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Top Items:
USA Today:
Wii game system rolls out on Nov. 19 — The final pieces of this fall's video game battle fall into position today as Nintendo announces that its new Wii home system will sell for $250 — half the price of Sony's cheapest PlayStation 3 — and launch Nov. 19, two days after the PS3.
Discussion: Engadget, Gearlog and broadbandreports.com
Peter Rojas / Engadget: Live at Nintendo's NYC Wii press conference
Jennifer DeLeo / Gearlog: Wii to Ship on November 19
Seth Schiesel / Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Nintendo gets Wii ready for holidays — Company plans to put console on market Nov. 19 — In a move that may allow Nintendo of Japan to take advantage of stumbles by its main rival, the company plans to announce today that it will release its new Wii video-game console in North and South America …
Discussion: Gizmodo, Engadget, Kotaku, Joystiq, Neowin.net, Gear Live, Go Nintendo, DigitalBattle, Alice Hill's Real Tech News and Slashdot
Ryan Block / Engadget: Nintendo Wii: November 19th, $250
Kyle Orland / Joystiq: Nintendo Japan conference not-so-liveblogging [update 29]
Todd Tanner / Neowin.net: Nintendo Wii for 趚 USD on November 19th
Andru Edwards / Gear Live: Wii Launches November 19 For $250
RawmeatCowboy / Go Nintendo: NCL Wii event - Let's try this again
Armin Siljkovic / DigitalBattle: Wii Price And Launch Details For US [Update 1]
Wii Dated And Priced For North America — November 19th. $250. That's what North American gamers have been waiting to hear. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is running a New York Times story dated September 14th. There will be over more than 25 titles available for the Wii this year …
Discussion: Gizmodo, Joystiq, CrunchGear and VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Microsoft Hardware Brings to Light First Rechargeable Wireless and Backlit Desktop — New hardware desktops and mouse combine style and performance. — Microsoft Hardware is evolving and transforming the desktop computing experience with the industry's first wireless rechargeable and backlit desktop …
Discussion: Don Dodge on The Next …, Engadget, Gizmodo and InsideMicrosoft
Paul Miller / Engadget: Microsoft Hardware rains down fiery peripheral death
Nathan Weinberg / InsideMicrosoft: LOTS OF NEW MICROSOFT HARDWARE
Microsoft Expands Digital Communications Line With Notebook LifeCam …
Microsoft Expands Digital Communications Line With Notebook LifeCam …
Discussion: Webtown, MobileWhack.com, Gizmodo and LiveSide
Tropicaljantie / Webtown: New Windows Live hardware. …
Sandeep / MobileWhack.com: Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000
All Systems Go: Microsoft Hardware Is Ready for Windows Vista
All Systems Go: Microsoft Hardware Is Ready for Windows Vista
Carol Mangis / Gearlog: Microsoft Announces New Keyboards, Mice, Webcam
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Showtime: The Big Picture — Apple came into yesterday's "Showtime" special event with an awfully high set of expectations to meet. First, the entire show pretty much had to be about movies — adding major motion pictures to the iPod Music Store, providing them in a high-enough quality format …
Discussion: Scobleizer, VentureBeat, IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband, Mobility Site, Mark Evans, robhyndman.com and O'Reilly Radar
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: Is Apple copying Microsoft?
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat: Apple's fireworks: The iTV and other goodies
Russell Shaw / IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband: Steve Jobs, give me over-the-air downloads. Is that so hard?
Jack Cook / Mobility Site: Ahh...to speculate, it's a mind exercise!
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
Apple's iPod Success Won't Be Repeated With iTV
Apple's iPod Success Won't Be Repeated With iTV
Discussion: Mickeleh's Take, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Mark Evans and Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check
John Paczkowski / Good Morning Silicon Valley: The other in-house code name for it is FUDtv
Nina Shapiro / Seattle Weekly:
Coming Zune — Once again, Microsoft is chasing Apple in the hipster hardware game. Will it make sweet music this time? — "Wicked!" exclaims Richard Winn, as he stands on Seattle Center's Broad Street Lawn during Bumbershoot, expressing appreciation for the French band Nouvelle Vague.
Discussion: MSTechToday, Gizmodo, Engadget, 21talks, The J. Botter Weblog, paidContent.org, Scobleizer, PVR Wire, Lost Remote, The Digital Music Weblog and Coolfer
Sidebar Geek / MSTechToday: Zune Announcement soon?
Jeremy Botter / The J. Botter Weblog: Zune We Will Know — Yes, that's a cheesy post title, but cut me some slack.
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: Why I'm disappointed with Zune and latest iPods
Cory Bergman / Lost Remote: Microsoft to unveil Zune today
Grant Robertson / The Digital Music Weblog: Zune debut tomorrow
Nathan Weinberg / InsideMicrosoft:
Discussion: Urlocker On Disruption and Addicted to Digital Media
Your DisplayName here / Addicted to Digital Media: New Zune Teaser Video, Music
Intuit and Google Forge Alliance — Combines the Power of QuickBooks with Google's Reach to Help — Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU) and Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) announced today a strategic alliance designed to help millions of small businesses promote themselves online using a variety …
Mike Boland / The Kelsey Group Blog: Google and Intuit StepUp to the Plate
Anita Campbell / Small Business Trends: Google and Intuit Partner to Serve Small Businesses
Ionut Alex. Chitu / Google Operating System: Google Delivers Marketing Tools for QuickBooks
Dennis Howlett / AccMan: GOOGLE + INTUIT: NICE STARTERS, WHERE'S THE MAIN COURSE?
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Major Google/Intuit Partnership — Google and Intuit are announcing a partnership today at 1:15 pm California time. The meat of it seems to be that they are building Google services directly into Intuit's QuickBooks, so small business users will be able to list themselves on Google Maps …
Discussion: Search Engine Watch Blog, Newsome.Org, B2Day, rexblog, Download Squad, Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life, Scobleizer, Screenwerk, robhyndman.com and digg
Greg Sterling / Search Engine Watch Blog: Intuit & Google Announce Major Local Search Marketing Partnership
Erick Schonfeld / B2Day: The Google-Intuit Partnership: This Could Be Massive
Chris Gilmer / Download Squad: Google-Intuit QuickBooks partnership rumored
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: Google Press Center is useless
Greg Sterling / Screenwerk: Google and Intuit Announce Major SME/Local Search Partnership
Rob Hyndman / robhyndman.com: Another Mortal Blow to Yellow Pages
Fatmike / digg: Major Google/Intuit Partnership
Michael Geist / Michael Geist's Blog:
The Missing Sony Exhibit — The Canadian Sony rootkit class action settlement heads to court next week amid mounting questions about the deal. The EFF calls attention to a number of missing provisions, including no security reviews and no ongoing obligations to provide uninstallers for the rootkit.
Discussion: robhyndman.com and Boing Boing
Rob Hyndman / robhyndman.com: Three Strikes for Sony BMG Canada
Marguerite Reardon / CNET News.com:
News Corp.: Entertainment going mobile — LOS ANGELES—A day after his company bought a controlling stake in ring tone giant Jamba, News Corp.'s president and chief operating officer said the time for partnering with the mobile industry to distribute entertainment content is now.
Discussion: The Wireless Report
Katie Fehrenbacher / GigaOM:
News Corp To Mobile: You Need Us
News Corp To Mobile: You Need Us
Discussion: Open Gardens
Associated Press:
Princeton professor raises alarm over electronic voting, hacks test machine — TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel Wednesday to claims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnerable to hacking that could alter vote totals or disable machines.
Discussion: Techdirt
Mike / Techdirt:
Diebold Brushes Off Yet Another Damning Security Report
Diebold Brushes Off Yet Another Damning Security Report
Discussion: Computerworld Blogs blogs and avi-rubin.blogspot.com
Pete Cashmore / Mashable!:
Smartpox - Create and Share Mobile Codes — Smartpox, which is currently in beta, is a social site that allows users to share URLs, email addresses and phone numbers in the real world. The data is converted into a "smartpox code" (aka QR code) which can appear on posters, stickers, business cards and other real-world items.
Discussion: Lifehacker and Free Roaming
Phone Scoop:
HTC Libra To Support EVDO Rev. A — At the CTIA show in LA this week, a new Windows Mobile device from HTC was revealed and HTC executives confirmed several key details about the device. The phone, code-named Libra has both a traditional numeric keypad and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
Discussion: Engadget, jkOnTheRun, Pocket PC Thoughts, Daggle and Mobility Site
Kevin C. Tofel / jkOnTheRun: EV-DO Rev. A support for the HTC Libra
Darius Wey / Pocket PC Thoughts: UTStarcom Reveals PPC6800
Danny Sullivan / Daggle: Ah — HTC Libra Windows SmartPhone With Keypad & Keyboard!
John Hatfield / Mobility Site: Wow, this could be the perfect form factor!! HTC Libra.
Mark Glaser / pbs.org:
Associated Press, MSNBC Video to Support Macs, Firefox — There is nothing more frustrating for Macintosh users or those who use the Firefox browser than going to a video site and hitting a wall demanding Windows and the Internet Explorer browser. But when the Associated Press' Online Video Network …
Discussion: paidContent.org, Lost Remote and New Media Musings
Cory Bergman / Lost Remote: AP video player to support Macs, Firefox
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Podango Launches Public Beta — Podango, which we wrote about last month, went into public beta today, so anyone can access the site and, if they care to, apply to be a station director. — Podango aims to combine multiple podcasts, which may only be publishing weekly, into a 3-5 shows per day channel with a single RSS feed.
Discussion: BizPodcasting and Paul Colligan's …
Jon Watson / BizPodcasting: Podango Opens Up Public Beta
Mary Jo Foley / Microsoft Watch:
Final Public Office 2007 Test Build Due Thursday — Updated: Microsoft will post the Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (TR) bits for download by more than 3.5 million testers on September 14. The new build is primarily a bug-fix patch. — Microsoft plans to make the final public test build …
Discussion: Neowin.net, CyberNet Technology News, jkOnTheRun, Jensen Harris, TechBlog, MSTechToday and Microsoft News Tracker
Steven Parker / Neowin.net: Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh Today
Kevin C. Tofel / jkOnTheRun: Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh later today: OneNote updates included!
