strategist@afripol.org               www.afripol.org

In classical physics, the study of fundamental principle of matter gave us the law of conservation of matter which states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Water is a matter and the quantity of water in Nigeria has not been altered. Therefore when we say that we lack water in Nigeria, it is a false premise because the rivers, lakes, streams and waters of Nigeria have not disappeared. What we lack is the clean and drinking water in Nigeria. Our government inability to deliver drinkable water to the citizens at the dawn of 21^st century is one of most difficult thing to fathom.

In terms of provision of drinking water to poor populace, we do not have to necessarily compare Nigeria to America, Britain or Western countries. African countries and third world countries with GDP one third of Nigeria have adequate and clean water supplies to its citizenry.  NO! We cannot journey oversea to make the comparison, we can just start from Nigeria’s neighbor in West Africa – countries like Ghana, Togo, Chad and many others are providing sanitized tap drinkable water to its citizens but the so-called giant of Africa with its enormous resources and huge foreign reserve cannot do it.

Nigeria of 1960s, 70s and even early 80s was doing it and providing treated drinking water to the people of Nigeria. But at a point with bulging population, poor planning and corruption diverted the professionalism of the Ministry of Water Works and turned into an incompetent and do-nothing entity.                                                            

 

Nigeria has abundant fresh water: Groundwater, rivers and lakes that can be channeled into Ministry of Water Works or Treatment plants. With application of chlorination and filtration procedures it will be ready for human consumption. The human capitals in terms of technical know-how are available and the technology for water purification is not an intricate methodology. Nigerians with GCE ordinary levels and secondary education can operate and manage water treatment plants.

The costs of setting up water treatment plants are minimal compare to the waste that Nigeria accumulated when she lunched the fallen satellite (NigComSat-1). The multi-million dollar Nigerian satellite (NigComSat-1) built and launched by the Chinese in May 2007, was shut down to prevent it spinning out of control and damaging others in orbit. The satellite project an example of a "white elephant in space" was a waste of time and resources. The billions of naira invested in the satellite technology can be utilized to solve the earthly problem of the supply of borne tap water to struggling villages in the interior of Nigeria.

UNESCO documented that, “Water-related diseases are among the most common causes of illness and death, affecting mainly the poor in developing countries. They kill more than 5 million people every year, more than ten times the number killed in wars. The diseases can be divided into four categories: water-borne, water-based, water-related, and water-scarce diseases.”

The consequences of drinking contaminated and polluted water in Nigeria come with a terrible and devastating cost. The cost and damage brought by drinking of parasite infected water with its borne diseases are very expensive which mostly affect new born babies and children. This is a major contributory to the abysmal high infant mortality rate in Africa and Nigeria in particular. This cannot be write off easily in same manner Nigeria treat anything important to the wellbeing of the nation.

Waterborne diseases have causative agents and “are caused by pathogenic microorganisms which are directly transmitted when contaminated fresh water is consumed. Contaminated fresh water, used in the preparation of food, can be the source of food borne disease through consumption of the same microorganisms. According to the World Health Organization, diarrheal disease accounts for an estimated 4.1% of the total DALY global burden of disease and is responsible for the deaths of 1.8 million people every year. It was estimated that 88% of that burden is attributable to unsafe water supply, sanitation and hygiene, and is mostly concentrated in children in developing countries. Waterborne disease can be caused by protozoa, viruses, or bacteria, many of which are intestinal parasites,” according to Wikipedia.

Nigeria according to UN's IRIN humanitarian information unit, “Guinea worm and onchocerchiasis( River blindness) are endemic water-borne diseases in certain parts of Africa's most populous country (Nigeria) of more than 120 million people. UNICEF had decided to emphasise water and environmental sanitation after realising that the occurrence of diarrhea, a major childhood killer in Nigeria, could decline by 15 percent if water quality was improved, Ackers said in the capital Abuja. Increasing the quantity of available water, he added, would lower the incidence of diarrhea by 22 percent. In combination with improved hygiene, the incidence could further drop by up to 35 percent while adding safe disposal of feces would lower this by 40 percent.”

In search of drinking water                                              

Due to the government inefficiency especially on the State and Local government levels, the energetic and pragmatic Nigerians are restoring to digging water boreholes for our children and families to quench the water thirst. The people cannot wait any longer for their elected officials, who refused to do the job of providing clean water to their neglected constituents.

Gradually the governments are joining the people in digging water boreholes and even appointing commissioners who channel funds for the project. This might look good even sounds good but the government in this case is in the wrong direction. The government should go and resuscitate the dormant water work plants and rebuild them. Then start providing tap drinking water and not digging boreholes.

Most of these boreholes are exposed to underground pathogens and pollutants especially E-coli that is responsible for stomach upset that comes with diarrhea and massive lose of fluids. In the underground the water might also be exposed to natural radionuclides and nature’s occurring hazardous metals (As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Hg, Mn, Ni, Pb, Sn, and Tl) these heavy metals as they are called are toxic with carcinogenic properties. Therefore it is highly recommended and intrinsic that water from the boreholes is sampled for laboratory analysis and bio-chemical analytical before consumption.

On this World Water Day, Nigerian government must understand the ramification of abandoning its basic responsibility to the people. The government should provide to the people of Nigeria treated and drinkable water.

 Dedicated to the World Water Day

 Emeka Chiakwelu is the Principal Policy Strategist at Afripol Organization. Africa Political and Economic Strategic Center (Afripol) is foremost a public policy center whose fundamental objective is to broaden the parameters of public policy debates in Africa. To advocate, promote and encourage free enterprise, democracy, sustainable green environment, human rights, conflict resolutions, transparency and probity in Africa.       info@afripol.org 

 

 

 

 

MÉXICO D.F., México. Ciudad Juárez sabe bien lo que son las matanzas. Localizada justo al otro lado de la frontera con EE UU, frente a El Paso (Texas), esta ciudad mexicana plagada de tiroteos ya suma en lo que va de año casi 500 asesinatos relacionados con el tráfico de drogas.

Pero el reciente asesinato de tres personas relacionadas con el consulado de Estados Unidos en la ciudad fronteriza, entre ellas una empleada embarazada y su marido, plantea una nueva pregunta en México: ¿Cómo responderá el país vecino al ataque a sus ciudadanos?

“La pregunta es ¿qué hace EE UU ahora?”, dice Shannon O’Neil, un experto en México que trabaja para el Council on Foreign Relations. “¿Debe de apostar EE UU por una estrategia estrictamente militar o debe de empezar a analizar de manera más amplia la ayuda y  asesoramiento que presta a México?”

La respuesta inmediata de la administración Obama ha sido reservada, pero de condena. Un comunicado de la Casa Blanca afirmaba que el presidente de EE UU estaba “profundamente triste e indignado por la noticia de los brutales asesinatos” , aunque comprometido a trabajar con el presidente Calderón en derrotar a los cárteles de la droga.

Tras el ataque de un grupo de narcotraficantes a una fiesta de cumpleaños en el que murieron 16 adolescentes, el 31 de enero, el presidente mexicano ha visitado Juárez tres veces. Al igual que la masacre de estudiantes, este nuevo baño de sangre tiene un motivo determinado.

Los ataques abiertos, a plena luz del día, han sorprendido tanto a las autoridades mexicanas como a las estadounidenses. Virginia Staab, una portavoz del Departamento de Estado de EE UU, ha dicho que su oficina todavía no está segura de si las víctimas fueron atacadas por su vinculación al consulado. Agentes del FBI han asegurado que los asesinos podrían haber disparado contra un objetivo equivocado, al confundir a las tres víctimas con miembros de un cártel rival.

Pero el alcalde de Juárez, José Reyes, declaró a CNN lo contrario. “Sabemos que los ciudadanos estadounidenses eran el objetivo”, aseguró. “Sabemos que les estaban persiguiendo”. Reyes dijo que los asesinatos fueron ejecutados probablemente por una banda local llamada Los Aztecas, que está aliada con el Cártel de Juárez.

Expertos en seguridad aseguran que si bien la violencia en México se ha disparado desde que Calderón comenzó su persecución a los señores  de la droga en 2007 (han muerto ya unas 15.000 personas), los narcotraficantes han evitado matar a ciudadanos estadounidenses.

