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Wanting to build a stable of passive job candidates and actually doing it are sometimes at odds. Separating true interested job-seeker from the window-shopper is a consistent challenge, and then there's the balancing act of keeping the "pool" engaged ~ are they really a "candidate" if they aren't interested in the jobs you represent?
As it happens, Fistful of Talent (with an assist from our friends at Jobvite) is here. Addressing the pain described above, FOT created our October webinar entitled "5 Easy Ways For Recruiters to Engage Talent Pools – Without Looking Like Complete Stalkers" to help solve the problem. Join us on October 3, 2013 at 1pm EST and we'll hit you with the following:
- A simple definition of what a talent pool is, how you organize it in your ATS, and how to manage the concept of "opt-in" to the people you include in that talent pool. The definition of who gets included and "opt-in" is important, because you're going to broadcast a bit over time– which will feel different (in a good way) to candidates included in the talent pool.
- A checklist of information (you already have access to) that those passive talent pool candidates would love to hear about. It's a checklist! All you have to do is go find the info we list and you're golden, Ponyboy.
- Data on best practices in thinking like a marketer (do you use email, LinkedIn, snail mail, text, etc.) to engage your talent pool – without looking like a stalker.
- Grand Finale, we'll deliver the top 5 ways to engage talent pools – and for each engagement method, we'll list what the communication looks like, where to find the information and why doing it the way we recommend is the best practice.
Special Bonus: we're even going to give you a monthly calendar of what to do and when to do it related to our list of 5 ways for you to engage your talent pool. It couldn't be simpler than that.
It's time to make the talent pools you've built in your ATS actually like you and your company. Join us on for October 3, 2013 at 1pm EST, "5 Easy Ways For Recruiters to Engage Talent Pools – Without Looking Like Complete Stalkers" and we'll show you how.


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subset: commoncrawl


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At a recent rationalist gathering, someone I don't know very well looked at my outfit and told me, in utter seriousness, "if I dressed like you, I would be undeniably evil." He changed the topic a moment later, but I proceeded to think about this comment for the next few weeks. It would be hypocritical to be angry about it, because he was correct: the way I look deliberately connotes at least otherness, if not deviance depending on the audience. It is, however, rare for someone to call it outright.
I have to thank the schlocky murder-erotica TV drama Hannibal for bringing me the phrase "ethics become aesthetics" (a condensed version of a theory put forth in Susan Sontag's On Style). Inexorably, the way one looks is tied to the way one constructs their worldview. How much can you judge about how someone moves through the world, without ever talking to them? Who are they performing for? What is it they care about? What do they want you to know?
In my case, I took great care to weaponize my appearance. I have what could be characterized as an actively dangerous aesthetic. Lots of black, harsh angles, militaristic connotations. I don't characterize myself as evil, but I'm happy to look it, in that I actively don't want to look good. I think it should be important to establish yourself as someone who exists outside of the prevailing moral dogma. This should be something people know about you from the start. In the era of fake news, cancel culture (groan) and a guilty-until-proven-innocent structure of discourse, is important not to be an easy mark.
This is the guide for why you should want to look evil.
The most common morality systems are faulty.
I used to be close with someone who could be called an ineffective altruist. They were nationally recognized for their charitable work, which was driven by a solemn religiosity. They were also so hung up on the idea of repairing the world, of playing the long game, that they came to regard the people around them as collateral damage. They could absolutely demoralize you and then say, "I'm doing this for the greater good." This was a person I later cast in a space opera as the planet-destroying villain, driven by delusions of godlike justice. It was very easy to think, if this is what goodness is, I don't want to be good. I started thinking that morally it would be better to be the kind of person they would despise.
Around this time I was also attending a middling Jesuit university with squeaky-clean facade. I quickly found myself entirely uncomfortable with Catholics – the wheeling and dealing of sin and confession; the professors brazenly shoehorning their own faith into their coursework; the trite pro-LGBTQ signage around campus at odds with the deacon who banned gay marriage in the chapel, convinced that the local archdiocese would pull their support and disrupt the university's cash flow; the useless storefront of Campus Psychological Services, which redirected you to the priests stationed in the dorms as counsel. Guilt and secrecy were the backbones of the culture. Many of the students wore matching necklaces from spiritual retreats; the whole thing was culty. So I set myself up as someone unrecruitable, someone who could never be one of 'those people'. I acquired a leather jacket, got more piercings, all the '80s movie trappings of someone who doesn't care what you think, man. It might have made me moderately obnoxious (I once got suckered into a trip to the chapel wearing a t-shirt that said HELL IS SO HOT RIGHT NOW) but it also made me a lightning rod for discourse in my classes because I was the de facto contrarian. People expected my opinions to be novel, which made my work better. It was productive.