Sidebar Geek / MSTechToday: New Office 2007 Release Tomorrow
Katie Hafner / New York Times:
Philanthropy Google's Way: Not the Usual — The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming. — But unlike most charities …
Discussion: Blogging Stocks and Valleywag
Peter Cohan / Blogging Stocks: Google.org's brilliant strategy
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
Yahoo! Mail Beta Release - Exclusive Podcast With Ethan Diamond — Today Yahoo is releasing the new Ajax-powered version of Yahoo Mail to all users in the US and across 18 international markets. Previously Yahoo Mail Beta (as it is known) was only available to a relatively small group of people.
Discussion: Web 2.0 Explorer and InsideGoogle
Richard MacManus / Web 2.0 Explorer: Yahoo Mail Beta released - new Ajax features
Nathan Weinberg / InsideGoogle: NEW YAHOO MAIL RELEASED


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Trollbeads – Create your own unique bracelet with Free Shipping!
The story about the original and unique Trollbeads all started in Denmark in 1976. The first bead, which later gave name to the Trollbeads collection, was a small bead decorated with no less than 6 faces. It was designed by Søren Silversmith and sold from his father Svend's jewellery shop in central Copenhagen. The beads were created at a time where it was fashionable to have a silver bead hanging on a leather thong around the neck. But instead of letting the bead hang in an eyelet, Søren wanted to let the leather cord go through the bead. Later on, Søren's sister, Lise, began to put the beads on silver bracelets, one on each bracelet.
Lise opened another jewellery store and one day a customer asked to have an extra bead put on her bracelet. The storekeeper was surprised but followed the customer's wish. From then on, the adventure and Trollbeads movement started. In cooperation with the customers and according to their wishes, the collection grew. This was the invention and the beginning of an original jewellery concept that today is enjoyed worldwide.
Get started with Trollbeads by collecting a bracelet that fits your style, memories and personality. Let your Trollbeads tell the best or most meaningful stories of your life.

subset: commoncrawl


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Tag Archives: vapelounge
Dangers Of Vaping Centered On Bad Products
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A five-year, first-in-Canada study, led by McGill cardiologist Dr. Mark Eisenberg, is exploring whether vaping really is the magic ticket to finally breathing free and easy.
By James Martin
Although the holidays may seem like a distant memory, statistically speaking, most of us are still sticking with our New Year's resolutions. (For now. Let's not talk about how many of us last until July.) For many, that means quitting smoking — and they're hoping that electronic cigarettes will help. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly half of all American smokers have tried e-cigarettes to help them kick the habit. But Dr. Mark Eisenberg wants to know: Is vaping really the magic ticket to breathing free and easy?
Dr. Eisenberg is passionate about getting people to butt out. He gives a lot of smoking cessation talks — just last month, he spoke at the Jewish General Hospital, where he is staff cardiologist — and has noticed that, invariably, reformed smokers come up to him afterward to sing the praises of e-cigarettes, those increasingly popular handheld battery-operated vaporizers that mimic conventional cigarettes.
"They say, 'I smoked for decades and I've tried everything — nicotine gum, patches, Zyban, Champix — and I couldn't stop. Then I picked up an e-cigarette and I never smoked again,'" recalls Eisenberg, who is also a professor in McGill's Faculty of Medicine and director of the Joint MD/PhD program. "Anecdotally, we have many, many cases like this."
What doctors don't have, however, is hard data to back it up. That's why, this month Eisenberg will start a five-year clinical trial to look at how effective e-cigarettes are at aiding smoking cessation. It's not just smokers and physicians who are interested in such clarity — so are lawmakers. Under Canada's Food and Drug Act, e-cigarettes containing nicotine cannot be imported, advertised or sold without Health Canada's approval; nicotine-free e-cigarettes are not restricted. Although Health Canada has yet to grant such approval, nicotine-loaded e-cigarettes are nevertheless widely and openly available in Canada.
The study, which is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), will follow 486 outpatient smokers at 19 sites across Canada. The smokers will be randomized into three groups. One group will be given e-cigarettes that contain nicotine and counselling. The second group will receive e-cigarettes that do not contain nicotine, and counselling. The third group will only receive counselling. The researchers will supply the smokers with e-cigarettes for 12 weeks, and then follow up with them after six months and a year, observing whether they graduate to total non-smoking, continue with the e-cigarettes, or return to conventional cigarettes. Although some reformed smokers may fall off the wagon after a smoke-free year, Eisenberg clarifies that "statistically significant results at 12 months would still be important evidence" for the efficacy of e-cigarettes as a cessation aid. All 486 patients will not be enrolled simultaneously, with the study expected to roll out over the course of five years.
"The ultimate goal is to use the e-cigarette as a transitional tool in going from smoking conventional cigarettes to not smoking at all," says Eisenberg. He notes that, at least in the early stages, e-cigarettes are about "transferring the addiction. You're getting people onto something else that is giving them their nicotine, so they may never quit. E-cigarettes also provide other physical and social aspects because they feel like a cigarette; a pack-a-day smoker makes that hand-to-mouth motion more than 70,000 times a year, for example. That's a difficult thing to break away from, and a nicotine patch doesn't provide it.
"We have great hopes that e-cigarettes will be helpful for people trying to quit smoking," he adds. "Even if they just switch to smoking e-cigarettes that would be better than continuing to smoke conventional cigarettes for decades. I'm not saying that e-cigarettes are safe, but they're much safer than conventional cigarettes. They're not going to give you lung cancer. They're not going to give you heart disease. They're not going to give you emphysema.
"But what we're really hoping for is that e-cigarettes lead people to not smoking altogether."
(This particular study, Eisenberg notes, is not designed to investigate safety concerns, such as whether e-cigarette vapour contains trace elements of harmful substances. Other than their smoking habits, the trial's participants are healthy, he explains, "so the chances that they'd have adverse effects over a short time like the course of one year are quite low." The researchers will, however, track whether the smokers are hospitalized for any cardiopulmonary issues. They will also gather data about benign side effects, such as throat irritation.)
E-cigarettes are already big business, ringing up an estimated $500-plus million in sales in the U.S. alone — and that's without being able to make any claims about helping smokers kick their habits. Eisenberg says that the e-cigarette industry itself isn't clamouring to make such claims: "They don't want to be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration [in the U.S.] and Health Canada, so they don't want to support clinical trials," he says. "And they don't need to: Smokers are voting with their feet by buying e-cigarettes to help them quit smoking." Governments, however, want more than anecdotal evidence.
"This study alone would not be enough for Health Canada to allow companies to market e-cigarettes as smoking cessation aids," explains Eisenberg. "That said, if this trial shows that there is a substantial reduction in smoking traditional cigarettes, then Health Canada will have to rethink their policy.
"This is just a first step. Then we would need multiple big trials in multiple populations. We would need to use tapering [of nicotine levels] studies, and we would need to use interventions that are longer than 12 weeks. But the fact is that smoking is still the single most reversible cause of mortality in Canada — so it's an important first step."
Posted on Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Do e-cigarettes make it harder to stop smoking?
People trying to give up smoking often use e-cigarettes to help wean themselves off tobacco. Most experts think they are safer than cigarettes but a surprising paper was published recently – it suggests that people who use e-cigarettes are less successful at giving up smoking than those who don't.
"E-cigarettes WON'T help you quit," reported the Daily Mail. "Smokers using vapers are '28% less likely to ditch traditional cigarettes,'" read the paper's headline.
The story was reported on many other websites around the world, including CBS: "Study: E-cigarettes don't help smokers quit," it said.
The study causing the fuss was written by researchers at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, and published in one of the Lancet's sister journals, Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
It is a meta-analysis, which means the authors reviewed the academic literature already available on the topic. They sifted out the weaker papers – ones that didn't have control groups, for example – and were left with 20.
The conclusion? Smokers who use e-cigarettes have a 28% lower chance of quitting than smokers who don't use them, according to Prof Stanton Glantz, one of the authors.
But while the conclusion is surprising, so is the number of academics who have criticised the paper.
One was Ann McNeill, professor of tobacco addiction at Kings College London, whose own research is included in Glantz's analysis.
"This review is not scientific," she wrote on theScience Media Centre website.
"The information… about two studies that I co-authored is either inaccurate or misleading… I believe the findings should therefore be dismissed.
"I am concerned at the huge damage this publication may have – many more smokers may continue smoking and die if they take from this piece of work that all evidence suggests e-cigarettes do not help you quit smoking; that is not the case."
Prof Peter Hajek, director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at the Wolfson Institute also called the findings "grossly misleading".
The critics are making three main points. First, the definition of e-cigarettes is a bit loose. There are many different types – some look like cigarettes, others have tanks for the vaping liquid, some are disposable and other are multi-use. They all deliver different doses of nicotine. Many of the papers included in the analysis don't specify which type people are using, according to Linda Bauld, professor of health policy at the University of Stirling.
Another point is that the studies vary in the way they measure how often people use e-cigarettes. "Some only assessed whether a person had ever tried an e-cigarette or if they had tried one recently, not whether they were using it regularly or frequently," Bauld says.
Even the paper's author admits it's possible that in some of the studies e-cigarettes may only have been used once, which he says would not be a good predictor of whether they had affected people's ability to stop smoking.
And there is another problem. You might expect, if you were going to draw conclusions about how useful e-cigarettes are in helping people quit, to focus on studies looking at people who are trying to give up.
Prof Robert West, who heads a team at University College London researching ways to help people stop smoking, says this analysis mashed together some very different studies – only some of which include people using e-cigarettes to help them quit.
"To mix them in with studies where you've got people using an e-cigarette and are not particularly trying to stop smoking is mixing apples and oranges," he says.