 “No han querido que la ira de Washington caiga sobre ellos”, sostiene George Grayson, un experto en los cárteles de la droga mexicanos. Grayson duda que con estas tres muertes se haya querido enviar un mensaje a EE UU. “Si estuviesen queriendo plantear algo político... hubiesen ido a por funcionarios de alto nivel”, afirma.

Los ataques de todos modos han acaparado la atención de la administración Obama. Tanto Obama como su secretaria de Estado, Hillary Clinton, han expresado su indignación por las muertes, y el embajador de EE UU en México, Carlos Pascual, acompañó a Calderón en su última visita a Juárez, en donde fueron recibidos con fuertes protestas ciudadanas.

Pero todavía no está clara cuál será la respuesta a largo plazo de Obama a estos asesinatos. Virginia Staab, del Departamento de Estado, dijo que los hechos acaecidos tan solo subrayan la importancia de los esfuerzos de cooperación entre los dos países, principalmente la Iniciativa Mérida por 1.300 millones de dólares firmada por George W. Bush para ayudar a México a combatir los cárteles de la droga. EE UU mantiene su total confianza en el presidente Calderón, dijo Staab.

No obstante, estas recientes muertes podrían haber espoleado a Washington a presionar al presidente mexicano para que cambie su estrategia. Durante el último año el gobierno de Obama ha intentado vincular los fondos de Mérida a progresos efectivos. Según Staab, EE UU está trabajando con México en el respeto a la ley y a los derechos humanos y para construir instituciones más fuertes, promover la completa participación de la sociedad civil, transformar sus fronteras y aportar una intensa formación técnica.  

Una misión ambiciosa. Si algo ha logrado la guerra de las drogas es debilitar aún más las instituciones del país. The Washintgon Post informó recientemente que de los 2.670 homicidios registrados en Juárez el año pasado, tan solo se persiguieron penalmente 37 casos de asesinato. The New York Times asegura que el equipo de Obama anunciará en breve la adjudicación de más de 300 millones de dólares para unidades de inteligencia conjuntas, que se concentrarán en investigar el blanqueo de dinero y también en la formación de jueces, fiscales y policía.

Pero el giro de EE UU hacia el afianzamiento de las instituciones mexicanas tendrá que esperar: Calderón ha sido duramente criticado en su país por su respuesta militar en Juárez, cuyas calles están patrulladas actualmente por 10.000 soldados. Y la secretaria de Estado de Seguridad Nacional de EE UU, Janet Napolitano, ha dicho al respecto que el despliegue del Ejército mexicano en Juárez “no ha ayudado nada”.

Los detractores del presidente Calderón aseguran que todavía tiene que presentar un plan para afrontar el acuciante problema de drogadicción en Juárez y la alta tasa de desempleo. La pobreza y la falta de empleo empujan a los jóvenes hacia los cárteles, plagados ahora de asesinos adolescentes.

Cambie o no cambie Calderón su política en Juárez, las opciones de EE UU son limitadas. En los últimos días políticos de los principales partidos mexicanos han criticado la presencia de agentes del FBI en la ciudad, lo que hace pensar que la cooperación policial a gran escala será algo difícil de lograr.

I know some of our regular readers were very sad to hear of the end of Scrapbook Inspirations’ monthly issues last December, and it was certainly sad news for all of us involved behind the scenes, both our full-time staff at the office and our team of contributors. But I am so very excited to report Scrapbook Inspirations is officially back on the scene.

Instead of thirteen magazines a year, we’re bringing you quarterly books. We’ve changed the format to bring you more ideas and less clutter, and there’s only a tiny amount of advertising. Each volume will include a variety of themed galleries sharing beautiful pages in a range of styles as well as articles on techniques, composition, photography and colour. In volume one, we’ve focused on some classic scrapbooking themes like family, weddings, babies and travel and there’s also an article on improving your everyday candid photographs, great looks with hand-stitching, ten techniques to put your patterned papers to work and a range of projects with one of my favourite colour combinations. We’ve also kept some of your favourite features from the monthly issues, like a revamped edition of Sketch Collection. We’re also bringing you special codes for free downloads from some of your favourite scrapbooking websites.

Volume One hits stores on the 31st of March. In the UK, you’ll find it at WHSmiths, Sainsbury’s and newsagents. It is on its way to the States as well, so keep an eye in the magazine section at your local Barnes and Noble and some other stores too. But even easier, you can order it online and have it delivered right to your door. Click here to order your copy now and it will be on its way to you on the 31st of March! The prices include postage: £10.99 for the UK, £11.99 to Europe and £12.99 to the rest of the world. (If you buy it at the store in the UK, it will be £9.99 — I’m not sure what the price will be in dollars in the stores just yet.)

We shared a few preview copies with readers at the Stitch and Craft show and it was lovely to see people excited that SI is not gone! As far as contributors, you’ll see familiar faces from our team and also new faces who have joined us to share their amazing pages. As the editor, this project is obviously pretty near and dear to my heart — but I hope you enjoy this new publication as much as I do! I have more bonus features to share with you online on and after the 31st of March too, so don’t be a stranger!

Contributors for Volume One, your layouts will be returning to you with a copy of the book very soon.

In other news, it’s rather an exciting week all round here! Tomorrow afternoon we’re having a Shimelle Digitals blog hop with some brand new releases and this Wednesday you’ll find a new step-by-step tutorial for the minibook class I taught this weekend at Stitch and Craft. So lovely to see so many of you in class — please do stop by on Wednesday afternoon for the post we discussed!

It’s sunny here today too — may this be a good week for everyone!

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Thirty-five years ago when I bought my first house I remember the real estate agent saying as we drove up, “This place has nice curbside appeal.” This term, mostly used in the real estate industry, resonated with me over the years in a way that went beyond how a house looks from the street. It made me think of other structures and locations, and whether or not they had a nice “curbside appeal.” As I began to study more and more about nonverbal communications (everything that sends a message except words), I wondered too about the human side of the equation. As it turns out, objects and locations are not the only things to have a curbside appeal; we humans also have a curbside appeal.

Early cave dwellers, our ancestors, adorned their dwellings with paintings of animals, hunting scenes, outlines of their hands and so forth, in part to enhance the aesthetic value of their dwellings. No doubt this made these primitive homes more appealing to their owners as well as visitors. Thirty thousand years later, we still do the same thing. We paint the house, trim the hedges, cut the grass, and manicure the lawn, all for aesthetic value. Nothing has changed for tens of thousands of years.

In “What Every Body is Saying,” I wrote about how when the conquistadores arrived in the so called “New World” they found the same need for aesthetic beauty in buildings, gardens, fountains, city squares, etc. here in the Americas. Buildings were found to be symmetrical, inspiring, decorated, painted, adorned and maintained just like in Europe. They had carved statues, tended gardens, lakes with gilded vessels, painted pottery and colorful yarns. This universal need to have order in designs, proportioned symmetry, and aesthetics, reflects in part our human desire for beauty in all manifestations.

But I think aesthetics also has other effects on us. I think it also gives order to the universe in the same way that birds on a utility pole will place themselves equidistant from each other, looking at times like a ruler with markings. We rely on aesthetics to provide comfort to us. When we have comfort, we can begin to trust. In fact, there is no trust when there is a high degree of discomfort. A topic of which I speak at length in my latest book, “Louder Than Words,” along with the “broken window effect.”

Here’s what I mean when I say that aesthetics affects us in many ways. Think about banks. All banks are up against the same prime lending rate. It is inescapable. So how do we choose one over the other? Proximity yes, but when two or more are each occupying the four corners of an intersection, a key influence on their selection is curbside appeal. Things such as a clean entrance, washed windows, well maintained exterior including bushes, as well as ample parking help us make that decision. Why would you want to bank at a place where the paint is peeling, the windows are filthy, garbage has accumulated at the base of the bushes and plants haven’t been trimmed in months? Why would you go there? That’s not the kind of place you want to entrust with your money. If they don’t care about themselves, they certainly aren’t going to care about you.

