occupation." In other words, for those who read this introduction (or Anthony Lane's and David Mason's swooning accounts of Fermor), the Cretans became sidekicks in their own country, in their own struggle – like the Arabs in T. E. Lawrence's memoirs.
There are two asides to this. Fermor's best known doing, the Kreipe kidnapping, conferred no strategic or tactical advantage, although the German reprisals were very real: they slaughtered and burned the village of Anóghia, the home of bard Níkos Ksiloúris. Like most of its kind, the action served to maintain Allied control over the "unruly" native resistance. Additionally, Fermor was frequently airlifted to Cairo, to decompress and receive his wages. The Cretans were not invited along. They remained in Crete, subject to said reprisals. But Fermor was British gentry. It was his version of reality that got heard, became canon history and granted him fame and fortune.
In Part 1, I said that if I wrote about New Orleans, readers and critics would be on me like a brick avalanche. I followed the recent conniptions of the British SF contigent over Connie Willis' depiction of WWII London. She got terms wrong, she got details wrong, blah blah blah. Care to know how many things Greg Benford got wrong about Bronze Age and contemporary Mycenae in Artifact? Care to know what I think of Neil Gaiman's "There is nothing uniquely Greek about the Odyssey?" For that matter, you hear endless hymns about Ian McDonald's books – until you discuss Brasyl with a Brazilian or Hyberabad Days with an Indian.
Myths and history that recedes into legend reach us already as palimpsests. When The Iliad became standardized, the events it recited were already half a millennium old. Such stories bear all kinds of revisionist tellings, and the more resonant they are the more ways they can be re/told. If you want to see a really outstanding retelling of Oedípus Rex from Iocáste's point of view, watch Denis Villeneuve's film Incendies based on Wajdi Mouawad's play Scorched. However, whenever people embed stories in a culture they haven't lived in and know intimately, I'm wary. This, incidentally, is true across genres. For example, I can't quite trust Martin Cruz Smith's Russia, although Arkady Renko is a truly stellar creation. If you read John Fowles' The Magus side by side with his French Lieutenant's Woman, the disparity in authenticity is palpable. Marguerite Yourcenar knew Hellás; Mary Renault, not so much.
There is nothing wrong with writers using other cultures than their own, especially if they're good storytellers with sensitive antennae. But when such works are taken for the real thing, the real thing often gets devalued or rejected outright, just as real science gets rejected in SF in favor of notions that are false or obsolete and often duller than the real thing. It's like people used to canned orange juice disdaining the freshly squeezed stuff because it contains pulp. Or like James Ruskin forming his opinion of women's bodies from classical statues and then struck impotent when he discovered that real women possess pubic hair.
There's another equivalence between science and non-Anglo cultures in speculative fiction. Namely, the devil's in the details. You need to have absorbed enough of your subject's essence to know what counts, what needs to be included for verisimilitude. You may get the large picture right by conscientious research; you may get by with bluffing – but small things give away the game even when the bigger items pass cursory inspection. The diminutive of Konstantin in Russian is not Kostyn, it's Kostya. Hellenic names have vocative endings that differ from the nominative. The real thing is both more familiar and more alien than it appears in stories written by cultural tourists. And often it's the small touches that transport you inside another culture.
When outsiders get things right, they get saluted as honorary members of the culture they chose to depict and deserve the accolade. Outsiders can sometimes discern things in a culture that embedded insiders cannot see. Mark Mazower wrote riveting histories of Salonica and my people's resistance during WWII that I recommend to everyone, including Hellenes. Roderick Beaton and Paul Preuss wrote absorbing novels set in Crete that are inseparable from their setting (Ariadne's Children and Secret Passages). And Ellen Frye's The Other Sappho may have dated considerably in terms of its outlook – but you can tell that Frye lived in Hellás for a long time and spoke idiomatic Hellenic, whereas Rachel Swirsky's A Memory of Wind suffers from a generic setting despite its considerable other merits.
Then we have the interesting transpositions, like Jack McDevitt's A Talent for War. If you don't know he's loosely retelling the wars of the Hellenic city-states against the Persians, you enjoy the story just fine. But if you do know, the underdrone adds emotional resonance. By knowing Hellenic history past the surface, McDevitt got something else right almost inadvertently: Christopher Sim is a parallel-universe portrait of Áris Velouchiótis, the most famous WWII resistance leader in Hellás. On the other hand, Ian Sales turned Eurypides' careful psychological setup into wet cement in Thicker than Water, his SF retelling of Ifighénia in Tavrís (to say nothing of the name changes, with Orris and Pyle for Oréstis and Pyládhis winning the tin ear award).
Previously, the costs and intrinsic distortions of translation stood between stories of other cultures told by their own members and Anglophone readership. With SF/F writers of other nations increasingly writing in more-than-fluent English, this is no longer the case. The double-visioned exiles that camp outside the gates of SF/F might be just what the genre needs to shake it out of its self-satisfied monoculture stupor. The best-known examplar of this is Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) whose bewitching stories have never gone out of print, though her Kenyan memoirs have their share of noble savage/colonial glamor problems. Of course, one swallow does not bring the spring: reading one author per culture won't result in major shifts; singletons cannot serve as blanket representatives of their culture — they remain individuals with unique context-colored viewpoints.
I think we should encourage cross-fertilization or, to use a biological term, back-breeding to the original stock. We need to listen to the voices from outside the dominant culture, if we don't want speculative fiction to harden into drab parochial moulds. We need to taste the real thing, even if it burns our tongues. Burt Lancaster (but for the accent) was a memorable Don Fabrizio in the film version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo; but Ghassan Massoud swept the floor with his Anglo co-stars as Salahu'd-Din in The Kingdom of Heaven. Although, to be thorough, Salahu'd-Din was a Kurd. So he might have had blue or gray eyes.
Images: 1st, Peter O' Toole in another quintessence of palatable exoticism, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia; 2nd, Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar; 3rd, Lubna Azabal as Nawal Marwan in Villeneuve's Incendies.