Some of the studies track smokers who use e-cigarettes for other reasons – perhaps because smoking a cigarette in a bar or an office is illegal and they want a nicotine hit.
"With the studies where people are using electronic cigarettes specifically in a quit attempt the evidence is consistent," says West, referring to two randomised control trials.
Both are quite small and one was funded by the e-cigarette industry. They took two groups of smokers, and gave one real e-cigarettes, and the other a placebo. The studies reach a broadly similar conclusion to a large, real-world study called the Smoking Toolkit run by West.
West's investigation follows people in their daily lives and assesses how successful various methods of giving up smoking are – this includes nicotine patches, medicines and going cold turkey.
These studies suggest that people using e-cigarettes to help them quit are 50% to 100% more successful than those who use no aids at all.
In his paper, Glantz acknowledges there are limitations to the research that he analysed. He agrees there are problems with the way the use of e-cigarettes is measured and accepts it's not clear which devices people are using. But he is sticking by his analysis because he believes he has taken these factors into account.
The editor of Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Emma Grainger, defends the article too. She says she does not see a problem with the paper and that it has been through the normal peer-review process.
VapeCon International Expo in Riverside, CA (VC Official Recap)
Vape Capitol's Official Recap of VapeCon International in Riverside , CA.
Headlines about e-cigarettes don't mean they're 'not safer than tobacco'
If your New Year's resolution was to stop smoking, and you were looking for support to help you quit, then recent headlines suggesting e-cigarettes 'aren't any safer than tobacco' might have raised an eyebrow or two.
Since Christmas, we've seen three sets of critical headlines about e-cigarettes, each looking at a different aspect of a device now used by millions across the UK.
But how accurately do these stories reflect the scientific evidence? What do we really know about how safe e-cigarettes are? Can they really help you quit? And do candy flavours attract kids?
If you were to go on the media reports alone, you'd be forgiven for being alarmed.
But as is so often the case in the reporting of science and risk, taking a deeper look behind the headlines reveals a very different story.
Just because they're not "safe" doesn't mean they aren't "safer"
The first study to make the headlines suggested that e-cigarettes were 'as harmful as tobacco'. After studying cells in the lab, the researchers found some indications of increased levels of DNA damage and cell death in those treated with e-cigarette vapour.
This led one of the researchers to tell the media, "I believe [e-cigarettes] are no better than smoking regular cigarettes." (More on this statement below).
The most important thing to remember here is that this was a study looking at the effect of chemicals on cells in a lab. Although this can be useful, it obviously can't give a clear idea of what the impact would actually be in your body. So any claims of impact on health based only on lab studies will always be far-fetched.
The study also looked at an extremely high concentration of vapour. As the researchers admitted at the time, "it was similar to someone smoking continuously for hours on end, so it's a higher amount than would normally be delivered."
It boils down to this: the study showed that it might be worse for your cells to be exposed to e-cigarette vapour than the air in a lab. So e-cigarettes might not be 100 per cent harm free. Andprevious studies have shown there may be some dangerous chemicals present in vapour – so this isn't a surprise. And there's little in life that really is 'safe' – even drinking too much water can kill you.
But here's the big caveat. The researchers also treated some cells with tobacco smoke. These died within 24 hours. Those treated with e-cigarette vapour were still alive to experiment on 8 weeks later.
So, contrary to the headlines, this study actually suggests that using e-cigarettes may be far less dangerous than smoking.
You'd never believe that from the headlines though.
There were a few great critiques published shortly afterwards, (notably this one in the Guardian) and the press release was amended (more than a week later) to include the following correction:.
Contrary to what was stated or implied in much of the news coverage resulting from this news release, the lab experiments did not find that e-cigarette vapor was as harmful to cells as cigarette smoke. In fact, one phase of the experiments, not addressed in the news release, found that cigarette smoke did in fact kill cells at a much faster rate. However, because similar cell-damage mechanisms were observed as the result of both e-vapor and regular cigarette smoke, Dr. Wang-Rodriguez asserts, based on the evidence from the study, that e-cigarettes are not necessarily a healthier alternative to smoking regular cigarettes. As stated in the journal paper and the news release, further research is needed to better understand the actual long-term health effects of e-cigarettes in humans.
But we're concerned that, as far as public perception goes, the damage may already have been done.
How can you tell if something helps people quit?
So the scientific evidence on e-cigarette vapour to date suggests it's far safer than tobacco smoke.
But can e-cigarettes actually help you quit?
Here we come across the second set of unfortunate stories, after a systematic evidence review and meta-analysis published last week claimed that those using e-cigarettes seemed to be less likely to quit smoking than those not using the devices.
But, again, there are a number of serious problems with the review.
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are usually extremely useful, because they pull together all the evidence in one area, to paint a fuller picture than one study alone.
However the relationship between this picture and reality depends entirely on the quality and relevance of the original studies that are included. In this case, since there haven't been many high-quality trials exploring whether e-cigarettes help people quit smoking, the researchers included a range of different types of studies.
The gold standard of evidence is the randomised control trial, which, in this case, would compare a group of smokers trying to quit using a nicotine-containing e-cigarette, to a similar group using nothing (or an e-cigarette without nicotine). But here's the problem – there have only been two published studies like that.
A 2014 meta-analysis of these found people using nicotine via an e-cigarette were more likely to successfully quit than those using e-cigarettes without nicotine.
Last week's review included both of these randomised trials alongside a range of other 'real-world' non-trial studies of e-cigarette use. This is a big problem. Whatever their strengths individually, these studies didn't use consistent measurements – neither of e-cigarette use, nor of whether people had actually quit – so the studies aren't necessarily comparable. And so including them together in a meta-analysis is questionable, at best.
Even so, when the analysis only included studies where people were actively trying to quit (as opposed to using e-cigarettes for other reasons) the results became inconclusive – people who said they'd 'ever' used an e-cigarette weren't any more or less likely to succeed.
Furthermore, some of the studies included only looked at current smokers and asked about e-cigarette use. This would exclude anyone who had used an e-cigarette but successfully stopped smoking.
Quitting smoking can be incredibly hard. Someone trying an e-cigarette once probably wouldn't have any better chance than if they hadn't. Whatever support aid is used it would need to be as part of a concerted quit attempt and used enough to deliver sufficient nicotine to wean yourself off tobacco, and preferably alongside specialist support from a Stop Smoking Service to get the best possible chance of quitting.
E-cigarettes aren't a magic bullet, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be a useful weapon in our arsenal against tobacco. The evidence for quitters using these products both within the Stop Smoking Services and without points towards this being the case in the UK.
The impact of advertising and flavours on kids
Whether or not they're 'safe', or help people quit, another big concern about e-cigarettes is that they could encourage children to start smoking – either by exposing them to nicotine (the 'gateway' argument) or by making smoking seem more normal again (the 'renormalisation' argument).
The first of these arguments isn't supported by the evidence to date: surveys across the UK last year found that young people who hadn't smoked weren't using e-cigarettes.
But a small study published this week found young people rated printed adverts with flavoured e-cigarettes more appealing than those without flavours, leading to headlines suggesting children are being lured in with sweet flavours.
But when you dig into the detail, again it's a more complex picture – the young people in this study, including those who saw the flavoured e-cigarette adverts, had negative views about e-cigarettes, and said they didn't intend to buy them. And, perhaps more importantly, it didn't find any evidence that e-cigarette adverts increase the appeal of regular cigarettes.
There are now measures in place to protect young people (e-cigarettes cannot be sold to under 18s, and further legislation heavily restricting advertising will come into force in May) but it's still important to continue looking at how e-cigarette adverts might appeal to children, and to track use of both e-cigarettes and tobacco cigarettes to make sure there isn't a negative impact from these products.
However, Linda Bauld, Professor of Health Policy at the University of Stirling (and our Cancer Prevention Champion), said the study "should provide some reassurance to those who say that e-cigarette advertising will result in a new generation of tobacco smokers."
Where does this leave us?
When you look at the bigger picture, rather than the headlines, the evidence so far actually points towards a positive role for e-cigarettes in helping combat the biggest preventable cause of cancer. However none of the questions posed here – on safety, effectiveness and impact on children – have full answers.
As we've said before we need years of good quality science before we can definitively answer these questions, and at Cancer Research UK we are working towards that. But for now the evidence we have suggests e-cigarettes are far safer than smoking tobacco, they might help you quit and non-smoking children aren't being lured into using them regularly.
While the evidence on e-cigarettes continues to accumulate, and the media controversy rages on, if you're looking for evidence-based inspiration to quit smoking in 2016, speak to your GP or localStop Smoking Service, or check out our website… but maybe keep reading the headlines with an appropriate dose of scepticism.
Nikki Smith is a senior health information officer at Cancer Research UK
You Are Being Lied To – A Billion Lives
The truth is coming. Get updates at http://ABillionLives.com
Another View: Taxing e-cigarettes will backfire on public health
California is on the wrong path if it moves forward with a regressive "sin" tax on vapor products, as supported by The Sacramento Bee's editorial board ("Another shot at e-cigarettes," Jan. 24).
The end result will only lead adults back to smoking cigarettes or force them to purchase products out of state or on the black market. The sad truth is that California received $1.52 billion in tobacco excise taxes and settlements in 2014, but only used 4.3 percent on prevention and cessation programs.
The statewide referendum to equate and tax vapor products like tobacco also is fundamentally flawedbecause it misleads voters by falsely implying that the harmful health effects of tobacco are similar to vapor products. Using students to politicize this debate is disingenuous.
Research shows that vapor products are less harmful alternatives to smoking, which accounts for 37,000 deaths and $18 billion in economic and health care costs each year in California.
Citing false data contributes to the misunderstanding of vapor products as effective replacements to smoking. The University of California, San Francisco, used faulty metadata to draw its conclusions on cessation and vapor products. A cadre of leading scientists called UCSF's data "unscientific" and "incorrect."