It is interesting to note how in the late seventies gas stations found that it wasn’t just the price of the gasoline that was attracting customers. How the place looked was also a large factor, especially with more women entering the workforce and driving more vehicles. They wanted, as we all do, cleaner spaces, more hygienic bathrooms, and lighting – lots of lighting. In fact, you can place two gas stations side by side and raise the price of gas of one of them; surprisingly, the station that is better lit at night, will attract more customers, in spite of the higher cost. Why? The curbside appeal is one of security and safety as well as cleanliness. And if you paint the place and make it look really attractive, you can raise the price of gas .05 cents a gallon and people will still come. That’s how powerful curbside appeal is.

But it’s not just buildings and houses that have a curbside appeal. Somewhere along the way, as humans began to clothe themselves, they also began to improve their own appearance or as we term it here, their “curbside appeal.” With clothing, ornaments, beads, flowers, tattoos, even bindings, humans have always sought to improve their outward image; no doubt an evolutionary requirement to enhance the ability to attract mates. Plastic surgery has soared in demand precisely to meet the desires of women and men, to enhance their physical attraction. Every culture speaks to us of beauty and its quest; it is now available to more people than at any time in history.

By enhancing our beauty, we are appealing to deep psychological requirements which we find rewarding. How do we know this? Babies (days old) are attracted to and will look at the faces of beautiful individuals longer than those less fortunate. In the same way that a runway model may hold our attention longer than someone who is passing us on the subway and has no makeup and is not well groomed. There is a beauty dividend, which I discuss in “Louder Than Words,” and that does help some individuals. But there are other things that communicate nonverbally which are equally or more powerful.

While it is useful to recognize that there is a beauty dividend, it is not, as my partner in writing, Toni Sciarra says, “destiny.” Poor performance and a bad attitude can derail the career of the most beautiful. Conversely, a great attitude, positive thinking, performance, and good grooming can compensate for less than perfect looks. For example, our bodies, not our words, communicate whether or not we are confident, honest, trustworthy, well mannered, and so forth. These aspects of nonverbal communications, say much about us and can have effects on those around us. Confidence and trustworthiness have a powerful curbside appeal. Of what value is beauty if no one wants to associate with your or trusts you? We gain trust and others seek us out by the totality of our curbside appeal.

Likewise, when we look at great leaders, truly wonderful individuals whose humility, dynamic presence, and demeanor sway us, we are looking at people whose curbside appeal does exactly as advertised.

When I talk to young people I remind them that they will be scanned for information by others every day of their lives. It is a non-stop process where each of us assess and test each other continuously. I also tell them that we have to be mindful of our curbside appeal. All of my students raise their hand when I ask, “Do you know someone whose dress, behavior, or comportment, makes you want to avoid them.” Without hesitation they can name at least one if not more individuals that match these criteria. That, I tell them, is because those individuals have poor curbside appeal, even at a distance their attire, attitude, or general demeanor detracts from them. Their nonverbals shout stay away and we do.

Just as we seek beauty in things and in others, we have to also be mindful of our own curbside appeal. It is in our nature to seek beauty and symmetry and find comfort there. We must not ignore our own appeal, because we too can become a blight to the eyes by our looks, as wells as our behavior. If we value ourselves, then we must value how we are perceived. To do less, is to relinquish dominion over ourselves and hand it to others, gratuitously, without say. As Shakespeare said in Henry V, “Self love is not so vile a sin as self neglect.”                                           _______

For references please go to www.jnforensics.com and ask for a free comprehensive nonverbal communications bibliography. You can also follow me on twitter at: @navarrotells or here at Psychology Today Blogs. Copyright © Joe Navarro 2010.

 

From Reader's Digest Asia:

Law enforcement and human rights investigators say the adoption racket has operated for about a decade and is worth millions of dollars. Cambodian government figures show that, since 1995, around 2000 Cambodian infants have been adopted. Though no-one knows how many overseas adoptions were legitimate and how many involved buying and selling children, a 2003 report by the Dutch embassy in Bangkok concluded that child trafficking cases that have been exposed are ''the tip of the iceberg.''

* * *

The adoption racket is driven by wealthy Westerners eager to acquire cute Asian infants, by unscrupulous adoption agents and orphanages ready to supply them at a price and by corrupt government officials willing to approve fabricated documents for bribes. In Cambodia, many children categorised as orphans actually have living
parents, and almost anyone with sufficient cash can buy a child.

* * *

Adoption petitions and foreign visa applications routinely describe the children as abandoned, birth parents unknown. Yet in some cases they aren't abandoned and the birth family is known. Almost always a child's identity, birthplace and family background are falsified.

* * *

Amid mounting evidence that Cambodian babies were being trafficked, the United States suspended the processing of adoptions from Cambodia in December 2001.By 2005, several European countries, including France, the United Kingdom and the
Netherlands, had put a freeze on Cambodian adoptions.

It hasn't stopped the shameful traffic. In spring 2005, posing as would-be adopters, my wife and I visited half-a-dozen well-known orphanages around Phnom Penh. We discovered that it is still shockingly easy to buy a baby. Who we were, where we came from and whether we had proper paperwork were not an issue. Mostly we were asked, "Do you want a boy or a girl?"

Read the whole thing to hear personal stories from birth families. Amazing how similar the stories are from country to country to country . . . .

Whenever we do a period piece, I do my best to give the cast as much detail about the time and place as possible, sometimes music or books written during that time, photos, magazines, whatever I can find. It helps the actors understand what these characters' everyday lives are like, what these people have lived through, what assumptions they have about the world, what daily habits they have, how much money they make, what their slang sounds like...

For The Wild Party, I gave the cast a short historical time-line, first the decade leading up to our story, and then what happened in 1928 when our story is set. And I thought you intrepid few who read my blog might find this stuff interesting, so here it is...

1920 – A major turning point in American culture. Women finally get the right to vote in America; Prohibition takes effect, soon creating a mammoth surge in homemade alcohol; and F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

1920 – The film The Flapper is released and starts a new cultural phenomenon. That same year, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes a collection of short stories called Flappers and Philosophers. The flappers are seen as brash and un-ladylike; they wear “excessive makeup,” drink, smoke, cut their hair, drive automobiles, and show skin. (The Horror!) One Harvard psychologist reports that flappers have “the lowest degree of intelligence” and constitute “a hopeless problem for educators.” In France they are called garçonnes (the word for boys with a feminine suffix added).

1921 – Silent film star Fatty Arbuckle is accused of raping and accidentally killing 26-year-old actress Virginia Rappe at a party, possibly from alcohol poisoning (which many believe is the inspiration for The Wild Party) and the ensuing scandal ends Arbuckle’s thriving film career. He is later acquitted, but it’s too late. He dies at 46.

1923 – Cecil B. DeMille’s silent Bible epic The Ten Commandments is released. Four years later, DeMille’s King of Kings will be released. Both have DeMille’s requisite Biblical orgy scenes. (In The Wild Party, this trend of sexualized Bible epics is what the D’Armano Brothers are trying to cash in on with their new muscial Good Heavens.)

1923 – The Charleston is introduced in a new Broadway musical called Runnin’ Wild. Many musicals in the 20s will introduce new dances (which is what “The Juggernaut” in Wild Party is a reference to).

1924 – The Gershwin Brothers open the first of three major Broadway musical hits: Lady Be Good (1924, the first full jazz score on Broadway), Oh Kay! (1926), and Funny Face (1927). (It may be that the D’Armano Brothers in The Wild Party are composites of the Gershwin Brothers, Cole Porter [who was gay], Richard Rodgers, Larry Hart [also gay], and others.)

1924-1929 – The Harlem Renaissance reaches its height.

1925 – F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, about the spiritual emptiness of the 1920s.

1925 – There are 30,000-100,000 operating speakeasies (they’re hard to count because they're so secretive!) in New York City alone.

1925 – A revue called The Garrick Gaieties opens, featuring a hit song by a brand new songwriting team, Rodgers and Hart, which catapults them to success. Their first full score will be heard in 1927 in A Connecticut Yankee. Cole Porter is also getting started but will not have his first hit show until the 1930s.

1925 – Charlie Chaplin, former Vaudeville clown (like Burrs) has been making comic short films, and now he starts making feature films with The Gold Rush.

