text:
In this article Tim Mackintosh-Smith investigates the horticultural past of Sana'a. Whereas as once Yemen at large was well known as a land lavishly green, Mackintosh-Smith discovers quite a different story amidst a city coping with the conflicting demands of modernity, and rumours of an increasingly nostalgic history.
|Enclosed Gardens
The scent of basil is the first thing I notice when I wake on Fridays, then the hum of voices from below the window.
Down on al-Zumur, one of the busiest market streets in the old city of Sana'a, my neighbor Maryam the qashshamah sits behind a heap of greenery: deep green alfalfa, fodder for animals; gray-green 'ansif (Astragalus abyssinicus) to give a zing to tea or to shafut, sorghum pancakes drenched in herby yogurt; parsley, rocket and fennel; and chives, lettuce and mint. The green is punctuated by giant white radishes, orange-yellow marigolds, and the bruise-purple of that pungent basil. Other colors come and go with the seasons, like those of quinces, figs and—best but briefest of all—the bloomy black of mulberries. All this I must climb over to get to my favorite breakfast place along the road, for Maryam's shop is my doorstep. But the pile of vegetation—usually interspersed with small children—is a pleasing inconvenience. And in any case Maryam always disarms potential objections. "Here," she says, holding out a bunch of basil and marigolds, "have a mushquri."
You will look in vain for that word in the standard Arabic reference books. Its origin goes back further—to Sabaic, one of the ancient South Arabian languages. Shqr (the vowels are anyone's guess) is the cresting on a building, and 2000 years of semantic vagaries have turned it to mean a posy to decorate your turban—a crest for the head. Similarly, qashshamah, Maryam's job title, and that of her male equivalent, the qashsham, as well as miqshamah (plural: maqaashim), the garden where they grow their produce, all have an origin just as old but better preserved: qshmt, the Sabaic
word for a vegetable plot.
In this long cultivated and most fertile corner of Arabia, the Qur'anic "Land of the Two Gardens," it is hardly surprising that the roots of words that have to do with growing things go deep. What is remarkable, in the intensely urban setting of Sana'a—a walled metropolis crowded with towers today, and the place where the Sabaeans built the 10-story Palace of Ghumdan some two millennia ago—is that not only the words survive: So, too, do the gardens. My Friday marigolds were picked less than a minute's walk from Maryam's doorstep shop.
The Italian writer Alberto Moravia once described Sana'a as a "Venice of dust." Since his visit, the streets have been paved with stone, and the dust is less in evidence. But the first impression is still one of sun-dried palazzos, of deep-cut streets flowing with people but devoid of moisture and vegetation. Amid this, it's easy to overlook the quiet spaces in between. And that is the only way most of the city's gardens can be seen at all: by overlooking them. Climb to the fifth floor of my house, and two gardens reveal themselves. To the east is Maryam's, the miqshamah of Khudayr Mosque, a rectangle of green—mostly chives (bay'ah), the dominant garden crop—subdivided by little banks of raised earth. To the west, there is Bustan Na'man. Go up another couple of floors, and the tops of what are locally called "pepper trees" mark the edges of other gardens, otherwise unseen. A bit more than a stone's throw to the south, there is another miqshamah, totally concealed behind a curtain wall of tower houses: I didn't even know it was there until I began to write this and looked at the map. Other great Islamic cities, such as Damascus and Bukhara, are famous for the gardens that surround them, but in Sana'a, they are all on the inside, walled gardens wrapped in a walled city, doubly hidden.
Altogether there are 43 of them. They range in area from nearly three hectares (7.4 acres) down to less than 1000 square meters (10,500 sq ft), all within the ring of mud wall and bastions that protects the historic core of Sana'a. Only a handful are visible at all from street level, and of these, one alone, Miqshamat al-Qasimi, can be seen in its entirety. The unsuspecting visitor would never guess that these urban oases occupy 13 percent of the space within the city wall. Most of them bear that ancient name, miqshamah, and most are also attached to nearby mosques as waqf, property of a foundation and inalienable under Islamic law. A few, known by the more usual Arabic name bustan, are held by individual families. None are public parks (except for the fortunate eyes of neighboring householders). Whether stadium - or backyard -sized, miqshamah or bustan, they were all founded as working market gardens.
The gardens may be largely invisible, but until a couple of generations ago they were highly audible. For the British entomologist Hugh Scott, visiting Sana'a in the 1930's, the characteristic sound of the city was a continual high-pitched screeching like the noise of gulls. Caused by the friction of wooden pulleys, this was the accompaniment to a more harmonious noise, the songs of the well-men. One went:
Hear me, oh you who come up from the well—
A candle for the lass and a lamp for the lad!
Hear me, oh bird, oh ash-grey bird—
Spread your wings and fly me home!
To the plaintive backing track of the pulleys and the voices of their drivers, camels or donkeys trudged up an inclined ramp to the lip of the well, then down again, gravity helping them draw up brimming leather buckets, which the well-men tipped into a cistern at the top of the incline. The length of these ramps, called in Sana'a marani' (singular: mirna'), was dictated by the depth of the well—usually between 40 and 70 meters (130'–225'). From the wellhead, the water passed into the garden either directly or, in the case of gardens attached to mosques, via the ablution cubicles provided for worshipers.
"It flows like a stream," wrote al-Shahari in his mid-18th-century Description of Sana'a, "since the least of the wells is provided with three or four sets of pulleys, and these work constantly, night and day." The miqshamah of the Great Mosque, he adds, had two wells, each with eight sets of pulleys. Nothing was wasted—neither time, nor the spent ablution water, nor runoff from the streets in times of rain, which was also channeled into the gardens. The dung of the animals, supplemented with ash from nearby public baths (themselves fueled by dried excreta collected from the lavatories of neighboring houses), went to fertilize the gardens. Even space was recycled. One mirna', that of Ibn al-Husayn, was tunneled under the courtyard of its mosque, while another, at Miqshamat Talhah, was given a superstructure of hostel rooms for itinerant scholars.
By custom, the head qashsham of each mosque-garden is in charge of providing water for ablutions and keeping the ablution block clean. Gardeners of family-owned bustans work as sharecroppers, dividing the income with the beneficiaries. But those who benefit most of all are the citizens of Sana'a. Not only are food, fodder and Friday-best headgear to be had, sometimes literally, on their doorsteps, but so too are plants used in the age-old rites of passage. Rue, for example, decorates the scenes of birth - and wedding-parties; basil adorns not only the heads of the living, but also the biers of the dead. Medicinal plants can sometimes be found in the maqaashim, but these are not for sale—they are given in exchange for a prayer for the gardener's health. (I once endured a course of liquidized mirrar [Ononis antiquorum], prescribed for a bout of jaundice. It is also known in Sana'a as qubbab. Both words mean "very bitter"—an understatement.)
From birth to death, in sickness and in health, the people of Sana'a rely on its hidden gardens for many of their needs. It seems unfair, therefore, that the gardeners have traditionally been consigned to the bottom rungs of the city's social ladder. (The reason is unclear, but may be connected to their dealings with used ablution water.) "It's better to be a qashsham in Sana'a," an old proverb goes, "than a shaykh in the sticks." The saying is double-edged: Even the noblest countryman, it implies, is worse off than the lowliest city dweller. All the same, qashshams are actually treated with respect. For example, from time to time, when the municipal authorities crack down on unlicensed street traders, my street, al-Zumur, empties. And Maryam looks on, secure in her doorstep greengrocery. No one would dream of asking her to move. She is as much a part of the city's fabric as the gardens themselves.
I began to wonder how these maqaashim and bustans had become so inseparably stitched into Sana'a's urban patchwork. The gardeners didn't know. The ones I asked answered with a shrug, or said they'd always been there. And not only the city's visitors, but also most of its historians seem to overlook the gardens. But I did come across one passage that appeared to solve the mystery. Formerly, wrote Qadi Muhammad al-Hajari in his 1942 book Mosques of Sana'a, the city's places of prayer "were for the most part lacking in ablution facilities, cisterns and wells."
|Overflowing Gardens
Worshippers would make their ablutions at home [he wrote], then go to the mosque to perform the appointed prayers. Then, in the year 933 [AD 1526–1527], during the government of Imam al-Mutawakkil 'ala 'llah Sharaf al-Din Yahya,…a plague befell Sana'a. As a result, much property was left abandoned, for there was no one to inherit it. The Imam therefore—may God have mercy on him—directed that these estates be used for the benefit of the mosques, assigning the property to selected mosques in each quarter of the city. He gave orders for the digging of wells and the construction of cisterns, ablution blocks and associated structures. He also appointed guardians, imams and muezzins for these mosques, together with well-men whose duty it was to draw the water for the ablution blocks. This they would do every day, irrigating their gardens with the spent water and replacing it with fresh supplies for the worshipers. The practice became established and has continued in more recent times, up to the present.
In the long history of Sana'a, the 500 years since Imam Sharaf al-Din turned a disaster into an urban amenity is no great span; I suspected that the origins of its gardens were still older. For one thing, it seemed more than likely that the gardens that became waqf property would already have been open space. Besides, the survival of that pre-Arabic term, miqshamah, suggested a continuous tradition from far earlier times. Another passage in al-Hajari's book took the association of mosque and garden back three centuries more: In AH 603 (AD 1206–1207), it said, quoting an inscription in the Great Mosque, an officer of the short-lived Ayyubid Dynasty established a garden and well by the musalla, the open-air mosque to the north of the city, where citizens prayed at the time of the two major 'ids, or festivals. I found an account by a contemporary chronicler that gave more details: A high mud wall enclosing an expanse of flowers and fruit trees; a well, a cistern and water channels lined with qadad, an indigenous concrete made from lime and powdered volcanic stone; a resident gardener to work the well. A typical miqshamah—except that it was outside the city wall. It was only later, as I looked through al-Razi's 11th-century history of the city (to which the account of the musalla garden forms an appendix), that I realized that the nexus of mosque and garden may be as old, and as literally central to Sana'a, as can be.
Whatever else they differ over, all historians of Sana'a, from al-Razi onward, agree on one point: that the city's first mosque was built by order of the Prophet Muhammad in the garden beside the Palace of Ghumdan, the high-rise hub of the ancient city. The mosque—the Great Mosque—is still there, one of the oldest places of prayer in the Islamic world. Ghumdan itself was demolished later in the seventh century, but it is tempting to wonder whether part of the old palace garden might have survived, next to the mosque.
An intriguing but equivocal bit of evidence exists—the illuminated frontispiece of a copy of the Qur'an that was discovered tucked away in the ceiling of the mosque 30 years ago. There is little doubt that this Qur'an was copied early in the eighth century in Damascus, capital of what was then the Umayyad Caliphate, and sent to Sana'a, then also under Umayyad rule. The frontispiece shows two magnificent and densely detailed mosques. Just beyond their Makkah-facing walls are gardens filled with fruit trees and leafy plants. Are they reflections of Paradise? Or are they depictions of an extant, earthly garden next to the mosque in Sana'a? Whatever the answer, the site of the mosque was still rich in allusions to an otherworldly beauty for the poet-historian al-Hamdani, writing two centuries on: "And if God made on Earth a heaven for our eyes / Then Ghumdan's palace was by that earthly paradise."
Earthly paradises need water. In Sana'a it seemed to be a never-failing blessing. Ghumdan's channels, said al-Hamdani, "gurgled ceaselessly," and these pleasant sounds flowed down the ages, and increased. "Sana'a's groundwater has risen so enormously," observed al-Shahari in 1757–1758, "that it has reached almost halfway up the wells…. Streams have sprung forth, and there are some 20 of them around the city." Earthly paradises proliferated: 50 years later, the poet 'Abd al-Rahman al-Anisi wrote of Jabal Nuqum, the mountain that flanks Sana'a to the east, as surveying a city of "lofty palaces crowned with gleaming belvederes / White among the green of gardens."
The first detailed map of Sana'a, drawn and colored by the Italian traveler Renzo Manzoni in 1879, shows an astonishing amount of green—around a quarter of the original city's area, and no less than three-quarters of Bir al-Azab, the garden suburb that had sprouted to the west over the preceding 300 years. Within living memory, most Sana'a households drew their water from their own wells. And then the population ballooned—from little more than 70,000 to over a million in the last 50 years. A rash of boreholes spread uncontrolled across the surrounding plain, and today every one of those domestic wells is dry. In the gardens, the song of the well ramps has given way to the thump of pumps, sucking precious water from ever-deeper strata.
If, that is, the gardeners are lucky. "It's in God's hands," the owner of the well -drilling rig at Miqshamat al-Wushali said when I asked how far down he was going. "We might find something at 400 meters (1300')." I wasn't surprised. Miqshamat Khudayr—Maryam's garden—is home to a hole almost that deep, drilled at great expense and to little effect. Her rectangle of green is now dwarfed by a much bigger rectangle of dust, currently a popular soccer pitch. Photos of a generation ago, showing the men of the family against a wall of luxuriant green, look as though they were from another country. Around a quarter of Sana'a's gardens are now abandoned, and some are probably lost for good. Bustan 'Inqad, for instance, is now Suq 'Inqad—a marketplace for the sale of vegetables, no longer a field in which to grow them. Outside the city wall, a school is being built on the last remaining bit of that 13th-century garden by the old musalla. Jabal Nuqum now surveys a city where the green is disappearing—an island city lapped by a gray suburban sea.
The news is not all bad. About three years ago, I peered over the high wall of Miqshamat Dawud, one of the partially visible gardens, and had a shock. A mechanical digger had punched a way in, channels and banks had been razed, and nearly all the vegetation had been ripped out. Only a few of the larger trees remained, looking like survivors of a war. But one of the worshipers from the Dawud Mosque explained to me that the miqshamah was not being destroyed, but restored.
'Abd al-Rahman Muhammad al-Haddad, in charge of the restoration and himself a native of Dawud Quarter, later told me that 12,000 cubic meters (15,700 cu yd) of detritus were removed from the garden. When this had been done, retaining walls and earth banks were reconstructed and the miqshamah replanted. It is now conspicuously green in its frame of tawny walls and towering houses. So too are the six other gardens renovated so far in a program run by the Social Fund for Development (SFD), an organization that channels funding for agricultural, educational and other projects across Yemen. In collaboration with the General Office for the Preservation of Historic Cities in Yemen, they have earmarked seven more gardens for renovation. Of course, no amount of expertise or goodwill can reverse the inexorable fall of the water table, so the SFD engineers are paying special attention to managing the gardens' dwindling lifeblood. And they have realized that the best material for repairing hydraulic structures also happens to be the oldest —qadad, that indigenous concrete. (It should give many years of service: I have seen a pre-Islamic cistern lined with the material that was still in use.)
And so some of Sana'a's secret gardens are coming back to life. And some are no longer so secret: Where possible, the restorers are inserting "windows" in the garden walls, barred openings that offer sudden glimpses of green.
Many, though, remain obstinately hidden. "What garden?" said a shopkeeper when I asked him how to get into the garden of the 'Ali ibn Abi Talib Mosque. His shop backed on to it, but he didn't know it was there. "Climb over that wall," some small boys advised. Eventually I discovered a more dignified way in, through the courtyards of two private houses, and I found myself in a tangle of fig and "pepper" trees—a tiny but literal urban jungle, lost in the innards of the Suq.
Maryam's garden is on the SFD 's list for restoration, too. Meanwhile, she sits on my doorstep, surrounded by greenery —some of it, admittedly, brought in from far outside the city—and by plenty of children to carry on the tradition.
But one part of that tradition has gone for ever. At the other end of town, I was surprised to find a gang of masons chipping stones to rebuild the well ramp beside Qubbat al-Mahdi Mosque. One of the men laughed when I asked if the mirna' was going back into operation. "To get to the water these days, we'd have to extend it out beyond the city wall, and the top of it would be as tall as a skyscraper! I think they're going to put a statue on it—you know, of a qashsham and his camels. For the tourists."
The song of the well-men, and the shriek of the straining pulleys, will never be heard again.
This article is a reprint of:
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, The Secret Gardens of Sana'a. Saudi ARAMCO World. 2006 Vol. 57 No. 1.
Image Sources:
Image 1 (Ruins) source: www.itv.se
Image 2 (Enclosed Gardens) source: www.personal.telefonica.terra.es
Image 3 (Overflowing Gardens) source: www.bugbog.com


