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Tom Lehman takes 2-stroke lead in Champions Tour's Tradition
SUNRIVER, Ore. – Tom Lehman moved into position for his second Champions Tour major victory of the year, shooting a 3-under 69 on Saturday at Crosswater Club to take a two-stroke lead in the Jeld-Wen Tradition.
The Senior PGA winner in late May, Lehman overcame a double-bogey 6 on No. 8 with three birdies on the back nine in cool, overcast conditions. He was 11 under.
"There is potential for a low round out here. The opportunity will be out there for guys to go 5-, 6-, 7-under par," Lehman said. "A two-stroke lead is nice, but there's really no room for error."
Bernhard Langer, attempting to become the second player in Champions Tour history to win three consecutive majors, shot a 69 to join Fred Funk (70) and J.L. Lewis (66) at 9 under in the fourth of the tour's five majors.
"Langer has had such a great year the last month," Lehman said. "It's going to force me to have to play well, but he's only one of so many."
Two strokes behind D.A. Weibring after two rounds, Lehman took the outright lead with a birdie at 14, then made a 45-foot birdie putt at 17 to increase his advantage.
Lehman, who opened with rounds of 67 and 69, said the round "tee to green, was my most solid round of the week."
Langer, the Senior British Open and U.S. Senior Open winner in consecutive weeks, made a 15-foot eagle putt on the par-5 12th en route to his third straight 69. Gary Player won three consecutive senior majors, the final two of 1987 and first of 1988.
Langer also could join Jack Nicklaus as the only player to win three senior majors in a season. In 1991, Nicklaus won the PGA Seniors, U.S. Senior and Tradition.
The German star is in line for a possible berth on the European Ryder Cup team as a pick by captain Colin Montgomerie. Langer refused to look ahead.
"I try not to go there," he said. "It doesn't do any good, anyway. It's Saturday. Why wonder what's going to happen tomorrow or the next day?"
Lewis, who turned 50 in July, had a bogey-free round. He'll play Sunday in the final group with Lehman and Langer.
"I feel like I can be very competitive, but you still have to play good. I hope I'm there. That would be fun," Lewis said.
Funk continued his strong play in the Tradition. He won the 2008 event finished fifth last year.
Weibring (74) and Chien Soon Lu (65) were 8 under along with John Cook (68), Bob Gilder (69), Bob Tway (71) and Gil Morgan (71).
Weibring made four bogeys on the back nine, though he finished with birdies at 17 and 18. Lu, who didn't play competitive golf from 2001-08 because of back problem, had the best round of the day. He birdied five of his first six holes.
Gilder, the lone Oregonian in the field, briefly tied for the lead early on the back nine, but made a bogey at 18.
Cook lost in a playoff to Mike Reid in the 2009 Tradition.


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A new online friend, Dave Atkins, asked recently what the value of Stumblupon was. "Who has time to randomly browse web for interesting things?" I've been thinking of that too. After all, there are dozens of social bookmarks or social news submission networks around the Web. You can see the best — or at least the most popular — over at popurls.com. Digg, delicious, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, Truemors, Newsvine, Metafilter, Slashdot — all the usual suspects plus many of the world's top blogs and newspapers.
When I saw what Marshall Kirkpatrick had written StumbleUpon Hits 7 Million Users, Quietly 50% Bigger Than Twitter" at ReadWriteWeb, however, clarity of utility of the service came quickly. Here's how he put it:
What's got a button to push, knows how to make money while changing the world and is read all over? StumbleUpon! The social discovery network [is] like Pandora for webpages and videos."
Needless to say, that got my attention. Twitter's business model is one of the great speculative exercises of our time — well, at least in the hothouse garden of the social media world. Mark D. Drapeau's thoughts on Twitter's vision offer considerable insight concerning the possibilities for the popular microblogging service. As Marshall notes, however, Stumbleupon has several things going for it that Twitter does not quite enjoy, at least to date.
- Stumbleupon has its own Firefox plugin and Toolbar. While there are many addons that allow you to add a Twitter bookmarklet to your browser, to date Twitter does not provide one itself. Small potatoes compared to the next three.
- Stumble upon is a social discovery service. As Marshall wrote, it's 'like Pandora for websites and videos." This resonates with me on a fundamental level. I've chosen who I follow on Twitter carefully; my network brings me news I care about constantly, especially when I ask questions about specific subjects. Stumbleupon, however, adds an algorithm and 7 million other clickers to the challenge of finding more content for me. That's incredibly powerful. I adore Pandora — and my stations continue to get better at tuning music to my interests. So if the parallel holds true, there's every reason to keep "stumbling" while I "tweet" away.
- Stumbleupon is profitable. According to Marshall, "Advertisers pay a few pennies to have their pages inserted into the Stumble streams of relevant users and those ads are silently voted on just like any other page. Silicon Alley Insider estimates the company was making $10 million each year as of this Fall." If Twitter monetizes the realtime search at search.twitter.com, maybe they'll get there too.
- Stumbleupon delivers massive amounts of traffic. I can vouch for that. When tweeted about my last post, Online J.R.R.Tolkien Translators and Font Converters, I earned a few dozen clicks and a retweet or two from friends like Shava. When one of those people Stumbled the post, however, I immediately began receiving a river of visitors to the blog (relative to normal traffic, anyway).
In sum, that's all powerful. And it's all occurred without much notice. So here's my answer to Dave's question: Stumbleupon has some power when one person uses it to bookmark sites and explore the Web that way. Like delicious or Twitter, however, the service shines when all of those clicks are analyzed and used to rate content on the Web. We're all deluged with increasing amounts of information online; the websites that matter to me are the ones that help me make sense of it all. I haven't been using Stumbleupon at all in 2009. I suspect Marshall's post may change that. Who knows? Maybe I'll stumble across you. You can find digiphile on Stumbleupon here.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
A minor actress from Texas was sentenced Wednesday to 18 years in prison for sending ricin-tainted letters to President Obama, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and the head of his gun-control group.
Shannon Guess Richardson, 36, was also ordered to pay $367,000 restitution as part of a plea bargain for pleading guilty in December to one count of developing, producing, possessing and transferring a biological agent for use as a weapon. She bought the materials — castor bean seeds and lye — online.
The FBI arrested her in June 2013 after she was indicted by a federal grand jury. She gave bith the next month while in jail.
Richardson mailed three letters in May 2013 from her home in New Boston, near Texarkana, and then drove to a Shreveport, La., police station to implicate her estranged husband, who had filed for divorce. She told the FBI she did not think the letters would be opened because of security measures.
"What's in this letter is nothing compared to what ive got in store for you mr president," read the letter to Obama. "You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face."
A former Dallas beauty queen, she had bit parts in TV series and film, including The Vampire Diaries, The Walking Dead, Franklin & Bash, All My Children and The Blind Side.
Richardson apologized Wednesday before being sentenced by U.S. District Judge Michael Schneider.
"I never intended for anybody to be hurt," she said. "I'm not a bad person. I don't have it in me to hurt anyone."
"I do love my country, and I respect my president," she added.
Schneider said Richardson's actions "put many lives in danger and threatened public officials at the highest level of government. The defendant claims that she did not intend to harm anyone, but certainly her actions could have had grave consequences."
Ricin is a biological toxin that can be fatal if inhaled or swallowed. There is no antidote or cure.
* Text by USAToday, July 16, 2014


text:
Oyster predicts "the Gulf Coast and New Orleans will get a single, insubstantial mention." I'm predicting there will be no mention. What do you think?
As well as any other predictions?
UPDATE:OUCH from BayouBuzz
UPDATE: Looks like Oyster has it right. From theWhite House website.…
In addition, the President will honor the resilience of the people of
the Gulf Coast, and the contributions volunteers have made to the
region, by announcing that the United States will host the annual North
American Leaders' Summit in New Orleans this April.


text:
LOS ANGELES (thefutoncritic.com) -- The latest development news, culled from recent wire reports:
Looking to keep track of all the various projects in development? Click here to visit our signature "Devwatch" section. There visitors can view our listings by network, genre, studio and even development stage (ordered to pilot, cast-contingent, script, etc.). It's updated every day!
Jon Tenney will reprise his "The Closer" role of Fritz Howard on "Major Crimes" as well as direct an upcoming installment (TVLine.com); Robert Knepper will guest as the FBI's latest target on "The Blacklist" (TVLine.com); Bailey Noble's Adilyn Bellefleur has been upped to series regular on the final season of "True Blood" (THR.com); and Lea Thompson will visit "CSI" as "a defense criminalist and will work very closely during her episode with Elisabeth Shue's Finlay" (TVGuide.com).


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Nobody Tells You
June 06, 2006
I lost my temper on Friday.
I yanked Noah's arm and yelled at him.
It took everything I had in me not to shake him. To grab his baby-thin shoulders and shake him until he started behaving like a reasonable fucking person. A person who wouldn't twist over on the diaper table and try to dive-bomb headfirst off the side. A person who wouldn't use my hair as a jungle gym. A person who would take a goddamned nap. And a person who kept his hands out of his own waste.
I didn't shake him. I put him in his crib and fled the room.
I was shaking like a leaf.
I tried counting to 10, but Noah was screaming. I went into the bathroom and turned the water on full blast. I could still hear him.
I ended up in my closet, upstairs. I counted to 50. I threw a pair of shoes at the wall.
And I've never felt so alienated and cut off in my entire life. I had no one to call -- at least not anyone who could actually show up within a reasonable amount of time to help me. And there was no one -- not my mother, not even Jason -- that I was willing to call and say what I was feeling out loud.
"Hello, I'm fighting an irresistable urge to backhand my 8-month-old child across the face. Could you please come stop me from doing that?"
No. That was NOT OKAY. That was BAD. That was ALERT SOCIAL SERVICES, YOU DON'T DESERVE A CHILD YOU FUCKING FAILURE BAD.
The thing is, it was totally normal. But how do you know that if nobody tells you?
So I'm telling you.
I lost my temper. It happens.
I went back into Noah's room and pulled him out of his crib. His eyes were damp as he reached out for me. I kissed him and said I was very sorry for yelling. He kicked me in the c-section scar. Jason called and said he was on his way home.
I laid down inside the play yard and amused Noah with some made-up songs (here we go 'round the big baby jail, banging with our tin cups, here we go 'round the big baby jail, OOPS, dropped the so-ap.) until Jason arrived. I climbed out and told him I needed 10 minutes upstairs.
He started to ask something. "10 minutes." I interrupted.
I went upstairs and was asleep within five.
Everything was better when I woke up.


