RAPSU BLOG

The RAPSU Blog is Inactive

2012-01-16T08:10:00.001-08:00

We are looking for a new webmaster. If you are a RAPSU member and would like to take over this blog, please contact us at rapsuatpsu@gmail.com.

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The North Plan: Review

2012-01-16T08:03:00.000-08:00

'The North Plan' review: At Portland Center Stage, the revolution is a laugh riot
Published: Saturday, January 14, 2012, 4:10 PM
By Marty Hughley, The Oregonian

The revolution will not be televised. But it will have a soundtrack: Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Then again, maybe it’s less a revolution than a resistance, a desperate attempt to preserve liberty, a people’s pushback against secretive, conspiratorial forces bent on oppression.

So just as well for this humble movement to begin in humble surroundings -- such as a police station in the tiny (and fictional) Southern Missouri town of Lodus. That’s where we meet Tanya Shepke, the most -- let’s try to be polite here -- colorful character in the Jason Wells play “The North Plan,” and the most unlikely political-thriller heroine you’ve ever encountered.

The country is in turmoil, a provisional government has taken power, checkpoints have been set up on the highways and curfews have been imposed in the cities. But Tanya’s concern is a DUI she feels she doesn’t deserve. (Sure she was blasted on Long Island iced teas, but shouldn’t she get credit, she argues, for turning herself in?)

Anyway, as long as things are changing, she figures, who better to be pictured on the new money than Skynyrd.

Tanya’s a little crazy, a lot crass, and constitutionally unable to shut up for more than a few seconds. Which makes her the perfect comedic centerpiece for the world-premiere production that opened on Friday at Portland Center Stage. Because despite such serious thematic concerns as the legitimacy of political authority, the importance of dissent and the uses of torture, “The North Plan” is a threat to public order because it’s a laugh riot.

Directed by Rose Riordan with a fine sense of timing and tension, it overcomes its rather static setting (a pair of jailhouse rooms, rendered with apt institutional efficiency by scenic designer Tony Cisek), building a headlong momentum until its sudden conclusion -- which on opening night brought the crowd to a hooting, hollering standing ovation.

Considering that nothing less than the fate of the nation is at stake, you might expect the story’s protagonist to be renegade State Dept. staffer Carlton Berg (an amusingly undone Brian Patrick Monahan), who has stolen a database that might provide liberty’s last hope. But Tanya might be a more authentic representative of the people, and in any case Kate Eastwood Norris (pretty much unrecognizable from the prim professional woman she played here in 2009’s terrific “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found”) portrays her in such brilliant redneck hues that she’s the clear people’s choice.

Tanya’s profanity flows like a mountain spring, so quoting her here is pretty much impossible. But Norris gives her enough dimensions that, however outrageous, she no mere cartoon.

Patrick Weishampel
Tanya Shepke (Kate Eastwood Norris) transforms from party girl to freedom fighter in "The North Plan," a comedy/thriller getting its world

While Tanya goes about her idiosyncratic way, the other characters have more rational calculations to make. Carlton expects to be shipped to some secret prison, but hopes his database can help save “the blood of millions.” The police chief (Portland veteran Tim True, disappearing into a subtle, fully realized character role) and a lowly administrative officer (the endearing Ashley Everage) have to decide whether to stick their necks out for motormouth prisoners or just pray the new government won’t be so bad.

Then come the bad guys from Homeland Security (Fredric Lehne and Blake DeLong), invoking conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as they justify their ruthless, bloodthirsty means.

Wells, who developed the script in part at Center Stage’s JAW festival in 2010, cranks up coincidences of timing and mistaken identities, almost the point of farce. And if you might be reminded at times of a sit-com slickness, that could also be interpreted as an admirable narrative efficiency.

And if the revolution ever comes, we should all hope it offers us so much opportunity to laugh.

-- Marty Hughley

Thomas Lauderdale In Portland Monthly Magazine

2010-08-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

RAPSU's youngest member, Thomas Lauderdale, in Portland Monthly Magazine's August issue.

Thomas Lauderdale Tours Portland from
Portland Monthly on Vimeo.

tenebrous

2009-10-30T08:39:00.001-07:00

clipped from dictionary.reference.com

Word of the Day

Friday, October 30, 2009

tenebrous

\TEN-uh-bruhs\ , adjective;

1. Dark; gloomy.

Origin: Tenebrous derives from Latin tenebrosus, from tenebrae, "darkness."

And lurking behind our every move is the knowledge of our own mortality. It gives life its edgy disquiet, its tenebrous underside.

-- Douglas Kennedy

"Sudden death", Independent, June 3, 1999

Iran's National Poet Speaks Out On Recent Events In Her Country

2009-10-30T08:34:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.youtube.com

Iran's National Poet Speaks Out On Recent Events In Her Country

Simin Behbahani, Iran's national poet, spoke with NPR's Davar Iran Ardalan from Tehran on Friday June 26th. She recites two poems inspired by the protests -- one dedicated to the people of Iran and the other dedicated to Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman mourned around the world because her death during last Saturday's protests was viewed by millions on the Web and TV.

Invisible man

2009-10-30T07:39:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.hoax-slayer.com

[The] attached photographs show a man who skillfully paints himself so that he so closely resembles his surroundings that he appears to be virtually invisible. At first glance, these amazing images may appear to be the result of digital manipulation and indeed a number of self-proclaimed experts have already dismissed them as being "photoshopped".

However, the images are in fact genuine photographs depicting the work of clever Chinese artist Liu Bolin. The Beijing based artist has exhibited his work around the world with shows in China, Paris, the United States and elsewhere. News.com.au notes that Mr Bolin is a perfectionist who can take up to ten hours to ready himself for photographs of his performances. The UK's Telegraph also reports on Mr Bolin's art, noting:

In a series of mind-boggling pictures Liu melts into any background, almost entirely invisible in front of red phone boxes, Chinese flags and even earthquake rubble.

It means people walking by while he is carrying out his performance often have no idea he is nearby until he moves away. Liu said he wanted to show how city surroundings affected people living in them and how.

He said the inspiration behind his work was a sense of not fitting in to modern society and as a silent protest against the Government's persecution of artists.

Mr Bolin generally uses assistants who help to paint him in readiness for performances.

Book thieves beware

2009-10-28T07:59:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.oregonlive.com

Security returns to Multnomah County's thief-prone library system

By Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Oregonian

October 27, 2009, 5:56PM

For years now, stealing from the Multnomah County Library has been an easy feat. You just have to pick up a book and walk out with it.

The Central Library -- which holds half of the library's collection -- has had no security system since the building was renovated 13 years ago. None of the 16 branches has working security systems either, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost materials each year -- nearly $300,000 in the last six months alone.

But book thieves beware: The days of easy pickings are almost over.

For the past month, workers at the Central Library have been busy in the back rooms sticking little flat tags in books and CDs that officials hope will reduce the number of missing items by 40 percent or more.

Doug Beghtel/The Oregonian

Library pages Deanne Gabriel (right) and Wendy Dudelheim attach security tags to books at the Central Library in the Multnomah County system's new attempt to cut down on thefts.

Multnomah County commissioners approved about $1.3 million last year from the general fund and another $1.6 million this year from a planned bond to pay for installation of the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system at all the branches by the end of 2010.

"We're going from security that is pretty much people watching to an automatic system that works," said Deanna Cecotti, Central Library collections administrator.

The move comes four years after a police officer discovered hundreds of stolen library CDs and DVDs at a patron's home and the public learned that staff annoyed by repeated false alarms had turned off the few security gates that existed in library branches. The discovery led to a study of library security released two years later that showed massive annual losses.

Doug Beghtel/The Oregonian
The Multnomah County Library is installing a new $2.9 million system to reduce theft and make materials handling easier in the Central Library and 16 branches. The small, flat RFID tags allow several books to be cataloged at once and will set off an alarm at new security gates if someone tries to remove an item that hasn't been checked out.

The library made security changes after that, said Cindy Gibbon, access service manager for the library, such as moving DVDs -- the items of choice for thieves -- and some other media behind counters and experimenting with locking shelves. But Gibbon said it took time to come up with the money to pay for a security program that would work systemwide and with all library materials.

RFIDs are small devices about the size of a nametag sticker that adhere to books, CDs and the other materials. They've been gaining popularity among libraries nationwide for the last five years and have been used in libraries in Europe even longer.

The tags store and retrieve data and contain antennas that enable them to respond to radio-frequency queries. They can't be removed from items without damaging them and will trigger an alarm at the door if the item isn't checked out.

RFIDs are favored because they're much more accurate than the magnetic strip systems often used by libraries.

In a year, items lost from the Multnomah County Library account for about 10 percent of the system's annual materials budget. The tag project, which will cost about $155,000 a year to maintain and mark new materials, could save $238,000 a year in lost materials, according to library estimates.

But just as important, library officials said, is that RFIDs are more efficient for both library workers and users and will save both time and money in handling books and other material.

"We wanted to make sure that whatever we did for security would make handling easier, not harder," said Gibbon.

The library is one of the busiest in the nation, but also has among the smallest in square footage for the number of books it circulates.

That means employees spend huge amounts of time logging books that must be transferred to, or that come in from, different branches throughout the county.

With the current system, workers must pick up each item that comes in and scan it in. Check-out workers must touch each item twice -- once to scan it into the system, the other to demagnetize the metal strip.

The new system allows workers to scan an entire shelf at once with a hand wand. Or, they can set a stack of books on a flat scanner and the scanner will catalog the entire stack. The tags will also allow the library to put DVDs back on the shelves where patrons can get them themselves.

Checking items in and out can be 60 percent faster with RFID tags, Gibbon said. That could save another $425,000 annually in streamlined materials handling.

The library is also adding new self-checkout kiosks that will work the same for library patrons.

"It speeds the checkout for patrons and for us," said Lucien Kress, project manager for the new system. "We handle so many items in this system and it take so much time that it can take 24 hours to get a book back on the shelf. With this system, things will go much quicker."

So far, the Central Library has tagged about 250,000 of its 800,000 items with a completion goal of early January. The new Kenton library will open by February with the new system and other branches coming online after.

"This should make it harder for someone whose intention is to steal materials," Cecotti said. "And it makes us better stewards."

-- Nikole Hannah-Jones

22@Barcelona, District of Innovation

2009-10-24T07:38:00.001-07:00

clipped from citiwire.net

Industrial Graveyard To Hot Innovation Center

Neal Peirce / Oct 23 2009

For Release Sunday, October 25, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group

BARCELONA — How can a city resuscitate an entire depressed, old inner city district, many of its blocks marked by the skeletons of abandoned factories?

Even more challenging–how to transform the same area into a high-powered knowledge hub that adds jobs by the thousands and draws dozens of high-powered national and international firms?

The "free enterprise" American approach might be to bring in the bulldozers, create an industrial park that displaces the old residents, and maybe offer companies public subsidies to move in.

Not Barcelona. Ten years ago this entrepreneurial city decided to build a modern "knowledge economy" close to downtown in its old waterfront Poblenou district, once a leading cotton mill center, renaming it "22@Barcelona, District of Innovation."

Barcelona's then-mayor, Joan Close, took the initiative. But an extraordinary political consensus–ranging all the way from the city's capitalist right wing to socialist-oriented left–came together to design 22@Barcelona and set it in motion.

Their central idea: Talent is the gold of our time, crucial to build thriving new economic clusters. Talented people (and cutting-edge firms) want lively urban environments. Instead of the isolation of corporate campuses, they're anxious to brush shoulders with other gifted people from companies, universities and the artistic realm.