text:
Get your glasses sent out next day, try our express service from 24 Hour Dispatch section.
Order today, and we will dispatch your glasses tomorrow from our lab in our lab in Shepshed.
24-hour dispatch guarantee applies to ALL single vision orders with a Spherical power of up to (±) 4 and cylinder power of up to (-) 2.
Order today, and we will send you your Royal Mail tracking number by 6 pm tomorrow. That's our guarantee!
View All Designer Glasses
View All £15 Glasses
View All £15 Glasses
View All Designer Glasses
Try us, we are surprisingly quick! With our '100% No Quibble Guarantee', you don't even need to worry about returns.
With every pair of glasses, you get FREE single vision lenses with a scratch resistant coating! You can also select from Prolite and Kodak lenses.
Perfect Glasses presents UK's best Virtual Mirror. Now see exactly how you'll look, before you buy your new glasses! Try. Compare. Buy.
At Perfect Glasses we provide an excellent range of high quality prescription glasses and sunglasses. You can literally choose from a collection of over 1000 pairs of glasses for men and women. And yes, buying prescription glasses online is easy. Every optician in the UK is required to give you a copy of your prescription when you go for your eye test. Once you have this, simply choose a pair of prescription glasses from our site, enter your prescription or click it using your smartphone and email it to us. Once you have placed the order for your new glasses online, you can expect to receive them within 7 working days!
It's simple. Each pair of prescription glasses that we supply is covered by a '100% No Quibble Guarantee'. This means that if for any reasons you are not happy with your pair of prescription glasses, designer glasses or prescription sunglasses, you get a FREE Exchange or Full Refund on the Frame cost. So go ahead & pick your perfect pair of prescription glasses online today!
Our range of prescription sunglasses is the best in the UK. Choose from over 300 styles of sunglasses for men and women. Price includes lenses made to your prescription and tinting with full UV protection.
Go ahead and buy sunglasses online today!
PerfectGlasses.co.uk Copyright 2019

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Salaam Brothers,
I am deeply concerned about the news that Pakistan may be dragged into the conflict in Yemen.
I would like to say that I have am living abroad and have no political preferences in the current political environment in Pakistan. Only concern I have is for my country and my brothers and sisters living there.
First of all this news clearly shows us that Pakistan is ruled by an elite (read Nawaz Sharif) which is the extended arm of the Zionists. And why am I saying this? The daughter of Nawaz Sharif is married to a grandson of King Fahd and thus Nawaz Sharif is a defacto member of the Saudi family and serving the interest of Saudis. And it is no secret the House of Saud are serving the agenda of US and thus the agenda of the Zionists. So by serving the Sauds, Nawaz Sharif is acutally serving the acutal masters who are the Zionists.
Secondly dragging Pakistan into the Yemen conflict is not only clear and concise evidence of the close link between Nawaz Sharif and the Saudis it could also spell disaster for Pakistan. The Zionists have succeeded in creating an escalating sunni-shia civil war in Syria, Iraq, Libiya and Yemen. In Pakistan there have always been som unrest in the sunni-shia relation, but by part taking in the Yemen conflict this could realy explode. What we must realize is that many, if not all, of these sunni-shia wars in different countries are part of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and which is being used by the Zionist to weaken the muslim Ummah. And Iran being a neighbour to Pakistan we would certainly see dire consequenses in Pakistan because Iran will definetely try to create major sunni-shia problems is Pakistan.
There fore my message to Prime minister Nawaz Sharif is:
Mr. PM. Keep Pakistan out of Yemen. For once do not submit to your masters in Riyadh. We Pakistanis do not want to be part of the age of Shaytaan that would come from Riyadh that was so precisely prophesised by our beloved prophet Muhammad (saw).


