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Cultural life
In many ways, Quebec, especially Greater Montreal, is a smaller plural society within the larger pluralism of Canadian society; that is, it is almost as difficult to define the cultural identity of Quebec as it is to define that of Canada as a whole. Although a basic sense of overall linguistic identity does exist in the life of the Francophone community in Quebec, there are many cultural differences between its French-speaking communities in east Montreal and those living in such smaller centres as Abitibi, Lac-Saint-Jean, Gaspé, or the Eastern Townships. Regional variations, heightened by immigration, have produced a sociocultural fragmentation that in part explains the differences in political voting patterns, religious behaviour, and even the quality in the use of the French language. Furthermore, there are class-based cultural differences and a strong elitist tradition that account for the high social status of such professions as medicine, law, the clergy, and business management. Even Quebec's French-speaking middle class, which expanded dramatically in the 1960s, has been more politically aggressive in Montreal, where they encountered stiff opposition from English speakers, than in Quebec city. Because of the cultural and socioeconomic variations within Quebec, it is often difficult and sometimes impossible for the provincial government to achieve consensus on cultural, linguistic, and educational policies.
The emergence of cultural and linguistic pluralism in the Greater Montreal region and the convergence of work styles and lifestyles between Québécois society and the larger Canadian and North American societies have created a serious dilemma for Quebec's nationalists. While claims of a unique French-speaking culture based on certain traditions brought from France have their origins in the literature and history of the 19th century, a debate now exists as to the exact nature of Quebec's Francophone cultural identity beyond the simple fact of the predominant use of the French language. Francophone cultural values have been called up in an attempt to define Quebec as a distinct society for political and constitutional purposes. This is reflected in successive Quebec governments fostering a "Québécois" national culture, which many have argued was largely nonexistent when French-speaking Québécois used to call themselves French Canadians. Cultural values have thus been a sign of political identity as much as, or more than, the expression of long tradition.
The arts and cultural institutions
To ensure the continuation of this Québécois identity, the provincial government has funded a number of institutions aimed at fostering cultural life. Foremost among these institutions is the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, which is responsible for improving the quality of the language used and for stimulating cultural, literary, and other artistic activities. Created in 1961 and modeled in part on the Canada Council, which had been founded in 1957, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs was the first such state institution in North America. It provides direct financial aid to such state cultural bodies as museums and archives. The ministry also helps finance more than 150 theatrical, ballet, and musical companies, all of which attract thousands of tourists to Quebec during the summer months.
Notable museums in Montreal include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the history-focused Chateau de Ramezay and McCord museums. Other notable museums include the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau and the Museum of French America in Quebec city. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, and La La La Human Steps dance company all enjoy excellent international reputations and perform regularly at the Place des Arts in Montreal. The acrobatic troupe Cirque du Soleil also originated in Quebec. Montreal is home to several arts festivals, most notably the Just for Laughs comedy festival and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. All of these arts and cultural organizations are also eligible for grants from the Canada Council. Notable singers and musicians from Quebec include Leonard Cohen, Felix Léclerc, Céline Dion, and Arcade Fire.
Quebec is also home to a small but successful film industry, though its audience is largely limited to the province. Nevertheless, several films and directors have found large audiences and acclaim outside of Quebec, most notably Denys Arcand, whose internationally acclaimed films include Jésus de Montréal (1989), Les Invasions barbares (2003; The Barbarian Invasions), and L'Âges des ténèbres (2007; The Age of Ignorance).
Sports and recreation
Quebec has more than 35 parks and wildlife reserves, many open for regulated hunting and fishing. Skiing and snowboarding in the Laurentian Mountains are popular activities for residents and tourists. Other winter recreational activities include snowshoeing, ice fishing, and snowmobiling. In summer, rock climbing, canoeing, swimming, fishing, hiking, and golf are popular. As in the rest of Canada, ice hockey and Canadian football are popular team sports. Although Quebec city once was home to a National Hockey League (NHL) franchise (the Nordiques, 1979–95), only Montreal has professional teams. The Canadiens of the NHL won 24 Stanley Cup championships in the 20th century and produced several legendary players, including Maurice Richard, Jacques Plante, Guy Lafleur, and Ken Dryden. The Alouettes play in the Canadian Football League. Professional baseball has long been a part of Montreal culture; the minor league Royals were a fixture from 1928 to 1960, and the major league Expos played in Montreal from 1969 to 2004. Montreal hosted the entertaining but costly 1976 Olympic Games and now uses the facilities built for the Games to host a great many Canadian and international sporting events.
Media and publishing
The Ministry of Culture subsidizes the publishing industry with direct grants and by funding the development and expansion of public libraries. Another institution created by the Quebec government in its efforts to stimulate French-language cultural development is Radio-Québec (founded in 1968). Its mandate was broadened quickly to incorporate television programming, and it was renamed Quebec Broadcasting Bureau. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's French-language networks, Radio-Canada and RDI, as well as the private stations, the TVA Network and the Quatre Television Saisons, produce a wide range of popular French-language programs. Quebec's English-language communities are served by the CBC, CTV, and Global TV. Among the most prominent French-language daily newspapers are La Presse and Le Journal du Montréal in Montreal, Le Novelliste in Trois-Rivières, and Le Soleil and Le Journal de Québec in Quebec city. The province's principal English-language daily is The Gazette in Montreal.
Early history to 1860
The origins of Quebec go back to 1534–35, when the French explorer Jacques Cartier landed at present-day Gaspé and took possession of the land in the name of the king of France. Cartier brought with him the 16th-century European traditions of mercantile expansion to a land where a few thousand Indians (First Nations) and Inuit (the Arctic people of Canada known as Eskimo in the United States) had been living for thousands of years. Permanent European settlement of the region began only in 1608, when Samuel de Champlain established a fort at Cape Diamond, the site of present-day Quebec city, then called Stadacona. A half century later the French settlement had a meagre population of some 3,200 people.
Although New France began with the founding of three cities—Quebec city in 1608, Trois-Rivières in 1616, and Montreal in 1642—it eventually included a vast inland territory incorporating Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, and Newfoundland and extending southwest all the way to Louisiana. In the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which confirmed France's defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession, Great Britain acquired all of Nova Scotia (except for Cape Breton), Newfoundland, and the lands around Hudson Bay. The remaining territory of New France, except for Louisiana and the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, was ceded to Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris (1763).
Within a decade of having acquired nearly all of France's North American colonies, Britain faced a revolution of independence by its original 13 colonies. In 1774, hoping to retain the loyalty of their new subjects in the French and Catholic colony of Quebec by gaining the support of its clerical leaders, the British passed the Quebec Act. The act granted Catholics freedom of religious practice, legalized the French seigneurial system, recognized the French civil code, and reextended the boundaries of Quebec into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys to satisfy the fur traders and maintain alliances with the Indians. This strategy worked, and a vast majority of French Canadians remained neutral when American forces led by Gen. Benedict Arnold invaded Quebec in 1775. While losing its original American colonies, Great Britain retained Quebec and Nova Scotia. The influx of several thousand British loyalists into Quebec, all of whom demanded land and representative government, forced the British to again alter the constitutional arrangements. The poorly conceived Constitutional Act (1791) divided the colony of Quebec along the Ottawa River into Lower Canada (Quebec) and Upper Canada (the future Ontario). It also provided for an elected assembly and for appointed executive and legislative councils. In short order, the majority French Canadian society ensured that members of its increasingly nationalistic professional middle class, educated by the Catholic Church, came to dominate the elected assembly. The Canadian Party defended the seigneurial system, denounced the Catholic Church for collaborating with the British, criticized the emergence of commercial capitalism, and demanded responsible government—full rule by the majority in the elected assembly. Members of the British merchant, bureaucratic, and military classes were reduced to a rump, but this minority British Party retained full control over the appointed executive and legislative councils.
By the 1830s the increasing control of British merchants over the commercial and financial life of Lower Canada, the emergence of an agricultural crisis as wheat production (the only cash crop) collapsed, and the rise of a politically dominant French Canadian professional middle class resulted in a severe political, social, and economic crisis. The society had become ungovernable. When the British authorities refused to grant the assembly sweeping powers, the secessionist Patriot Party (formerly the Reform Party) sought to take the colony of Quebec out of the British Empire and create a new Republic of Quebec. The secessionist movement, led by a weak and indecisive Louis-Joseph Papineau, culminated in the unsuccessful rebellions of 1837–38. Papineau fled to the United States only to return in the late 1850s. The British military forces crushed the rebels (a few were hanged and others exiled in Australia) and instituted military rule. According to a report written by Lord Durham in 1839, the source of the rebellion was "two nations warring in the bosom of a single state." Durham recommended the union of Upper and Lower Canada, massive British immigration, municipal reform, and the institution of responsible government.
Fearful that the French Canadian majority would dominate the new colony created by the Act of Union in 1841, the British refused to grant responsible government and ensured British control over the elected assembly by granting each of the colony's two administrative regions, Canada East (the former Lower Canada) and Canada West (formerly Upper Canada), 42 seats. Pressured by French Canadian and British political reformers from Canada West and Canada East, and hoping to transfer the rising administrative costs to the colonies, British authorities granted responsible government in 1848, much to the dismay of the old British Party, which preached annexation to the United States. French Canadian members of the government shared power, including the power to tax and spend. They supported funding of the transportation revolution, notably the building of the canals that made the Great Lakes accessible via the majestic St. Lawrence River and the construction of the very expensive Grand Trunk Railway from Sarnia to Levi, on the south shore of Quebec city. In return, they pushed hard for and won the right to use their own language in the assembly and gained full control over educational, social, and municipal institutions in Canada East.