Related entries:
Being Part of Everyone's Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!
A (Mail)coat of Many Colors: The Songs of the Byzantine Border Guards
Evgenía Fakínou: The Unknown Archmage of Magic Realism
Athena Andreadis brief bio
Athena Andreadis was born in Greece and lured to the US at age 18 by a full scholarship to Harvard, then MIT. She does basic research in molecular neurobiology, focusing on mental retardation and dementia. She is an avid reader in four languages across genres, the author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek and writes speculative fiction and non-fiction on a wide swath of topics. Her work can be found in Harvard Review, Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, Bull Spec, Science in My Fiction, SF Signal, The Apex Blog, SFF Portal, H+ Magazine, io9, The Huffington Post, and her own site, Starship Reckless.


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Award-winning documentary tackles Freedom Summer murders
Emmy-award-winning filmmaker Micki Dickoff was just 17 in 1964 when Freedom Summer sent people to the Deep South to register African-Americans to vote. Despite her desire to join the cause, her father was adamant about not letting her go.
So when three civil rights leaders went missing from the small town of Philadelphia, Miss., and their bodied were discovered a little more than a month later, she was devastated.
As the decades passed, the memory and pain of the slayings still resonated with Dickoff. By 2004 she knew there was still a story that needed to be told and the result is the award-winning "Neshoba," a 90-minute documentary about the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
"This film is very important to me, and is very important to a lot of people," Dickoff said. "Even though the events that led to the film being made took place over four decades ago, the film's message and relevance still ring true to this day."
The film will be shown at the Mabray "Doc" Kountze Arts/Film Festival at Tufts University on Saturday.
Viewers may be most aware of the murders from the 1998 film "Mississippi Burning," starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, which looked at the FBI's investigation into the incident.
"Neshoba" provides a detailed history of Neshoba County and residents' reactions to the murders throughout the years, as well as ultimately documenting the 2005 trial and eventual conviction of Rev. Edgar Lee Killen, the man believed to be the mastermind behind the murders.
In addition to Killen, the documentary addresses how police and the Ku Klux Klan worked with federal investigators to preserve the white-supremacist attitudes in the region after the murders.
Dickoff has been screening the film at festivals across the country for several months, with the most recent screening being the Canada International Film Festival in Vancouver, where "Neshoba" was honored as the Best Humanitarian Film.
The Vancouver festival was the first international showing of the film, but Dickoff said no matter where the film is shown the reactions are the same.
"The reactions have been incredibly strong everywhere we've gone, and I think that has to do with the nature of the film," Dickoff said. "It's the type of film that gets people to openly talk about issues of race in this country, which was the ultimate goal."
The film's relentless and unadulterated tone adds to the effect.
"It's like a big bad wound that you never took care of," she said. "The film forces people to look at that wound and finally address it, and talk squarely about some pretty difficult issues."
Dickoff admits when she started shooting the documentary in 2004, she had no idea Killen would be indicted 10 months later or that she would have unprecedented access to him for several months. She said having such access to Killen helped make the movie what it is, and that getting inside his head proved to be vital to the film's authenticity.
"I knew my own truth pretty well, but interviewing Rev. Killen was about trying to understand his point of view and letting him open up," Dickoff said. "He has his own truth as well, and has absolutely no remorse over what he did, so it was important not to impose my truth onto his."
Dickoff said keeping her objectivity wasn't easy, but it was crucial for the film to play out the way it needed to.
"As difficult as it was, I don't think I would have been able to sit across from him and make this film 20 years ago," she said. "He is still a human being, and in a way we needed to humanize him in order for his side of the story to be told."
A film takes shape
Dickoff met Ben Chaney, the younger brother of victim James Chaney, in 1999, during the 35th anniversary of the murders. She started looking into making the film then, but it never materialized. It did give her the opportunity, however, to meet Carolyn Goodman, the mother of the late Andrew Goodman.
"Carolyn was a real hero to me," Dickoff said. "We got to be very close in the years leading up to the film, and she was 88 years old in 2004, and I knew that if this film was ever going to get made, it would have to be made now."
Dickoff was further encouraged by the efforts of the Philadelphia Coalition, a multi-racial group of Neshoba County citizens who banded together around that time to raise awareness of the murders and pressure the state of Mississippi to bring charges against the killers.
"The timing was right, and things couldn't have worked out better that way," Dickoff said.
Dickoff teamed up with filmmaker Tony Pagano, a longtime collaborator, and more than five years later the film was completed and debuted Sept. 14, 2008 at the Boston Film Festival. It won Best Documentary at that show, and would go on to win several awards, including Best Political Documentary at the New York International Independent Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.
A longtime Boston resident and one-time Emerson College instructor, Dickoff was called to Hollywood after winning an Emmy earlier in her career, but she still thinks of the Boston area as her home in some ways.
"I still visit often and have a connection to the city," Dickoff said. "It meant a lot to debut the film at the Boston Film Festival, and to have it win the award was even better."
Medford Transcript


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Newport, New Hampshire (CNN) – GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is standing by a recent statement interpreted as racially insensitive prompting reaction from a major civil rights organization.
"And so I'm prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention to talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps," Gingrich said Thursday.
– Follow the Ticker on Twitter: @PoliticalTicker
The NAACP, responding to reports about the line in the speech, said the former speaker's comment is "problematic on several fronts."
"It is a shame that the former Speaker feels that these types of inaccurate, divisive statements are in any way helpful to our country," said President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous in a written statement.
The quote in question came from a speech in Plymouth, New Hampshire when Gingrich was laying out his "food stamps versus paychecks" argument, a frequent topic on the stump when he talks about President Barack Obama's liberal policies and the need for change.
On the campaign trail Gingrich often argues that more people are on food stamps under the Obama administration and that he would pursue policies that get people back to work. He has previously labeled Obama a "food stamp president."
Jealous charged Gingrich of feeding a stereotype. "The majority of people using food stamps are not African-American, and most people using food stamps have a job," he said in the statement.