So 22@Barcelona has been consciously shaped to include attractive green spaces, restaurants and entertainment, bike lanes, and plentiful public transit both within the area and between it and greater Barcelona.

But to create that environment–and not force out the families and workers living there–the Barcelona politicians decided on an ingenious but highly controlled form of real estate redevelopment.

Each of the district's 100-square meter blocks–rather than individual land holdings–were made the basic unit for regeneration. Once 60 percent of landowners in any one of the 115 blocks agree to act collectively, they can–as a community–increase the value of their property by getting city permission to rebuild with greater height (more stories) than allowed in the past.

But there's a tradeoff. In return, owners must agree to release 30 percent of their land holding for new public investment. Of that 30 percent, the city takes a third each for shared green space, for publicly subsidized housing, and for knowledge-based activity such as a technology center or university facility. The land parcels can also be exchanged across blocks–for a larger park, for example.

One can imagine American property owners screaming "property rights" and "eminent domain abuse" at any such proposal. Not to mention another "taking": 22@'s owners are obliged to pay 50 percent of street infrastructure improvements.

But look at what they gain, notes Josep Miquel Piqué, Barcelona's forceful CEO of 22@ operations. There's revitalized public space to lift the spirits of residents and workers. District heating and cooling, plus fiber optic connections are provided. There's actually a pneumatic underground waste disposal system (with colored bags to make recycling easy). Plus a system of underground "galleries" for cables and pipes and future needs, avoiding the need to keep digging up streets for improvements.

And 22@ isn't shy about defining and shaping the economic environment. It's defined five top "innovation clusters" –information technology, media, design, medical devices and energy efficiency. And, says Piqué, "We are managing the ecosystem for innovation. We've grown to 1,441 companies, many international, in nine years. If we need university talent, finance, or information technology, we promote the connections to make it possible. We incite artists to work with the companies, for inspiration. We work together with the private firms, the universities, to create a critical mass to compete in the world."

The physical result is an amazingly eclectic neighborhood. Technology centers and new apartments are cheek by jowl with old lots and housing still in transition. Government offices, television and radio studios, cultural centers, social service agencies–they're all there, and much more.

Yet Piqué claims "We don't forget the people living here beforehand. We are including social housing. We recognize residents' children as the new generation of talent we want right here. We invite students for internships in the firms, the activities we have. That's the difference between the Silicon Valley model and ours."

An American can't visit 22@ without wondering: Could U.S. cities ever find the left-to-right political consensus, muster the faith in a government-chartered organization with 22@-like powers, to remake our lagging neighborhoods with parallel stem-to-stern remedies and approaches?

For our dawning back-to-the-city era, what better? But I'm not optimistic. Barcelona-style collaboration (and trust in government) just isn't in our political DNA.

But what if a talent-focused economic era, marked by keen global competition, requires intensely entrepreneurial and rule-setting city government on the 22@Barcelona model? It will be a tough shift. But we Americans can't keep saying "no" and "can't" forever.

Neal Peirce's e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

Autumn in Portland by June Underwood

2009-10-23T07:55:00.001-07:00

clipped from southeastmain.wordpress.com

Autumn in the City

By june [Underwood]

When I read Terry Grant's post about the gorgeous fall we've been having in Portland, Oregon, I almost just sent you to her site. She stole my fire — and my blog post idea, too. Not that that's so surprising; we do live in the same place, after all.

But then I looked at my photos and decided that all was not lost. I take different photos of fall than Terry does, even though I have equal amounts of abject adoration of its colors:

This looks like the usual fall color photo — with the addition of the bike, the fire hydrant, cars, and utility wires. But aren't those grasses yummy.

Even when Hawthorne fills the camera's screen with debris, there's still no denying the advent of the color.

And southeast Grand Avenue's bars can't match the maple across the street.

I have a couple more that I couldn't resist, but I'll put them in the continuum. I wouldn't want to show Terry up <snort> June

I was particularly fond of the one above, particularly as I had just been complimented on my photo processes a moment before, when I took this next one:

This one is nice, but there's something very zen about the glimpse of beauty amidst the debris of the quotidian — telephone poles, posters for rock bands, graffiti on the back of a walk light — and a blaze of oak leaves.

Portland Opera's next production: Orphée by Philip Glass

2009-10-23T07:18:00.000-07:00

Orphée and Philip Glass Events in Portland

"Northwest Previews" Tune in for an in-depth preview of Orphée.
October 29 | 6pm All Classical 89.9 fm

We're also happy to point you to YouTube where you can meet the man, kind of in person: A preview of Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts

This one features Philip Glass talking about how he approaches writing music.

An interview and concert with Philip Glass: In Conversation: Philip Glass and Tim Page

Opera Appreciation Lecture Explore the history and culture surrounding Orphée. Lecture presented by Portland State University
October 31 | 2pm Portland State University Tickets: 503-725-4832 or online $20 general $7.50 students

Orphée Preview Enjoy a lively, 50-minute sneak peek of Orphée featuring the Portland Opera Studio Artists.
November 1 | 2pm Multnomah County Central Library FREE!

Creativity and Collaboration: An Evening with Philip Glass
Philip Glass will present an animated exploration of artistic collaboration, featuring film clips, live piano selections, and lively discussion.
You also have the chance to meet Philip Glass at a post-event reception!

November 3 | 7:00pm
Portland Art Museum, Kridell Ballroom, 1219 SW Park Ave.
Event: $20 Portland Opera Subscriber, $25 General Online

Event and Reception w/ Philip Glass: $75 Online
or call the Portland Opera Box Office at 503-241-1802

Beam me up, Scotty

2009-10-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

Climate Change

2009-10-22T09:35:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.npr.org

Innovative 'Times' Reporter Draws Limbaugh's Ire

by David Folkenflik

October 22, 2009

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh suggested this week that perhaps climate change reporter Andrew C. Revkin of The New York Times should take his own life to reduce carbon emissions, if he felt it was so important to the planet's future to reduce them.

"If he really thinks that human beings, in their natural existence, are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth," Limbaugh asked, "Mr. Revkin, why don't you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying?"

Limbaugh accused Revkin of being part of a radical environmentalist fringe. But those who know Revkin say he's a scrupulous journalist who's somewhat revolutionary in an altogether different aspect: the way he reports the news.

Part old-school newspaper reporter, part frenetic blogger, Revkin is curating information on the question of how the world can grow to a projected population of 9 billion people over the next 40 years with as little damage as possible.

"My way is to say, 'What do we know? What don't we know? What can we learn? What's essentially unknowable?' And then, 'What does society do with that body of information that's left'?" Revkin says.

Revkin's first long article on climate change appeared in Discover magazine 21 years ago. His blog, Dot Earth, is just two years old, an outgrowth of earlier online reports he filed while on extended reporting trips to the North Pole and Greenland.

On the blog, Revkin posts early versions of his own reporting, excerpts of stories from other news outlets, links to government documents and scientific journal articles, corporate presentations and blog postings. Revkin often solicits and publishes the opinions of readers — relying on them for tips and insight, while simultaneously helping them sift through the flood of information coming their way.

It's a new role for someone who had been a fairly conventional though distinguished print reporter.

"It's more like being a mountain guide after an avalanche, than being the old-style, 'Here's the news, take it or leave it, thank you very much, goodnight,' " Revkin says.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen says Revkin's work on Dot Earth represents an important step toward a new model for how the news business will work.

"One day, I think all beat reporting will be done this way," Rosen says. "The pressures to be in the paper regularly, to be on the front page have kept traditional reporters from really exploring what the Web — the two-way Web, the read-write, back-and-forth nature of the Web — can do for their reporting."

Even after all these years, the sensitive nature of the climate change debate can lead Revkin to wade into controversial areas. Sometimes he gets slapped by environmental advocates who take issue with Revkin's reporting. Former Clinton administration energy official Joe Romm, who writes the Climate Progress Blog for the left-of-center Center for American Progress, is a frequent critic.

But more often, Revkin finds himself attacked from the right. Such was the case after a recent public forum held by the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Revkin spoke long distance by Internet videophone to the group.

He says his remarks were intended to indicate skepticism toward the push for governments to grant financial credits for reducing carbon emissions. "Probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, a young American, could do to lower their carbon footprint is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius — it's having fewer kids," Revkin said.

If the country pursues carbon-centric policies, Revkin asked, should there be financial rewards for families that have one child rather than two or three?

He told the audience, "Obviously it's just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions."

By Revkin's account, those statements reverberated around the Internet — and were quickly distorted.

"In this case, I was asking a question about population and carbon — and it got conflated with those who make strong statements about depopulating the world and that kind of thing," Revkin says.

The conservative editorial page of Investors' Business Daily ran a critical piece. Then the nation's top-rated radio talk show host spoke up. Limbaugh invoked the much maligned Chinese government's "one child" policy — and made pointed comparisons to jihadists and Palestinian suicide bombers.

Revkin has received angry hate mail and telephone messages. He wants Limbaugh to apologize to the rest of his family — especially his older son, a regular Limbaugh listener who is, Revkin says, currently serving in the Israeli military.

Philosophy

2009-10-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

Diderot wrote, "All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings."

Click to Enlarge.

Now playing in Portland: A Serious Man

2009-10-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

Tzadik: one whose merit surpasses his iniquity.

2009 H1N1 (Swine) Flu in Humans

2009-10-21T10:01:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.cdc.gov

2009 H1N1 Flu in Humans

How does 2009 H1N1 virus spread?

Spread of 2009 H1N1 virus is thought to occur in the same way that seasonal flu spreads. Flu viruses are spread mainly from person to person through coughing or sneezing by people with influenza. Sometimes people may become infected by touching something – such as a surface or object – with flu viruses on it and then touching their mouth or nose.

How long can an infected person spread this virus to others?

People infected with seasonal and 2009 H1N1 flu shed virus and may be able to infect others from 1 day before getting sick to 5 to 7 days after. This can be longer in some people, especially children and people with weakened immune systems and in people infected with the new H1N1 virus.

Prevention & Treatment

What can I do to protect myself from getting sick?

This season, there is a seasonal flu vaccine to protect against seasonal flu viruses and a 2009 H1N1 vaccine to protect against the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus (sometimes called "swine flu").

A flu vaccine is the first and most important step in protecting against flu infection.

For information about the 2009 H1N1 vaccines, visit H1N1 Flu Vaccination Resources. For information about seasonal influenza vaccines, visit Preventing Seasonal Flu With Vaccination.

There are also everyday actions that can help prevent the spread of germs that cause respiratory illnesses like the flu.

Take these everyday steps to protect your health:

Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.

Wash your hands often with soap and water. If soap and water are not available, use an alcohol-based hand rub.*
Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread this way.
Try to avoid close contact with sick people.
If you are sick with flu-like illness, CDC recommends that you stay home for at least 24 hours after your fever is gone except to get medical care or for other necessities. (Your fever should be gone without the use of a fever-reducing medicine.) Keep away from others as much as possible to keep from making others sick.

Other important actions that you can take are:

Follow public health advice regarding school closures, avoiding crowds and other social distancing measures.
Be prepared in case you get sick and need to stay home for a week or so; a supply of over-the-counter medicines, alcohol-based hand rubs * (for when soap and water are not available), tissues and other related items could help you to avoid the need to make trips out in public while you are sick and contagious.

clipped from 74.125.155.132

Dr. Vinay Goyal is a renowned doctor who visited last week to lecture on the topic H1N1 (SWINE FLU), its origin and precautions. To summarize, Dr. Goyal reported that virus H1N1, like other Influenza A viruses, only infects the upper respiratory tract and proliferates only there. The only portals of entry are the nostrils and mouth/ throat. In a global epidemic of this nature, it's almost impossible not coming into contact with H1N1 in spite of all pre- cautions. Contact with H1N1 is not so much of a problem as proliferation is. Will a face mask protect? What most N95 respirators are designed to filter is about 95% particulates of 0.3, while the size of H1N1 virus is about 0.1. Hence, dependence on N95 to protect against H1N1 is like protecting against rain with an umbrella made of mosquito net.