Confederation to the 1920s
The British North American colonies were faced with a number of pressing problems by the mid-1860s, and a new constitutional arrangement became imperative. The population of Canada West had surpassed that of Canada East, and the colonies were caught in political deadlock. Liberal politicians in Canada West wanted out from under French control of the government and were anxious to turn the western territories owned and controlled by the Hudson Bay Company into a vast hinterland for Toronto. The accumulated debt of the colony, notably due to canal and railway construction costs, threatened financial ruin. Finally, the British wanted out of Canada because colonial administration was too costly and free trade promised to supply Britain with cheaper natural resources and foodstuffs. Three years of debate and negotiation produced the British North America Act in 1867 (now called the Constitution Act, 1867). The British Parliament created a quasi-autonomous federation, the Dominion of Canada, comprising Quebec (formerly Canada East), Ontario (formerly Canada West), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The French Canadian community, a minority within the larger federation, was granted control over the provincial government of Quebec through which it could design and administer social, economic, and political programs reflecting its traditions and values. The Canadian Parliament and the Quebec legislative assembly and council, as well as the federal court system, were designed as bilingual French-English institutions.
Beginning in the 1850s, Montreal occupied an important role as Canada's dominant financial, commercial, transportation, and industrial metropolis. For this reason, Quebec was quickly integrated into both the western European and North American economies. The rapid growth of Quebec's French Canadian rural population, supplemented by immigrants, provided a large pool of surplus labour for a wide range of primary and secondary industries. In 1879 industrialization was accelerated by Canada's policy of protective tariffs, as well as by the construction of three national transcontinental railways, which opened up the Northwest Territories and parts of northern Quebec and Ontario for settlement. Where Quebec society differed from that of the rest of North America was in its ambivalent response to rapid industrialization and urbanization. Because the process was initiated and controlled by Montreal's British Canadian and American financial, commercial, and industrial bourgeoisie, a cultural division of labour quickly emerged. The industrial labour force was largely composed of unskilled and semiskilled Francophone Catholics, and the captains of industry were Anglophone Protestants. In the late 19th century a French Canadian upper middle class emerged, but its scope was limited to small and medium-size businesses, including financial institutions, located largely outside the Montreal region.
Both of Quebec's principal political parties—the Conservatives, who dominated the legislature in the 19th century, and the Liberals, who held office between 1897 and 1936—supported the industrialization of Quebec's economy. There were strong links between the political class and the business leaders, both English- and French-speaking, as the province competed with Ontario for domestic and foreign investment. While Montreal was the headquarters of the national banks, the insurance corporations, and the railway companies, Ontario—because of its proximity to the United States, their shared language, and the vast amounts of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls—attracted the lion's share of direct U.S. investment. A struggle developed between Montreal and Toronto, which would slowly but inevitably gain the upper hand as the 20th century progressed.
The cultural division of labour became a major concern of French-speaking Quebec's traditional petit-bourgeois leaders and officials of the Roman Catholic Church. These cultural and religious nationalists feared that members of the rapidly expanding French-speaking Catholic working class would lose their religion, language, and culture as they earned their living in English-language Protestant factories and commercial enterprises. Leading French Canadian nationalists Henri Bourassa and the abbé Lionel-Adolphe Groulx argued vigorously that the province's Francophone society must remain predominantly Roman Catholic and rural. They denounced French-speaking politicians for neglecting the needs of the rural communities and for selling out Quebec's natural resources to foreigners.
Yet, remaining isolated on farms and in rural villages and rejecting much-needed factory jobs was not a realistic alternative for the vast majority of French Canadians. Realizing that industrialization was inevitable, moderate church leaders created a range of Catholic organizations and institutions, including labour unions, professional associations, and agricultural cooperatives, that allowed French Canadians to gain some control over the new economic and social order. The church also retained control of education and rejected attempts by politicians and businessmen, both French and English, to reform the traditionalist school system. While Quebec's industrial economy diversified and expanded during and after World War I, Francophone children were deprived of the necessary education and training skills to take advantage of the new opportunities. French Canadians and their society became economically and socially inferior in a province where they constituted the majority.
In the interim, it was far easier for French Canadian nationalists to convince their compatriots that Canada's English-speaking and Protestant majority was depriving them of their political and constitutional rights. Bourassa led the campaign to convince British Canadians to perceive their country as a bilingual and bicultural nation-state. He argued that Canada should declare its independence from the British Empire and become a full-fledged member of the international community. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada was obligated to participate. French Canadians felt deeply betrayed by Prime Minister Robert Borden's Conservative government's decision to impose conscription in 1917. They abandoned the national Conservative Party and turned to the Liberal Party, which dominated politics in Quebec for most of the 20th century. The consequences at the provincial level were somewhat more convoluted.
The Great Depression to the 1950s
The collapse of international trade and industrial capitalism in the 1930s had a profound and lasting impact on the French-speaking community of Quebec. Believing that the economic crisis had proven them right, French Canadians helped create a coalition of Liberal and Conservative politicians and nationalists to establish the National Union party, led by Maurice Duplessis, who obtained the support of the Roman Catholic Church leaders and became premier in 1936. His government, abandoning momentarily the nationalist agenda, gave substantial financial assistance to hard-pressed farming communities and hounded organized labour while supporting continued industrialization. Duplessis strongly objected to Canada's participation in World War II. Although defeated in 1939, he was reelected in 1944 and remained premier until his death in 1959, owing to the support of big business, the Catholic Church, rural voters, and nonunion workers.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of educated French Canadians—neonationalists who redefined themselves as Québécois and neoliberals committed to the Keynesian social service state—set in motion an ideological revolution. They began to make reform proposals in the 1950s. Both groups rejected traditional French Canadian nationalism and its antiquated portrayal of Francophones as a minority Roman Catholic and rural society. These intellectuals also rejected the traditional nationalist regime of Duplessis, its antidemocratic alliance with an overly clerical and autocratic Roman Catholic Church, its antiunion legislation, and its open invitation to U.S. corporations. Neonationalists proposed the creation of a modern, secular Quebec state run by and for the French-speaking majority. The state, not the Catholic church, would be responsible for the survival and expansion of Québécois society. Acquiring a modern bureaucracy, the state would finance and control a full range of social services, reform the outmoded Catholic-run educational system, and establish a Francophone-controlled industrial labour movement.
Progressive Liberals also proposed the creation of a modern, democratic, and interventionist Quebec state, but they wanted it to be the servant of every citizen of Quebec, regardless of language, ethnicity, colour, class, religion, or gender. They called for an integrated, secular, and progressive educational system. Most importantly, they wanted to block the creation of a Francophone nationalist state committed primarily to collective, rather than individual, rights.
The "Quiet Revolution" to the present
Under the Duplessis administration, none of the neonationalist or liberal reforms were implemented. In the interim, the social and economic transformation of the Québécois community continued apace, thus creating the opportunity for rapid institutional change should a more sympathetic political party take office. The Quebec Liberal Party chose a former federal minister, Jean Lesage, as its new leader in 1958 and adopted a new political platform comprising elements from both the neonationalist and neoliberal platforms. Following Duplessis's death in 1959, Lesage and the Liberals formed a government with a slim majority in 1960, and the "Quiet Revolution" began. Supported by an emerging new middle class of well-educated Québécois, the Lesage government created a modern, secular Quebec state that took control of all social, health, and educational institutions, opening thousands of jobs for educated Francophones. The government also created and managed numerous Crown corporations, including Hydro-Québec, where French was the language of the workplace. Many Québécois used this experience to create private companies that became part of Quebec, Inc., a consortium of large Québécois corporations. To finance all of these expensive reform programs, Lesage and his successors demanded and received a greater share of federal personal, corporate, and estate taxes. Quebec also opted out of many of the Canadian government's shared-cost programs and received additional tax points. Quebec garnered the largest share (nearly 50 percent) of the equalization transfers made by Ottawa to Canada's have-not provinces.
The Quebec government's pursuit of additional tax revenue and jurisdictional power over domestic and foreign matters posed a serious political challenge to an already decentralized Canadian federation. Right- and left-wing secessionist political movements emerged in the mid-1960s. They coalesced around René Lévesque's Parti Québécois, which was founded in 1968. Following defeats in the elections of 1970 and 1973, the Parti Québécois, promising a referendum on secession, was elected in November 1976. The Parti Québécois's first legislation was Bill 101, the Charter of the French Language. Responding to this very serious threat to national unity, the Canadian Liberal government, led by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, prepared itself for the provincial referendum on secession that took place in May 1980. Garnering 60 percent of the vote, the federalist forces led by Trudeau defeated the secessionists. Trudeau acted immediately on his promise to renew the federation. The Canadian Parliament, with the support of nine provinces and a majority of Canadians, acted to "patriate" (a uniquely Canadian term meaning roughly to Canadianize) the country's founding document, the British North America Act of 1867, which originally had been enacted by the British Parliament. The resultant Canada Act of 1982, augmented by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (a bill of rights), provided the country with a new constitution. Lévesque's Parti Québécois rejected the new constitution on the grounds that it diminished Quebec's power over language and education and that it did away with Quebec's constitutional veto.