The former speaker believes his comment Thursday has been taken out of context.
"I think you would have to be nuts to read those two paragraphs and conclude anything except that I was saying that every young American deserves the right to pursue happiness. Every young American deserves a chance to have a job. Every neighborhood in America deserves a chance to have pay checks instead of food stamps," he said.
Gingrich added that this is another example of being labeled a racist for challenging government entitlements such as welfare, which he said he will continue pursuing "even if it makes liberals uncomfortable."
"And for the life of me I can't understand why having a conservative Republican who cares about young people having jobs should be seen as such a terrible idea or should be seen as somehow a racist characterization," he told reporters.
In addition to talking his food-stamp-vs.-paycheck argument on the stump, Gingrich often talks about speaking to the NAACP, as well as other groups, in an effort to reach out to all Americans.
Based on previous experience with Gingrich, the NAACP is not so convinced.
"We invited Speaker Gingrich to attend our annual convention several times when he was Speaker of the House, but he declined to join us," Jealous continued. "If he is invited again, I hope that he would come, with the intention to unite rather than divide."
The Gingrich campaign was unable to confirm or deny Jealous' assertion because they didn't have on hand the former speaker's schedule from the '90s.
– Follow Shawna Shepherd on Twitter: @ShepherdCNN
Also see:
Huntsman hits Romney ahead of N.H. primary
Boston Globe backs Huntsman
FIRST ON CNN: Santorum to make large ad buy in South Carolina
Santorum tangles with Gingrich, same-sex marriage supporters
McCain courting former South Carolina backers for Romney
vicki willis
Why? This man can't keep his penis in his pants! Why should we can what this man says. We women have not forgotten what he did. But a cute want to be blond wife he has! Go home Newt
But you loved Bill Clinton.
we can call him the adulterer president
Let's not forget who created this massive increase of newly-poor, former middle class citizens...I remember Fall 2008 all too well. I will vote accordingly.
Unbelievable. Gingrich has absolutely no tact. His tongue could be VERY dangerous as he has little diplomacy. We don't need a guy this polarizing at the helm as we deal with other countries (or try to work across the aisle either).
May I have some of the food stamps that us blacks folks are receiving, because I don't get any. Everybody I know work and they do not get food stamps. Most of the people I know are black people.
"I think you would have to be nuts to read those two paragraphs and conclude anything except that I was saying that every young American deserves the right to pursue happiness. Every young American deserves a chance to have a job. Every neighborhood in America deserves a chance to have pay checks instead of food stamps,"
That would have been a perfect alternative to the actual words Newt used. Slipping the African American part into the speech served it's purpose: to trigger his Republican base into thinking he's their guy. Gingrich is smart. Racist, but smart.
What he said would apply to anyone, he can not hide his racism.
Ninety percent of black people are still slavs. Their Massa is Uncle Democrat.
Okay, based on the data from "Characteristics of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Households: Fiscal Year 2010" and the US Census Bureau's "U.S. Census Bureau Guidance on the Presentation and Comparison of Race and Hispanic Origin Data" the numbers come out....... if you are white you are about 11% likely to be on foodstamps and if you're black you are 26% likely to be on food stamps. There's the numbers. Take it how you want.
Too bad you won't win the nomination Newt. There isn't a more deserving man to lose by a massive, embarrassing landslide than you.
"likely figures are not actual facts...its 24% white...11% black ..40% hispanic..and the rest asst.....
For once, I must say that I'm proud of these message boards. I'm glad people are calling Gingrich on his cynical race-baiting.
Delisle, assuming your figures are correct and food stamp recipients for blacks and whites are 26% amd 11% respectively, who gets the other 63%?
""It is a shame that the former Speaker feels that these types of inaccurate, divisive statements are in any way helpful to our country," said President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous in a written statement." He doesn't feel these statements are helpful to the country. He feels that they will be helpful to HIM!
As stated by the 2010 US Census data, this country is made up of 72.4% of people who identify themselves as "white" and 12.6% of people who identify themselves as "black". If in fact the amount of "whites" and "blacks" receiving government assistance were "equal", one should expect to see these same percents in the breakdown. That is not the case. I am not a supporter of Newt Gingrich, but I abhor the misuse of statistics by those trying to prove a point. Yes, there are more whites than blacks receiving assistance, but the percents are vastly disproportionate to the actual population. Blacks have a higher risk of receiving government assistance. The interpretation and implications of this are left up to individuals.
The Gop/TP party and their base have been hateful and devisive every since President Obama was sworn into office, They toss out signals in their speeches to divide the country. Newt and Santorium are their attack dogs and Romney is the puppet who will carry out their wishes, because why else would he keep flip=flopping to get their votes knowing darn well he is not accepted into the GOP/Tp party. The republican party are a disgrace to America. The voters need to send a really tough messge that we will not tolerate their malicious behavior against any American Citizen. Wake up people they are showing their true colors, the flags are up and do not ignore them.
Without increasing corporate taxes one iota, why don't CONServatives talk about corporations that don't pay federal taxes, or very wealthy individuals who use loopholes and tax shelters that only apply to them to reduce their fair share of taxes? The middle class and poor, no matter what race, have been hit so hard in the last 3 decades, income has not kept up with inflation and ordinary folk are losing ground every day, yet these numbskull Republicans focus on putting the squeeze on those who're already under tremendous pressure, particularly in the last 5 years. Unbelievable.
For me, the election of 2012 is pretty simple. It is the party that most commonly looks out for the 1%, versus the party that most commonly looks out for the 99%


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Grimaldi, Giovanni Francesco
Grimaldi, Giovanni Francesco jōvän´nē fränchās´kō grēmäl´dē [key], 1606–80, Italian painter and architect, called Il Bolognese. He was a pupil of the Carracci and of Francesco Albani. With the exception of two years in France (1649–51), where he decorated the Mazarin Palace (now the Bibliothèque nationale) and other buildings for Cardinal Mazarin, most of his life was spent in Rome. He was employed as architect and painter by several popes. His paintings, chiefly landscapes in the manner of the Carracci, are found in the Borghese and Colonna galleries and the Quirinal, Rome; the Louvre; and in Vienna.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: European Art, 1600 to the Present: Biographies


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The roses are blooming everywhere, so now is a great time to create your very own hydrating rose body oil.