Another example of misrepresenting scientific data was the editorial's reference to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics about teens and a "gateway effect." The study's authors cannot conclude that the use of vapor products directly leads to smoking. The same goes for advertising. Time and again these studies get widely reported without any due diligence, further adding to confusion.
The vapor industry – which primarily consists of independent manufacturers, suppliers and vape shops, and not Big Tobacco – continues to lobby for sensible regulations at the state and federal levels, including banning sales to minors and adopting child-resistant packaging.
Rather than tax consumers looking for a solution to smoking, the debate needs to focus on getting the 4 million adult smokers in California to switch to vaping.
Cynthia Cabrera is president of the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association. She can be contacted at firstname.lastname@example.com.
By Phil Kerpen
After a lengthy and heavily contested regulatory process, a final rule deeming vapor products to be subject to pervasive FDA regulation is currently in the White House Office of Management and Budget for a final review before it is published and takes effect this year. Leaks of the purported final rule suggest it remains deeply flawed and will impose a draconian, one-size-fits-all model that risks disrupting the fast-growing vapor industry and denying access to products that pose vastly less health danger than conventional tobacco cigarettes. Unfortunately, in the final negotiations over last year's omnibus bill a provision addressing this issue was dropped, but that should not be the last word on the issue from Congress.
Mitch Zeller, the FDA's top tobacco regulator, told Congress "If we could get all of those people [who smoke] to completely switch all of their cigarettes to noncombustible cigarettes, it would be good for public health."
Indeed, vapor products are displacing regular cigarettes. The most recent data from the CDC show the percentage of the adult population that smokes has dropped six consecutive years, from 20.6 percent in 2009 to 14.9 percent in the first half of 2015. An estimated two million ex-smokers are using vapor products.
So we're on the right track, and Zeller warned: "Let's not lose our focus on what the primary cause is for those 480,000 avoidable deaths each year—it's primarily burning, combusting cigarettes."
Unfortunately, his agency is poised to do precisely that with its deeming rule.
"This is not really regulation. It's prohibition," says Boston University community health sciences professor Dr. Michael Siegel.
He's referring to a feature of the rule that sets a grandfather date of February 15, 2007 – effectively denying grandfather status to nearly every vapor product on the market and forcing each to go through a lengthy approval process or be pulled from the market within 24 months.
That date and timeline were established by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, passed by Congress in 2009 – and it grandfathered all but the very newest cigarette products. By now deeming vapor products subject to regulation seven years later, the FDA is subjecting these safer products to more draconian regulation.
Jan Verleur, co-founder and CEO of VMR Products, a major manufacturer of vapor devices, said: "It's essentially a death sentence for industry. It could be held up in litigation for many years."
That's only slight hyperbole.
Once the rule is final, manufacturers would be required to submit to the FDA, for each product, a Premarket Tobacco Application (PMTA) or a Substantial Equivalence (SE) report. The PMTA process is complex and expensive and would be challenging for all but the largest manufacturers – the major tobacco companies – to navigate. The SE choice depends upon showing that a predicate product is already approved, but vapor technology is new and rapidly evolving, ruling this option out. The investment driving that innovation would be chilled by time and expense of submitting every product for regulatory approval – and the agency already has a substantial backlog.
The solutions are simple but will require Congress to act quickly, because the rule currently sits at OMB and could be published any day. On the next appropriate must pass vehicle Congress should include language that either delays the rule completely or fixes its most egregious flaws – the imposition of an inappropriate grandfather date and an insufficient approval period. Failure to do so will result in regulating vapor more strictly than cigarettes, destroying thousands of small businesses, and, tragically, likely increasing tobacco-related sickness and death.


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IF YOU LIKE A CERTAIN BLOG POST, PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD A LINK TO IT OR, SHARE or TAG IT (not just "Like" it) ON FACEBOOK. Performers can use the extra exposure to draw potential audience members to an event.
By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post:
The 16th annual Wisconsin Flute Festival will be held on this coming Saturday, April 6, at the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Wisconsin Flute Festival brings together flutists and music lovers of all ages from Wisconsin, the greater Midwest, and across the country, for an engaging and educational day celebrating everything flute.
The festival includes: workshops; lectures; performances; junior, youth, and collegiate artist competitions; master classes and an extensive exhibit hall.
This year's festival will feature guest artist Bonita Boyd (below in a photo by Kate Lemmon), an internationally renowned performer and Professor of Flute at the Eastman School of Music. (You can hear a sample of her teaching in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
The festival will begin at 8 a.m. at the Pyle Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will culminate in a FREE 90-minute public concert beginning at 5:30 p.m. in Music Hall, at the bottom of Bascom Hill and a short walk from the Pyle Center.
The free evening concert will be performed by featured guest artist Bonita Boyd with Madison guitarist Christopher Allen (below).
Workshop topics will include yoga for flutists, orchestral audition preparation, recording techniques, a repair clinic, piccolo techniques, and more.
Participants will also have the opportunity to participate in an interactive session with low flutes including; alto flutes, bass flutes, and a contrabass flute, and take part in two flute choir reading sessions.
Performances during the day will feature an eclectic mix of music performed by professional and student flutists.
Festival attendees will hear music by composers from around the globe and from a variety of periods. Compositions by living composers will feature prominently in many of the recitals at the festival. Solo flute, flute and piano, flute quartet, and flute with mixed ensemble can be heard.
For flutists shopping for an instrument, music or accessories, companies from across the U.S. will be on-site in the Festival's exhibit hall. Technicians will be also available to evaluate instruments and conduct minor repairs. Confirmed exhibitors include Burkart Flutes and Piccolos, Flute Specialists, Inc., Flute World, the Geoghegan Company, Heid Music and Verne Q. Powell Flutes.
Tickets range from $30 to $40 for festival participants. Tickets for non-flutist family members of participants (parents, siblings, etc.) are available for at a special rate of $7. Registration is now open and information is available online at https://wisconsinflutefestival.org. Tickets can also be purchased at the festival.
The evening concert, beginning at 5:30 p.m., will be held in Music Hall at the UW-Madison and is FREE and open to the public.
The program will include Mountain Songs by Robert Beaser, Histoire du Tango by Astor Piazzolla, Canyon Echoes by Katherine Hoover, Entr'acte by Jacques Ibert and Pièce en form de Habenera by Maurice Ravel.
The 2019 Flute Festival – which is a program of the Madison Flute Club — is sponsored by Heid Music. Major funding is provided by Verne Q. Powell Flutes, American Printing, Eric and Tobi Breisach, Distillery Marketing and Design, and Karl Sandelin – in memory of Joyce Sandelin.
Additional funding is provided by Audio for the Arts, Breisach Cordell PLLC, Dr. Danielle and Jeffrey Breisach, Madison Classical Guitar Society, Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras, and Jessica and Jim Yehle.
The Madison Flute Club was founded in 2002 and currently presents over 20 concerts each year to an audience of more than 1,500 community members. The club involves, on average, 35 active adult members and over 30 youth from the surrounding area.
To advance and achieve its mission, the Madison Flute Club has undertaken several large projects and partnered with numerous organizations and events in Dane County. These projects include the commissioning and world premiere of a work for flute choir for Design MMoCA, successfully fundraising for a contrabass flute — the first such instrument in Wisconsin — and performing at the National Flute Association Convention.
Madison Flute Club ensembles and members have been featured on Wisconsin Public Radio's The Midday with Norman Gilliland, on WORT 89.9 FM in Madison and in the publication The Flutist Quarterly.
For more information about the Madison Flute Club, go to: http://www.madisonfluteclub.org


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For further information on SCADAs, please see the following Global Geopolitics entries that were ahead of the curve:
- Security backdoor found in China-made US military chip
- UPDATE 3: U.S. probes cyber attack on water system
"Red Dragon Rising: Communist China's Military Threat to America" from 1999 is a highly recommended read. The United States is in more vulnerable than most people know, and longer than most people would have thought.
Cyberspies linked to China's military targeted nearly two dozen US natural gas pipeline operators over a recent six-month period, stealing information that could be used to sabotage US gas pipelines, according to a restricted US government report and a source familiar with the government investigation.
From December 2011 through June 2012, cyberspies targeted 23 gas pipeline companies with e-mails crafted to deceive key personnel into clicking on malicious links or file attachments that let the attackers slip into company networks, says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report.
The report does not mention China, but the digital signatures of the attacks have been identified by independent cybersecurity researchers as belonging to a particular espionage group recently linked to China's military.
The confluence of these factors – along with the sensitive operational and technical details that were stolen – make the cyberbreaches perhaps among the most serious so far, some experts say. The stolen information could give an adversary all the insider knowledge necessary to blow up not just a few compressor stations but perhaps many of them simultaneously, effectively holding the nation's gas infrastructure hostage. Nearly 30 percent of the nation's power grid now relies on natural gas generation.
"This theft of key information is about hearing the footsteps get closer and closer," says William Rush, a retired scientist formerly with the Gas Technology Institute who chaired the effort to create a cybersecurity standard applicable to the gas pipeline industry.
"Anyone can blow up a gas pipeline with dynamite. But with this stolen information, if I wanted to blow up not one, but 1,000 compressor stations, I could," he adds. "I could put the attack vectors in place, let them sit there for years, and set them all off at the same time. I don't have to worry about getting people physically in place to do the job, I just pull the trigger with one mouse click." Continue reading


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Tuesday as I sat, in disbelief, watching the results from the Wisconsin recall election I began to wonder. I wondered why in the world, given what is known about Gov. Walker and his cohorts on the right, would anyone not in the 1%, ever vote to support this man and his policies. I then remembered a post I came across in March of 2011, and I thought, maybe this will help explain it.
Author Al Stefanelli re-posted a comment that was referred to him and, well, I'll just let you read it:
Al Stefanelli
About People Who Vote Against Their Own Interests.
