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For readers who have had the chance to visit those cities, however infrequently, that means there is a body of literature, set across the decades if not centuries, that portrays the London or New York or Paris that we know only from our travels. I'm partial to those novels — there's nothing better for a cold winter day than settling in with a book that brings back to life the locale of past vacations or explorations, even if the timing of the book is decades before my visits.
Author Amor Towles doesn't quite fit that model completely. He was born and raised just outside Boston, graduated from Yale and Stanford and is the principal in a Manhattan investment firm — no Iowa cornfields in that CV. Rules of Civility, his first book, does deserve a place in the ranks of "New York novels", however — and for this reader, a prominent one. Towles' New York is not the gritty, steamy one of Philip Roth or Martin Amis (in Money) — it is much more the society New York of Edith Wharton, perhaps closest of all to the New York of Truman Capote in Breakfast at Tiffany's or Answered Prayers.
I was already making those comparisons when I came upon the following passage on page 206 of Towles novel. This is a very long excerpt for a review, but I've repeated it for a reason — if it strikes a chord with you, I'm pretty certain you'll like Rules of Civility and, if it doesn't, you might want to move on to something else immediately:
Autumn in New York,
Why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York,
It spells the thrill of first-nighting.
Written by a Belarussian immigrant named Vernon Duke, "Autumn in New York" practically debuted as a jazz standard. Within fifteen years of its first being played, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald had all explored its sentimental bounds. Within twenty-five, there would be interpretations of the interpretations by Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Frank Sinatra, Bud Powell, and Oscar Peterson. The very question that the song asks of us about autumn, we could ask ourselves of the song: Why does it seem so inviting?
Presumably, one factor is that each city has its own romantic season. Once a year, a city's architectural, cultural, and horticultural variables come into alignment with the solar course in such a way that men and women passing each other on the thoroughfares feel an unusual sense of romantic promise. Like Christmastime in Vienna or April in Paris.
That's the way New Yorkers feel about fall. Come September, despite the waning hours, despite the leaves succumbing to the weight of gray autumnal rains, there is a certain relief to having the long days of summer behind us; and there's a paradoxical sense of rejuvenation in the air.
The reference to Duke's Autumn in New York is quite appropriate for this novel — the song first appeared in 1934; after a short prologue set in 1966, Towles' story proper opens on New Year's Eve, 1937. The tune has had staying power: Wikipedia, in what it acknowledges is an incomplete list, cites over 200 recorded versions, more than 50 since 2000 (KfC's iPod playlist has six, I should say). And while the New York that Towles portrays may be that of more than 60 years ago, it too has equal staying power — this is a very "uptown" book and present-day visitors to the City will find many recognizable references.
The author also uses that prologue to alert the reader that his story will be a bittersweet one. Katey Kontent, who will narrate the novel, and her husband are at the opening of a photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art featuring portraits taken on the New York subway, candid camera style, by Walker Evans (several of which feature later in the book to introduce new chapters). Katey recognizes one of the subjects, the then twenty-eight-year-old Tinker Grey, a banker known to both her and her husband at the time, but here "ill shaven, in a threadbare coat":
Twenty pounds underweight, he had almost lost the blush on his cheeks, and his face was visibly dirty. But his eyes were bright and alert and trained straight ahead with the slightest hint of a smile on his lips, as if it was he who was studying the photographer. As if it was he who was studying us. Staring across three decades, across a canyon of encounters, looking like a visitation. And looking every bit himself.
The photo takes Katey back to the last day of 1937 and New Year's Eve at The Hotspot, "a wishfully named nightclub in Greenwich Village that was four feet underground". Katey was raised in Brooklyn so her "magnet" New York is Manhattan, just across the river — she's works in the typing pool at a large law firm. Her roommate (and partner for the evening), Eve Ross, is more typical of the stylish young New Yorkers of the era (and today, for that matter):
Eve hailed from somewhere at the upper end of Indiana's economic scale. Her father was driven to the office in a company car and she ate biscuits for breakfast cut in the pantry by a Negro named Sadie. She had gone to a two-year finishing school and had spent a summer in Switzerland pretending to study French. But if you walked into a bar and met her for the first time, you wouldn't be able to tell if she was a corn-fed fortune hunter or a millionairess on a tear. All you could tell for sure was that she was a bona fide beauty. And that made the getting to know her so much less complicated.
Katey and Eve may share a room in a rundown boarding house, but that matters little — they are in New York with all its attractions and opportunities. One of which turns out to be banker Tinker Grey, who walks through the door of The Hotspot in his cashmere coat and, drawn by Eve's flittering eyelashes, joins the two. No boarding house for Tinker — he has an apartment in The Beresford at 211 Central Park West (yes, that building too has its own Wikipedia page). What follows is a year in the ups and downs (more downs than ups, it has to be said) of three young thrill-seekers.
Through a combination of good fortune and good sense, Katey gets out of the typing pool and finds a job as a publishing assistant at a new lifestyle magazine soon to be launched by Condé Nast, a convenient device that brings New York fixtures like the Plaza, Ritz, Dakota and others into play. Her world starts to spin much, much faster.
If it is not already obvious, a suspenseful "plot" is not the star of Rules of Civility — well-executed as it is, the action is as predictable as the seasons that supply the timeline of the novel. The "star" is the way Towles captures New York. I'll offer one more extended example:
On the Thursday after Wallace left, I wandered over to Fifth Avenue after work to see the windows at Bergdorf's. A few days before, I'd noticed that they'd been curtained for the installation of the new displays.
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, I always looked forward to the unveiling of the new seasons at Bergdorf's. Standing before the windows, you felt like a tsarina receiving one of those jeweled eggs in which an elaborate scene in miniature has been painstakingly assembled. With one eye closed you spy inside, losing all sense of time as you marvel at every transporting detail.
And transporting was the right word. For the Bergdorf's windows weren't advertising unsold inventory at 30% off. They were designed to change the lives of women up and down the avenue — offering envy to some, self-satisfaction to others, but a glimpse of possibility to all. And for the Fall season of 1938, my Fifth Avenue Fabergé did not disappoint.
The theme of the windows was fairy tales, drawing on the well-known works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen; but in each set piece the "princess" had been replaced with the figure of a man, and the "prince" with one of us.
That excerpt is a teaser, not a spoiler — just to extend the tease a bit, you have to read the book to find which character gets the Schiaperelli and who gets the Chanel.
A final note: This hardly seems the kind of book that KfC would rate highly. Oprah's Magazine and People loved it, it was an NYT bestseller and it's a book club favorite (one entrepreneur actually offers New York tours based on it) — those normally are all serious warning signs, not recommendations, for this reader. All of that hype was offset for me by anokatony at Tony's Book World who called Rules of Civility "a smart stylish elegant novel" and placed it second on his list of 2011 favorites. Tony's nod carries a lot of meaning for me: he introduced me to Maile Meloy on a previous best-of-year list and she has become a favorite — he didn't go wrong with this unlikely choice either. If you have any affection at all for reading about the stylish side of New York (and I acknowledge many people don't), Towles legitimately joins Wharton and Capote as a worthwhile and highly entertaining source.


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It's time to retool the 4 P's of marketing for today's B2B reality. As a framework for fine-tuning the marketing mix, the P's—product, place, price, and promotion—have served consumer marketers well for half a century. But in the B2B world, they yield narrow, product-focused strategies that are increasingly at odds with the imperative to deliver solutions.
In a five-year study involving more than 500 managers and customers in multiple countries and across a wide range of B2B industries, we found that the 4 P's model undercuts B2B marketers in three important ways: It leads their marketing and sales teams to stress product technology and quality even though these are no longer differentiators but are simply the cost of entry. It underemphasizes the need to build a robust case for the superior value of their solutions. And it distracts them from leveraging their advantage as a trusted source of diagnostics, advice, and problem solving.
It's not that the 4 P's are irrelevant, just that they need to be reinterpreted to serve B2B marketers. As the sidebar below shows, our model shifts the emphasis from products to solutions, place to access, price to value, and promotion to education—SAVE, for short.
Motorola Solutions, a pioneer of the new framework, used SAVE to guide the restructuring of its marketing organization and its go-to-market strategies in the government and enterprise sectors. Along the way the firm identified three requirements for successfully making the shift from 4 P's thinking to SAVE.
First, management must encourage a solutions mind-set throughout the organization. Many B2B companies, particularly those with an engineering or a technology focus, find it difficult to move beyond thinking in terms of "technologically superior" products and services and take a customer-centric perspective instead.
Second, management needs to ensure that the design of the marketing organization reflects and reinforces the customer-centric focus. At Motorola Solutions, this led to the dramatic reorganization of the marketing function into complementary specialties, allowing focus on each element of the SAVE framework and alignment with the customer's purchase journey.
And third, management must create collaboration between the marketing and sales organizations and with the development and delivery teams. Motorola Solutions required that specialist teams concentrate on solutions and coordinate their approaches to specific customer needs. This ensured that functional boundaries did not determine the firm's solutions.
B2B marketers who continue to embrace the 4 P's model and mind-set risk getting locked into a repetitive and increasingly unproductive technological arms race. The SAVE framework is the centerpiece of a new solution-selling strategy—and B2B firms ignore it at their peril.

