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Brother Relationship Essay
My brother doesn't know where I live. He doesn't know who my friends are. He doesn't know I have two new puppies. He doesn't know I am talking again to my daughter after 20 years. He doesn't know if Susan is still well and free from cancer. He doesn't know if I am well or sick, working or not, vigorous or an old man. I know nothing about him either. I have not talked to him in three years. I have not seen him in five. I have seen him only three times in the last 12 years, at my house in Florida in 2000, at our mother's funeral in 2002, and at my father's funeral in 2005. He doesn't know what I look like now, at 69, whether I have gained or lost weight, whether I have lost my hair like Dad, or still have it like him. But I know what he looks like because he has never aged. He looked old when he was young, but when he got old he looked the same. He's 83 now. With short hair like Brillo, a long horsey face, and small eyes (his friends called him "Moose"). A tall, sturdily built man with a vise-like handshake that made me wince, his reminder that he would always be stronger than me, like a solid oak unbending in the wind, while I would always be a sapling whipped by the wind until uprooted.
At my mother's funeral in 2002, my father, my brother, and I greeted mourners in the back of the church in our hometown of Fairfield, Conn. My brother, 6'4", wore his Ivy League suit from J. Press Clothiers in New Haven, and his wing-tipped cordovan shoes, as sturdy as Dutch clogs. My father, 5'6", at92, wore his navy blazer with brass buttons and his regimentally striped tie. I, 6'1", wore my black leather sport jacket, jeans, and work boots. I had long gray hair and a white beard. My father looked at me and said, "You look like a bum." My brother said, "Leave the kid alone, Dad. He came all this way." My brother always defended me to my father. That's why he always called me "the kid." It was a sign of affection. To him, I would always be "the kid"; it was his way of excusing my behavior among adults. And whether my brother realized it or not, it was a way to diminish me. Which was the problem, one of them anyway, which is also why, at 69, I have reconciled myself to the possibility that I will never see my brother again.
We have never called each other by our given names. We have called each other only "Brother" all these years. It is a half-truth. My brother is not my father's natural son. Our mother was married briefly when she was a teenager, and then divorced after she had a son. When my father married her years later, he promised to raise her son as his own. And he did. In fact, he was such a good father to my brother, better even than a natural father could ever have been, that for years it never dawned on me that my brother was only my half-brother even though we had different last names. I was 12 when I learned the truth. At the time, my brother had some small fame as a high-school basketball coach. Each week his name would appear in the local newspaper after yet another of his team's victories. One day I brought one of those newspaper stories to school. I showed it to my friends. "That's my brother," I said. My friends refused to believe me because we had different last names. I got hot, always my problem, and in a rage bloodied one of those boys' noses.
When I told my father about the fight, he told me the truth about my brother. He had a different father, with a different last name. My father had not changed my brother's last name to his own because my brother's natural father was a wealthy man. My father thought that by not changing my brother's last name he would make sure my brother would share in his father's wealth when he died. My father was a professional gambler, a con man, and a grifter, and our circumstances were always precarious, the house for sale after a week's losing streak betting on the Knicks, and he knew he'd never be able to give my brother the things he wanted for him. College. Law school. Respectability. Legitimacy. A career that would make an Italian-American father proud. He thought that by keeping my brother's real last name he could ensure such a future. When my brother was ready for college and my father had no money to send him, he journeyed to Massachusetts to talk to my brother's father, who had, for all intents and purposes, disowned his son. My father stood before that wealthy man, humbled, not my father's natural demeanor, and pleaded for the money to send his son to college and then law school. After he got it, my father returned home. It was late at night. From my bedroom I heard my father cursing the day my brother's father had ever been born while my mother said nothing.
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My brother was so grateful for such acts from my father, for my father's very real affection for him, that when he married he wrote my father a letter. He told him not to worry, that even though he had a wife now, that didn't mean he'd ever neglect his brother. When I was in my late teens my father thought I was old enough to be told about that letter. It was a sign of my brother's love for me, he said, with tears in his eyes. It did not dawn on my father, or my brother, that my brother's promise to repay my father for his affection made me only a piece of barter between them. I have always felt outside of what my father called his "special relationship" with my brother. It was a relationship I never questioned for years because there was so much about it that I didn't know until the day of my mother's funeral.
My brother slid out of the pew and went up to the pulpit to talk about my mother and father. He said my mother's full name. I never knew her middle name was June. He said my mother was always unflinchingly honest (I knew that). When my brother asked her as a boy why she always told people he was handsome, she said, "You were my son. What the hell else could I say?" The mourners laughed. My brother was never a handsome man. But what my brother didn't mention was that our mother always said I was the pretty son and my brother was the good son. That defined us all our lives. One day, in my 20s, I told my brother what a pain in the ass it was always being the "pretty son." He said, "I'd like to be 'the pretty son' just once before I die." I said, "Yeah, and I'd like to be 'the good son' just once before I die." We both laughed.
Then my brother told the mourners the story of my mother's and father's great romance. He did not mention his own natural father who had abandoned him and my mother shortly after he was born. That would be the basis for my brother's and my father's unshakable bond. My father was an orphan, abandoned at birth. He never saw his parents except one time, when, as a boy of 6, he was taken out of the orphanage where he spent the first 15 years of his life, to visit a young woman dying on a hospital bed, his mother. She asked him for forgiveness, told him she loved him, then died.
When my father left the orphanage he supported himself by gambling. He hustled pool, shot craps with loaded dice, played poker with marked cards, and past-posted horse races. The first and only woman he ever fell in love with was my mother. He was a teenager then, and she was four years older, a married woman with a son. My father hung around my mother like a lovesick steer. He ingratiated himself with her family, especially her father, a local club fighter. My father bankrolled that older man's fights and "waited patiently until my mother turned his way," said my brother. They were finally married when my brother was 9. I never knew that. I always thought they married when my brother was a baby.
My brother concluded his talk by saying he inherited my mother's and father's indomitable will, and then returned to his pew. Sitting there I thought it strange that all his reminiscences had to do with their life before me. My brother, my mother, and my father shared a past I was not a part of. I came late in lives that were already formed. My father told me that he was tired after raising my brother as his son, so he turned over my raising to him. My brother was always more of a father to me than a brother. All my life my father punctuated that point by telling me stories about my brother that were designed to show me how good my brother had always been to me, how I owed him the utmost gratitude and loyalty. My brother changed my diapers. He washed toilets to get money to buy me birthday presents. These were stories my father didn't need to tell me, stories I remembered on my own. When I was a Little League pitching star, my brother would come to our house for lunch and then have a catch with me on the sidewalk while my parents sat on the porch steps and applauded my pitches. I can still see him in my mind's eye, tall and horsey-faced, in his Gant button-down shirt and tie, going into his catcher's crouch and calling out, "C'mon, kid. Show me what you got." When I graduated from high school, pursued by a host of Major League teams, my brother traveled to those teams with me and negotiated my bonus contract. When I tried to repay him by buying him a car (he had an old Lincoln Continental at the time), he refused my offer. "It's your money, Brother. You earned it."
Is it any wonder, then, that all the years of my life I have loved my brother, more even than my parents? For years I tried, increasingly against my grain, to emulate him. As a boy I told my parents I wanted to be a lawyer, like my brother, and work at his law firm. My father was thrilled. Before I got married, at 19, I told my wife-to-be that I wanted to have six children, like my brother. We had five. And when I got a job as a high-school English teacher in my 20s, I went to school each day dressed in the tweeds and plaids of J. Press Clothiers, with ponderous wing-tipped cordovan shoes on my feet.
I loved my brother for many reasons, not only for the things he did for me, or because of my father's obsessive insistence that I love him. I loved him for what he was. Strong, manly, tough, disciplined, righteous, with an indomitable will. He was pedantic, too. He always spoke in certitudes that appealed to a young boy like me who was hungry for guidance, discipline, and order. My father had no time for me when I was growing up. And our life, because of his gambling, was always in a state of turmoil. It unnerved me, made me a fearful boy. My brother calmed me, the way one would a skittish colt. When I was in Little League he made me run wind sprints to stay in shape. It never occurred to me then that a 12-year-old didn't get out of shape. But that was not the point. It was my brother's way of telling me that a man had to work hard at the things he wanted. When I was in my late teens I helped him carry a big wing chair up to his attic. It wouldn't fit through the narrow attic doorway. We struggled and struggled until finally I measured the chair and the doorway. I said, "Brother, the chair's 36 inches wide, the doorway's 33. No way." But he insisted. Finally, I left. He called me two hours later. "As usual you quit too soon, brother," he said. "I got it up by myself." A few days later he admitted that he got the chair through the doorway only after he cut off its legs. We both laughed.
When I was a freshman on my high-school baseball team and my coach refused to pitch me in a game, I told my brother I was going to quit the team. He talked me out of it. "A man never quits," he said. "You'll just set a pattern of behavior that will haunt you." So I didn't.
The one story about my brother that captured the kind of person he was, was one my parents told me often. The moral of this story—stories in my family always had a moral—was what a man my brother was, even at 21. He was standing by the railroad tracks waiting for the train that would take him back to law school when he felt a hand in his back pocket pulling out his wallet. Without thinking, he whirled around, his fist shooting out, smashing the pickpocket's nose. The pickpocket fell to the ground, blood spurting everywhere, an old man, a bum. My brother was so overcome with guilt, he helped that bum up, gave him his handkerchief to stanch the blood, then gave him all the bills he had in his wallet. That story always thrilled me, the hardness of it, and the softness of it, both encapsulating all the mysteries of what it meant to be a man.