"You should read "What's the Matter with Kansas" & "Deer Hunting With Jesus". Both are great takes on a working class, anti-intellectual, redneck culture that has been convinced to consistently vote against their own best interests. I listen to my own father, who has been the victim of layoffs from corporate merger after merger, who's had his retirement fucked, who's lost money on wall street – he's done everything he was 'supposed' to do. He joined the military, went to college, had 2 kids, bought the house, invested & saved his money, worked his fucking ass off all his life & he still has squat to show for it. Now as a man well into his 60s he's feeling the wrath of age discrimination, he's finding his skills becoming outdated & his pay & benefits today (for the last 10 years) are lower than what they've been in the last 30 for him. Living the american life he finds his health failing as he's a lifetime smoker with a growing waistline.
He's the prototypical uncultured, red-blooded american male. He slathers his streak in ketchup, votes conservatives down the line, and wants the good old days before the women, blacks and fags took over. He's a flag waver, supports his troops, and fends for himself. He's always bitching about how much money corporations have to spend bc of regulation & about how the upper class need a tax cut. Nothing in the world makes him angrier than "socialism" & the so-called welfare state. Working people getting needed services bothers him tremendously because a few extreme token examples get painted as degenerate leeches by the likes of AM Radio & Fox News. ANd then he'll turn right around & support corporate subsidy for just about anything from corn to oil – b/c it "stimulates jobs" and it "trickles down".
He refuses to recognize that we as a nation spend more money at the beckoning of corporate America than we even begin to touch what we spend on our own citizenry through what he claims is "welfare" or infrastructure. He's a working class guy who's been fucked by the system all his life. He still puts his suit on with a kind of sad pride, every day, & goes to work downtown to phone-monkey job nowadays. He's doing a job any body could do but he likes to pretend all his education & experience has gotten him somewhere. He's deluded about what America's exceptional way of life has brought him personally as he is deluded about what the world is like at large. So he denies global warming, blames the unions, blames teachers & other government workers, blames regulation, blames the EPA & the FDA, blames those struggling to make it in this world, blames the blacks, blames the immigrants, blames everyone & anyone but those at the top.
He'd rather blame fellow working people trying to grab a piece of the pie, rather than blame the crooks who deprive us all. Because somehow – be it by gender identity, racial identity, national identity, he thinks his class, his type belongs at the top. He's the top dog! But he's not. He's a nigger, i'm a nigger, muslims are niggers and mexicans are niggers, teachers and steel workers, and farmers too. To people like the Koch Brothers, we're all niggers and my dad can't see that. This is an us vs them game and people like my father are fucking deluded as to what side they're on or can be on one day. Somewhere deep down inside, he admires those at the top – he wants to be them & even though he knows he'll never be one of them, he likes to pretend.
He goes to his Applebee's, Red Lobster & Outback & bitches about all the blacks there. I think this is important to note – it's indicative of his whole perspective. He is the same CLASS of people as these folks, he's spending roughly the same amount on dinner as them, but thinks things are going to hell because they are there. He doesn't get that he IS THEM. He's the same fucking class, in the same fucking boat. He's got relatively the same education level, roughly the same pay checks, living roughly the same way of life. But he's been convinced to fight, to hate, to dislike his own class of people & to admire & defend the class that basically owns & controls his life & all our lives. He has been perfectly trained to rail against the 'other'.
Against feminists, environmentalists, labor movements, racial minorities, immigrants, public sector workers, union members. These people aren't HIS brothers & sisters – they are his enemy. He's so busy hating "otherness" that he doesn't realize he is them – and we're all getting fucked by the same small group of people at the top. This is the same thing as him blaming unions & the welfare state. He has been indoctrinated through the years to fight amongst, to disagree with, to blame, & sometimes to outright hate people in the same boat as him. Not only kiss the ass of, but actively defend & fight on behalf of those who would take everything away from him, his wife & his family if they could make a buck on it – because he believes in an American dream & a way of life that simply doesn't exist. He talks of freedom of those who have all the capital, but he doesn't worry about his own freedom. He doesn't worry about the freedom of his neighbors.
All he see's as those liberal that take away rich people's money are the same people telling him where he can & cannot smoke and that he should put his seatbelt on – so liberals must "hate freedom!". Those damned reading elitist liberal communists! He has been convinced, as have many Americans – to hate their own & to defend their masters. To squabble over our petty & even cosmetic differences, rather than to unite on our common interests to fight for proper pay, benefits, rights as a consumer & as a worker, & for a clean environment. This is what happens when you have a class of people who were never taught to think for themselves, who act like reading is for fags, who are more willing to listen to hot heads like Beck & Limbaugh than to read any kind of political theorists, scientists, or economists.
This is what happens when you close your mind & you become one who's always looking for that "other" to hate & to blame for your problems rather than to look at yourself or open your eyes to the bigger picture. People like my dad are willing to accept AM radio, Fox News talk shows, & even Fwd chain emails as official sources, & then single-handedly ignore any material the talking heads on these shows didn't point him to. Because you can't trust anyone but them! The ability to critically think, verify, discern the credibility of sources, to do the damned research yourself, is completely lost on these folks. That's what these fucking Tea Party & GOP talking heads hope for. They hope to god that their lies they spew get echoed in the public sphere so often that it becomes reality. That people are too dumb or too lazy to verify what they spout.
This makes it so that people who are trying to get real shit done have to waste our time correcting mis-truths & disinformation just to garnish the slightest bit of public support to make progress anywhere. People don't realize how dangerous this shit is. Right now the economy is & had been in the shitter. People are scared. People have lost their jobs & they're angry. They have organized & mobilized into this populist "tea party". They even think it's a real grassroots org & dismissing the fact that they're being led by billionaires & a corporate media. These are the angry masses that will eat up any scapegoat that their "leaders" feed them.
We've seen this in history before. I'm not trying to evoke Godwins Law or anything but i see a lot of correlations between the right-wing disenfranchised populist uprising here in America & a lot of what people experience in Wiemar Germany. There was a lot of angry people, scared about the loss of their jobs & an economy in bad shape. Those angry, uneducated people were looking for someone to blame. They didn't care if they sided with a political party that would be responsible for fucking them over & destroying their democracy, not to mention the massive harm they would do to other groups. No, all that mattered was they found leaders who pretended to have answers. People like quick & simple answers & fixes, certainty & shared anger.
That's what the Nazi Party gave them. That's what the Tea Party/Fox News/AM Radio & portions of the GOP are giving this right wing uprising too. Anything intellectual is ignored or met with disinformation & a general air an superior anti-intellectualism. Everywhere I go: home to my parents, at work in the break room, flip on the tv, browse the internet – i see the same message: "My opinion is better than your facts". This approach is rooted deeply in ignorance & anger most of the time. When the populace stops listening to those with brains & ignores factual information, & opts for those that shout opinions, we got a problem. The Tea Party would be an extremely powerful force if they had a politician that was worth a damn. Every time they have someone who is charismatic, they're an obvious idiot or crook.
If somebody comes along who is charismatic & honest the US is in trouble bc of the frustration, disillusionment, justified anger & the absence of any coherent response from liberals. What are people supposed to think if someone says 'I have got an answer, we have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants from Mexico, the Muslims, teachers, unions, Planned Parenthood, NPR, & blacks (you can toss in atheists, homosexuals & liberals too). We will be told that WASPy private sector males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves & the honor of the nation. instead of fixing problems that truly affect the all of the working class, the nation will be convinced to support legislation that will further protect & consolidate power for the corporate elite.
All those privacy rights, the voice we have in our government, & due process checks & balances that protect us all? Those things just get in the way of security & stability. The right-wing that supports these parties & leaders get hurt too, just in a more subtle way – they give away their rights & are too stupid to realize what they've done to themselves."
You can find this post and the comments (must read) at this site:


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Was Admiral Byrd telling the world that vast unexplored territory as large as America (roughly 2,427 miles) is on the other side of the south pole?
Also, was Byrd referencing some region in the middle of North America, or the Middle America Trench (a submarine depression in the Pacific Ocean off the western coast of Central America)?
The major point for me is that land is unexplored and Admiral Byrd did not say it was merely more ice!


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Seen on YahooNews.com and written by John Marshall
Obstacle course runners start on their feet, but eventually end up on their stomachs, sides, even backs at they clamber through mud, over shipping containers, across netting made of mangled ropes.
The most mentally strong will choose courses where they have to jump off large platforms into water, run across fire, even crawl through water as live wires zap them from above.
Sound like fun?
OK, burning and shocking may not be for everyone, but not allobstacle course races are that intense.
Most are filled with obstacles that are challenging but not painful, providing a good test of strength, stamina and mental toughness in a way that's fun and as demanding as the competitors want it to be.
And for those who make it across the finish line, the can't-believe-I-just-did-that reward is usually worth all the agony.
"It challenges your cardio, it challenges you muscularly and challenges you mentally," said Michael Sandercock, founder of obstacleracers.com. "To start out wondering if you can get through everything and push beyond what you thought were your limits is really a good feeling for people."
Obstacle course races have been around pretty much since the dawn of civilized society; the ancient Greeks had a race called the Stadion, where runners ran naked around a track covered with obstacles.
The Stadion was once part of the five events in the Olympic Pentathlon, and obstacle course races — with clothes — continued through the centuries. The races also became staples of military training, the variety of maneuvers a perfect blend for getting troops ready for the multitude of challenges they might face in the field.
The current trend in obstacle racing started a few years ago, when elite athletes started looking for new challenges, ones without the joint-jarring pain of long-distance running or the cost of triathlons.
The Spartan Race, created in 2005 by seven ultra athletes and a Royal Marine, was one of the first major obstacle course races, and The Warrior Dash and Tough Mudder races weren't far behind.
Now there are over 50 races and series across the United States, from the difficult, fire-and-electricity types to entertainment-slanted ones like the Run for Your Lives 5K, where participants are chased by zombies.
"It's really taken off in the past three years or so," said James Villepigue, co-owner of one event called The Survival Race, and author of the "Obstacle Race Training Bible" (Alpha, 2012). "I think we're hitting critical mass now with races popping up everywhere."