1926 – Boxing champion and celebrity Jack Dempsey loses his title to Gene Tunney, and boxing again becomes one of America’s favorite pastimes (which explains Eddie in The Wild Party), often making celebrities out of boxers. In a 1927 rematch, Tunney will beat Dempsey again.

1926 – The famous speakeasy owner/hostess Texas Guinan, who greets her patrons with “Hello, Suckers!”, makes over $700,000 in this year alone. (She was later the model for Velma Kelly in Chiacgo -- and also for Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

1926 – Gay neighborhoods are appearing in both Harlem and Greenwich Village and many prominent women become known as open lesbians, including blues singers Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie, and Joan Crawford (who would soon get married). Meanwhile in Paris, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas have become a famous lesbian couple.

1927 – The Jazz Singer with vaudevillian Al Jolson is released. The whole film doesn’t have sound, but a section in the middle does, and it takes the public by storm.

And then there's 1928, the year our story is set...

Unemployment is at 4.2% and the Dow Jones reaches a high of 300. A vaudevillian’s salary could range from $100 a week to a couple thousand a week for a headliner. The average cost of a house is $2,500, a car costs $300, gas is 21 cents a gallon, a loaf of bread costs 5 cents

At least 1,565 people die of drinking bad homemade liquor in this year alone, hundreds are blinded by it, and many are murdered in the bootlegger wars. Federal agents are arresting more than 75,000 people a year just for violating Prohibition.

There are the first appearances this year of CBS, Peter Pan peanut butter, Rice Krispies, adhesive tape, shredded wheat, Philco radios, Mickey Mouse, penicillin, the Oscars, and Double Bubble bubblegum.

The book Lady Chatterly’s Lover is banned in the US and UK.

Che Guevara, Andy Warhol, and Shirley Temple are born.

Amelia Earhart is the first women to fly across the Atlantic.

Calvin Coolidge is President, but later this year, Herbert Hoover will beat Al Smith in the Presidential election. Hoover campaigns on “rugged individualism” and will take us right into the Great Depression…

The NY Yankees beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series.

Walt Disney opens Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon with sound. Charlie Chaplin says publicly, “Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics.”

The first all-talking feature film is released, The Lights of New York.

In 1928, vaudeville is at the height of its popularity, and an estimated 2 million people daily attend performances given at the approximately 1,000 vaudeville theaters across the U.S. The Palace Theater in New York City is the leading theater on the vaudeville circuit, and to appear there is the aspiration of almost every vaudeville performer. Star headliners include singers Nora Bayes and Eva Tanguay, comedians Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields, and the comedy duo of Joseph Weber and Lew Fields. Not only American but also foreign performers appear in American vaudeville houses, including the Scottish singer-comedian Sir Harry Lauder, the French singer Yvette Guilbert, and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt.

Popular songs in 1928 include “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” “Button Up Your Overcoat,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Short’nin’ Bread,” and “Stout-Hearted Men.” Popular musicians include Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Rudy Vallee.

On Broadway there’s Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill (winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama), The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and still running, the popular Abie’s Irish Rose (which Act Inc. is producing in St. Louis this year!). 43 new musicals open on Broadway, including Oh Kay!, The Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, The Three Musketeers, Greenwich Village Follies, Present Arms, Blackbirds of 1928, George White’s Scandals, Earl Carroll’s Vanities, The New Moon, Hold Everything, Treasure Girl, Whoopee, and others. Still running from the previous season are Rio Rita, Hit the Deck!, Good News, A Connecticut Yankee, Artists and Models, Funny Face, and Show Boat.

Wild, fascinating times to go with our wild, fascinating story...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Filed under: Babies, Toddlers, Fun & Activities, Places To Go, Holidays

You want to be very careful when you go on an airplane trip with children.

Remember the famous case of the McCallister family in 1990? In the rush of the family leaving for Paris, a young Macaulay Culkin was forgotten and left "Home Alone." We all had to endure three sequels before that nightmare was finally over.

The Web site travelingwithkids.com has a checklist for the bazillion things you need to remember before you go flying with little ones. A whole three months ahead of time, the site recommends you do everything from visit the travel agent with your child to check with the airlines on their car seat and sky cot policies.

Then, a month before you take off, the site suggests you find a container and create an in-flight first aid kit. Of course, the kit can't contain much more than Band-Aids. Airport security won't allow you to take any of the usual contents of a first aid kit on board, such as tubes of lotion or tiny scissors.

But don't stress about it. The site also suggests you take the month before your flight to practice in-flight relaxation techniques.

Is all this really necessary?

Lenore Skenazy doesn't think so. She's the author of "Free-Range Kids" and has become something of a guru in a national movement to get parents to chill out.

She says fretful parents try to plan for every possible contingency, something, of course, you can't really do. Airlines already have first aid kits. And you don't need to -- as travelingwithkids.com suggests -- double and triple check the airline's cot policy. Very nice people will make sure kids get all the cots and special seats they need, she says.

One of the biggest fears parents face is their children flying alone. During summers and holidays, children of divorced parents are often put on planes by themselves to visit one parent or the other.

"Fear of kids flying makes less sense to me than fear of kids walking to school alone," Skenazy says. "After all, it's not like they're going to get lost. They can only get off at their final destination."

Some parents transfer their own fear of flying to their children. Skenazy suggests getting a grip: They are in more danger traveling by car. Flying is much safer. "Statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel," she says.

Skenazy says she hears from kids about how liberating it is to fly solo for the first time.

"There is something thrilling about taking to the air without a parent with you," she says. "It makes you feel grown up."

Parents should welcome such opportunities to put kids on planes by themselves, Skenazy says. "This is one of the safest things you can do to foster a feeling of independence in a kid."

As for the checklists and all the things you should remember, family therapist and ParentDish "Ask AdviceMama" columnist Susan Stiffelman says there are just a couple of basics to remember.

"Be prepared with some new toys and books (for a toddler or child) that you produce once in awhile (depending on the length of the flight)," she says.

And don't forget food. "Bring some special snacks that kids can munch on," she says.

Stiffelman traveled with her son to India when he was 2, and to Australia when he was 3. Long trips, for sure. Yet, Stiffelman says she had no problems. It gets back to the theme echoed by Skenazy: Relax.

"I'm convinced my relaxed attitude about the whole thing made a significant difference in his adaptability to the constriction and length of the flights and has probably influenced him to be a more adaptable person," she says.

It really is all very simple, Stiffelman says: "Do a bit of preparing, make sure your child is in general good health and enjoy your travels."

Related: Fake Vacations -- the New Staycation

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by Amy Tuteur, MD

Homebirth advocates like to tout the many “advantages” of giving birth at home. High on the list is limiting exposure to hospital acquired infections, and since only your “own germs” are in your home, you are protected.

Yes, you are protected from hospital acquired infections, but the most dangerous infectious agents are actually those that live inside the mother, not the ones in the hospital. Consider that for newborns both Group B strep and herpes virus represents potentially deadly threats. And both Group B strep and herpes virus are infectious agents carried by the mother. In other words, the most deadly infectious threat to the baby is the mother herself.

For mothers, the most common infectious risk is a uterine infection. Once again the infectious agent is usually a bacteria living in the vagina. Homebirth advocates like to fling accusations about women who contract life threatening sepsis at home and are fond of pointing out horror stories like the unfortunate woman in Florida who ended up losing parts of multiple limbs due to Group A strep (”flesh eating” bacteria) sepsis. But what they don’t realize is that approximately 90% of cases of Group A strep sepsis are acquired outside the hospital because the bacteria lives in the community. Usually it is harmless, but when it invades a wound (like the raw surface of the inside of the uterus after birth), the results can be disastrous.

It appears that this has happened in a small Texas town. According to the local paper:

A few weeks ago, a perfectly healthy Katy gave birth to daughter Arielle, only to experience an intense and prolonged pain after the birth.

… Doctors at Kingwood Medical Center eventually discovered the new mom had a Streptococcal A infection that had aggressively invaded her body.

As a result, Katy has experienced multiple organ failure and is unconscious. Surgery last week involved the removal of several sepsis organs. She is currently on a ventilator and is receiving dialysis.