My brother used to take me in my stroller around the neighborhood when I was a baby. Mothers stopped to coo and swoon over the beautiful girl with the golden curls. My brother immediately took me to a barbershop for my first haircut. When I began to talk as a child, and called my mother "Mommy," he taught me to call her "Mom" or "Ma," like a man. He even tried to teach me how to shake hands, firmly, like he did, but I could never match his vise-like grip.
"He was always trying to make a man of you," my father told me once, "even then." That's why, I thought, my brother was so hard on me as I got older. When I struck out 19 of 21 batters in a high-school baseball game, I waited outside my house for my brother to stop by and praise me. He pulled up in his big Lincoln, rolled down the window, and summoned me. I leaned into the car and he said, "You could have struck out all 21 yesterday, but you choked."
When I played on his high-school basketball team, he insisted I call him coach, not Brother during the season. He called me by my last name during practices. He belittled me in front of my teammates while, at the same time, he devised plays for my beautiful jump shot. And when I scored with that jump shot, the moral of my success was never my talent but the brilliance of his plays, for me, his brother. In this way, he not only shared in my talent, but he created it, and controlled it. He told me once that the great frustration in his life was that, "I never had any talent, like you, Brother." So he coached others. "Those that can't, teach," he said.
I sprained my ankle before an important game in my junior year and told my brother I didn't think I could play the next game. He accused me of "dogging it; show some guts." So I played on that painfully sprained ankle and scored 30 points by an act of sheer will. Still we lost. After the game, my brother accused me of being selfish for playing hurt "just so you could score your points."
When I was in my early 20s and I had begun to get fat, he told me that getting fat was a sign I lacked character. Years later, when I took up bodybuilding and became a muscular 30-year-old, and my brother, in his mid-40s had begun to put on weight, he told me that my obsession with my body was unmanly, "a woman's vanity."
At first, I thought these were games my brother played with me to keep me sharp, on my toes. But over the years I began to realize it was his way of making manhood elusive to me. It shifted with whims I was never privy to. Which was the point. I would never be a man, in his eyes, or mine, as long as he kept shifting its definition.
When, approaching 20, I was about to get married, my brother summoned me to his office for "a little talk." He told me that sex was only for procreation, never pleasure, because then it would give women power over men. Men had to rule their families, and with that rule came responsibilities. He had to make as much money as possible so his family would feel secure. His talk disturbed me. It was the first time I ever disagreed with anything he said. "What about happiness?" I said. He waved the back of his hand in disgust and said, "It isn't a man's place in life to be happy. It's to be responsible."
That talk was the beginning of a change in our relationship. I got married, left baseball, had children, became a schoolteacher, and dreamed of someday becoming a writer. But most of all, I began to formulate my own ideas of what it meant to be a man, and usually those ideas conflicted with my brother's. Now, when we met for our little lunches at a diner in town, I no longer just sat there, absorbing his monologues. I disagreed with him, got hot, argued, stood up, my face flushed, and stormed out. He'd call me the moment I got home. "Your problem, Brother," he said, "is that you refuse to accept life's answer." I shot back, "I don't even know the fucking question."
After one of our many arguments, my brother looked at me with a knowing smile and said, "Why do you always have to be better than me, Brother?" I was dumbfounded. Better? I was just different. Why did he need my eternal acquiescence? Over the years, I began to realize my brother created these little scenarios at lunch on purpose to rouse my anger. It was his way of fulfilling the role Dad had prescribed for him. The older, wiser brother trying to make a man of the young, hot-tempered, immature brother. He was, after all, always trying to make a man of me, precisely up to that point, but never beyond, at which I would become independent of him.
It was a crushing blow for my father to see his two sons begin to drift apart. "After all your brother's done for you," he said to me. He tried to punish me into reconciling with my brother. When he found out I had been having affairs with other women, he shook his head in disgust. "A real womanizer!" he said, with some satisfaction, as if my behavior proved some point about me he'd always believed. I just looked at him and said, "If it had been my brother, could you have called him a womanizer?"
My father looked truly pained. "I could never do that," he said. "It would hurt him." Then, after a long pause, he said, "Why have you always been jealous of my special relationship with your brother?"
"I'm not jealous. I just think it's sick."
Dad was most crushed by my decision not to become a lawyer and join my brother's firm. I didn't tell my father that it was my brother who discouraged me from becoming a lawyer. He hated the law.
"Then why'd you become a lawyer?" I said to my brother.
He gave me an ethereal smile, turned up his palms to heaven as if presenting an offering, and said, "For Dad."
He shook his head at my ignorance and said, "There's more to it than you know, Brother."
I became a writer in my late 20s, and through my writing I began to formulate my own ideas on how to live a life, often in contradiction to my brother's unbending, joyless life. My brother and I had fewer and fewer conversations. I now tried to avoid his calls, his constant attempts to grind me down to his will, and that's what it had become. A battle of wills. His maddeningly soothing voice, my furious anger, the receiver slammed down. Finally, he stopped calling, relieved, it seemed to me in my 30s, that he no longer had to fulfill the little charade of our brotherhood after all these years. God, how he must have hated always being the loving brother! How he must have hated the terrible pressure Dad, and I, unwittingly, burdened him with! How he must have hated … no, I will never believe that … how he must have resented me. Then, he had his nervous breakdown.
I was in my mid-30s, in a motel room in Orlando, Fla., with a woman who was not my wife, when my wife called to tell me the news. My brother was in a private sanitarium.
"Everyone's hysterical," she said. "Your father said it should have been you. They want you to come home and make it go away."
I flew home the next day and took a cab from the airport to the sanitarium. The cab drove up a long, winding driveway shaded by maples trees. I saw a picturesque pond with swans floating on it, then a vast, perfectly manicured green lawn. The sanitarium was set on a hill, a huge, white, old New England Colonial. I got out and went inside. While I waited for my brother's psychiatrist in his office, I thought to myself, all those years of unbending certitudes must have finally weighted him down. What I had admired so much as a boy, I realized now, had been for my brother an unbearable, debilitating cross he had to bear. It was my fault somehow. I should have always let him be right with me. Why did I have to argue with him, over what? I should have kept my thoughts to myself and just acquiesced to my brother's certitudes as I had as a boy.
The psychiatrist came into the office and sat down behind his desk. He was spectrally thin, with taut, pale skin and a Mephistophelian beard. "Someone has to sign these papers to commit him," he said. He pushed the papers toward me. "We can only keep him 10 days involuntarily. No one else in his family seems to want to take the responsibility."
"I'd like to see him first," I said. He looked annoyed.
"If you insist. But be prepared. He's not the brother you knew." He led me down a narrow hallway and ushered me into a bare room with a wooden floor covered with linoleum. He stayed at the door. "It's better if he doesn't see me," he said. "I seem to disturb him." He closed the door behind him and I waited. The room was completely bare. No plants, pictures on the wall, chairs, nothing. Another door opened and my brother entered the room. His eyes were glazed over as if he had been given a sedative. He saw me and smiled and held out his arms.
"Brother," I said. He hugged me, and I smelled his smell, the smell of the brother I had once slept in the same bed with when I was a child and he was a man. He'd made me scratch his back while he told me stories about "Jimmy and the Ghost" until I fell asleep. The next morning, I asked him what had happened to Jimmy. "Wait until tonight," he said. "I'll tell you tonight." But the story never ended.
I began to cry. My brother gripped my shoulders in a vise-like grip and held me at arm's length.
"Why, Brother," he said. "What's wrong?"
"I love you so much, Brother."
He smiled at me, and nodded. "Yes, Brother," he said. "That's always been the problem, hasn't it?"
I was no longer crying when I walked back down that narrow corridor to the psychiatrist's office. He was sitting behind his desk. He looked up and said, "I told you you wouldn't recognize him." He pushed the papers across the desk toward me. I looked at them and saw, in my mind's eye, my brother, my father, and that delicate false world they had created for each other. Like a house of cards I could finally destroy. But I realized what I had thought was sick all these years wasn't sick; it was perfectly understandable. My father deferred to my brother and was hard on me because I was his natural son. His only blood relation in all the world. My brother had been rejected by his natural father. My father knew how that felt. Alone. Unwanted. Adrift in life. He was determined my brother would never feel that way, too, even if it had to be at my expense. It was their common bond that shaped, or misshaped, their relationship, and, in the process excluded me. So what? I was supposed to know these things. I was supposed to know that despite everything these two men loved me in their way. Everything else I felt was the self-pity of a boy who'd never become a man. A pampered boy who would never realize how blessed he was to have had not one but two fathers.
"He's not the brother you know," the psychiatrist said.
I looked at the paper, then at him. "Yes, he is." And then I left.
When my brother returned home, he was never the same again. He retreated into the bosom of his family. His wife, his children, his grandchildren. He sat at his kitchen table, like the potentate of a small, diminished kingdom. His family acquiesced to him out of fear that if they didn't they might push him again over the edge of sanity. It was painful to watch, for me at least. My brother's life became smaller as he aged, while my life became bigger. Some small fame as a writer. Recognition. Our roles had been irrevocably reversed. So I removed myself from his life so that my presence would not force him to confront what must have pained him.