The moral here is that it's effective to cast yourself as someone who isn't playing by the rules. Quite literally wearing your ethics on your sleeve can do a lot of the legwork in saying I am not like you, I don't believe what you believe, and can more accurately set the tone for the interactions you want to be having in these morally-governed spaces.
Much of what we think of as morality is just play-acting.
One malady of late capitalism is that none of us want to look like we're doing too little. Public performance has always been an aspect of morality (think self-flagellating monks, or Victorians in their funerary black), and the demands of looking like a morally upstanding citizen today are painstakingly specific. The information age has given us a cornucopia of choices regarding who we are allowed to be in society, but we cherrypick certain behaviors to put our best foot forward. Just a sampling: wear a smile, even when there is nothing to smile about, because you need to look and sound authentic (happiness is of course taken to be the default authentic state). Sit up straight, even when exhausted; maybe get a standing desk so you can lord your able-bodiedness over your peers. You may talk to your officemates about certain preapproved topics when allowed time to be lax (definitely don't mention that it feels like the world is ending), but don't be too lax. Perform self-care, but not too much. Repost the correct current events to your newsfeed so everyone can know you did your part by raising awareness. Always be aware, but stay optimistic, like someone who doesn't read the news. Do meatless Mondays. Make a show of riding your bike. Act like your small acts save the world, even though a handful of people with more power than you can dream of are actively trying to kill it. These rituals are distracting, exhausting virtue signaling. They barely do anything for the net good of the planet other than telegraphing please like me to your immediate peers. They are not the kind of actions that, when everyone does them, will make a difference; they are bare-minimum nods to environmentalism that don't change the fact that the people at the top of the heap won't do anything that matters in time to fix the state of this planet (also your affinity for quinoa is decimating indigenous populations in South America).
I'm not saying we should all give up. I'm saying that many of the behaviors we partake in to increase our social worth are inefficiencies, and it is possible to care deeply about justice without constructing a shell of empty symbols to do it. The mask can slip off with little consequence. Speedrunning the impractical parts of these social contracts may at worst lead to some meaningless name-calling about being uncaring. It is worthwhile to construct yourself as the kind of person who doesn't care about these things, who has convictions that exist outside of hollow late capitalist ethics. To save yourself some energy, look like someone who wants to bring down the system, not like someone who wants to earn a gold star from it.
Any system that defines good and evil as inexorable, all-or-nothing states of being is not a just system.
Hell was the worst idea humans ever had. Hell makes everything a moral imperative – you're either 100% saved or 100% damned, no matter how complicated the human experience. Even in secular circles, this sort of thinking is carried out in paradigms like cancel culture, in which a community decides to cast members out based on often small infractions which are then extrapolated into rigid judgments about the person's character as a whole.
I participate in some social justice work. It was never an active decision to do so; it felt like a reflex, like some primordial decision-making structure told me I had to do it. I help edit a list of known offenders within a certain community, people prone to abuses of power or coercive business practices. It is left up to the readers to decide whether they can handle working with the people documented on the list. Some mistake the existence of a list like this as evidence of rampant cancel culture, and assume me to be its figurehead, but my only goal to make sure instances of abuse are documented in a field that has no formal accountability. The list doesn't tell anyone who they should shun. But if someone wants to based on information provided in the list, that is their choice.
In working on a project like this, embracing underhandedness is necessary. The list is effective because it acts as a proverbial anvil hovering over the heads of people who do deplorable things, and embracing the role of a villain made dealing with these tough subjects tolerable. There is a vicious kind of joy in singling out what makes a person dangerous, and then documenting it dispassionately, like a hunter hanging a game trophy. Being a threat can be thrilling. Power can be balanced swiftly and gracefully from afar, if the need arises.
Being a villain, however, requires being an outsider. I have had opportunities parlay this project into restorative justice, to become a compassionate advocate instead of a slightly rude fly on the wall, and it was always imperative that I decline these. The list works because it doesn't provide any definitive judgments. The moment I take a stand for the goodness of certain people over others, presuming the innocence of some but not others, the whole endeavor becomes moot. It would cease to be an unbiased instrument of justice and would instead be a popularity contest. It only functions if my personal judgments are entirely out of the picture, if I maintain a moral otherness as someone on the outside of the system looking in.
On looking vs. being:
I'll admit that I went through about five separate drafts of this essay because I didn't want to come off as an absolute asshole. Some of the ideas here are what I would typify as "dark side theologies" (and I'm sure there's a real term for this that I don't know): ideas that immediately threaten group security by reducing rule adherence. Or, more simply: ideas that would make me an absolute misanthrope depending on context. To round this out and to rescue my ego, I'd like to loop back around to the comment that started this screed off, with my emphasis: "if I dressed like you, I would be undeniably evil." The sentence structure seems to indicate that while I only look like I should be evil, there is some ineffable factor that keeps me from actually being evil (something that the person who said this doesn't seem to think he has). This conversation happened in a place where I clearly look like an iconoclast, but where ethically, I don't seem to be one. I'm happy to interpret this as reinforcement that what you appear to be isn't what you are.