Tamiflu drug does not kill the virus, but it prevents H1N1 from further prolif- eration till the virus limits itself in about 1-2 weeks during the virus’ natural cycle.

While you are still healthy and not showing any symptoms of H1N1 infection, in order to prevent proliferation, aggravation of symptoms and development of secondary infections, some very simple steps not fully highlighted in most official communications - can be practiced:

1. Frequent hand-washing.

2. "Hands-off-the-face" approach except to eat, bathe, etc.

3. Gargle twice a day with warm salt water (use Listerine if you don't trust salt). H1N1 takes 2-3 days after initial infection in the throat/ nasal cavity to pro- liferate and show characteristic symptoms. Simple gargling prevents proliferation. In a way, gargling with salt water has the same effect on a healthy individual that Tamiflu has on an infected person. Don't underestimate this simple, inexpensive and powerful preventative method.

4. Clean your nostrils at least once every day with warm salt water, swabbing both nostrils with cotton buds dipped in warm salt water is very effective in bring- ing down viral population.

5. Boost your natural immunity with foods that are rich in Vitamin C, or Vitamin C tablets that contain Zinc to boost absorption.

6. Drink as much of warm liquids as you can. Drinking warm liquids has the same effect as gargling, but in the reverse direction. They wash off proliferating viruses from the throat into the stomach where they cannot survive.

Portland Views

2009-10-21T08:32:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.portlandonline.com

Four pieces of public art, created by RIGGA - a group of local artists, are featured between the Morrison Bridge and the floating walkway [of the Eastside Esplanade.]

The Alluvial Wall, clings to a concrete retaining wall and echoes the natural shape of the river before Portland was Portland. It alludes to the interwoven layers of the river's pre-industrial geology and human artifacts; an amalgam of sedimentation and erosion formed of cold-forged steel plate with bronze castings lodged between its layers.

Click to Enlarge

National Chemistry Week

2009-10-20T09:02:00.001-07:00

clipped from chemistry.about.com

National Chemistry Week - Elements in the Human Body

Sunday October 18, 2009

Today marks the start of National Chemistry Week, an ACS-sponsored event designed to help foster an interest and understanding of chemistry. This year's focus is on the elements, so I thought the best way to kick off National Chemistry Week would be to introduce the elements found in the human body. 99% of the human body is made up of just six elements.

clipped from jchemed.chem.wisc.edu
What could be more central to the study of chemistry than the periodic table of the elements? It combines all of the known elements into a tabular form, arranged by atomic number, grouping elements together by similarities in their chemical properties. "Chemistry—It's Elemental" is exactly what this year's National Chemistry Week is celebrating—and it is no accident that this is the 140th anniversary of Mendeleev's periodic table.

clipped from chemistry.about.com

Most of the human body is made up of water, H2O, with cells consisting of 65-90% water by weight. Therefore, it isn't surprising that most of a human body's mass is oxygen. Carbon, the basic unit for organic molecules, comes in second. 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of just six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.

Oxygen (65%)
Carbon (18%)
Hydrogen (10%)
Nitrogen (3%)
Calcium (1.5%)
Phosphorus (1.0%)
Potassium (0.35%)
Sulfur (0.25%)
Sodium (0.15%)
Magnesium (0.05%)
Copper, Zinc, Selenium, Molybdenum, Fluorine, Chlorine, Iodine, Manganese, Cobalt, Iron (0.70%)
Lithium, Strontium, Aluminum, Silicon, Lead, Vanadium, Arsenic, Bromine (trace amounts)

Liquid oxygen in an unsilvered dewar flask. Liquid oxygen is blue.

Warwick Hillier, Australia National University, Canberra

Photograph of graphite, one of the forms of elemental carbon.

U.S. Geological Survey

NGC 604, a region of ionized hydrogen in the Triangulum Galaxy.

Hubble Space Telescope, photo PR96-27B

Image of solid, liquid, and gaseous nitrogen.

chemdude1, YouTube.com

Calcium is a metal. It readily oxidizes in air. Because it makes up such a large part of the skeleton, about one-third of the mass of human body comes from calcium, after water has been removed.

Tomihahndorf, Creative Commons License

Red phosphorus is one of several forms taken by this element.

RTC, wikipedia.org

Chunk of potassium metal with peroxides/superoxides (yellow crystals) and ozonide (red coloring) on its surface

Justin Urgitis, www.wikipedia.org

Sodium metal chunks under mineral oil.

Justin Urgitis, wikipedia.org

Vial of chlorine gas.

Ben Mills

Chlorine is a part of hydrochloric acid, used to digest food. It is involved in proper cell membrane function.

Photograph of the element magnesium, with a penny to indicate size of the sample.

U.S. Geological Survey

Crystals of the nonmetallic element sulfur.

Smithsonian Institution

Drawing

2009-10-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

To watch this image emerge Click Here.

Try this one: Click Here.

To see many pages of images by this artist Click Here.

Autumn Waiting

2009-10-18T08:40:00.001-07:00

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Autumn Waiting

by Tom Hennen

Cold wind.
The day is waiting for winter
Without a sound.
Everything is waiting—
Broken-down cars in the dead weeds.
The weeds themselves.
Trees.
Even sunlight
Is in no hurry and stays
For a long time
On each cornstalk.

Blackbirds are silent
And sit in piles.
From a distance
They look like
Something
Spilled on the road.

"Autumn Waiting" by Tom Hennen, from Looking into the Weather. © Westerheim Press, 1983.

Two more nights to experience this great concert

2009-10-18T07:46:00.001-07:00

clipped from tickets.orsymphony.org

[Do you like classical? Do you like jazz? Hear Kirill Gerstein perform Bernstein. He is performing tonight 10/18/09 and tomorrow night 10/19/09 at the Schnitzer.]

Bach! … Beethoven! … Bernstein? It's an updated version of music's "Three Bs," featuring the first Oregon Symphony performance ever of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2, [The Age of Anxiety] with Portland audience favorite Kirill Gerstein at the piano.

Carlos Kalmar, conductor
Kirill Gerstein, piano

Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 4
Bernstein: Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra, "The Age of Anxiety"
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7

[Watch Kirill Gerstein in action performing Rachmaninoff at another venue.]

Beer and molasses tsunamis

2009-10-17T09:25:00.001-07:00

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

The London Beer Flood occurred on this day in 1814. At 6:00 on a Monday evening, a torrent of beer came rushing through the streets of the St. Giles district of London.

It started at the Horse Shoe Brewery at Tottenham Court and Oxford Street, where there were huge vats of porter perched on top of the roof. They contained beer, which had been fermenting right there for months. The wooden vats were enormous — some as tall as 22 feet — and were structurally supported by large iron hoops, dozens of them. They sat on the roof of the Meux Brewing Company, each of them containing hundreds of thousands of liters of beer.

The largest vat had started to strain under the weight and pressure of all that porter, and on this day, around 6:00 p.m., one of the iron hoops gave way and all the porter in the 22-foot-tall vat came gushing out. There were about 600,000 liters of beer in there, and when the vat burst and all that beer came exploding out, there was a chain reaction and the surrounding vats on the roof also burst. More than a million liters of beer toppled the brewery's brick wall (it was 25 feet tall) and began flooding the streets of St. Giles.

People came out onto the streets of St. Giles with mugs and buckets and pots and pans to collect the free beer; others leaned over and drank directly from the streams gushing down the streets. But many people were injured by the torrent and sent to the hospital, where inpatients smelled the beer and nearly rioted to get their share.

Nine people died. About half were children who drowned or sustained fatal injuries from the flood, which had also crushed the roofs of buildings near the brewery, adding heavy timber to the gushing rivers of beer. One man died a few days after the flood from alcohol poisoning. Trying to prevent all of it from going to waste, he had drunk a lot of beer in the span of a few days. People brought a lawsuit against the Meux & Company Brewery, but in court the flood was ruled an Act of God, and the brewery was not held legally responsible.

In 1919 there was a molasses flood in Boston, Massachusetts, after a massive tank of molasses crumpled and burst. The molasses flood destroyed houses and trains and killed 21 people.

Art criticism

2009-10-16T09:46:00.001-07:00

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Twenty-seven-year-old Oscar Wilde arrived in New York in January 1882.

He lectured to coal miners in Leadville, Colorado, where he saw a sign on a saloon that said, "Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best," and called it "the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across."

Red Ribbon in Tanghe River Park

2009-10-15T16:58:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.contemporist.com

This was featured in the Portland Art Museum's new show: China Design Now.

Red Ribbon in Tanghe River Park

Posted by Dave on March 27th, 2008

In Qinhuangdao, China the Tanghe River Park features a new installation of a red steel bench that runs for half a kilometre through the park.

The Red Ribbon project has won an honor award from the American Society of Landscape Architects, and was also selected by readers of Conde Nast Traveller magazine as one of the seven new wonders of the architecture world.

Wall Street Smarts

2009-10-15T15:19:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Wall Street Smarts

CALVIN TRILLIN

Published: October 13, 2009

"IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence."

The statement came from a man sitting three or four stools away from me in a sparsely populated Midtown bar, where I was waiting for a friend. "But I have to buy you a drink to hear it?" I asked.

"Absolutely not," he said. "I can buy my own drinks. My 401(k) is intact. I got out of the market 8 or 10 years ago, when I saw what was happening."

He did indeed look capable of buying his own drinks — one of which, a dry martini, straight up, was on the bar in front of him. He was a well-preserved, gray-haired man of about retirement age, dressed in the same sort of clothes he must have worn on some Ivy League campus in the late '50s or early '60s — a tweed jacket, gray pants, a blue button-down shirt and a club tie that, seen from a distance, seemed adorned with tiny brussels sprouts.

"O.K.," I said. "Let's hear it."

"The financial system nearly collapsed," he said, "because smart guys had started working on Wall Street." He took a sip of his martini, and stared straight at the row of bottles behind the bar, as if the conversation was now over.

"But weren't there smart guys on Wall Street in the first place?" I asked.

He looked at me the way a mathematics teacher might look at a child who, despite heroic efforts by the teacher, seemed incapable of learning the most rudimentary principles of long division. "You are either a lot younger than you look or you don't have much of a memory," he said. "One of the speakers at my 25th reunion said that, according to a survey he had done of those attending, income was now precisely in inverse proportion to academic standing in the class, and that was partly because everyone in the lower third of the class had become a Wall Street millionaire."

I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks.

"That actually sounds more or less accurate," I said.

"Of course it's accurate," he said. "Don't get me wrong: the guys from the lower third of the class who went to Wall Street had a lot of nice qualities. Most of them were pleasant enough. They made a good impression. And now we realize that by the standards that came later, they weren't really greedy. They just wanted a nice house in Greenwich and maybe a sailboat. A lot of them were from families that had always been on Wall Street, so they were accustomed to nice houses in Greenwich. They didn't feel the need to leverage the entire business so they could make the sort of money that easily supports the second oceangoing yacht."

"So what happened?"

"I told you what happened. Smart guys started going to Wall Street."

"Why?"

"I thought you'd never ask," he said, making a practiced gesture with his eyebrows that caused the bartender to get started mixing another martini.

"Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing. At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they'd have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they'd wanted to be in the first place. That's when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That's when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds."

"But you still haven't told me how that brought on the financial crisis."