He didn't seem to mind our long absences. And, on those rare occasions when we did talk, I tried to defer to him. It was a false relationship now, tiptoeing around the unspoken. I think he knew what I was doing, condescending to him, and it must have pained him, "the kid," who had seen him at his weakest moment, now treating him as if he was the child.
Over the years of our parents' deaths, and our increasing old age, we rarely spoke or saw each other. For both of us, it was painful to have our brother in our lives. So we absented ourselves from each other's lives. But we have never absented ourselves from our brother's love. Of that, of all the things in my life, I am most sure.
By the time you read this, my elder brother, Jeff, will have arrived on his annual visit from his home in New Orleans. I am looking forward to it immensely. (I have a younger brother, Jack, of whom I am equally fond, but he lives only a few streets away from me, so the novelty value is not so high.)
I have always got on well with Jack but, to be frank, I used to detest my big brother. My resentment lay rooted in my feelings of rejection from him when I was growing up, as a rather insecure, nerdy kid. Like most big brothers, he wasn't too keen on his whiny little appendage, only 20 months younger, and didn't bother hiding the fact.
As a teenager Jeff was (secretly) my hero – cool, good-looking and charming, which is why his indifference to me cut so deep. Tension between us continued up until the year my mother died, in 1988, when we were in our 30s. After that, we began to get closer, until eventually we became firm friends. I now can't imagine life without him, even though he lives 4,500 miles away.
Why am I telling this story? Because it is not an unusual one – or at least the first part isn't. Sibling rivalry is a profound part of growing up. Many developmental psychologists now believe that whereas once the father, then the mother, was seen as key to a child's growth as a personality, it is actually the sibling – your first "peer group" as it were – who determines most strongly the character traits you are going to develop.
Most often this happens in a sort of inversion. Siblings – at least when there are only two of you, close together (Jack came 13 years after me) – influence each other most often by defining themselves as not being the other.
This explains why when two people who share 50% of their genes, and more or less identical family environments, so often end up with radically different personalities.
When I was writing my novel about brothers, Under the Same Stars, I did a great deal of research about siblings, and was surprised to find that hatred – of the kind that I felt as a child – was extremely common among brothers and sisters. That dynamic could continue for a lifetime.
Although the hatred is long gone, the importance of my relationship with Jeff is underlined by the fact that a lifetime after I had shared a house with him, I was writing a book which, in essence, was a coded and fictionalised examination of our own relationship.
The book ends with a cataclysmic revelation about the two brothers' childhood, followed by reconciliation between the two. That theme of reconciliation is the reason I am writing this column.
Because siblings are simply too precious to waste. They are your longest lifelong memory bank, your shared history, the person who may know you better than anyone else (one of the reasons they are so good at getting under your skin). They are so deeply part of your identity that they cannot be erased, even by their absence.
Many siblings grow apart and stop seeing one another altogether. I think that is a terrible pity, and if anyone out there reading this is estranged from a brother or a sister, I would urge them to make efforts to change that situation before it is too late. If Jeff and I can become so close, after half a lifetime of resentment and harsh words, you can do it. Yes, it may end in failure – some rifts are too deep to heal. But if you can find a way, you will never regret it. Siblings are simply too precious to throw away – because, even more so than your parents, they helped to make you who you are.


text:
While millennials seem like prime candidates for ad industry employees — they're young, hip, and know how to Tweet/Pin/Instagram/Facebook the hell out of something — there's one con to hiring a fresh batch of college graduates: their attitudes are the worst.
While many millennials are brilliant, focused, and innovative, Brian Morrissey at Digiday collected hilarious stories from ad agency execs about what makes most of them simply terrible employees.
Those and other advertisers' quotes explain why millennials make their bosses want to go into early retirement:
- "Only at the agency a few months upon graduation, a young lady walked into my office and told me her dad thought that she was underpaid," an anonymous agency exec told Digiday. "I replied that her dad should call me so that we could discuss the matter. He never called."
- "You do have to speak to them a little bit like a therapist on television might speak to a patient," Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR North America, told CBS News. "You can't be harsh. You cannot tell them you're disappointed in them. You can't really ask them to live and breathe the company. Because they're living and breathing themselves and that keeps them very busy."
- "They're a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately generation," another ad exec told Digiday. "A paycheck doesn't seem to count as part of that what you have done. You have to give up so much more time to reviewing and patting them on the back. I can't imagine ever asking for a performance review unless it was a way to up my salary, but I'm constantly asked for them. You do realize it's only been four months since your last one, right?"
- Andrew Leavitt, 26, provided the Wall Street Journal with a quote that's evidence of why millennials are the worst. Leavitt worked as an account planner at Ogilvy & Mather in 2010 but left shortly thereafter — too many status reports and client calls. Although he's happier at CreativeFeed, it appears as if he's already planning his next move. "I mean, what kind of millennial would work for the same company their whole life?"
- An agency exec told Digiday a similar lament: "There's a level of career impatience that used to be reserved for the "kids that were too smart for their grade," justifying misbehavior with boredom. Now the entire grade feels too smart for their grade — and we have to manage that."
- While some are incredibly hardworking, Salzman noted that others are simply incorrigible. "It's their way or the highway," Salzman noted about the incorrigible sect of millennials. "The rest of us are old, redundant, should be retired. How dare we come in, anyone over 30. Not only can't be trusted, can't be counted upon to be, sort of, coherent."
- And finally, "one of our new hires sent me an email requesting dual monitors and that one of them be a large one. I simply forwarded the email to that girl's manager suggesting that she come check out my dinky 15-inch monitor that I'm rocking."
Read other funny examples on Digiday.
If you have any agency horror stories, send them to firstname.lastname@example.com.

subset: commoncrawl


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After Two Years of R&D, Company Reveals Sophisticated New Technology to Disable the Capability of Malware and Bots to Attack Your Website
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 21, 2014) - Shape Security today launched a revolutionary new product to protect websites against the most dangerous cyber attacks. The ShapeShifter™ is a network security appliance that prevents website breaches by immediately disabling the capability of malware, bots and other scripted attacks to interact with your web application.
"For years, attackers have used automated malware to conduct huge numbers of attacks on computer systems quickly and cheaply," said Bob Blakley, director of security innovation at Citigroup. "By taking a technique -- polymorphic code -- out of the attackers' own playbook, Shape turns the cost equation back around in the defender's favor."
The revolutionary technology
The key to being able to block attacks on websites from malware and other scripts is a technique called real-time polymorphism. Malware has long used polymorphism, rewriting its code every time a new machine was infected, to easily evade antivirus detection systems. Shape is now reversing this advantage, using polymorphic code as a powerful new foundational tool for website defense. Shape has invented patent-pending technology to be able to implement real-time polymorphism, or dynamically changing code, on any website, to remove the static elements that botnets and malware depend on for their attacks.
"Modern cybercriminals employ sophisticated attacks that operate at large scale while easily evading detection by security defenses," said Derek Smith, CEO of Shape Security. "The ShapeShifter focuses on deflection, not detection. Rather than guessing about traffic and trying to intercept specific attacks based on signatures or heuristics, we allow websites to simply disable the automation that makes these attacks possible."
When a ShapeShifter protects a website, instead of encountering an application with fixed elements that are trivial to program an attack against, cybercriminals now face the daunting task of making their malware interact with a web application that has become a moving target, constantly rewriting itself. All of this happens transparently, with legitimate users continuing to see the original, unchanged user interface.
"Shape is operating on a previously inaccessible layer of the security problem: the fact that everyone has a user interface, but user interfaces are inherently vulnerable to attacks from malware, bots and scripts," said Robert Lentz, former chief information security officer of the United States Department of Defense and member of the board of directors of FireEye. "By preventing automation against a website's user interface, Shape's technology allows enterprises to block dozens of attack categories, such as account takeover, application DDoS, and Man-in-the-Browser, with a single product. This is not only a powerful new tool for enterprises but a potentially disruptive technology for multiple sectors of the cybersecurity industry."
"The industry has long needed a botwall -- a new tier of your security architecture that blocks attacks from bots, malware and scripts, which are the source or enabler of nearly all breaches," said Ted Schlein, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "Shape has successfully created the world's first botwall. The Internet badly needs this. This is a game-changing technology."
About Shape
Shape Security is led by a world-class team of former leaders from Google, the Pentagon, VMware, Cisco, Mozilla and Palo Alto Networks. The company has raised $26M in Series A and B funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, Google Ventures, Wing Venture Partners, Allegis Capital, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures, and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem. The company is currently accepting product demo and sales requests at www.shapesecurity.com.
Contact Information:
Media Contact
Christine McKeown
(415) 963-4174x11


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Distance learning, also called distance education, e-learning, and online learning, form of education in which the main elements include physical separation of teachers and students during instruction and the use of various technologies to facilitate student-teacher and student-student communication. Distance learning traditionally has focused on nontraditional students, such as full-time workers, military personnel, and nonresidents or individuals in remote regions who are unable to attend classroom lectures. However, distance learning has become an established part of the educational world, with trends pointing to ongoing growth. In U.S. higher education alone, more than 5.6 million university students were enrolled in at least one online course in the autumn of 2009, up from 1.6 million in 2002.