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By Alice Munro
Knopf, 319 pgs., $26.95
In the ring for world's greatest living short-story writer is England's William Trevor, age 84; in the far corner is Canada's Alice Munro, age 81. And it's a fact: The two writers are not only close enough in age to be longstanding contenders, but you rarely read of one these days without mention of the other in the championship bout for the title of short-story master or mistress.
Except the word "mistress" in this context is not OK. Just as "poetess," in another context, isn't either. But "poetess" is how some people described Greta back in the early 1960s in Vancouver, where "housewife" and "mother," in that order, were the order of the day.
What was clearly out of order, then or now: Greta having sex with Greg, an actor traveling on the same train as Greta and her daughter Katy. But as Greta is having her rendezvous, Katy goes wandering from the berth where Greta has put her to sleep. When Greta finds Katy missing, she panics, but this scenario isn't the whole story in "To Reach Japan," the opening story in the latest collection, "Dear Life," from Alice Munro. It's one component of the story, and who's to say life isn't built on moments of melodrama? Not Munro, who here demonstrates, in 14 stories, her greater skill: registering life as it is lived — simpler moments, perhaps, which doesn't make them, in Munro's hands, any less decisive for her women and men, regardless of time or place.
The time frame covered in "Dear Life" goes from World War II to more recent decades. The place can be Vancouver or Toronto, but mostly it's out of the way — not the center of towns and not quite the full countryside of Munro's native Ontario. And while she certainly doesn't shortchange the male characters, the women are this observant writer's main concern (particularly the female character in the collection's four closing, autobiographically based stories, which, according to the author, are not stories at all, "only life"). That woman is the writer's mother. —Leonard Gill
By Ian McEwan?
Nan A Talese/Doubleday,?320 pgs., $26.95
"I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them," explains the narrator of Ian McEwan's new novel, "Sweet Tooth."
That is true of any novel, but such a statement reveals just how much is at stake in a novel about an obsessive reader. The book must be obsessively readable itself, if only to demonstrate that character's defining trait.
Part Jane Austen romance and part John le Carré spy novel, "Sweet Tooth" lives up to such heavy expectations, thanks mainly to its narrator, a young woman named Serena Frome. The daughter of an emotionally reserved bishop in rural England, she cultivates a bookish air in her teenage years, in parallel with her rather conservative politics — both of which serve her well when she takes a job at MI5, the British equivalent of the CIA.
Set in the tumultuous early 1970s, this book vividly evokes England's political and economic unrest, the violence in Ireland, and the last thrums of Cold War paranoia. Serena's devotion to contemporary fiction and her knowledge of the latest novels by Anita Brookner, A.S. Byatt, and others lands her an undercover assignment. Posing as a representative for a literary foundation, she is tasked with encouraging a young writer named T.H. Haley to produce a politicized novel. It's no spoiler to say they become lovers.
Highly intelligent yet deeply naive, Serena proves a fascinatingly unreliable narrator — excellent company for these 300 pages. Ultimately, her bookishness may be her most endearing trait, as well as her most empowering. Describing her favorite novels, she sets high standards: "I wanted to feel the ground beneath my feet," Serena explains. "The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual."
Writing with a sharp eye for detail and character, for period detail and literary whimsy, McEwan follows her demands to the letter. —Stephen Deusner
By Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick?
Gallery Books, 750 pgs., $30
For all of the gridlock and polarities in the land, there are still a few subjects on which people of all political persuasions — left, right, or whatever — are likely to agree. And one of them is that Oliver Stone, the filmmaker and professional controversialist, cannot be entirely trusted as a source of real-world history.
To take a couple of instances, ranging from the monumental to the ridiculous, Lyndon Johnson did not conspire with the likes of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw to murder John F. Kennedy, nor did Richard Nixon call his wife Pat "Buddy."
These examples — from Stone's movies "JFK" and "Nixon" — are but two of the many errors, ranging from the clearly fabricated to the merely mistaken, to be found in the work of Stone, who has now taken his method of free-handed invention-cum-analysis to the subject of "The Untold History of the United States," which is both a 10-part pseudo-documentary now airing on Showtime and a book co-authored with American University historian Peter Kuznick.
Yet, like another noted fabulist, one Will Shakespeare some 400 years ago, Stone is a dramatist of imagination and power whose renderings of real events (as well as of avowedly fictitious ones) manage to illuminate and reveal even as they avail themselves of copious amounts of poetic license. So it was with the Bard's "Richard III"; so it is with Stone's "Untold History."