text:
Web development
Budget $30-250 USD
I need a new website. I need you to design and build a website for my small business. SMP Line
27 freelancers are bidding on average $167 for this job
Greetings!! We have reviewed your given [login to view URL] are ready to deliver eye catching for SMP Line business. we have completed 150+ projects in shopify..bigcommerce,woocommrce,wordpress,etc we can give you service More
Yes I can design and build a nice website as per requirements. I have more than 7 years of experience in web designing and development using latest technologies. See our work portfolio at [login to view URL] Recent w More
Hi, I have a team of 45+ maverick and dedicated designers and developers which makes me 45 times better than any other designer and developer available in the market. Every single member of my team is proficient in More
Hello sir, We have check job detail as per that you need web site for your small business. Relevant Skills and Experience Website Design, HTML, CSS, PHP Please check our portfolio Proposed Milestones $170 USD - we w More
HI Hello Sir, We have gone through the details you have provided and would be pleased to work on this with you to deliver the results that you have expected Relevant Skills and Experience Hello sir we are expert in More
Dear Hiring Manager, Let's make Your website design awesome together! I will make your website and I am ready to start the project right now. Creative, responsible and purposeful web-developer with over 4+ years More
Hello, I am a full time freelancer experienced in emerging web technologies and Front-end developer with more than 5 years of experience Relevant Skills and Experience I am expert in the following : PHP, Wordpress, H More
I'm a web and app developer with 7 years experience in PHP, MySQL, CSS3, HTML5,android and WordPress, WP plugins, and 3rd party API as Facebook, Twitter, Google API, shopping engines, etc. Relevant Skills and Experie More
Hi I am interested to work on this . Please contact me so we can discuss about it more. I assure I will provide you best quality. Hope to work with you soon. I am waiting for your reply. Relevant Skills and Experience More
I can do this project. Lets discuss further and [login to view URL] - JOHN Relevant Skills and Experience WordPress Proposed Milestones $123 USD - On complete


text:
Vinni's Colours
There are no products matching the selection.
Vinni's Colours is a yarn company based in Cape Town, South Africa. They specialise in hand dyed cotton and bamboo yarns with a palette of over 200 colours.
In 2004, Vinni Nielsen, a nurse, native of Denmark and an avid knitter since childhood, started her business in South Africa. She soon realised that the South African yarn market was in dire need of a good range of coloured cotton yarn. She began to experiment with dyes in her kitchen and Vinni's Colours was born. Very quickly she needed to hire staff to skein and ball the yarns that were draped over her furniture and hanging up in the windows to dry. The business moved from the kitchen to the garden shed, where the yarn was dyed in baths. After 6 years she was finally able to move her rapidly expanding concern into its current premises, which is two factory buildings in Cape Town.
This success has had much to do with the dedicated help of a team of supportive staff (as well as faithful customers who love this unique South African product) who live within a stone's throw of the factory. All processes are done by hand, from the dyeing to the balling and skeining, and the yarn is sun-dried in the factory forecourt.


text:
eq as test
Major Section: PROGRAMMING
(Assoc-eq x alist) is the first member of
alist whose
x, or
nil if no such member exists.
(Assoc-eq x alist) is provably the same in the ACL2 logic as
(assoc x alist) and
(assoc-equal x alist), but it has a
stronger guard because it uses
eq for a more efficient test for
x is equal to a given key of
alist. Its guard
requires that
alist is an association list (see alistp), and
moreover, either
x is a symbol or all keys of
alist are
symbols, i.e.,
alist is a


text:
The multi-functional use of a kerb or edging provides visual definition to an area creating an edge restraint, delineate areas of different usage between traffic and pedestrians and to deter vehicular over-run.
Available in all Natural Paving's range of products to standard profiles or bespoke dimensions designed by Natural Paving's Technical Team, our range of kerb profiles are capable of suiting the demands of traffic types and levels whilst providing an aesthetic and functional solution to enhance a commercial design.
Building Regulations Part M require reasonable provision for access to a building where steps need to be clearly defined by the provision of tactile corduroy paving and visibility strips to aid the partially sighted.


text:
Who remembers that Fred Armisen and Scarlett Johansson Marble Columns "Saturday Night Live" skit?
The granite base on the bottom of the Falcon Northwest Tiki might not be to everyone's aesthetic taste, but there's no denying the technical and design achievement behind this slim tower gaming desktop. Should you spend $2,783 for it? With competing systems out there that offer more-flexible and more-powerful graphics card configurations in a similar price range, it's hard to recommend the Tiki unless you are unwaveringly attached to its slim-tower design.
The Tiki is the boutique PC answer to the mass-market-leaning
Falcon Northwest borrows heavily from the Alienware X51 here, adopting a similar slim-tower design in the Tiki, and the same full 3D card connected via a PCI Express daughter card. It also seems to have improved on Alienware's concept.
While the X51 has a massive 330-watt external power brick, the Tiki has an internal 450-watt power supply, as well as liquid cooling hardware. Liquid cooling is important, because it helps Falcon Northwest manage internal temperatures well enough that it can overclock the Tiki's third-generation Core chips. Alienware doesn't overclock. It also doesn't charge over $1,800 for any configuration of the X51. The Tiki starts at $1,870 or so. Our review unit will cost $2,793 when Falcon starts taking orders at the end of June.
That brings us to the granite base. However innovative the interior, the overall design of the Tiki is taller and narrower than the X51. That means it's top-heavy, and prone to falling over. The solution, Falcon Northwest has decided, is to include a custom cut-and-polished piece of granite that you can screw into the bottom of the unit.
I will not disagree that the granite serves its functional purpose. It also makes the Tiki look like an employee-of-the-month award, at least with the light-gray version included in our review unit. Falcon offers a black option that might look better. You also don't need to use the granite at all.
|Falcon Northwest Tiki
|Alienware X51
|Maingear F131
|Motherboard chipset
|Intel Z77
|Intel H61
|Intel Z77
|4.3GHz Intel Core i7-3770K (overclocked)
|3.0GHz Intel Core i5-2320
|4.7GHz Intel Core i7-3770K (overclocked)
|8GB 1,866MHz DDR3 SDRAM
|8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
|8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
|2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 680
|1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 555
|(2) 2GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 680
|Hard drives
|256GB SSD, 2TB 5,400rpm Western Digital hard drive
|1TB 7,200rpm
|60GB Corsair Accelera SSD, 2TB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive
|Optical drive
|Blu-ray drive
|dual-layer DVD burner
|dual-layer DVD burner
|Operating system
|Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
|Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
|Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
A potentially larger problem for the Tiki is that it can't support two graphics cards. I say potentially because many gamers might not care. The Geforce GTX 680 card in our review unit can play any game on the market at 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution with reasonably high, if not maxed-out, image quality. That's all the PC many gamers will need.
Then again, the larger, still-trim
I imagine some of you are in the market for the best slim-tower gaming PC you can find, regardless of price. This is that system. But I'd be willing to bet that most gamers shopping in this price range will prioritize 3D frame rates above most other features, even if that means a larger case. That argues for the dual card-capable Maingear as the better way to spend your $2,800 to $3,000. The Tiki is a reasonable value, but you won't be able to overcome its single graphics card limitation.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
|Rendering Multiple CPUs
|Rendering Single CPU
The Falcon Northwest Tiki performs reasonably well on our benchmark tests for its price. The 4.3GHz overclock setting is stable, but also on the more conservative side, likely due to air flow and cooling restrictions of the smaller case. Maingear turned in a faster overclocked Core i7 3770K chip, hitting 4.7GHz, and the ensuing performance boost helps keep it above the Tiki, but not by such a large margin that it earns an overabundance of bragging rights.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
|1,600 x 1,200 (high, 4x aa)
|1,280 x 1,024 (medium, 4x aa)


text:
Strangely, since our big move last year… I hadn't picked up a pack of these goodies!?
I think we'd kinda' forgotten about them as we looked at other flavor options…
when I realized we'd actually started eating snacks that were not good for us… I knew I needed to revisit some old standbys!
Re-Enter Go Raw!!!
I happened upon their goodness years ago at our San D area natural foods store, Jimbo's Naturally!
I'd purchased their flax snax crackers for a quick snack in the car! They were so good and savory… I then started eating some of their granola bars and Dano loved taking the 'cookies' to work for snacks.
Silly people, we were, to go off them! But in the time we'd not been eating them… they added SO many more flavor options AND had greatly improved their taste and texture (and they already had it good!)
HEY!! Also, the package says they are located in Mt. View, CA! So that makes for a perfect SFO Newb post. 😉
Go Raw products are Gluten, Wheat, and Nut Free!
They are prepared in the Raw method of being dried, not above 105degrees, so they are considered 'Alive'!
They contain NO added sugar!
They are made with sprouted seeds, which is more nutritious for our bodies and digestion!
And they are 100% Organic!
AND they are YUMMY! 🙂
They are so crunchy and tasty!
Go Raw is a perfect addition to your kids afternoon snack and they are great to keep at work for when the crunch urge hits! Whether you are looking for Savory or Sweet… you will find enough to satisfy your wants with Go Raw!
Find them at your favorite Natural Foods Store or on-line!
Our favorites right now!?!?
Pizza Flax Snax and Lemon Super Cookies… mmmm… got to go… I have some crunching to do! 😉


text:
ATLANTA — Soft drink giant Coca-Cola Co., often accused in recent years of helping to fuel rising childhood obesity in the United States, is taking on the problem 10,000 steps at a time.
That's the thrust of "Step With It," a new program developed by The Coca-Cola Co. in partnership with The National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE), which encourages middle-school students to take at least 10,000 steps a day. Everyone who participates in the program is given a specially designed "stepometer" to track the number of steps they take. Through activity charts and supplemental materials, participants are also encouraged to engage in a number of fun activities to accumulate steps and meet the goal.
Premiering just months after President Bush's call for all Americans to lead more active lifestyles, the program is expected to reach more than 50 schools in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Charlotte, Detroit, Minneapolis, San Antonio, Seattle, Los Angeles and Philadelphia during the coming school year. More than 50,000 students and teachers are expected to participate in 2002.
"Coca-Cola has worked all over America for years to develop relationships that help schools meet critical needs. One critical need in education today is more resources to get kids active and keep them physically fit," says Jeffrey T. Dunn, president and chief operating officer of Coca-Cola North America. "We've worked with the National Association for Sport and Physical Education to develop the 'Step With It!' program as a fun, practical solution for integrating physical activity into the school day and encouraging students to stride toward a healthier future."
Coca-Cola's pledge to help students become healthier comes slightly more than a year after the company agreed to start selling water, juices and other nutritional drinks in school vending machines and cafeterias.
"Daily physical activity has declined significantly among today's students and NASPE is working vigilantly with educators, parents and partners like Coca-Cola to develop engaging programs to influence children's activity levels," says Judith C. Young, Ph.D., executive director of NASPE, the nation's leading association for physical education. "Middle school students should be physically active at least 30 to 60 minutes per day. By demonstrating the benefits and fun of such a simple activity as stepping, Coca-Cola's 'Step With It' program helps students see how easy it is to be active on a regular basis."
As the program evolves, both students and their parents will be provided with additional activities and challenges and unique incentives for meeting fitness goals. Teachers and school administrators are also encouraged to track their daily steps and participate in the activities with students.