The essential oil of roses is found to be very nourishing, moisturizing and restorative. It is good for almost all skin types and works well even with sensitive skin. The aroma is relaxing and heavenly. You will love making your own rose oil – plus it's easy!
You'll need:
1 cup fresh organic rose petals
1 cup sweet almond oil or sesame oil
1 wide mouth glass jar with a lid
1. Place roses in jar and gently crush to release their oils
2. Pour the oil over the petals.
3. Secure the lid and place the jar in a dark, cool place for a week.
4. Strain the oil and place into pretty bottle.
5. Apply after bath or shower while skin is still moist.
Image via Flickr


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55yr Old Granny Admits To Having s3x With A 12yr Old Boy To Celebrate Her Birhtday In Ohio & Only Gets 5 Years!
Dayton, Ohio — A woman accused of celebrating her 55th birthday by having sex with a 12-year-old boy pleaded guilty to one count of gross sexual imposition of a person under age 13 on Friday, Oct. 23. Gloria J. Murphy, of 5440 Rawlings Drive, appeared before Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Mary Katherine Huffman, who set sentencing for Dec. 2. The charge is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Murphy, who uses a walker and an oxygen tube, appeared frail.
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The chairman of the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA, for short) is neither intimidated nor impressed by the Internet "revolt" of sorts that took place earlier this week on sites like Digg. When the AACS used cease-and-desist letters to encourage scores of Internet sites (including Google) to remove an unencrypted HD DVD key, users responded by posting it everywhere. Now the AACS LA is out there talking tough, and it's as if we haven't seen this scenario played out once already before.
What is it they say about history? Those that don't know it are going to look really clueless when they repeat it? Something like that. AACS, meet DeCSS. DeCSS, meet your latest imitator.
Such is the lesson that hasn't been learned by Michael Ayers, the chairman of the AACS LA. Ayers told the BBC that the AACS LA will nevertheless use technical and legal means to stop the distribution of the key, apparently ignoring exactly what happens when you attempt to increase your grip on situations like this: keys start flying out everywhere. And we do mean everywhere: they're now on t-shirts, one group wrote a song about the key, and I've had more than a few pictures of new tattoos sent to me (boy, do I hope those aren't permanent).
Ayers' position on the free speech angle is clear. "A line is crossed when we start seeing keys being distributed and tools for circumvention. You step outside of the realm of protected free speech then," he said. And Ayers may have the law on his side, at least in the US, as the EFF's Fred von Lohmann explains clearly. AACS LA isn't claiming copyright protections for the key. Rather, the key could constitute a circumvention device, which makes it illegal per the DMCA. Until a court has ruled, it's all speculation of course.
Yet even if the law is on his side, Ayers can hope for nothing more than a pyrrhic victory. His misunderstanding of the situation was made clear in a comment he gave to the EE Times in which he characterizes Digg users as vandals. "If the local neighborhood gang is throwing rocks at your house, some people might tell you not to call the police because they will just throw bigger rocks," Ayers said.
But the bigger point is what happens when you "call the police," to continue with his metaphor. Yes, the cops can stop people from throwing rocks at your house, so you've got to take that risk knowing that those same kids might retaliate next week. But AACS isn't a house, and encryption keys aren't rocks. Can "the cops" stop a 16-byte number from existing online? We can peer into the future and see the answer because history is, in fact, repeating itself.
Current-generation DVDs are protected by CSS, which is really the father of AACS in so many ways (except that AACS was supposedly so much more secure). And like father, like son, CSS was cracked, and the code used to do so was spread around the 'net. When Hollywood came running with lawyers and threats, the code just spread faster. That was 1999. Lawsuits abounded; lots of money was spent. It's now 2007: guess how many days there were between now and then in which the DeCSS code couldn't be easily found online. If you guessed zero, you're right!
Such is the effect of "calling the police" in this situation. The issue becomes that much more noticeable, tensions and emotions start running high, and no solution will be found.
The AACS LA has missed the lesson of DeCSS: the Internet holds no secrets. While one might sympathize with their predicament, the larger lesson to be learned here is that security based on secrets is truly no more secure than any other form of security. Once that secret is out, it's game over. The more you try to stop that secret from spreading, the more likely it is to spread. The more coveted that secret is, the worse it gets.
When "DVD Jon" was targeted for his involvement of DeCSS, geeks around the world rallied around him and the idea of DeCSS. If the AACS isn't careful, they'll simply make another generation of hero out of a problem they created. What makes it even more deplorable this time is that it's now 2007, and the writing is on the wall: DRM is a failed idea, and a waste of time and money.


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MenuDirections abounded in ideas, some so self-contained that it's difficult to lump them into categories or one of our larger themed stories from the conference (which you'll find here.) Here, then, is a mixed assortment of those notions and insights. We like to think of them as small plates of brain food:
Nuts, contrary to the assertions of some pop diets, can be healthful additions to diets in moderation. Nutritionist James Painter noted that they make a particularly good replacement for meats.
One of the ideas floated for making soybeans sexier called for pureeing the beans, saucing them with some ponzu and serving the whole thing in a martini glass.
Tacos made with tempeh were also saluted, as was the substitution of silky tofu for ricotta in lasagna.
One of Mediterranean food's operational benefits is its durability as a takeout food. It holds for long times at ambient temperatures, and many versions are meant to be eaten without reheating. That makes it "a great way to stretch your dayparts without having to keep the doors open all the time," noted LifeWorks' Marion Gibson.