While it is certainly true, for example, that Henry Wallace, FDR's vice president for his third term, had a following, it is laughable to present this literal-minded idealist of the left, whom the Democratic Party bosses did in fact shove aside to make room for Harry Truman, as a virtual messiah, complete with a crucifixion motif. And it is surely one-sided to characterize Truman only by his connections to the Kansas City Pendergrast political machine and by his somewhat effete childhood while making short work of his sterling military record in World War I and omitting altogether the career-boosting ad hoc work his Truman Committee did in investigating and exposing corrupt war profiteers.
But yes, as Stone and Kuznick suggest, for better and for worse, Truman abandoned the policy of friendly collaboration with the Soviet Union that Roosevelt had followed and Wallace would have continued and took a harder line consistent with a developing Cold War rivalry. Yes, too, dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been aimed at Russia as much as Japan, which the authors posit.
And the authors are surely on solid ground in their efforts to de-emphasize the Anglo-American role in defeating Hitler compared to that of the Soviets, who for most of World War II engaged the bulk of the German army and suffered casualties in the tens of millions. In inveighing against the biases of the Cold War and of "greatest generation" historiography, however, "Untold History" overdoes it in the other direction. Virtually every crisis and malaise and threat to mankind of postwar history, right up to the present, is attributed to the predations of the American empire and its incorrigible military-industrial complex. Wars in Korea and Vietnam. Coups in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Turmoil in the Middle East. All were either caused or exacerbated by this country's "global imperialism." Few of the conclusions of Stone and Kuznick are utterly without merit, but they are enhanced and magnified beyond measure by a relentless cherry-picking and conflating of actual sources and by the inclusion of some clearly dubious and uncorroborated ones. Still, Oliver Stone has narrative gifts, and they are in full display in "The Untold History of the United States," a work that is more propaganda than history but a compelling and often enlightening read all the same. —Jackson Baker
By Edmund Morris
Random House, 475 pgs., $32
Edmund Morris is best known for "Dutch," his controversial official biography of Ronald Reagan. "Dutch" employed narrative techniques to describe episodes of Reagan's life. Those techniques got more attention (mainly negative) than the book itself. That's unfortunate, because Morris is among our best historical biographers. Morris has chronicled Theodore Roosevelt and Beethoven. His wonderfully digressive approach to huge lives places him on the shelf with William Manchester, Robert Caro and David McCullough.
Morris is a different sort of writer, something brought into clearer focus with the release of "This Living Hand," a collection of essays published as he was compiling his larger works. The collection goes behind the scenes of Morris' great biographies and finds him in a more loquacious mood than is generally allowed in the Halls of History.
The title essay, published in The New Yorker nine months after Reagan's handwritten farewell letter to the American people in 1995, finds Morris at his best. Already aware of digital encroachments upon the sources of history, Morris pauses on the script itself. He reads the document as a capstone to years spent with Reagan's vast epistolary output. But he breaks the proscenium, barely containing his emotional reaction, while writing this essay in the Gipper's post-presidential office in Century City, Calif. He is describing his last goodbye with a great man who gave him great privilege. Regardless of your politics, it is informed and moving first-person history.
Morris also offers a bit of his own story, which is a fascinating, sprawling life that stretches from far-flung British colonial Kenya to Century City and includes a perhaps too personal but funny account of buying a suit on Savile Row.
This is a charming collection of historical insights from someone who has done the heavy lifting. Morris' "Beethoven: The Universal Composer" has just jumped to the top of my must-read list. —Joe Boone
By Joseph Epstein
Axios Press, 603 pgs., $24
Let's be honest. The trouble with a lot of biographies is that they are too long. Recent tomes on Winston Churchill, Lyndon Johnson and General Ulysses Grant come to mind. Sure, you and I might check them out of the library or give them to someone at Christmas, but will they actually be read? To ask the question is to answer it.
So call me a slacker. There is much to be said for HarperCollins' "Eminent Lives" series of short biographies by excellent writers and even more to be said for Joseph Epstein's "Essays in Biography," 40 essays on knowns and lesser-knowns, none of the essays more than 30 pages.
Epstein is no slacker. He has 22 other books on his personal shelf. I approached this one warily, having read only a little of his previous work. His roster of subjects is heavy on intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Irving Kristol. So I skipped to names I knew, including Adlai Stevenson, Joe DiMaggio, W.C. Fields, Michael Jordan, A.J. Liebling and Malcolm Gladwell. And in every one of those essays I learned something I did not know or smiled at some well-turned phrase or fresh observation. Epstein at his best rivals H.L. Mencken or Christopher Hitchens.