Katy had had an eight hour, drug-free, intervention free labor and delivered a 10 pound baby girl … in a planned homebirth.

Of course, the result may not have been any different had Katy given birth in the hospital, since she would have brought the bacteria in with her. And that is the important point to keep in mind. While hospital acquired infections are a serious problem for the elderly and the immuno-compromised, they are far less common in obstetric care. During childbirth, the bacteria and viruses that pose the greatest threat to babies and mothers are those carried by the mother herself.

Homebirth does not offer protection against serious neonatal and maternal infections, because the most dangerous “germs” are “your own germs at home.”

Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician-gynecologist who blogs at The Skeptical OB.

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Nos meses de março e abril, os fãs de quadrinhos terão acesso a volumes raros de Abie the Agent, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, entre outros. A exposição "Do Superman ao Gato do Rabino" está em cartaz no Centro da Cultura Judaica, em São Paulo. Veja a página especial sobre quadrinhos na Livraria da Folha A mostra --co-realizada pelo Museu de Arte e de História do Judaísmo de Paris e pelo Museu de História do Judaísmo de Amsterdã e com curadoria de Anne Helene Hoog e Hetty Berg-- enfoca as relações entre a imigração judaica para Nova York e a evolução dos quadrinhos no século 20. Destaque para o "Gato do Rabino", do francês Joann Sfar. Leia mais (15/03/2010 - 11h08)

Um, yeah. So where was I? Right... about to leave to go to Texas for a long weekend. Sorry it's been so long since I've updated. I basically slept through most of my trip to Austin. Travel is exhausting, I know, and twice so when you're knocked up.

The baby shower was fine. My mom's best friend and two of my dad's long-time teacher friends co-hosted the shower. They decorated with Dr. Seuss books (some of which were mine from when I was a child) and lots of my old stuffed animals. My mom's BF told me that she planned the menu so that it would be in line with my desire to eat healthily, which I laughed and laughed and laughed at. Because, yeah. Generally, I eat healthily, but I'm so over any pretense of denying myself anything for the sake of being healthy. If I want ice cream, I eat ice cream. If I want to eat real butter, I eat real butter. I figure with the insane amount of fruit and veggies that I crave lately, that it all balances out. So, I got lots of great gifts, a ton of clothes (of course) and baby supplies, and had a great time visiting with my friends. And eating cupcakes, too.

Other than the shower, I didn't really do much in Austin. When I arrived on Thursday, I went to the gigantic consignment sale that my friend and her partner own. Again, I got a ton of clothes and a few assorted small things (a sleeping wedge, a car seat head support thingy, some board books), but I didn't really find anything major that I still needed (at least not anything that would be worth trying to transport back to NC). The best part, though, was that I didn't have to buy ANY of it, since I went shopping with my mom and her BF. So, even though I said I didn't really need much in the way of clothes, they kept finding cute things that they liked and so they bought them. Of course, since we're going to be cloth diapering (or at least we'll be trying), I'll be doing diaper laundry every day or two, so I'm perfectly pleased to have enough clothing that I won't have to do attire laundry but once a week or so at the most.

After the sale, we had dinner at one of my favorite Austin restaurants, Chuy's (I want to bathe in their Deluxe Tomatillo Sauce), and then went home. We got up early on Friday and grabbed breakfast tacos (have you had a breakfast taco? Oh, so much deliciousness. I wish they would catch on here in NC...) before we went to the outlet mall by my mom's house. My mom was looking for a new purse, and I was looking for something I could wear to my baby shower. And while we were there, we (of course) went to the Carter's, Osh Kosh, Gymboree and Baby Gap outlets. Which, of course, meant more clothes... My brother and sister-in-law were coming to town for the shower, so they arrived Friday evening and we all ate dinner together at my parents' house (gumbo with creme brulee for dessert). I had anticipated that I might feel like going out after dinner, but dinner got started late, so afterwards, I just went to bed.

The shower was on Saturday around 11, so I slept in and then puttered around the house before heading over to the party. I then slept some more after the shower, and then went to my favorite coffee shop (Epoch) to meet up with some friends (all of whom I missed seeing due to poor timing on my part). And then, to my dear CC's house to have dinner and play cards. I managed to stay up till 11:30! Oh, MY! Which naturally meant that I had to sleep in on Sunday. We got barbeque for lunch on Sunday, and then I promptly fell asleep again.

Austin is having their restaurant week, and so my parents and my mom's BF and I went to dinner Sunday night at a fancy-schmancy place. My food was so-so. My mom offered two different options of restaurants to choose from, one being the place we went to, and one being a seafood restaurant. After hearing the restaurant week menu, I was leaning toward the other, but my mom assured me that this place was fantastic. As it turns out, I found out that the reason she was pushing so hard for the place we ended up choosing was because they had a lobster appetizer on their menu that my parents really liked, and despite telling my mom a thousand times that I HATE lobster (love shrimp, but lobster just tastes like a giant rancid shrimp. Blech.), she really thought we should eat there so that I could try the lobster. Sorry, but you could cover that lobster in Deluxe Tomatillo Sauce, and I'd still think it was nasty. So I don't know. Maybe I just picked the wrong thing off the menu, but I wasn't very impressed with the food. I (again) assumed that I'd be up for something after dinner on Sunday, but I was sadly mistaken. I think I could have mustered some energy to sit around at a coffee shop, but my friends are all normal people who do things like drinking beer and hanging out till after ten o'clock. And as much as I wanted to see my friends, I just didn't have the energy to sit at a bar (too noisy) or hang out late (too sleepy). And knowing that I had an early flight the next day, I just decided to call it a night.

My flight was at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, and I don't think I'll ever choose to fly on a Monday morning ever again. The line to get through security was ridiculous. I got to deal with a smart assed TSA agent who, even after I profusely apologized because I had forgotten that my Nalgene was full of water inside my carry-on, and told her that she could just throw it away because the line to get through security was over an hour long and I didn't have time to go out and come back through, decided to lecture me on the number of ounces of fluid I was allowed to take, and the conditions under which those ounces could be carried and that I was allowed to go out and empty the container or I could "relinquish" it. I rolled my eyes, and told her that I JUST EFFIN SAID THAT I UNDERSTOOD THAT I HAD ACCIDENTALLY BROKEN THEIR RULE AND THAT SHE COULD THROW THE BLEEPIN THING AWAY... And she sarcastically said that she had to inform me of my options, and I said that I clearly didn't need to hear options when I'd already indicated the option I'd like to choose, and that lecturing me on such was unnecessary and sarcastic and just plain rude. And she started to say something else, but I just put my hand up walked away. After standing in line for over an hour to get through security, I just didn't have the patience to deal with assholery.

The absurdly short flight from Austin to Houston was turbulent and crowded and hot. I HATE Continental's connection hubs, because It's always some tiny, pointless flight before getting on a puddle-jumper and cramming yourself in for two hours.

OH, and the Continental Airlines gate agents in Houston can KISS MY ASS. When a pregnant lady tells you that she wants transportation from one terminal to the next, you do NOT lie to her and tell her that the tram is "just around the corner", when, in fact, it is across two terminals and up several sets of very tall stairs, and another long walk once the tram arrives at the new terminal. And when there's a gate change, and a pregnant lady asks you how far away the new gate is, do NOT lie to her and tell her that it's "right at the end of the hall", and when she says that she's already walked really, really far that day, that she's exhausted, and asks you to clarify the precise distance, do not tell her "Oh, you'll be fine", when the gate is actually on the exact opposite side of the terminal, as far as it can be and still be in the same terminal. Seriously. If someone asks for transport, it's not your job to convince them that they're causing you a major hassle, and that they don't really need it.

So, the rest of my day on Monday was spent trying to recover from the aching and cramping caused by the hour plus of brisk walking I did trying to make my connection in Houston. I did a little unpacking, but mostly I just rested.

Tuesday, we decided to make a trek to IKEA (big surprise, I know). Our kitchen faucet has almost no hot water supply, and my dad thought that the problem might be in the gasket that switches the water from hot to cold (single handle fixture). As we hated our old faucet, we decided to get a new one. And we had a couple of other small things we wanted to look at as well. So most of Tuesday was spent at IKEA. We got home and ran an errand to Target, before I collapsed in a heap of exhaustion.