An increasing number of universities provide distance learning opportunities. A pioneer in the field is the University of Phoenix, which was founded in Arizona in 1976 and by the first decade of the 21st century had become the largest private school in the world, with more than 400,000 enrolled students. It was one of the earliest adopters of distance learning technology, although many of its students spend some time in classrooms on one of its dozens of campuses in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. A precise figure for the international enrollment in distance learning is unavailable, but the enrollment at two of the largest public universities that heavily utilize distance learning methods gives some indication: in the early 21st century the Indira Gandhi National Open University, headquartered in New Delhi, had an enrollment in excess of 1.5 million students, and the China Central Radio and TV University, headquartered in Beijing, had more than 500,000 students.
Students and institutions embrace distance learning with good reason. Universities benefit by adding students without having to construct classrooms and housing, and students reap the advantages of being able to work where and when they choose. Public-school systems offer specialty courses such as small-enrollment languages and Advanced Placement classes without having to set up multiple classrooms. In addition, homeschooled students gain access to centralized instruction.
Characteristics of distance learning
Various terms have been used to describe the phenomenon of distance learning. Strictly speaking, distance learning (the student's activity) and distance teaching (the teacher's activity) together make up distance education. Common variations include e-learning or online learning, used when the Internet is the medium; virtual learning, which usually refers to courses taken outside a classroom by primary- or secondary-school pupils (and also typically using the Internet); correspondence education, the long-standing method in which individual instruction is conducted by mail; and open learning, the system common in Europe for learning through the "open" university (see below).
Four characteristics distinguish distance learning. First, distance learning is by definition carried out through institutions; it is not self-study or a nonacademic learning environment. The institutions may or may not offer traditional classroom-based instruction as well, but they are eligible for accreditation by the same agencies as those employing traditional methods.
Second, geographic separation is inherent in distance learning, and time may also separate students and teachers. Accessibility and convenience are important advantages of this mode of education. Well-designed programs can also bridge intellectual, cultural, and social differences between students.
Third, interactive telecommunications connect individuals within a learning group and with the teacher. Most often, electronic communications, such as e-mail, are used, but traditional forms of communication, such as the postal system, may also play a role. Whatever the medium, interaction is essential to distance education, as it is to any education. The connections of learners, teachers, and instructional resources become less dependent on physical proximity as communications systems become more sophisticated and widely available; consequently, the Internet, mobile phones, and e-mail have contributed to the rapid growth in distance learning.
Finally, distance education, like any education, establishes a learning group, sometimes called a learning community, which is composed of students, a teacher, and instructional resources—i.e., the books, audio, video, and graphic displays that allow the student to access the content of instruction. Social networking on the Internet promotes the idea of community building. On sites such as Facebook and YouTube, users construct profiles, identify members ("friends") with whom they share a connection, and build new communities of like-minded persons. In the distance learning setting, such networking can enable students' connections with each other and thereby reduce their sense of isolation.
Early history of distance learning
Correspondence schools in the 19th century
Geographical isolation from schools and dispersed religious congregations spurred the development of religious correspondence education in the United States in the 19th century. For example, the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly in western New York state began in 1874 as a program for training Sunday school teachers and church workers. From its religious origins, the program gradually expanded to include a nondenominational course of directed home reading and correspondence study. Its success led to the founding of many similar schools throughout the United States in the chautauqua movement.
It was the demand by industry, government, and the military for vocational training, however, that pushed distance learning to new levels. In Europe, mail-order courses had been established by the middle of the 19th century, when the Society of Modern Languages in Berlin offered correspondence courses in French, German, and English. In the United States, companies such as Strayer's Business College of Baltimore City (now Strayer University), which was founded in Maryland in 1892 and included mail-order correspondence courses, were opened to serve the needs of business employers, especially in the training of women for secretarial duties. Most nonreligious mail-order correspondence courses emphasized instruction in spelling, grammar, business letter composition, and bookkeeping, but others taught everything from developing esoteric mental powers to operating a beauty salon. The clear leader in correspondence course instruction in American higher education at the end of the 19th century was the University of Chicago, where William Rainey Harper employed methods that he had used as director of the Chautauqua educational system for several years starting in 1883.
Early educational theories and technologies
Behaviourism and constructivism
During the first half of the 20th century, the use of educational technology in the United States was heavily influenced by two developing schools of educational philosophy. Behaviourism, led by the American psychologist John B. Watson and later by B.F. Skinner, discounted all subjective mental phenomena (e.g., emotions and mental images) in favour of objective and measurable behaviour. The constructive approach arose from ideas on progressive education advanced by the American philosopher John Dewey and others, who emphasized the education of the "whole child" to achieve intellectual, physical, and emotional growth and argued that learning is best accomplished by having children perform tasks rather than memorize facts. Constructivism, whose leading figure was the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, asserted that learning arises from building mental models based on experience. These theories led to different techniques for the use of media in the classroom, with behaviourism concentrating on altering student behaviour and constructivism focusing on process- and experience-based learning.
Technological aides to education
One of the first technological aides to education was the lantern slide (e.g., the Linnebach lantern), which was used in the 19th century in chautauqua classes and lyceum schools for adults and in traveling public-lecture tent shows throughout the world to project images on any convenient surface; such visual aides proved particularly useful in educating semiliterate audiences. By the start of the 20th century, learning theories had begun concentrating on visual approaches to instruction, in contrast to the oral recitation practices that still dominated traditional classrooms.
The first significant technological innovation was made by the American inventor Thomas Edison, who devised the tinfoil phonograph in 1877. This device made possible the first language laboratories (facilities equipped with audio or audiovisual devices for use in language learning). After World War I, university-owned radio stations became commonplace in the United States, with more than 200 such stations broadcasting recorded educational programs by 1936.
Edison was also one of the first to produce films for the classroom. Many colleges and universities experimented with educational film production before World War I, and training films were used extensively during the war to educate a diverse and often illiterate population of soldiers in a range of topics from fighting technique to personal hygiene. Improvements in filmmaking, in particular the ability to produce "talkies," were put to use just before and during World War II for technical training and propaganda purposes. While the most artistically acclaimed propaganda production may have been Triumph of the Will (1935), one of a series of films made by Leni Riefenstahl during the 1930s for the German Nazi government, similar films were produced by all the major belligerents. In the United States the army commissioned Hollywood film director Frank Capra to produce seven films, the widely acclaimed series Why We Fight (1942–45), in order to educate American soldiers on what was at stake.
Instructional television courses began to be developed in the 1950s, first at the University of Iowa. By the 1970s community colleges all across the United States had created courses for broadcast on local television stations. Various experiments in computer-based education also began in the 1950s, such as programmed or computer-assisted instruction, in which computers are used to present learning materials consisting of text, audio, and video and to evaluate students' progress. Much of the early research was conducted at IBM, where the latest theories in cognitive science were incorporated in the application of educational technology. The next major advancement in educational technology came with the linking of computers through the Internet, which enabled the development of modern distance learning.
Modern distance learning
Web-based courses
By the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of all two-year and four-year degree-granting institutions of higher education in the United States offered distance education courses, primarily through the Internet. With more than 100,000 different online courses to choose from, about one-quarter of American students took at least one such course each term. Common target populations for distance learning include professionals seeking recertification, workers updating employment skills, individuals with disabilities, and active military personnel.
Although the theoretical trend beginning in the 1990s seemed to be toward a stronger reliance on video, audio, and other multimedia, in practice most successful programs have predominately utilized electronic texts and simple text-based communications. The reasons for this are partly practical—individual instructors often bear the burden of producing their own multimedia—but also reflect an evolving understanding of the central benefits of distance learning. It is now seen as a way of facilitating communication between teachers and students, as well as between students, by removing the time constraints associated with sharing information in traditional classrooms or during instructors' office hours. Similarly, self-paced software educational systems, though still used for certain narrow types of training, have limited flexibility in responding and adapting to individual students, who typically demand some interaction with other humans in formal educational settings.
Modern distance learning courses employ Web-based course-management systems that incorporate digital reading materials, podcasts (recorded sessions for electronic listening or viewing at the student's leisure), e-mail, threaded (linked) discussion forums, chat rooms, and test-taking functionality in virtual (computer-simulated) classrooms. Both proprietary and open-source systems are common. Although most systems are generally asynchronous, allowing students access to most features whenever they wish, synchronous technologies, involving live video, audio, and shared access to electronic documents at scheduled times, are also used. Shared social spaces in the form of blogs, wikis (Web sites that can be modified by all classroom participants), and collaboratively edited documents are also used in educational settings but to a lesser degree than similar spaces available on the Internet for socializing.
Web-based services
Alongside the growth in modern institutional distance learning has come Web-based or facilitated personal educational services, including e-tutoring, e-mentoring, and research assistance. In addition, there are many educational assistance companies that help parents choose and contact local tutors for their children while the companies handle the contracts. The use of distance learning programs and tutoring services has increased particularly among parents who homeschool their children. Many universities have some online tutoring services for remedial help with reading, writing, and basic mathematics, and some even have online mentoring programs to help doctoral candidates through the dissertation process. Finally, many Web-based personal-assistant companies offer a range of services for adults seeking continuing education or professional development.
Open universities
One of the most prominent types of educational institutions that makes use of distance learning is the open university, which is open in the sense that it admits nearly any adult. Since the mid-20th century the open university movement has gained momentum around the world, reflecting a desire for greater access to higher education by various constituencies, including nontraditional students, such as the disabled, military personnel, and prison inmates.