He can play rough, as he does with Gladwell (author of "The Tipping Point" and "Outliers"), and he can be gentle to the point of adulation, as he is with Jordan and DiMaggio. Epstein is an intellectual who also likes sports. But the most touching essay is the last one in the book. Its subject is an old man named Matthew Shanahan, whom Epstein met on what he expected to be a brief and uneventful visit with his granddaughter at the Jewish Home for the Blind in Chicago. Shanahan, who was 88 at the time, proved to be a self-taught intellectual, widely read, liberal in thinking, and wise in many ways. They became fast friends. Epstein's book is dedicated to him. —John Branston
By Henry Horenstein
W.W. Norton, 144 pgs., $50
In the song "Blue Side of Lonesome," Gentleman Jim Reeves gets to the existential heart of the honky tonk when he describes a tavern known as Three Teardrops. It's a place, he says, where "the hands on the clock never alter" and "things never change."
"There's no present, no past, no future," Reeves sings. "We're the ones who have lost in love's race." This "Twilight Zone" sense of timelessness is the best thing about the black-and-white photographs collected in Henry Horenstein's book "Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music."
The stars in Horenstein's book are only occasionally the stars. He's captured a clean-cut Hank Jr. and a disheveled Waylon Jennings looking every bit the part of a young outlaw. But few of the portraits, which place golden-age icons like Porter Wagoner and Hank Snow alongside hippie outsiders like the Holy Modal Rounders, bluegrass legends like Jimmy Martin and Bill Monroe, and contemporary barroom warriors like Dale Watson, are as interesting as the images of the bars themselves and the country fans who gather to drown their sorrows or dance all night.
Horenstein's photos of swinging doors, juke boxes, and barstools were taken across five decades, but, hairstyles excepted, very little changes: Bands pass around the tip jar, PBRs are raised in celebration, tour buses roll on to the next town and the next gig. Did I mention Dolly Parton? Or hairstyles?
There's nothing wrong with Horenstein's celebrity portraits. But everything's right about his 1978 shot of the wall behind the bar at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, the essential Music City dive where bags of Lay's potato chips, show posters, and a grimy American flag hang alongside Polaroids, newspaper clippings, and promotional photographs that tell the story of the bar, its patrons, and the Nashville Sound. Like a good old song, it's a photo you can easily lose yourself in. —Chris Davis
By James Ellroy
Byliner, 66 pgs., $1.99 (digital)
James Ellroy's "Shakedown" is a classic little be-bop that fits in nicely with the great American crime writer's canon. It is also published by Byliner, a company that produces digital books called "eSingles." The publisher commissions original fiction and nonfiction that can be read in a single sitting, and other authors who have gotten the Byliner treatment include Jon Krakauer, Nick Hornby, Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan, Taylor Branch and Ann Patchett.
The complete title of Ellroy's latest is "Shakedown: Freddy Otash Confesses." Otash was a real-life ex-cop and private detective in the 1950s and '60s. He was infamous in Hollywood for being the guy who could get the dirt on any celebrity, who would commit most any illegal, morally suspect deed to provide smut, gossip and innuendo for the pages of Confidential magazine. Photos and surveillance transcripts of favorite starlets shacked up scandalously? The public ate it up. But some of it Otash kept quiet and used to extort his victims. When Confidential died, however, Otash got mobbed up.
Ellroy knew Otash. In Ellroy's magnum opus, "American Tabloid," he has Otash wiretapping JFK's liaisons with Marilyn Monroe, an event that did allegedly happen. Ellroy wades in historical truthiness.
"Shakedown" has Ellroy going back to this outlandish character, this time putting him in purgatory. It's June 16, 2012, and Otash writes that he has spent the decades since his demise in a "penance penitentiary" but that he might go to a better place if he confesses his sins: "There's heaven for the good folks, hell for the beastfully baaaaaad. There's purgatory for guys like me — caustic cads that capitalized on a sick system and caused catastrophe."
In "Shakedown," Ellroy gives Otash a ghost writer who will plead his case before God: James Ellroy. It may sound a little mad, but he pulls it off with fearless, audacious writing — what he calls "scandal language," the tabloid patois that spritzes the page (or e-reader) with energy. What results is an anamnesis of Otash's foulest hits. "Shakedown" names names. —Greg Akers
By David M. Halperin
Harvard University Press, 560 pgs., $35
In his provocative new book "How To Be Gay," University of Michigan professor David M. Halperin makes a shocking claim that is sure to rile both gay activists and Christian conservatives alike: Being gay is not about sex, identity, or even love. Instead, being gay is about possessing certain sensibilities, specifically ones that embrace irony, Madonna videos, and a taste for interior decorating and Broadway musicals.
Halperin makes it clear early on that he is not interested in the politics of gay identity, the we're-just-like-everyone-else mentality used by many gay activists in the fight for equality and one that made "Will & Grace" a huge hit among straight people. Instead, Halperin, whose college course of the same title as his book sparked conservative outrage when it was introduced in 2000, seeks to turn gayness away from politics and back into a form of expression. According to Halperin, gay men are unique in their ability to laugh in the face of tragedy and adversity, in their tinge of feminine melodrama, and in their deep appreciation for the movies of Joan Crawford. In fact, whole chapters of the book are devoted to analyzing one scene from Crawford's classic "Mildred Pierce" and its effect on generations of gay men.