"Did you ever hear the word 'derivatives'?" he said. "Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn't have done the math."

"Why do I get the feeling that there's one more step in this scenario?" I said.

"Because there is," he said. "When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn't even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn't have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness."

"So having smart guys there almost caused Wall Street to collapse."

"You got it," he said. "It took you awhile, but you got it."

The theory sounded too simple to be true, but right offhand I couldn't find any flaws in it. I found myself contemplating the sort of havoc a horde of smart guys could wreak in other industries. I saw those industries falling one by one, done in by superior intelligence. "I think I need a drink," I said.

He nodded at my glass and made another one of those eyebrow gestures to the bartender. "Please," he said. "Allow me."

Calvin Trillin is the author, most recently, of "Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme."

Get Clipmarks - The easiest way to email text, images and videos you find on the web.

My Father’s House Community Shelter

2009-10-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

clipped from www.familyshelter.org

My Father's House Community Shelter is a family shelter located in East Multnomah County, Oregon. We provide a safe environment for 30 families, a place families can stay together as they address their spiritual, physical, emotional, and relational issues and needs.

Since more than half of our residents are children, our family shelter provides a home-style atmosphere that encourages change, structure, and accountability, as well as life changing classes and services that are suited for the entire family. For many of these parents it is their only opportunity for a chance to get back on their feet.

All of our programs stress responsible living and decision making. We never do anything for residents they are able to do for themselves, but we are available with assistance, encouragement, support, training and prayer. We are a community-based and completely privately funded family shelter – supported by hundreds of local churches, businesses and individuals.

FAST FACTS:

My Father's House…

Turns away an average of 100 families every week
Is the largest privately funded family shelter of its kind in the United States.
Has an incredible success rate of 85% (stats from 2007)
Shelters over 130 families each year

OTHER FACTS:

There are over 3,000 homeless families on any given night in Multnomah County
The average age of a homeless person is "9-years old"
Homelessness is growing exponentially at a rate of 37% each year
There are more homeless families than there are homeless singles

all which isn't singing is mere talking

2009-10-14T09:41:00.001-07:00

all which isn't singing is mere talking

all which isn't singing is mere talking
and all talking's talking to oneself
(whether that oneself be sought or seeking
master or disciple sheep or wolf)

gush to it as diety or devil
-toss in sobs and reasons threats and smiles
name it cruel fair or blessed evil-
it is you (ne i)nobody else

drive dumb mankind dizzy with haranguing
-you are deafened every mother's son-
all is merely talk which isn't singing
and all talking's to oneself alone

but the very song of(as mountains
feel and lovers)singing is silence

2009-10-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Rolighetsteorin
October 07, 2009
We believe that the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory.

The Paintings of E.E. Cummings

2009-10-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

clipped from www.eecummingsart.com

THE PAINTINGS OF E.E. CUMMINGS

As a poet, E. E. Cummings has enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout the 20th century, and great critical acclaim from many different literary circles. His poetry has been widely hailed for its experimental form, typography, grammar, and word coinages, as well as for the subtlety and sensitivity of its perceptions and feeling. His nonfiction prose has been praised for its bitter wit and for the clarity and forcefulness of its expression, revealing Cummings as an intelligent, critical observer and chronicler of the modern, who, bound to no school of writing, expresses himself as an idiosyncratic individualist. His highly developed sense of the aesthetic was married to a deep skepticism toward that which was fashionable but uninformed by critical intelligence and the warmth of the human heart. Ezra Pound went so far as to place Cummings' EIMI as the second most important book of the 20th century, ahead of James Joyce's Ulysses and second only to Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God.

Less well-known, however, are Cummings' achievements as a visual artist and the extent to which they express in an entirely different medium the same aesthetic principles and rigorous artistic intelligence that inform his poetry. Cummings viewed himself as much a painter as a poet, as evidenced by the enormous amount of time and energy he devoted to this lesser-known half of his "twin obsession." Not only did Cummings spend a greater portion of his time painting than writing, he also produced thousands of pages of carefully thought-out notes concerning his own aesthetics of painting: color-theory, analysis of the human form, the "intelligence" of painting, reflections on the Masters, etc.

~ waterfall ~

While Cummings achieved substantial acclaim as an American cubist and abstract, avant-garde painter in the years between the wars, he later viewed the artistic establishment as hopelessly anti-intellectual and dropped out of the New York gallery scene, devoting the remainder of his life to painting representational work: landscapes, nudes, still lifes, and portraits. In these works Cummings continued to explore the issues and elaborate the principles that had impelled his early abstract paintings, and he brought them to bear in his later, more personal, representational work. Indeed, he deliberately shunned avant-garde circles and the critics who validated them in favor of a more domestic or private environment in which to pursue his art and his continued inquiries into color, form, and feeling. Many of the paintings in this collection, while recognizable subjects, display a wild, exuberant, and sometimes nearly fantastic use of color. As such, they merit comparison with his poetry, the greatest accomplishment of which has long been considered his bold, inventive use of language and form in the service of a modern sensibility and aesthetic that is essentially individualistic, traditional, and even romantic.

Critics have tended to divide Cummings' painterly career roughly into two stylistically differing chronological phases. The first phase, more or less from 1915-1928, covers his widely-acclaimed large-scale abstractions and his immensely popular drawings and caricatures published throughout the 1920s in the leading modernist journal, The Dial.

The second phase, covering the period from 1928 until his death in 1962, consists primarily of representational works: still lifes, landscapes, nudes, and portraits. This dichotomy of avant-garde vs. representational in Cummings' visual work has its parallel in a public vs. private dichotomy: above and beyond the popular Cummings-as-experimental-innovator of the first period, there is in the second phase the very much more private Cummings-as-aesthetic-sensualist, strikingly revealed in the wild explosions of color that are found in his landscapes and in the physical intensity of his erotic work. While the representational works are more traditional and accessible than his earlier abstracts, their use of color and form reveal a sophistication and development of technique fully as complex as the earlier work, if not more so.

When Cummings died in 1962, he left to his estate a large oeuvre of visual art, including oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings. The current collection comprises the bulk of the material he left at his death--a large number of pieces representing the width and breadth of Cummings' visual output. Included are drawings dating back to his childhood, abstract oil paintings, circus drawings, burlesque sketches, visionary landscapes in oil and watercolor, erotic art, sensuous nudes, figure drawings, portraits of friends and family, as well as rare ink drawings documenting his travels abroad in the 1920s and '30s, a critical point in his development as a visual artist.

To read more Click Here.

Ernest Bloch Legacy Project

2009-10-13T15:07:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.youtube.com

The Ernest Bloch Legacy Project is devoted to preserving the legacy of composer, humanist, and philosopher, Ernest Bloch. Ernest Bloch lived in Agate Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean, now a part of Newport, Oregon. During the period he lived in Agate Beach, Bloch entered the final and most productive period of his life: during which he composed more than a third of his entire output -- a large piano concerto, four more string quartets, three more symphonies, and a variety of other works, large and small.

Poetry

2009-10-13T08:57:00.001-07:00

clipped from englishhistory.net

'The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting - '

John Keats to his brother George, 1819

5 Things to know about parking in Portland

2009-10-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

clipped from blog.oregonlive.com

Deck is stacked in favor of Portland in parking-ticket game

By Joseph Rose, The Oregonian

October 11, 2009, 9:32PM

Street parking in downtown Stumptown isn't the most dangerous game (unless you're still confused by those new, superwide bike lanes on Oak Street).

But every driver who tries to match wits and clocks with Portland's traffic enforcement officers and their little yellow envelopes knows it can be costly.

Here's a little-known truth about Portland parking: The small army of enforcers who generated $3.7 million in revenue last year don't start and stop with the city's pay-to-park hours.

I'd like to offer you weary street parkers a brief guide to the rules of the game.

No government secrets, just a little toolbox --five things to know about how parking enforcement in Portland works.

1. The hours officers keep. From Monday through Friday, officers are on duty from 6:15 a.m. to 11:45 p.m. Saturday: 7:15 a.m. to 11:45 p.m. Sunday from 10:15 a.m. to 11:45 p.m

2. The actual meter hours. Officers police hundreds of vehicles at a time. How do they keep track of any given car's time in a specific spot or block? Multifunction tablet computers.

After scanning the bar code on the side of a SmartMeter to register the location, officers walk down the block, punching in plate numbers. The little machines keep track of streets, times and sequences in which the cars are parked, which is how officers know if you're simply feeding the meter.

They also use the device to snap photos as evidence to support citations. Oh, and the gizmos print out the tickets, too. Makes cheating hard.

3. Parking tickets aren't just for downtown. Enforcement officers work with police, neighborhood associations and schools on targeted missions to change bad parking behavior around the city. And they don't discriminate.

"If you live near a school, you may have been complaining about parents parking in a bus zone or parking in your driveway," said Cheryl Kuck, a Portland Bureau of Transportation spokeswoman. "But if you're parked the wrong way on your street during a mission, you're also subject to a ticket."

4. The costliest parking tickets. Worried about parking tickets draining your bank account? Avoid these whoppers: Unlawful use of a disabled permit ($450); abandoned vehicle ($280); blocking a handicap sidewalk ramp ($150); parking in a disabled zone ($190); and using a vehicle on the street for storage ($100).

5. Perforated edges are our friends. Each receipt printed by a meter has a side piece with information about when your parking expires. Tear it off and use the adhesive to attach it to your computer monitor back at the office. Of course, it's still easy to lose track of time.

Last week, I got a ticket 10 minutes after my parking expired. Ten minutes! Twenty-four bones for the city coffers.

Well played, traffic enforcement. Well played.

-- Joseph Rose; Twitter: pdxcommute

Water Table

2009-10-11T11:41:00.001-07:00

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Water Table

by Billy Collins

It is on dry sunny days like this one that I find myself
thinking about the enormous body of water
that lies under this house,
cool, unseen reservoir,
silent except for the sounds of dripping
and the incalculable shifting

of all the heavy darkness that it holds.

This is the water that our well was dug to sip
and lift to where we live,
water drawn up and falling on our bare shoulders,
water filling the inlets of our mouths,

water in a pot on the stove.

The house is nothing now but a blueprint of pipes,
a network of faucets, nozzles, and spigots,
and even outdoors where light pierces the air
and clouds fly over the canopies of trees,
my thoughts flow underground

trying to imagine the cavernous scene.

Surely it is no pool with a colored ball
floating on the blue surface.
No grotto where a king would have
his guests rowed around in swan-shaped boats.
Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow
there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock
and no man holding a long oar,
ready to take your last coin.

This is the real earth and the real water it contains.

But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain.

"Water Table" by Billy Collins, from The Art of Drowning. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

The Crow Paradox

2009-10-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

clipped from www.npr.org

The Crow Paradox

by Robert Krulwich

July 27, 2009

Here's a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them — apparently for years. But people — even people who love crows — usually can't tell them apart. So what we have for you are two experiments that tell this story.

First, how do crows tell us apart? Watch this video:

Now, our second experiment. On you. There are crow scholars who raise, study, and even live with a crow. But once that crow flies off and joins a group, these researchers say they can no longer tell their crow apart from the others.

So let's see how well you do:

If you want to hear researchers describe what it's like to alienate a crow, and then be razzed and harassed by its family and neighbors wherever they go — tennis courts, ATM machines, parking lots — listen to our radio story. We'll also tell you how unbelievably long a crow can keep a grudge.

To listen to the story Click Here and scroll to the bottom of the page.