An Italian meat platter—basically rolled salamis and other cold cuts presented cheek-to-jowl with sliced cheeses on some type of open-faced Italian bread—is a good way to get $20 from a couple of sharers who might otherwise buy two $5 sandwiches. It's twice the money for half the food, and everyone's happy, said Gibson.
The new frontier in the use of beans is getting them into breakfast and dessert items, said Chef Tom Smith of Food IQ. He noted how the menu-idea lab is tinkering with such products as waffles, breads and white custards made from ground-up beans. He also asserted that beans would be accepted by more "customers" in K-12 if the industry could brainstorm ways of enabling the beans to be eaten neatly on the go in hand-held products.
Rhubarb can give new color, literally, to margaritas served in catering situations. It can be a good sour base for the popular drink, and delivers an attractive, unusual hue, said McCormick Chef Kevan Vetter.


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Kirk Cameron Blasted by GLAAD Over Gay Marriage Comments
Kirk Cameron Blasted by GLAAD Over Gay Marriage Comments
Kirk Cameron's comments to Piers Morgan on gay marriage are not sitting well with the folks at GLAAD ... who think the former "Growing Pains" star "sounds even more dated than his 1980s TV character."
Cameron said during last night's show that he does not support gay marriage, and when it comes to homosexuality in general ... he said, "I think that it's ... unnatural. I think that it's detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization."
Herndon Graddick, Senior Director of Programs at GLAAD, tells TMZ he feels Cameron, a Born Again Christian, is "out of step with a vast majority of Americans, particularly people of faith who believe that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be loved and accepted based on their character and not condemned because of their sexual orientation."
A GLAAD spokesman says they plan on monitoring Cameron's media bookings and various acting gigs to ensure "the news and entertainment industry is aware of his outrageous anti-gay views."


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This article is more than 1 year old
Hitachi scores largest loss in Japanese manufacturing history
NEC optimistic
Hitachi and NEC have reported their their fiscal 2008 results, and the numbers are not good. Hitachi set a new record for the largest annual loss by a Japanese manufacturing company as NEC struggled. On the up side, though, NEC was optimistic about the coming twelve months.
Hitachi, which is an extremely diversified manufacturer with a dabble here and there in IT, posted sales of 10 trillion yen ($102bn), down 11 per cent, and had a net loss of 787.3 billion yen ($8.03bn). Hitachi pointed the finger at the US for its economic woes, saying the financial crisis, the ensuing turmoil in global financial markets and the decline in spending across most sectors of the economies of the world were the drivers of that huge loss for the year.
Oddly enough, Hitachi's hard disk drive business was one of the bright spots within the conglomerate's Information and Telecommunication Systems group. Hitachi said that the return of the disk business to profitability was one big reason why the operating income for the ITS group rose by 52 per cent to 176.6 billion yet ($1.8bn) even though revenues fell by six per cent to 2.59 trillion yen ($26.5bn).
That said, hardware sales on the IT side - which includes a smattering of servers - fell even as telecom system sales rose. Hitachi's Electronic Devices group, which makes computer displays and semiconductors of various kinds, fell by 11 per cent to 1.15 trillion yen ($11.75bn), operating income for this group fell by 49 per cent to 27.3 billion yen ($279m).
Looking ahead to fiscal 2009, ended next March, Hitachi says that it expects the Chinese economy to "achieve comparatively high growth" thanks to stimulus efforts coming out of Beijing, but that the global economy is not going to see a "full-fledged recovery" until 2010 at the earliest.
As such, Hitachi is planning for an 11 per cent decline in overall sales in fiscal 2009 to 8.9 trillion yen ($93.7bn), and that it will have a net loss on the order of 270 billion yen ($2.84bn). That's not exactly good news, but the losses are not expected to be as bad as Hitachi posted for fiscal 2008.
Over at NEC the numbers were equally challenging. NEC's revenues dropped 8.7 per cent to 4.22 trillion yen ($46.4bn) and the company posted a net loss of 296.6 billion yen ($3bn), compared to a tiny profit of 22.7 billion yen in fiscal 2007.
NEC's IT/Network Solutions group had sales of 2.72 trillion yen, down five per cent and an operating income of 124.9 billion yen, compared to a loss of 35.8 billion yen in fiscal 2007.
Within this group, the IT Services/System Integration division did pretty well, with sales of 824.5 billion yen, down one per cent, while the IT Products division - which sells laptops, PCs, and servers, among other things - posted a decline of 5.4 per cent for the year to 574 billion yen.
Network Systems just broke through one trillion yen in sales, but was down by 7.5 per cent. As previously reported, NEC has been pulling out of the PC business outside of its home Asia/Pacific market.
NEC's Mobile/Personal Solutions group, which makes and sells mobile handsets and PCs of various kinds, posted 810.3 billion yen in sales in fiscal 2008, down 7.2 per cent, with PC sales falling 13.2 per cent to 462.2 billion yen. This group booked an operating loss of 31.1 billion yen, compared to a loss of 7.9 billion yen in fiscal 2007. NEC's Electron Devices unit continued to hemorrhage, with sales down 21.4 per cent to 652.8 billion yen and an operating loss of 79.3 billion yen.
In an effort to cut costs, NEC is working on a partnership with Renesas Technology - itself a partnership between the chip units of Hitachi and Mitsubishi dating from 2003 - that will see the companies work together on 32 nanometer manufacturing capacity. This combination would create the third largest semi manufacturer in the world, behind Intel and Samsung Electronics, and also gives the combination a dominant share of the microcontroller space.
Looking ahead to fiscal 2009, NEC is far more optimistic than Hitachi. NEC said it expects to report 3.73 trillion yen in sales, down 11.5 per cent, but will swing to a tiny 10 billion yen profit. ®


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Classicrockmagazine.com have shared details about the latest video from NEWSTED, for the track 'As The Crow Flies.' Check it out below:
'As The Crow Flies' is taken from the debut Newsted album, "Heavy Metal Music", out now on Spinefarm Records.