Quebec's constitutional struggle with the federal government remained largely dormant until 1987, when Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney negotiated a deal with the Quebec Liberal government of Robert Bourassa. The result, the Meech Lake Accord, recognized Quebec as a distinct society and gave the government and legislature of Quebec the right to preserve and promote its uniqueness. It also gave Quebec and the other provinces expanded powers, including a veto over all changes made to Canada's central institutions. However, the Meech Lake Accord was not ratified by all 10 provinces within its required three-year limit because of opposition in Manitoba and Newfoundland.
Canada's constitutional wars continued when Bourassa, with support from Mulroney, threatened to hold another referendum on secession in October 1992 if his government was not offered an acceptable set of constitutional proposals by the federal government and the other provinces. Months of negotiations produced the Charlottetown Consensus Report, which called for enhanced autonomy not only for Quebec but for the country's aboriginal groups. The proposal was rejected by Canadians in a national referendum by a margin of 55 to 45 percent. Mulroney resigned, and in the 1993 election the Conservative Party was shattered. Bourassa, ill with cancer, also resigned. His successor, Daniel Johnson, lost the 1994 election to Parti Québécois leader Jacques Parizeau, who promised to hold a referendum within the year. However, under pressure, Parizeau backed away from a referendum on outright secession. Instead, Quebecers were asked if they supported the concept of sovereignty partnership between an independent Quebec and the rest of Canada. In 1995 a powerful campaign for the "yes" vote nearly won the day for the separatist cause, as the referendum was defeated by fewer than 55,000 votes. Parizeau stepped down and was replaced by Lucien Bouchard, a founder of Bloc Québécois.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was shocked by the narrow margin of victory. His government passed a resolution recognizing Quebec as a distinct society and a bill stating that the Canadian government would never ratify another major constitutional amendment without the approval of Quebec's National Assembly. He also referred Quebec's referendum law to Canada's Supreme Court; it stipulated that the Quebec assembly had the right, under international law, to make a unilateral declaration of independence following a simple majority vote on secession. In August 1998 the Supreme Court justices, in their landmark Quebec Secession Reference decision, ruled that Quebec did not have, under domestic or international law, the right to secede unilaterally. The justices then opined that if Quebecers voted on a direct question pertaining to secession only, with a clear majority, the Canadian government would be obligated to negotiate secession with Quebec. The court made it clear that the negotiations would encompass all matters, including borders, and that there was no guarantee that they would succeed. They concluded that the Quebec state could proceed to take all the risks inherent in an illegal declaration of independence.
The vast majority of Québécois accepted the Supreme Court's controversial decision, thereby preventing the Parti Québécois government from employing it as a catalyst for a third referendum on secession. Quebecers reelected Bouchard's Parti Québécois to a second term in 1998. At a convention in May 2000, Bouchard pledged to promote with renewed vigour the cause of Quebec's independence but refused to set a date for another referendum. He retired in 2001, citing his failure to make advancements toward sovereignty. Bouchard became the leader of a movement against another referendum on secession on the grounds that the Québécois society had far more urgent demographic, social, and economic problems to resolve to ensure its long-term viability, prosperity, and sustainability. In 2003, however, Parti Québécois and Bernard Landry, who had succeeded Bouchard as premier, were ousted from office by the Liberal Party and its leader, Jean Charest, who promised to restore the health care system and to lower taxes for the middle class.
In November 2005 Parti Québécois elected as its leader André Boisclair, a charismatic 39-year-old who had been a member of the party's executive committee from 1985 and a member of the provincial assembly since 1989. The vast majority of the Québécois lost confidence in him, however, a result of what many considered a lack of political judgment and in response to a personal scandal (before his election as leader, he had admitted prior cocaine use). As a result, Charest's Liberal government, despite failing to deliver on its two key promises, was reelected in 2007, though with only one-third of the seats, mostly in Anglophone and Allophone ridings. Mario Dumont's Action Démocratique du Québec, which represented the interests of small-town rural Québécois and disgruntled middle-class suburbanites, garnered one-third of the seats from both the Liberal Party and Parti Québécois.
In the wake of Parti Québécois's second defeat, many Québécois appeared to have no desire to be drawn into a third referendum on secession. Like Bouchard, most Québécois came to understand that it was necessary and urgent to resolve the many demographic, social, and economic problems confronting their society before confronting the risks inherent in seceding from the Canadian federation. Québécois also gambled that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative federal government would grant the province of Quebec special constitutional status within a more decentralized and asymmetrical Canadian federation, thereby making secession unnecessary. A failure to deliver on this promise might well revive the secessionist movement, leaving Canadians once again facing a challenge to the political and territorial integrity of their nation-state.Michael D. Behiels
In 2012 the Liberal Party's provincial budget included a major increase in university tuition fees. The result was arguably the greatest student mobilization in the country's history. For several months the student movement occupied the limelight of Quebec's political news: tens of thousands of college and university students went on strike, blocking access to their campuses, and daily demonstrations were held in Montreal and elsewhere in the province.
Meanwhile, the government continued to defend itself against growing allegations of collusion and corruption. In August 2012 Charest set the stage for an appeal to the "silent majority" by asking the lieutenant governor to dissolve the National Assembly of Quebec in order to hold new elections. In elections in September 2012, Parti Québécois won a plurality of seats in the Assembly, and the party's leader, Pauline Marois, became Quebec's first woman premier. Having failed to obtain a majority of seats, however, the Parti Québécois government faced the need to compromise with other political parties in order to pass new legislation. The 2012 election also confirmed the rise of the Coalition Avenir Québec. The new centre-right party (which had absorbed the former Action Démocratique du Québec) won 19 of the 125 seats in the Assembly. Only18 months later, in March 2014, Marois—seeking to obtain a majority—called a new provincial election for April. The Liberal Party won in a landslide, handing Parti Québécois its worst defeat in terms of seats won since 1970 and propelling Philippe Couillard to the premiership.The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Canada: The Quebec questionThe issue of Quebec's autonomy dominated Canadian politics for the last decades of the 20th century. Through various historical constitutional guarantees, Quebec, which is the sole Canadian province where citizens of French origin are in the majority, has developed a distinctive culture that…
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At first glance, George Zimmerman's painting of State Attorney Angela Corey, executed in vermilion, carnelian, rhodamine, yellow and orange, is bizarre. With its rough strokes, it resembles the maniac wall daubs that are de rigueur for television serial killers who always have human blood around to paint runes, witchcraft symbols and mysterious messages.
To Duval County Courthouse denizens, however, it's hilarious. Corey is famous for the erubescent rages for which her predecessor, Harry Shorstein, fired her. When she terminated Ben Kruidbos, the IT director who testified that she withheld evidence from Zimmerman's attorneys, the rubor of the ensuing litigation and the uproar in the press were of equal magnitude.
Among criminal defendants, she is the scarlet virago of maximum charges, maximum bail and maximum sentences. To her supporters, she is justice incarnate; to her detractors, outrage incarnadine.
Red becomes her.
Who knew that George was a wit? Not the nattering classes, which pegged him as a loser and cop wannabe, terms repeated endlessly, like echoes in the empty canyon of modern journalism. I suspected otherwise, initially when I listened to him speak Spanish, his best language, and later when he arrived at trial with a quarter-million bucks he'd scored on the Internet for his defense. The sale of his first painting, of an American flag with blue stripes, for $108,000, reinforced this impression.
In exacting some tiny payback on his tormentor, his choice of weapons was interesting. Nearly all prisoners, under a rough blanket in the solitude of a cell, dream of smashing the skulls of the prosecutors who put them there. Zimmerman chose, instead of a club, the paintbrush.
This is insightful. Most elected officials are notably humorless and irony-challenged. When teased with a funny painting or a bon mot that has more than one meaning, they're helpless.
Zimmerman made his artwork by projecting a photograph onto canvas and painting over the image. This used to be considered an artistic cop-out, until Andy Warhol tweaked the technique to make silkscreens of the rich, the famous and the well-married and left an estate valued at $220 million.
The photograph was taken by Rick Wilson, a Jacksonville stringer. The copyright is owned by the Associated Press. The AP is threatening to sue, and copyright violation is the new halloo of a press that prefers to run in packs rather than think.
This received opinion is insufficiently informed. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that a commercial parody, even when sold for profit, can be fair use, rather than infringement, of copyright. The case was brought after 2 Live Crew composed a song titled "Pretty Woman" that mocked Roy Orbison's original. That the Supremes spent many august hours to defend the right of guys like Fresh Kid Ice and Mr. Mixx to have some fun and make a buck makes one think that there is, on occasion, justice in law.
Legally, Zimmerman is justified; practically, he's up the creek. Every schlub who's been cleaned out by lawyers knows that before you arrive at trial, you have to get through motion hearings, discovery and deposition and go through your last dollar. If your bank balance hits zero, you default and the other guy wins, right or wrong.
My prediction? Zimmerman will carve out a slice of the sale price for the AP, which will, in due course, remit to Wilson whatever chump change is due under his contract. It's just business.
I admire George for taking his shot. It doesn't happen often. I sat in Judge Lawrence Haddock's court as he recused himself, with flimsy pretext, from presiding over the $5 million lawsuit that Kruidbos filed against Corey. Attorneys I asked to comment on this story said not a word. All fear her fury.
Zimmerman definitely has some stones. Like justice, those are always in short supply,
In Crime City.