text:
Time for your Deadspin Open Mailbag Tuesday. Email us here or submit your questions via Twitter. This week, we're covering whacking speed, haterade, rugby, peanut butter and weed crackers, and more.
I'm an expert in self-gratification. I've been doing it for over two decades now, and it's the only pursuit in which I possess a modicum (cum!) of skill. I'm so adept at jacking it that I barely even notice when I'm doing it anymore. It's an involuntary reflex. Sometimes, I have to double check and make sure I'm not actually doing it, lest I'm in a public setting. This horny Kraut knows what I'm talking about. It's as normal an everyday function as breathing now. Only sexier!
Every man keeps a mental journal of his own masturbatory feats. His personal best for number of times in a day (seven). The oddest place he's managed to pull it off (middle of 8th grade math class, pants on and buttoned). And such and such. But there's one skill category in the Quarterwhack Challenge that, for no good reason, I never bothered to attempt: SPEED.
When you have a wife and kids, you have to be quick on the draw. There's not much time to yourself if you're a family man, so if you can steal a couple minutes in the shitter to work with, you better be able to act fast. And I can. I can still sneak in a solid two square a day. My secret? Sheer will, and a hitch-free stroke. So today, I decided to see just how fast I can get my daily jack out of the way. I set a few ground rules beforehand, and here they are:
1. Start from 100% flaccidity
2. No porn at hand. ALL IMAGINATION!
3. No self-fluffing prior to starting the clock
4. No sexy thoughts prior to starting the clock
5. Lotion and/or spittle allowed
6. No breaks
I set a stopwatch on the toilet tank, got to work, and 59 seconds later, I was done. You'll just have to take my word on that time. You don't want visual evidence of that. But I give you my word. Under a minute. BEAT THAT, YOU LITTLE WHACKRASCALS.
This site was built upon masturbation. Carl Monday. Mike Cooper. Weintraub (NOTE: all Weintraub jerking off literary in nature). And now, continuing in that spirit, I challenge YOU, Deadspin reader, to beat (beat!) 59 seconds. Child's play, you say? You try it with a stopwatch eyeing your every move. Pressure can kill a man. Email me and lemme know. Then we'll see who's truly THE GRAND WIZARD OF HITCHHIKING UNDER THE BIG TOP.
Let's go to the letters.
Who is going to be the first boner in the media that makes his case for Favre being MVP? You know it is coming...
He'll show up on King's ballot next week if the Vikings win, and I'm certain one of the NFL Live guys will toss it in there sometime this week. And you know damn well Gruden and Jaws will bring up the idea sometime during Monday night's telecast. Speaking of which…
When are Jaws and Chucky going to throw down in the MNF booth? They're getting closer every week.
They seem to get along just fine to me. I thought I liked Gruden in the booth when he first started. I was wrong. Gruden's getting to be really fucking annoying. Here are two actual quotes from him last night:
On Delhomme: "Jake Delhomme leads the league in grit."
On Romo: "This guy's a PLAYER!"
The cheerleading for the QB's was fucking out of control. Both analysts blamed Muhsin Muhammad for Jake's first pick of the game, which is insane. Delhomme tried to hit the fucking video board with that pass. Even if Muhammad turned the right way, it was still a shitty pass. And Jaws' "I'm a professional broadcaster!" voice grates after a while. Just talk like a normal fucking person, Jaws.
Is it ever acceptable to actually root for a team you hate to miss the playoffs more/harder than you root for your team to make the playoffs? Not that your or my rooting changes the results of anything, but do you think it is healthy to hope for someone else's failure more than your own success?
I hope it's acceptable, because it's the foundation of everything I do as a football fan. I'd trade in a potential Vikings Super Bowl ring for a fucking grease fire destroying all of Lambeau Field any day of the week.
I think it's healthy to hate in sports because it's the safest outlet for it. That's why sports exist. It's a haven for you to unleash every petty, irrational emotion you've ever had: hate, jealousy, greed, etc. Outside of sports, open displays of such emotions make you a douche. But at the bar on Sunday? That just makes you PASSIONATE. And awesome.
And yes, I root for failure outside of sports as well, but only in instances where everyone else does as well. I hope Goldman Sachs folds, so I can read weepy NYT stories about dickhead bankers having to cut back on Tuscan vacations, filling me with a black, raging ire I never knew I had.
I also hope Jay Leno tanks. Did you see him mock Conan's head injury last night? What a cock.
One thing that without fail always makes me feel better is to go on to message boards for teams I hate after they lose. I love to read the sky is falling posts and the inevitable infighting among posters that losing creates. I don't post myself. I just sit back and take it all in. My wife says this is very shallow and is probably bringing bad karma on my teams. Please confirm that there is nothing wrong with me enjoying a little internet schadenfreude.
Again, perfectly acceptable AND encouraged. Look at this post from a Skins fan after they lost to Detroit on Sunday:
"Today I cried. I just think they have given up on Zorn and yes it sounds silly but true"
AHAHAHAHA. It's funny because he's a BITCH!
It's also fun to watch fans squabble amongst one another after a bad loss, with Pollyanna fans bitching out naysayers for giving up on the team and what not. One Skins message board dude predicted the team would still make the playoffs. What an idiot. Mocking his stupid prediction makes me feel like a big man.
12-Inch Idongivafuck Sandwich:
My brother's kid is turning 1 next month. What kinda toys and crap work for kids about the age of 1? We're talking somewhat educational (my brother won't teach her anything), however not incredibly annoying because they live with my folks.
Books. Just get the litter fucker some books. They're cheap, and the kid's parents will approve. Plus, they don't make noise. Well, some of them make noise. NEVER buy a kid's book that makes sounds. They're worse than ass herpes.
I know you do (or did) more print ad work at the 9-to-5 (right?) but I wonder: What makes bad ads bad? And great ads great?
The general rule in TV ad production is: Tits, monkeys, dogs, and babies (only if they don't talk). Preferably all four. The only ads that fail even while deploying tits are those fucking Danica ads for GoDaddy.com. "Hey, go online to see the rest of our shitty ad, which has no nudity of any sort!"
You seem like a gentleman who likes organized violence that has built in beer drinking. Thoughts on Rugby?
I played for a couple years. Everyone who plays rugby is very cool, and enjoys drinking. But man, that is NOT a fucking fun game to play. You run as much as you would in soccer, you have to wear tight shorts and grease your ears, and you have to group together tightly with other men to help advance the ball forward if you aren't fast enough to be a back (I was not). I played second row. At that position, you spend an hour of every rugby game with two guys' asses on your shoulders and your head between their legs. Not that fun.
NOTE: The above paragraph does not apply to sevens rugby. Sevens rugby is fucking AWESOME.
In my life I have had terrible luck with buying football jerseys. A lifelong Giants fan, it seems like every time I buy a player's jersey they almost immediately get hurt. For instance, in grade school I bought a Jason Sehorn jersey, and he got hurt on a preseason kick return. In college, to spite my friend who is a Redskins fan, I bought a Lavar Arrington jersey when we signed him. He appeared in 4 games before blowing out his ACL and never playing again. A year later, I bought a Jeremy Shockey jersey. I literally wore it for the first time ever the game that he broke his leg, went on the IR and got traded to the Saints a few months later. Finally, this past Sunday watching the Giants-Cowboys game I was debating - just thinking about whether I should buy a Justin Tuck or Kenny Phillips jersey, and now I find out Tuck hurt his shoulder and Phillips is out for the season. (This is nowhere near as bad luck as my aforementioned friend, who bought a Sean Taylor jersey, and yeah... we all know how that turned out.) But it gets worse - I was talking to my Dad about this and he reminded me that the first football jersey I ever owned was a Phil Simms jersey he bought me when I was 3, in 1990, the same year Simms went down and Jeff Hostetler led us to the super bowl (yes, I know two of these years we ended up winning the Super Bowl anyway, which just makes this all the more confusing because maybe its not bad luck? Fuck me.)
Anyway, I wanted your advice on this. Should I a) never buy another jersey ever again, b) ignore this as it is coincidence, or c) go out and buy Tony Romo and Donovan McNabb jerseys at the beginning of every season (I would name a Redskin as well, but there is no need to add injury to SUCK.)
In each of your three Jambaroo columns so far, you've failed to write even a one sentence blurb about the Chiefs and whoever they played. Did they run over your dog or something?
No, but Haley's working on that.
They just played the Eagles in Vick's first game back as well. You couldn't even manage a snippet about his affinity for hanging puppies or something like that you lazy sack of cow piss?
That's tough but fair. The Chiefs are putrid, Haley is a cock, Larry Johnson is somehow even MORE worthless than in year's past, AND Whitlock just gave Scott Pioli the nickname EGOli. Get it? He took the word "ego" and then made a delicious, oozing pumpkin of a pun out of it. Straight from the Mariotti Institute Of Stupid Nicknames For Use By Sarcastic Local Sports Columnists (see: Romo, Phony).
Firecrackers should be the gametime snack of the week sometime. Ingredients are crackers, peanut butter and weed. You put them all together and put them in the oven for like 15 minutes. They are delicious (not really) and get you really high, and watching the NFL high is better than watching it not high.
Just whole buds of weed? That sounds like shit. Here's a recipe for grinding weed and making pot extract for cooking. Mmmm… brown.
I'm no connoisseur of glasses, but I must say, I'm impressed with Duralex. Sadly, their production is on hiatus.
What? THAT'S BULLSHIT.
Of course, I had to read more, and some shitty translation of a page:
"Duralex International France, which has long fueled canteens and French communities in glasses, plates, bowls and others, was yesterday placed under court receivership with further activity by the Commercial Court of Orleans.
"The information gathered indicates that the company is unable to meet its liabilities and is in a state of insolvency. It is therefore necessary to initiate liquidation with further activity until 25 July," said court.
"I think that means bankruptcy. So hang on to those Duralex glasses. They may be worth something someday. Kind of like a non-gay Fiestaware. By the way, the enamel in that "classic" has lead in it. Don't feed your kids off it.
How could I get rid of Duralex glasses even if I wanted to? The fuckers never break. You could nuke France and all that would be left are those glasses and all the douchebag pipes.
Do you think Plaxico will be raped in prison? Does being famous make prison rape more or less likely? Maybe Plax would be like a trophy prison rape for some inmate. I could even imagine a small gang forming for the sole purpose of raping Plax. But at the same time, maybe some of the guards are Giants fan who will look out for him for winning the Super Bowl.
I say he rapes himself by accident. And no, famous people don't get raped in prison because most of them are sequestered from the general population specifically because they'd be targeted. I think. If I were an inmate there, I'd definitely give it a shot. There's definitely a lucrative rape pool for that ass.
You said Crack the Skye is the best album of the decade, what would your 5 best albums of this decade be?
I shouldn't have said "best" because that implies I think my opinion is somehow definitive, and that's a douche move that Uff is always calling me on (I did it in the Louis CK post too). I'll just say it was my favorite. I know Leitch pointed it out a while back, but I too just realized we're reaching the end of the decade, and that a slew of retrospectives and lists await us in November and December. A lot of people will say this decade sucked, what with the wars and economic ruin and all that. I say this was the decade we got porn on our phones, and that makes it the best decade of all. I'd rather live in this decade than any that came before it. Here were my five favorite albums from the past ten years:
1. Crack the Skye, Mastodon
2. Songs for The Deaf, Queens
3. In Rainbows, Radiohead
4. A vs. Monkey Kong, A
5. Boys And Girls In America, The Hold Steady
I also liked Rubber Factory (Black Keys), I Get Wet (Andrew WK), Now Here Is Nowhere (Secret Machines), the last Metallica album, and The Rising (Springsteen). Gimme yours. We'll make this a little music exchange. Delightful!
Just wondering if you noticed that Josh Vick, QB, UNH, made his debut this weekend and now has a 221 passer rating. I just pray that this young man can clear his name after those cow-tipping allegations.
What's that you say? You don't follow the CAA conference?
I do now!
Why is your wedding ring on your right hand? Are you a Cake Eating, Friend of Nancy?
It's not. Mac Photo Booth always takes pictures as mirror images, and I was too lazy to flip it in Photoshop. Waiting for any goddamn Adobe Creative Suite app to open takes years off of my life. Ever open InDesign? SPINNING WHEEL, GOT TO GO ROUND…
This weekend I will be turning 30 and as if that weren't bad enough, I have a very good Jewish friend who refuses to buy me a gift. The reason I am telling you about this is because it's really all your fault. I couple months ago, you wrote this article where you specified which events were okay and not okay for giving gifts. My friend specifically points to "Best friend turns some horrible age like 40" to justify him Jewing me out of a 30th Birthday gift. You see, my friend already turned 30 a couple years ago thus he does not see it as being "some horrible age", and since 40 is the only age specified in your list, he doesn't feel like he owes me a gift. I think he's just being Jewish. Could you please clear this up? Also, could we get Nazi Shark to weigh in on this? I think he could have some valuable insight.
You're turning 30? Big fucking deal. No one cares. Have your friend buy you a drink, you goddamn anti-Semite. Rolf says you're a bitch. Right, Rolf?
"Demanding a pricey gift? Who the real Jew here?"