Yesterday morning, I went to see an apartment that my mom is thinking of subletting for the summer so that she can be here to help with the babies (though in true Mom fashion, this went from "This is my plan" to "This might, maybe, possibly, I'm not sure, maybe not be my plan" in the last few weeks as she is suddenly not sure she wants to be away from home that long). The apartment is great. It's in one of my favorite buildings downtown, and not terribly far from our house. BUT, as I said, my mom is suddenly undecided as to whether or not she really wants to be here. To which I say, COME or DON'T. I refuse to get wound up about this. But if you're not going to come, please quit dicking around with me, asking for help making arrangements, and generally promising shit that you're not going to deliver on. (This is SO typical for my mom. She got the whole "promise small, deliver big" thing backwards...)

And then, I spent three+ hours yesterday morning removing the old faucet and installing a new one. Oh, IKEA, with your non-standard hoses... what will I do with you? Yeah, it was as fun as it sounds to be just past the mid-point of a twin pregnancy, crawling around on the floor under the sink trying to figure out how to get the old faucet out and the new faucet in. Or alternately, trying to explain to one of the most mechanically disinclined individuals on the face of the planet how to locate the nut that needs to be removed/tightened/adjusted, etc., especially while dealing with a serious case of pregnancy-induced aphasia...

And then, I did laundry (thousands of tiny pieces of clothing which must be washed before they can be used...). And I read (The Hour I First Believed is the most depressing book I've read in a really long time...). And I slept.



So. All of this should serve as excuse for why I haven't updated in a while. Things are busy around here. And there's all the sleeping I seem to need to do lately. I really intended to post yesterday, because (as the title implies) I turned 24 weeks pregnant yesterday. Were the awful to happen, and I either had to deliver for some reason, or couldn't stop labor for some reason, there's a reasonable chance that the babies might live. As my pregnancy book so flippantly mentioned, I might be surprised to know that at 25 weeks, the babies have a chance of living. That book was clearly not written for the hyper-vigilant infertile lady, who knows that there's a whole SEVEN days before the 25 week mark during which there is also a decent chance of having surviving babies. I really thought there would be some sense of relief when I hit this mark (and there is, sort of), but as you have all often told me, these worries never really go away. They just morph into new worries. And so, while there is plenty left to worry about, I find that I am more and more able to look at this race as having more hurdles behind me than in front of me (presuming, of course, that "Birth" is the finish line for this particular segment of the race... don't get me started about child rearing and toddlerhood and teenagers and ugh...).

And now that you've been updated, I'm off to hang some shelves and some net-things and do a little sewing in an effort to get the nursery a little closer to done.

And you? How do your parents drive YOU crazy? Anything exciting going on? Everyone still hanging in there???
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Actor Joseph Fiennes, 39, who portrayed a young William Shakespeare in the Academy Award-winning drama Shakespeare in Love (1998) and currently stars in ABC's mind-bending series FlashForward, has just taken on a very big role: proud new Papa! Fiennes and his wife, model Maria Dolores Dieguez, welcomed their first child, a baby girl, on Monday.

Fiennes -- younger brother to fellow actor Ralph Fiennes -- married Dieguez, 27, in Aug, 2009. The couple announced they were expecting a child last fall and said they were "utterly thrilled," according to People. The pair have not yet announced what they've named their brand new daughter.

On Fiennes' ABC hit FlashForward (returning to ABC with new episodes on Thursday, March 18 at 8 p.m. ET), the actor plays agent Mark Benford, who's trying to uncover what happened during a worldwide blackout. Here's hoping he isn't too blacked out by the exhaustion of new parenthood!

PHOTOS: Oh, Babies! Celebs' New Arrivals

Are you a fan of Joseph Fiennes on FlashForward? Chime in below!

3/9/10

Yesterday's comments were, as always, truly insightful and awesome. As I suspected, people were actually quite sanguine about "settling" for their day job, even if that meant settling for something you'd experience more often than your family. That kind of compartmentalization is truly a skill - one that I don't possess at all - and probably makes you able to deal with a lot of things that would flummox others.

I asked about the relationship "settling" because that subject has been on high rotation in the NY/LA literati echo chamber of late. Lori Gottlieb, a prolific 42-year-old New York writer who chose to raise a child without a partner/husband, wrote a book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough - largely borne out of the experience of solo parenting. The book set off a predictable firestorm of invective, especially from other women writers. Here's Jessica Grose writing in Slate:

Gottlieb's argument is that college-educated women in their late 30s and early 40s who are still single are without husbands because they were too picky when they were younger and more marketable... She is not benignly trying to share her experiences, she's trying to scare women.

Perhaps the best takedown of Gottlieb - or really, the best ass-kicking I've read on the Web in months - comes courtesy of Liesl Schillinger, an old friend of mine and Tessa's who writes with vitriolic flair:

The way [Gottlieb] sees it, a generation of women... were tricked by the women's movement into "ego-tripping themselves out of romantic connection." That's right girls: If you're unwillingly unwed, blame it on mom and Title IX for duping you into educating, respecting and supporting yourselves...

...[F]or anyone who dares order millions of people she doesn't know to sell out their dreams, regret their accomplishments, fear their futures and "Marry him," whoever he is, I have two words: You first.

Now let's get something straight right off the bat: Lori Gottlieb did not write this book because she actually wants to set back the women's movement or frighten 29-year-olds, she wrote it because she got a book deal. This is the way the non-fiction world works. If you have an idea that is compelling, salacious, vaguely relatable and able to piss off half of the Conde Nast building, you have a check waiting for you at your literary agent's office.

But it's not so easy to turn away from the book's content, because the fact remains: there are a lot of successful, awesome, physically attractive, smart, funny women in their early 40s who are wondering why the fuck they aren't married and why they now have to get sperm donation to have a kid. Lori Gottlieb wants you to blame them, which is not entirely inaccurate, but you know who gets off scott-free in this exchange yet again? That's right: dudes.

Nowhere is there a book called "Stop Picking Your Butt: How Guys Need to Cease Being Such Emotionally-Stunted Babies" and there isn't likely to be one. When women choose to spend their thirties drinking apple martinis and taking the Jitney to the Hamptons with no plans to settle down, it becomes the Tragedy of a Lost Era; when guys do it, it's called "2003 through 2010".

But here's the rub... no matter what they tell you, a woman's fertility starts being an issue after 36. Sure, you can often use cutting-edge (and expensive) science to give you a shot into your early forties, but that window eventually becomes an arrow slit. So if you want to get married and have kids, you really do have to hope this intersection occurs:

To me, the worst thing about a book like Gottlieb's is that her advice is impossible to take. Nobody in their right mind is going to marry someone they don't love if there's a .001% chance of meeting your soulmate in the next few years. The stakes of personal self-actualization are far too large (at least in self-oriented cultures like ours), and the promise of actual true love is far too inspiring to marry the guy you happen to be kinda dating.

A word about "settling". I realize it's a very charged verb, one that chafes against every movie you've ever seen, every novel, every dream you had for yourself in your teenage bedroom. And let's be honest: for an 18-year-old guy, anything south of getting a blow job on the roof of a Suburban going 75 mph through South Beach while shotgunning a vat of Cuervo is "settling". So our definition changes wildly as our wants. But it doesn't mean that "settling" isn't very real.

Here's the sad truth... finding the love of your life (or even "a" love of your life) is akin to Dean Smith's quote about winning national championships: you have to be very good, and very lucky. You have to be "good" enough to truly know yourself, get healed, salve your childhood wounds and mature into somebody who understands the glorious panorama and limitations of love.

And you have to be "lucky" enough to find somebody else who has done the same, and find them in your time. The rest is fashion.

Los fans de las películas de acción del cine más reciente saben que la combinación de Matt Damon y Paul Greengrass -activa en El mito de Bourne y El Ultimatum de Bourne- es un bombazo. Es el caso de Green zone, película que se estrena en España el 19 de marzo.