subset: commoncrawl


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Down the Drain—Water Metering in the Home
Superstorms and costal flooding may grab headlines, but water scarcity is emerging as our most immediate environmental concern. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent assessment highlights the increasing risk of water scarcity in this age of climate extremes and skyrocketing populations. Another recent study finds that if, by the end of the century, 500 million people are subjected to water scarcity, it will be the result of an optimistic warming scenario. Even now, the droughts plaguing many of the world's most arid regions—including parts of western United States—are contributing to economic fragility and social unrest.
Water meters, small devices that track water usage, could play a key role in helping people understand the reality of water as a limited resource. Because they allow utilities to bill by volume, meters encourage customers to conserve—often with dramatic results. In this series, we will examine metering's effect on water consumption, its intersection with cultural norms and individual rights, and its impact on communities.The first installment highlighted water metering policy in Chile.
In 2009, only 55 percent of the homes in California's San Joaquin Valley had water meters installed. That low percentage was not the result of a naturally slow adoption process. It was a result of aggressive resistance to the devices, which were billed as "taxing machines."[1] When the city of Fresno, in the heart of the arid valley, attempted to install 8,000 meters in a pilot program, a group of taxpayers fought fiercely and successfully to amend the city charter, banning residential meters.
The United States isn't the only developed country with popular opposition to metering. In southern England a renewed compulsory metering drive has been met with indignation. Some customers claim that volumetric pricing is a tax on children, as larger families might now pay more.[2] Financial concerns are colored by a popular distrust of England's private utility companies. In the past decade, water prices have increased 84 percent, while the utilities profits have jumped up to 200 percent.[3]
With correct regulation, however, residential metering encourages individual conservation. When coupled with grace period and gradual price increases, metering can be rolled out fairly. In Denmark, the transition to residential metering and volumetric billing were correlated with a 12.6-percent decrease in consumption between 1996 and 2007.[4]
Metering also improves equity. When customers pay by volume, the implicit subsidy that high-volume users receive at the expense of low-volume users is eliminated. Although most residences in the United States are metered, regulations differ by state and even by district. Water is not always billed volumetrically. Many meters are never even read.
In the past, Fresno utilities charged a flat rate regardless of usage. For a city that averaged just under 290 gallons per person per day—almost triple the national average of 100 gallons—this was a problem.[5] In light of diminishing aquifer levels and excessive usage, the California legislature mandated that any city drawing from federal dams install water meters by 2013.[6]
Today, Fresno is almost completely metered, and the results have been positive. Patrick Weimiller, Fresno's director of Public Works, told local news affiliate KFSN that he has already seen a reduction in usage. "Our actual numbers are showing we're about 17 percent below where we were with the fixed rate, with some room to grow."[7]
This post is the second in a series on water metering. The next installment will look at agricultural metering in the United States.
[6] http://www.fresno.gov/Government/DepartmentDirectory/PublicUtilities/Watermanagement/meterfaq.htm
[7] http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=8934000
Rachel Lipstein is a junior at Yale College majoring in English major with a concentration in Writing. She is interested in sustainable agriculture and enjoys spending time on farms. Previously, she worked on the 108-foot sloop, Clearwater, which is dedicated to protecting the Hudson River through education, advocacy, and celebration.


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Algeria Scandals Mask High Level Power Struggle
Nearly a week from regional elections, Algerians are less interested in the public vote than an intensifying behind-the-scenes power struggle — one that is playing out through a flurry of corruption probes.
Though ostensibly a democracy, Algeria is really ruled by a powerful president and a shadowy collection of military generals and intelligence chiefs, making figuring out who has real power a constant preoccupation.
Thursday's local elections, like last May's legislative ones, mean little to people who know that real power lies with officials that have been appointed, not elected.
Aging President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has said he will retire in April 2014 after three terms and 15 years in power, setting the stage for a wide open presidential contest for the first time in the country's history.
Voters expect to have little direct say in the outcome.
Like the rest of North Africa, Algeria was shaken by protests calling for reform in the wake ofTunisia's dramatic overthrow of its long-ruling dictator in January 2011.
But in this North African country of 35 million, the protests never truly caught fire and were crushed by a combination of ruthless security forces and public sector salary increases, as well as lingering fears of instability after a decade-long civil war in the 1990s that claimed more than 200,000 lives.
The stakes are high for the presidential elections for not only this oil-rich nation, but for the region as a whole: Algeria has the strongest military in North Africa and neighbors unstable Libya and even more fragile Mali, where al-Qaida appears to control much of the north.
When a new daily newspaper began printing stories last week about three prominent politicians with close ties to Bouteflika taking bribes, it was widely taken as an opening salvo ahead of the presidential polls.
"These revelations are directly related to current politics and the upcoming 2014 presidential elections," said Rachid Tlemcani, a politics professor at Algiers University. "Corruption has reached grotesque proportions in Algeria, but rather than being fought with the law, it is unfortunately used as a weapon by the different clans in the system fighting among themselves since the war for succession to Bouteflika has opened."
That fight involves control over billions of dollars.
Algeria is awash in oil and natural gas money and has foreign reserves of almost $200 billion. It has embarked on a string high profile infrastructure projects — and accusations are rife that foreign companies have been paying massive bribes to secure contracts. That has all contributed to Algeria's ranking of 112 out of 183 countries on Transparency International's 2011 corruption index.
The head of the ruling party, Abdelaziz Belkhadem, the minister of public works, Amar Ghoul, and well as the minister of industry, Cherif Rahmani, have all been accused by Algerie News of taking bribes to influence bids for the $12 billion East-West highway project (won by a Chinese-Japanese consortium), the Algiers metro and an extension of the tramway.
Belkhaddem and Ghoul are both close to the 75-year-old Bouteflika and are seen as possible candidates for the 2014 elections.
While Ghoul, for his part, has denied the allegations, the other two have remained silent — as has the Ministry of Justice.
Noureddine Benissad, the president of the Algerian League to Defend Human Rights, expressed outrage over the ministry's lack of action. "The Ministry of Justice should order a judicial investigation," he said, lamenting the lack of independence of the ministry from the executive.
After his appointment in September, Bouteflika's new prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, like many Algerian leaders before him, promised to lead the fight against corruption. Yet just last week the daily El Watan also published a four page expose over the misuse of public funds, including fancy cars for ministers and the construction of new seaside villas for them from public money.
Algerie News has said it has confidential files in its possession and more corruption revelations are expected — suggesting it is being fed by the feared "Research and Security Department" or DRS, as the intelligence service is known.
The military and security services are meanwhile reportedly backing Ahmed Ouyahia for the presidency, a former prime minister and head of the other main party in the ruling coalition.
Ouyahia coexisted uneasily with Bouteflika for years, but after May's elections and the overwhelming victory of the president's National Liberation Front, he was not asked back as prime minister.
Members of his own party, the National Democratic Rally, have even criticized Ouyahia for using the party to further his presidential ambitions.
According to political expert Mohammed Said, the fact that the revelations involve two politicians close to the president could also be the military's way of warning Bouteflika against harboring any ideas of staying in power.
"It is a likely a warning shot to discourage him from running for a fourth term," he said.
The president, who is rumored to be ailing, had already said that he would not run again and just a week before the May parliamentary elections, he made a landmark speech in which he said that the mission of his generation, the generation that fought the war of independence from France in 1962 and had ruled the country ever since, was over.
He also announced a series of reforms and promised to rewrite the constitution during the start of 2013.
On Tuesday, however, Interior Minister Dahou Ould Kablia said that the constitution reform process had been postponed — indefinitely.
Columnist Ihsane el-Kadi has suggested that the reform and talk of other candidates is all a smoke screen for Bouteflika's own continuing presidential ambitions.
"For several months, he's been pushing the idea that if there is no agreement on his successor, it should be him," he said in the online news site Maghreb Emergent. "I sincerely doubt he ever thought it wouldn't be him."


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Four people have been arrested in connection with the fight that broke out near an exit gate following the Jets' overtime win against the New England Patriots on Sunday, police said.
New Jersey State Police said Tuesday that two women and a man from Massachusetts and a man from New York were charged with assault and disorderly conduct.
Police said the women were seen punching and kicking the man from New York, who then punched one of them in the face. The Massachusetts man then allegedly punched the first man.
Cell phone video shows the skirmish following Gang Green's big win. The video obtained by NBC 4 New York shows a man on the ground, surrounded by a group of fans, as the fight erupts.
Punches are thrown, and one female Patriots fan comes up behind one of the Jets fans and grabs his neck, fighting to pull him away from the person on the ground.
Others pull the Jets fan away from the woman after a brief struggle, and then another female Patriots fan walks up to him, yelling and getting in his face. The Jets fan then punches her in the face.
A male Patriots fan then tries to join the fracas, and it's eventually broken up, according to the video provided by Robert Littal.
The lawyer for Kurt Paschke Jr., 38, the New York man charged in the assault, says his client was defending himself, his mother and friends from being hurt.
"After the police complete their investigation, we expect Kurt to be vindicated," the lawyer, Bruce Barket, said.
Nick Folk kicked a 42-year field goal in overtime to lift the Jets over the Patriots, bringing Gang Green to a 4-3 record, second in the division. The Patriots lead the division with a 5-2 record.
The Jets play the 5-2 Bengals in Cincinnati next week.


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CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. � Elon University�s late-game magic fizzled in a 72-68 loss at Chattanooga in Southern Conference men�s basketball Saturday night.
Elon pulled within 69-66 of the Mocs on Jack Isenbarger�s jumper with three minutes remaining, but went without a field goal the rest of the way at McKenzie Arena.
So a run of four straight victories that turned dramatic at the end of regulation was halted for the Phoenix (19-9 overall, 12-4 league), which clinched the conference�s North Division title two nights prior.
Gee McGhee, a freshman guard, poured in a season-high 24 points and grabbed eight rebounds as Chattanooga (12-17, 7-9) won its home finale.
Ryley Beaumont led Elon with 20 points and seven rebounds. Sebastian Koch added 13 points and Isenbarger chipped in 12. Elon leading scorer Lucas Troutman, who suffered a sprained ankle two weeks ago and since has been bothered by soreness, didn�t play.
Elon opened the second half on a 16-9 spurt go up 51-46 before Chattanooga responded to take a 59-56 lead.
Beaumont cut it to 59-58 with a layup. The Mocs used a 10-4 run to pull away. McGhee scored seven points during the span.
Z Mason and Drazen Zlovaric added 10 points apiece for Chattanooga, which shot 54 percent (13 of 24) in the first half en route to a 38-37 halftime lead.