text:
Maybe it's because I'm in my mid-40s and part of what a friend from college calls the sandwich generation, helping out with both our children and our parents, but I am once again thinking through what it means to succeed or, in the language of sports and politics, what it means to win.
Both of us have children in late elementary school and middle school. This means that we have fewer hands-on duties as mothers, and we are no longer fully consumed by just making it through the day. But we are also very aware that we will not be around forever. In my case, that has led me to wonder about the legacy I will leave my children.
They were born 22 months apart, which made the first two years of my second child's life a bit of a blur to me now. During my son's first year of life, I thought of myself as successful if all three of us made it through the day in one piece.
While I welcome the fact that my daily hands-on responsibilities have decreased as their ages have increased, the breathing space has given me time to reassess where I am.
During the past few weeks, I've been wondering if I'm on the right path.
Should I have taken a different turn in earlier years? Am I doing what God has called me to do? Am I marking time or making progress?
In a world where accomplishment and affluence are the easiest measuring stick, am I successful? How should I think of success, and does success change as one gets older?
This week, I realized that this level of navel-gazing is not helpful because, as I was reminded by a friend's book, it's not about me.
Thank goodness, now I can quit worrying about me and get on with my life.
And I can thank Dr. Frank Luntz for that epiphany. Slightly disheveled, constantly in motion, talking rapidly with conviction and confidence, Luntz looks more like a mad scientist than like the well-known pollster, language artist and political guru that he is.
Luntz helped refine the language used in the Republican Revolution of 1994, and since then he has added business consulting to his repertoire.
No longer content to focus solely on communication issues and optimization of words, Luntz's lays out winning business and personal principles in his newest book, "Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business From Ordinary to Extraordinary," (Hyperion Books, 2011).
His nine Ps of success are as follows: People-centered, Paradigm breaking, Prioritization, Perfection, Partnership, Passion, Persuasion, Persistence and Principled action. Throughout the book, Luntz offers real-life examples from business, sports and politics of how his principles can be incorporated into life. In addition, he recommends focusing on goals that go beyond monetary ones. Luntz notes that "winning transcends self. It is done in service to a higher calling to improve the human condition."
Luntz has led me to question myself. What I am doing to be extraordinary? Am I working toward leaving this world in a little better condition once I am gone?
Am I winning -- not in terms of money saved or accomplishments attained, but in terms of people reached and inspired to live their best life? These are questions worth thinking about again and again.
"Winners understand that it's not about them, it's about you," Luntz notes in his closing chapter.
As we look for leaders in our community, in business, in politics and even in our family, we naturally gravitate toward those who want us to be more, to do more, to reach for more and to accomplish more. Leaders who understand we are not interested in their problems or their challenges, but interested in helping us find solutions to make our lives better. Leaders who work hard, who live life with passion, who get up every day ready to once again work to win. Leaders who remind us that, together, we can make the world a better place.
Winners who understand it's not about me, it's about you.


text:
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text:
Brooke Tucker-Reid, momstown Writer
As the leaves start to fall and temperatures start to drop, we exchange the grill for the slow-cooker in our family. 'Tis the season for warm, comforting fare that fills our homes with aromatic bliss. Try these recipes and hacks to make life a little easier this Fall.
It smells like Fall
Leaving candles unattended is a no-no, especially with curious little ones scurrying around. An out-of-reach alternative is simmering slow-cooker potpourri. Try these two mixtures for deliciously calming aromas:
Orange Cinnamon
3 oranges, sliced
5 cinnamon sticks
1 1/2 tablespoons whole cloves
2 cups water (more as needed)
Apple Cinnamon Vanilla
1 apple, sliced
3 cinnamon sticks
2 tablespoons dried chamomile
1 tablespoon almond extract
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 cups water (more as needed)
With both mixtures, add the water first before the other ingredients. Set to high and leave the lid off. Check on it every few hours and add more water as needed.
Make bread in a… slow-cooker?
Oven space can get a little tight when hosting large family gets together. Slow-cookers can be used for so much more than soup, stew and chili. I would never have thought about baking bread in a slow-cooker until I stumbled on this perfect Fall recipe for slow-cooker butternut squash cornbread. It only takes about 15 minutes to prep, then in 2.5 – 3.5h, you'll have moist, mouthwatering cornbread. Just set it and forget it while you prep the rest of your meal.
Don't worry old girl
If your slow-cooker is anything like mine, you know that little baby owes you nothing. I'm talking about a floral design Crockpot from the 80's with only two temperature settings. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? However, some recipes only call for four hours of cook time, but how can we turn it on midday while we're at the office or running errands? Plug your slow cooker into a programmable dial so it will turn on part way through your day. That way, you don't have to worry about overcooking!
Hack facts and tips:


text:
MILWAUKEE – If Benson Henderson (19-3 MMA, 7-1 UFC) is determined to once again call himself UFC lightweight champion, he may need a little help from the man who just took his belt, Anthony Pettis (17-2 MMA, 4-1 UFC).
UFC President Dana White admitted that with Henderson now 0-2 in his career against Pettis, not to mention after suffering a first-round defeat to "Showtime" at this weekend's UFC 164 event, "Smooth" may find the path to a third fight a little longer than he might hope.
"That's definitely the case," White told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com).
Henderson, the former WEC lightweight champion who also surrendered that title to Pettis in the pair's 2010 initial meeting, earned the UFC belt in February 2012 with a unanimous-decision win over then-champ Frankie Edgar. The bout was so closely contested that UFC officials booked an immediate rematch, which Henderson also won.
But at Saturday night's UFC 164 event in Milwaukee, Pettis looked unbeatable, stuffing Henderson's takedown attempts before blasting him to the body with thunderous kicks and eventually earning a first-round verbal submission with a slick armbar from his back.
White believes the action was so one-sided that fans won't be interested in seeing the pair fight again anytime soon and recalled Anderson Silva's 2011 knockout of Vitor Belfort – and the promotion's subsequent refusal to pair them up again too quickly – as an example of Henderson's predicament.
"We had the fight with Ben and Frankie where some people thought he won," White said. "There's no f—ing denying who won this fight, and it was a first-round annihilation, kind of like the Vitor-Anderson thing, you know what I mean?"
For his part, Henderson remained relatively upbeat at the evening's post-event press conference. His right arm was damaged in the fight-ending submission, but he didn't yet know to what extent. And unlike after the first loss to Pettis, Henderson kept his emotions in check. However, he insisted the sting was no less painful than the first time around.
"I did my crying and blubbering backstage," Henderson said. "I figure you guys have enough film and footage of me crying, so I was like, 'Yeah, I'll go ahead and do that backstage so you guys can't film me and then play it over and over and over.'"
For complete coverage of UFC 164, stay tuned to the UFC Events section of the site.
(Pictured: Benson Henderson)