La apabullante victoria de En tierra hostil en los Oscar 2010 demuestra que Estados Unidos quiere empezar a curar con el cine sus heridas en el campo de batalla de sus dos frentes abiertos. Irak y Afganistán. Mientras la cinta Brothers (Hermanos) utiliza la presencia del Ejército estadounidense en Afganistán, otras dos películas que asedian las carteleras también esta primera, Los hombres que miraban fijamente a las cabras y Green zone acuden a Irak, como la oscarizada película de Kathryn Bigelow, para contar sus respectivas historias.

En Green zone la acción se sitúa durante la ocupación de Bagdad en 2003. Matt Damon es el subteniente Roy Miller quien, junto a su equipo de inspectores, les es encomendada la misión de recorrer el desierto en busca de armas de destrucción masiva supuestamente almacenadas allí.

Registran escondite tras escondite, a cual más peligroso, pero en vez de letales agentes químicos, descubren un elaborado plan que da la vuelta al propósito de su misión. Rodeado de agentes con objetivos contradictorios, Miller debe abrirse camino entre una maraña de espías en un país desconocido mientras intenta encontrar respuestas que quizá sirvan para salvar a un gobierno o para extender la guerra en una región muy inestable. No tardará en descubrir que, en un momento difícil y en una región explosiva, el arma más difícil de encontrar es la verdad.

Los prostíbulos Flower, de las Rozas, y The Factory, de San Fernando de Henares, ambos regentados por el empresario Antonio Herrero, están en el punto de mira judicial. El 7 de marzo del pasado año se cerraron en Cataluña el Riviera, también controlado por Herrero, y el Saratoga, de Castelldefels. Sobre ambos había abierta una investigación de presunta corrupción policial y maltrato a las prostitutas. Judicialmente se trató de demostrar si efectivamente los dueños de los clubes sobornaban a los agentes para que les avisaran en el momento en que se fueran a realizar las inspecciones. De este m...

Antibodies play a central role in prophylaxis against many infectious agents. While neutralization is a primary function of antibodies, the Fc- and complement-dependent activities of these multifunctional proteins may also be critical in their ability to provide protection against most viruses. Protection against viral pathogens in vivo is complex, and while virus neutralization—the ability of antibody to inactivate virus infectivity, often measured in vitro—is important, it is often only a partial contributor in protection. The rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) remains the “gold standard” assay to measure rabies virus–neutralizing antibodies. In addition to neutralization, the rabies-specific antigen-binding activity of antibodies may be measured through enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs), as well as other available methods. For any disease, in selecting the appropriate assay(s) to use to assess antibody titers, assay validation and how they are interpreted are important considerations—but for a fatal disease like rabies, they are of paramount importance. The innate limitations of a one-dimensional laboratory test for rabies antibody measurement, as well as the validation of the method of choice, must be carefully considered in the selection of an assay method and for the interpretation of results that might be construed as a surrogate of protection.

When we last left Bob Costas uber-protector Peter King, he was marveling over the tenacious white man speed of Toby Gerhart, savoring the deliciousness of Shock Top, and imploring you to visit the Indianapolis airport. There’s a shoeshine stand right next to the Hudson News! YOU TELL ME THAT PLACE DOESN’T LEAD THE LEAGUE IN CONVENIENCE!

So what of this week? Will Peter encounter more women breastfeeding in public? Will he offer to lend a teat? Will he learn more things from Gil Brandt? Did you know Rhode Island is NOT an island? How about that? And will we hear more about that crazy Boston weather? Sometimes it’s rainy and sunny on the same day! Bonkers! Read on…

Free agency is overrated

So true. Except that the current Super Bowl champions have a quarterback that they signed in free agency who helped make the team good, contributed untold amounts of money and personal time to reviving his new city, and has the power to heal dying puppies.

One… point about the value of splurging: In 2008, as a precursor to their Super Bowl seasons, Arizona and Pittsburgh signed no one from other teams in the first two days of free agency. In 2009, as a precursor to their Super Bowl seasons, New Orleans and Indianapolis signed no one from other teams in the first two days of free agency.

However, the Saints did sign Darren Sharper later on in free agency, who turned out to be a DPOY candidate. But overall, FREE AGENCY IS TOTALLY LAME.

That’s the thing about free agency: We celebrate it like it’s a huge event, like if you get nothing done the opening 72 hours, your season’s down the drain.

Who does this? Who’s this “We”? Oh, you mean STUPID fans. And Dan Snyder, who is also a stupid fan in his own way.

There’s a clarion call out there, and it’s screaming: Free agency is vastly overrated.

No. Free agency is NOT overrated. Free agents can be overrated and often are. The actual process of releasing players onto the open market? Not so much. OMG THE ARBITRATION PROCESS IS SOOOO OVERHYPED.

Again, the Saints are currently world champs because they, you know, signed a very good free agent QB. And the Vikings made the NFC title game with half their starters imported from other teams (including their QB). So no, free agency itself is not overrated. But Al Haynesworth is!

The Cardinals, more and more, are taking on a Steeler persona.

Look at how Pittsburghish they are!

Jim Schwartz must be one heck of a texter.

Look at his THUMB DISCIPLINE!

I praise, I criticize, I wonder. The Bears and Ravens get noticed.

I praise. I criticize. I uber-walk. I hug. I cradle. I propel. I, robot. I, Claudius. I rannnnn, I ran so far awayyyyyyy…

There’s a reason Albert Pujols is good, and Bill Parcells finds it out.

Is it because he hits lots of home runs and has a great OBP? No way! I never would have guessed that. Thank you, coach Parcells. LIGHT: BROUGHTETH.

You know what I learned from the Saints’ Super Bowl DVD? The reversal of the two-point conversion catch by Lance Moore was spot on by ref Scott Green –and Sean Payton loves him some Juicy Fruit.

Coach Payton is gonna move ya! He steals some wine… he gets right to ya! Coach Payton… the coach the coach the coach is gonna moooooooooove ya!

I’m not sure it’s going to work, but it’s can’t be much worse than the old days, when the Redskins won the NFL offseason championship every year but precious little else. Shanahan, the Redskins’ coach with the power, and Allen, the new general manager, worked on a long-term plan for the team in their first month on the job and gave it to Snyder just before the Super Bowl. “He said, ‘Good. Do what you guys think is best,’ ” Allen said Sunday.

Snyder then he batted down his right arm repeatedly, which acts as its own independent claw that does VERY EVIL THINGS like offer Clinton Portis a $25 million contract extension. He then had the arm strapped to a folding table, and asked Vinny Cerrato to sing lullabies to it to calm it down.

Schwartz, VandenBosch’s former defensive coordinator in Tennessee, flew to Nashville last Thursday to recruit him. Schwartz said as soon as his watch showed 11 p.m. local time (free-agency began at midnight Eastern), he was close to VandenBosch’s home and sent him this text message:

I could be anywhere in the country tonite, but I am here in Nashville to see you. Can I get a half hour tonight or tomorrow morning?

Schwartz

VandenBosch invited him into the house, and he stayed until the player agreed to come to Detroit, essentially.

I could be anywhere, Kyle. But I’m here, outside your bushes, staring through your window, watching your wife toss on the biggest pair of granny panties I ever saw. What kind of briar patch is that gal hidin’? COME TO DETROIT.

The three best decisions teams made in free-agency over the weekend:

1. The Bears being bold.

You know what’s overrated? Free agency, especially when teams sign players for big money right out of the gate. In other news, HOW BOUT THE BEARS! WHAT A SIGNING!

What choice did they have? I’m not in favor of free-agent spending sprees because they rarely bear fruit. But even though Julius Peppers is an overrated player, he clearly was the best player on the open market, and the Bears have no picks in the first two rounds of the April draft, and they had to do something to improve a sinking team.

I think free agency is dumb. I think Julius Peppers isn’t that good. But I applaud the Bears for doing something stupid anyway! YOU GOTTA DO SOMETHING!

The three worst decisions teams made:

2. New England not moving aggressively to get a receiver.

WE COULD HAVE DRAFTED PERCY HAHHHHHVIN! Belichick is slippin’! I should be named VP of Cawmmon Sense, becawse I’m the only smahhht person around! I HATE THE COEN BROTHERS EVEN THOUGH I NEVAH SAW BIG LEBOWSKI AND ONLY WAWTCH RAWCKY FARRRR AWN A CONTINUOUS LOOP!