text:
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Not sure what they are, exactly, but you should check out Halestorm! I love them <3
Ever heard of Falling In Reverse?
Where do I even start on this topic. Considering their are so many varieties of "metal" and peoples opinions on what is and is not will vary. Like I don't consider CoF demonic in any sense. Danny himself said they where not and their music... I'll leave it at that. A7x... Yeah. I got nothing to say about them either. While I consider CoF metal, I don't consider A7x metal. So, I'd say if we are talking about the harder side of the rock genre then it would open up to more posts and more people learning about bands that they may have not heard of. That is just my two cents though.
Really? No way! I approve; I like you now. Ronnie is my baby. <3
Hahaha xD I like you too!! Have you heard of I See Stars or Chunk, No Captain Chunk??
I've heard of them, but I've never listened to them. C!NCC is on the Punk Goes Pop cds. Ever heard of those?
Opeth guys, just hear them. NOW.
Ive always heard opeth here and there but ive never been able to listen to em enough to truly experience their music ya know?? I need to soon
Name this song and artist. She's losing consciousness I'm gaining confidence, its starting to make sense, whoah whoah, she's covered in finger prints from her lips to her hips, all I wanted was one more kiss, whoah whoah
Geeze where would I start? I like COF myself... I also listen to Five Finger Death Punch, Lamb of God, Amon Amarth, Children of Bodom, King Diamond, Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth and others. I started in the '80's and never looked back...
If no one gets this by like tomorrow or something I'll explain it to you allGood stumper Babygirl
You should! They're pretty good. I recommend Damnation, their only album without gutturals. It's a bit depressive, but it's a masterpiece. Blackwater Park is VERY good too.
Ive always loved their theme. Mystical and trippy but then just raw as fuck ya know??? Haha
Page created in 0.095 seconds with 27 queries.