text:
You were just eighteen when you first came to New Haven. Marie drove you up from New York City in her friend Jean-Luc's car, and Celeste stayed home. She said she wasn't feeling well, but the truth was that she hadn't wanted you to come here, that she didn't want to have anything to do with your coming. Celeste didn't even want you to apply to your father's school, and your grandfather's also, and she did everything she could to discourage you from it. She told you that you wouldn't like New Haven, she told you that the weather was bad and the people were unkind; she told you that Bleak College was a brooding place, which turned out to be more true than she could probably have known. She even told you that you, with your troubled academic past, wouldn't get in to Bleak. Don't get your hopes up, she said, when you were filling out the application form, in life there are the swift and the slow and you are not the swift. But Bleak College took you swiftly enough, and you were elated; all summer you were so happy that Celeste couldn't stand it. Then you arrived here, this was in the fall of 1988, and you wondered if she hadn't been right after all. Remember how you sat in a corner of the dining hall, because you couldn't stand being exposed in the middle of so much open space? The name for that was agoraphobia, and the dining hall was full of pigeons, which got in through cracked windows high up, and shat on the tables; at mealtimes they came down to steal food, and seemed to prefer the vegetarian entrees, which you did not eat, not because you liked meat, especially, but because the vegetarians belonged to the ranks of the swift, with their invariant ethics and autumnal sweaters made from repurposed rope fiber, whereas you were among the slow, the agoraphobic, the cornered, watching the pigeons and wondering who was watching you.
Agoraphobia means fear of agoras, which didn't make any sense to you, because, although you have never been to an actual agora you've seen photographs of them in books on Ancient Greece, and they do not look like places where you would be afraid: a few piles of stone on a weedy knoll, the sketch of something no more threatening than an average-sized newsstand, incomparable to the great railway stations of the nineteenth century, which were, you read somewhere, the model for the dining hall, and still they call the condition agoraphobia and not, what would the Latin be for fear of railway stations, you don't know, but you know there is a Latin word for it. There is a priest in the Vatican whose job it is to invent Latin words for modern phenomena: telephones and Vaseline, Kleenex and eighteen-wheel trucks and the television news. If only you could have asked that priest what the word was for railway stations you might have been able to name your fear correctly, which might have made the fear go away, because wasn't that the nature of fear, to be nameless, to be dispelled by names, in which case was the word agoraphobia deliberately inexact, was it, in other words, a secret means by which the disease perpetuated itself?
O, god, I forgot to take my pills.
I don't know what would have become of me if I hadn't met Momus. He was a junior but for some reason lived in New East House, a low limestone-faced fortlet that was built in the 1930s with the idea of keeping people out, and refitted in the 1970s with the idea of keeping people in. It was traditionally inhabited by freshpeople and mid-year transfers; I don't know what Momus was doing there—maybe he thought he was being original.
Momus hadn't yet reached the height of his notoriety, which would come the following year with his all-nude production of Othello in the college cemetery, but he was already infamous for misleading campus tours. One story I heard from a disappointed freshman concerned the library, which, according to Momus, was rebuilt with money from a shipping magnate whose son had committed suicide out of romantic despair while an undergraduate at the College. What he had actually done, Sam said that Momus had said, was put his head in one of the mechanical dumbwaiters the old library used to transport books from one floor to another, and then wait, and… Momus made a grinding sound, as of a head being severed from its trunk by a slow-moving dumbwaiter full of books. The shipping magnate left the college a fortune on the condition that they tear the old library down and construct a new one in its place, with various features that would prevent anyone from getting hurt in it. Which is why, Sam said Momus had said, all the dumbwaiters in the Werner Halbstarker Junior Library are securely locked! Also, no flight of stairs is more than eight feet long, and no window is more than a foot and a half wide. It was, Momus concluded, the only heartbreak-proof library in the world.
"Only it's all bullshit," Sam said bitterly. "I measured the stairs."
"Just as well," I said.
"But he lied to us," said Sam.
"He told you a story," I said. "It's not the same."
In my freshman seminar on Introduction to Historical Problems, we had just considered the difference between historia and fabula, things as they were and things as we wanted them to be. Was there any way of knowing things as they were? our professor—actually a graduate student named Earl, who had a club foot—asked, his black bushy eyebrow suggestively arched. If you peeled all the fabula away from the historia, would you have the truth, or the bleached bones of a skeleton? I was thrilled by the importance Earl seemed to attach to fabula, and I thought Momus was doing the same thing. He was improving the world by fleshing it out with something more interesting than the truth.
I have no idea why Momus chose me to be his friend. Maybe he thought that was original, too. One night when I was leaving the library, I saw him perched on a low stone wall, smoking. He wore a bright red scarf, which, combined with his vaguely pyramidal body, made him look like a safety cone with a neon streamer dangling from it.
"I've been waiting for you," he said. This was almost certainly not true. How could he have known that I was in the library, and why would he care? "What are you doing?"
"I'm going to bed."
"I was thinking of driving to Milford, to see the dog races."
"Isn't it too late?"
"Never too late," Momus said. He blew on the tips of his fingers, as though to launch a kiss or an eyelash in my direction. "Do you want to go?"
"I don't have a car," I said.
"Ah," said Momus. "My mistake. Well, good night."
A few days later I saw him in the Café Oblique and he waved for me to join him. "Quid agistis?" Momus enjoyed speaking Latin to confound people, but I had had three years of Latin in high school.
Momus smiled. "Did I catch you checking out Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana the other day?"
It was true: I'd been looking into the mythology of the Puritans for my Historical Problems class. Still, I didn't feel like that made me special. People at Bleak were forever checking out books like that. The library couldn't keep the works of Jonathan Edwards on the shelves.
"Did you know Mather was a necromancer?" Momus asked. "It's true. Even as he was busy preaching against witchcraft, he had a laboratory where he re-animated corpses. Or tried to," Momus said, registering the steep increase in my disbelief. "You know where he learned necromancy? From witches, of course. Mather was a total hypocrite."
"Really?" I said doubtfully.
"You doubt?" Momus scowled. "Listen."
For what seemed like a long time Momus unwound a story about Mather's one successful attempt at necromancy, which, ironically, involved returning an even more powerful necromancer to life. I was pleased to be the recipient of one of his stories but at the same time I couldn't help noticing the seams: the places where he trifled with well-known facts in ways that made me doubt he had read the Magnalia at all.
"Which is why he writes, Doe not call up any that ye cannot put Downe," Momus said. But that line came from H.P. Lovecraft, an author I knew only too well.
"Huh," I said.
Momus seemed to see that I saw through him. With sudden urgency he asked, "What are you doing for dinner?"
"I'm going to West Orange for Vietnamese. Do you want to come?"
"But you don't have a car."
"Ha!" He could refute me now. "My girlfriend is driving."
"I don't want to be in the way."
Momus laughed. "How could you be in the way?"
His girlfriend, Jenny, turned out to be a voluptuous blonde woman in her early thirties, whose otherwise shocking beauty was eased a little by a heavy jaw and wide-set bulging eyes. She was nonplussed when I followed Momus into her oldish Toyota Corolla. I got the back seat, which was buried in clothes and smelled for some reason of baby powder.
"You must be the friend Bill's been telling me about," Jenny said.
Bill? I thought. But of course there was no reason why Momus shouldn't go by Bill.
"This is a new friend," Momus said.
Jenny leaned around the seat; her blouse fell away from her breasts. "What do you do?"
I stammered something about being interested in history.
"Oh, history," Jenny said, and drove us through the outskirts of New Haven.
I couldn't help thinking how strange it was to be in her car. I'd never met her before; I barely even knew Momus and still didn't understand what he wanted from me. It was like I had consented to be kidnapped. We drove for a while along little roads that crossed over and under the highways—Jenny was clearly taking some kind of shortcut. Momus talked about Ablette, our school's notorious secret society. He was hoping to be tapped. He'd heard from reliable sources that they owned an island off the Connecticut coast.
"Where they experiment on animals," he said. "Breeding them to make them intelligent."
"Really?" Jenny said.
Aha, I thought: I'd just understood what Momus was doing with Jenny.
"Yes," Momus said. "They've had some successes, over the years, too. They bred a dog that could talk, but only in Finnish."
"They think it was Finnish. Unfortunately, the dog died before they could verify it."
"Huh," said Jenny. "I used to work with a girl from Finland."
"Too bad they didn't know about her," Momus said. "No, I'm only kidding. This was years and years ago. Now they work mostly with mice. They're trying to breed them to have opposable thumbs."
I laughed and tried to pass it off as a cough. Luckily Jenny's car made a lot of noise and neither of them heard me.
"Anyway," Momus said, "I hope they tap me. They're far and away the most interesting people on campus."
The restaurant was in a strip mall, between a hairdressers' and a pharmacy. There were a couple of Vietnamese families eating there, and many empty tables. We had an awkward dinner: not only did Jenny and I not know what to say to each other, I got the impression that Jenny didn't really know what to say to Momus. I wondered how long they'd been going out. So as before Momus did most of the talking: he told us about the time his family had spent in Africa when he was a kid. They'd lived in a big house with servants and a pool and tennis courts, more or less exactly what you'd expect, only one day Momus came home from school and found the housekeeper on the kitchen floor, her throat slit.
"All the servants had been murdered," Momus said.
"Oh my god, why?" Jenny asked.
Momus shrugged. "The police never found out. Politics, probably."
"What did you do?"
"No one would work for us, so my mother had to cook," Momus said.
"Weren't you afraid to stay in the house?"
"No, we had it cleaned up."
It was shocking to think that Momus might be lying about something so gruesome, so important, but on the other hand his story was vague and rang less than true. Africa? Politics? The more I doubted Momus, the more I found myself looking at him, in the hope that his chubby face, his close-cropped hair already touched with gray, or his thick white fingers would tell me whether to believe him or not. I was so intent on Momus that I paid no attention to Jenny that night, and when she drove us back to campus and dropped me off at New East (she and Momus were going on to take a walk in the arboretum) there was distinct sarcasm in her "Nice to meet you." But the whole evening had been so strange that it didn't occur to me to worry that I had offended her. I didn't understand what I'd been doing there at all.
I saw Momus often that fall. We saw movies by Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr at the Bleak Film Society; we played chess at the Café Oblique. We took walks around campus, and admired the statues on West House and the strange windowless tower behind the anthropology building. Inevitably at some point Jenny joined us. She picked us up in her car and drove us to places she knew about in Connecticut: a mall in Hamden, a movie theater in West Orange, the dog track in Milford, where we watched greyhounds yip sadly after the mechanical hare. I thought it was sweet that Momus saw Jenny so often, but I didn't understand why he brought me along on these expeditions. Did he want a chaperone? Or merely a witness to his ever-so-slightly scandalous relationship? There was another possibility, but I didn't see it until one October night when we ate dinner at an Italian restaurant in Wooster Square. Momus was talking about Ovid, who had, he said, been exiled from Augustan Rome because of his Ars Amatoria.
"And what," Momus said, "was so scandalous about the Ars Amatoria? Does Ovid propose overthrowing the state, or reinstating the Republic? No. It's just people having sex. Why is it that people are so shy of talking about sex?"
"Bill, ssh," said Jenny. "People are looking at you."
"But tell me, why? No? I'll tell you. It's because an open view of sex would free the woman from her ancient role as property. What we repress, when we repress sex and sex talk, is female freedom."
"Women aren't property," Jenny said dryly. "We have the vote and everything."
"But you still... belong! What would you do if I said, go ahead and have sex with him?" Momus gestured at me with the back of his hand. "What if I said, it wouldn't bother me in the least if the two of you had sex?"
Jenny's throat flushed a deep red. "I don't want to sleep with your friend."
I blushed too. Jenny's rejection hurt me, even though I hadn't imagined sleeping with her until that moment. What would I have done, I wondered, if she had said yes?
"That's because you've been conditioned. Garçon!"
A waiter approached us, more out of curiosity than obligation.
"Let us have another bottle of your Chianti," Momus said.
"Bill, I have to drive," Jenny said.
"Then you'll only have a little."
The wine was brought and we drank it. We talked about regular things: I think Jenny might even have asked me how my classes were going. We left the restaurant more than a little drunk and walked the perimeter of the square, enjoying the fine old houses and the clear stars overhead. Momus and Jenny held hands and I hung tactfully back so as not to give them the impression that Momus's proposition was still on my mind. But of course it was, how could it not be, Jenny was beautiful, even if she wasn't what Celeste would have called the sharpest crayon in the box. I spun out fantasies in which the three of us drove to Jenny's house in Hamden and undressed in front of—for some reason—a big brick fireplace. I rolled us around on featherbeds, on waterbeds. At last we returned to Jenny's car.
"Well," Momus said with nervous pomp, "now where to?"
"I'm taking you home," Jenny said.
And she did. She dropped me at New East; there was some murmured discussion, then Momus also got out of the car. "Good night," he said, and hurried upstairs to his room.
I saw Momus many times after that, but not Jenny. I assumed that she had talked to Momus and our threesome was off the table for good. By the middle of November it was too cold to walk around New Haven; Momus and I huddled at a table in the back of the Café Oblique and drank unhealthy quantities of cheap bitter coffee. Momus talked a lot about Ablette and his chances of being chosen for that exclusive society.
"I hear they're diversifying," he said. "It used to be that the only way you could get in was if your father was in. Now they've got women, gay people, people of color."
"Diversity and tolerance," I said, these being two of Bleak College's watchwords in the late Eighties.
"I believe in both," Momus said solemnly. "Even if they reduce my chances of being tapped, as a WASP." Then, catching sight of someone who had just come in, he nodded. "See that guy in the blue coat? He's one of them."
"Maybe you should say something to him," I said.
"Are you kidding? That's suicide. You have to pretend you don't know. Wait, stop looking at him, look at the wall!"
I stared at a poster which told me how to administer the Heimlich maneuver.
When the danger had passed, Momus went on. "The question is, have they heard about my exploits?"
"With Jenny?"
"Don't be impertinent. Jenny isn't an exploit. I mean, with the tours."
"Oh. Probably."
"I've done some amazing things! Last week I convinced a group of prospective parents that Bleak College was founded in the eleventh century, by the Danes."
Momus took off his small round glasses and polished them on the end of his scarf. "Do you really think I think of Jenny as a stunt?"
"I don't know, Momus. It just came out."
"I love her," he said. He put his glasses on and glared at me through them. "We're going to get married."
"After I graduate. Or sooner. Maybe we'll do it this coming summer. We already picked a place. There's a beach over by Westport, a state park. I'll wear a white suit."
"Are you sure that's a good idea?"
"It's a risk I'm prepared to take. Anyway, I can have it cleaned."
"I mean, getting married."
"Why wouldn't it be a good idea? I love her," he said again. "I don't see any reason not to go forward."
"It's just that…"
"She's old? Please. I thought you were open-minded."
"I was going to say, you're young, actually. I don't think Jenny is old."
"Thanks for that. And I'm old enough to know what I want. I'm older than anyone in this fucking school. I don't mean, chronologically. But in every other way. Think of me as being fifty." Momus ran his hand over his hair. "Your middle-aged friend."