Sometimes these ideas feel slightly regressive, almost as if Halperin longs for the days of life in the closet; it is hard to imagine today's gay youth being inspired by a black-and-white movie from the 1940s. But if Halperin is more "Glee" than Gaga, his arguments never feel dated. Gay culture is culture, he says, and everyone, even heterosexuals, can learn from it.
"How To Be Gay" is not the sex manual its title suggests, nor is it a straight-to-gay conversion blueprint the religious right may fear it to be. It is a careful dissection of the taste and style that define so many gay men. Joan Crawford would be pleased. —Sean Kelly Robinson
By Will Hermes
Faber & Faber, 384 pgs., $16 (paperback)
By referencing the title of a popular Talking Heads song, "Love Goes to Buildings on Fire" seems to be, at first glance, the latest in a long list of literature paying homage to the Big Apple's pioneering punk and new wave scene. But after reading the first few pages, it becomes clear that author Will Hermes has not only created a partner to the Victor Bockris book "Beat Punks" but gone much deeper, examining everything from the jazz scene to the blood-and-booze-soaked glory days of CBGBs.
Hermes has certainly done his research. While books like "Please Kill Me," the oral history by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain that focused on the tumultuous, often violent interactions between the scenesters of the New York underground, Hermes instead talks about the intimate relationships that transcended music genres and helped mold modern music into what it is today. That doesn't mean things were always pretty in this musical melting pot. Hermes points out verbal spats between Suicide's Alan Vega and the Talking Heads' David Byrne as well as the physical altercation between Handsome Dick Manitoba and Wayne County that could have ended in death.
In a little over 300 pages, Hermes manages to capture the sights and sounds of a city ready to explode with talent from 1972 to 1977. He also finds a way to effortlessly intertwine what New York's citizens were going through during this time. The city's financial crisis and rampant crime supplied plenty of song-writing fodder to musicians, regardless of genre.
And while it's easy to point out that New York shouldn't be considered the mecca of everything cool in the mid-'70s, Hermes' extensive coverage — from Hector Lavoe to Joey Ramone — makes it hard to dispute that the city really was the place to be if you were a musician looking to make it. —Chris Shaw
By S.G. Browne
Gallery Books, 208 pgs., $14.99
Though Christmas is behind us, zombie lovers should not overlook this gory gem, in which it took author S.G. Browne only 15 lines in the opening chapter before mentioning a decomposing corpse.
Turn the page, if you dare, and more details emerge: "When the human body dies, the bacteria that live in the stomach continue to feed. Though instead of eating the food we've consumed, they start eating away at us and excrete gas, which builds up in our abdominal cavity until usually something gives way. Usually the intestines but sometimes the torso. Either way, it's not something you want to occur on a first date."
It's right about here when most readers understand they are not reading "Twas the Night Before Christmas."
Welcome to the world of romantic zombie comedy — rom-zom-com for those in the know — and the decidedly twisted holiday story, "I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus."
When I was a child, a visit to a department store Santa was a terrifying experience. People today are clearly made of hardier stuff, and Browne introduces us to the adventures of Andy Warner, who tells us when we first encounter him, "I am a zombie." But none of that "Hollywood crap," he assures us. No, "We are normal, sentient, reanimated corpses who are gradually decomposing and could use some serious therapy."
And so could I, after learning this: Zombies "hate getting shot in the head," "you're not going to win any spelling bees when the gray matter explodes out the back of your skull," and — this is important — "you tend to speak in vowels while getting eaten alive."
Like this: "Ooooo." And "Eee aaa ooooooo."
Browne — or Andy Warner — has this to say about being a zombie: "If you've never woken up in a body farm wearing a Santa suit with your brains blown out the back of your head, you wouldn't understand."
Rudolph had that pesky shiny nose; Warner has his blown-out brains. He has just escaped from a zombie research facility and decided to elude his captors by wearing a Santa Claus suit. I guess that's the comedy element of rom-zom-com. And the rom? Well, he encounters a girl who … oh, forget it.
If you're not a real zombie, you wouldn't understand. —Michael Finger


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Ryan's Analysis of Zero Dark Thirty Scene
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I chose to use this torture scene from Zero Dark Thirty because of the tremendous controversy over using these techniquesRead more
The Indians on T.V. episode of Master of None was extremely relatable and humorous, yet shared a very poignant messageRead more
I chose this particular scene in Zero Dark Thirty because while the action scenes were interesting, the scenes with discussionsRead more
I chose to analyze two scenes (or one full scene and part of another) in order to demonstrate specific ideologiesRead more
Bigelow, Kathryn, Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, and Chris Pratt. Zero Dark Thirty. United States: Alliance Films, 2013. I chose thisRead more
I picked this scene because it immediately struck me while I was watching it. Last semester I read a lotRead more
While analyzing 'Master of None', I decided to focus on the topic of representation and how gender/race is portrayed inRead more
I pieced together multiple scenes from the film, Zero Dark Thirty. I did this because I felt that the messageRead more
Download the full film here.Read more


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Automotive Restore Outlets
Whilst the dialogue of critiques is ok, isn't this only a particular case of the issue of negatives in search engines like google and yahoo which I posted a comment on many years back.