text:
(or do you plan them at all?)
I've just posted a new planning form: The Weekly Menu Planner with Bento Lunch Box. I've been working on the layout and testing it out for the past few weeks, and I've found it quite useful, though more complicated perhaps than the original Weekly Bento Planner.
I'm curious though - do you plan your bentos? If so, what do you use? What do you take account of in your plans?
The Big Onigiri.
- Wherever you go, there you are. -
I should plan them but more often I don't. I tend to just look in the fridge for any leftovers and use that. But one of my resolutions is to plan more.
I have a great rice maker with a timer and I finally used that feature yesterday. It was nice to come into the kitchen in the morning with fresh rice all ready! Made my teenage daughter two onigiri with dried salmon filling for her bento lunch. My husband and I were home all day, so lunch was leftovers and rice and it got finished in the afternoon as more onigiri for snacks. I used just a bit too much water and the rice was pretty moist in the AM but that worked out since I left it on 'warm' all day, it didn't get too dried out and the last servings were fine.
Wow, sorry about rambling on like that. ^_^
I do a weekly meal plan for lunches and dinners, leaving off weekends (something always seems to come up or we have leftovers) and that's just part of my process. I use a legal pad so that I have enough space, but otherwise, it's pretty boring stuff.
I'm really looking forward to checking out your form, however! I used to use your bento planner religiously when I was making separate bento for my partner and myself.
My bento blog: http://basil80bento.livejournal.com/
I wish i planned out my stuff, unfortunatly i don't! The last bentos I made were American bentos... I have two bento boxes which are both 2-tier boxes. I used one tier to put a salad of just simply lettuce, grape tomatoes, match stick carrots, and cucumbers if they are in season. I usually try to use a Balsalmic vinagrette or low-fat italian, but sometimes Thousand Island is good.
I've either done a turkey and chesse sandwhich which i cut into small pieces or sometimes it's been left overs. Once I used fried rice and chicken teriyaki that I made.
and that's about it. XD
Yum yum bento yum yum!
The problem is that I make bento just for myself.
So if I buy a cauly-flower or whatever, I'm going to eat almost the same meals everyday of the week.
So I plan my bento lunches on saturday, do the shopping and cook on sunday.
Plus, it's not possible for me to re-heat my food at lunch time.
So I have to think a lot to prepare meals that will be eaten cold, as various as possible with a few ingredients... :S
I really need ideas! I can't stand salads anymore !!!
~~ Ryukei
Hi Ryukei,
I usually make bentos just for me as well, and we don't end up with much leftovers so I have a similar issue. To keep it interesting, I make a lot of bento-stash items and keep them in the freezer to use in the morning. I find that if I keep varying the protein & carbs, I don't mind if I eat broccoli every day!
I have run my stash down just before Christmas, but as I'm returning to work on Monday, tomorrow I'm making:
Carrot kinpira (not in freezer)
Chicken tsukune
Meat soboro
Salted salmon
Cooked to death peppers (not in freezer)
Spinach with sesame sauce
5 bento size serves of rice
I don't do this much every week, but as I said, my stash is running low, but the stuff that goes in the freezer will last me up to a month. I can then rotate through all the bits and pieces (in addition to occasional dinner leftovers) and it doesn't get boring. You'll notice these are all Maki's recipes: I have found them all to be yummy and foolproof.
I hope this helps!
Hi Ryukei,
I usually make bentos just for me as well, and we don't end up with much leftovers so I have a similar issue. To keep it interesting, I make a lot of bento-stash items and keep them in the freezer to use in the morning. I find that if I keep varying the protein & carbs, I don't mind if I eat broccoli every day!
I have run my stash down just before Christmas, but as I'm returning to work on Monday, tomorrow I'm making:
Carrot kinpira (not in freezer)
Chicken tsukune
Meat soboro
Salted salmon
Cooked to death peppers (not in freezer)
Spinach with sesame sauce
5 bento size serves of rice
I don't do this much every week, but as I said, my stash is running low, but the stuff that goes in the freezer will last me up to a month. I can then rotate through all the bits and pieces (in addition to occasional dinner leftovers) and it doesn't get boring. You'll notice these are all Maki's recipes: I have found them all to be yummy and foolproof.
I hope this helps!
Ryukei - try to think of ALL meals, not just lunches. If you buy a cauliflower, for instance, you can use half of it to make a soup that can be frozen in plastic bags to have for dinner at home some time in the future. You can also freeze raw cauliflower - but it takes up a bit of space in the freezer. I'm assuming that you do have a freezer of course! If you don't, you'll just have to take a friend shopping with you and cut the cauliflower and broccoli heads in half.
My blog is Food and Shoes
Until now I have not planed my Bentos. But there have not been many so far. This week I tried your weekly-bento-planner and I realised that I'm not so got in sticking to the plan. The things I made have been more than I expected so I had to use the leftovers.
I hope to get better in planning during the challange
Hmm. So far I haven't really planned my bentos [when I manage to make one] so they usually consist of leftovers. Boy, that rice cooker with a timer sure sounds great. I have a huge rice cooker so I tend to make a big batch and freeze 1 cup portions. I only cook for myself so, like Ryukei, I tend to eat the same thing for the week. Which can sometimes lead to my lunch staying in the office fridge while I go out to a restaurant.
I want to have more variety in my diet so I am going to try and use the bento planner. I love that the spaces are pretty equivalent to the recommended portions. I also want to start using make-ahead items that can be frozen then quickly assembled into a bento in the morning. I'm also hoping that in the course of preparing a bento in the morning, I make breakfast too! Right now that almost always consists of a fiber bar and green tea at my desk.
Denver, Colorado USA
I usually plan because I make them when I get up and I don't have more than 30 minutes to spend on the task. So I write out menus and make what I can the night before. I have a folder of recipes to try that seem bento friendly and use those while planning my menus. I keep the successful ones and toss those that aren't enjoyed. I also keep my weekly menus so I can use them for ideas. But the menu planning also helps me make sure daughter is getting fruits and veggies, etc. And she's asked for more protein on her workout days 2 x weekly so I've incorporated that into the bentos too. More protein/food on Mondays and Wednesdays!
Having said all of that, I didn't do a menu this week so had to punt this morning! I made a chicken parmesan sandwich (heated chicken patty in olive oil, micro'd to melt the provolone cheese, warmed pizza sauce to put on top, and placed all on english muffin). I boiled an egg in my hotpot and molded it into a heart, cut up a spear of fresh pineapple and prepared a cucumber salad (rice vinegar, splenda, salt, onion, cucumbers). So that was my ad-lib bento for today!
I'm doing menus for next week tonight as I only have to make one more this week. So I'll do menus and some food prep this weekend and hopefully be able to make quick bentos next week.
It used to be pack whatever leftovers I had in my box until I realized what the volume of my box was (bigger than I thought althoug it looks relatively small) - which made my calorie count much higher than I expected so now I have adapted a bit. I plan day to day not by the week - with 2 teenagers and a husband in the house, I can't count on the food, that I planned on using, being there at the end of the week.
I now tend to look for smaller boxes (and using bulkier foods to fill up the boxes that I already have without adding an undo amuont of calories). I am also using a 1200 calorie/day daily servings check off sheet (somewhat like WW check off list before they switched over to points) 1/3 of the total goes towards each bento box, leaving 1/3 for dinner (approximately). This way I am assured I am eating well balanced meals - not avoiding certain food groups (consciously or unconsciously)
Northern California
It really depends on how busy I am and if I remember to use a bento planner or not. I started making bentos last year and my planning fell apart as the fall semester wore on (I work full-time as a staff member at a university, go to grad school and TA part-time). But, I've resolved to make my bentos more nutritious and attractive, which requires more planning.
So, this weekend, I'll sit down and plan my lunches, go to the store if needed, and cook food for the week. Of course, I always use leftovers as appropriate, so I'm sure that will change up a few lunches since my husband and I don't really do meal planning for dinners.
tried to post this under Ryukei post (by clicking on reply) since it was a response to her, but it didn't quite work out that way...anywho,
I used to waste a lot of veggies due to not using them up quickly enough - now, if I can buy it frozen, that is what I do that way I can eat it in my own time rather than feel like I have to eat the same veggie every day till it is gone. If you eat your cauliflower cooked, this would work.
I don't like to prepare salad so I have been eating easy to make raw veggies - I use sliced (or large chunks - that way they take up more space in the larger bentos) cucumbers, jicama & red, green or yellow peppers a lot. I can prep them and they last a few days without going bad. Celery, I haven't figured out yet, it immediately turns brown/grey on me (good thing I don't like celery all that much)
Hi jskidmoreca !
Thanks for your answer.
I'll try to freeze the more veggies I can. The problem is that I live with my parents and my mother don't like to share her kitchen. So there isn't much space left in the freezer for me!
Anyway, thank you for your ideas
(I don't like celery either!!)
The only week I wanted to try the "maki bento planner", many food was spoiled, because
1° I have been invited twice to the restaurant and
2° I didn't think about the remaining ingredients of a bento lunch (living alone, it's harder to cook all)
I think I need to be more experienced in bento-lunch cooking. Then, I will be able to anticipate the food and its remains and to organize them in a whole week.
But it's alreday good to talk about it in this forum. Now, I have a better idea on bento-planning.
I don't usually plan mine at all, just if i want something i'll go to the shop and buy the ingredients and the way home from work and then make it up the next day. i'm trying to get into the habit of planning and keeping stuff frozen too.
I only loosely plan my bento.
My husband shops at our local market on Saturdays, and buys whatever is cheap and voluminous - usually seasonal vegetables. They determine the sorts of dishes I'll be preparing during the week. On Sunday, I go to the supermarket for meat and staples to match the vegetables. I usually plan a couple of dinners that will leave leftovers, and at least one soup to be frozen for lunch later in the week, when I'm stressed out and don't have a lot of time to prep. I always make a point of buying one or two "bento back-ups" in the meat department - for example, some chicken filets, pre-made tsukune, or some ground chicken for soboro. Then I make the soup and freeze it, and sit down and write the plan for the week.
I tried doing it the other way 'round - planning, and then shopping - but it didn't work, since I found myself running around, trying to find this and that ingredient, wasting money and time. Now I work with what I have at hand, which means I don't have to spend a lot of time thinking up what to put into my lunch. Now I look at a pile of vegetables and think, "Okay, I have carrots, daikon, potato, and renkon. What can I make?"
My fridge is too small for me to fit a week's worth of groceries, so I plan a "staples" day midway through the week, and have a shopping reload trip as well. I freeze a lot of vegetables, and make some into pickles which will keep all week. This means I get some variety.
I also have my cookbooks tabbed seasonally, so I can find recipes for ingredients easier.
I'm fairly new to the bento world, but have been planning meals for a while.
What I did, was fiddle around with a template on Word for weekly meals, printed out and laminated it using self laminating sheets.
I keep it on the fridge door, with magnets and since it's laminated, it acts as a whiteboard.
On Saturday or Sunday, I sit down and plan the menu and then wipe out the previous menu on Sunday and write the new one on.
The cool part about doing it this way, is that my husband and anyone who comes to the house adds their own comments on the menu.
Every morning I make a bento for my 6 year old daughter and myself. It's become our routine to start Sunday morning with a bit of mise en place...
*rice - steamed, portioned, frozen.
*Mini-burgers cooked and frozen (Over rice for me, sliders for her!)
*chicken breasts marinated, grilled, frozen
*whatever else sounds good.......or was on sale!.....that can be frozen
*hard-boiled eggs, as my child could live on these alone.
*a few days of veggie prep (I do this every three days or so)........carrots sliced.....blanched broccolli, asparagus, whatever....anything to make our mornings more "grab and go"
Every morning, my goal is to make our lunches in 15 minutes or less. If I'm running behind, I worry more about the kiddo. I work in a hotel restaurant, and can score all my veggie goodness from the boys in the pantry. These days I just pack my rice and protein.
The kiddo is cranky upon wake-up. Every morning it's a battle to get her to school without being smelly, tangled, and hungry. This includes pickiness about her lunch. If I have plenty of quick options, then I can successfully make her lunches with not too much effort. Usually some kind of peanut butter sandwich or rice-ball, a soy-sauce egg, some carrots and some rice or potatoes or soybeans or any other random thing she has decided is her new most favoritest thing in the whole big wide world.
I don't go into my week with any real idea what I'm making for us, it's more a matter of making sure I have the bits and pieces to make good spur of the moment decisions. I treat my home kitchen like my work kitchen - gotta have good mise en place. I am a confirmed scatterbrain, and I love to plan not to plan.
I sometimes plan mine and also mostly dont lol. I think about it during spare time at work and sometimes plan character designs but mostly it revolves around what I end up with for dinner or what leftovers I have. Planning is deffinately a good thing tho as they always end up realy super nice!
The crazy rat lady @
I have several days a week when I will have to make 2 Bentos a day to take to school so Planning will be important...I will be doing my cooking on Sundays so I can just throw everything in my box every morning
I try to plan. But you know what they say about plans...
I used to cook and freeze a lot of little things. Lately I've been just putting whatever I can find in my box (or going out to lunch...mmmm cheeseburgers...).
But I intend to plan a lot more! And hopefully my bentos will be better for it!
My planning goes like this:
What will the creature eat? OK, do we have the ingredients? No. What do we have? Will he eat that?
Then I usually run through a list of stuff I could make off the top of my head and he finds one vaugly acceptable. Then I make both lunches the same. Eccept obviously mine is usually smaller, the vegetables vary a little, his is less decorative touches on his.
This is the only planning method I find practical, as no one in my family will tell me when they are shopping for food and what their buying, so getting stuff specially is currently not an option. Also, my dad throws out anything me or mum put in the freezer to make space for his stuff, so I can't make things and freze them.
I never really plan, since a lot of what goes into my bento depends on what my mother has cooked the previous night. My bentos are usually leftovers from dinner the previous night and anything else I can think of in the morning to add to it, after some brief rummaging in the fridge. I'm still in high school, and not particularly experienced in cooking and don't tend to try fixing that (I should ^^'). Besides, there are only two people in our household and it doesn't make a lot of sense for my mother and me to cook separately. She's used to cooking for three, so now the third person's portion I take with myself to school.
Even if I DID try to plan... well I second what arglebargle said about plans ;)
"A common way to tell if it is well cooked is to throw the sausage onto a hard surface; if it bounces, the sausage is good."
I tend to plan in several stages. First, I plan my meat options for several weeks - things like meatballs, mini-burgers, steak, etc. - but not exactly when I'll eat it. Second, I make a general plan once I get my produce box for the week. I always know what's going to be in it, but never exactly how much. Then, once I know what dishes I'm going to have for sure, I start planning the meals, usually no more than a day in advance, and sometimes not until I start packing the lunch. However, I do make sure to pick up extra items that complement the things I know I will have in my lunches. I do try to have a sort of joubisai, but it's mostly the meat.
Planning is one of my goals for the challenge as I have different needs (due to health issues) than my husband and son and yet want to NOT turn into a short order cook!
I also am home full time and will be looking at using bento for 2 out of 5/6 meals a day so planning would be helpful there (I hope) and I would be looking at full 7 day week rather than 5 "work" days.
As it is now I am not doing as well as I would like re eating (not as regular, not as much variety, not always enjoyable, etc).
~ Begin by knowing you have already arrived ~
my blog - http://honeysheistwisted.blogspot.com/
I am bleary eyed when I make a bento for my hubby at 4:45am. I have a bit less than half an hour to get it made and packed. He eats it in 15 minutes without leaving his desk.
I use Maki's planner, but with modified labels to show the 3 cups of the Classic Bento thermal container I use, plus dinner. I try to list the things we have on hand that need to be used up, including leftovers. Sometimes I end up writing in what I made after I made it, but I try to plan ahead a few days.
I use a rice cooker with a timer to make sure the rice is ready at 4:30am, and put the kettle on right away for hot water for soup (usually instant miso) for the bottom cup. The top cup alternates between salad, vege side dish or fruit (sometimes canned). I aim to include 5 colors of food. The protein and the vege is the main thing I have to think about in advance. I try to pre-cut meat before I freeze it, and sometimes I pre-cut veges to save time and fingers :)
If I'm having a bad day he gets canned fruit salad, canned mystery meat (spam or corned beef hash, both of which he likes!), rice and canned soup. Better than the same-every-day lunchmeat and cheese sandwich he used to make himself.
If I haven't made a plan the night before I usually end up dreaming about what I will make.
I only make one bento a week for my boyfriend (since we don't live together) and plan what I want to make 2-3 days in advance. I usually browse some bentosites and cookbooks to find something I didn't do before. Sometimes I look for recipes with certain ingredients my boyfriend asked for, or which I happen to have lying around.
Then I do the full bento in the evening before, so I won't have any stress in the morning and can eat any leftovers (and there are always enough) for diner. ;)
I wish I could get my husband to plan more. I think that I will have to insist starting this weekend, because I will be starting night classes again next week [packing 2 bentos for myself on some days].
I really will not have time to time to go back and forth with him about what he wants, to have him give me no input. He eats meat and I do not, so I really have no vested interest in what meat he is going to be eating that week or how it is cooked. So lately, unless he gives me specifics of what he wants, I do not cook anything for him. Plus he is not a fan of the bentos, so he is on his own, unless he gives me specific of what exactly he wants.
But I do a lot of lose planning for myself, I have a lot of staples in the freezer [instant soup balls, mini burgers, frozen veggies, frozen rice, etc.] I try to make at least one thing every weekend to add to my stash, so I have a bit more variety.
I also do not really plan out the ingredients I use. I usually go with whatever fresh vegetables are on sale and stock up on staples that are on sale. I also try to cook the vegetables in different ways, making smaller portions of them so I do not get tired of having everything cooked exactly the same way every day that week.
I don't really plan my meals out. I try to decide what I'm going to have the evening before, but sometimes I just wing it. I'm trying to plan a little more now that I've started this challenge, but I think learning to plan will be harder for me than other aspects of the challenge.
I wasn't going to plan my meals out, until I found that when I was prepping late at night my mind was just as blank as it used to be in the mornings. Then I caved yesterday in and made this (very much inspired by Maki's form):
It helped my mornings a lot more than just staring at lists of foods, but I find that usually pencilling in a list of things I've got on hand the day before on my lecture notes is enough to get me by. (Unless it's the same list as the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that as well...)
I love your form!!!! Where did you find it? Eilish