The origin of the movement can be traced to the University of London, which began offering degrees to external students in 1836. This paved the way for the growth of private correspondence colleges that prepared students for the University of London's examinations and enabled them to study independently for a degree without formally enrolling in the university. In 1946 the University of South Africa, headquartered in Pretoria, began offering correspondence courses, and in 1951 it was reconstituted to provide degree courses for external students only. A proposal in Britain for a "University of the Air" gained support in the early 1960s, which led to the founding of the Open University in 1971 in the so-called new town of Milton Keynes. By the end of the 1970s the university had 25,000 students, and it has since grown to annual enrollments in the hundreds of thousands. Open universities have spread across the world and are characterized as "mega-universities" because their enrollments may exceed hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of students in countries such as India, China, and Israel.
As one of the most successful nontraditional institutions with a research component, the Open University is a major contributor to both the administrative and the pedagogical literature in the field of open universities. The university relies heavily on prepared materials and a tutor system. The printed text was originally the principal teaching medium in most Open University courses, but this changed somewhat with the advent of the Internet and computers, which enabled written assignments and materials to be distributed via the Web. For each course, the student is assigned a local tutor, who normally makes contact by telephone, mail, or e-mail to help with queries related to the academic materials. Students may also attend local face-to-face classes run by their tutor, and they may choose to form self-help groups with other students. Tutor-graded assignments and discussion sessions are the core aspects of this educational model. The tutors and interactions between individual students are meant to compensate for the lack of face-to-face lectures in the Open University. To emphasize the tutorial and individualized-learning aspects of its method, the Open University prefers to describe it as "supported open learning" rather than distance learning.
Academic issues and future directions
From the start, correspondence courses acquired a poor academic reputation, especially those provided by for-profit entities. As early as 1926, as a study commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation found, there was widespread fraud among correspondence schools in the United States, and there were no adequate standards to protect the public. While the situation was later improved by the introduction of accrediting agencies that set standards for the delivery of distance learning programs, there has always been concern about the quality of the learning experience and the verification of student work. Additionally, the introduction of distance learning in traditional institutions raised fears that technology will someday completely eliminate real classrooms and human instructors.
Because many distance learning programs are offered by for-profit institutions, distance learning has become associated with the commercialization of higher education. Generally, critics of this trend point to the potential exploitation of students who do not qualify for admission to traditional colleges and universities, the temptation in for-profit schools to lower academic standards in order to increase revenue, and a corporate administrative approach that emphasizes "market models" in educational curricula, or the designing of courses and curricula to appeal to a larger demographic in order to generate more institutional revenue—all of which point to a lowering of academic standards.
Distance learning, whether at for-profit universities or at traditional ones, utilizes two basic economic models designed to reduce labour costs. The first model involves the substitution of labour with capital, whereas the second is based on the replacement of faculty with cheaper labour. Proponents of the first model have argued that distance learning offers economies of scale by reducing personnel costs after an initial capital investment for such things as Web servers, electronic texts and multimedia supplements, and Internet programs for interacting with students. However, many institutions that have implemented distance learning programs through traditional faculty and administrative structures have found that ongoing expenses associated with the programs may actually make them more expensive for the institution than traditional courses. The second basic approach, a labour-for-labour model, is to divide the faculty role into the functions of preparation, presentation, and assessment and to assign some of the functions to less-expensive workers. Open universities typically do this by forming committees to design courses and hiring part-time tutors to help struggling students and to grade papers, leaving the actual classroom instruction duties, if any, to the professors. These distance learning models suggest that the largest change in education will come in altered roles for faculty and vastly different student experiences.
The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the first and second decades of the 21st century represented a major shift in direction for distance learning. MOOCs are characterized by extremely large enrollments—in the tens of thousands—the use of short videotaped lectures, and peer assessments. The open-online-course format had been used early on by some universities, but it did not become widely popular until the emergence of MOOC providers such as Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and Udacity. Although the initial purpose of MOOCs was to provide informal learning opportunities, there have been experiments in using this format for degree credit and certifications from universities.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
education: Alternative forms of education…education controlled by central governments, distance learning and other technological developments have opened the possibilities of learning in multiple ways at various sites—all under the control of individual learners. Technologies that promise to bring people together to share knowledge and life experiences, conversely, may also lead to the isolation of…
Education, discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships). Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a…
University, institution of higher education, usually comprising a college of liberal arts and sciences and graduate and professional schools and having the authority to confer degrees in various fields of study. A university differs from a college in that it is usually larger, has a broader curriculum, and offers graduate…
University of Phoenix
University of Phoenix, for-profit institution of higher learning based in Phoenix, Arizona, that offers classes primarily online, though it also has campuses and learning centres. The largest university of its kind in the United States, it spurred the rise of for-profit postsecondary schools in the late 1990s. It is owned…
Correspondence educationCorrespondence education, method of providing education for nonresident students, primarily adults, who receive lessons and exercises through the mails or some other device and, upon completion, return them for analysis, criticism, and grading. It is extensively used by business and industry in…
More About Distance learning2 references found in Britannica articles
Assorted References
- higher education developments


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Advanced Article Marketing – 13 Steps To Get Major Mileage From Your Articles
I've seen some people wondering if article marketing is still effective traffic generation strategy so I figured today would be an excellent time to revisit the topic of article marketing.
I was feeling a little lazy at the keyboard today, so the video or the accompanying podcast are both going to be a lot more illuminating and detailed than the straight up text. (Perhaps I'll get the video transcribed for you at some point, but for now you'll have to survive with what I've got for you here.)
The bottom line is that yes, it still works, but if you're taking a "quantity over quality" approach, you're doing it wrong.
These days if you really want to get your articles noticed, you need to create a high quality article. If you're not going to write quality content, then you can skip the rest of this guide, you'll find it to be entirely too much work.
Follow these 13 steps (yes, 13!) and you'll find your articles getting major distribution, bringing in traffic, links, high search engine rankings to your website.
Step 1) Write your article.
Step 2) Create two more versions of that article. Here's a video on how to do just that since it's much easier just to show you how to do it than try to write it out.
Step 3) Put whichever article version you feel is best on your blog. This needs to be your own domain name, by the way – not some blogger domains – get your own.
Step 4) Submit another version of your article to Ezine Articles. Ezine Articles doesn't like spun content so just use one of the other two complete versions of your article.
Step 5) Record a video based on the article topic. The easiest way to do this is to simply fire up Powerpoint or some other slideshow software and essentially read the article while displaying bullet points. You won't win any awards for your presentation skills, but if that's what it takes to get your video done, then do it. You can use software like Camtasia, Camstudio and Screenflow (for mac users) to record your computer screen in video format.
Step 6) Distribute the video. Turning your videos into multimedia presentations is really going to enhance your text… even if it says the same thing! Now we'll take these videos and put them on video sharing sites. Youtube can be all you ever need in terms of video sharing, but since there are a lot of video sharing sites out there, we may as well use them, right? Go on over to TubeMogul and get yourself a free account to distribute your videos. Personally, I use TrafficGeyser for video distribution, but it runs $97/month and really isn't necessary until you start seeing money come in the door from your efforts.
Bonus: If you use Traffic Geyser, they now have an article distribution service built into their video service. It's not the best article distribution service on the planet, but if you have an account, you may as well take advantage of it.
Step 7) Use Search Engine Nuker to distribute your video and text combination. Once you have your video uploaded, now you can take your combined three versions and the embed url for your video and put together a nice multimedia presentation to share on social networking sites.
Step Distribute through Article Marketing Automation. Article Marketing Automation is an article distribution service that puts unique versions of your article on blogs.
Step 9) Distribute through Unique Article Wizard. Unique Article Wizard is a similar service to Article Marketing Automation but they have a completely different distribution network and again provide quality backlinks to your site.
Step 10) Create A Squidoo Lens On The Topic.
Step 11) Create A Hubpage on the Topic
Step 12) Social bookmark all this content you've been creating. If you used the Search Engine Nuker program I recommended in Step 7, they have a URL manager that makes this extremely simple. In fact, it's about the only way to keep all these links organized. Social bookmarking will get all your content indexed a lot faster and since SEO and organic traffic generation takes long enough as it is, I recommend you take advantage of it.
Step 13) Submit Your RSS Feeds to RSS directories. Search Engine Nuker makes this really easy as well. Remember to manually add in your own blog's RSS feed, your Youtube RSS feed, as wells as feeds from Ezine Articles, Squidoo, and Hubpages.
Note: Your Youtube RSS feed can be a big tricky to find so here's what it looks like:
So for my Youtube account, it looks like this:
Optional Advanced Tactic – I don't do this on every article I create, but if I think it needs some extra help on ranking in the search engines, I'll use Linksvana to get an additional 20 links to the post. It may not seem like a lot of links, but I've found these links really pack a punch compared to most other links you get. If you sign up through this link, they'll give you 50 free credits for using their system (I'm jealous, because I never got that deal).