Since parting ways with Metallica, Jason Newsted has lent his signature skills to a selection of artists, including Voivod and Ozzy Osbourne, but 'As The Crow Flies' (complete with brand new video, below) is very much his own work.
As the blurb says: "The groove is immense, and the vocals are his, too. Heavy metal music, indeed!"


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Corey Feldman celebrates life, new double-CD as he turns 45
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nothing is off the table in an interview with Corey Feldman.
During a wide-ranging conversation over lunch at Jerry's Deli in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Encino, Feldman talks about his movies, past marriages, his production company and record label, his son, his home recording studio, the group of beauties he calls Corey's Angels, and his new double-album 10 years in the making. But most of all, he talks about gratitude.
As Feldman turns 45 Saturday, he feels deeply grateful for a contented life, and it shows.
"I feel very grateful and very lucky to be alive still, to have any kind of semblance of normal life," he says. "I am blessed to have a beautiful child, a beautiful home, a beautiful girlfriend and a beautiful career... I don't take any of it for granted."
Feldman says he still does at least one film a year, interspersing acting with writing and recording music.
His latest project is the "Angelic 2 the Core album," 22 tracks he wrote or co-wrote, save for a cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero." Feldman's first full solo album since 2002's "Former Child Actor" was released June 22.
While recovering from his second divorce and the deaths of his grandfather and close friends Michael Jackson and Corey Haim, Feldman poured himself into music, building a recording studio in his house and tinkering on every instrument. The result is the genre-hopping album, which features such artists as Snoop Dogg and Fred Durst, and Feldman playing everything from drums to keys to bass and guitar.
There album spans electronica, hip-hop, hard rock and even a gospel choir. Disc one is all dance music and dedicated to Jackson; Disc two is rock-based and dedicated to Haim.
"There's something for everyone," Feldman says. The lyrics are personal and positive, with songs for his girlfriend, Courtney, and son Zen, now 11.
The entertainer's "attitude of gratitude" comes from a practice of daily prayer and nightly self-evaluation to see where he can improve. Positivity was a survival method during what he describes as a "heinous" childhood.
A survivor of abuse by his mother and molestation by men in the entertainment industry, Feldman also struggled with drugs and a battered public image that made him the butt of many a late-night comic's joke. He has been sober for more than 25 years.
If the public ridicule hurt his feelings, it hasn't stopped him from being warm and open. He wrote candidly about his life in his 2013 memoir, "Coreyography," which he says is being adapted for the big screen.
Feldman also hasn't lost his sense of humor. The album cover features two of his Angels — the beautiful, young women whose careers he says he's working to jump start — and he poses for a "Tiger Beat"-style centerfold inside, the lyric booklet contained by what would be the waistband of his pants.
"You have to reach into my pants," he says with a laugh, "and pull out the package."
Follow AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen at www.twitter.com/APSandy .


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- Every professional development Request must be approved by the Board before the date of the professional development.
- Submit professional development request form five active business days before the board meeting. Please refer to the Bronx – ASCS Board Meeting Schedule
- Please attach the registration form, institute brochure or other descriptive literature that includes all relevant information.
- Upon completion, e-sign your document, enter your e-mail address and submit.
- You will receive an e-mail from Adobe EchoSign for identity verification. Confirm your e-mail address.
- You will receive an e-mail notification once your supervisor(s) certify your submission.
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Jul. 10, 2013 - By JIM McELHATTON - Defense News
The Office of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction called a 64,000-square-foot headquarters facility in Afghanistan, which cost the U.S. military $34 million to build, a 'troubling example of waste' in a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. The building will likely never be used and torn down.
The military spent $34 million to build a 64,000-square-foot headquarters facility in Afghanistan, but officials concede they'll probably just tear it down or turn it over to the Afghan government in what some officials call a case study of what can go wrong in military construction.
Located in the country's Helmand province, it's a project the Office of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) called a "troubling example of waste" in a letter this week to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
Whether the building is turned over to Afghan officials or torn down, both outcomes raise troubling questions about why the military would push forward on the project despite early concerns that there was no need for it, according to the July 8 letter from IG John F. Sopko.
Sopko praised the building as impressive, perhaps the best built facility he's seen in his travels around Afghanistan.
"Unfortunately, it is unused, unoccupied and presumably will never be used for its intended purpose," he wrote.
He also cited unnamed military officials who cited the project as an example of the pitfalls of military construction, saying "once a project is started, it is very difficult to stop."
SIGAR investigators said the Army sought funding for the project in February 2010, but the I Marine Expeditionary Force (FORWARD) requested the project be canceled months later.
Nonetheless, the Air Force's 772nd Enterprise Sourcing Squadron issued a task order to AMEC Earth and Environmental Inc. to build the facility in February 2011, and the U.S. government took control of it in November 2012, according to the letter.
Sopko said one senior military official noted that as U.S. military presence decreases at Camp Leatherneck, the Marine Corps base in the province, the building could fall outside of the security perimeter, making it unsafe for the military to occupy.
"This leaves the military with two primary options — demolish the building or give it to the Afhan government," Sopko told Hagel.
But the problem with turning the building over to the Afghans is that doing so would require a "major overhaul" in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems.
Yet another problem: The building was constructed based on U.S. construction standards, not Afghan standards. As a result, the power runs at a different voltage, complicating the transfer.
"These were some of the reasons why the U.S. military officials we spoke with believe the building will probably be demolished," Sopko wrote.
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WASHINGTON -- Amid talk of a new liberal movement to counter the Tea Party, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison sprinted onto a stage with a chant, not a speech.
"Jobs, not cuts! Jobs, not cuts! Let me hear you!" the Minnesota Democrat yelled at a liberal conference last week. "We're going to go to Capitol Hill, and we're gonna raise some hell today!"
Across the nation, unabashed liberals like Ellison have grown increasingly frustrated at being on the political sidelines -- a bitter pill after Democrats swept into power in the election of 2006 and took the presidency in 2008. Now Ellison is part of a mounting chorus of activists trying to build a movement focused not on big government, but on what they see as the ills of Wall Street and corporate greed.