subset: commoncrawl


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A piece I wrote for WSJ.com in honor of Butch.
- YouTube
- Lawrence D. Butch Morris in "Black February."
The death of avant-garde composer and musical pioneer Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris on Tuesday, Jan. 29, has unleashed a flurry of memorials to his life and technique. Butch will rightfully be remembered most for his development of "Conduction," his trademarked technique of improvisation, which he developed as a musical sign language and used as a tool for live composition with large ensembles. But what shouldn't get lost in the eulogies that have begun flooding the Internet is the fact that Conduction, beyond an innovative system of music-making, was in Butch's hands a deeply demanding and personal method of self exploration.
It wasn't just about the music, but also about the people who were making the music.
I spent several years making Black February, a documentary about Butch. He'd asked if I was interested in recording a series of concerts he was performing in New York in February 2005. He planned on playing every night of that month, often several times a night with different ensembles at various locations throughout the city, as a sort of marathon celebration and showcase of Conduction.
"Black February," as he called it, marked 20 years of the technique he had developed partly through his work with such jazz luminaries as Gil Evans, Alice Coltrane, and Henry Threadgill and brought to fruition with saxophonist David Murray's big band.
By the time those 28 days were done, Butch had performed 44 shows in nine venues with almost 100 musicians in the city, playing everything from funk, big band jazz, choral theater, electronic music and beyond. It was a muscular gesture, a bold statement meant to show off the potential he'd seen in his technique when he debuted Conduction No. 1 in New York with an ensemble that featured, among others, saxophonist John Zorn, multimedia artist Christian Marclay and guitarist Brandon Ross.
During the interviews for the film, he told me, "What I'm asking for is a human feeling, and in many cases, that's a difficult thing to ask for." He explained that the act of asking for a sincere sound from a musician and not being satisfied with some tired vamp amounted to an act of personal confrontation. "Because I'm asking you to give me musically or sonically something that's actually very close to you…It's more personal than we think. And then when you get down to this encounter, then you find out how personal it is."
That encounter, both between Butch and the musicians, and the musicians with themselves, was at the heart of his technique and moved Conduction for me into some realm beyond music into a zone somewhere between psychology, philosophy and spirituality.
In a fundamental way, that sense of going beyond music and into deeper personal realms was simply a reflection of Butch's own personality. Despite his reputation as a demanding band leader, he was also known as a gregarious East Village presence and generous friend, much beloved by musicians and non-musicians alike.
The purity in his nature that people naturally reacted to was best epitomized for me this fall, when on a walk through the East Village he was accosted by a child from the neighborhood.
"Butch! Your majesty!" she called out.
There's no more fitting title for the artist we lost.


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End of life care
Care at home
Open all pages about End of life care
You may not need to move away from home to receive care, as end of life and hospice care can be provided at home. To find out what's available locally, ask your GP.
Your GP can arrange for community nurses to come to your home and provide nursing care for you there. You may also need specialist care from community palliative care nurses who visit you at home to:
- provide or arrange hands-on nursing or personal care, if you need it
- advise on pain and symptom control
- provide practical and emotional support for you and your carers at home
They can also involve other specialist professionals in your care, if their expertise is needed.
Your local authority's social services department may provide a range of services and equipment to help you remain at home as you approach the end of life. This could include home adaptations, such as hand rails.
Read about what you can expect from end of life care.
Hospices and palliative care services can also provide support for your partner, relatives or anyone else who is helping to care for you at home. This could be through community support groups or one-to-one advice.
Find out about the support available for carers.
Not everyone feels comfortable helping family or friends with personal care.
Marie Curie provides some practical advice about caring for someone with a terminal illness, including helping them wash, take their medication, and stand and walk.
Macmillan Cancer Support's information about advanced cancer care and support talks about ways your carers can help you manage your practical needs and symptoms at home.
You may want to carry on living at home but visit a hospice during the day for the care and support you need. Going to a hospice for 1 or more days a week means you may be able to access some types of services than are not available to you at home.
These may include creative and complementary therapies, such as art therapy and physiotherapy. You can also meet other people who are receiving hospice care. Check with your local hospice whether it provides transport to and from your home.
Hospice spaces are limited, but you can talk to staff at your local one to see what is available.
Find hospice services near you
healthtalk.org has videos and written interviews of people talking about their experiences of end of life care at home.
Page last reviewed: 18/10/2021
Next review due: 17/10/2024