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Our auto restore shop hence group at Final Probability specializes on home & international, restore & service, a-z. Positioned in Casselberry, Circuit Motorsports provides top quality, aftermarket automobile performance components, service, and tuning for car fanatics. Shop … Read the rest


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Domestic violence should be a concern for leadership. Well beyond the individual who suffers the mental or physical abuse, friends, family members, and coworkers' lives are also vulnerable to potential violence. Anyone in close proximity to the victim is in potential danger. It gets worse . . .
The family may know something isn't right. A friend may be a confidante. But, when the victim doesn't talk about or report the attacks to leadership, coworkers, leadership and team members are clueless about what may well be — emanate danger.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that more than 25% of women and 1 in 10 men will encounter domestic violence.
- According to Legal Momentum, organizations are negatively impacted as victims lose an average of 137 hours of work a year. Intimate partner violence causes victims to lose 32,000 full-time jobs each year.
- Organizations experience an uptick in personal or sick time as some need time off from work to seek medical attention, a restraining order, or a safe place to stay.
Some states have established law with respect to organizational obligations to domestic violence victims. Some have not. Beyond that, and regardless of legislation, workplace violence can be avoided or mitigated by supporting victims who may show high levels of absenteeism, may disclose the situation to leadership, or may suffer mental health repercussions as a result of the trauma.
The C-Suite should meet with Human Resources for guidance on recognizing the symptoms, how to properly approach an employee who shows signs of possible domestic violence, and how to address the greater good in the face of an employee's right to privacy.
The following Frequently Asked Questions are from the Workplace Fairness website, which is an excellent source of information for leadership.
- I am dealing with a domestic violence situation and afraid I will be fired from my job. Do I have any legal protections?
- I was discriminated against at work for being a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking. What rights do I have?
- I was fired because I missed too much work while dealing with an abusive situation. Can I collect unemployment?
- I quit my job to make sure my abuser couldn't come to work to attack me or create a disruption in the workplace, can I collect unemployment insurance?
- I need to take off from work to go to court, but my employer won't give me the time off. What can I do?
- I missed work after being battered by my spouse so badly I had to go to the doctor. I was written up for missing work. Is there anything I can do?
- What employment policies might help to protect me in the workplace against domestic violence discrimination?
- How do I find out if my employer has policies that can help?
- How should I talk to my employer or supervisor about my domestic violence situation?
Also from the Workplace Fairness website is this list of state legislation governing employer responsibility to domestic violence sufferers.
- Arizona
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Hawaii
- Illinois
- Kansas
- Maine
- Massachusetts
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Nevada
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- New York City
- Westchester County, New York
- North Carolina
- Portland, Oregon
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Vermont
- Washington
If your organization does not have a plan for recognizing and supporting employees suffering from domestic violence, proactively develop a plan. To be considered are the following factors:
- It doesn't matter whether domestic violence victims suffer a single event or ongoing abuse, the abuser may be untethered from reality and the entire workforce needs to be protected from a workplace violence event.
- Include, in your protocol, a systemic communication plan that includes employees and onsite security personnel. The abuser should NOT be allowed to gain access to employees.
- Maximize technology to support allowing domestic violence victims to work remotely in order to reduce productivity-drag that may occur as a result of absenteeism.
- Human resources can advise as to how leadership may weight privacy versus warning the employees of potential workplace violence.
NATIONal domestic violence hotline
[1] Workplace Fairness: It's Everybody's Job™. Domestic Violence in the Workplace.


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Yeah, it got a little hairy at the end. Louisville scored 21 points in the fourth quarter including two touchdownns in the final 4 minutes. Still, when the Cardinals botched their last-gasp onside kick, it was over.
Syracuse's 38-35 victory over defending league champion Louisville is the greatest upset in Big East Conference history. The Orange was a 37-point underdog. Its victory upstaged Temple's win at Virginia Tech in 1998. The Owls were 35-point underdogs in that one.
The Orange ended Louisville's 20-game home winning streak. It also jumped into first place in the Big East Conference standings.
Syracuse quarterback Andrew Robinson completed 17-of-26 passes for 423 yards and four touchdowns. He missed by 2 yards setting a school passing record. He tied the school mark for touchdown catches with eight other quarterbacks.
Receiver Taj Smith had his breakout game with four catches for 173 yards and two touchdowns.