I made it in MS word with the objects drawing tool and a bunch of columns. ^^;
I actually use Maki's Meal Planner forms.The only change is that instead of the bottom one being snacks, it's notes. My mom and I sit down and plan them out two weeks in advance (just before payday). Since I do the cooking, but she's more used to it, it takes both of us. Some things change, inevitably, especially on the weekend, but it's nice to not have to panic about what to make, which is what we're used to doing.
I usually plan it the night before, but do consider it when shopping as well. I make two, three or four lunches in one go. I only make lunch for my husband if he has done the dishes and left me space to do it! Sometimes I am lazy and eat out, but I have to make lunch for my kids regardless.
We do half and half Japanese or western style. My kids prefer Japanese. Their favourite lunch is rice with furikake, egg rolls and hiyayakko tofu with katusobushi and soy sauce. I keep the tofu in tupperware covered with water, and it goes straight into the fridge at creche, so it's fine. They also bring fruit to share, so I figure it's pretty balanced.
Today's lunch is ham, cheese and marmite sandwiches, leftover penne with tomato and home grown zucchini, and custard over tinned pears. Not in a bento box today!
I also try to plan my meals ahead. During the 5 weeks challenge, there has been a week I didn't plan, and it was an poor bento week. I live alone, so it's quite important for me to plan if I don't wand to throw away to much food. My freezer is just a small compartment in the fridge, which is not very large itself. And I'm not so much used to freeze food, my freezer is mostly used for things I buy already frozen. I generally go shopping once a week on Saturdays, as I don't really have time during the week. So I shop first and then plan ahead with what I bought, as it depends on what was on sale and what looked good in the shop. I try to stick to season vegetables and local products, and organic products as much as I can. Beside this I always have canned or pickled products. I have enough food at home for some time to be honnest, but I prefer fresh food as much as I can. I don't like empty cupboards I suppose ;-)
So I plan a week ahead, lunch and supper, but I often eat the same thing in various recipes... one cabbage lasts a week in four meals, when I cook rice it's also used in three or four meals. I just use a small cardboard white board and it's OK. I don't always stick to the plan as I may be invited or come home to late for cooking, so I have to adjust the planning according to the most perishable goods. But I like not to have to think to much in the moring and just read the plan.
I find myself planning bentos around what I have in the fridge and what my activity would be for that day. Some days, I play tennis or go to the gym after work, so I have to pack heavier lunch and a banana. Lately, I've been preparing 2 days worth of bento at a time, and it's always rice w/ side dish(es). Except for Friday, when I don't do anything strenuous after work, I'd bring simple onigiri or sandwich, or eat out.
i don't plan them because, due to my job, i don't know if I'll be able to actually eat it or not. I mean, sudden meetings and such things. There have been lots of times that i plan a cool meal that stays in its box until night :(
That's the reason that I also buy my food daily (or try to do so) because most of the times it spoils sitting in my fridge.
So when i can make a bento i cook it with the food i have. Mostly pasta and some veggies.
I hate my job, lol xD
My bento blog: http://justbento.com/blog/1305
My art blog: http://jizaacaso.deviantart.com
I do something similar to what a lot of the folks above do.
There is a Saturday farmers' market a few minutes' walk away in the local park. I'm there quite early, to see what's good and what's ample. A lot of it is less costly than what's stocked in fancy supermarkets, but none of it is cheap; this is New York City (borough of Manhattan) and most of these farmers bring in their goods from as far away as the forks of Long Island and even central New York State (prime farm country, where I was born). That's a minimum four-hour trip one way. Farmers are pragmatic; they're not taking their precious kids off the growing and harvesting to pay gas & tolls into the city In Order To Lose Money. Many of them make arrangements with neighborhood NYC people to run the stall for them, so that the farm kid drivers can do a straight round trip and bring that needed truck back ASAP.
Most of what's offered is not "certified organic." Certification is expensive, invasive, and takes a great deal of could-otherwise-be-productive time in sample taking and record keeping and fooling around with stuff that ain't farm work. [Knowing what I know, I'd rather eat pastured eggs than 'organic' eggs. That's just for starters.] I simply ask the farmer, bee keeper, rancher, dairyman, goat minder (or whoever's behind the table) whether they follow organic standards. When I get an old-fashioned look and a flea in my ear about how they do a lot better than GOvernment ORganic! well, I know I'm home. Those are the folks I seek out first, every time after. :-)
There is a husband and wife who drive 9 hours round-trip to bring us their excellent Finger Lakes wines. I went to school up there and remember the unique quality of the local drinkables. The mirin of the West? it's a thought. Hey, I'd never even heard of mirin when I lived there, so who knew? I DID know Rieslings though, intimately. When these people first showed up at our greenmarket last year, I stood gabbing with them in the rain for half an hour. Wondrous vintners! The Blonde was bowled over by what I brought back that day. You'd think an Austrian would have some fondness for Eiswein; not he, until then. Their Rieslings? Spectacular! SO good. Right up there with Prum! Beyond, even! Very exciting!
This may seem like an odd thing to say, but take it for what it's worth: the market provides food, but it's not just about food; it's about our lives, and the lives of those who actually produce what we need to live... as well as what makes living a joy, a mystery, a maze, and just plain magnificent. Please don't limit yourself from experiencing all of it!
Anyhoo, I key my menus according to what's really good at that market. Usually I then put in an order to our butcher for pick-up in the afternoon, and/or I check the local (asian) fishmonger for goodies. For mid-week, I make a fill-in delivery request from the fairly dependable organic grocer, and monthly I subway down to Whole Foods for certain items difficult or too expensive to Internet order/phone order/beg for/get anywhere else (a belly laugh since people call it Whole Paycheck with good reason, but our health is paramount to us and we steadfastly spend more on food-as-our-medicine than anything else). Two or three times per year, I make a bulk order of things like oils, sea salts, soba, kuzu, glass-jarred juices, grass-fed butter, Ujitawara tea, rice, all kinds and shapes and colors of rice pastas from Tinkyada, and various 'organic' whole, white, and sprouted flour grains: amaranth, buckwheat, millet, quinoa, rice, spelt and teff. The whole spices and such we obtain from an excellent supplier only every 5 years or so, and grind as needed. Cooking and preserving of the week's acquisitions happen early Sunday morning.
Next week I'll start doing bentos for four adults and a five-year-old girl. Since this post went Tolstoy-long, maybe it's best I start a new one for the individual planning of the bentos.
grinding your own spice! what an inspiration you are :-)
Plan? What's that? I don't. I do however make double batches at meal times and freeze small single portions. Then I look in the freezer and toss stuff in a box. I have to make bentos the night before because I make for 5 of us and have to get up at 5:30 for work anyway without working out. I'd never sleep if I woke up to make them in the morning. So I guess my idea of planning is to make them the night before.
Just the new girl around here looking for some lunch ideas.
I've just about set up my Bento Planner for the two adults & child (plus Man & Me) whom I'll be doing for. Mostly, I've been testing about 50 recipes in small batches, and I am here to tell you that Maki's Just Gorgeous (aw shoot, I keep making that error for some reason, hee hee)... Just BENTO Cookbook is da bomb. I am so grateful for it.
So, a friend was to come over early this morning to sort through clothing. She and I do distributions in some of the poorer neighborhoods around NYC. I usually have breakfast ready on these occasions, and thought it would be fun to construct a bento breakfast for us as my [formal] maiden voyage on this enchanting sea. ;-)
I did a 3-egg tamagoyaki layered with some thin-sliced smoked turkey, a blanched red chard leaf, a bit of horseradish mustard and sprinklings of raw minced sweet red onion. (The colors... so pretty!)
Then, a silicone cupcake mold full of sushi rice mixed with leftover 'nori dust' and topped with a little chrysanthemum pattern made from paper thin slices of the steamed chard stem. (Took 12 minutes to do that deco on two cups.) Tucked around the lower edge of each cup was a fan of bitty slices of the last of my precious nukazuke (is that the word? it's bran-pickled daikon).
Finally, cold triangular chunks of deep red watermelon in their own lime green square Laptop Lunches cups; I gave her the "Kaze" black bento box and used my Fukuro brown one, but all this food (almost) filled only one level, albeit _fairly_ stylishly! ;->
The tamagoyaki, though I say so myself, was knock yer mama down delicious. We both started with a few pieces of watermelon, moved to the rice, tucked into the tama, and... started slowing down.
She is what I'd call a bigger eater, and can put away all kinds of breakfast fare. Breakfast is my biggest meal of the day, too: usually a sort of curried mixed veg and lamb stew topped with scrambled eggs & KAL yeast & hot salsa. I never considered how small a Quantity of it I eat.
This Bento dealio is mysterious! One single level of these largish (but very little in the hand) boxes holds a whoopload of food. Neither of us could finish it all! We kept picking away at it until we gave up, leaving 1/4 the rice, 1/4 of the tamago and half the watermelon. Whuhh!?
If we'd tried eating a classic construction of 2/3 of the level filled with rice topped with veg and 1/3 with meat-ish okaze, I may have lain down and not gotten up.
Gadz! Does anyone else notice this is one Hail of a lotta ingestibles? Maki, does your husband ever bring back part of his boxed bennies? Anyone else have thoughts? I mean, woo!
Hi Heidi!
Sometimes I do find that I can't eat all my bento. But reading Maki's guide to buying the right size bento box was so helpful!! I was using a big box because it "looked" the right size. Now I'm down more than 200ml to a 2 tier 500ml box and it's much better. But even then I need to make sure a big chunk is a vege or fruit (something lighter) otherwise it's just too much some days.
The amount you can fit in a bento is still mysterious to me! I had a bento break for months and coming back into it I'm needing to relearn how much to cook for just one box. I ended up making two at once the other day because I steamed too much of everything.
You & me, moonshae! Maybe it's the vertical aspect of the boxes which allows packing more food than a plate... sheesh, I dunno, but it gives us ideas, eh?
Well, I promised a bento plan and here it (sort of) is. I think it's more a concept than a plan, since I need to stay loose on this one. Coincidentally, it's a temporary one and in a narrative form rather than a nice useful graph but some folks might find it helpful, so here goes!
I met Sean and Cleo through a Q&A blog I wrote years ago on a doctor's site. By chance and good luck we all fired up a friendship, exchanged visits and became very close friends. They since had a daughter, Tessa, who's now 5 and ready for a big trip to our house! :-)
Bento planning for September & October, the 'meal cascade' looks like this:
(1) early breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack for me;
(2) non-bento breakfast for five;
(3) bento lunch for The Blonde;
(4) bento encompassing one or two meals for S/C/T day trips including snacks; and
(5) non-bento dinner arrangements for however many show up.
Thank Gates for the Excel Spreadsheet, the one bit of Windoze Software that truly rules.
I set one up with multiple columns: S/C/T are all blood group AB (lucky!), which once upon a time I was accustomed to cooking for; then I'm O, & The Blonde is A.
Goat, lamb, rabbit and turkey are the meats I'm stocking on a rotating basis. There are a dozen cans each of tuna and wild salmon in the cupboards; and for white fish I've got a chilled half-pound of smoked whitefish and readily-available fresh turbot and cod. None of us tolerates corn, so various rices, crackers and sprouted-spelt bread provide the basic group carbs. They don't eat sweet potato, and we don't eat regular potato; the're fine with wheat and rye, which we ain't; but that's it for dissonance in the menu flow... besides, it's fun to have an expanded foodset to cook with!
Monthly or so, I cook and freeze the 'glop' I prefer for ['second'] breakfast: a curried mix of vegetables and ground lamb.
Sunday mornings, I'll be baking and preparing staples for the week. Last Sunday starting at 1:30am, made the week's mayonnaise then transformed three pounds of languishing carrots into carrot & celery kinpira and carrots with miso, tahini and nut paste. Also, hard-boiled two dozen quail eggs and simmered up a batch of cooked-to-death sweet & hot peppers and a few containers of tuna soboro with ginger. At that point the heat and humidity drove me out of the kitchen, so I'm taking next Saturday same time for the breads and various meat/spiced sausage or fish or lentil patties. Very happy the weather has finally cooled. I'm a bit nervous that the freezer is groaning already and I haven't yet pre-prepped the green veggies, replaced my raw turkey sausage stash & varied patties, nor finished bread & muffin baking; I'll now focus on finishing the preliminary work, then move Sunday/Monday/Tuesday things into the fridge.
1. 1:30am -- I slap this bento together after dinner daily, taking no more than 5 minutes using either leftovers or prepped foods from the early Sunday cooking:
a. Daily early meal for me ("First Breakfast" for the Hobbits among us) is some plain homemade chicken or dashi/miso broth, and a few rice crackers topped with whatever spread I have at hand: egg and olive, tuna and capers, or smoked whitefish and/or canned salmon mixed with katsuobushi, green onions and homemade spicy mayo. Shredded Romaine/arugula tops the spread.
-- Pack the crackers in the bottom of the red WanWan box, the spread/lettuces in the lidded center compartment, and the soup in the black Ojyu bottle (pre-heated with boiling water) to be served in the top Wan bowl. No utensils, as I just dip with the crackers and sip from the bowl. Band the box & stick it in the fridge and leave the bottle on the counter. Summer beverage is iced gyokuro karigane, brewed with the perfect-temperature water discarded from pre-heating the soup bottle then poured into an old vodka set (a wee glass which fits over a 16-oz (250ml) bottle) and stashed in the fridge.
[Often I'll substitute some sort of baked patties, sliced meatloaf or leftover sashimi for the crackers and line the lower bowl with bits of romaine lettuce as 'grabbers,' with red or green salsa, chive mayonnaise, or a yuzu-based dipping sauce in the lidded compartment. Lately I've developed a bug-eyed addiction to nukezuke (bran-pickled daikon), and expect to stack a few pieces atop the sauce compartment to crunch on at will.]
b. Make up a Fukuro-box pack of salad greens, some simple oil/lemon/garlic dressing, then perhaps a handful of nuts, hard-boiled or deviled eggs, broccoli aemono, carrot kinpira, or mixed steamed quinoa or a couple onigiri or bits of leftover meat/fish, whatever's good, as a big lunching/snack pack. Band and toss into back of fridge.
c. 1:30am - Retrieve previously deposited WanWan and a napkin, tuck soup bottle under my arm, grab nice cold tea, and tote all into the office area and get to work.
2. 6:10am -- wake from dawn nap, and prepare Non-Bento Group Breakfast, ideally the largest meal of the day.
--Warm up a few spoonsful of my 'glop,' top with a tablespoon of KAL yeast and two eggs any convenient style, dot with homemade chili garlic sauce or green tomatillo salsa. For The B, spelt toast with butter & jam, accompanied by sunny-side up or scrambled egg. That's standard, and real quick... and now for the fun part.
-- A traditional (albeit porkless) Irish fry-up in the 12" iron pan! Applegate Farms make a decent organic turkey bacon; I make a rather good turkey sausage patty which will serve; a few sliced cherry tomatoes, some thinly sliced potatoes, and three small bundles of (pre-)blanched chards or kales, all fried in the olive oil and sausage fat; then six of our very lovely pastured eggs broken into the lot, and the lid applied for three minutes. Kill flame, wait another three minutes, remove lid and let cool off a bit. Cut & serve. Think "Irish Tortilla," lol. A side slice or two of crusty buttered rye or soda bread for each of the three happy eaters; then they'll either be ready to conquer the world or to stagger back to bed. ~;=D
3. Bento for The Blonde: Lunch
There are four basic patterns for B-bentos, alternating among veg-or-pasta salads, sushi rolls, rice-based "don" styles, soboro-topped styles, or onigiri, and sandwiches or little spelt flatbreads rolled with goodies; miso soup always welcome.
He's the one I need to walk a very straight-and-narrow path with, as he needs an extremely light hand with toasted sesame oil, can't abide many of my favorite veg and seaweeds, leans toward the sweet side in sauces, dressings, mustards and vinegars (unlike me) although he dislikes "sweets;" he wants a spoon even with clear soup -- and no potential messiness at all in items to be eaten by hand (which he'd rather not have anyway, but will enjoy if properly presented - besides, he's got a brand-new hachibori for hand-wiping). Leftovers are out; this 'supertaster' can tell if it's not absolutely fresh veg/fish/meat, preferably rice too. The frozen kinpira(s) and green-pea patties will be an experiment... !
4. I wash my First Breakfast Boxes/Bottles and start three lunch bentos during the breakfast cooking. I'm counting on about 30 minutes from the end of breakfast to the departure of The Folk. Daily menu is drawn from the rice cooker, fridged onigiri fillers, the dashi stock, breads/flatbreads for sandwiches or quick rolls, and the quick-defrostables such as soboros, muffins, kinpiras and legume patties. A weekly batch of a dozen hard-boiled quail or chicken eggs, quick-fried sausage from the freezer stock, toasted pignoli, diced sweet onion, fresh sliced or cooked-to-death peppers or pepper/onion confit, and fresh salad greens give me loads of leeway in construction of the bentos. I have a big stash of 100% buckwheat soba and rice stick, which can slot in for a nice cool lunch with gomadofu & side dip of kaeshi, or a fully loaded sesame sauce & cold sliced smoked meat & scrambled egg & green onion extravaganza. The ABs can enjoy a number of soft cheeses and things like sour cream & yogurt, further expanding the repertoire. I'm also having so much silly fun making tamagoyaki and tea- or veg-dyed molded hard-boiled eggs that I almost think this project will go off without a hitch. {optimistic grin}
(a) The two Wan boxes go with the Irish, rotating between soups and steamed veg/rice/onigiri; soboro & cute egg-topped rice; patties or breads with dipping sauces; and salads with varied accoutrements (depending on whether it's a one- or a two-meal pack for their plans that day). One of the Wan bowls carries a bag of fruit/nut/grain/chocolate dry snack foods, somewhat modeled on trail mix. They have both the black and red Ojyu bottles on soup days; the "Kaze" black big box goes with The Blonde, with the red Ojyu bottle filled with miso (or similar) soup on his soup days. I'm using odd/even days for this determination.
(b) At my wake-from-midday-naptime (11:10am), I snatch up my booty in the form of the fridged Fukuro along with a glass of ice and a bottle of organic grape juice, and go back to work.
Just want to take a breath here and send HUGE PROPS TO MAKI. The detail and variety you've provided in your recipes is a godsend. ok. :-)
5. Dinner is planned when I hear from The Travellers, lol. Either a quick salad & fixin's for the B & Me, or a light salad plus tapas-style plate for five. Finding little dishes in the stocked stuff will be a breeze. On weekends I like to roast a chicken with lemon, garlic and parsley, but we'll skip chicken while the ABs roost wid' us.
That's the concept, to be implemented according to appetites and how the volumes flow over the next two months. Once the beloved visitors leave, I'll mourn the loss of their company -- but I may almost feel like a real cook. :-)
Please wish me luck!
wow heidi!!!
how's it all going??
I didn't really use to plan my dinners / lunches at all, just tried to get to the grocery store in time after work, and every day thinking about what to cook for dinner, what to make for lunch... I was getting annoyed with it, so now I always plan the meals for a whole week in advance. I also do all my shopping on sundays, unless there is something that won't keep long, of course. I also learned how to use my freezer much more effectively. I am a lot more relaxed about our meals now & can just come home and enjoy a little bit of cooking after work.
Is this okay for a bento box meal? Please help me out.
|Last Post
|Sesame salad dressing
|5 years 40 weeks ago
|Authentic paella?
|5 years 42 weeks ago
|IMPORTANT: If you have a blog on JustBento...
|5 years 44 weeks ago
|Shiso - uses for this herb
|5 years 46 weeks ago
|Fuki (Japanese Butterbur) Tsukemono Recipes
|5 years 46 weeks ago
@justbento - strictly site updates
@makiwi - Maki tweets at random