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Huey Long
Excerpts From Huey Long's Autobiography
In 1933, at the ripe old age of 39, Huey Long published his autobiography. This might seem, at the least, premature. But it turned out to be a provident move as Huey Long was dead two years later, felled by an assassin's bullet.
Huey Long was a man in a hurry. He passed the Louisiana bar exam and became a lawyer after taking only two law school classes and spending a year reading every law book he could find. He became Governor of Louisiana in 1928. In four short years as Governor he paved roads, built bridges, provided free textbooks to poor children, reformed the hospitals, broke the power of the old political bosses, and took on the near-monopolistic power of the big oil companies. Within a year of taking office he was impeached by the Louisiana House, although the charges were dismissed by the State Senate. In 1930 Long was elected to the U.S. Senate. But since he was busy with his agenda as Governor, he never bothered to show up in Washington to take the oath of office until 1932. Huey Long was a man in a hurry.
(Huey Long's brief career in the United States Senate was contentious and disagreeable to his fellow Senators. Of his fellow Democratic Senator, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, he would say on the Senate floor: "The Senator from Mississippi has another way of standing by his friends. . .catch your friend in trouble, stab him in the back and drink his blood." A few months after arriving in Congress he made a permanent enemy of Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson (D-AK) by reading into the Congressional Record a long list of corporate clients of Robinson's Arkansas law firm and then intoning with mock sincerity "I want now to disclaim that I have the slightest motive of saying, or that in my heart I believe, that such a man could to the slightest degree be influenced in any vote which he casts in this body by the fact that this association might mean hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to him in the way of lucrative fees." This sort of behavior would make him a pariah to his colleagues. Senator Harry Byrd of West Virginia would ask that his desk be moved from next to Long's "even if I have sit on the Republican side."As you might imagine, Huey Long was not a successful legislator. In the following excerpt, Long recounts his first moments on the Senate floor, when he offends the senior Senator from his home state by refusing to be introduced by him.)
"I ARRIVED in Washington January 25, 1932. Soon thereafter I met our Democratic leader, Senator Robinson of Arkansas. He escorted me to the lounging room immediately adjacent to the Senate, where I sat awaiting the time when I would enter the Senate and be administered the oath of office..
My old friend, Senator Broussard, whom I had not seen for eighteen months, walked up to me while I sat there.
'Huey,' he said, 'there is a rule here that a Senator from one State should escort a new Senator from that State when he takes the oath.'
'Edwin, I will be glad to have you do that,' I said, 'but I don't want you to misunderstand me. When I reached here this morning I read in the newspapers remarks attributed to you, saying that you had not decided whether you would or would not introduce me. I was asked concerning your remarks, and I made the statement that that was a matter you were not going to decide. Now, I just want you to know that.'
The Senator was angry.
'I won't introduce you unless you ask me to,' he said.
'Don't hold your breath until I do, Edwin,' I replied.
Senator Robinson returned, and I told him of the conversation.
'Well, would you have any objection to his introducing you, just dropping matters?' he asked.
'No, not particularly,' I said.
He left to talk to Senator Broussard; but on returning he said:
'All right; I'll introduce you.'
(pgs. 286-287)
(Huey Long was a nominal Democrat, but many in the Democratic party thought the old saying applied, "with friends like these, who needs enemies." President Roosevelt considered Huey Long a demagogue and privately said of him that he was "one of the two most dangerous men in America." Probably the nicest thing Huey Long had to say about President Roosevelt was to compare him to President Hoover, in his best piney-woods barnyard analogy: "The only difference between Hoover and Roosevelt is that Hoover is a hoot owl and Roosevelt is a scrootch owl. A hoot owl bangs into the roost and knocks the hen clean off, and catches her while she's falling. But a scrootch own slips into the roost and talks softly to her. And she just falls in love with him, and the first thing you know, there ain't no hen." [1] For his part, Roosevelt tried to establish a political relationship with Huey Long, even inviting Huey to dine with the Roosevelt family at the estate in Hyde Park. The resulting scene was like something out of a B-movie comedy of manners. Roosevelt displayed no irritation at Huey's outrageous costume (a loud suit, clashing shirt, and pink tie) or at his effort to dominate the conversation during lunch, lecturing the candidate like a schoolboy. Roosevelt's mother, however, was not so tactful. "Who is that awful man?" she said in a loud whisper. Everyone pretended not to hear, but Long almost certainly took note. "By God, I feel sorry for him," (Huey) later remarked of Roosevelt. "He's got more sonofabitches in his family than I got in mine." [2] Despite all of this, Huey Long was initially a supporter of FDR, as indicated in these excerpts.)
"When I reached Washington on January 25, 1932, newspapermen generally inquired what I thought of the approaching presidential election. My reply was that I thought most any Democrat could win; that I thought some one like my friend Senator Joseph T. Robinson or my friend Senator Pat Harrison would be the best choice. I spoke kindly of Garner as a prospective candidate, as well as of Al Smith, but I expressed contrary predictions on the then Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I had been in the Senate but a few days, when the famous sales tax fight developed; much of our Democratic leadership in Congress was either favorable to this policy which was being advocated for Mr. Hoover, or, at least, was not unsympathetic to it.
I regarded the sales tax as a disaster. It was diametrically opposed to what I considered the only course which the nation must take to relieve itself from the distress which then and now afflicts it. I was soon looking away from my early inclinations, and eventually toward Governor Roosevelt, who all the time, day by day, made commitments exactly consistent with my belief and understanding of correct government.
Progressive members of the United States Senate, particularly Senators Norris and Wheeler, played a material part in my inclination for the then Governor of New York and present President of the United States. They were the boldest, most courageous men I had ever met."
(pgs. 288-298)
"On my way from New Orleans to Washington one night I met Clark Howell of the Atlanta Constitution on the train. I gave him to understand that I was inclined to Roosevelt. Soon thereafter I received a letter from Governor Roosevelt telling me that Mr. Howell had informed him of what I had said. He paid me a few compliments and closed by saying:
'You and I are alike for the rights in behalf of the common man of this country.'
I was more than ready to join him."
(pg. 301)
"But I saw to it that my views were known to Mr. Roosevelt, then Governor of New York and now President of the United States. Early in his candidacy in a speech delivered in Atlanta, Mr. Roosevelt said:
'The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.
Many of those whose primary solicitude is confined to the welfare of what they call capital have failed to read the lessons of the last few years and have been moved less by calm analysis of the needs of the Nation as a whole than by a blind determination to preserve their own special stakes in the economic disorder.
We may build more factories, but the fact remains that we have enough now to supply all our domestic needs and more, if they are used. No; our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital; it was an insufficient distribution of buying popover coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production.'
Soon thereafter on the basis of such declarations, I became convinced that the best chance for a solution of America's difficulties was through the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President."
(pg. 298)
"The Democratic National Convention assembled in its first formal session in the Chicago Coliseum on the 27th day of June, 1932. The first controversy was the dispute between contesting delegations. Contests were heard alphabetically, beginning with Louisiana. This was the original test of strength of the Roosevelt forces in that convention.
We knew an effort would be made on the first contest, regardless of what it might be, to break through our lineup; furthermore, in the seating of delegates, the Roosevelt forces did not dare to sacrifice a vote, for the selection of a permanent chairman bade fair to be a nip and tuck contest due to the early commitments certain of our forces had made.
The opposition to the seating of our delegation was most ably presented by two distinguished anti-Roosevelt Democrats from Illinois and Iowa. Our floor leader, Arthur Mullen, and myself replied for the Roosevelt forces.
The final vote stood 638 3/4 to 514 1/4 and our delegation was seated.
It was the initial victory for the Roosevelt forces at the National Convention in Chicago."
(pg. 312)
Huey Long says he came to the U.S. Senate for only one purpose--to push his "Share The Wealth" philosophy. And push it he did (see the excerpts from the section on his Senate speeches). This excerpt from his autobiography makes the case for the crisis that Long sought to address with his plan.
"I HAD come to the United States Senate with only one project in mind, which was that by every means of action and persuasion I might do something to spread the wealth of the land among all of the people.
I foresaw the depression in 1929. . . I had predicted all of the consequences many years before they occurred.
The wealth of the land was being tied up in the hands of a very few men. The people were not buying because they had nothing with which to buy. The big business interests were not selling, because there was nobody they could sell to.
One per cent of the people could not eat any more than any other one per cent; they could not wear much more than any other one per cent; they could not live in any more houses than any other one per cent. So, in 1929, when the fortune-holders of America grew powerful enough that one per cent of the people owned nearly everything, ninety-nine per cent of the people owned practically nothing, not even enough to pay their debts, a collapse was at hand.
God Almighty had warned against this condition. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and every religious teacher known to this earth had declaimed against it. So it was no new matter, as it was termed, when I propounded the line of thought with the first crash of 1929, that the eventful day had arrived when accumulation at the top by the few had produced a stagnation by which the vast multitude of the people were impoverished at the bottom.
There is no rule so sure as that one that the same mill that grinds out fortunes above a certain size at the top, grinds out paupers at the bottom. The same machine makes them both; and how are they made? There is so much in the world, just so much land, so many houses, so much to eat and so much to wear. There is enough--yea, there is more--than the entire human race can consume, if all are reasonable.
All the people in America cannot eat up the food that is produced in America; all the people in America cannot wear out the clothes that can be made in America; nor can all of the people in America occupy the houses that stand in this country, if all are allowed to share in homes afforded by the nation. But when one man must have more houses to live in than ninety-nine other people; when one man decides he must own more foodstuff than any other ninety-nine people own; when one man decides he must have more goods to w ear for himself and family than any other ninety-nine people, then the condition results that instead of one hundred people sharing the things that are on earth for one hundred people, that one man, through his gluttonous greed, takes over ninety-nine parts for himself and leaves one part for the ninety-nine.
Now what can this one man do with what is intended for ninety-nine? He cannot eat the food that is intended for ninety-nine people; he cannot wear the clothes that are intended for ninety-nine people; he cannot live in ninety-nine houses at the same time; but like the dog in the manger, he can put himself on the load of hay and he can say:
'This food and these clothes and these houses are mine, and while I cannot use them, my greed can only be satisfied by keeping anybody else from having them.'
Wherefore and whence developed the strife in the land of too much, beginning in the year 1929."
(pgs. 291-292)
|SOURCES: All Huey Long quotes from, Every Man A King: The Autobiography of Huey P. Long, National Book Co., New Orleans, 1933. Copyright retained by Mr. Russell B. Long.
[1] Quoted in Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & The Great Depression, Vintage Books, 1983., pg. 64.)
[2} Quoted in Brinkley, op. cit., pg. 58.)