With his double chin dropping into the folds of his scarf, his high forehead and short hair, he really did look middle aged. "I'm sorry if I offended you."
"Tut," Momus said. "I have a thick skin. Now, can I beat you at chess?"
After that conversation, I didn't see Momus for weeks. I wondered if I really had offended him, or if he was just busy. It was the busy time of the semester for everyone: papers were due, exams coming up. I spent a lot of time in the library, reading about the Puritans. I'd also begun seeing a girl named Gabby Furst, whom I'd met in the dining hall. Gabby was from Philadelphia; she had dark curly hair and was planning to major in psychology. Neither of us thought we were beginning anything serious, and when we finally took our clothes off, in my room in New East, a small but perceptible disappointment passed between us: an acknowledgement of the diversity of human bodies, and a recognition that we were, to each other, facts, rather than dreams.
In early December, the first snow fell in New Haven. Late that night, Gabby and I staggered into the lobby of New East House, arm in arm. We had just kissed, or were about to kiss. A lock of Gabby's hair had frozen several inches above her head, like a horn.
"Have you seen Bill?" Jenny asked.
She was curled on the sofa in the social area, a square of carpet with several pieces of vinyl furniture arranged around a television in the hope of attracting a gathering, although no one ever gathered there. I didn't know how she'd got into the building. I'd never seen her on campus before. She wore tight jeans and a big white cable-knit sweater, and she looked like she'd been crying.
"Not for a week," I said. "Is something wrong?"
"We had a fight," Jenny said.
"I'm sorry." I wanted to sit on the sofa with Jenny and console her, but I didn't want to give Gabby the wrong impression, nor was I sure the impression would have been entirely wrong.
"I'm worried about him," said Jenny. "He's so drastic."
"Did you knock on his door?"
Jenny shook her head unhappily. "I don't know which one it is."
The three of us went up the stairs, an awkward procession. We knocked on Momus's door. There was no answer. I listened at the door but no sound came from the other side.
"I guess he's out."
Jenny took an appointment book from her handbag, wrote in it and tore off a page. "If you see him, will you let me know he's all right?" She smiled awkwardly as I took the paper from her hand.
"Of course."
"Thanks." Jenny swiveled past us and strode down the stairs. She was much shorter than I remembered, at most five feet tall. When she and Momus and I went out together she must have been wearing heels.
"Who was that?" Gabby asked.
"Momus's girlfriend."
"Really?" Gabby turned and gawked. "She's so old!"
The horn of ice on Gabby's forehead melted. We rolled around on my double bed—actually two single beds pushed together—then lay on our backs, looking at the orange streetlight diffused brightly by the falling snow.
Momus re-appeared the next day. He was sitting by himself in a corner of the dining hall, drinking coffee and toying with a bowl of sad-looking steamed spinach.
"On a diet?" I asked, taking the chair next to him.
"Iron is good for you," Momus said. "Did you know that melancholy is caused by a deficiency of iron?"
"Where have you been?" I asked, suddenly annoyed. "Jenny was looking for you."
"She thought you'd done something drastic."
Momus smiled. "I was writing a paper."
"We knocked on your door, but you didn't answer."
Momus noted the first-person plural pronoun with a quick, sharp look. "I must have been listening to music. I do that, you know, when I work."
"Fine, but will you call her? She's worried about you."
"Let her worry. Jenny is sweet, but I can't be the center of her world all the time. She needs to develop her inner resources."
This, coming from a twenty-year-old, about a woman who was old enough—biologically—to be his mother, struck me as highly insulting.
"I thought you were going to get married."
"The one has nothing to do with the other. I love her, but I'm not blind to her faults. I don't think she would want me to be, either. We have to correct each other, that's what marriage is. We correct each other and thereby find…"
"The truth?"
"I was thinking, freedom." Momus ate a forkful of spinach. After a while, he said, "Did you know that Jenny is literally a witch? It's true. She's descended from a line of witches. One of her ancestors barely avoided being burned at the stake."
"For what?"
"Witchcraft, obviously. How am I supposed to know? You're the historian, look it up. Her last name is Riggs. The Riggses of Hamden, Connecticut."
"OK, I'll look."
"Do. And, if I could make a suggestion? Don't live my life. You have one of your own. Although you may not have discovered it yet."
Heedless of Momus's advice, I called Jenny. My motives were good. I thought that she deserved to know Momus was all right; I didn't see how she was supposed to develop her inner resources when she was worried that her boyfriend, her fiancé, might be dead. I called at eight-fifteen, which I imagined to be the best possible time to call someone: too late to interrupt dinner, too early to disturb sleep. It was not a good time for Jenny, however.
"What do you want?" she asked. "I'm just going out the door."
"I saw Momus," I said. "He's all right."
"Bill. I saw Bill in the dining hall. He's all right."
"Oh." There was a rattling on the other end of the line. It sounded like Jenny was shaking a bowl full of little stones. "Did he say where he was?"
"Writing a paper."
"Oh." Jenny's voice was small and flat. "Well, thanks."
I could sense that Jenny was going to hang up on me and I didn't want her to hang up. "Listen, there's something I have to tell you." This sentence began as a pure lie but as I got to the middle of it I realized that I did want to tell Jenny something. I wanted to warn her not to go out with Momus.
"Yeah? Go ahead."
"Can I tell you in person? It's kind of hard to say over the phone."
"I'm on my way to work," Jenny said.
"Where do you work? I'll meet you there."
"No, don't do that. Maybe… Is this important?"
"It's pretty important."
Jenny sighed. "I'll come by after my shift."
She called at two-thirty in the morning and told me to be downstairs in fifteen minutes. I'd fallen asleep, and for a moment I couldn't remember who this old-sounding woman was or what she wanted from me. Then I washed my face, brushed my teeth and ran out, with a guilty look back at the mostly dark windows of New East: was Momus watching? Jenny's Toyota pulled up and I got in.
"Where do you work?" I asked.
"None of your business." She glared at me. "What did you want to tell me?"
"You want to talk in the car?"
"Yeah," Jenny said.
"Can we at least go around the corner or something? In case someone is watching?"
"Fine." Jenny stepped on the gas and we lurched forward. She drove to the parking lot of a closed diner. This wasn't what I wanted: I'd pictured myself talking to Jenny in a bar, or, better, in her house, a candle and a bottle of wine between us, not in her cluttered car which smelled of baby powder. "OK, talk."
"Momus didn't tell you where he was because he doesn't want to be the center of your life. He thinks you don't have any inner resources."
"What? What does that mean?"
"Also, he thinks you're a witch."
"He said that?"
"Yes," I said solemnly. "And nothing he tells you is true. For example, there is no island where people experiment on animals."
Jenny frowned. There were little drops in her eyelashes: tears, I thought, but actually some kind of silvery makeup. "Nothing?"
That was surely a lie, but on the other hand, I thought, then, maybe it wasn't. Momus could have lied to me about wanting to marry Jenny. He could have lied to himself. I had no way of knowing for sure. Jenny sat stiffly in the driver's seat of her car and didn't say anything. After a moment her shoulders began to shake. She coughed. She reached a hand toward her eyes but, remembering her makeup, let it drop. A small real tear left a blue-black trail on the side of her cheek. She believed me, of course. She believed everything.
The horrifying thing is that I still didn't know what was happening. I thought Jenny might be grateful to me for telling her the truth about Momus. I twisted awkwardly in my seat and put my hand on Jenny's shoulder. "I'm sorry," I said. I squeezed Jenny's shoulder in what I hoped was a consoling way. Here we were, two people sitting in a parking lot at three in the morning, both of us angry at Momus: I thought I had the right to console her. But deep in my breast, hidden, even from me, burned the simple thought that I might now take Momus's place, and Jenny saw it.
"Ugh," she said, "what are you doing? Get your hand off me!"
"I'm sorry," I said again, retreating.
Jenny turned to me, her face terrible. "You creep! Get out of my car!"
"I didn't do anything," I said. With lifeless fingers I unfastened my seat belt and opened the door, still hoping that Jenny would relent.
"Jerk!" she shrieked.
I stumbled out of her car and shut the door gently as if to underscore the fact that I meant no harm, that I had never meant any harm. Jenny threw the car into reverse and screeched into the street. I watched her go. With a detachment which alarms me as much as anything else about this scene, I noticed that the interior light in her car was still on, and I worried that I hadn't closed the door completely.
I went back to New East House and lay on my bed. I'm a monster, I thought. In the sharp greenish light of Jenny's creep I saw what I'd wanted to happen and by that light I looked hideous and wicked. After a certain amount of time, the phone rang. I didn't answer. The only person who could be calling was Momus and I was afraid to talk to him. I had ruined everything, I thought, and in my mind Celeste said, Yes, that's what I meant by not being the swift. At a certain point there was nothing more to think about. I lay on my bed in a kind of stupor, unable to want anything. It seemed possible that I would lie there forever. I would become a campus legend: Who's in that room at the top of New East, the one that's always locked? —Oh, that's the monster. Finally the sky lightened with what passed for morning in New Haven in the middle of December. It was the last day of the semester. I was going home.
Now I come to the frightening part of the story. It begins with Momus forgiving me. He did it almost brusquely: I came into the Café Oblique and he motioned for me to sit with him. After an awkward silence I said, "Momus, listen—"
"I already know," he said. "Jenny told me."
"I shouldn't have called her. I just—"
"You did what you thought was right," Momus said. "Didn't you?"
"I was confused."
"Put it behind you. Vita brevis."
"OK." I hesitated. "Are you—"
"Fine," Momus said. "I have weathered the storm."
I wanted to ask if he and Jenny were still together but Momus gave no sign that he wanted to be drawn out. "Listen, I think it's going to work with Ablette," he said in a low voice.
"I had a conversation. Obviously, my interlocutor didn't tell me he was one of them. But I had a strong feeling that he was checking me out."
"I hope they take you," I said. "You're right for them."
"Do you really think so?"
"I do." I meant it sincerely. I'd never met anyone who had such apparent depths as Momus. If I had been him, I would never have forgiven me. The part of me that was him, that thought the way I imagined Momus would think, still hadn't forgiven me, although over the winter break it had grown tired of shouting. How had he turned, where had he looked to find this much forgiveness?
"Thank you," Momus said. "I know it's indiscreet, but… if they do take me, I'll let you know."
Momus and I played chess as before; we saw movies as before: now they were by Truffaut and Godard. As the winter resigned itself to being upstaged by spring we started going for walks again, endless walks, that led us to East Rock, where, Momus said, the city of New Haven had harbored royalists during the Revolutionary War: they lived in a cave on the back side of the hill. The river at the edge of East Rock Park was swollen with snowmelt. The trees began to put out little green buds.
One day we stood outside an abandoned Victorian manor on Prospect Street, which the college had protected from its students' curiosity by means of a high chainlink fence. "What's in there?" I asked, hoping for a story.
"Don't know," Momus said. "Don't care."
"Mm hm." He stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and looked triumphantly at the cracked asphalt.
"Wait. Did they…?"
"Mm hm."
"Congratulations," I said. "Now you will know all."
"No one knows all." Momus kicked a piece of gravel through the fence. He seemed to be making his mind up about something. "But there is something I want to show you. Do you have plans for tonight?"
I was supposed to see Gabby. "I can change them."
"All right. Meet me at midnight, in the New East lounge."
"This will require some courage on your part," Momus said. "Are you sure you can be brave?"
"I'm game."
"Fine. Shall we?"
He turned away from the abandoned house, his red scarf flapping in the wind.
Midnight in the lounge of New East House: no less frightening place could be imagined. Some freshpeople are watching The Empire Strikes Back: "Do, or do not," they say along with Yoda. "There is no try." Momus comes down at twelve-fifteen, wearing, unusually for him, a sweatshirt and jeans. He motions for me to come with him and I follow. No one sees him or notices that I am gone. We walk a short hall that twists back toward the lounge and ends in a blank metal door, to which Momus has the key. Beyond the door, stairs lead down.
"Is this something to do with…?"
"No questions yet," Momus says.
We are in the tunnels under Bleak College: the fabled tunnels. Everyone claims to have explored them, the way everyone claims to have had sex. As with sex, reports from the tunnels vary in a way that suggests many people are lying. Some say they have found stockpiles of food, others, animal heads, taken down from the college walls in conformity with the new sensitive age. There are stories of rooms full of cots, made up with sheets and blankets against some disaster in the past, or still to come. There are stories of electrified doors, hidden alarms. I am excited to see the tunnels but also in a way disappointed: if there's any part of Bleak College which does not need Momus to turn its fact into fabula, this is it. The tunnels themselves conform unsurprisingly to their actual function: they follow fat pipes and bundles of electrical cable from one building to the next.
"Neat," I say, trying to hide my disappointment.
Momus looks at me as though I'm an idiot. He walks a little faster, turning sideways now and then to slip past a pipe he identifies as hot. I very quickly lose track of what direction we are heading. We've taken many turns: we could be at the edge of campus or next to New East. I wonder if we are going in circles, if Momus is trying to get me lost. For the first time I am afraid.
As if to reassure me, Momus begins talking, but what he says is far from reassuring. "People used to die down here," he says. "In the early days. Each year one or two of the undergraduates would go into the tunnels and not come out."
"Come on. These tunnels weren't even here back then."
"Not these tunnels, no. But other ones, older ones."
Older ones? Momus is losing his touch. He isn't paying attention to detail. "Tunnels dug in the late seventeenth century, by monsters," I suggest. I can't help but feel a little superior.
"No, not monsters. Just old tunnels. You'll see."
After some further navigation Momus unlocks a door marked NO TRESPASSING—absurd, as if we hadn't been trespassing all along—and leads me through. We are in a different kind of tunnel now. The walls are brick, the low vaulted roof of the tunnel is black with soot. Water trickles along a channel worn in the stone slabs of the floor. White lichen daubs the edges of the bricks.
"Where are we?" I ask.
Momus doesn't answer. "You know Jenny and I broke up," he says.
"I didn't know. What happened?"
"It's not worth talking about."
"I'm sorry," I say. "I hope it didn't have anything to do with what I—"
"Don't worry about it," Momus says.
And we go on in silence.
After a while Momus starts talking again. "Apparently Ablette used to practice human sacrifice," he says. "As part of their initiation process."
"Apparently?" I ask, my voice studiously nonchalant.
"The interesting thing is how they'd do it. They wouldn't, like, cut your throat or anything. No. They would manacle you to a wall and… just leave you there. And they, the person who was being initiated, would come back every few days and ask you, What is truth? The idea being that eventually you, the sacrifice, would know the answer. And you'd say it. And that's how the initiation worked."
"Where did you hear that?" I ask.
As I expect, Momus doesn't answer.
I'm annoyed with Momus's horror-movie talk but at the same time I have begun to feel an alarming doubt. These tunnels are real. They are old. Could Momus be telling the truth? Bad things certainly happen in the world, and not just in Africa, either. I have read enough history by this point to know that the Puritans were scarcely less savage than the people they displaced. Or really not less savage at all. The name of the college we attended was not Bleak College; it was not founded by Prosperity Bleak; the name of its secret society is not Ablette; there is no Episcoscope, no West Tower; these are only stories I made up to keep pace with Momus, or rather, to outdo him, but one thing that occurs to me as I follow Momus through the tunnels is that even the most frightening story protects its readers from a world which is much more frightening, not because bad things happen there, although they do, but because we have so little control over what happens, we don't get to say where it begins or where it will end, and we have so little idea of what's coming next. At this point I really start to feel the weight of the earth over our heads. What is the Latin for fear of tunnels? Momus would know, but I am afraid of Momus. I don't know where he is taking me and, more and more, I don't want to know.