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Midway brings back all the craziness of the Cartoon Network's ED, EDD, N EDDY with ED, EDD, N EDDY: MIS-EDVENTURES for the PC. Centering around three kids with the same name, MIS-EDVENTURES follows Ed, Edd, and Eddy through yet another of their zany adventures. Gamers will control all three kids throughout the game, switching between them at any point. Each of the three had their own special abilities, and players will need to master each character to get through the puzzle-filled levels. Ed is the powerhouse of the team, able to pick up large objects and move them out of the way. Edd can operate machinery and can make use of different items. Eddy has stealth abilities and is the only character who can use stink bombs to get enemies out of the way. Each of the three also has an unique team-up move that involved all three characters working together. The levels contain the typical insanity often found in the cartoon. On the first level, for example, players have to try to sell a number of snow cones from their snow cone stand; however, to get the business going, players have to steal ice from other characters. There are eight different scams to complete, each of which involves Ed, Edd, and Eddy making use of whatever they can find or steal. Gamers who love ED, EDD, N EDDY will love stepping into the characters' shoes with ED EDD N EDDY: MIS-EDVENTURES.
Also known as: Ed, Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures, Ed, Edd and Eddy: The Mis-Edventures
Release Region: United States
Release Date: November 14, 2005
Publisher: Midway Games
Also available on: Game Boy Advance, GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox
For more info on these technical requirements and features, please view GameSpy's Specs FAQ.
Ed, Edd 'n Eddy: The M... at IGN
Ed, Edd 'n Eddy: The M... at GameSpy
Ed, Edd 'n Eddy: The M... at GameStats


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Interview Date: 02/14/2011
Run Date: 02/23/2011
Interviews Home / Movies Home / Bullz-Eye Home
Mimi Rogers is decidedly best known for her work as an actress, but over the past several years, she and her husband, Chris Ciaffa, have found equally honest employment behind the camera, serving as producers on several films made for television. In 2010, however, Rogers and Ciaffa produced their first theatrical release, and it was a doozy: "Unstoppable," directed by Tony Scott and starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine.
Bullz-Eye was fortunate enough to chat with Rogers in conjunction with "Unstoppable" hitting DVD, and although the conversation was woefully short (we got the "last question" announcement just before hitting the 10-minute mar), we still managed to slip in a few questions about her acting work, touching on "The Rapture," "Desperate Hours," and her short-lived and highly underrated TV series, "The Loop."
Mimi Rogers: Hi, Will!
Bullz-Eye: Hello, Mimi! It's a pleasure to speak with you.
MR: Yes, you, too!
BE: I really loved "Unstoppable." It's just a really great action flick.
MR: Well, thank you! I feel the same way, and I'm incredibly proud of this movie.
BE: So my understanding is that, prior to this, you had not really done a great deal of feature film production. Is that correct?
MR: Well, actually, my husband and I have a company, and we've been producing for about 12 years. We did about six movies for Showtime, and we did something for ESPN, so we've actually done quite a bit. In terms of a big feature film, though, this is the first one that we've had make it to the screen.
BE: What were the differences between working with television production and feature film production?
MR: Millions and millions and millions of dollars. (Laughs) And having a three-month schedule as opposed to a three-week schedule. And having Tony Scott as a director. You know, we've worked with a number of incredibly talented and remarkable actors in our films. We've had Holly Hunter and Stellan Skarsgård ("Harlan County War"), Gena Rowlands ("Charms for the Easy Life"), and Kirsten Dunst ("The Devil's Arithmetic"). But in those films and in those situations, we were always doing the scrabble-through with a low budget, making every penny count, and we'd come out with products that we were incredibly happy with, but when you're on a 29-day schedule, you're just running as fast as you can all the time. To have the luxury of the schedule and the budget to do this film…not to say that it wasn't having to run 24/7, because what Tony Scott was able to accomplish in terms of physical production, he literally did things that had never been done before, so there was a huge amount of pressure to get everything accomplished, even with a realistic schedule and budget. I'll say any day of the week, this movie happened, this movie made it, this movie is brilliant because of Tony Scott.
BE: How hands-on are you as a producer? Are you in the thick of it and on the set whenever the opportunity presents itself?
MR: Well, here's the deal: when Tony Scott comes on to direct your picture, you step back gracefully. (Laughs) Tony doesn't need anybody looking over his shoulder. Tony doesn't need a producer telling him what to do or overseeing what he does or monitoring him on a close level. So we are very hands-on as producers as the situation dictates. Certainly, when it comes to developing, pitching, putting this thing together, we were on it every second and every step of the way. But as I said, when Tony Scott takes the helm, you know your place. You know what's needed of you. And, really, what's needed of you at that point is just to get out of the way.
BE: Were you actually onset for the filming, though?
MR: Yes, I was. Absolutely.
BE: In general, what's it like for you to be on the other side of the camera, as it were?
MR: You know, it's incredibly exciting and interesting…and, at times, really frustrating. (Laughs) But, ultimately, it's really great. This business is great. There's a different skill set that you bring to the table as an actor than as a producer. I've often likened being a producer to being a parent: you're in charge, you have to pay for everything, everybody comes to you with their problems, and nobody says "thanks."
BE: As the father of a 5-year-old, I can appreciate that.
MR: Yeah, and I have a 16-year-old and a 9-year-old, so I can guarantee you it's true. (Laughs) But that really is the way it is. The other analogy I use is that, when you're a producer, you're like the farmer who buys the seed, takes and plants the seed, watches it grow, fertilizes it, takes care of it…you're in the whole process. When you're an actor, you kind of come into the field when the crop is already there.
BE: I wanted to ask you about a few of your acting roles as well. First of all, I see you're going to be in "Balls to the Wall" with Christopher McDonald, who I know was also on the episodes of "My Boys" that you did.
MR: I know! I love Chris McDonald.
BE: I can't recall: had you worked with him prior to "My Boys"?
MR: Yes, actually, Chris and I played married folk in a film that Thora Birch was the star of and that Franco Amurri directed, called "Monkey Trouble."
BE: Oh, sure, I remember that!
MR: Well, if you have a 5-year-old, you should rent it again. (Laughs) I think Thora was 11 when we made that movie, and Chris and I ended up having way, way too much time while the monkey misbehaved and wasn't getting his takes right, so we ended up bonding in a hilarious, juvenile way. (Laughs) He's one of my favorite people.
BE: I was a big fan of "The Loop." I thought was a very underrated series, particularly the first season.
MR: Thank you! Yes, particularly in the first season, it was actually…well, I didn't write it, so I can say it: I thought it was a comic masterpiece and incredibly subversive, yet it wasn't duly appreciated or recognized.
BE: I talked to Philip Baker Hall a few years ago, and when we talked about "The Loop," he was still upset about the way the show had been handled when Fox switched presidents of entertainment, and the new one just kind of shunted it off to the side .
MR: Yeah, it was disappointing, because those opportunities are so rare. You can't help but be left with a little bit of "ah, what might've been…"
BE: Given that you're doing work behind the camera as well, would you still be open to another full-time television gig if the opportunity presented itself?
MR: Oh, yeah! As an actress, I'm still out there beating the bushes all the time! It's not the most pleasant time to be an actress of a certain age. Everybody says it's getting better or it's going to get better, but…it's not getting better. It doesn't get better. I think for actors who are women, aging in Hollywood is still an incredibly difficult process because, you know, you reach a point where you're kind of at the peak of your skills just at a time when the opportunities are extremely limited. But you know what? You just go out there and keeping banging away!
BE: What would you say is your favorite project that you've worked on over the years that didn't get the love you thought it deserved?
MR: Oh, probably "The Door in the Floor." I mean, Jeff Bridges should've gotten an Oscar for that film, and I thought that the movie was heartbreakingly beautiful and just so well done on every level. Even though I'm a member of the Academy, I was really quite infuriated that it was not sort of paid attention to at all. Have you seen it?
BE: I have. Actually, I was just going to say how odd it is to have seen such a different side of Tod Williams as director of "Paranormal Activity 2," knowing that he was the writer and director of "The Door in the Floor."
MR: Yeah, he did a truly masterful job on that film.
BE: Thanks to the beauty of Netflix, I was able to revisit a couple of your earlier films. I went back and checked out "Desperate Hours" again.
MR: Yeah, it's interesting, huh?
BE: It is. The cast is amazing, considering how far so many of them have come since then. And it's definitely an interesting take on the original film, to say the least, but it's an enjoyable one, I think.
MR: Yeah, I mean, (Michael) Cimino was in an interesting frame of mind, needless to say, while we made the film, and he and Mickey (Rourke) had an interesting relationship… (Laughs) …along with Dino DeLaurentis. And Anthony (Hopkins), another one of my all-time favorite people and actors in the world, was, towards the end of shooting, doing phone lines for "Silence of the Lambs," which he was going to be heading into next. And he was one of those just remarkable spirits, who was, like, "I'm so happy to be here, I'm so happy to be acting, I'm so happy to have a job…let's just do this!" And I think a lot of the film is really well done and really interesting. I think there are a couple of moments that are…weird. But overall I think that the film is really, really interesting.
BE: I have to wrap up with "The Rapture." I'm sure it wasn't a surprise that it received such a decidedly hate-it-or-love-it reception, but were you happy with the way the film turned out?
MR: Oh, yeah. I was thrilled. And the critical and audience response was actually really wonderful. We had our world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, and Roger Ebert was in the audience, and it was terrifying that he was there, but it was also kind of great. He loved the movie, and Michael (Tolkin) and I ended up having a three-hour dinner with him, and it's still one of the greatest film and theology conversations that I think I've ever had.
BE: It's a heavy film, but it's an interesting one as well.
MR: Yeah, that's my favorite work that I've ever done.