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Remains ID'd as missing Oak Ridge teenager
Remains found near a submerged 1996 Ford Ranger truck in a South Knoxville waterway last week have been positively identified as those of missing Oak Ridge High School graduate Derek Ryan Funk. Derek was only 19 years old when he went missing on May 12, 2010.
Darrell DeBusk of the Knoxville Police Department stated in a Tuesday email that the remains have been "positively identified" as Derek. He said the cause of death has yet to be determined and that the investigation is continuing.
Kevin Funk stated in a Tuesday phone interview that the family had just been notified of the identification. Derek's father said he wasn't surprised.
On Friday, as the several days' investigation was still getting underway, Kevin shared with The Oak Ridger: "We have prayed for (Derek) or his truck to be found. … Now we have to be prepared to deal with the answer that God has given us."
KPD public information officer DeBusk stated in a phone interview Friday that someone working off Island Home Avenue saw the wheels of an upside-down vehicle protruding from the water on Thursday and called authorities.
Around noon Thursday, officers responded under the initial belief a vehicle had just gone off the roadway and into the water in the 1400 block of Island Home Avenue. As the pickup was recovered, however, it was quickly determined the vehicle "had been in the water for an extended period of time."
Though no remains were found in the truck Thursday, a dive team with the Knoxville Volunteer Rescue Squad returned to the area Friday "to search for additional evidence under the surface of the water."
"The dive team has been successful in locating human remains," Friday's KPD release stated. "It is undetermined at this point if the remains are those of Mr. Funk."
In another Friday afternoon email, DeBusk reported: "The investigation into the vehicle and human remains discovery is continuing. Additional remains have been discovered by the Knoxville Volunteer Rescue Squad's dive team.
"It will likely be at least sometime next week before the remains can be positively identified. Knoxville Police Department missing persons investigators, along with investigators from the major crimes division are working together to determine if the person who has been discovered in the water died as a result of a homicide," Friday afternoon's email stated.
"Currently, we are working with additional law enforcement agencies to investigate leads that have developed as a result of the vehicle discovery. We will continue to provide updates as the multi-agency investigation continues."
"He loved his job," Derek's mother Tricia told The Oak Ridger in a May 2010 interview — just one week after Derek's disappearance. He had worked for East Tennessee Railroad for two years, she said.
A Knoxville television station's news story at the time reported Derek had been "severely depressed," but his mother said that wasn't the case.
In Friday's more recent phone conversation with The Oak Ridger, Derek's parents said they had had a busy day after the story broke — one that was filled with television interviews, visitors and calls.
Knoxville police officials reportedly notified and met with the Funks early Friday morning — before the story regarding the submerged vehicle was made public — so they were aware of the situation, Kevin Funk told The Oak Ridger.
He also said all the investigators, media representatives and well-wishers had been very nice and understanding to them.
Now Derek's parents have to wait until the remains are released before they can make final preparations for a son who went missing almost four years ago.
Kevin Funk said they have been told the remains will likely be released in another week.
Russel Langley can be reached at (865) 220-5514.


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Twelfth Day:
An Etching by Rembrandt
A Literary extract from Charles Dickens
Music by Shostakovich conducted by Rostropovich, played by Maxim Vengerov, Bob Dylan and Judy Garland
Our painting today is by Rembrandt who may be the most searching anatomist of the human heart who has ever lived.
There is such depth of humanity in Rembrandt's etching of Mother and Christ Child.
The scene glows with immediate and eternal love and intimacy.
Our first music selection today is one of the great works of the 20th Century.
Shostakovich lived through dark times yet, perhaps because of this, his work while never denying the darkness always returns to the light.
Maxim Vengerov is a musician to his fingertips and urged on by Rostropovich he wrings every scintilla of emotional power from the work.
So, at last – the twelfth day of our Sleigh's journey and it's Christmas Eve!
I hope you have enjoyed the music and reflections on the way here.
I have agonised over the music choices in this series and have many years worth stored up for Christmases to come (you have been warned!).
But today's choices were the first I wrote down and were my inevitable selections for the day before the great Feast.
First, the Keeper of American Song, Bob Dylan, with his inimitable spoken word rendition of Clement Moore's, 'The Night Before Christmas'.
It is safe to say that Bob's pronunciation of the word 'Mouse' has never been matched in the history of the dramatic arts!
Of course, in the process of his more than 50 year career Bob has continually been reinventing himself and in so doing has gloriously renewed American culture.
The clip, above comes from his wonderful, 'Theme Time' radio show where over a 100 episodes he displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of twentieth century popular music and a wicked sense of humour.
Bob also recorded for the season at hand the deeply heartfelt, 'Christmas In The Heart' album which gets better and more extraordinary with every hearing.
It is clear that Bob, who is well aware that it's not dark yet (but it's getting there) is consciously rounding out his career by assuming the mantle of the grand old man of American Music tipping his hat to every tradition (hence the deeply stirring Sinatra covers CDs).
The only safe thing to say about Bob is that he will have a few surprises for us yet!
And, indeed this year he assumed in typically enigmatic way the mantle of a Nobel Laureate. The man never known to make a foolish move managed by not attending the investiture ceremony to harvest more publicity than all those who did!
In his nicely judged speech he managed to be both filled with humility and unblinkingly directly compare himself to Shakespeare!
Now that's the one and only Bob Dylan!
Now we turn to Judy Garland with a Christmas song without peer, 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas'. Her singing on this song seems to me to be almost miraculous.
It's as if her singing really came from the secret chambers of the heart all the rest of us keep under guard.
No wonder she has such a deep impact on us – we know she is expressing a profound truth about the human condition – our need to love and know we are loved.
Judy Garland paid a high price in terms of personal happiness for living her life and art with such an exposed heart and soul but she fulfilled a vocation given to very few and left an indelible mark on her age and will surely do for aeons to come.
Today, not a poem but the concluding passages from, 'A Christmas Carol' by the incomparable Charles Dickens – a writer for all seasons and situations.
'Hallo!' growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as near as he could feign it. What do you mean by coming here at this time of day?
'I am very sorry, sir' said Bob, 'I am behind my time,'
'You are?' repeated Scrooge. 'Yes. I think you are. Step this way, sir, if you please.'
'It's only once a year, sir,' pleaded Bob, appearing from the Tank. 'It shall not be repeated. I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.'
'Now I'll tell you what my friend, said Scrooge, I am not going to stand that sort of thing any longer. And therefore, he continued, leaping from his stool and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again, and therefore I am about to raise your salary!'
Bob trembled and got a little nearer to the ruler. He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it, holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat.
'A merry Christmas Bob! said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. 'A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!'
Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed; and that was quite enough for him.
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards, and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.
May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, Every One!
And who am I to do anything other than echo Mr Dickens and Tiny Tim?
So, to all the readers of the Jukebox I wish you a peaceful and joyous feast – however you choose to celebrate it. God bless us, Every One!


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Introducing Yongjinglong datangi, a titanosaur that lumbered across the fields of China during the Early Cretaceous period some 100 million years ago. The specimen discovered, a juvenile not yet fully grown, measured nearly 60 feet in length, making it one of the largest species to ever walk the Earth.
The image above illustrates an Alamosaurus, a titanosaur similar to Yongjinglong. I chose it because the researchers provided a depiction that, uh, leaves much to be desired:
The team of palaeontologists, led by University of Pennsylvania researchers, didn't have much to go by — just three teeth, eight vertebrae, the animal's left shoulder blade, and the radius and ulna from its right leg. But that was enough to piece this bad boy together — and to conclude they were dealing with an entirely new species. It's considered one of the more advanced titanosaurs ever found.
One of the things that made it unique, aside from its tremendous size, was it's freakishly long shoulder blade. It was so long that it didn't fit in the body in a conventional way, but oriented at an angle of 50 degrees from the horizontal.
Read the entire study at PLoS.


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Last night's attempt at MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) in Polymer did not quite work out the way I hoped.
I am trying to rework the very simple
<hello-you> Polymer element used in a couple of Patterns in Polymer chapters:
I had hoped that the simplicity would lead to a quick solution on which I could build something more complex. I found myself stuck on the Model. I think the class is simple enough. To support the element as-is, the most basic of objects ought to suffice:
function Person(name) { this.name = name ? name : ''; }What tripped me up was marking
name observable. If a human introduces themselves, the
Person object should have its
name property updated and the View should be able to observe that change so that it can update itself with the new
Last night's solution was to shelve the idea of a
Person object and use a plain old
Object instead. That works fine in Polymer since Polymer can observe plain old objects out of the box—its properties are automatically observable. That solves my simple case, but what about a more complex object with a prototype and methods?
I can think of at least three approaches that might work for this. Tonight, I try what I hope is the easiest: making the Model a UI-less Polymer element:
Polymer({ is: 'x-person', properties: { name: { type: String, value: '', observer: 'nameChanged' } }, nameChanged: function(v, old) { console.log(v + ' ' + old) } });This should give me an
<x-person> element that I can use inside of
<hello-you> to store the name of the Person being greeted:
<x-person name="Chris"/>. I declare the UI-less template as:
<polymer-element name="x-person">  </polymer-element>I import this into the
<hello-you> element with a
<link> import:
<link rel="import" href="../bower_components/polymer/polymer.html"> <link rel="import" href="x-person.html"> <polymer-element name="hello-you"> <template>  </template>  </polymer-element>With that, I should be able to use my
<x-person> "Model" in the ViewModel (
<hello-you>'s backing class) and the View (
<hello-you>'s template).
The easiest (but possibly not the best for this pattern) way to bind
<input> to the
name property of
<x-person> is in the template/view:
<polymer-element name="hello-you"> <x-person name="{{name}}"></x-person> <template>
Hello {{name}}