Louisville quarterback Brian Brohm completed 45-of-65 passes for 555 yards and four touchdowns. Receiver Harry Douglas caught 12 passes for 205 yards and one touchdown. The Cardinals finished with 628 yards total offense against Syracuse. However, they turned the ball over four times - twice on interceptions and twice on fumbles.
Syracuse plays at Miami University of Ohio on Saturday. Louisville, which has lost two straight, plays at North Carolina State on Saturday.
- Donnie Webb


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"LORD, make me to know my end, and what is the measure of my days, that I may know how frail I am…. My age is as nothing before You; certainly every man at his best state is but a vapor" (Psalm 39:4,5)
For when a few years have come I shall go the way from which I shall not return. (Job 16:22 ESV)
Lately I've been thinking about the brevity of life. I've been brought face-to-face with the reality of death. I've watched men who were once strong and the epitome of vitality and human life come to the point of physical, emotional, and mental weakness. And I realize that I too am quickly going that same way. And life for me has become a time to prepare for death…and for the eternity to follow.
I cannot help but to think back to a few men whose lives were snuffed out so quickly as they sought to take the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ to some unreached tribal people in Ecuador. One of those men was Jim Elliot who before his death wrote in his journal, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot loose." It wasn't long ago that "The Chet Bitterman" story was brought to life during Missions Emphasis week at our church. He was a Wycliffe missionary to Columbia, South America who was abducted by government rebels, held hostage, and killed. Chet left behind a wife and two young children. Yet in his personal journal we find these words,
The Apostle Paul, being imprisoned, beaten, stoned, dragged through cities by mobs of people, and banned from others penned these great words, "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."
In Psalm 39:4,5 the Psalmist prays a familiar prayer, "make me to know my end, and what is the measure of my days." (cf. Job 6:11; 7:7; 14:13; Psalm 90:12; Eccl. 2:3) The Psalmist requests something that we must all come to understand, embrace, and experience. Chet Bitterman, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming and many who've gone on before us have all come to the point of understanding the frailty and brevity of life, embracing the sovereignty of God, and experiencing the joy of living in submission to Him.
As you look at these verses you see immediately that all begins with the Lord God. Why does the Psalmist pray "make me to know my end"? He prays that way because God ALREADY KNOWS HIS END. In fact, just as God has decreed the beginning of every man He has also decreed his end (Deut. 8:3; Psalm 23:4; 37:23; 48:14; 116:15; Prov. 14:32; Rev. 14:13).
He also prays to know the measure of his days. That is not a request to know how long he would have on the earth but a request that he might remember that his days are short. In the very next phrase he reveals that he knows what the measure of his days is—a handbreadth. That is the smallest measuring unit of the ancient times—in other words, it is symbolic rather than literal. The handbreadth is approximately just less than 3 inches. It is used here in a figurative manner. Man's life is not 3 inches long, obviously. He is speaking of the frailty and brevity of life—it is as small in comparison with God as we can possibly think. That is the Biblical truth that is sounded forth in many passages of Scripture. That is the Biblical truth that so many others have come to understand.
My question is why are there so many more who have failed to embrace this truth? Why is it that so few have embraced the sovereignty of God—the absolute control of God—over the affairs of this life? By embracing God's sovereignty, I am referring to the kind of attitude that allowed Joseph to say, "But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good…" (Gen. 50:20). Or as Paul wrote, "But we know that [God works all things together] for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose" (Rom. 8:28). That is a full-fledged embrace of God's sovereignty. It is not a passive resignation, to be sure. It is an embracing of the truth that we have come to understand. We know that our life is frail and brief. We know that this life is not eternal, neither is it the end. We also know that we don't know everything but that He does. So we embrace His loving and compassionate control, we embrace His goodness and glory, and we embrace His holiness and righteousness.
Such understanding and embracing leads to the wonderful experience of joy—true joy in the presence of God. The truly joyful Christian is one who has come to grips with the frailty and brevity of this life, and embraced the sovereignty of God over the affairs of this life. When commanding his readers to rejoice Paul said that they were to find their joy in the Lord (Phil. 4:4). Nehemiah reminded his people that the joy of the Lord is their strength (Neh. 8:8). And we must not forget the teaching of our Lord when he taught His parable of the talents. Remember his reply and reward to the faithful servants? "Well done, good and faithful servant…enter into the joy of your lord" (Matthew 25:21).
I await to hear those words…do you?


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Check out these stunning images of an algae farm in Western Australia. Hutt Lagoon is about 14 km long by 2k m wide and around 1 m deep. Photographer, Steve Back took the pictures from above, showcasing the amazing pinky red algal blooms.
The micro-organisms produce beta-carotene, which has a multitude of applications including ice-cream and nutritional supplements for pregnant women.
|Hutt Lagoon (Photo credit: kid_wendy)