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BRANDON — Now that petitioners have triggered a re-vote on the Brandon town budget after it passed on Town Meeting Day by eight votes, the stage is set for voters to ask their long-awaited questions.
An informational meeting about the budget will be held at the Neshobe School on Monday, April 29, at 7 p.m. The Brandon selectboard will take budget questions from voters. The meeting will be moderated by Bernie Carr.


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Sunday, March 27, 2011
The Places I've Been
I'm only missing 12, not to bad I think. Now for the hard part of the post, my favorite places. That is so tough because there are so many amazing and wonderful cities in the US, it's hard to narrow it down to the best.
1. New York City- I went to college in New York City (Queens actually) and it holds a special place in my heart. I loved to go into the city each weekend and just explore, there was always something new to find and check out; Greenwich Village, Chinatown, SoHo, the West Village, MoMa, the Met, the Guggenheim, Time Square, I could go on and on.
2. Chicago- Another amazing city not too far from where I live now. Eric and I have both gone on work trips to the windy city and I have several family members who have lived there. I love the atmosphere of Chicago, one of the best places to be on a warm, beautiful spring day. They also have so many great places to go, Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum, Navy Pier, Oak Park (love Frank Lloyd Wright), Art Institute of Chicago, and who can forget the incredible shopping along the Magnificent Mile!
3. Honolulu- What a truly incredible location! I was fortunate enough to get to go to Honolulu one year over Christmas break and even got to spend New Year's there. It was so wonderful to get to escape the cold weather of the midwest (they had a huge snowstorm back home while I was there) for the gorgeous beaches and perfect weather of Honolulu. It was so relaxing and was a wonderful vacation. Definitely someplace I want to go back and visit again!
4. Sanibel Island, FL- Another amazing beach destination! It's the seashell capital of the world and it does not disappoint, I have never seen so many shells in my life. I also love how development of the island has been restricted and so much of it has been preserved as wildlife refuges. My in-laws have a condo there and I can not wait to take Avery and the new baby (hopefully next summer).
5. San Francisco- I've only been there once as a teenager but it still is one of my favorite cities. The hillside streets and picturesque neighborhoods all overlooking the large beautiful bay. From the cable cars to Fisherman's Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge, it's such a great city to explore!
Where have you been? What are your favorite cities? Create your own map here.
9 comments:
How fun, I love to travel as well and have been to 35 stats, I think!ReplyDelete
Going to make one of these of my own!
Wow! You've been around. My map looks very different - very east coast! I'll try to get it posted on my blog later today.ReplyDelete
Found you on someone else's blog. Seeing how far back people are going with this fun thing! LOL I love Sanibel. I'm originally from FL and actually never went until AFTER I moved to OH. Have a great week!ReplyDelete
WOW I AM SO jealous of how much you have traveled. I think I need to go update my bucket list to add some more places to visit : )ReplyDelete
How funny - my states are colored so much from competitive diving. :) You have some great favs. I would love to see the Guggenheim one day, and Hawaii!ReplyDelete
Oh - and I adore Frank Lloyd Wright too. Such amazing creations. I grew up near a lot of his stuff. :) Glad you could join in - it is amazing to see it all down in color isn't it??
Wow! I can count the states I've been to on my fingers... I'd love to have traveled as much as you have.ReplyDelete
Washington and Oregon are beautiful. You need to go there!ReplyDelete
Wow, you have travelled all over. What a neat post. I'm from Canada but I've been to a few places in the States. My sister lives in CA so we have travelled down the West Coast a few times to visit. For our next vacation, hopefully sooner than later, I would like to go to Florida.ReplyDelete
Love to travel as well...but in my opinion nothing beats Chicago. I was lucky enough to live there for 5 years and loved every minute of it. Don't get me wrong...I wouldn't trade in Calgary for the world now...but I'll always love my Chicago days.ReplyDelete


text:
Hackage on Sparky
Hi, Haskellers. It's been a while since I finished most of Hackage 2.0's internal infrastructure. The site still needs a visual makeover, but I feel that enough of the core functionality is exposed for it to be useful to you guys. The latest from the darcs repository is running at:
This is imported from Hackage package data a day or so ago—no user account data. The features currently enabled on the server are package pages, uploading packages, uploading candidates, distribution information, user groups, documentation, build reports, preferred versions, package deprecation, reverse dependencies, download statistics, tags, name search, and a handful of others.
The most important feature, though, and the reason this was a complete rewrite instead of just extending the old server, is that the internal design is modular and meant to be extended easily. If there's a feature you don't like (say, doing download statistics), it should take very little time to gut it from the application and not compile it in at all. The NameSearch module, as an example, adds two search indices, a simple search page (at /packages/find), and an OpenSearch plugin with suggestions. Installing it entails adding a line to Features.hs and writing an HTML view for it.
As far as performance goes: the process of routing a URI, querying data from several sources, and rendering the resultant page takes anywhere from 15ms (for an unadorned package page) to 3 seconds (for long lists of packages with descriptions and tags) on the sparky server. This is the amount of time it takes to fully generate the document as a ByteString, which is then given to the Happstack web framework. Here are some example times. I expect that switching from xhtml to BlazeHTML, based on the benchmarks so far, would definitely reduce the rendering time; I'm looking into other places to cut corners, though I'm no expert here.
Routing itself takes around 1ms, based on the dynamic approach I described in this post. On my laptop, which has faster cores but far fewer of them, crafting a response takes anywhere from 2ms to half a second, and routing takes around 0.2ms, for the same server configuration and package collection.
Unfortunately, sparky itself seems a bit laggy: yesterday it took 30 seconds (!) to request and retrieve a 350KB HTML document which is fully cached in memory, even though it took a fraction of a millisecond to get a ByteString for it. I'm looking into this.
Try it out!
So, take a look around and tell me what you think! If you want to try out your own copy, these should work as a bash shell scripts, if you have ghc+cabal-install+alex+happy on your system: import current Hackage data or start a completely new server. (These install the server and use its command line interface.) Importing the current Hackage dataset requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 750MB of memory (I'm looking to reduce this) and 600MB to run the server (sparky has 32GB of memory). A brand new server requires just 2MB of memory.
To do
The primary goal this summer was to create a server architecture that could handle whatever we as a community need, and implement as much of it in Haskell as possible. I'm only one person, so there's still a lot left to do, short-term and long-term, to get a better Hackage. I've outlined some of these tasks below.
What needs to be done before deploying to hackage.haskell.org?
- Documentation. It's one of the most important things Hackage provides. hackage-server lets maintainers upload documentation tarballs, but ticket 517 should be resolved so documentation can be more easily generated with Cabal.
- Importing download statistics from the last few years. Granted, this is a minor one, but it's a big help to have these without a gap in recording.
- Stress-testing, in terms of making sure the server performs well and maintains the consistency of internal indices. Make sparky a bit more responsive. Ensure compatibility with cabal-install, including old versions. Double-check security in order to minimize the risk of attacks (replay, DDOS, etc.).
- Deciding policy for things like account creation and uploading. I'll put up a blog post soon about the policy that hackage-server currently has for these sorts of things, including an overview of the user group system.
- Implementing backup for some of the newer features and creating an interface for admins to download backup tarballs.
- Make sure the URI scheme is convenient for everyone.
- Make robots.txt and set noindex on pages as appropriate.
- Arrange for distribution maintainers (for Debian and Arch, presently) to send us updates about which packages they have available. Haskell packages in distribution repositories tend to be simpler to install and more stable, so connecting to them is important.
- We need site admins and package trustees!
In the short-term future? (these should be implemented, sooner better than later)
- Build reports: get a system working for cabal-install clients to send build reports, anonymous or non-anonymous, as a replacement/enhancement of the build bot's functionality. At present Hackage can accept basic build reports, but this should be gotten right before it's enabled, particularly for anonymous reports.
- Web interface redesign. Since Hackage has more information to serve, it needs a better way to visually organize it. Anyone with web design chops is welcome. Other things to do here: expose JSON representations for Ajax functionality; rewrite HTML generating-code to use Blaze.
- Serve the internals of packages and set up a sitemap.xml so they can go on Google Code Search.
- Allow modifications to the cabal file without bumping the package version number. Admins can do this, but under some circumstances package maintainers might want to as well.
- See if user group information can be stored better internally.
- Get an STMP client running on the server to send automated email notifications.
- More server-side logging of actions (with user and timestamp): this makes it easier to find out what's going on and provide historical data.
In the long term future? (looking into the crystal ball)
- Social features. This includes reviews, voting, contributing content: the little things that let you know your fellow Haskellers are humans and not code-generating automatons (besides mailing lists, IRC, reddit, meetups, conferences, blog posts…). The more effectively we can connect maintainers and users, the better. Most of these social features would be simple to implement technically. It's more difficult to decide which features would actually benefit us as a community and get better-quality packages.
- Allow the creation of arbitrary groups of packages. Currently, there's a Haskell Platform feature, which puts a little star next to every package that's in the platform. Why not lay the groundwork for other package groups?
- Insert your idea here
There's a document in progress about the server internals, and how you can extend Hackage with new features. For the next week, I'll be tidying up the code, bug-hunting, writing documentation, and seeing what I can do with transition preparations. Come join #hackage on freenode, if you like, since we'll be discussing some of these things in the coming weeks.
10 Comments
This is excellent!
I was expecting to see a redesign, but i see you have that planned. Other than that looks great.
The distro data for Debian is provided at
and the same format is generated by Arch somewhere. On current hackage, this is downloaded periodically by a cronjob. Is there any reason to change this scheme?
Joachim, the current interim method for providing distro links is backwards. Distros should push this information to the server rather than having the server poll and pull it.
This was noted at the time the feature was added to the old server implementation. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/570#comment:2
We didn't require that the feature be rewritten at that time because it was known that it would only be in use in the old server until the old server is retired.
So in the new server implementation all you need to do is to PUT the updated map to the server (using appropriate credentials). This should be easy to do using curl/wget.
Nice work! If you need any help with blaze, I'd be glad to lend a hand.
Exciting stuff. Thanks for your work!
I think you can bring in collaborators to help with things like the design of the site, too. As well as the BlazeHTML team and the happstack team, to help with performance issues. This is such a high profile project, they'll want to help.
What support is there for storing the system — are all packages kept on disk as with the current Hackage?
I'm getting 403 on Hackage's trac, though other projects are up:
What/where is the latest info on Hackage 2.0?
wh0cd266460 furosemide 40mg