 <input value="{{name::input}}">
  </template>  </polymer-element>That is probably not quite right for MVVM since three items (
<x-person>, the

 title, and the
<input>) bind to a local
name variable instead of a ViewModel property. I will worry about that later. For now, I have the ViewModel worrying about presentation (from last night) and a Model worrying about the "business" of naming.
Only this does not work.
When I update the
<input>, the change observer that I logged in
<x-person> is not seeing any changes. This turns out to be caused by placing
<x-person> outside of
<template> tag. The fix for this is easy enough, I move it inside of the
To complete tonight's efforts, I would like to drive the most basic of business logic in the Model: setting a default value. This is accomplished in Polymer 0.8 with a
<x-person name="{{name}}"></x-person>

Hello {{name}}

<input value="{{name::input}}">

value property:
Polymer({ is: 'x-person', properties: { name: { type: String, value: 'Bob', observer: 'nameChanged' } }, // ... });But when I load up
<hello-you>, I am not seeing "Bob":
This is due to the lack of change notification from the Model. For a host element like
<hello-you> to see changes to attributes of child elements, the child has to specify that the property generates notifications. This is done with the
notify property:
Polymer({ is: 'x-person', properties: { name: { type: String, value: 'Bob', notify: true, observer: 'nameChanged' } }, // ... });Now, when I load my element, the name defaults to "Bob":
I am unsure if this binding more properly belongs in the ViewModel than in the View as I have done here. For tonight, I claim a small victory in the form of an observable Model. It is clear that I need to continue my investigation into MVVM as I still do not have a complete handle on it.
Day #24


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#9: All My Ex's Live in Toronto
Ahhh, one of the first season classics. Lacey is a little worried about her ex-boyfriend coming out to Dog River for a visit. Ohh, by ex-boyfriend she means ex-fiancee. By ex-fiancee she means ex-fiancee whom she abandoned at the alter and broke up with the groom by phoning his parents. By ex-fiancee whom she abandoned at the alter and broke up with the groom by phoning his parents she doesn't mean that he's a crazy stalker. Through some Hank-related miscommunication, that's exactly what Hank and Oscar and Davies come to believe though, and when fatally-niceguy Steven shows up with Karen in tow there's a whole lot of excitement. The subplot of Oscar needing to be arrested to go to the doctor was also beautifully done, and in a way that facilitated the main plot rather than being tied in at the end or B-plot in its entirety. Best scenes have to be Oscar and Davis at the doctors (the handcuffs were necessary, as Oscar did take a swing at the cop), Karen and Davis' long-ride to The Ruby from slightly off-screen from The Ruby, and Davis' gun/baton wife/lover ramblings (which feature the only obscure reference to his failed marriage). Ultimately the end scene in the police interrogation room and Steven's later legal troubles remind us that maybe some city folk just don't belong in the country. (Unless they look as good in a tanktop as Gabrielle Miller!)
Honourable Mention: Physical Credit
A generally passable episode, the main reason to watch is the parody/homage to "Do It", the Partici-paction commerical from the 80s. "The Canadian Fitness Guide is the last great thing this country ever acheived" is the classic old-man rant you'll hear if you hang around the rural west for more than 18 minutes, and in the end the shuttle run saves the day. If Corner Gas is Canada's Seinfeld, then the shuttle run rescue in "Physical Credit" is equivalent to George Constanza's video game coming to life in "The Frogger"
#99: I Love Lacey
Years ago The Simpsons did "a Superbowl-themed episode without showing any football" that received meta-criticism within the episode itself. The one time during the show's run that the Grey Cup was held in Saskatchewan, and they couldn't even make it to Taylor Field? Emma and Wanda in the Dollar Store was a little agonizing, Davis and Karen "scalping" tickets from a prostitute was pretty agonizing, and even Oscar and Hank robbing a dead man was agonizing. Oddly enough the saving grace was Lacey and Brent's almost kiss moment on the farm, but it was made agonizing by Lacey's cell phone calls to the towing company that she was passing off as calls to her Mom. Such a waste, which is odd because the next episode of the 2nd season that took advantage of the unresolved kiss was excellent.
Comments for the Best/Worst of Corner Gas are closed. Please direct all comments to the portal page.
Corner Gas Countdown, #9
#9: All My Ex's Live in Toronto
by Feynman and Coulter's Love Child at 10:56 am
Labels: Entertainment


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Visual is a one page theme which comes with 2 types of layout, Photography & Design Agency.
The psd is designed on grid and can be easily converted into responsive html.
- Lato (google font)
- Icons8.com
Note: the images used in the design are for only demo purpose and are NOT included in the downloadable files.


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Fashion has greatly influenced the fabric of societies all over the world. What people wear often characterizes who they are and what they do for a living.
In the United States of America, employment in the apparel manufacturing industry has declined by more than 80 percent (from about 900,000 to 150,000 jobs) over the past two decades. The decline has been proportional throughout the apparel manufacturing component industries. However, manufacturing is only one aspect of the clothing industry. If we pull out manufacturing, their is still a wide variety of career paths available to people that wish to work in the garment industry.
The fashion industry is a global industry, where fashion designers, manufacturers, merchandisers, and retailers from all over the world collaborate to design, manufacture, and sell clothing, shoes, and accessories. In order to keep the world of fashion spinning, it requires many workers in various fields. You may find fabulous fashion jobs in California.
Employment opportunities in our industry rise and fall from time to time. However, their is almost always good employment opportunities if you look hard enough. If you don't find the perfect job in California, you may want to try another state or explore different segments of the fashion market. For example, you may be searching for a job at a fashion boutique. If you can't find one, possibly research jobs at clothing wholesalers or manufacturers as well.
Search for California fashion jobs by using various employment search engines. You can also visit directly to fashion company websites to learn about position openings. Most of the large fashion companies have career sections on their websites.
LinkedIn Fashion Jobs in California
ZipRecruiter Fashion Jobs in California
CareerBuilder Fashion Jobs in California
SimplyHired Fashion Jobs in California
Occupations such as textile and garment pressers, sewing machine operators, hand sewers, shoe and leather workers and repairers, and textile bleaching and dyeing machine operators are only a few of the many options available in the manufacturing segment. You can also find employment as a pattern maker, embroiderer, printer, etc. The apparel industry has so many great opportunities.
Fashion designers create original or exclusive custom-fitted clothing (e.g. haute couture) or off the rack garments to be sold to mass merchants. They can also design accessories and footwear. In doing so, they must know how to sketch designs, select fabrics and patterns, and give instructions on how to make the products they design. Fashion designers work in wholesale or manufacturing establishments, apparel companies, retailers, and design firms. Within the United States, most fashion designers work in large cities, such as New York or Los Angeles. However, fashion designers can be successful in any state in the country.
Nothing should stop you from finding the perfect career path. Do your research and get started today.
We hope that this California fashion job search page was of help to you.
Find the perfect fashion job in California. You know you want to work in the apparel industry, so you certainly should start your job search as soon as possible. Keep in mind, you will need more than just a good sense of style.
Thank you for using the Apparel Search website.


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Frp Chief and Finance Minister Siv Jensen says he is satisfied with the election of KRF, but adds that Frp does not intend to promote government expansion.
"I am glad that the Parliament of the Krf has proposed compulsory cooperation to prevent AP, SV and Sp from influencing it," she told NTB.
The Council of State noted that the parties had carried out a number of good policies, reducing lost lines of health and freedom of choice.
"We are building more ways and ways than ever and we have created a balance between strict immigration policy and good integration policy," he continues.
As for the upcoming government talks, it takes one step at a time.
– Frp is ready for probes with KrF, but I do not want to promote government expansion. For Frp, policy is the most important. That is why we strive to anchor the process of the party to ensure that the fundamental questions of Frp are taken when KrF goes to the government, he says.
Likewise, you can get more recent and recent reviews here!
Source link