The Greatest Show on Earth

2009-10-10T09:15:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.oregonlive.com

Darwin's pitbull: Richard Dawkins on evolution and unintelligent design

By Joe Rojas-Burke, The Oregonian

October 09, 2009, 2:25PM

In his best-seller "The God Delusion," evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins attacked religious belief, arguing that faith in God is irrational and harmful.

His new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution," takes on creationists, including followers of intelligent design, by meticulously laying out the evidence scientists have amassed during the 150 years since Charles Darwin set forth his theory.

Dawkins, who will read from his book Saturday at the Wordstock Festival recently spoke with The Oregonian.

Do you expect creationists to be convinced by your book, or are you just preaching to the choir?

Dawkins: It's not a bad thing to preach to the choir. The choir can enjoy reading about the wonders of nature and science and the evidence for evolution. They may be "the choir" in the sense that they don't dispute evolution, but I'd rather not use a word like "choir," which implies that we're jumping into a controversy. There is no controversy in science. It's true that there's a political controversy, especially in the United States, and it'd be nice to be able to influence that. But I wouldn't expect that young-Earth creationists would read my book. I'm not really after converting them. I think there's a great number of people who are genuinely interested but perhaps don't know very much about evolution, some who even vaguely think of themselves as creationists because they haven't thought about it very much.

What do people most often get wrong when they try to understand evolution?

Dawkins: It's the idea that it is a theory of random chance. That single misunderstanding alone accounts for just about everything you will read on so-called arguments against evolution, things like, "I can't believe that something as complicated as an eye could come about by chance." Well of course it couldn't come about by chance! How could it be possible to be so stupid as to think that anybody could ever suggest that it comes about by chance? Natural selection is the very opposite of chance -- that's the whole point! Oh, I probably have to adopt a less impatient, irritated and preemptory tone.

The so-called intelligent design critique argues that some biological machines are too complex to evolve without help from above. Your book counters with several examples of "unintelligent design." Any favorites?

Dawkins: The recurrent laryngeal nerve is a remarkable piece of unintelligent design. The nerve starts in the head, with the brain, and the end organ is the larynx, the voice box. But instead of going straight there it goes looping past the voice box. In the case of the giraffe, it goes down the full length of the giraffe's neck, loops down one of the main arteries in the chest and then comes straight back up again to the voice box, having gone within a couple of inches of the voice box on its way down. No intelligent designer would ever have done that.

To illustrate the plight of biology teachers, you invite readers to imagine being a Latin teacher beset "by a baying pack of ignoramuses" who tirelessly work to persuade students that the Romans never existed, a funny analogy. But then you compare creationists to Holocaust deniers. That's a risky strategy.

Dawkins: The analogy to me is simply that both are deniers of history. There is something really horrible about Holocaust denial. You know that it is motivated by anti-Semitism. Needless to say, I have absolutely no wish to make that sort of comparison with evolution deniers. The comparison is limited to the fact that both deny manifest facts of history.

What is the harm of creationists? Or as a creationist quoted in your book kept asking, "Why is it so important to you that everyone believes in evolution?"

Dawkins: It is important to me that when there is a beautiful truth about the world I feel a sense of mission to communicate that truth to people because it is so beautiful. Carl Sagan said: "When you are in love, you want to tell the world." He loved science. For me, the story of how we got here, how the trees got here, how the birds got here, how iguanas and dinosaurs and turtles got here, it is just so beautiful, and elegant, and thrilling, and enthralling. How could you resist trying to pass that on to anybody who will listen? If they don't want to listen that's fine, they can just shove off.

The Wordstock event with Dawkins requires a separate $22 ticket. He takes the stage at 3 p.m. Saturday.

– Joe Rojas-Burke

The power of access

2009-10-10T07:44:00.001-07:00

clipped from finance.yahoo.com

Wall Street speed dial gets Tim Geithner directly

Wall Street cadre has Geithner on speed dial: When these men call, Treasury boss answers

By Matt Apuzzo and Daniel Wagner, Associated Press Writers
On 4:26 pm EDT, Thursday October 8, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As the federal government propped up the housing market and braced for the collapse of General Motors this spring, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner capped a busy week with phone conversations with three men.

The first was Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The second was Jamie Dimon, the CEO at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The third was President Barack Obama.

Dimon and Blankfein are members of an exclusive club: Along with executives at Citigroup Inc., they are among a cadre of Wall Street executives who have known Geithner for years, whose multibillion-dollar companies survived the economic crisis with his help, and who can pick up the phone and reach the nation's most powerful economic official.

Geithner's calendars, obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the extraordinary influence of three companies. More than any other company or any of their rival banks, Goldman, Citi and JPMorgan can get Geithner on the phone several times a day if necessary, giving them an unmatched opportunity to influence policy.

"They're people he has relationships with and who he can trust," said Taylor Griffin, a Treasury Department spokesman during the George W. Bush administration and an adviser to the 2008 presidential campaign of John McCain. Griffin defended Geithner's relationships with industry executives. "There's only so much time in the day and you can only talk to so many people. You choose the people whose point of view you value."

There is nothing inherently wrong with senior Treasury Department officials talking to industry executives, or even with the secretary keeping tabs on the market's biggest players. But the calendars offered fodder for critics who say Geithner is too close to the Wall Street firms he helped bail out following the economic meltdown.

"It's appropriate for Treasury officials to keep in touch with those who work in the markets every day, particularly when the economy and the markets are so fragile," Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said.

Not all players in the market enjoy the same access. In the first seven months of Geithner's tenure, his calendars reflect at least 80 contacts with Blankfein, Dimon, Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons or Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit.

Geithner had more contacts with Citigroup than with Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who leads the effort to approve Geithner's overhaul of the financial system. Geithner's contacts with Blankfein alone outnumber his contacts with Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Partly this is explained by the extraordinary clout of these companies. Goldman, JPMorgan and Citigroup are among the dominant Wall Street players. Their executives can move not just markets but entire economies. Treasury invested heavily in all of them to keep the industry afloat, and Citi faces tighter scrutiny because Treasury owns a larger stake in the bank.

But size does not tell the whole story. Treasury has a huge financial stake in North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp., but CEO Ken Lewis appears on Geithner's calendars only three times. Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack also appears three times.

Smaller banks have felt frozen out of the process as the Treasury Department, first under President George W. Bush and now under President Obama, pushed through massive financial plans, said Wayne Abernathy, a lobbyist with the American Bankers Association, which represents banks of all sizes.

"Their focus was the big banks," he said. "They only focused on the guys that occupied the biggest space in front of them. We constantly remind them that there are hundreds of other banks, and they've had to adjust their programs to take other guys into account."

Geithner's relationship with Goldman, JPMorgan and Citigroup dates to his tenure as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he helped put together multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts for Wall Street last fall. Critics said the government was unwilling to let banks suffer the consequences of their bad bets.

When he arrived in Treasury's corner office, Geithner brought those relationships with him.

The prominence of those relationships is clear by the company they keep on Geithner's calendars.

On March 24, just after Geithner announced plans to help banks sell off toxic debts left over from the housing market meltdown -- which stood to be a boon for big banks -- his calendars reflect a busy morning. He had a briefing on terrorism financing, a meeting on tightening financial regulations and a prep session for congressional testimony.

Geithner emerged to take just three phone calls, from Vice President Joe Biden, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and, shortly before heading to Capitol Hill, from Dimon.

Officials at JPMorgan, Citigroup and Goldman had no comment on Geithner's calendars. Geithner did not take questions during his only public appearance Thursday, a conference call with reporters. Asked about Geithner's contacts with Wall Street, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the administration had "tremendous confidence in his stewardship and in his leadership."

Geithner's predecessor at Treasury, Henry Paulson, similarly kept in close touch with Wall Street power brokers. In particular, he was criticized for his close ties to Goldman, his former employer.

But Geithner's calendars show Geithner is too close to Wall Street, said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist with the International Monetary Fund and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.

"Your worldview in the middle of a crisis depends on whom you talk to and what their perspective is, and you need a broad cross-section of opinions to truly understand what's happening," Johnson said.

By seeking information from such a narrow group of contacts, Johnson said, Geithner risks limiting his exposure to the views of his trusted banker colleagues.

Geithner must believe he can set aside their inherent biases, he said, adding, "I don't see how you do that."

clipped from baselinescenario.com

What's Wrong with a Phone Call?

Yesterday Simon pointed out the AP story highlighting Tim Geithner's many contacts with a few key Wall Street executives — primarily Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Vikram Pandit, and Richard Parsons — while leading the government's rescue efforts as Treasury secretary. It's certainly useful for the nation's top economic official to talk to people in the banking industry, and it's also useful for him to talk to banks that are being bailed out by the government. But the AP story did come up with a few important distinctions. Geithner talked to these Wall Street executives more than the key people in Congress — Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd — that he needs to pass his regulatory reform plan. And he talked to them much more than to, say, Bank of America, which is equally big and equally in debt to the government. So to be clear, Geithner is talking to these people more than dictated by the requirements of his job (or he's not talking to Ken Lewis enough).

Still, you could say, what's wrong with that? Can't Tim Geithner talk to whomever he wants to talk to?

Of course he can, in a legal sense, and no one is saying he is doing anything illegal. All the evidence is that Geithner is a man of unassailable integrity, and a modest, courteous guy to boot.

But as the lobbyists have known for decades, the key to political power in the United States is access. Under-the-table bribes are relatively rare. The revolving door (government officials taking lucrative jobs at the companies they used to oversee) is important, but of little use when it comes to the very top people. Paul O'Neill, John Snow, and Henry Paulson were already easily rich enough to overlook such temptations (although Snow did leave Treasury to become chairman of Cerberus); Geithner may not be a mega-millionaire, but he already turned down his shot at being CEO of Citigroup in 2007.

Instead, if you want to sway some of the top people in government, the most important thing is to talk to them. All of us are influenced by the information and opinions that we are exposed to. Many people have a tendency to agree with either the first person or the the last person they spoke to on a particular issue, regardless of what other information they take in. (Where Geithner falls on that spectrum I have no idea.) This is why lobbyists make so much money; they sell access.

If, in the midst of a financial crisis, you get a disproportionate share of your advice from a few select Wall Street veterans with enormous personal interests in your decisions, you will be swayed a certain way. This is particularly worrying if you have spent the last several years even more deeply steeped in that circle, because you will be getting information and ideas that are confirming your prior beliefs. It is also worrying if, as was the case this past year, you do not have the time for detailed fact-finding or empirical studies, and instead you have to make important decisions based purely on logic and conjecture. Instead, you (and the public) would be better served going out of your way to talk to people who do not share your prior perspective and are likely to disagree with you. Now, the Obama administration is nowhere near as bad as the Bush administration, which disdained talking to its critics; this administration has reached out to its intellectual opponents, for example in the famous White House dinner with Krugman and Stiglitz. But one dinner does not balance eighty phone calls.

There's nothing scandalous about the fact that Tim Geithner talks to the CEOs of Goldman, JPMorgan, and Citi a lot. It's just a fact. It's a fact that demonstrates the deep linkages between the thinking inside Treasury and the thinking on Wall Street (and yes, I know Citi and JPMorgan are in Midtown). It's also one reason I have little interest in conspiracy theories — who needs a conspiracy when you have a sympathetic ear in the Treasury Department that you can get access to regularly? As we've said before, the key factor throughout this financial crisis has been political power. And if that power is composed of the power of ideas and the power of relationships, so much the better.

By James Kwak

In my brother's garden today

2009-10-08T19:14:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.donsessions.blogspot.com

Bumble Bee on Celosia Bloom

Click on Image to Enlarge

Celosia - Amaranth Family. Also Cockscomb and Wooly Flower. These red flowers have been blooming since August and are just beginng to wind down. They are popular with butterflies and bees which are currently swarming around them.