text:
Home Warranties
Q. What do you think about home warranty for rentals? Best regards. Azhar, San Diego, Calif.
A. I'm glad to see that you are a rental property owner now! I've been hearing more and more investors that use home warranties, which is quite a turnaround from a few years ago. I'll note how these work and a few issues to consider.
A home warranty costs about $350-$500 per year. Many sellers provide a home warranty to a buyer at the sale in hopes that gives the seller a little extra protection in case an appliance or other item breaks. And some home warranty companies do a decent job servicing their policies, but some don't do a good job. Home warranty companies, unfortunately, are some of the most complained about service providers for unsatisfactory service, but many have good experiences too. You just have to find the good ones!
The main issue to understand is that a home warranty doesn't cover everything that could go wrong. Like any insurance policy, there are exclusions for some issues, plus there are items like pools or air conditioners that cost extra. Most policy buyers don't read the policy and just assume, incorrectly, that everything is covered.
So if you are going to buy a policy, make sure you understand what is covered and what is not covered. Due to the relatively low cost, I don't see any issues with buying a policy for a year and seeing what you experience if you need to make a service call and how good a job the company does on that call. Make sure to fill me in on your experience next year.
1031 Exchange
Q. We are doing a 1031 exchange and will soon be selling property for about $2,100,000. We want to buy some rentals and thought about Texas, but taxes are insane. So we are considering California. My question to you is do you think buying four to five ready-to-go rental properties is a good idea and where do you think we should be looking, since with the 1031 exchange we have limited time to identify properties. Josh B., North of Los Angeles
A. Make sure to get good legal, accounting and 1031 exchange advice months before you close escrow on what you are selling. Identifying a property within 45 days that you can actually get under contract and buy is very tough. If you are trying to buy five properties, that's even tougher. You need the buyer of your property to work with you and agree to close escrow once you have all the replacement properties under contract and moving close to closing escrow. Otherwise, good luck completing the exchange.
Regarding buying rental properties, rentals are hard work. If you folks are older, you may not want to deal with rentals. Having a management company might help some, but might not help that much. So make sure you want to be landlords. Also, you should buy properties near where you live. If you have to travel long distances to service the property – even if you have a management company – this can be very disrupting to your life and you might find that the properties are more of a pain than they are worth.
Think it through and make sure the money you will save on taxes from the 1031 exchange is best placed in a relatively risky and high-maintenance asset like rental properties. If it doesn't make sense, find a better investment choice – which might not be real estate. Good luck!
Leonard Baron, MBA, is America's Real Estate Professor® and is a real estate investment columnist for Zillow. Find more of his answers to property questions at Mint.com. Email your questions to: email@example.com


text:
Find Your Perfect Home.
Beaver Island Real Estate
Beaver Island is located in Michigan. Beaver Island, Michigan has a population of 597. Beaver Island is less family-centric than the surrounding county with 21.59% of the households containing married families with children. The county average for households married with children is 24.07%.
The median household income in Beaver Island, Michigan is $46,944. The median household income for the surrounding county is $46,709 compared to the national median of $53,482. The median age of people living in Beaver Island is 55.9 years.
Beaver Island Weather
The average high temperature in July is 75.2 degrees, with an average low temperature in January of 13.1 degrees. The average rainfall is approximately 31.8 inches per year, with inches of snow per year.
View Homes for Sale in Beaver Island
Beaver Island Map
Real Estate Near Beaver Island
Nearby Cities
Nearby Cities Homes for Sale
Beaver Island Zip Codes


text:
Raw Footage: CNN's Anderson Cooper Saving Haitian Boy Who Was Beaten By Looters! (Heartbreaking)
A boy is injured during looting in Haiti's streets. A CNN crew with Anderson Cooper was nearby as it unfolded.
Please click the "Report" button below if the video on this page is not working properly.
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text:
CLAREMONT – Kaitlyn Christian wanted to compete in the mixed doubles draw of the U.S. Open last year with USC women's tennis assistant West Nott, but wasn't able to do so since rules didn't allow athletes with remaining college eligibility to compete in the tournament with their coaches.
Christian wound up being paired with former UCLA talent Dennis Novikov and lost in the first round to the veteran team of Max Mirnyi and Andrea Hlavackova, who went on to capture the U.S. Open title.
With her USC career completed, Christian — a three-time Pac-12 winner and half of last year's NCAA women's doubles champions with Campbell Hall graduate Sabrina Santamaria — had the opportunity to team this summer with Nott and the results of their first tournament indicated it was worth the wait.
Christian and Nott won the mixed doubles sectional qualifier in the U.S. Open National Playoffs with a 6-1, 6-1 victory Thursday over former UCLA All-American Pamela Montez and past Fresno State standout Andrew Scorteanu at Claremont Club.
"We kind of always knew we wanted to play together and now we finally get that chance," Christian said. "I've known him for years, so I don't get nervous out there with him. He knows what I'm good at and what I'm not good at, so he plays to my strengths and can cover my weaknesses. he and Sabrina know me equally well, so I'm lucky to have great partners in both of them."
Christian and Nott earned a berth to compete Aug. 20-23 at the New Haven Open in Connecticut, with the winner of the mixed doubles tournament earning a berth into the main draw of the U.S. Open, scheduled for Aug. 25-Sept. 8.
"The U.S. Open is the place I want to be in August. That's been our goal since we started," Christian said. "We practice together all the time at school, so we were excited to finally get into a tournament and play."
Christian and Nott won't play together again until New Haven, with Christian entered in women's doubles events during the summer with former Stanford star Kristie Ahn while Santamaria continues to rehabilitate an ACL injury suffered in March.
Montez and Scorteanu were playing their first match in the tournament because of a double withdrawal in their half of the bracket, with Christian and Nott benefiting from playing their third match, all won in straight sets.
"I'm super excited. I'm just happy to go and getting through this draw is a great thing," Nott said. "(Playing with Kaitlyn) it's unorthodox and it's creative and every point is an adventure."
USC All-American Zoe Scandalis, the Pac-12 runner-up, was also looking to earn a trip to compete in New Haven, but fell in the women's singles final 6-4, 6-3 to Cerritos' Kelly Chen.
"I fought hard, but she was just too good. She didn't miss much," Scandalis said. "I came here just hoping to get some good matches and then when I got to the quarterfinals, I realized I had a chance to win this, so to be in the finals and have a chance to advance was great. She just played better than I did."
Scandalis is scheduled to attend a week-long training camp in Sacramento with other college standouts, including Pac-12 champion Jennifer Brady of UCLA.
"This was a really good experience for me," Scandalis said. "I just need to get better and I will."
Daniel McCall won the men's title with a 6-4, 6-1 victory over Dustin Goldenberg.


text:
I went to the doctor for my yearly physical.
The nurse started with certain basics.
"How much do you weigh?" she asked.
"135," I replied..
It turns out my weight is 180.
The nurse asked: "Your height?"
"5 feet, 6 inches," I answered.
The nurse checked and saw that
I only measure 5 feet, 3 inches.
She then took my blood pressure
and told me that it's very high.
"Of course it's high!" I screamed.
"When I came in here
I was tall and slender! Now I'm short and fat!"
She put me on Prozac..
What a bitch!