text:
The Crucible Presented by The Dorset Players the weekends of March 8-10 and 15-17. Show times are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm and Sundays at 2pm at The Dorset Playhouse. Tickets are $20 and are available at The Dorset Playhouse box office at 802-867-5777.
Marchdi Gras Festivities at Stratton Mountain Saturday, March 9 from 3pm – 10pm. Celebrate March in Mardi Gras fashion! Enjoy live music, street performers, delicious food and give aways in Stratton Village at the base of the mountain.
Bird Walk at Hildene Sponsored by The Vermont Bird Place & Sky Watch, local birders meet to conduct a survey of birds on the Hildene grounds. Meet at the Hildene Welcome Center at 8am on Saturday, March 16th; free to all birders.
The Saturday Series at Burr and Burton Academy World renowned performing artists presented in high definition broadcasts. Saturdays at 7pm in the academy's Riley Center for the Arts, cost is $18 per adult.
March 16 – JEWELS, a George Balanchine ballet presented by the Mariinsky Ballet Company from St. Petersburg, Russia.
March 30 – PEOPLE, a comic play by Britain's celebrated playwright, Alan Bennett, from the National Theater of London.
Off the Shelf Series sponsored by the Northshire Bookstore Author Jodi Picoult presents The Storyteller in this author in conversation series at The Maple Street School. Thursday, March 21 at 6:30pm.
Sugar on Snow The Vermont Country Store presents this time honored tradition of indulging in sweet maple syrup drizzled over snow! The store is also offering Maple Syrup sampling. Join the VCS on Saturdays and Sundays in March from 12pm – 3pm (through March 24th).
Vermont Maple Sugar Open House Weekend This annual event is statewide and being held on Saturday and Sunday, March 23 and 24. Visit sugar houses as they boil maple sap. Learn how goods such as maple syrup and maple candy are produced. Watch the boiling process and sample different grades of syrup.