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Showtime deal with Netflix shows emerging rivalry
(AP) -- Amid an emerging rivalry between traditional pay TV operators and rising star Netflix Inc., CBS Corp.'s Showtime pay TV service confirmed Wednesday that back seasons of current original series like "Dexter" and "Californication" will not be available on Netflix's streaming service as of this summer.
Instead, CBS will offer them to subscribers who pay for Showtime through Comcast Corp. on Comcast's Xfinity TV online platform. Other cable TV providers are expected to offer online access to Showtime in the future.
Netflix and CBS had reached a separate deal in February that allows older shows that are not generating new original episodes to be run on Netflix's streaming service, including "Medium," "Frasier" and "Cheers."
But news that episodes of current Showtime series would no longer be available broke this week after Netflix announced it was buying the right to debut the series "House of Cards" from executive producer David Fincher.
Debuting an original series on its service makes Netflix even more of a direct rival to pay TV channels like Showtime and HBO.
Netflix had 20.2 million subscribers in the U.S. at the end of December, compared with just under 20 million for Showtime and HBO's estimated 28 million.
Showtime originals that have stopped airing on TV, including "The Tudors" and "Sleeper Cell," will continue to be available for streaming on Netflix.
Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey acknowledged the deal allowing it to stream Showtime shows like "Dexter" would expire this summer. But he said negotiations were still ongoing to keep them up.
"We're perplexed at these comments because we're negotiating and these titles may or may not be available," he said.
The conflicting versions of events highlight how new technology is upending the traditional pay TV business.
CBS is seeking to maximize the money it can receive from Netflix from older content, while encouraging consumers to continue to subscribe through pay TV providers like Comcast for new original shows on Showtime.
Highlighting the importance of these existing arrangements, CBS cut a 10-year pact with Comcast in August. The deal allows for CBS and Showtime shows to be played on Comcast's Xfinity TV platform, which can be accessed on computers and iPad tablets.
Other companies, like Time Warner Inc.'s HBO have shunned Netflix entirely. HBO offers its service online for no extra charge to its pay TV subscribers.
Netflix, meanwhile, has been spending more to acquire the rights to TV shows and movies that it can stream to customers to wean them off ordering DVDs in the mail in an effort to reduce postage costs.
Goldman Sachs analyst Ingrid Chung said the impact of CBS pulling some shows from Netflix would not materially affect Netflix, but it could signal that it will have to pay more for the right to stream shows in the future.
CBS shares closed up 21 cents at $24.87 on Wednesday, while Netflix shares finished the regular session up $7.67, or 3.5 percent, at $229.06.
©2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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So. On that plagiarism, apology, forgiveness thing? I'm more of a cynic than I thought.Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Posted in: Azteclady Speaks
Tags:Kristi Diehm, Plagiarism, The Story Siren
Yes, I'm sure many here are tired of the topic, particularly since it seems to crop up regularly, all over the place.
Me, I'm one of those who believes that talking about it, keeping the perpetrators and their victims clearly separated, is the only way to reduce the instances of plagiarism. (Like racism, there are some people who don't realize what it is–or that they are indulging in it¹–until someone points it out to them.)
But, onwards with today's post.
Yesterday Jill Sorenson commented on my latest post on Kristi Diehm, plagiarist.
My own reply to Ms Sorenson took me back to RRRJessica's awesome post on the scandal (seriously, go and read the whole thing; it's wonderful and full of win. The part about moral autonomy and women? Win, I tell you).
Upon re-reading the post, my mind, that horrible, suspicious, cynical fiend, fixated on the following bits:
What we got from The Story Siren, beginning from the moment she asked her victims to keep quiet, continuing when she deleted her own plagiarism post, and then again when she reworded her own (already inadequate) second apology post, was the kind of apology that seeks to repair personal damage and restore personalsocial status, much like the celebrity and politician apologies we see on TV every week.
Yes, indeed (picture me doing my nodding dog imitation).
But wait, the next paragraph is the one that got my (cynic) spidey senses all tingly:
A restorative apology is not focused on the self, but on re-building community. Since The Story Siren appears to be moving on, business as usual, I doubt one is forthcoming. I'm sorry that she has opted not to take this opportunity for educating and strengthening the book blogging community. I won't bore you with my idea of the elements such an apology would contain, but I will make a prediction based on my many years as an ethics consultant working with health care providers who have made medical errors: without a meaningful attempt to take responsibility and restore trust, The Story Siren will never fully recover. With them, she may become more admired and influential than ever. (bits in bold by yours truly, cynical so and so AL)
Will you look at that! Suddenly, Kristi Diehm is taking it upon herself to educate herself on plagiarism–never mind the much-trotted out post on plagiarism she herself wrote and later deleted, which spells out quite clearly what plagiarism is and isn't–and to educate the community by inviting others to do guest posts about how plagiarism is "tricky" and "not black and white." ²
*silent while pondering*
Bu surely, I hear someone say, it's a coincidence, right?
As Eve Dallas would say, coincidences are hooey.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In further conversation with Ms Sorensen, I remembered another plagiarism scandal from earlier this year–Kay Manning aka…well, aka a bunch of other people. After some fudging and further lying, she posted a full apology over at Dear Author:
I've gone back and forth on how to address this for several hours. A personal blog post would not be seen by enough people. Nor would a response to Ms. Fielding's blog. When Dear Author posted this blog, I felt it was the answer I'd been looking for. I couldn't find a more public place than this.
To all the authors, publishers, and editors I stole from, I am sorry. There is no excuse. All distributors have been notified and those I couldn't take down/remove myself are being removed by the third party as soon as possible.
To all the authors, publishers, and editors I've met and known over the years, I am sorry. I know you will never forgive me and you shouldn't.
To anyone associated with the Kiss of Death Chapter, you can be assured that all funds relating to the chapter are well managed and controlled by a dedicated President and Board. I have not had access to any accounts where wrongdoing could have occurred without their immediate and swift action.
Finally, so there is no misunderstanding. I am a thief, a plagiarist. I am not an author.
See the parts I highlighted? That's an apology. No bullshit explanations, no woe is me, no "it just happened." And you know what? I think it works–I'm not an expert but I don't think anyone has spent a whole lot of time persecuting KM since then.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A further point: while using my meager GoogleFu to check whether or not there are people out there making it their lives' mission to keep tabs making KM miserable over her thefts, I found this over at The Passive Voice:
I guess this person, and other plagiarists, are narcissists — they have a role inside their heads that they want to be seen as, and how they get seen as that role doesn't matter. The role in this instance is "author." Actually being an author isn't a point — it's being seen by others as "an Author." I can't think of any other reason to waste so much time in something that will be found out sooner or later. And of course now she has a new role: the person who was caught plagiarizing, got humiliated, wrote an apology, and is now felt sorry for. Maybe I'm very cynical, but the underlying problem with cases like these isn't the stealing, it's the narcissism.
Looking at Kristi Diehm's actions through this lens, then her silence while Grit and Glamour, Beautifully Invisible and those calling her on her theft are attacked, make a lot of sense. She is now That Poor Little Thing, So Brave, Who Needs Support and Forgiveness
I did tell you I'm a cynic, didn't I?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Updated to add: Queen of chutzpah indeed! The guest post today ends with the following gem:
Conclusion: People learn from their mistakes and move on.
Gee, teach, you sure told us meanies.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Further update on May 25th 2012: must read Grit and Glamour's Damage control 101: The Fine Art of Covering Your Ass and Beautifully Invisible's The Art of the (Non) Apology.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
¹ There shall be a conversation about this cryptic allusion soon.
² In her introductory post–no link, hie thee to the SmartBitches for that–Kristi Diehm claims that 'an author' contacted her with this bit of wisdom:
"A lot of young people, bloggers and writers read your blog, and all of them have probably walked that plagiarism line at least once, whether they are willing to admit it or not. We all like to think plagiarism is black or white, this or that. But the truth is, it can be tricky. When you are a student who is assigned to regurgitate someone else's thoughts and opinions in a paper, or a blogger trying to explain why you liked or didn't like the same book that a hundred other bloggers are also writing about, or if you are a writer chasing the latest trend in publishing … it's not that easy to come up with something that is the same — but different."
Yeah, cue more cynicism from this corner of the room.


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BETWEEN Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man's personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.
From the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man
This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown—Chrestos [Christos, The Higher Self].
The closer the union, the more serene man's destiny, and the less dangerous the external conditions. This belief is neither bigotry nor superstition, only an ever-present, instinctive feeling of the proximity of another spiritual and invisible world.
"This world, though it be subjective to the senses of the outward man, is perfectly objective to the inner ego."
The foregoing words were written by H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, her first first major work on Theosophy—examining religion and science in the light of Western and Oriental ancient wisdom, and occult and spiritualistic phenomena.