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For an Oracle Database, we have several ways to audit user activity. With this posting, we will take a closer look at Fine Grained Auditing (FGA), working together with the very useful standard function SYS_CONTEXT. The demonstration is done with 11gR2 but should work very similar with older versions down to 9i, where FGA was introduced, if I recall that right.
For a general overview about auditing, see my presentation slides here.
The standard function SYS_CONTEXT shows us many interesting properties of the connected sessions and is not only useful in the context of auditing:
SQL> connect sys/oracle@orcl as sysdba Connected. SQL> select * from v$version; BANNER -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 184.108.40.206.0 - 64bit Production PL/SQL Release 188.8.131.52.0 - Production CORE 220.127.116.11.0 Production TNS for Linux: Version 126.96.36.199.0 - Production NLSRTL Version 188.8.131.52.0 - Production SQL> set serveroutput on begin dbms_output.put_line('AUTENTICATION_METHOD: '||sys_context('userenv','authentication_method')); dbms_output.put_line('CLIENT IDENTIFIER: '||sys_context('userenv','client_identifier')); dbms_output.put_line('CURRENT_SCHEMA: '||sys_context('userenv','current_schema')); dbms_output.put_line('CLIENT HOSTNAME: '||sys_context('userenv','host')); dbms_output.put_line('INSTANCE: '||sys_context('userenv','instance_name')); dbms_output.put_line('CLIENT IP ADDRESS: '||sys_context('userenv','ip_address')); dbms_output.put_line('IS SYSDBA: '||sys_context('userenv','isdba')); dbms_output.put_line('OS USER: '||sys_context('userenv','os_user')); dbms_output.put_line('SERVER HOSTNAME: '||sys_context('userenv','server_host')); dbms_output.put_line('USER: '||sys_context('userenv','session_user')); dbms_output.put_line('SESSION ID: '||sys_context('userenv','sid')); end; AUTENTICATION_METHOD: PASSWORD CLIENT IDENTIFIER: CURRENT_SCHEMA: SYS CLIENT HOSTNAME: uhesse-PC INSTANCE: orcl CLIENT IP ADDRESS: 555.555.55.55 IS SYSDBA: TRUE OS USER: uhesse-pc\uhesse SERVER HOSTNAME: uhesse USER: SYS SESSION ID: 33 PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
Notice that there is a difference between "current_schema" and "session_user": The first would change after an "alter session set current_schema=someotherschema;" but the second stays the same.
Following creates a small demo schema with one table, containing the sensitive column "BUDGET":
SQL> grant dba to adam identified by adam; connect adam/adam create table adam.audept (deptno number, dname varchar2(20),budget number); insert into adam.audept values (10,'DELIVERY',10000); insert into adam.audept values (20,'MARKETING',100000); commit;
End-users connect with the Database user ADAM, using the "Audept Application". Normally, they do not access the audept table directly. Instead, they use a view that does not show the budget column:
SQL> create or replace view audeptvu as select deptno,dname from audept; View created.
Our goal is now to audit access on the audept table, but only if the sensitive column "BUDGET" is touched and even then only if the access is not done through the "Audept Application". This goal cannot be reached with traditional auditing, because this would audit each & every select on the table:
SQL> connect / as sysdba Connected. SQL> truncate table aud$; Table truncated.
AUD$ is the base table for the Data Dictionary View DBA_AUDIT_TRAIL, like FGA_LOG$ is for DBA_FGA_AUDIT_TRAIL. As sys, we can truncate it, which can be monitored as well. A more sophisticated way to restrict and monitor activities of highly privileged users like sys would be the separate products Database Vault (restrict) resp. Audit vault (monitor).
SQL> audit select on adam.audept by access; Audit succeeded. SQL> connect adam/adam Connected. SQL> exec dbms_session.set_identifier('AUDEPT_APPLICATION') PL/SQL procedure successfully completed. SQL> select * from audeptvu; DEPTNO DNAME ---------- -------------------- 10 DELIVERY 20 MARKETING SQL> select count(*) from dba_audit_trail where obj_name='AUDEPT'; COUNT(*) ---------- 1
Although the access on the audept table was completely compliant with our "Business Rules", it was audited by traditional auditing. Therefore, FGA was introduced:
SQL> connect adam/adam Connected. SQL> create or replace function auditif return number as begin if sys_context('userenv','session_user')<>'ADAM' or sys_context('userenv','client_identifier')<>'AUDEPT_APPLICATION' or sys_context('userenv','client_identifier') is null then return 1; else return 0; end if; end; / Function created.
This function will be used later on to determine the Audit Condition for Fine Grained Auditing. We could specify many more conditions (from SYS_CONTEXT or else) here of course. Although it was tempting (at least for me) to use a boolean return value, it is not a good idea: You cannot test it then with select from dual. Fine Grained Auditing is implemented with the DBMS_FGA standard package:
SQL> begin dbms_fga.add_policy(object_schema=>'ADAM', object_name=>'AUDEPT', policy_name=>'AUDEPT_POLICY', audit_column=>'BUDGET', audit_condition=>'ADAM.AUDITIF=1'); end; / PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
With this policy, an audit entry is only generated if the column "BUDGET" is touched. Additionally, in order to get audited, the access must be done without using the "Audept Application". We look at a compliant access first:
SQL> connect / as sysdba Connected. SQL> truncate table fga_log$; Table truncated. SQL> select count(*) from dba_fga_audit_trail; COUNT(*) ---------- 0 SQL> connect adam/adam Connected.
A Client Identifier can be used to differentiate multiple (application or human) users, connecting with the same Database user. This is a common technique, executed (and verified) at the application layer:
SQL> exec dbms_session.set_identifier('AUDEPT_APPLICATION') PL/SQL procedure successfully completed. SQL> select * from audeptvu; DEPTNO DNAME ---------- -------------------- 10 DELIVERY 20 MARKETING SQL> select * from audept; DEPTNO DNAME BUDGET ---------- -------------------- ---------- 10 DELIVERY 10000 20 MARKETING 100000 SQL> select count(*) from dba_fga_audit_trail; COUNT(*) ---------- 0
No audit entry was generated. Now we do not follow the business rules:
SQL> connect adam/adam Connected. SQL> select * from audeptvu; DEPTNO DNAME ---------- -------------------- 10 DELIVERY 20 MARKETING SQL> select count(*) from dba_fga_audit_trail; COUNT(*) ---------- 0 SQL> select * from audept; DEPTNO DNAME BUDGET ---------- -------------------- ---------- 10 DELIVERY 10000 20 MARKETING 100000 SQL> select count(*) from dba_fga_audit_trail; COUNT(*) ---------- 1
The first SELECT did not show the critical column and was therefore not audited, although no Client Identifier was specified. The second select was audited with many details, though:
SQL> select db_user,os_user,object_schema,object_name,policy_name,sql_text,timestamp
from dba_fga_audit_trail;
----- --------------- ----- ---------- -------------------- -------------------- ---------
ADAM oracle ADAM AUDEPT AUDEPT_POLICY select * from audept 22-AUG-11
Notice that FGA will show the SQL text, regardless of the setting of AUDIT_TRAIL – no "EXTENDED" necessary here:
SQL> show parameter audit_trail NAME TYPE VALUE ------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------ audit_trail string DB
Conclusion: With Fine Grained Auditing, we have the option to limit our audit entries to only non compliant access, according to our business rules. One comfortable way to specify audit conditions is the standard function SYS_CONTEXT.