BE: Well, I wish we had more time to talk, but it's been a pleasure talking to you. Like I said, I loved the film, so I'm looking forward to your future production endeavors!MR: Well, thank you so much! It was great talking to you!
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You searched for: Languages English Remove constraint Languages: English Dates by Range 2000 and later Remove constraint Dates by Range: 2000 and later Start Over
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1. Breath of life: an exhibition that examines the history of asthma, the experiences of people with asthma, and contemporary efforts to understand and manage the disease
- Publication:
- Bethesda, Md. : National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, [2001]
- Subject(s):
- Asthma -- history
Famous Persons
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National Library of Medicine (U.S.)


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I've been playing a lot of Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus lately. As I said in my earlier post about it, it's a surprisingly fun game. And I've come to realize something else: it's a easy platinum. You'll get most of the trophies just playing through the game normally without having to do anything special. I'm not quite there yet (haven't done all the modes with all the characters yet), but looking at the list I've realized that there's only one sort of tricky trophy that I don't have yet. And I'm sure I could get it if I really tried.The thing is, in all my time gaming I still haven't gotten a single platinum trophy. There are a few games I've thought about doing it for, but there's always at least some BS trophy I just don't want to bother with. This time I think I could totally do it...but do I really want my first platinum trophy to be for Senran Kagura...
Playing lots of Theatrhythm... it's like Elite Beat Agents but with music I care about. The battle music gameplay is the most fun out of the three.
So, I finally got to play Suikoden III. The only installment that never made it to our shores. Twas a damn fine game, some complaints and grievances but otherwise I was pretty damn pleased.So now that I have played them all my personal list of best Suikoden is:Suikoden IISuikoden VSuikoden IIISuikodenSuikoden IV


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RehabAdvisorDotCalm: This Must (Not) Be the Place
DATELINE: June 2011 (a far superior residential drug and alcohol treatment facility, compared to the first, somewhere along the southern California coast. 56 days sober and counting ...)
The story you are about to read -- about my first-ever experience at drug rehab -- is entirely true. However, the names (including my own) have been changed to protect the innocent, the kind, the not so kind and the idiotic.
At the appropriate time and in the proper forum I'll revert to the actual names and places. But for now, please use your intelligence and imagination.
I believe in and live by honesty; I do not believe objectivity actually exists. And this tale --about my first seven days in drug treatment and in sobriety -- is painstakingly honest. The deeper knowledge one has of a situation (in this case, the real story behind the images of a treatment facility most know only through its advertising image over the last 25 years) is essential to making an informed decision about where one might go to get clean. I take my rehab, my recovery, and my sobriety very seriously indeed.
Every day I write the book*, and it ain't fiction.
* * *
My name is Travis** and I am a train wreck. My drug of choice: crystal methamphetamine.
Just before 8:00 am on the morning of April 22, 2011, my loved ones threw a "Surprise Party" in my honor, in my own home. I despise surprise parties, as do most control freaks, and most addicts. However, mine was a special sort of surprise party. Some may call it an "intervention" -- pure semantics as far as I'm concerned.
I'd been awake since 5:30 am. At around 7:00 am I'd sent out one of my two early morning work reports (the modern day smoke and mirrors of laptops, VPN, and "working from home"). After a strong cup of coffee, a few even stronger hits off the meth pipe, and one off the hash pipe for good measure, I was just about to hit the shower and contemplate all the pathetic reasons I should head into work. Those were the days of difficult mental gymnastics, and of being supremely miserable for all the wrong reasons.
It was Friday, praise drugs (my then Higher Power), and even though I'd just returned from a week's vacation two days before, I was more than ready for a weekend of fun, party, and sex with my drug pals and with the meth I'd smuggled back from the California desert and stowed away in my checked luggage, in the nether regions of a travel-sized deodorant stick. I'd become such a clever drug addict, and as I'd told a meth friend but five days before the Surprise Party, I'd become a high-functioning addict as well. Thanks to the planners of the Surprise Party, I am alive and well today and here to write that when all is said and done there is no such thing as a high-functioning drug addict.
"Who the hell is knocking on the door at this hour?" I cried out, a fluffy white towel wrapped around my waist. I wasn't expecting a handyman that day, or at least I did not think so, and it was too early for the Jehovahs to come calling, but then again I was high as a kite so who really knew. Perhaps the knocking sound was a figment of my messed up imagination.
I'll never forget how I felt when I opened the door and found three of my loved ones and Trudy, the interventionist. They clearly had planned the surprise party with precision, and boy, was I ever surprised. My partner Peter, my cousin Loretta and my friend Andrea from work -- the loved ones who planned the surprise party together with Trudy -- thought I might run off in the woods adjacent to my home, denying my addictions every step of the way down the very steep hill.
But instead, I threw on my robe, grabbed my seven-month-old Maine Coon kitten and dropped myself onto the sofa, holding the Coon very tightly. I listened to them, one by one, as they read the extraordinarily beautiful letters of love they each had prepared. As for the Maine Coon, he'd had enough of the intervention, thank you very much, and split the scene. But the painstaking honesty within each letter kept me on the sofa, and left me weeping, and alone.
Before agreeing to honor a flight reservation they had made for me in just a few hours, I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the 10 hard boiled eggs I'd prepared before the start of the Surprise Party, and commenced making what turned out to be a wicked tasty egg salad. Trudy the interventionist later told me that never in her 15 years of surprise party planning had anyone prepared an egg salad at their own party. There's a first time for everything, Trudy.
The surprise party became the crystalline moment (pardon pun) -- the moment I knew the party was over, once and for all and forever. Kaput. And less than four hours later, accompanied by Greg, a "sober transporter," I was on a plane bound for the Triplet Cities in the U.S. state I'll call … Chaos. When Greg and I arrived at CONCEIT Center, an inpatient drug and alcohol center specifically marketed to the SFTF (Sapphic Fey Tri Flipped) addict, he asked the staff for a tour while I was completing some intake forms. If I had known then what I know now -- that Greg is a sober coach and travelling companion for some rather high-profile personalities and is extremely knowledgeable about treatment centers -- I would have grabbed his hand, held it tight, and hightailed it back with him to the airport. But I was not even 12 hours sober, and still a bit tweaked truth be told, and was still in shock about the circumstances in which I found myself. File under: live and learn.
Much like you would read customer reviews of hotels, at travel websites for instance, I've organized my experiential review of CONCEIT Center by category and have assigned a letter grade to each category. After more than 25 years as a privately run treatment facility, the CONCEIT Center was recently purchased lock, stock and barrel by none other than one of the largest and most ruthless health insurance companies in the United States. To say that the entry of health insurance companies into the business of alcohol and substance abuse inpatient treatment facilities is a foreboding sign is an understatement of epic proportion.
Herewith an encapsulation of my seven days at CONCEIT, organized from level of least importance or concern:
The cafeteria staff at CONCEIT did the best they could, kinda sorta, but I cannot classify them as particularly creative or nutrition-minded institutional chefs. All the beverages contain High Fructose Corn Syrup, most of the veggies were frozen (save for the small, adequate salad bar), and vegetarian/vegan options were sparse to nonexistent, bland, and offered up when available as if you were asking the line cook to part with their first born along with a slab of tofu. And when I was assigned kitchen clean-up as my chore duty, the toxic blend of bleach, detergent and Lord-knows-what-else caused my hands to break out in a nasty case of contact dermatitis. It was not purty and I was not amused.
Grade: B-
I am fully aware that drug and alcohol rehab is in no way akin to, say, a reflective and luxurious retreat at Canyon Ranch. But threadbare sheets, replete with blood stains? Darling, please pass the Clorox. And when a new client, my roommate Adam, is admitted late on the fourth night of my seven days, one would think they would have had a clean pillow for him to lay down his weary head. Not CONCEIT. The night staff had to throw two pillows in their washing machine that danced a quirky cha-cha-cha and leaked water out the bottom for good measure. Read my lips: 1-800-MAYTAG. And while I spent Easter Sunday at CONCEIT, I had hoped for an audience with the real Easter Bunny. Instead, I communed with thousands of dust bunnies, seeming permanent residents of CONCEIT. What a dump!
Grade: D
Counseling and Therapy Services
I came home from CONCEIT with some decent photocopies of articles and readings relating to crystal methamphetamine, my drug of choice, but the materials are hardly unique or inspired and could be found in a few clicks on an internet search, or for that matter, an old-fashioned trip to my town's library.
I've received weekly acupuncture treatments for the past five years, to help ease symptoms I experience from ulcerative colitis, depression/anxiety, as well as HIV immune boosting. When I asked my CONCEIT therapist if I'd have the opportunity to receive acupuncture during my 28-day stay, he replied, without missing a beat, "No, acupuncture needles trigger addicts." Hello, hello, is anyone home? Last time I checked, acupuncture needles bear no resemblance whatsoever to hypodermic needles, not to mention that detoxification acupuncture is offered primarily using ear and forehead points. If you can see acupuncture needles in your ears and upper forehead, I'll sign over the title to my 1920 funky home to you. I promise. (Looking at yourself in a mirror to see the needles does not count!) If CONCEIT so desires, don't let junkies receive acupuncture, but to categorically dismiss and deny acupuncture's efficacy as an integrative detoxification therapy is just plain silly, and ignorant.
The program where I am now a client, which by the by was my loved one's second choice in rehab facilities, employs a robust and honest integrative approach to sobriety and recovery and as such, each week clients are offered choices ranging from Kundalini yoga, detox acupuncture, equine therapy, Tai Chi, and spirituality groups, to name just a few.