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Iraq bombings kill dozens
IRBIL, Iraq — A wave of bombings struck majority Shiite Muslim areas of Baghdad and two other Iraqi cities on Monday, killing at least four dozen people in an apparently worsening spiral of sectarian bloodletting.
In the deadliest incident, a suicide bomber set off his explosives in a mosque, killing 11 people and wounding more than 30 in a poor, predominantly Shiite section of the capital known as New Baghdad.
The Sunni Muslim extremist group known as Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, which it said was in revenge for a mass shooting Friday of Sunni worshippers at a mosque in Diyala province, east of Baghdad, that left 73 people dead.
Four other car bombs exploded in neighborhoods across Baghdad, killing 21 people, while deadly blasts also shook the Shiite holy city of Karbala and the majority Shiite city of Hillah, south of Baghdad.
The attacks came on the day that Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi held his first official news conference and called for national unity as the country struggles to stop the advance of Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate in the lands it controls in Iraq and Syria.
Al-Abadi condemned the Diyala mosque attack, which has widely been blamed on Shiite militias loyal to the government, and called for the militias to come under Baghdad's control and cease acting independently. The Diyala attack prompted leading Sunni politicians to pull out of crucial talks on forming a new government, which al-Abadi must complete by Sept. 10.
"All the massacres being committed against the civilians by the armed groups and militias are condemned and rejected," al-Abadi said.
As the Obama administration weighs whether to expand airstrikes against Islamic State, Syria pledged to cooperate with international counterterrorism efforts but said that any military action within its borders must be approved by President Bashar Assad's government.
"Being serious in combating terrorism isn't achieved by transgressing against others' sovereignty," Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said at a news conference in Damascus, the Syrian capital. "We know better than anyone else what is happening on our land."
The offer of cooperation by Assad's government, which the Obama administration has accused of committing crimes against civilians during Syria's three-year civil war, illustrates how Islamic State's rise has upended U.S. policy in the Middle East. Last week, the militant group released a video showing one of its fighters beheading American journalist James Foley, an act that could force President Barack Obama to take tougher action.
The United Nations on Monday accused Islamic State militants of "appalling, widespread and systematic deprivation of human rights," including targeted killings, abductions and sexual abuse in areas under their control.
U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said the Sunni extremists were singling out religious and ethnic minorities, including Christians, Yazidis, ethnic Turkmen and other groups, as they promulgate a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam.
Pillay said the U.N. has received credible reports that hundreds of Iraqis have been abducted and that many have been executed for refusing to convert to Islam.
"Such persecution would amount to crimes against humanity," Pillay said in a statement.
(Special correspondent Nabih Bulos in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.)
(c)2014 Los Angeles Times
Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services