text:
"Getting Lucky"
a song by Tro Gunnison
Wouldn't care if I could. I'm up to no good.
Taking what I want instead of what I should.
I'm made of pure greed. There's shit that I need.
The mask is off and the demon's freed.
I'm gonna get drunk.
I'm gonna get played.
I'm gonna get rich.
I'm gonna get laid.
And I'm gonna get Lucky.
Raised in the system, Shiloh Luck's first sixteen years have been anything but lucky. After winning The Voice, she's finally living the dream—a record contract, talk shows, a North American tour opening for the hottest band out there. Everything is going according to plan…until their frontman, Tro Gunnison, explodes her life into chaos. He's shallow,
self-centered, and completely infuriating, and he'll do anything for notoriety.
Including her. Like it or not, she's stuck with him for three months on the road, but the longer they spend together, the more she begins to realize there's more to Tro than anyone has ever dug deep enough to find. If his attention is anything other than just another publicity gimmick, she might let herself see where it leads. But before she can risk everything, she has to be sure.
If there's one thing that Tro Gunnison has learned in the six years since he left his past in the dust, it's that living life big, bold, and totally outrageous keeps people from seeing past the glare. He's buried his demons beneath six feet of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and he's convinced no one will ever dig them up…until Lucky. She's young, but not naive, and without even trying, she sees past the facade to the man underneath…which scares the
hell out of him. Because what started out as smoke and mirrors has somehow turned real, and for the first time in his life, there's someone he cares about more than himself. But it turns out getting Lucky could be a double-edged sword.
He's always been sure it would be his past that would bring him down, but it might turn out to be Jail Bait instead.
About the Mia Storm:
Mia Storm is a hopeless romantic who is always searching for her happy ending. Sometimes she's forced to make one up. When that happens, she's thrilled to be able to share those stories with her readers. She lives in California and spends much of her time in the sun with a book in one hand and a mug of black coffee in the other, or hiking the trails in Yosemite. Connect with her online at MiaStormAuthor.blogspot.com , on Twitter at @MiaStormAuthor, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MiaStormAuthor