After being eclipsed by the energy and staying power of the Tea Party on the right, liberals may be forming an organic counterweight in the Occupy Wall Street protests erupting across the country. What started in New York with a few hundred people has swelled to tens of thousands in downtown Manhattan and spread across the country, including Minneapolis, where hundreds gathered over the weekend to "occupy" the Hennepin County Government Center plaza.
The clamor is music to Ellison's ears. He and other leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have toured the country for months to rally popular opposition to Republican tax and budget cuts, to little avail. He visited the Minneapolis protests last Friday.
In the leaderless Occupy Wall Street protests, liberal stalwarts like Ellison see the signs of a changing tide.
"These people are outraged," Ellison said. "We gotta be mad all together so we can restore the American dream."
Van Jones, a former Obama adviser who was a key player in the liberal "Take Back the American Dream" conference in Washington last week, said the left should channel protesters' anger to form a Tea Party of its own.
"I'm not mad at the Tea Party," Jones said. "I'm not mad at them for being so loud. I'm mad at us for being so quiet the past two years."
More mainstream Democrats are embracing the protests, like state Rep. Carly Melin, D-Hibbing, who tweeted Wednesday that she would be at the Occupy Minnesota event "in spirit." Established labor groups, such as the Service Employees International Union, are joining the cause, too. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee started an online petition supporting Occupy Wall Street.
Matthew Kerbel, a Villanova University political scientist, said it's too early to know if the protests will have political staying power. "This is going to have legs if you start to see the narrative change about the reason why we're in the dilemma that we're in economically," said Kerbel, who has written a book about the online progressive movement.
A growing movement
For the first two weeks, the public paid little attention to the Wall Street protests, which began innocuously Sept. 17, when a mostly college-age crowd began camping out in a park near Manhattan's New York Stock Exchange.
But the movement soon ballooned, swelling to 10,000 in New York and drawing support from unions and others. Minnesota's Service Employees International Union issued a statement supporting the protests that began in Minneapolis last Friday.
"This debate, Occupy Wall Street, is bringing a voice back to the working people and middle class people," Melin said.
Liberals like Ellison acknowledge that it's difficult to know what direction the protests will take. Their goal is to channel into the anger and frustration, as the Tea Party did on the right, but there is no concrete plan as the protests continue to evolve.
"I think this is sustainable," Ellison said. "If you look at the Wisconsin thing, you look at this -- there's a liberal swing."
Dismayed at actions by Gov. Scott Walker to strip collective bargaining rights, thousands of protesters stormed the Wisconsin capitol earlier this year, camping out in its rotunda for days to protest Walker's actions.
Back on the street
The Occupy Wall Street protests have no leader or stated goals, nor do they align neatly with Democrats. Many liberals express open discontent with President Obama over the loss of the public option in the health-care debate and his compromise with House Speaker John Boehner in this summer's debt-limit fight.
When Obama was asked about Occupy Wall Street, he said the protesters "are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."
Republicans, meanwhile, have decried the protests. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called them "growing mobs." GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney labeled it "class warfare."
Ellison said liberals realize they went dormant after Obama's election, allowing the Tea Party to seize momentum and shape the debate. "We fought so hard to get Obama in the White House and take the majority, and I think people thought that was going to do it," Ellison said. "It took a reminder for us to really get back on the street."
Jeremy Herb • 202-408-2723 Twitter: @StribHerb


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Hearing "Media-Capitalism" in Egypt
As I began researching my first book Ordinary Egyptians, a study of Egyptian culture from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, sounds and early sound media were the last thing on my mind. However, When I dug more deeply into the historical sources, I realized the importance of music and the comedic theater in the urban culture of turn of the century Egypt. This made me expand the scope of my research to incorporate the vernacular culture of Egypt as an entire media-system, which as I showed in my book, was instrumental in constructing a modern Egyptian national identity. Music, songs, plays, chants, speeches, conversations and chatter, were very influential in forming an Egyptian national culture at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in a society with low literacy rates. By incorporating performance and sound media–especially the rising record industry–my book strives to expand the historical study of this period beyond just the visual and the printed to include sound, and aural/oral expressions of culture.
Ordinary Egyptians also engages with some of the theories of nationalism and tests their applicability to Egypt and the Arab world. It introduces the concept of "media-capitalism," which expands the historical analysis of Egyptian nationalism beyond just print and silent reading, through the incorporation of audiovisual, sound, and performance media. By integrating these new media, especially the burgeoning record industry, my book attempts to make room for both the "ear" and the "eye"—for the aural and oral alongside the visual—and in the process provides a more comprehensive explanation for how individuals and communities digest and embody cultural information. As this excerpt explains, cultural productions, in any form, are not socially relevant unless they are communally and socially activated; they must be discussed, breathed, and animated in the routine of everyday life.
The following is an excerpt from Ordinary Egyptians, with thanks to Stanford University Press. Notes have been included in the text to conform to Sounding Out!'s style sheet.
Mundane Nationalism
Egypt's new mass media reflected on relevant everyday political, economic, and cultural concerns, and amplified them on the national stage in a comprehensible, locally pertinent and entertaining form. The repeated themes of many of these media included: bemoaning the lack of economic opportunities for native Egyptians, portraying the economic exploitation of Egyptians by foreigners, warning of perceived declines in national "morality," satirizing and at times insulting British and native officials, and rousing patriotism and a sense of collective national solidarity.