text:
Baked Mushroom Topped Brie
From: Mushroom Council
Quick Facts
Servings: 12
Prep Time: 7 min.
Cook Time: 20 min.
Total: 27 min.
In this inspired appetizer, the sharp flavor of brie is enhanced with a savory topping of mushrooms, rosemary, thyme, and crunchy walnuts.
- 1/2 lb fresh sliced mushrooms (white or crimini)
- 1/2 cup coarsely chopped onions
- 1/4 cup finely chopped walnuts
- 1 large clove garlic, sliced
- 1/2 tsp dried thyme
- 1/2 tsp dried rosemary
- 1/2 tsp dried pepper
- 1 Tbs olive oil
- 1 Tbs balsamic vinegar
- 1 wheel cold Brie cheese
- 2 Tbs finely minced fresh parsley or chives (optional)
- Finely chop mushrooms, onions, walnuts and garlic, thyme, rosemary and pepper in food processor.
- Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat; cook and stir mushroom mixture for 5-7 minutes or until all liquid has evaporated. Stir in vinegar and cook 1-2 minutes. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature; cover and chill.
- At serving time slice the wheel of Brie in half horizontally and place cut side up on oven -proof serving plate or baking pan. Spoon the topping evenly on cut surfaces of Brie. Bake in 350° F oven for about 8-10 minutes or until cheese is beginning to melt. Sprinkle parsley or chives on top to garnish if desired. Serve with thinly sliced whole wheat baguette or plain crackers.
Cooking Tip: To barbecue, place cheese on presoaked cedar plank and barbecue, covered over medium -high heat for 8-10 minutes.
Nutrition Facts
Calories 90
Calories from Fat 65 (72%)
(11%)Total Fat 7g
(16%)Saturated Fat 3g
Polyunsaturated Fat 1g
Monounsaturated Fat 2g
(6%)Cholesterol 17mg
(4%)Sodium 106mg
(4%)Potassium 135mg
Total Carbohydrate 2g
(2%)Dietary Fiber 0g
Sugars 1g
Sugar Alcohols 0g
(9%)Protein 4g
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
Nutrition facts are calculated by a food expert using nutritional values provided by the USDA for common products used as recipe ingredients. Actual nutritional values may differ depending on the amounts or products used and can be affected by cooking methods.
Copyright © 2019 Healthnotes, Inc. All rights reserved. www.healthnotes.com
Read our healthy recipe definitions.
Learn more about Healthnotes, the company.
The information presented here is for informational purposes only and was created by a team of US–registered dietitians and food experts. Consult your doctor, practitioner, and/or pharmacist for any health problem and before using any supplements, making dietary changes, or before making any changes in prescribed medications. Information expires December 2019.


text:
It all started with a workshop. In 1972, Gary Austin (a veteran of San Francisco's "The Committee") assembled a group of performers in Los Angeles who just wanted to work on their craft. Together they would improvise, perform monologues, scenes, characters, songs, dances, classic plays, you name it. After about a year, they started doing performances and inviting friends to come and watch. Word got out about the workshop, more people started coming, and soon a core group of performers began to showcase their material at various venues around Hollywood.
In January of 1974, Austin announced that he wanted to create a theatre company. Taking its name from the group of lower class audience members who stood on the ground in front of the stage to watch plays in Shakespeare's day, "The Groundlings" was officially incorporated as a non-profit organization. There were fifty founding members of the company (membership at that time required only that you pay the $25 to attend workshops), who would develop material in the workshops and then perform the best pieces in the shows on the weekend. The first show as this new group was in the 30-seat basement of the Oxford Theatre (now The Met) near the corner of Santa Monica Blvd. and Western Ave. Esteemed LA Times theatre critic, Sylvie Drake, was in the audience that first weekend, and wrote a rave review. "This could be the start of something big," Drake predicted.
As the buzz about the new company increased, the entertainment industry started taking notice. Comedian Lily Tomlin was a regular in the audience, and she hired several Groundlings to perform on "The Lily Tomlin Show." Later that year, Lorne Michaels, who produced Tomlin's TV special, asked Groundling Laraine Newman to be a cast member for his new late night comedy series "Saturday Night Live."
Before long, membership in the company grew to 90 performers. To keep the size of the company down, auditions became required to join. (Phil Hartman, who then was a graphic designer and not an actor, attended that first audition. He got in, but because of the stiff competition, it would be over a year before he started performing in the shows.) With such a large company, workshops seven days a week, and sold-out shows going up three nights a weekend, it became clear that The Groundlings needed a place to call their own.
The Groundlings Theatre at 7307 Melrose Avenue (previously an interior decorator's studio, a furniture showroom, a gay bar, and then a 'massage parlor') was acquired by the company in 1975. Original Groundlings member Archie Hahn oversaw the ominous project. First step: Throw out all the soiled mattresses that littered the building. Through lots of sweat equity and with the use of their own funds, company members set out to modernize the building and turn it into a performance space. Hooray! New theatre, right? Not so fast. It would be four years of battling red tape, building codes, and parking restrictions before any shows would appear on the stage. During that time, The Groundlings performed their revues at a handful of theatres all over town, including The Improv, The Matrix, The Hollywood Canteen, and the White House. Finally, in April of 1979, the revitalized 99 seat theatre was finally able to open its doors to audiences.
In November of 1979, Gary Austin stepped down as artistic director. Tom Maxwell was voted in as his successor, and he would and remain at the helm for the next ten years. In 1989, The Groundlings began the enduring tradition of having Groundlings or Groundlings Alumni direct each new revue. The Main Company (now capped at 30 members at a time) collectively acts as the organization's artistic director, democratically making business and creative decisions as a group.
The Groundlings School of improvisation officially began in 1979 with only 17 students and original staff members Gary Austin, Tom Maxwell, Phyllis Katz, and Tracy Newman. The Sunday Company was formed by Suzanne Kent in 1982 to further develop the talent coming through the school. After ascending through the curriculum and honing their improv and writing skills, the cream of the crop are voted on by the Main Company to decide if they are to join The Sunday Company. After further demonstration of their abilities in the weekly Sunday Show, the members are voted on once again in the hopes of becoming a Groundling. The Groundlings school is very proud of the fact that many former students and Sunday Company Alumni go on to very successful entertainment careers. Among them are Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Fallon (SNL), Rita Wilson, Tyra Banks, Dax Shepard, Oscar Nunez, Kaitlin Olsen, and Nasim Pedrad (SNL).
The Groundlings Revues (now commonly referred to as the Main Shows) were the first shows performed by the company and they established the Groundlings improv, character, and sketch comedy style. In 1981, the revue was given a title, "L.A. 200, Groundlings 3". From that point on, every revue would have its own name, and always with the word "Groundling" in it somewhere. Initially there would be one or two revues a year. By the 1990's, three shows a year was the norm. And in 2007, the company decided to do four shows a year, in addition to a special holiday show in December.
Starting in 1981, alternative format shows began to be added to the line-up. The first one was "The Pee Wee Herman Show" created by Paul Rubens as a showcase for his Pee Wee character, which he created in Groundlings workshops and revues. Pee Wee and his friends (played by other Groundlings like Phil Hartman, Lynne Stewart, John Paragon, Edi McClurg, and John Moody) started performing Saturday at midnights, after the regular revues. Quickly, the show became a huge LA hit, transferred to a theatre on Sunset Blvd, and was filmed for an HBO special. In the following years, Pee Wee became a pop culture icon, spawning films, toys, and a children's television show. An updated revival of that original stage show (with many of the original Groundlings reprising their roles) enjoyed a successful Broadway run in 2011/2012.
Since then, other alternative format shows would play the theatre: "Waco," "On the Road With Guy DiSimone" (Tim Stack), "Olympic Trials: A Chick Hazard Mystery" (an improv mystery starring Phil Hartman that represented LA in the 1984 Olympic Games Arts Festival), "Mea Culpa" & "Mea's Big Apology" (Julia Sweeney), "Casual Sex" (inspired the film), "Ladies Room" (basis for the film "Romy & Michelle's High School Reunion"), "Holiday Dinner," "Your Very Own TV Show", "The 48 Hour Show", and "Beverly Winwood Presents The Actor's Showcase", to name a few. In 1992, Melanie Graham created "Cooking With Gas", a weekly short form improv show performed by Groundlings, Groundlings Alumni, Sunday Company members, and special celebrity guests. The show continues every Thursday night, and is now the longest running improv show in LA. It was followed in 2001 by the long-form improv "Crazy Uncle Joe Show", which runs every Wednesday night.
In 1998, the Groundlings were given their own improv television program on the F/X network called "Instant Comedy with The Groundlings," which introduced the theatre to a larger national audience. As a group, the Groundlings have also been featured on such shows as "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" "The Merv Griffin Show" and "The Today Show". But the biggest imprint that the Groundlings have made on pop culture is through the work company members have taken from the Groundlings stage to television, films, or the internet. Groundlings who have gone onto "Saturday Night Live" (Laraine Newman, Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Julia Sweeney, Cheri Oteri, Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Parnell, Maya Rudolph, Will Forte, Kristen Wiig, Michaela Watkins and Taran Killam) and "Mad TV" (Mike McDonald, Phil LaMarr, Mary Scheer, Mike Hitchcock, Christian Duguay, and Danielle Gaither) often turn their scenes and characters created at Groundlings into TV audience favorites. And in 2006, on the heels of the invention of You Tube, Groundlings Michael Naughton and Mikey Day filmed their main show sketch "David Blaine Street Magic" with Mitch Silpa in the alley behind the theatre. That video, and its sequels, has been viewed over 50 million times by people all over the world, broken YouTube records, and helped launch a wave of internet comedy videos. With the help of new and old Media, The Groundlings comedy continues to expand its reach beyond the four walls of 7307 Melrose.
A Note From The Groundlings Founder Gary Austin
"In 1972 The Gary Austin Workshops began. The name was changed in 1974 when we incorporated as the non-profit company THE GROUNDLINGS. The people who came through the workshops and shows in the seventies formed a "melting-pot-rainbow-coalition" of the time and place.Early members were "unknowns" Craig T. Nelson, Laraine Newman, Edie McClurg, Cassandra Peterson (Elvira), Mary Edith Burrell and Paul Reubens. Tim Matheson, Anne Ruyman, Pat Morita, Jack Soo, Steve Bluestein, Adriane Barbeau, Jaye P. Morgan, Jeannie Berlin and Victoria Carroll had established themselves career wise. Lynne Marie Stewart's characters were "perfect" and held up when we did the 70's reunion shows in the 2000's."
"Notable character creators were Jimmy Martinez, Sandy Helberg, Bob McClurg, Suzanne Kent, Doug Cox, the late Kip King and the late Phil Hartman, as well as those afore and aft mentioned. Phyllis Katz improvised songs the audience did not believe were improvised. She was that good."
"John Paragon performed gymnastics while improvising songs (four suggested styles per song), managing to hold onto the mic as Mr. Excitement. Joey Arias (now the legendary solo artist) was sixteen when he first performed in Groundling shows. That's a Groundling record. Valerie Curtin hadn't yet written (with Barry Levinson) "And Justice For All" or "Best Friends." Bill and Cherie Steinkellner met in The Groundlings and in later years became writers and executive producers of "Cheers." Mary Cross became a prominent literary film agent. Tony Delia tours as Vaughn Suponatime in a spot on impression of Frank Sinatra complete with big bands and Sinatra arrangements."
"Rob Dames and Bob Fraser came into the company as actors and left as writers and executive produced "Benson." There were well over a hundred folks who came through the Groundlings in the seventies. Additional notables were Laraine Newman, Tracy Newman, Tom Maxwell, John Mayer (not the singer), John Moody, Gloria Vassy, Terry Bolo, Shirley Prestia, Steve White, Rosemary Bandes, Richard Frattali, Archie Hahn and Carole Ita White. Years later I realize "who all" I worked with in that seven year span. It's hard to fathom."
-Gary Austin