Bumble bees - Family Apodea, Genus Bomba These bumble bees collect pollen in baskets of stiff hairs on their hind feet. Their lip forms a long tube for sucking nectar from flowers which is converted to honey in the bee's digestive tract.

BBC's Loyn: Afghanistan's History Of Defying Invaders

2009-10-08T07:24:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.npr.org

BBC's Loyn: Afghanistan's History Of Defying Invaders

October 8, 2009

To Listen to story Click Here.

The challenges the U.S. faces in Afghanistan should come as no surprise.

David Loyn says that first Great Britain and then Russia were confounded by the same rugged terrain and divisive politics that dog the U.S. occupation today.

Loyn is a BBC journalist who's followed the Taliban since it took control of Kabul in the mid-1990s. His latest book is In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation.

Loyn tells NPR's Renee Montagne that Afghanistan's sprawling deserts and 16,000-foot mountains are a key reason why the country has come to be known as the "graveyard of empires."

"It's natural guerrilla territory," he says. "It's not an easy place for modern technological armies to operate."

In fact, when the British invaded in the 19th century, they found themselves using the same mountain passes their British military ancestors had cut through the mountains half a century earlier: There were — and remain — simply no other passable routes.

Loyn also says governing Afghanistan's multiple ethnic factions isn't only a challenge for outsiders.

In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation
By David Loyn
Hardcover, 288 pages
Palgrave Macmillan
List price: $27.95

"Afghans tend to ally against a foreign enemy when the enemy comes in," he says. "But then they tend to fall apart like sand when you try to govern them from inside, and many Afghan kings have discovered that."

Loyn believes government corruption is the biggest obstacle to any lasting stability today. He says it's helped win the Taliban new recruits, even among those who would prefer the Taliban not gain power.

The Oregon connection

2009-10-08T07:04:00.001-07:00

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Frank Herbert, born in Tacoma, Washington (1920). He got an assignment from the [San Francisco Examiner] magazine California Living to write about a project that the government was sponsoring in Oregon to slow the spreading of the sand dunes on the coast. He went to Oregon to research, and he became so fascinated with the project that he ended up collecting far more material than he could ever fit into his piece. He wrote an article called "They Stopped the Moving Sands," which California Living never published. But Herbert couldn't stop thinking about the ecological implications of the growing sand dunes. He spent six more years researching and envisioning what would happen if the situation on the Oregon Coast was magnified to the scale of an entire planet. The result was his novel Dune (1965), considered one of the best science fiction novels ever written.

I would prefer not to

2009-10-07T09:36:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.pshares.org

For Bartleby the Scrivener by Billy Collins

"Every time we get a big gale around here
some people just refuse to batten down."

we estimate that

ice skating into a sixty
mile an hour wind, fully exerting
the legs and swinging arms

you will be pushed backward
an inch every twenty minutes.

in a few days, depending on
the size of the lake,
the backs of your skates
will touch land.

you will then fall on your ass
and be blown into the forest.

if you gather enough speed
by flapping your arms
and keeping your skates pointed

you will catch up to other
flying people who refused to batten down.
you will exchange knowing waves
as you ride the great wind north.

Hand Artistry

2009-10-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

Watch a slide show of these hands by Clicking Here.

Harvest

2009-10-05T13:15:00.001-07:00

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Harvest

by Louise Gluck

It's autumn in the market—
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They're beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties

misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—

Inside, they're gone. Black, moldy—
you can't take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit

still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin

to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry

the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,

harvest, to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground's so hard the farmers think
it isn't worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,

no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there's no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.

The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:

calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.

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Haochen Zhang played in Portland last night (10/4/09). Wow!

2009-10-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

19-year-old Van Cliburn gold-medal winner Haochen Zhang plays the third movement of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit during the 13th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition on June 6, 2009.

Haochen Zhang played the entire Ravel concerto at Portland Piano International (PPI) Sunday afternoon.

In addition to hearing one of the most exciting new talents in the piano world, the Portland audience experienced a new technology. Over the piano was a movie screen showing the performance in close-up. Those not fortunate enough to have seats on the keyboard side of the piano could see all his keyboard techniques.

Choosing Civility

2009-09-30T09:46:00.001-07:00

Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct by P.M. Forni, founder of the Johns Hopkins Civility initiative.

clipped from sites.google.com

25 Rules of Considerate Conduct

A free evening of LIVE theatre

2009-09-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

clipped from www.freenightoftheater.net

Free Night Performances in Oregon (Portland)

The Portland Area Theatre Alliance invites you to attend a free evening of LIVE theatre. Tickets will be released on October 1st, 4th, 8th and 15th, so keep checking back for additional opportunities.

Free Night of Theater Ovation TV Spot from Theatre Communications Group on Vimeo.

Tickets may be reserved as of: 10-01-2009 11:00 AM

To choose another region, click here.

Currently sorted by current shows and Show Name.

Show Name

Theater Name

Location

Date&Time

A Chorus Line	Stumptown Stages	Portland , OR	10/09/2009 08:00PM
Becky's New Car	Artists Repertory Theatre	Portland , OR	10/10/2009 07:30PM
Becky's New Car	Artists Repertory Theatre	Portland , OR	10/13/2009 07:30PM
Becky's New Car	Artists Repertory Theatre	Portland , OR	10/17/2009 07:30PM
Blithe Spirit	Beaverton Civic Theatre	Beaverton , OR	10/08/2009 07:30PM
Blithe Spirit	Beaverton Civic Theatre	Beaverton , OR	10/15/2009 07:30PM
Blithe Spirit	Beaverton Civic Theatre	Beaverton , OR	10/22/2009 07:30PM
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Oregon Children's Theatre	Portland , OR	10/31/2009 02:00PM
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Oregon Children's Theatre	Portland , OR	10/31/2009 05:00PM
Death of a Salesman	Bag & Baggage Production	Hillsboro , OR	10/08/2009 07:30PM
Death of a Salesman	Bag & Baggage Production	Hillsboro , OR	10/09/2009 07:30PM
Death of a Salesman	Bag & Baggage Production	Hillsboro , OR	10/10/2009 07:30PM
Death of a Salesman	Bag & Baggage Production	Hillsboro , OR	10/11/2009 02:00PM
Fiction	Portland Playhouse	Portland , OR	10/09/2009 08:00PM
Fiction	Portland Playhouse	Portland , OR	10/11/2009 08:00PM
Fiction	Portland Playhouse	Portland , OR	10/15/2009 08:00PM
Fiction	Portland Playhouse	Portland , OR	10/16/2009 08:00PM
Fiction	Portland Playhouse	Portland , OR	10/19/2009 2:00AM
Fool For Love	CoHo Productions	Portland , OR	10/15/2009 08:00PM
Halloween Improv Show!	Super Project Lab	Portland , OR	10/17/2009 08:00PM
Halloween Improv Show!	Super Project Lab	Portland , OR	10/18/2009 08:00PM
Henry IV part 2	Northwest Classical Theatre Company	Portland , OR	10/29/2009 07:00PM
I've Got Confidence!	Eastland Academy and auGi	Portland , OR	10/30/2009 08:00PM
I've Got Confidence!	Eastland Academy and auGi	Portland , OR	10/31/2009 08:00PM
Oliver!	Lakewood Theatre Company	Lake Oswego , OR	10/08/2009 07:30PM
Ragtime	Portland Center Stage	Portland , OR	10/08/2009 7:30PM
Ragtime	Portland Center Stage	Portland , OR	10/15/2009 7:30PM
Talking With	CAST Theater	Hood River , OR	10/08/2009 07:30PM
Talking With	CAST Theater	Hood River , OR	10/15/2009 07:30PM
Talking With	CAST Theater	Hood River , OR	10/16/2009 07:30PM
Talking With	CAST Theater	Hood River , OR	10/17/2009 07:30PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/09/2009 07:30PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/10/2009 07:30PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/11/2009 04:00PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/16/2009 07:30PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/17/2009 07:30PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/18/2009 04:00PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/23/2009 07:30PM
Teeth of the Sons	The Re-Theatre Instrument	Portland , OR	10/24/2009 07:30PM
The Garden of Monsters	Portland Theatre Works	Portland , OR	10/19/2009 07:00PM
the Portrait the Wind the Chair	Shaking the Tree	Portland , OR	10/31/2009 03:00PM
The Tempest	Blue Monkey	Portland , OR	10/08/2009 08:00PM
The Women of Troy	Lunacy Stageworks	Portland , OR	10/08/2009 08:00PM
Wait Until Dark	Magenta Theatre	Vancouver , WA	10/09/2009 07:00PM
Wait Until Dark	Magenta Theatre	Vancouver , WA	10/15/2009 07:00PM
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown	St. John's North End Players	Portland , OR	10/10/2009 08:00PM

Elk rut

2009-09-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

From YouTube.com: "This is video of the elk rut in Estes Park, CO in the fall of 2009. The elk are in a frenzy, and don't care about people around!"

The First Hundred (Dog) Days

2009-09-28T13:09:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.nytimes.com

The First Hundred (Dog) Days

By BEN GREENMAN

Published: July 16, 2009

BEFORE my arrival in the White House in April, I was not well known to the American people. Perhaps understandably, I was greeted with some suspicion. "Portuguese water dog" has a foreign sound to it. My hair covers my eyes, which can create the impression that I am not trustworthy. From the first, I took it upon myself not only to illustrate my own belief in clear thinking and accountability, but to give the American people a sense of what their lives would be like during my time in the White House. As I approach the milestone of my first 100 days in office, I want to reiterate some of my basic convictions.

Historically, my breed is used to herd fish in shallows or carry messages from ships to the nearby shore, and I have tried to show the American people that I will continue that tradition, both leading (the fish) and communicating (the messages). I have succeeded more than I have failed, but there have been lapses. Remember when I bit that reporter's microphone? I had a sudden urge to get that thing. I thought it was a fish. Even thinking about it now makes me jumpy. Another time the president almost tripped over my leash, and even though that wasn't technically my fault, I take full responsibility.

My time in the White House thus far has had one driving theme: we all share the same world. There have been those who have criticized my willingness to sniff in an exploratory manner around hostile breeds from foreign lands. But remember, we are all one species, from the tiniest Chihuahua to the mightiest mastiff. I have tried to practice this openness closer to home as well, by spending more time with Joe Biden's German shepherd puppy, despite our considerable difference in temperament and bite force.

The press likes to play a game where it compares my record with that of other presidential pets. I find that premature and unhelpful. Other presidential pets came to power in different times, and faced different challenges.

Still, I would like to remark briefly upon the pet to whom I am most often compared. Fala came to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in November 1940, and quickly captured the national imagination. But Fala lived in a time when there was an understanding between the press and politicians, and many of his peccadilloes (his habit of eating garbage, his eye for the ladies) were simply overlooked.

By comparison, consider the way that the news media scrutinized Buddy, the Clintons' Labrador. Before his untimely death by car accident in 2002, Buddy was persistently maligned by rumors that he did not get along with Socks the cat, as if that were his fault. (Cats, need I remind you, are jerks.)

In the end, while it is all well and good to compare this dog with that dog, any honest and forthright White House pet must acknowledge that we are all standing in the long shadow cast by Dash, the brilliant, charming, perfect-tailed collie mix owned by President Benjamin Harrison's wife, Caroline. Dash responded to voice commands with great efficiency, never demonstrated undue unruliness and still found time to pursue his own interests. I use his example to remind myself that there is always room for improvement, and that we should never fail to aspire to perfection, even as we know that we cannot reach it. Excuse me: I must chase a ball.