Most of the group lectures during my seven-day stint at CONCEIT were delivered by "technicians" or licensed practical nurses who had obviously pulled the lecture notes from a file cabinet and delivered the content in the most robotic of ways -- not unlike listening to a tortuously boring lecture by that uninspired college assistant professor who will never ever receive tenure.
Client Safety, Staff Accountability
Each night at CONCEIT ended in the same fashion -- a 9:00 pm community meeting called "Echoes" featuring affirmations, sharing, consequences and other related announcements. As I took a seat for my last "Echoes" my olfactory glands took in the oddest of scents -- hard liquor, and lots of it.
My name is Travis and while I am a train wreck, I am not now nor have I ever been an alcoholic. But that sour, pungent smell pushed each and every one of my addict buttons (and epaulets). To the best of my knowledge and six days sober, I was at a lock-down drug and alcohol treatment facility, and alcohol and drugs are not allowed at such a place (or so I thought, silly me). The gentlemen two seats to my right was the perpetrator, beyond the shadow of a doubt, and when it came time for him to introduce himself and share an affirmation with the group he could not even utter his own name. BUSTED.
Immediately following the meeting I went downstairs to the nursing station to report the infraction. "I'm new to this rehab thing," I told the tech on duty, "but something tells me I'm not supposed to be knocked out by the smell of hard liquor." I urged her to do something about it, and she promised that she would.
I went off to the area CONCEIT refers to as a gymnasium to see if I could sweat out my anxiety; it was already 9:45 pm and "lights out" was at 11:00 pm. Not much time. When I went to the men's rest room 30 minutes later, I saw "DrunkWhat'sMyName" lurking at the entry to the shower stalls, without his shirt but wearing jeans, and he looked positively crazed, drunk, psychotic, choose your diagnosis. It became painfully obvious to me that the technicians had not yet given him a breathalyzer. I asked my friend James to go into the restroom to confirm what I had seen and that I had not lost touch with reality. James reported I was spot on; he caught this very odd behavior twice, and he confided to me at that time that this man was not only a client at CONCEIT but also a Class C Registered Sex Offender, with multiple convictions and incarcerations over the years for molestation and penetration of children between the ages of 8 and 13. I only needed to walk to CONCEIT's small library to verify this, where sure enough the town's police department had taped a Sex Offender poster to the wall.
When I confronted the technician as to whether (or not) she had dealt with the situation, she replied that she was too busy but she'd get to it. WTF? When a cop pulls someone over for a suspected DUI, do they take them out for coffee and pancakes, then a string or two of bowling, and then and only then make the suspect blow a breathalyzer? I rest my case. The technician told me to go to bed.
I awoke at 3:30am, startled and afraid, and went immediately to the nursing station to see what had become of the Inebriated One. "I can't tell you," Kristine, the nurse on duty, told me. "Patient confidentiality." "Bullshit," I replied. I reported the situation, and at the very least felt I had the right to see how CONCEIT had or had not dealt with it. "Patient confidentiality," she said again. I told Kristine I'd spend the rest of my living days standing at the nursing station until I received an honest reply, and so she went into the back room, returned several minutes later and told me he had tested negative for alcohol.
And that was the moment I knew I would leave CONCEIT as soon as the sun came up. They were protecting the wrong person -- an intoxicated registered sex offender who, I'd put money down, was neither fey nor tri nor flipped and had certainly not blown a breathalyzer. The State of Chaos had no other place to place him, save CONCEIT Center, and that is a sad commentary unto itself.
As I walked out the door later that morning, to the waiting driver who would take me to the airport, my therapist Doug called my partner Peter back east and told him I was leaving CONCEIT AMA (Against Medical Advice), and that I was coming home to use drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth, either then or now. I am not a fiction writer, and if my life depended on it I simply could not make this shit up.
For shame.
The State of Chaos, in which CONCEIT Center operates, has a peculiar and insidious law on the books that bankrolls, at taxpayer expense, any resident of the State of Chaos who seeks drug/alcohol treatment up to 90 complimentary days at an inpatient facility, followed by sober or halfway house living at highly subsidized rates. Trip up a bit, post treatment? Feel triggers to use? Cravings? Fret not, dear addict. Have a big old tumbler of Johnny Walker Red, and a mondo hit off your bud's meth pipe, shoot up if you really want, and go right back into treatment.
At least 80 percent of the clients at CONCEIT were what I call "professional rehabbers," serial abusers of a state law that has addicts from across the United States flocking to the State of Chaos for the perks of free rehab, Ad nauseum, Ad inifinitum. None of these individuals were good role models for me, the ingénue addict who was entering rehab for his first (and last) time. I have no intention of making rehab my career, so you know; rather I will focus on my sobriety and my continued recovery. The law and its insidious effects on treatment and rehab facilities quite simply broke my formerly bleeding heart.
My loved ones, the same who threw me that fabulous and auspicious surprise party (the soiree I'll never forget) sent me to CONCEIT with the best of intentions, and made their decision based primarily on an image of a place and on its name (the dangers of advertising, caveat emptor). What with me being fey and all, they also thought that fey rehab might help me deal with certain underlying issues that possibly fueled my addiction. Their thought process: fey rehab, and being with SFTF addicts, could possibly assist in my successful recovery. Frankly my dear, I care not if my plumber is fey or if the electrician is sapphic or if the barber is flipped -- I seek excellence with any service professional, and one's orientation never plays into decisions such as these. Nor do I care if my friends, in or out of rehab, are fey or straight. Just saying.
When I returned from the Triplet Cities, and before leaving for this facility in California less than 72 hours later, my loved ones did admit that if a resource had been available, not unlike the review I've just scribed of my seven days at CONCEIT, they would have made an entirely different decision and sent me instead to this facility and to the excellent integrative drug rehabilitation program I will complete in less than two days.
RehabAdvisorDotCalm, anyone?
My name is Travis and I am a train wreck.
* * *
** Travis is a regular contributor to TheBody.com. Travis is his pseudonym. The photo used is of Drat (the cat), his present Higher Power and now 9-month-old Maine Coon.


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Children of the Nile is a unique gem of a city-building game, unparalleled in both grandeur and attention to detail. As Pharaoh of ancient Egypt, you build glorious cities and massive pyramids, to create a civilization that will live through the ages. Every inhabitant of your city is a fully developed person - part of an individual household with wants and needs, from priests to entertainers, scribes to laborers and many others. -Immersive 3D graphics -Lifelike citizens -Breathtaking monuments commemorate your achievements -Exploration, combat, diplomacy, trade -Expansive Campaigns, Map Editor
Only registered members can share their thoughts. So come on! Join the community today (totally free - or sign in with your social account on the right) and join in the conversation.


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An interesting building, complete with a wall plaque which was concreted to the left of left door, just beyond the tree in the picture.
This photograph is of the Masonic Lodge at Sidmouth Devon. You can see a bit more detail and the location of the lodge HERE
Shared with the Fraternal Organisations for Genealogists Group


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Kathryn A. Berger, 73, of Pocono Lake, passed away Feb. 16 at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville.
Kathryn was the loving wife of Maurice Berger. They celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary on July 11, 2012.
She was born in Bowmanstown on Aug. 18, 1939, the daughter of Florence (Snyder) Weidman of Jonas and the late Kenneth Weidman.
Kathryn was a member of the Faith Lutheran Church in Blakeslee, where she was active with Bible study, served as a greeter for services and was a member of the Women of Faith.
We have been blessed with the presence of Kathryn in our lives. She will be deeply missed by her husband, Maurice; her mother, Florence of Jonas; her sons, Brian Lee Berger of Pocono Lake, Scott Allen Berger and his wife, Jennifer, of McCalla, Ala.; and her daughter-in-law, Brandy Berger of Albrightsville. She was the loving and gentle grandmother to her three grandchildren, Jessica and Zachary Berger of McCalla, Ala., and Rachel Berger of Albrightsville. She is also survived by an aunt, Martha Davies of Lebanon and an uncle, Bruce Snyder of Lebanon.
A memorial service will be held 2 p.m., Sunday, March 10, at Faith Lutheran Church in Blakeslee, with the Rev. Wayne Kaufman officiating. Family and friends are welcome to offer their condolences from 1 p.m. until time of service Sunday, March 10, at the church. Interment will be private and at the convenience of the family.
In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made In Loving Memory of Kathryn A. Berger to: Faith Lutheran Church, P.O. Box 288, Pocono Lake, PA 18610.
Donald N. Gower Funeral Home
1426 Route 209, Gilbert
Kathryn A. Berger
Kathryn A. Berger, 73, of Pocono Lake, passed away Feb. 16 at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville.


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Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 12:43 pm
Since PayPal is an eBay Company they already have a foundation for it. I don't see any reasons why they can't do it.
Ebay's big enough now, they really need to set up some third party shipping/receiving/cash on delivery type service. As in: I send the item I just sold to the Transaction Center, and the buyer sends the payment to the Transaction Center, and someone there says "Item looks good. Payment looks good. Okay. Everything's verified." I'm certain it would be more complicated and troublesome than that. But as Ebay gets bigger, and the scamming too, the days are numbered for unregulated peer-to-peer dealing.
So go start one. Right now. Get off the GX1 and go.
Or not.