Obstacle course races are all based on the same basic principles — testing competitors' limits in unique ways — but there is a wide variety of distances and types of obstacles.
Many, like The Survival Race and Warrior Dash, are more family-oriented, with shorter distances and obstacles that aren't too punishing, such as climbing walls and cargo nets, going through mud pits, scrambling up and over shipping containers — sometimes with a net in between — and running through tires like prospective professional football players do at the NFL combine.
The races often have live bands playing throughout the day, food and equipment vendors, sometimes even beer to enjoy with fellow competitors after the race.
The difficult obstacle course races are run over longer distances and have more challenging obstacles, such as climbing ropes, carrying heavy objects like tires and sandbags, and crawling under barbed wire.
The Tough Mudder races, arguably the most difficult in the genre, feature up to 25 obstacles along courses that cover 10 or more miles, including a plunge into a dumpster filled with ice water and a sprint through fire. The series, which has over 50 events in several countries, also has the shocking obstacles: live wires carrying up to 10,000 volts of electricity hanging in a tunnel that runners have to go through, and a crawl through frigid water with more live wires hanging above.
But even some of the toughest races have a range of distances and challenges.
The Spartan Race series, which has three dozen races in Canada and the United States this year, includes four distances, from 3 to 26 miles, and many other races include shorter versions and kid runs.
Of course, there are always those athletes who want the ultimate challenge, so for them there's the Spartan Death Race, which last 48 hours, and the World's Toughest Mudder, an invitation-only race that lasts 24 hours.
"Depending on your athletic ability, you can choose these races and pretty much find something that will suit where you're at at the moment," said Sandercock, a mechanical engineer from Milwaukee who created his website to help fellow obstacle course racers keep track of upcoming races.
Whatever the distance or difficulty of the obstacles, these races require a decent level of fitness.
Villepigue has been a personal trainer for over 20 years and gets his clients ready for races with workouts that focus more on time than a certain number of repetitions. He gears workouts toward the movements they'll need during the race, like building upper-body strength (to climb ropes), planking exercises that include dragging the lower body (for mud pit crawls), and running up and walking down steep hills.
Sandercock, who's training for an Ironman Triathlon, focuses on running because the obstacles are often spread out, and cross training, working on cardio and strength so his energy doesn't get sapped on the more difficult obstacles.
"It's not easy," said Villepigue, who lives in East Northport, N.Y., and has authored more than 20 fitness-related books. "We have people who ran our race in Dallas last weekend — very athletic people — who said, 'Man, I didn't expect it to be that difficult.' But it's up to the person how hard they want to go at it."
The pain can be worth it.


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I just love the farmers market during Summer. This is not my fave season, although if you have friends with a beach house — as it turns out I do — life is certainly greatly improved. But, goodness, the market is lush with fruits and vegetables for the most healthful cooking. And, living.
Of course, we are in the middle of peach season – yummy. Eaten in the hand, or sliced into whole grain cereal and a dash of nutmeg, or macerated in cognac with a scrape of vanilla bean. And, that's if you aren't going to cook cobblers, pies, crumbles.
This weekend, at the Union Square greenmarket in Manhattan, I happened upon the cutest little tomatoes. Larger than cherries, smaller than standard. With a deep orange/red color and topped with a dash of burgundy. Wonderful. I cut them up and added them to my sautéed fairytale eggplants, with some roast chicken. And a crumble of James Brown blue cheese from the Cato Corner farm.
I would show you that dish, but gee, it seems to have disappeared. But, here are some of my market goodies sitting on my NYC kitchen windowsill.
This is the time of the year when I cook up some of my grandmother's garden vegetable dishes: with fresh green beans or zucchini. When I was growing up, you could not get me to eat them. Now, they are not only redolent and evocative of my youth, they are simply delicious!
Grandma's Green Beans
2 Tomatoes (Beefsteak are fine, no sense overpaying for heirlooms at this time of the year)
3 handfuls of Green beans (look for those flat Roma beans – but any type or color will work)
2 or 3 smallish Potatoes (I like the little Yukon Golds — starting to see the first picks of the season)
3-4 T. Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Cut up the tomatoes, put them in a saucepan first — they create most of the liquid you will need for this dish. Cut up the potatoes into biggish chunks then toss in the green beans. I remove the ends – cook's choice. Drizzle on the olive oil, pour in (maybe) a couple of tablespoons of water, salt and pepper. Put on the lid and cook at a low, slow simmer. 20-30 minutes or so. This is no al dente affair. More like a vegetable stew. I let the potatoes determine the length of the cook. If you pick a potato that can stand up to the cook, you should be fine.
Buon appetito!


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Almost 20 years ago, I saw London's largest shrine. It was outside Kensington Palace a week after the death of Princess Diana. It was one of the strangest sights I've ever seen in London, an doubtedly historic moment that made me feel completely alienated from the city around me.
Just look at this nonsense.
I am not a royalist and, at first, had little interest in Diana's death. My main recollection of the immediate aftermath was that London appeared to have sprouted a thousand flagpoles overnight. Taking the bus from Victoria to Maida Vale a day or two after the accident, every building seemed to be flying a Union flag at half mast. Every building except Buckingham Palace of course. I was working for News International and The Sun was furious at the Queen's lack of respect. So furious, in fact, that they erected a flagpole outside their office just so they could fly the Union flag at half mast for a photo opportunity, a tabloid stunt aimed at shaming the Queen and aligning The Sun with the views of the people, despite their having helped ruined Diana's life over two decades of intrusion.
A week or so later, it was quietly replaced by a flag bearing the News International logo.
Private Eye's hypocrisy-nailing cover seemed more in tune with my thinking, but caused such a furore they had to withdraw copies. I wish I'd kept my issue.
Over the following week, hysteria built across London. I wanted no part of it, and had no intention of visiting Kensington Palace until I was persuaded by an older friend who wisely pointed out this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I'm sort of glad he did.
We met at Hyde Park Corner and began to walk across the park. As we got closer to the palace, a smell began to rise – I can still smell it to this day, the acid sweet stench of slowly rotting flowers.
Kensington Palace was a genuinely incredible sight. The park in front of Kensington Palace was carpeted with flowers, thousands of bouquets, several layers deep and turning to compost in the summer heat. There was no way of getting near the palace gates and lone figures walked among the flowers, stooping to read labels, looking like peasant farmers or bomb disposal experts. I'd never seen or smelled anything like it. I remember reading one label. It was from a mother who wrote that she had lost a son in the Falklands War. She hadn't cried then, but she had when Diana died.
There's too much to unpick here to even know where to start, but one thing that stood out – above the general public insanity and my own utter bewilderment at how people were responding – was the strange, seditious, slightly exciting undercurrent undercurrent to it all.
A shrine is a very public way of responding to private grief, and they are almost always political in some way in the sense that the are the public's way of drawing attention to somebody who they feel was otherwise neglected by authority. Shrines are often about the way a violent or unpredictable deaths provokes a proletariat response that has rebellious, anti-establishment bent. Shrines are rarely sanctioned, they are impromptu and organic. This shrine felt as close to a revolutionary act as anything that had happened in London since the Poll Tax Riot, and it was far more wideset, an angry reaction to what was perceived as the cold, heartless behaviour of the establishment. It also felt very un-London like, as this city isn't usually so ostentatious in its response to tragedy or crisis. It unleashed a national trait for emotional drama that has never fully gone away and I've still to completely understand. And boy, did it smell.


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To tell the truth, I haven't been a big fan of vanilla fragrances. Don't get me wrong, I do love the smell of vanilla itself. I have a whole bunch of vanilla beans that I brought back from Zanzibar stashed in my kitchen cupboard and I sometimes open the jar just to enjoy their heavenly sweet smell. But I like vanilla in something edible, not in something I put on. I don't enjoy smelling like a little cupcake.
Recently when I was digging through my perfume samples, I discovered that I had quite a few un-sniffed ones with vanilla as an important part of their compositions; they were all lying at the bottom of my sample boxes, buried and forgotten under the other little vials. I suddenly felt kind of pity for them. Whether I was feeling mellow in the recent cooler weather or merely trying to escape from my workload, I gathered them around and decided to have a good vanilla sniffing session. People say that life will never give you more than you can handle. Well, I certainly survived through it and managed to find a few vanilla fragrances I could wear.
So here we go, the list and mini reviews of vanillas I tried:
Love – don't be shy – by By Kilian
Peppery Orange Vanilla
This is a seriously sweet fragrance, peppery nonetheless. You've got to love gourmands to enjoy wearing this one. Very strong orange blossom and neroli, and a touch of jasmine and rose with a blast of sugar and vanilla. It is pretty, not beautiful, and it has an amazing lasting power. I don't hate it but I won't be able to wear it. I think you need to be twenty-something & bubbly to get away with this.
Nose: Calice Becker
Released in 2007.
50ml EDP | $260 from By Kilian.
Back to Black – aphrodisiac – by By Kilian
Moody Vanilla
First of all, I like smoky and powdery fragrances. Back to Black is sweet, smoky, powdery and yummy, all at the same time. I'm not too keen on its opening with raspberry but the smoky drydown is rather attractive. I quite enjoyed the honeyed gingerbread notes in this one. Yes, it's sweet but I can wear this in winter. I don't love it but I like it. Some people suggest that it smells like Tobacco Vanille by Tom Ford and Hedonist by Viktoria Minya but I didn't find it so.
Nose: Calice Becker
Released in 2009.
50ml EDP | $260 from By Kilian.
Amour Liquide by Memoire Liquide
Milky Vanilla
This is a sugary vanilla that you will either love or hate. The vanilla itself smells quite authentic but it's all about vanilla and nothing else. There are three notes listed in this one; vanilla, tonka, and incense. I was hoping to smell more of the incense note but it was very weak and completely overpowered by the sweet notes. If you are very careful, you might be able to catch a whiff of it. There is something woody-musky smell in the background, like sandalwood, and it adds to the milky-ness of this fragrance. Great longevity. This is too "edible" for me to wear.