O.K., I'm back. As we head into the second hundred days of my administration, I feel more pride and pleasure than ever at the prospect of serving the American people and finding ways to make this nation, and this planet, a better place for our children and our children's children. I am speaking metaphorically here, of course, as I am neutered.

This has been a rewarding but difficult time for our nation, yet I remain confident of our prospects so long as I spend every day with at least three feet on the ground — four is a little optimistic, if you know what I mean. Thank you.

Ben Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker, is the author most recently of the novel "Please Step Back."

Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

2009-09-27T07:13:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

Published: July 17, 2008

Kay Ryan has been chosen to be the country's 16th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress.

A CAT/A FUTURE

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

BLANDEUR

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

THE NIAGARA RIVER

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice — as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced —
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

HOME TO ROOST

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small —
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

GREEN HILLS

Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the languor of their
rolling over.

THINGS SHOULDN'T BE SO HARD

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.

Bloomberg’s “PlaNYC” Continues Forward Moves

2009-09-26T11:56:00.001-07:00

clipped from citiwire.net

Bloomberg's "PlaNYC" Continues Forward Moves

Neal Peirce / Sep 24 2009

NEW YORK–So ambitious was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "PlaNYC" for America's lead city, first unveiled on Earth Day 2007, that it set a new standard for 21st century planning in U.S. cities.

But then came prolonged wrangling and eventual rejection by the state legislature of a salient feature of the plan– "congestion pricing" under which tolls would be imposed on private vehicles entering Manhattan's traffic-clogged business district during working hours. Outer borough and suburban opposition proved to be extreme.

Out of the limelight, however, two-thirds of PlaNYC's 127 recommended steps are reported to be on time or ahead of schedule. In the plan's public accounting, released each Earth Day, advances include a sharp increase in more clean-fuel taxis, $100 million yearly outlays for efficiency upgrades of government buildings, and first cutbacks in city-wide greenhouse gas emissions. Some 200,000 trees have been planted, 20 pilot projects begun to clean up city waterways, 79 new playgrounds constructed.

And in contrast to "here today, gone tomorrow" initiatives in many cities, a remarkably strong base for long-term progress appears to have been set. The City Council voted to make Bloomberg's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability a permanent part of city government. And that office is making waves. As an outside observer relates, it "beats up on the bureaucracy to stay focused. The approach is ruthless, and so is the mayor. Quarterly and annual targets are set. Commissioners and department heads are held strictly accountable."

Plus, interested–and influential–outside eyes are watching. A 15-member advisory board, with a cross-section of the city's top business, civic, labor, environmental, science and foundation leaders, not only helped shape PlaNYC in the first instance, but now watches over the process carefully as working groups meet regularly with city department leaders.

The venture has one other foundation, described by Rohit Aggarwala, director of the Long-Term Planning and Sustainability office. The Bloomberg administration, he notes, "came to environmentalism honestly." It needed a long-term strategy for a future with a projected 1 million more city residents by 2030–the equivalent, as one participant put it, of "cramming the entire cities of Boston and Miami into our relatively cramped boroughs." With a 20 percent population rise, it was feared New York simply wouldn't be able to handle added demand on its roads or current subways, or provide enough energy from its existing power plants. Major expansions would be mandatory.

"So we needed to think of efficiency as strategy," Aggarwala said. "That led to an overarching idea that long-range planning and sustainability are the same thing. Even planting 1 million trees–our analysis showed 7 percent higher value on a street with trees compared to one without. Even in the teeth of a recession, it still makes sense to plant trees."

Against that background, a recheck of PlaNYC's major features suggests a coordinated, timely–indeed compellingly necessary–effort for the city's economy and livability. A sampling: Putting all of New York's road and transit lines in good condition for the first time ever. Cleaning up all the city's power plants, and contaminated brownfields and creating room for 250,000 housing units. Putting recreation space in reach of all New Yorkers, opening 290 schoolyards as public playgrounds. Creating public plazas for every community (like this year's move to turn a large area encompassing Times Square into a pedestrian-only zone).

And because New York City is akin to an archipelago, sensitive to sea level rises, it's started a massive campaign of special inducements to building owners to energy retrofit their structures (source of 80 percent of the city's greenhouse gas emissions). The goal: 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.

Keeping movement on all these goals will be daunting. But the broad participation in assembling them, Bloomberg's insistence on tough accounting, the buy-in sought and received from the business and environmental communities, and the vision of a more sustainable and competitive city, augur well.

Even the congestion planning element, predicts Robert Yaro, president of New York's Regional Plan Assn. (RPA), will return–likely in a more sophisticated form, akin to systems in Singapore and Stockholm, with a high-tech monitoring system and pricing measures to really achieve greater reductions in the traffic that now strangles movement on Manhattan streets so many hours each day.

If there was a built-in weakness to PlaNYC, it was that it was formulated for New York City proper, not the entire 22.5 million person New York-Northern New Jersey-Connecticut citistate. But Yaro reports his organization and city staff are spending time conferring with the Long Island Regional Planning Council, Newark, Bridgeport, Stamford and other governments in the region.

So at least several of the larger regional constituencies, he says, are now developing their own sustainability plans. "But the fact New York went ahead, took the lead, makes a big difference," he adds.

Neal Peirce's e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce's column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

This article was posted on September 24, 2009. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

Word of the Day

2009-09-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

Word of the Day from Dictionary.com

horripilation \haw-rip-uh-LAY-shuhn; ho-\, noun: the act or process of the hair bristling on the skin, as from cold or fear; goose flesh

There are a few things capable of sending an icy horripilation through even the bravest man.
-- Who Will Provide Social Security?, Washington Times, June 11, 1996

This is not to say that the horripilation Iran's nuclear programme inspires is unjustified; nor is it to claim that no other state would seek to develop or maintain nuclear weapons if the official nuclear powers gave theirs up.
-- George Monbiot, Guardian, January 23, 2002

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, Celebrity Paranormal Project is fascinating as a demonstration of physiological fear: dilated pupils, nausea, shallow breathing, horripilation, the mind-twisting power of expectation.
-- Vinay Menon, Out of body with Busey, Toronto Star, July 3, 2003

by 1623, from Latin horripilatio, from horripilare "to bristle" + pilus "hair"

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Barbra Streisand Love Is The Answer

2009-09-26T09:05:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.youtube.com

Barbra Streisand Love Is The Answer

Album Release - September 29, 2009

Track listing:

1. "Here's to Life" (Artie Butler, Phyllis Molinary) 4:35
2. "In the Wee Small Hours" (Bob Hilliard, David Mann) 4:02
3. "Gentle Rain" (Luiz Bonfá, Matt Dubey) 4:19
4. "If You Go Away" (Jacques Brel, Rod McKuen) 4:14
5. "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" (Fran Landesman, Tommy Wolf) 4:32
6. "Make Someone Happy" (Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Jule Styne) 4:08
7. "Where Do You Start?" (Johnny Mandel, Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman) 4:26
8. "A Time for Love" (Mandel, Paul Francis Webster) 5:12
9. "Here's That Rainy Day" (Johnny Burke, Jimmy Van Heusen) 5:04
10. "Love Dance" (Ivan Lins, Gilson Peranzzetta, Paul Williams) 4:43
11. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" (Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach) 4:22

12. "Some Other Time" (Leonard Bernstein, Comden, Green) 4:43
13. "You Must Believe in Spring" (Bergman, Bergman, Michel Legrand) 4:04 [Bonus track]

2009 Columbia Records

The Quiz for People who know everything

2009-09-25T07:57:00.001-07:00

clipped from uk.answers.yahoo.com

The Quiz for People who know everything

1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.

2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?

3. Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?

4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?

5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn't been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?

6. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters 'dw' and they are all common words. Name two of them.

7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them?

8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.

9. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter 'S.'

Answers -

1. The one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.

Boxing

2. North American landmark constantly moving backward.

Niagara Falls (The rim is worn down about two and a half feet each year because of the millions of gallons of water that rush over it every minute.)

3. Only two vegetables that can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons.

Asparagus and rhubarb.

4. The fruit with its seeds on the outside.

Strawberry.

5. How did the pear get inside the brandy bottle?

It grew inside the bottle. The bottles are placed over pear buds when they are small, and are wired in place on the tree. The bottle is left in place for the entire growing season. When the pears are ripe, they are snipped off at the stems.

6. Three English words beginning with dw.

Dwarf, dwell and dwindle. (Isn't "Dweeb" a word?)

7. Fourteen punctuation marks in English grammar.

Period, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, questionmark, exclamation point, quotation mark, brackets, parenthesis, braces, and ellipses.

8. The only vegetable or fruit never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form but fresh.

Lettuce.

9. Six or more things you can wear on your feet beginning with "S". Shoes, socks, sandals, sneakers, slippers, skis, skates, snowshoes, stockings, stilts.

Ken Burns, the Voice of the Wilderness

2009-09-24T09:05:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Ken Burns, the Voice of the Wilderness

By ELIZABETH JENSEN

Published: September 10, 2009

SEAL HARBOR, Me.

ON a perfect August afternoon, some of the nation's wealthiest and most philanthropically generous citizens gathered on the porch of David Rockefeller Jr.'s home here, but neither the crowd nor the view of the sparkling Atlantic Ocean was the attraction. Instead they had come to grab (they hoped) a few minutes of chitchat with the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who for the occasion had reluctantly put on a blue blazer to go with his ever-present jeans.

In recent years Mr. Burns, whose patented blend of original photographs, celebrity readings and articulate historians has captivated the television documentary audience with programs like "The Civil War," "Baseball" and "Jazz," has suffered some setbacks. His last project, with Lynn Novick, the 15-hour 2007 World War II history "The War," received a couple of particularly dismissive reviews, and he has lost his guaranteed financing from the struggling General Motors, forcing him to spend more time hustling for support.

None of that seems to matter to his fans, whose ardor has only increased. ("The War" drew PBS 's largest audience in a decade.) And that celebrity is particularly crucial to a broad list of groups that need him more than ever.

PBS has high expectations for Mr. Burns's new 12-hour film, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," which begins Sept. 27, and which prompted the August cocktail. [Portland Local Listing KOPDT 710 Sun, Sep 27 8:00 PM]

Financially challenged public television stations want him to visit their towns as a draw for major donors. The National Park Service is hoping that the new film will inspire more visitors and has prepared dozens of tie-in events across the country. And philanthropic groups like the National Park Foundation (of which David Rockefeller Jr. is vice chairman emeritus), the National Parks Conservation Association and Friends of Acadia, a sponsor of the August event, are using him to raise the profile for their own causes.

A view of Grand Teton National Park, from “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” a new 12-hour documentary film made by Ken Burns.

Ten years in the making, the new film, while not a travelogue, is an unabashed love letter, with its backdrop of spectacular vistas filmed in 53 national parks.

It had its beginning when Dayton Duncan, an author who was the national press secretary for Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign (and is Mr. Burns's best friend and frequent collaborator), was appointed to the National Park Foundation board and was pondering how to contribute.

Mr. Duncan, who appears in the film and wrote a companion book with Mr. Burns, frequently chokes up when discussing the project. The film covers a wide scope, from the inspirational writings of the naturalist John Muir in the 1800s up through 1980. It tells the multiple stories, Mr. Duncan said, of "an individual, a small group of people, an organization who fell in love with a place so deeply that they dedicated themselves to finally convince the government over a long struggle that it should be set aside for everyone."

The Grand Canyon, Mr. Burns said, is "the most obvious thing to be a national park," and yet it took decades to make it so, given the special interests that wanted it for other uses. "In each place," he added, "there's great conflict and drama and unbelievable characters and great scenery."