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text:
COOKEVILLE, Tenn. – The Grey Team completed a two-game comeback Thursday afternoon, defeating the Purple Team 9-5 in the decisive Game 5 of the Purple & Gold Series. The Grey team which trailed in the series 2-1, unloaded for a series-high nine runs to win the title.
Senior utility man Evan Frazier and junior outfielder/first baseman Brandon Thomason led the offesnive surge for the Grey Team, knocking in three RBI apiece. Sophomore infielder/pitcher Seth Lucio added two RBI himself.
The Grey Team combined for nine hits and did the majority of its damage in the first and second innings, scoring four runs in the first and three more in the second.
The Purple Team actually managed to out-hit the Grey squad, taking an 11-9 advantage in the game. However, the performance by the Grey pitchers proved to be too much to handle.
Senior right hander Tristan Archer picked up his second win of the series behind a three inning, three strikeout performance. Sophomore righty Byron Skinner and junior right hander Ross Spurgeon combined for the final four innings, allowing no walks and striking out four.
The 2012 series marked the second straight year that the series went to a decisive game five.


text:
Eight sophomore students from the Experimental Sciences class at Lake Weir High School placed third out of six teams in Deep-C Consortium's first Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Competition, held in early March.
Eight sophomore students from the Experimental Sciences class at Lake Weir High School placed third out of six teams in Deep-C Consortium's first Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Competition, held in early March.
The team, known as Riptide 4.0, also finished first in the engineering presentation and evaluation part of the competition.
"After seeing the competition they were up against we were very pleased with their finish," said the team's teacher, Karon Baumann.
The underwater ROV competition was held at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab on Dauphin Island, Ala., and was funded by a grant from the Deep-C Consortium and the BP-sponsored Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.
Baumann said the research facility receives grants from BP as part of recovery efforts to study the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
She said the purpose of the competition was to inform students of the ways the oil spill is still affecting the Gulf and how ROVs are used in the field to research and examine fish. Students also met researchers at the lab, and from Florida State University, who use the ROVs — some of which can be up to a ton in mass, although others may only be a few feet tall.
"The kids got to go onto a research vessel and pull up fish to look at them, handle them and learn lessons. Some of these kids would not have had that opportunity otherwise,Baumann said.
Matthew Avecilla, 16, said he wasn't previously aware of the extent that ROVs were used in the Gulf. He said the course and competition were helping prepare him to pursue a mechanical engineering degree in college.
"This is what education is moving toward: real-world applications of what kids need to be learning and preparing for in a real job market," Baumann said.
To attend this year's competition the classroom of 22 students and five ROVs were whittled down to the final team of eight students and their winning ROV during a preliminary competition, which was held in the pool at Principal Cynthia Saunder's house.
Saunders and Baumann attended a five-day ROV teacher training session last summer at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. Saunders said the teachers learned how to instruct students on building the underwater robots but didn't actually help build the ROV; that was all up to the students.
Matthew said they had to build most of the parts themselves, including a net to capture items in the pool and an arm with a hook to pick things up. They also wired the motors and the control box.
Baumann said the ROVs were built to scale of what is officially used by researchers, but that trouble-shooting was a big part of the assignment.
"They are perfectionists and they've rebuilt it I-don't-know how many times," Saunders said.
Matthew said team Riptide 4.0's greatest challenge was its original built-from-scratch camera, which had been worked on since January.
"It was very tedious and we ran into trouble with the wiring and waterproofing. We didn't have very good instructions to go off of, so in the end we did use a pre-made camera that we hooked up to the batter and ROV," Matthew said.
Saunders said the camera was the most important part because if they couldn't see underwater they couldn't operate the ROV, which was connected to the control box by a 40-foot tether. During the underwater competition the students controlled the ROV from a tent and were not able to view the pool.
"It is like a real-life video game," Saunders said.
Baumann said her students competed against five other teams from Florida high schools. Each team's ROV had to go inside a cave-like structure to identify and count specifies of fish. Students also had to identify an entangled toy animal and measure its size, and pick up, skim or maneuver around objects.
"The competition was very tight and it was so cold and windy — it was 30 degrees and the wind speed was at 20 knots. It was an even playing field for everyone, but it wasn't what they were used to practicing in," Baumann said of her team's overall third-place finish.
She said Riptide 4.0 placed first in the engineering presentation and evaluation section of the event because the members kept a journal of their trial-and-error approach. No other team did that.
Baumann said the funds to build the five ROVs were provided by a $1,000 grant from the Public Education Foundation of Marion County as part of Grants for Great Ideas. She said the total cost of the materials was around $1,300, and that Lake Weir High School paid for the extra travel and food expenses of $700, although some of the money came out of her own pocket.


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I give talks on Karate from time to time. I also give talks about real estate law (I am a real estate attorney).
Recently I gave a talk to about 100 real estate professionals. It seemed to go very well. Afterwards, my wife asked about the comments I received after speaking. I reported that the comments were very positive.
But I added that people generally say nice things after someone gives a speech or teaches on a subject. It is common courtesy to show appreciation for the speaker's time and effort.
I am sure that most people mean what they say, but I am also sure that some people might think that the talk was no that great, but keep it to themselves. People with something nice to say are more likely to do so.
I have never given a talk and had someone say, "Man, you have no idea about what you're talking about and you're a lousy speaker!" People might have thought it, but kept it to themselves.
What is the point? When we talk about Karate or demonstrate Karate, there is a likelihood that people will say nice things. They might be correct, they might be wrong, or they might just being polite.
That kata you just performed may be the best ever, or it might be the worst ever. More than likely, it is somewhere in between.
I often tell my children that if you live for the approval of other people, then they are controlling you. You are putting your happiness or sadness in the hands of others. It is far better to take control yourself. You are the best judge of your effort. Try your best. If someone says that you did well, say "thank you" but realize that they may be right, wrong, polite, or even lying. If someone says that you were terrible, the same applies. Who knows if they are correct?
We are often taught that if we do not have something good to say, it is better to say nothing at all. If you give a talk or demonstration to 100 people and 10 people say you did great, you might feel pretty good. But what about the other 90? Perhaps they had nothing good to say.
I have never seen a senior perform a kata and feel 100% good about it. The more senior the person is, the more he feels that he could have done better. My own Sensei is never satisfied because he is so demanding of himself. In his mind, I think he is saying, "I could have done better. I still need to work on myself."
When I perform kata, I am happy if I do one movement well. Two movements done well is a reason to celebrate!
My own children are very critical. If they compliment me on even one movement in a kata, I feel great!
Imagine, I do Pinan Shodan and one of my children might say, "that one shuto was good." One shuto out of an entire kata? Ouch! I have created critical children. (You have to realize that I have brought my children to class with me from the time they were 5 years old, so they have seen a lot of kata.)
Anyway, the next time someone says that you are "great", or whatever, you might think in the back of your mind: "I wonder if they really mean it? Are they just being polite? Do they have the requisite skill to accurately evaluate my movement? How do I think that I did? Could I have done better? If so, how?"
Also remember that if someone attacks you, he probably will not know who you are and will certainly not be impressed by you. Compliments and a reputation will not defend you -- you will have to do that yourself.
Charles C. Goodin
That Was Great!
I give talks on Karate from time to time. I also give talks about real estate law (I am a real estate attorney).
Posted by Charles C. Goodin on Wednesday, August 20, 2008


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Rosslyn, Va.-based National Electrical Manufacturers Association's (NEMA) Electroindustry Business Confidence Index (EBCI) for current North American business conditions posted a small gain in June, climbing 1.6 points from May to 70.4. Despite their prevalence, though, reported improvements in the business environment have been relatively modest in intensity. The average degree of change in business conditions cited in the survey was unchanged once again in June, holding at +0.7 for a third straight month. Intensity of change is reported on a scale ranging from –5 (deteriorated significantly) through 0 (unchanged) to +5 (improved significantly).
Meanwhile, the EBCI for future North American conditions dropped 6.7 points to 70.4, giving back more than twice the 3.2 point gain recorded in May, but remaining well above the 50-point threshold indicative of broad-based expansion. Nonetheless, panelist comments suggest that any improvement is seen as likely to be limited in strength.