text:
Standard Capabilities
Production colour printing
Rated speed
110 ppm
Recommended average monthly volume
Up to 650,000 pages per month
Digital Front Ends
Xerox® FreeFlow® Print Server
Xerox® EX Print Server, powered by Fiery®
Xerox® EX Print Server, powered by Fiery®
Booklet Making, Case Bound, Flats, Lay Flats, Perfect Bound, Stitched Sets, Tape Bound
Media Types
- Coated: gloss, matt, dull, silk
- Uncoated, textured, speciality stocks
- Recycled, perforated, tabs, transparencies, a wide variety of labels, synthetics
- DocuCard™, NeverTear, DuraPaper™
- Mixed-stock jobs supported at rated speed
- No drying time before coating
Skaitmeninio spausdinimo programos
Detailed specifications
Next steps
Finishing and Options
With the range of feeding and print finishing options available for your Xerox production equipment, you can add the capabilities that best suit your job mix and improve your workflow. For instance, digital front ends and other customizable solutions keep more jobs in progress and increase the return on your investments.
Darbų automatizavimo programos
The leading technology for engaging your audiences with personalised, relevant communications across print and digital media touchpoints.


text:
Barack Obama proved Friday he's got grit. He enforced trade laws.
These are special trade safeguard rules called "Section 421" that the Chinese had agreed to obey to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are, however, laws that had gone unenforced by the U.S. in the past.
President Obama used these safeguard rules to impose tariffs on tires manufactured in China and imported into the U.S., following a recommendation by the International Trade Commission, an independent, bi-partisan group. The action made Obama the first president to execute sanctions under "Section 421."
The International Trade Commission recommended sanctions under "Section 421" four times before Obama took office. Nothing was done. The result was closed American factories, lost American manufacturing jobs, diminished American dreams.
Not this time though. Not this president. Obama showed he's made of tougher stuff. By placing tariffs on imported Chinese tires, President Obama put himself in the line of fire for the jobs of U.S. workers, for the preservation of U.S. manufacturing and, ultimately, for the stabilization of the U.S. economy.
Don't kid yourself. This is a battle. For the U.S. to maintain a viable economy, it must sustain a strong manufacturing base. It must make products of value that can be sold here and overseas — not just swap paper, some of it bogus on Wall Street.
The U.S. economy is under attack by countries engaging in unfair trade. In the past decade, we've lost 40,000 manufacturing facilities. In just the 21 months since the Great Recession began, more than 2 million manufacturing workers have lost their jobs, making their unemployment rate 11.8 percent, significantly higher than the 9.7 percent rate for the average worker.
That's what the Chinese tire case was all about. My union, the United Steelworkers (USW) filed it in April. We demanded penalties against China because it has smothered the U.S. market with tires. In 2004, its share of the U.S market was 4.7 percent. Four years later, it was 16.7 percent. In that time, the number of tires it sold rose from 14.6 million to 46 million. As a result, four U.S. tire manufacturing plants closed and 5,100 workers lost their jobs. Another three plants will close before year's end, throwing 3,000 more U.S. workers on the street.
We filed for relief under "Section 421" for two reasons. One is that it provides quicker relief than other trade remedies. The other is that China consented to its provisions. When China wanted to get into the World Trade Organization in 2000, it secured U.S. support by agreeing to abide by Section 421 until 2013. Section 421 was designed to protect the U.S. economy by providing ways to combat unfair and damaging surges of particular Chinese imports.
In the past, corporations had asked for Section 421 tariffs. And we had joined them. This time, not one tire company joined us, though, to be clear, Goodyear was openly neutral. By contrast, Ohio-based Cooper fought us. As did a collection of rag-tag import firms, one of which had nearly gone bankrupt after importing defective Chinese tires that had to be recalled after a series of crashes.
Cooper, in testimony to the International Trade Commission, reported that all of the tires it makes at its Chinese plant, under its licensing agreement with the Chinese, must be exported until May, 2012. So it has a clear financial interest in preventing tariffs on imported tires to the U.S. The tire import companies have the same interest. For them, it's about the money they make today, no matter how or where it's made. They've got no allegiance to the U.S. and don't care what happens to America's future manufacturing capability or financial stability.
President Obama, by contrast, is a patriot who sees the big picture and takes the long view. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio was right when he said after the tire tariffs were announced:
"Today the President courageously stood up and enforced fair trade rules that will save jobs and help our communities. Since China joined the World Trade Organization, American workers have not been assured that the government would defend them against unfair trade. With this "Section 421" decision, President Obama has taken the side of American workers and manufacturers.
"Rigorous trade enforcement is a major piece of our manufacturing and global competitiveness strategy. If American workers and manufacturers are going to compete in the global market, they need to have a government that uses trade enforcement tools, including the Section 421 safeguard."
American workers and American manufacturers can compete — when trade is fair. It's unfair when countries don't enforce their own labor regulations, including their own minimum wage laws. It's unfair when U.S. companies abide by strict environmental regulations and those in other countries openly pollute air and water. It's unfair when other countries allow their firms to steal trade secrets, when other countries demand that firms export all of their products for a certain number of years and when other countries manipulate the value of their currencies.
If trade laws aren't enforced, America will lose virtually all manufacturing and become nothing but a dumping ground — a place where the rest of the world sells the stuff it makes. Fewer and fewer citizens in that America would be able to buy stuff after the factories close and all the jobs that they support disappear.
In announcing the tire trade sanctions — tariffs of 35 percent for a year beginning Sept. 26, 30 percent for a year after that, and 25 percent in the final year — U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said, "Enforcing trade laws is key to maintaining an open and free trading system."
Unfair trade isn't free.
President Obama is bold enough to draw that line of distinction for America.


text:
I'm using my Mac to connect to an Active Directory drive.
When I was running on Leopard, it worked fine : I could open, modify and save files from the remote drive.
Last week I upgraded my computer to Snow Leopard (10.6.7) and since that, I'm having problems : I still can connect to the remove drives, I can open files, but when I want to save them I get the following error : "
The document mydoc.txt could not be saved."
But if I do
Save as and save the document under the very same name, then, it's working !
I have no idea what's wrong ! I tried to disconnect from the domain and reconnect, but I still have the problem.


text:
World Cup matches happen a day later for Guantánamo detainees
Guards revealed that detainees get to watch the World Cup — the fourth for many in U.S. custody — on a one-day delay to give staff time to scrub recordings of incendiary material.
Journalists were allowed to peer through one-way glass for a few minutes at a white-clad, cooperative captive sitting at a stainless steel picnic table, possibly watching an unseen television screen.
And an Army lieutenant in charge of the library and prisoner classes disclosed Thursday that a horticulture course was under way for the more than 70 compliant captives.
"I believe they'll start planting soon," said the officer whose name and face are banned from publication under six-month-old media restrictions.
The military pulled back the curtain on detention center operations during a war court week and granted 15 journalists a quick look inside two prison buildings. The access came near the end of a quirky week that included a half-day hearing in the Sept. 11 case and a half-hour arraignment of an alleged al-Qaida commander.
The tour, as the soldiers call it, was short on facts. Commanders wouldn't say how many of the 149 captives were tube fed that day. A Navy doctor couldn't explain why there was such a high ratio of medical staff to detainees — seven doctors and 94 corpsmen plus an assortment of nurses and physician's assistants.
But the commander of the prison, Navy Rear Adm. Richard Butler, assured from a podium set up at a prison compound not far from the psychiatric ward, that there was no basis for complaints aired in court this week by lawyers for Yemeni ex-CIA detainee Ramzi bin al Shibh that guards were subjecting him to sleep deprivation.
"None of those things are happening," he said.
The trip to the prison camp was the first during a week of war court hearings since a prison spokesman squired war court journalists around a $744,000 soccer field called Super Rec in February 2012 — and some Pentagon executives apparently recoiled at the coverage, pulling the plug on prison camp visits during military commissions weeks.
The war court hearings drew more than a dozen news organizations in the aftermath of the Taliban prisoner exchange.
TV news reporters were especially eager for details of what went on during the transfer of five Afghan indefinite detainees in exchange for Taliban prisoner Army Sgt. Bowe Berghdahl.
Not much happened, according to Butler.
"There was no disruption in the camps as a result of the movement," he said.
Butler did clarify, however, that it was neither expedience nor error that excluded International Red Cross representatives from interviewing the five Afghans before they left Guantánamo, a usual practice prior to a prisoner release. It was a decision, he said, made at the Pentagon.
Over at the prison hospital, while a Navy doctor in charge of the medical staff argued that tube feeding is humane, photojournalists jostled for shots of a restraint chair that has become emblematic of the massive hunger strike that erupted in the camps last year.
Not everyone who refuses to eat is tube fed every day, said the doctor, a commander. "Different people are allowed to have nasal rest days," he said. And hunger-striking prisoners who observe Monday and Thursday fasts for religious reasons aren't tube-fed on those days, he added.
Ramadan is around the corner, and the doctor assured that the medical staff will continue its practice of administering tube-feedings to hunger strikers after sunset in consideration of Islam's month-long holiday that requires daylight fasting.
The guards' description of detainees watching World Cup matches a day late was at odds with a talking point peddled by prison spokesmen earlier in the week that captives can feed their obsession with the sport they call football live on satellite feeds into the prison cells.
One prison staffer said the captives' television sets get free satellite stations — no for-charge cable programming — so they can sometimes tune into grainy games on foreign government stations. The DVDs they distribute are cleaner, captured from a certain sports channel.
At the library, the lieutenant in charge of detainee diversionary activity said the staff needed the day to check recordings of the matches in Brazil for three things — extremist material, "military technical stuff, we're not going to give them 'How to make a bomb,' " and material that might incite unrest.
So far, he said, all the World Cup games have gone into the prison uncensored.
This year marks the fourth World Cup in U.S. detention for many of the detainees, who started arriving on Jan. 11, 2002. But it's only the second that many captives can watch, according to a long-time prison staff member, who noted that the majority only got satellite television in time for FIFA 2010.