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The God of War, says novelist Marisa Silver, is "another kind of California narrative, one that does not end in glamorous reinvention, but has to do more with one kind of social and economic reality. Sometimes there are no reinventions possible. There is just hanging on, making due."
The bleak moral and socio-economic climate that colors the early years of the 21st century has rendered millions of people figuratively and literally impotent. The world market for sexual disorder pharmacotherapy drugs indicated for erectile dysfunction is currently estimated at $3 billion and expected to increase to $6.6 billion by 2012. In the same vein, the market for psychotherapeutic drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Ritalin is a $37 billion market annually and revenues are projected to grow more than 50 percent by 2010. Modern man, it would appear by pharmacology alone, has arrived at some kind of collective dead-end road, a dark and scary cul-de-sac where no reinvention — no turning back and no moving forward — is possible. Our only option is to just hang on and make due while we struggle to read the road map in the darkening light.
Laurel, the strong-willed matriarch at the center of Silver's sad and stirring family drama and putative coming-of-age tale, does not cling to modern medicine, in particular any therapy that might allay the effects of her six-year-old son's severe developmental disability. Today there are words for the kind of child Malcolm is, labels and therapeutic regimens and even drugs. But in 1978, the year of the novel's events, and in the remote corner of California where the story unfolds, science, Silver says in the voice of her narrator, Ares Ramirez, "had not caught up to us, and diagnoses of abnormal behavior, when they were made at all, ran to generalities. My brother was simply 'backward,' as if he were a sweater someone had put on wrong."
The God of War, Silver's second novel after No Direction Home (2006), is a heart-wrenching parable for the rudderless modern world cloaked as an L.A. novel. The author has taken many of the vital ingredients of a regional novel and composed an L.A. tale that is not set in Los Angeles proper but many miles to the east instead, at the edge of the desolate Salton Sea, a devastating wasteland that would have held tremendous appeal to T.S. Eliot.
One notable hallmark of the L.A. novel is the theme of life moving inexorably downward toward destruction. An uneasy sense of looming disaster hovers over Silver's slim narrative, as sure as the bullet that takes struggling actress Gloria Beatty's life in Horace McCoy's stark They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, as certain and calculating as the deadly riot mob in the climax of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. But Silver does not carry the hard-bitten cynicism of McCoy and West or even Raymond Chandler, inarguably the dean of the Southern California regional novel. If Silver leans on any of the past masters of the genre it is upon the existential resignation of Joan Didion, whose Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays demonstrates, as one analyst put it, "courage in the face of nothingness".
"Although I have read West, Chandler, and Didion over the years, I would hardly call myself an expert on the California novel," says Silver, who surrendered a career in Hollywood as a successful writer-director to enroll in grad school to become a short story writer. "Perhaps the work of these and other California writers affects me at a subconscious level, although I did not consciously think about other California novels while at work. I am sure that like so many works of fiction, my own fits into certain paradigms. But when I am writing, I try very hard to think only of my characters and the situations I invent for them, to try to be as true to their fictional reality as I can be. I do not step outside the process to think about how my work does or does not fit into any kind of literary lineage. While certain aspects of my novel may seem to respond or, as you note, continue the themes and textures of the Southern California novel, this was certainly not on my mind during the process."
Silver's process has produced an emotionally complex novel that hits all the right notes for a regional text while virtually reinventing the playbook by injecting a pathos that will undoubtedly elicit tears from the most jaded of readers.
Silver's narrator, Ares Ramirez — named for the Greek god of war — is looking back in these pages on his 12-year-old self, living with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm, in a trailer adjacent to the Salton Sea, an inland saline lake covering a surface area of approximately 376 square miles, the largest inland body of water in California in the middle of the Southern California desert. At childhood's end, Ares bears the dual burdens of his single mother's unconventional choices in life and his own unspoken grief, "shadowed by an old mongrel guilt" that he is responsible for Malcolm's profound mental disability.
As a 12-year-old, Ares is also battling for personal identity and waging a war between responsibility to self and to others. While Laurel works as a massage therapist in nearby Palm Springs, Ares is left to help his brother face the real world of neighborhood bullies, dentist appointments, conflicts at school, and the ramifications of the six-year-old's increasingly violent behavior. Ares sees his brother's damaged brain as "a sea of nothingness…. His entire existence narrowed in on the time and physical space of one second." Malcolm's only nod to the physical world around him is his deep affinity for the sea birds that flock to the Salton Sea, making the lake a crown jewel of avian biodiversity.
Laurel has effectively conscripted or "boxed" Ares into the task of taking care of his younger brother. She has simply chosen to ignore the implications of Malcolm's disability and arrogantly sees the boy's attributes as strengths. Ares narrates that Laurel regards her damaged child "as if Malcolm's critical faculties were so sophisticated that he had judged the culture and found it unworthy of his participation." She believes that "labels are for boxes so people don't have to look inside them" and dismisses the notion that "being normal is something to strive for". Laurel's love for her boys (born of different fathers) is fierce and intense but when coupled with blind, boundless optimism, her actions are, in the words of the author, "careless and ultimately destructive".
"Laurel comes from a fundamentalist Christian background," Silver tells PopMatters, "and has grown up surrounded by ideas of redemption and reclamation all her life, so she has very strong feelings about the issue, and her attraction to the desert is very much a reaction to those notions. She loves it for what it is: dry, desolate, unclaimed. She loves her boy for who he is. For better or worse, she finds Malcolm's 'imperfections' worthy and beautiful. She's a mistrusting and defiant character, and somewhat misguided by her own personal value system. Her love for her son, which is powerful, like her love for her home, ends up being both wonderful and damaging."
For Ares, the central dilemma presented to the young man in the novel is thus: does he embrace his mother's ethos, her values about land and people, or does he reject all of it and become his own man out of the clay he has been left to mold with? Entered into this mix is Kevin, a 15-year-old veteran of juvenile detention facilities, foster son of the school librarian. Ares befriends and feels "mesmerized by Kevin, by the evident power of his apathy". As the distant narrator looking back on Kevin, Ares cannot "easily point to any value except that he happened to be alive for a time through no fault or talent of his own". One does not need schooling in Lit 101 to realize that Kevin will play an instrumental role in bringing about the violent and tragic episode that is hinted at in the first, sparse chapter of The God of War. Kevin and Laurel notwithstanding, there are no good guys or bad guys in Silver's remarkable novel, simply a mosaic of confused earth-bound wanderers with no direction home. In this manner, too, the author embraces hallmarks of the L.A. novel while also rejecting or reinventing them.
"I write characters from the inside out," Silver asserts, "so Laurel may, in the end, represent a certain type of character, but my intention was not to make her a type but rather a fully realized, contradictory being. We, each of us, exhibit behavior that adheres to type, but I believe we are also so wildly inconsistent that our actions will always make us more complex and inscrutable and less able to be seen as representative of anyone but ourselves. Laurel is a product of her time, to be sure, a post-Vietnam, post-hippie-era wanderer. But I hope I have created a character of sufficient complexity that she defies labels, just as she would want Malcolm to defy them. She may share traits with a kind of California character, but I think these characters exist everywhere in the country. Anywhere there is a grid to step outside of, we might find a lot of people like Laurel. But if we look closely at them, they might remind us of other kinds of characters, too."
Salton Sea (Photo by Jeff T. Alu)
The collapse of traditional cultural standards is at the heart of almost every Southern California novel. Instead of serving as a setting for the regenerative possibilities of America, Southern California, in the literature of West, Cain, McCoy, Scott Fitzgerald, and Ross MacDonald, became the antithesis of El Dorado: the anti-myth, "that of the dream running out along the California shore". Landscape is always weighted with meaning in the Southern California novel. In Robert Parker's detective novel A Savage Place, his Boston-based private eye travels to Los Angeles for a case:
I don't know anything like it for sprawl, for the idiosyncratic mix of homes and businesses and shopping malls. There was no center, no fixed point for taking bearings. It ambled and sprawled and disarrayed all over the peculiar landscape — garish and fascinating and imprecise and silly, smelling richly of bougainvillea and engine emissions, full of trees and grass and flowers and neon and pretense. And off to the northeast, beyond the Hollywood Hills, above the smog and far from Disneyland were the mountains with snow on their peaks. I wondered if there was a leopard frozen up there somewhere.
Consider Parker's No Fixed Point rule while reading Silver's description of the hamlet of Bombay Beach near the Salton Sea:
The desert would briefly come alive with color before the summer heat and sun fired it into an old, faded Polaroid. Bombay Beach, where we lived, lay in the distance, not a town really, but a satellite of the nominally larger Niland to the south and east. I thought of our community, crosshatched by a handful of dirt and gravel streets, as an asteroid, a piece of something larger that had been cast off and that orbited at a constant, bereft distance from its source … [Laurel] said Bombay Beach was a good place to hide out … Bombay Beach, like all half-attempts at towns nearby, was a place for people who had a provisional relationship to the world.
Hiding out. A familiar theme from Chandler's California narratives, people fleeing from shadowy pasts in shadowy small towns for the opportunity the West purportedly provides for a little emotional duck and cover.
"Bombay Beach and [neighboring] Slab City are both interesting places to me, not only because of how they look but because of the people who choose to live in them," Silver explains. "In writing the book, I focused less on the deficits of these places than on thinking of the relationship each of my characters has to this unforgiving, yet powerful, landscape. Laurel, of course, loves the castoff, the untended, which cleaves to unlikely places. And she finds a kind of refuge in a place which is devoid of the strictures and formulations of society relative to where she grew up. In the empty expanse of the desert, she finds a place to hide out."
Ares informs the reader that in Bombay Beach "Laurel conjured a life for us out of nothing" and "we eschewed rules that conflicted with our privacy and Laurel's convictions that society had little to offer us."
Throughout the novel, Ares' bicycle provides his only freedom and the only momentary respites from his growing insolence toward his great responsibilities to his brother and his mother in that blighted expanse. The boy's bicycle gives him the illusion of freedom, of mobility, of control over his frenetic and confusing life: "I rode my bike day and night, whenever and wherever I pleased. There was nothing more exhilarating than the feeling of swinging my leg over the seat and making those first few turns of the pedals until my wheels seemed to glide above the ground." In Didion's Play It as It Lays, Maria receives the same temporary transcendence by the many thousands of miles she logs on her Corvette in similar pointless journeys, hers on the L.A. freeway system:
She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour…. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night she slept dreamlessly.
Silver's evocative description of Slab City and its aesthetic clutter, a metaphor for the lack of aesthetic control, evokes not only Leonard Gardner's despairing California boxing novel Fat City but also detective novelist and L.A. social observer Chandler at his best:
…we reached Slab City, the decommissioned base where snowbirds in RVs stayed every winter and other people lived year round in renegade homes built out of corrugated metal or trailers, all constructed atop the forsaken concrete foundations of barracks that no longer existed…. We rode past the bar and a sign advertising a community talent show, past the trailer that served as the church and the one that belonged to the unofficial mayor, who also ran the local shortwave radio broadcast. A sitting area had been set up outside his trailer with a handful of mismatched lawn chairs, a plastic table, and some browning potted palms. Empty plastic water jugs were scattered about, some reconceived as planters or dog bowls. Slab City's residents had to bring in their own water and get rid of their own garbage because Slab City wasn't really a city. It was a place for people who liked to get away with things.
Compare and contrast Silver's Slab City with Chandler's Downtown People from The High Window:
In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruit stands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander.
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.
One final "compare and contrast" will hopefully conclude the argument that Silver is tilling on fertile ground and in the process is reinventing and reinvigorating the Southern California novel. In Nathanael West's classic The Day of the Locust, protagonist Tod Hackett, an artist by schooling and trade, climbs a Hollywood canyon and observes the eclectic design of the homes that "outlined the tops of the ugly, humpbacked hills":
But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.
Silver encounters the same maddening aesthetic clutter in the Slab City Bar, where a local talent show and a major incident occurs in The God of War. The bar is described as a "semi-permanent structure decorated with a reckless combination of objects. Wagon wheels were nailed to the wall as well as old movie posters. A fake stuffed King Kong hung from one corner holding a Barbie doll in his hairy fist. Giant Chinese fans decorated the walls behind the bar." Even Silver's description of the topography of poor Malcolm's mind reads like a physical description of Southern California: "I thought about how he must experience life as a smashed mirror, a collection of fractured pieces that never fit together to make a perfect whole. There was this, and that, and the other thing, and all the separate shards didn't really have anything to do with one another, not even the central fact that they were in my brother's brain."
Finally, there is the Salton Sea itself, as strong and vivid a character as Ares, Laurel, Malcolm, and the doomed juvenile delinquent Kevin:
"My sea," she sighed, shading her eyes against the lowering sun. She possessed the sea as if it were another of the half-orphaned children she had collected around her like Malcolm and me, the crippled fragments of the earth she had decided to keep close while rejecting all the rest. For the sea was castoff, too. Some sixty years before, travelers crossed the desert looking for a new home. They wanted the land to be wet and arable, like the places in the east they lived in before drought and blight made them uninhabitable. Those pilgrims vowed to reclaim the desert as though it had been something else in the first place: an Eden of lush, generous plants and fruits, a place where people were meant to thrive. Determined, they tried to redirect a river, but the river broke loose and flooded, the water rushing down to this place, filling it up, creating a new sea and scuttling their plans. Laurel rarely spoke about her own past, or the farm in Indiana where she was raised. I knew only a little about my grandparents, whom she left when she was eighteen, and what they did to her. But she talked about the history of the sea as if it were her own, and in that way its story became mine, those early settlers my distant relatives, their exploits my legacy.
"I chose to write about the Salton Sea, Slab City, and Bombay Beach because they are places whose histories captivated me," Silver reflects. "The sea itself, as I write about in the book, is the result of human error, the desire on the part of early California settlers to irrigate the desert. I was certainly intrigued by the wonderful hubris of these settlers whose efforts to divert the Colorado River to create the irrigation they needed failed (until they succeeded) and created a sea. The effort is certainly redolent of a certain kind of California optimism, but of course, the story of America is based on such optimistic if sometimes foolhardy efforts. The story of California, sometimes seen as so distinct from that of other parts of the country, is really just the last stop on a continuum as pioneers pushed westward with their hopes and dreams and confronted a place that had to be re-worked to suit these dreams."
Silver's The God of War is, simply put, a stunning meditation on heartbreak and history, of choices made and the seismic consequences of those choices. In the foreword to Archer in Jeopardy, Southern California crime novelist Ross MacDonald wrote: "The dead require us to remember and to write about them. We reinvent them and ourselves out of memory and dream."
Dedicated to the memory of Jacqueline McAtee, 1942-2008.