However, the most effective way that national identity and a sense of nationhood was 'absorbed' was not only through these overstated themes and methods, but through the mundane media portrayals and representations of everyday "national" life and the internalization of these modes in actual practice. As Michael Billig describes in Banal Nationalism, nationalist ideology "might appear banal, routine, almost invisible," however, these "subconscious" matter-of-fact representations create a common sense "naturalness of belonging to a nation" (15-16). Billig explains that often there is "continual 'flagging', or reminding, of nationhood," as on a daily basis, citizens are reminded of their national identity. This reminding however, is "so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding" (8). Mundane and unstated representations of Egyptian-ness abounded in most forms of mass culture, where "Egyptians" distinctively spoke and acted and were clearly, though tacitly, differentiated from non-Egyptians. Most of the media examined in this study implicitly addressed their listeners, viewers and readers as members of an Egyptian "nation." To be sure, the most influential aspect of vaudeville and the satirical press were not necessarily the outwardly nationalistic messages of many of their articles, cartoons, and dialogues, but the recurring and mundane representations of colloquial Cairene as the de-facto dialect of all Egyptians, and the implicit understanding that flawlessly speaking and understanding it was the basic marker of a "modern" Egyptian national identity. Only an "authentic" ibn or bint al-balad (son or daughter of the country) would employ Egyptian Arabic and grasp its multiple meanings and nuances and hence participate in this new mass-produced colloquial culture. In fact, many of the comedic dialogues depicted in political cartoons and vaudeville repeatedly contrasted the mispronunciations of foreigners—who often played unsympathetic or villainous roles—with the "correct" pronunciation of affable Egyptian characters. This repeated portrayal of Cairene as the only "authentic" Egyptian accent reified it as an unofficial dialect of all Egyptians, even if back in the villages and towns of the Sa'id more localized modes of expression were employed. By way of media-capitalism, Cairo's dialect and culture was overwhelming—colonizing, if you will— the multitude of other localized dialects and cultures in Egypt. Thus, paradoxically, Cairene Arabic was the primary tool for nationalist, anti-imperialist discourse, and simultaneously, through internal-colonialism, it imposed its own culture on the "nation" [Note: This is very similar to what was happening in France during roughly the same time period. See Eugen Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, 486-88].
The Sensorium and the Public Sphere
The efficacy of the new mass media and its potential for mass mobilization was best demonstrated during times of national crisis. The 1906 Dinshaway Incident and the 1919 Revolution in particular reveal how all forms of mass media functioned together to effectively document, memorialize, celebrate, and mobilize on a national scale. The growth of popular Egyptian mass culture, articulated almost exclusively in colloquial Egyptian, was the pivotal factor in the popularization and dissemination of an Egyptian national identity. The evolution and universalization of a colloquial Egyptian middle culture, made possible especially through the utilization of sound and audiovisual media, allowed for a shared and "uniquely" Egyptian cultural landscape. It is primarily within this non-official web of colloquial Egyptian mass culture, driven in large part by media-capitalism, that Egyptian national identity was widely disseminated and popularized.
One crucial aspect of this study was the critical role coffee shops played as cultural hubs, where differing mass media from newspapers to recorded music were publicly merged, negotiated, and digested. Many of the songs initially written for musical and comedic plays were recorded and played, or performed by street musicians at coffee shops and even in the streets and sidewalks. The role of the thousands of urban cafés and other public meeting areas in the broadcasting and reception of these new cultural productions is central to understanding the potency and effectiveness of this developing nationwide culture. Indeed, coffeehouses, as Peter Burke has remarked in A Social History of the Media, "inspired the creation of imagined communities of oral communication" (30).
However, as discussed in previous chapters, this was never a one way conversation, as writers of these vernacular media were plugged into the streets and public squares through these very same cafés. As we have observed in this study, it can be said that the entire vaudeville theater industry arose out of the cafés on 'Imad al-Din Street, where most of the vaudeville theaters were housed [Note: See Ibrahim Ramzi, Masrahuna 'Ayyam Zaman wa Tarikh al-Fananin al-Qudama' (Cairo: Matba'at al-Salam (1984), 25. There were at least three major cafés in Imad al-Din Street that were frequented by actors, singers, writers, and musicians— Qahwat al-Fan (The Arts Café), Qahwat Barun (The Baron Cafés), and Qahwat Misr (The Egypt Café)]. It was through these dialogical "physical" interactions with the people in the streets, market places, and cafés that the writers, musicians and performers of these media (re)calibrated with the subtleties, textures, and flavors of everyday Egyptian life. As Mikhail Bakhtin cautions in The Dialogic Imagination, we must not ignore the "social life of discourse outside the artist's study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages;" for it is in these public spheres that Egyptian mass culture is embodied into everyday life, acquiring its socio-economic, political relevance, and more importantly perhaps, its perceived authenticity, and contemporaneity (259). Indeed, access to any form of knowledge— be it visual, aural, tactile, gustatory or olfactory—is corporally mediated and is acquired through a living dialogical engagement. Or as Bakhtin elaborates in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, "the single adequate form to verbally expressing authentic human life is the open ended dialogue . . . In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life, with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, within his whole body and deeds" (293). In other words texts alone are meaningless when viewed in isolation of the socially embodied realities of their production, and more importantly perhaps, their reception on the street. It is in their interrelationship with social life that texts become meaningfully activated and authenticated as genuinely reflecting popular concerns and realities. As we have seen throughout this book, colloquial Egyptian culture is better equipped in engaging in this dialogue with the everyday, and hence guaranteeing its circulation and popularity.
(Ordinary Egyptians, p. 170-172)
Featured Image: View 042: Egypt – Street in Native Quarter, Cairo., n.d., T. H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician. 49 Nassau Street, New York. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9785).
Ziad Fahmy is an Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History at the department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Fahmy received his History Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Arizona, where his dissertation "Popularizing Egyptian Nationalism" was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award (2008) from the Middle East Studies Association. His first book, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011), examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Professor Fahmy is currently beginning another book project tentatively titled, Listening to the Nation: Sounds, Soundscapes, and Mass Culture in Interwar Egypt. In 2011-2012, he was a Faculty Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where the focal theme was "Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, and Politics."
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Tags: 1919 Revolution, A Social History of the Media, Banal Nationalism, Egypt, Egyptian popular culture, Media-Capitalism, Michael Billing, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ordinary Egyptians, Peter Burke, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Stanford University Press, The Dialogic Imagination, Ziad Fahmy
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