Nose: Ilias Ermenidis
Released in 2009.
50ml EDP | $95 from Memoire Liquide.
Seven Veils by Byredo
Country Kitchen Vanilla
It's nothing like other fragrances I've ever smelled in my life. The opening is a mixture of slightly bitter wisteria and orchid, soon taken over by vanilla, carrot seeds, and pink pepper, then it settles straight into sweet and tangy spiciness. It smells like a lovely country kitchen with a wooden spice cupboard on the wall, occasionally catching a whiff of flowers through the open windows. The vanilla is prominent but it isn't in your face. I don't love it but I somehow appreciate it. I might wear it on a golden autumn day.
Nose: Jerome Epinette
Released in 2011.
50ml EDP | €95 from Byredo.
Vanille Insensee by Atelier Cologne
Edgy Vanilla
Like other Atelier Colognes, it is clean and very wearable. The mixture of woody incense, amber, and vanilla is fairly cozy but there is a sort of edginess to it. It's not a cute vanilla fragrance, more for the grown-ups. The citrus notes at the beginning don't last long; it soon reveals vanilla and exotic coriander with velvety vetiver and amber in the background. It might work in the spring to summer seasons.
Nose: Ralf Schwieger
Released in 2011.
30ml Pure Perfume | €65 from Atelier Cologne.
Un Bois Vanille by Serge Lutens
Dark Vanilla
Another woody vanilla but totally different to Vanille Insensee. It is much darker and deeper. I was a little bit worried about trying this one at first because of the coconut and liquorice notes. Actually they coordinate with each other very well and it didn't give me the choking effect that I was concerned about. Vanilla is on the sweeter side but the strong wood note keeps holding it back. There is a strange plasticky smell in it and it disturbed me a little. I can probably wear this, maybe in late autumn to winter.
Nose: Christopher Sheldrake
Released in 2003.
50ml EDP | €90 from Serge Lutens.
Eau Duelle by Diptyque
Well Behaved Vanilla
Surprisingly, I liked this one as soon as I opened the vial. It is resiny and earthy vanilla with a touch of greenness. I was so sure that I could smell floral note in it but it's not listed. It is delicious but not in a cakey way. It is one of the most inoffensive vanillas I've tried. Actual vanilla in this one is very rounded and not too sweet. I think this one works all year round.
Nose: Fabrice Pellegrin
Released in 2010.
75ml EDP | €105 from Diptyque.
Shalimar Souffle de Parfum by Guerlain
Lemon Meringue Vanilla
Shalimar Souffle opens with bright citrus notes. It is a delicious vanilla fragrance with the bitterness of citrus peels and a fraction of white florals. Somehow it's a little ozonic too. It's decidedly sweet but not sugary. As so many people already suggested, Shalimar Souffle smells like a lemon meringue pie and makes me feel hungry. Very light weight and airy for a vanilla fragrance.
Nose: Thierry Wasser
Released in 2014.
50ml EDP | around $100. More information: Guerlain
Tobacco Vanille by Tom Ford
Smoky Vanilla
Tobacco Vanille is a spicy and smoky vanilla fragrance. I usually enjoy tobacco fragrances but, at the beginning, I wasn't sure about this one at all. I kept smelling something tart and ripe besides rich tobacco, vanilla and spice mixture and it was a little unnerving. But after 15 minutes or so, it turned into more luscious sweet tobacco fragrance and I could enjoy it better then. Towards the end, sweetness of vanilla intensified a lot and it was a bit like a combination of ice cream, cigar, and Pepsi. I quite liked it.
Nose: Olivier Gillotin
Released in 2007.
50ml EDP | $220 from Tom Ford.
The Sexiest Scent on the Planet. Ever. IMHO by 4160 Tuesdays
Spicy Vanilla
It doesn't match with my idea of sexy scent but it's not bad at all. The vanilla wasn't sugary sweet and merged well with the citrus note. Also the woodiness of this fragrance was down to earth and comforting. It's not listed but I could smell something like patchouli and strong peppery/spicy notes – could there be ISO E Super or something similar in this fragrance? Whatever it is, it's nicely blended into it and gives warmth to it. Definitely an autumn to winter fragrance.
Nose: Sarah McCartney
Released in 2013.
50ml EDP | £60 from 4160 Tuesdays.
Baiser Vole Essence de Parfum by Cartier
Flowery Vanilla
A flower shop right next to a patisserie; loads of lily, loads of vanilla. You've got to love the smell of luxurious lily and gourmand vanilla to appreciate this fragrance. There is something green and spicy in this fragrance, like fresh juice seeping out of the cut carnation stem. The vanilla is sweet and strong but it's a proper vanilla pod smell. At first it was too intense for me to enjoy fully but the combination turned creamy and a little bit woody after a while. If I can manage to stand the initial stage, I might be able to wear this one. I'll try again.
Nose: Mathilde Laurent
Released in 2011.
40ml |around €50. More information: Cartier
Now I can feel approaching autumn in the air, I long for something evocative and snuggly to wear. Vanilla certainly has those qualities – warm, cuddly and nostalgic – and it would be pretty appealing in the cool autumn days.
After experiencing the different takes on vanilla by ten perfumers, I came to the conclusion; I don't hate vanilla fragrances, I just prefer the vanilla to be in the background and not on the main stage. A whispering level would be nice. I'll be re-trying some of the fragrances again in the coming seasons when I swap my sandals and summer dresses for boots and jumpers.
Do you like vanilla in fragrance? What is your favourite?


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Hoppy Easter!
May your day be filled with
joy, love, peace, and hope,
happy surprises,
and at least a little bit of chocolate!
Cheers & Hugs,
Happy Easter to you all. We both had much smaller families when we first met. Now look at us!
Benjamin and I opened "his" email yesterday after the indoor Egg Hunt. I was enchanted, not recognizing Hoppy until Benjamin said : "I know Hoppy, My Jodi painted him last year with an orange tail for me cause I love orange and she loves me!" This could explain why he always wins when we play the Good Night, Good Night, Construction Site memory game and I never do! Benjamin gave Hoppy a kiss on his nose and sent My Jodi : "Namaste, a kiss and a neckbuster hug!" I didn't have time to post his comment yesterday when we visited and planned to come back last night to do so. But a mishap with a bottle of water and the computer put a damper on my plans. Benjamin accidentally tipped the bottle, but it was that silly Gem who gave him the bottle of water with a paper straw while sitting at the computer. Long story short, after shaking the keyboard and mouse to empty the water a scathingly brilliant idea came to me. My hair dryer set on cool to hopefully save them. Auntie H later suggested allowing them to air overnight to prevent "frying" in case it was not completely dry. As you can tell, all is well! Hope your Easter was overflowing with the very same things you wished for us! Also, some jelly beans…today is National Jelly Bean Day. My children grew up on the Russell Stover pectin ones, although they and Benjamin now favor Jelly Belly. Have you ever had Sarris Candies, they make a pectin jelly bean and some yumalicious chocolates too! Frank Sarris , aka the "Candy Man", made chocolates in the basement of his Canonsburg, Pa. home until building a candy shop next door in the early 60's. That is in your area of the state, but I don't know how close it is to you. Thank-you!


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Ex-House majority leader joins investment bank
Staff Writer
Columbus CEO
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has a new job as vice chairman and managing director of a global independent investment bank.
New York-based Moelis & Company announced Cantor's appointment Tuesday in a news release.
Cantor lost his re-election bid in the June primary and left Congress in August. The Virginia Republican had served seven terms representing the state's 7th Congressional District.
Cantor says in the release that he considered his career options and knew he wanted to join a firm with what he calls "a great entrepreneurial spirit that focused on its clients."
Moelis & Company has 15 offices in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.


text:
Fireworks & Rocktopia
Rocktopia Team Members
Results 1 - 42 of 42
Bruce Mee
Fireworks & Rocktopia Managing Editor
I blame my brother for getting me hooked on rock. I was an avid ABBA fan when he joined the Brittania Music Company around 1978, and one of the first albums he bought was Rainbow 'Rising'. It didn't take long for those majestic vocals and melodies to weave their magic into my soul, and I've been a ...
James Gaden
Fireworks & Rocktopia Art Editor
James Gaden has been into classic rock music even before he was born, thanks to his heavily pregnant mother attending shows by Status Quo and Thin Lizzy. His love for the music was kick started by seeing Queen perform at Wembley - on the telly sadly, but it was still inspiring. Not only did the ...
Dave Scott
Fireworks & Rocktopia Reviews Editor
Music has always been a part of my life. From the moment I was born I was initiated in Rock through the likes of Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones and Queen. There was also plenty of sixties music, Folk and Disco to name but a few others that my parents listened to. As I grew older ...
Steven Reid
Fireworks & Rocktopia Deputy Features / SSSOR Editor
Imagine a time of darkened rooms, hushed learned tones and music that mystified and delighted. These were the Friday nights that shaped and formed my love of a whole host of Rock and Metal bands as Tommy Vance shared with his attentive, headbanging masses the sounds that we'd hold dear to our ...
Ant Heeks
Fireworks & Rocktopia Deputy Reviews Editor
For virtually all of the 40 years of my life so far I've lived in the uninspiring Staffordshire town of Tamworth, home of Sir Bob Catley and Blaze Bayley & Wolfsbane (and less interestingly Sir Robert Peel, Julian Cope and two runaway pigs). I'm married to Izzy, have two lovely daughters ...
Rob McKenzie
Fireworks & Rocktopia Books Editor
I am an assistant editor for Fireworks Magazine looking after the ´Bookmark´ page which handles reviews of music related books. My role started officially in Issue 62 and I am very pleased with how it has gone so far and love the eye-catching layout produced by James Gaden. I have very quickly ...