But the film's broadcast is merely the most visible centerpiece of myriad related initiatives. For the last year Mr. Burns has, by his estimate, been away from his New Hampshire home for 110 days, hopscotching the country as part of a $6 million promotional campaign.

In one August week Mr. Burns, 55, flew from a meeting with television critics in Los Angeles to a station event in Cleveland, and then drove some 1,800 miles for several days of promotional activities, with 6,000 people coming out to hear him in Chautauqua, N.Y.; 1,200 in Bar Harbor, Me.; and 1,500 in Portland.

In between he recorded promotional spots, posed for tourist pictures snapped by Mr. Duncan and went to the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park at 4:45 a.m. to watch the country's first sunrise for CBS cameras.

Of his travels, he acknowledged: "There's an evangelical dimension to it. People ask me what I like. I like shooting; I like getting up at 3 a.m. and getting out with the camera and getting out and filming; I like that moment in the edit room where the removal of something or the addition of something or the rearranging of something makes it better. And then I love the proselytizing."

That is a good deal of his appeal, said Judith Goldstein, a historian who appears in the film and whose private Somes Pond Center was one of the sponsors of the Rockefeller event. When Mr. Burns and Mr. Duncan discussed the film in Bar Harbor, she said, "People were almost more touched by their language, by the things they had to say about the film, than by the film itself." She added, "It's very rare that filmmakers are as articulate."

Mr. Burns "was cutting-edge once, and now he's traditional," Ms. Goldstein said, but his fans, of which she is one, appreciate that "these films are partly talking head but also a kind of wonderful deference to those who mattered in the past."

Not all the critics agree. The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin, for one, called "The War" "tedious"; Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times faulted it for ignoring voices that happened not to be American.

But that didn't discourage viewers. The program reached 37.8 million people in its first run, according to Nielsen numbers provided by PBS.

Mr. Burns admitted to the Portland audience that he has "made the same film over and over again," one with a single theme at its core: "Who are we?"

In an interview, he said, "I think 90 percent of the reason that people like these films is that we treat them like they're smart." He said he has resigned himself to the negative reviews, which he attributed partly to his work's lack of irony.

"Irony is a protective armor that substitutes sometimes for the experience of real emotion," he said. "It's easy to dismiss huge swaths of a complicated American polity because they are unironic."

As powerful a pull as similar projects may be — he is updating his "Baseball" series, investigating Prohibition and profiling the two President Roosevelts next — Mr. Burns is working on one film that raised many eyebrows when he discussed it in Maine: a re-examination of the 1989 rape and beating of a Central Park jogger.

The five men originally convicted and imprisoned were released in 2002 after another man confessed. Mr. Burns, who has already found financing from Atlantic Philanthropies, said he became interested in the men's story after his daughter interned at a law firm handling a suit on their behalf.

The subject is hardly historic, but Mr. Burns says he has found a way to make it so. He sees parallels between "the Central Park Five," as he calls them, and the so-called Scottsboro Boys, charged in a 1931 rape case that eventually led to a Supreme Court ruling on the racial makeup of juries.

But first there is "America's Best Idea" to promote. So on Sept. 26, National Public Lands Day, there will be screenings in national parks across the country and one on the Ellipse in Washington. And on Sept. 23 there will be an evening preview in the East Meadow of Central Park, accompanied by performances from Carole King, Eric Benet, Gavin DeGraw, Jose Feliciano, Alison Krauss and Union Station, and Counting Crows. It will be beamed to PBS stations nationwide for them to show to supporters.

Ray Charles

2009-09-23T09:20:00.001-07:00

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It's the birthday of Ray Charles, born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia (1930). They called him the "Father of Soul." He first got national attention in the mid-1950s with his performance of "I Got A Woman," which fused rhythm and blues, gospel, and jazz.

A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts

2009-09-23T07:25:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.nytimes.com

A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts

By SARAH LYALL

Published: January 22, 2005

DRACHTEN, The Netherlands

"I WANT to take you on a walk," said Hans Monderman [1945-2008], abruptly stopping his car and striding - hatless, and nearly hairless - into the freezing rain.

Like a naturalist conducting a tour of the jungle, he led the way to a busy intersection in the center of town, where several odd things immediately became clear. Not only was it virtually naked, stripped of all lights, signs and road markings, but there was no division between road and sidewalk. It was, basically, a bare brick square.

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

'Who has the right of way? I don't care,' said Hans Monderman, a traffic engineer. 'People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains.'

But in spite of the apparently anarchical layout, the traffic, a steady stream of trucks, cars, buses, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians, moved along fluidly and easily, as if directed by an invisible conductor. When Mr. Monderman, a traffic engineer and the intersection's proud designer, deliberately failed to check for oncoming traffic before crossing the street, the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or shouted rude words out of the window.

"Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."

Used by some 20,000 drivers a day, the intersection is part of a road-design revolution pioneered by the 59-year-old Mr. Monderman. His work in Friesland, the district in northern Holland that takes in Drachten, is increasingly seen as the way of the future in Europe.

His philosophy is simple, if counterintuitive.

To make communities safer and more appealing, Mr. Monderman argues, you should first remove the traditional paraphernalia of their roads - the traffic lights and speed signs; the signs exhorting drivers to stop, slow down and merge; the center lines separating lanes from one another; even the speed bumps, speed-limit signs, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view, it is only when the road is made more dangerous, when drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer.

"All those signs are saying to cars, 'This is your space, and we have organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you,' " Mr. Monderman said. "That is the wrong story."

The Drachten intersection is an example of the concept of "shared space," a street where cars and pedestrians are equal, and the design tells the driver what to do.

"It's a moving away from regulated, legislated traffic toward space which, by the way it's designed and configured, makes it clear what sort of behavior is anticipated," said Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British specialist in urban design and movement and a proponent of many of the same concepts.

Highways, where the car is naturally king, are part of the "traffic world" and another matter altogether. In Mr. Monderman's view, shared-space schemes thrive only in conjunction with well-organized, well-regulated highway systems.

Variations on the shared-space theme are being tried in Spain, Denmark, Austria, Sweden and Britain, among other places. The European Union has appointed a committee of experts, including Mr. Monderman, for a Europe-wide study.

MR. MONDERMAN is a man on a mission. On a daylong automotive tour of Friesland, he pointed out places he had improved, including a town where he ripped out the sidewalks, signs and crossings and put in brick paving on the central shopping street. An elderly woman crossed slowly in front of him.

"This is social space, so when Grandma is coming, you stop, because that's what normal, courteous human beings do," he said.

Planners and curious journalists are increasingly making pilgrimages to meet Mr. Monderman, considered one of the field's great innovators, although until a few years ago he was virtually unknown outside Holland. Mr. Hamilton-Baillie, whose writings have helped bring Mr. Monderman's work to wider attention, remembers with fondness his own first visit.

Mr. Monderman drove him to a small country road with cows in every direction. Their presence was unnecessarily reinforced by a large, standard-issue European traffic sign with a picture of a cow on it.

"He said: 'What do you expect to find here? Wallabies?' " Mr. Hamilton-Baillie recalled. " 'They're treating you like you're a complete idiot, and if people treat you like a complete idiot, you'll act like one.'

"Here was someone who had rethought a lot of issues from complete scratch. Essentially, what it means is a transfer of power and responsibility from the state to the individual and the community."

Dressed in a beige jacket and patterned shirt, with scruffy facial hair and a stocky build, Mr. Monderman has the appearance of a football hooligan but the temperament of an engineer, which indeed he trained to be. His father was the headmaster of the primary school in their small village; Hans liked to fiddle with machines. "I was always the guy who repaired the TV sets in our village," he said.

He was working as a civil engineer building highways in the 1970's when the Dutch government, alarmed at a sharp increase in traffic accidents, set up a network of traffic-safety offices. Mr. Monderman was appointed Friesland's traffic safety officer.

In residential communities, Mr. Monderman began narrowing the roads and putting in design features like trees and flowers, red brick paving stones and even fountains to discourage people from speeding, following the principle now known as psychological traffic calming, where behavior follows design.

He made his first nervous foray into shared space in a small village whose residents were upset at its being used as a daily thoroughfare for 6,000 speeding cars. When he took away the signs, lights and sidewalks, people drove more carefully. Within two weeks, speeds on the road had dropped by more than half.

In fact, he said, there has never been a fatal accident on any of his roads.

Several early studies bear out his contention that shared spaces are safer. In England, the district of Wiltshire found that removing the center line from a stretch of road reduced drivers' speed without any increase in accidents.

WHILE something of a libertarian, Mr. Monderman concedes that road design can do only so much. It does not change the behavior, for instance, of the 15 percent of drivers who will behave badly no matter what the rules are. Nor are shared-space designs appropriate everywhere, like major urban centers, but only in neighborhoods that meet particular criteria.

Recently a group of well-to-do parents asked him to widen the two-lane road leading to their children's school, saying it was too small to accommodate what he derisively calls "their huge cars."

He refused, saying the fault was not with the road, but with the cars. "They can't wait for each other to pass?" he asked. "I wouldn't interfere with the right of people to buy the car they want, but nor should the government have to solve the problems they make with their choices."

Mr. Monderman's obsessions can cause friction at home. His wife hates talking about road design. But work is his passion and his focus for as many as 70 hours a week, despite quixotic promises to curtail his projects and stay home on Fridays.

The current plan, instigated by Mrs. Monderman, is for him to retire in a few years. But it is unclear what a man who begins crawling the walls after three days at the beach ("If you want to go to a place without any cultural aspect, go to the Grand Canaries," he grumbled) will do with all that free time.

"The most important thing is being master of my own time, and then doing things that we both enjoy," he said. "What are they? I don't know."

Laika

2009-09-22T15:47:00.001-07:00

clipped from goodcomics.comicbookresources.com

Laika Review

by Brian Cronin

Nick Abadzis' graphic novel, Laika, is about the story of the dog itself, the woman in charge of handling the dogs for the space program, and the head of the space program, a man who years earlier was in a Russian gulag. It's a strong cast and a strong story, and Abadzis does a wonderful job depicting it.

Abadzis did an extensive job of researching the events involving the launching of Sputnik II. It is a really good backdrop for a story - the launch of Sputnik I was a massive propaganda boom, leading to Khruschev making the bold declaration that he wants a second Sputnik to be launched, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution - in a MONTH'S time!! This puts the head of the program, Koralev, in an almost impossible position - to launch in that much time (and be different from the first launch), they have to include a dog passenger, but they will not be able to bring the dog back.

That is all historical data - the book is not really about that historical data, but the human (and animal) background behind the facts, including the background of Laika (actual name Kudryavka - yep, they actually renamed her before they launched her into space), which Abadzis obviously had to fictionalize, but he does it well.

Koralev is an interesting character, mostly because of the amazing fact behind his rise from being in a Gulag to later becoming the head of the Russian space program (all while techinically considered only a "paroled prisoner" - he was not cleared of all charges until AFTER Sputnik I, even though there were never any crimes CHARGED against him!), but the emotional hook of the story is Yelena, the lab technician in charge of the dogs.

Here Abadzis demonstrates his manner of having Yelena communicate with the dogs, by having her basically imagine conversations between her and the dogs, but due to the dogs' expressiveness, it feels as though they ARE saying the words she imagines them saying. Good stuff.

Here is a sample page...

Click on image to enlarge.

As you can tell, Abadzis also has a nice art style - cartoony, but never skimping on details. It is strong, and evokes emotion quite well.

By the end of the story, you will find yourself feeling "very sorry for the poor little puppy on the Russian satellite," and Abadzis deserves a lot of credit for creating that emotion.

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