text: As being a college student, I like dormitory life significantly. Since I Have am a rather sociable individual, discussing a room with many other folks does not trouble me in any way. Even so, dormitory life is not without its petty annoyances, specifically if you are unlucky enough to experience a horrible other when your… Continue reading Student Dormitory Policies


text:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. — John 1:1
The Bible is the best selling book in the English language. The King James Bible (aka Authorised Version) is the best selling edition.
The King James Bible has had huge influence on the English language. To many it is the Bible. Contrary to popular misconception, it was not the first Bible in English.
The Venerable Bede was the first known attempt at a translation into English. Fragments, scribbled commentaries in margins of Latin Bible.
The Bible is a collection of books.
The Old Testament is the history and sacred text of the Jews, mainly written in Hebrew, 4000 to 130 BC. 39 Books.
The New Testament is oral accounts of the life of Jesus, plus the letters Paul wrote to the scattered Christian communities. Written in Greek from around 80AD. 27 books.
St Jerome (382-405 AD) produced a Latin translation known as The Vulgate. It was written in common Latin, ie not the Classical Latin of Julius Caesar.
Is English a suitable language for communication with God?
1380 John Wycliffe translated a Bible into English from The Vulgate. He had to invent many English words. The Bible contains many revolutionary ideas. Suitable reading for peasants? The Wycliffe Bible (1380) directly influenced the Peasants Revolt (1381).
Enough was enough. Archbishop Arundul (1409) made it illegal to translate the Bible into English, illegal to read in English, punishable by death!
In the Dark Ages, the only centres of learning, of Christianity, were the monasteries, few people could read.
The Renaissance brought about radical change. There was an interest in Greek, in Classical texts, a rise in literacy, a desire to translate or at least read the Bible in its original Greek.
An important development took place in Mainz in Germany. Gutenberg was a metalsmith. He devoloped metal movable type. He saw a market in printing the Bible as it would be widely read. And it would be in German to maximise the readership. This led to the Gutenberg Bible (1456).
Erasmus translated the Bible from Greek to Latin. He corrected many of the mistakes of The Vulgate.
Martin Luther, a Calvanist, wanted a German Bible so that the common man could read the Bible.
William Tyndale, a very able linguist, translated the New Testament from Greek to English. This led to the Tyndale Bible, Cologne 1535, first five books of the Old Testament (plus parts) and the New Testament. There was followed by a 1534 edition.
It was still illegal to read or print the Bible in English in England. The Tyndale Bible was heretical. Neverthless copies were smuggled in England and it was very popular. Tyndale was executed in Brussels (1536).
Coverdale Bible (1538) during reign of Henry VIII
By the River Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Sion.
The Great Bible (aka Whitchurch Bible after the printer) was ordered by Henry VIII. Copies to every parish church.
The Geneva Bible (1560) by English Calvanists exiled in Geneva. It introduced chapter and verse and marginal notes. This was the Bible Shakespeare used. Too radical, King translated as tyrant!
Bishops Bible (1568) ordered by Queen Elizabeth I.
This was a time of religious upheaval across Europe.
1530 Dissolution of Monasteries.
1559 Elizabethan Church Settlement.
In Europe the Reformation was religious. Not so in England and that is why it has been so drawn out and is still ongoing.
Henry VIII had two reasons to establish himself as the head of an English Church: Divorce, money to finance foreign wars. Great wealth was acquired by the Crown.
1603 No Pilgrimages. No statues. Service in English. No monasteries. No shrines.
Puritans: authority lies with scripture, not the church.
1603 James I of England.
1604 Hampton Court Conference called to try and resolve some of the religious issues. The Big Idea was let's have a new Bible! Six companies as they were known were formed, two in Westminster, two in Oxford, two in Cambridge. They were drawn from all sides of the church. The Bishops Bible was to form the base, but also draw upon Tyndale, Coverdale, Great Bible and Geneva Bible.
They went well beyond their brief and went back to the original works in Hebrew and Greek. They also looked at German translations. Two men were allocated to each book. They would translate independently, then compare translations.
The New Testament is written in a Greek dialect koine not Classical Greek.
The work was then revised in 1610, two men from each company under the general direction of Launcelot Andrewes, a scholar and Dean of Westminster. Each person would read out his work, it had to sound good, if no interuptions, it was accepted. The model, the literary style, was the Book of Common Prayer by Cramer.
It should as though God Himself was speaking.
The King James Bible was published in 1611, the same year George Abbot (one of the translators) was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury. It was not an immediate success. It was the English Civil War that made it a success.
By 1700 it was the English Bible. It was to have a huge influence on the English language.
At a time when few could read, few had books, if there was one book in the house it was The Bible.
If there is one thing that gets Evangalists excited it is converting the Heathen. Schools were established, English was taught, the book used was The Bible. Thus English spread around the world.
Many of our modern English idioms are from the King James Bible (or Shakespeare):
East of Eden
how are the mighty fallen
the root of the matter
Set your house in order
Be horribly afraid
Suffer little children
Turned the world upside down
a thorn in the flesh
there were giants in the earth in those days
white as snow
The skin of my teeth
from strength to strength
reap the whirlwind
Many are called but few are chosen
see through a glass darkly
a man after his own heart
rod of iron
be of good cheer
new wine into old bottles
fell by the wayside
eat drink and be merry
den of lions
fly in the ointment
there is nothing new under the sun
Where to now?
Older Greek texts has led to revisions. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi find have provided new information.
The likelihood of a new translation is very low. 50-80 people were involved in the King James Bible. It would not be possible to gather together today that number of scholars with their knowledge. And from where would come the resources for such a project?
Based on an excellent talk given by Catherine Ferguson at St Nicolas Church in Guildford. Part of the King James Bible Celebrations 2011.
– The Book of Books
– The Gospels
– Where does the New Testament come from?
– The Bible A Biography
Tags: Authorised Version, Bible, Holy Bible, King James, King James' Bible, The Bible


text:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has recommended Kansas State University at Manhattan as the site of a $451 million lab designed to study foreign animal diseases.
DHS officials have not confirmed the recent announcement made by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), pending public release of an environmental impact statement.
Construction of the facility in Manhattan would mark the most significant economic development in the city since the founding of Kansas State University, according to Lyle Butler, president of the Manhattan Area Chamber of Commerce.
However, a New York lawmaker, whose district includes the Plum Island animal research facility off eastern Long Island, has protested the decision. Rep. Tim Bishop has indicated he will ask the incoming Obama administration to reconsider spending half-a-billion dollars to create a research facility that would duplicate many of the functions currently served by Plum Island.


text:
2024 Philippines Immunodiagnostic Analyzers and Reagents Market Shares and Forecasts for Over 100 Tests: Growth Opportunities, Supplier Strategies, Emerging Technologies, Latest Instrumentation
This new report is designed to help current suppliers and potential market entrants identify and evaluate business opportunities emerging in the clinical chemistry and immunodiagnostic markets during the next five years.
The report is available by section, and can be customized to specific information needs and budget.The report provides specimen, test volume and Sales Segment forecasts; compares features of leading analyzers; profiles key competitors; and identifies specific product and marketing opportunities emerging during the next five years.
The clinical chemistry and immunodiagnostic markets are undergoing significant transformation, caused by convergence of new and more stringent regulations; advances in diagnostic technologies, system engineering, automation, and IT; and intensifying competition. Some segments, like routine chemistry, are already resembling commodity markets, where product positioning and cost per test are more critical than underlying technology. This evolving marketplace creates exciting opportunities for a variety of new instruments, reagent systems, and auxiliary products, such as specimen preparation devices, controls, and calibrators.
Tests Analyzed in the Report:
Routine Clinical Chemistry
Albumin, Alkaline Phosphatase, ALT/SGPT, Ammonia, Amylase, AST/SGOT, Bilirubin, Total, BUN (Blood Urea Nitrogen), Calcium, Cardio CRP, Carbon Dioxide/Bicarbonate, Chloride, Cholesterol, Creatine Kinase (CK), CK-MB, Creatinine, CRP, Ferritin, GGT, Glucose, HDL Cholesterol, Homocysteine, Iron, LDH, LDL Cholesterol, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Protein, Total, Sodium, Triglycerides, Troponin, Uric Acid.
Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM)
Amikacin, Carbamazepine, Cyclosporin, Digoxin, Everolimus, Gentamicin, Levetiracetam,
Lithium, Methotrexate, NAPA/Procainamide, Phenobarbital, Phenytoin, Quinidine, Sirolimus, Tacrolimus, Theophylline, Tobramycin, Topirimate, Valproic Acid, Vancomycin.
Endocrine Function
Cortisol, Estradiol, FSH, HCG, Gastrin, LH, Progesterone, PTH/IO PTH, Prolactin, T3, T3 Uptake, Free T3, T4, Free T4, TBG, Testosterone, Thyroglobulin Ab, PO Ab, TSH.
Tumor Markers and Special Chemistry
AFP, CA 15-3/27-29, CA 19-9, CEA, Ferritin, Follate (Folic Acid), Glycosylated Hemoglobin, HCG, 25-Hydroxy Vitamin D2 and D3, Occult Blood, PAP, PSA, Thyroglobulin, Vitamin B-12
C3, C4, Free Light Chains, Haptoglobin, IgA, IgE Specific, IgE Total, IgG, IgM,
Immunofixation, Prealbumin, Protein Electrophoresis.
Current and Emerging Products
- Analysis of current and emerging clinical chemistry and immunodiagnostic tests.
- Review of current instrumentation technologies, and feature comparison of high-, medium-, and low-volume/POC analyzers.
Technology Assessment
- Assessment of current and emerging technologies, and their potential market applications.
- Comprehensive lists of companies developing or marketing new technologies and products by test.
Strategic Recommendations
- New product development opportunities with significant market appeal.
- Alternative market penetration strategies.
- Potential market entry barriers and risks.
Competitive Assessments
- Strategic assessments of major suppliers and emerging market entrants, including their Sales Segment, product portfolios, marketing tactics, collaborative arrangements and new products in RandD.
Contains 517 pages and 65 tables
Companies Profiled
Competitive Assessments
- Abbott Laboratories
- Agilent Technologies
- Beckman Coulter/Danaher
- bioMerieux
- Bio-Rad
- DiaSorin
- Eiken Chemical
- Fujirebio
- Grifols
- Instrumentation Laboratory/Werfen
- Kyowa Medex
- Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics
- PerkinElmer
- Quest Diagnostics
- Roche
- Siemens Healthineers
- Sysmex
- Thermo Fisher
- Tosoh
- Wako