Sophie Brownlee
Fireworks & Rocktopia Assistant Editor
Rock music was a part of my life from my first gig of The White Stripes and then Monsters of Rock at the age of twelve. It was here that I saw Alice Cooper for the first time and the world of Motley Crue, glam metal and Buckcherry quickly followed. At first I was heavily influenced by my ...
Az Chaudhry
Fireworks & Rocktopia Assistant Editor
When I was growing up in the early 70s I used to listen to the charts and watch Top of the Pops and loved The Sweet and 10CC. My elder brother was really into Yes, Genesis, ELP, Floyd, Zep, Rainbow and Deep Purple and I could hear their classic albums blasting out from his bedroom and initially ...
Dave Crompton
Fireworks & Rocktopia Assistant Editor
I suppose my first foray into the world of adult music came when I first heard the unmistakeable tones of Marc Bolan and Tyrannosaurus Rex back in the very early 1970's – I was 12 at the time, an only son with two elder sisters, living in Bolton, Lancashire. Whilst my parents listened to Burt ...
Paul Jerome Smith
Fireworks & Rocktopia Consultant
Well, I suppose I am the oldest member of the team, as I now enjoy travelling around using my Concessionary travel pass and Senior railcard! Travel is certainly one of my greatest pleasures, and reflects upon my interest in the environment (both built and natural) as a Geographer. Indeed, Geography ...
Paul 'Woody' Woodward
Fireworks & Rocktopia Rocktopia News Editor & Contributing Writer
I am from Walsall in The Black Country area of the Midlands, UK. Being a big fan of live music, I love going to loads of gigs! I'm very lucky to live in an area which has quite a few venues of varying sizes, so I do get a good chance to see a lot of bands. A couple of my favourite venues are The ...
Steve Price
Fireworks & Rocktopia Rocktopia Podcast Host & Producer
Along time stalwart of the music business, his first job upon leaving college was for a leading Guitar Amp manufacturer and on his first day at work he was taken to the Frankfurt Music Fair and 'introduced' to the social side of the music business (i.e. Hangovers!). Steve started his ...
Sue Ashcroft
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
I was born in the small seaside town of Gourock on the west coast of Scotland. Having been brought up in a household filled with music, it was soon apparent that I would develop the family passion for singing, playing instruments and listening to whatever music was available. In my formative years, ...
Dave Bott
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
My love of music started at an early age and I even convinced my dad to take me to see Sweet in concert as a 1974 birthday present. As my tastes developed so did my appreciation for bands who were recognised for rock music and all through secondary school I remember having the names of many bands ...
Carl Buxton
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
Bio awaited.
Monica Castedo-Lopéz
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
Bio awaited.
Alan Holloway
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
Much like Bruce Mee, my brother is to blame for me liking rock music, as his AC/DC fetish made me put away the ABBA albums and get mum to knit me an AC/DC logo jumper (seriously, it was legendary). As he drifted away into Madonna and shite like that, I decided to stay with the rock and metal, ...
Duncan Jamieson
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
It was a pre-pubescent purchase of Rainbow's 'Down To Earth' and a record collection left behind by an uncle who had gone off to Germany with his band that got me into rock music. Amongst the records were classic 70s albums like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company and 10CC as well as great ...
Ian Johnson
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
I'm really part of the Fireworks / Rocktopia team because of one man. His name: Ronnie James Dio. I first heard him sing (way back in 1976) the song 'Man On A Silver Mountain' and the rest - as they say - is history. Rock music became my life long passion because of RJD! Before this my ...
Gary Marshall
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
As I type this biography I'm looking down the barrel of my 50th Birthday, albeit I'm sure my love of music keeps me younger than those years. In my youth music was all around in the family home with my older siblings listening to the likes of The Carpenters, Simon & Garfunkel and Elton John ...
Ray Paul
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
I got my first taste of music as most do from the radio in the seventies, upon getting a record player around 7 years old. I really found my true love in music, when my father gave me a batch of singles and albums he no longer wanted, and I began to spin them every day. For every classic album ...
Steve Swift
Fireworks & Rocktopia Staff Writer
Born in Nottingham and raised at Rock City, Steve has been a Manchester resident since 1986 when he relocated to attend University and the famous Hacienda where he flirted with Funk and has never really lost the love, hence his constant arguments that Purple's 'Come Taste The Band' needs ...
Mike Ainscoe
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
My love of music can probably be traced back to the Dave Clark Five's 1964 single "Bits And Pieces". Being jigged about to the 2 minute antiphonal (google it) hit whilst a toddler was at the beginning of an ongoing journey of musical discovery. Inevitably, things led to Top Of The Pops and ...
Michael Anthony
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Michael Anthony is a Cardiff-based rock fan and writer. He is author of the recently published book 'Words and Music: Excursions in the Art of Rock Fandom'. He also writes for Uber Rock and is a contributor to Prog Magazine. First musical love: Neil Diamond ('Hot August Night' – I still ...
Mark Ashby
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
I first got into rock and metal in my early teens, when NWOBHM came onto the scene and bands like Motorhead, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest were appearing on 'Top Of The Pops'. Having trained as a journalist, I first started writing about rock music in 1985 – and haven't looked back since! It ...
Bruce E.J. Atkinson
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Bruce was raised in an area of Canada noted for its rich history and staunch loyalty to the British Crown. Atlantic Canada is fertile ground for culture, tradition and music and Bruce absorbed all of it, from childhood on, favouring the Arts over Sports. Immersed in these influences, the lad ...
Mark Donnelly
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
I first got into rock music back in 1980 whilst at secondary school, in my hometown of Lincoln. The song that started my journey was Rainbow's 'Since You've Been Gone'. I subsequently got a cassette of the album 'Down To Earth' that I had on continuous rotation throughout that summer. I ...
Lara Kisel
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Bio awaited.
Julien Marbaix
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Bonjour! Let me introduce myself with a slight French accent and the sun of south west of France. My name is Julien and I come from Toulouse, where I am doing academic research in chemistry. Originally coming from Paris where I grew up, I have the chance to have a big brother really into ...
Tony Marshall
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
A guitarist, singer, father, otter sexer and all round bloke. Played in more bands than I care to remember, probably the most famous being Vaughn and one show for Tyketto. I like all sorts of genres of rock and am annoyingly opinionated about it. I'm rarely wrong (though often mistaken) so will ...
Alexandra Mrozowska
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Born in 1991 in Bydgoszcz, Poland, I discovered Rock music as early as at the age of 9. My first exposure to it, however, was when I was about five. It was when Queen released Freddie Mercury's post-mortem album 'Made In Heaven'. Recorded on a cheap cassette that was owned by my mother, this album ...
Enrico Navella
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
My name is Enrico Navella, an Italian guy living in London who's devoted his own life to rock music since he was a little kid. I was on, behind, beside, in front of the stage. Been a singer, bouncer, bartender, tour manager, rock club PR, events & concerts coordinator, press office manager, ...
Dawn Osborne
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Dawn has been in love with rock n roll since she saw Sweet, Slade, T Rex and the Glitter band on Top of The Pops in the early seventies. Her father reignited that love when he gave her 7 inch vinyls of 'You Really Got Me' by The Kinks and a number of early Stones singles. Meeting boys on the ...
Helen Bradley Owers
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
I was born in Cheltenham but moved to the New Forest when I was very young. I knew from an early age my musical taste was 'different' to other girls at school, while they were all listening to the Osmonds and David Cassidy I was listening to Cream, Zep and Purple, I just about managed to avoid ...
Jack Press
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
I spent a lot of my childhood playing American sports video-games, particularly anything with the letters 'WWE' or 'NHL' slapped across the cover. Through these games I discovered several bands who triggered a series of events I'll never forget. Falling first in love with Three Days Grace, Rise ...
Simon Ramsay
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Call me a deviant, devotee or debauched geek, but if it ever becomes legally acceptable to marry my guitar I'll waltz that curvy beauty down the aisle quicker than you can scream "Holy Hendrix!" Standing opposite my gleaming Les Paul, I'll happily promise to love, honour and obey - before whisking ...
Brent Rusche
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
One innocent day after school in 5th grade forever ossified my bond with music after hearing Iron Maiden's 'Live After Death' and Metallica's 'Master Of Puppets.' While the opener, 'Battery' from the latter album was a bit too much for my virgin ears, Maiden's 'Aces High' made an immediate impact ...
Paul Sabin
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
I was born in Eastbourne, Sussex just as the 60's were drawing to a close. Music always featured heavily around the house although in my formative years it was my fathers tastes which flowed into this young lads ears in the shape of big bands, Wurlitzer organs and ABBA! The radio, and in particular ...
Malcolm Smith
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
My musical journey started at a very early age with me hearing my parents playing the Soundtrack albums of old Doris Day films and the crooners of the day such as Frank Ifield and Cliff Richard. Later on my older brother introduced me to the delights of The Beatles and The Moody Blues, but that was ...
Fabiana Spinelli
Fireworks & Rocktopia Contributing Writer
Born in 1983, pledged by Metallica, bewitched by Helloween and infected by Mercyful Fate's and Alice Cooper's smooth poison. A growing and unstoppable love and curiosity for all kind of Rock and Metal music, I love AOR and Thrash Metal, Hard Rock and Death, Progressive Rock and Stoner Rock: whoever ...
Bernhard Kellerer
Fireworks & Rocktopia Guardian of Rocktopia and Owner of Transistor Pictures
Berny is a founding member of Rocktopia Ltd. He directed and edited all Firefest concert films released under the "Transistor Pictures" brand. Berny graduated from the London Film School and received his diploma with distinction in 2001. He founded iMagic Films the same year and StratoVox - a ...
Central Electronic Brain
Fireworks & Rocktopia Rocktopia Mainframe
Released in 1981 by Sinclair Research, I am the follow-up to the Sinclair ZX80. My distinctive appearance was the work of industrial designer Rick Dickinson, whose work include case designs for the Sinclair QL, the Sinclair TV80 and the Gizmondo handheld console. Running at a clock rate of a ...