/eats at Dunkin Donuts, brags about this for some reason

I can see Julian Edelman doing a fine impersonation of Welker…

Not as good as my impression of him! “Durrr I’m Wes Welker and I run hard after that catch and stuff.”

Quote of the Week I

“I have seven kids that live in five different states. I made some wrong decisions in my first two years in the league. Now I have to take on the responsibility of being a father to my kids. I can separate my personal life and off-the-field issues from football … The mothers [and I] try to work out a schedule where I can see my kids. I talk to them on IChat and Skype. We try to find different ways for me to be in their lives, no matter how it is.”

n Antonio Cromartie, traded from the Chargers to the Jets on Thursday night, on some of his off-the-field issues that spurred San Diego to jettison him.

Gah! Skype! Why didn’t I think of that?

/leaves wife and kids

/talks to kids on Skype once a week

/Closes Skype three minutes into call because the vid is choppy

Now THAT is parenting.

Quote of the Week III

“I’m proud of my players for doing that. This was the best team-building exercise we have ever done.”
– Texas A&M-Commerce football coach Guy Morriss, a former coach at Kentucky and Baylor and a longtime NFL player, who, in a police incident report, supported his players’ removal of every copy of the student paper from campus outlets after the East Texan reported two of Morriss’ players were arrested on drug charges.

The theft and disposal of a reported $1,100 worth of college newspapers angers me because I worked up to 10 hours a day for much of three years at The Post, Ohio University’s independent student paper…

Oh, to read Peter back in those days:

-Coffeenerdness: You call THAT coffee, Boyd Dining Hall? More like coffee-flavored Schlitz! Harvey Greene Sr., director of Boyd’s beverage services, should be ashamed of himself.

-Call me crazy, but I think women might really grow to like this birth control pill!

-Look, just because everyone is protesting the war, and just because soldiers are dying by the truckload, and just because there seems to be no way to get out of this war with a victory, does NOT mean the war is somewhat unpopular. That’s absurd to suggest. NOT A PATTERN!

-I typed this article on my SmithCorona Air!

-I see a lot of my fellow students lying out in the sun. WHERE IS THE RESPECT?

I know the effort that goes into putting out a newspaper, regardless of the size or scope, and if school fathers at Texas A&M-Commerce have any guts, they’ll sanction Morriss and his players seriously for this act of abject theft of school property. Shame on you, Guy Morriss.

How DARE you steal a newspaper no one reads and is effectively now organized garbage?

Factoid of the Week That May Interest Only Me

Last Monday, Dolphins president Bill Parcells, a huge baseball fan, stopped by the Cardinals’ training facility in Jupiter, Fla., before going to the office. It was 6:50 a.m., and Parcells went looking for his good friend Tony LaRussa. Parcells walked by the Cards’ weight room. There was one man there. Albert Pujols.

“And he hadn’t just gotten there either,” Parcells said. “He was working hard, sweating. There’s a reason why the great ones are great.”

This just in: Great players work very hard. Join us next week when Coach Parcells calls you a nip faggot and tells you that great players also have PASSION.

Enjoyable/Aggravating Travel Note of the Week

This was the aggravating part of my weekend:

My Braun coffee grinder broke! Can you believe that? Like watching a child being scalped.

My wife and I went to New Jersey to see friends and run some errands over the weekend, and I wanted to see how the new Giants Stadium was looking. So we dropped down onto the Turnpike, got off at construction-addled Exit 16W onto route 3 west for the 10-minute jaunt to Montclair, and immediately I felt it. Guy on my tail. Really on my tail. I’m driving 45 in the middle of three lanes, keeping with the flow, and he angrily weaves to the right, bursts past and, with not enough room to get ahead of me, weaves back to the right, taps his brakes and I tap mine and we all drive on. Aaaah. Back in Jersey!

GTFO. A man tailgated you? IN NEW JERSEY? The hell you say. And to top it all off, there was TRAFFIC. Why is Obama focused on health care when this is what’s happening at the grass roots level? THIS IS A PROBLEM IN AMERICA RIGHT NOW.

This was the enjoyable part of the weekend: having lunch with Paul Zimmerman and his wife Linda in Morris Plains, N.J., Saturday. Matt Millen came over from eastern Pennsylvania to eat with us…

NO, MATT! DON’T DISCONNECT THAT FEEDING TUBE! GAHHHHHHHHHHH YOU KILLED DR. Z YOU BIG FAT MAN!

…and it was great to see Millen and Zim sit next to each other, with Millen spinning some of the craziest yarns I’d ever heard.

“And then, this one time, I destroyed a city’s spirit! Just because I could! BAHAHAHAHA!

(Next time you see Millen, ask him about helping a cow give birth on his neighbor’s farm. That’s a keeper.)

Oh, it’s great story. It happened on a Wednesday during the first week of the 2005 season. Wednesday was always Millen’s designated Farm Day.

Anyway, the story goes like this: This cow was giving birth, and Millen was asked to catch the calf. So he did, only he wrapped the umbilical cord around the calf’s neck by accident and it died. Then he kicked over a lantern and started a fire that destroyed $2 billion in local property. HILARIOUS.

I admire the Panthers for firing Jake Delhomme.

Way to cut a shitty player a year too late, guys!

Good to see, by the way, John Fox. You’ve been Mr. Recluse.

Someone has not been answering my texts! Do I have to send Jim Schwartz to hide in your shrubbery, Foxy?

Chester Taylor will be the best thing that ever happened to Matt Forte.

It’s true! Think of all the stress that Forte will get rid of by not playing for 70% of the game.

I think this is a good get for UMass-Lowell: The commencement speaker for the Class of 2010, on May 29 at 10 a.m., is Roger Goodell.

What a coup. It would be even more of a coup if Goodell wasn’t the type of person who puts you into a Level 8 coma within four seconds of opening his mouth. I’d rather see Gunnar Nelson do a guest spot in the booth. AFTERRRRR THE RAIN!

I think we all have to be careful about rushing to judgment on Ben Roethlisberger after he was accused of sexual assault by a 20-year-old woman in Milledgeville, Ga., near where Roethlisberger has an offseason home. It’s the second time in seven months that a charge of sexual assault against Roethlisberger has come to light, the first coming from a Nevada woman last July.

So without being judgmental…

Let’s be judgmental!

…if Roethlisberger is without fault, it still is utterly preposterous that he puts himself in these situations.

Let’s not be judgmental about Big Ben in the wake of these allegations, but for real. What a fucking retard.

This Super Bowl was a win as much for the community and Saints Nation as it was for the team. And though NFL Films touches on that several times in the sometimes transfixing video (interviewing local luminaries like Anne Rice about the meaning of it…

Oh, Christ. Anne Rice. “I’ll only let you people interview me if you put me some kind of dark, abandoned church. And I get to wear black, and intimate the close links between vampires and sexual repression! OOOOOOOH SCARY VAMPIRE GOTHNESS!”

(Sean) Payton to an inactive player late in the (Super Bowl): “I want a piece of Juicy Fruit! Is this Juicy Fruit? … It’s good.”

It’s gonna moooooooove ya… down the field!

I think I haven’t spoken to one coach or personnel man in the last three days who thinks Seattle would be smart to deal the sixth pick in this draft for Brandon Marshall. It just makes no sense. He’s a great player, potentially, but you’re giving up a cornerstone pick in the best draft in years and paying an incendiary player at least $8 million a year on a long-term deal. No question Marshall could justify the faith if Pete Carroll shows it in him. But the operative word there is “could.”

Could Brandon Marshall be a success? I don’t know. Is he worth the sixth pick? I doubt it. MAYBE. Does he like throwing bricks at women? MAYBE. Has the US Army developed some kind of supergun made only of barley and flint? It could be, but I emphasize that COULD. A legitimate 40 percent chance of couldness.

Disappointing big, big, big episode of “The Office.”

WHERE WAS MORE NARD DOG?!

One: Pam is too smart and too caring about her child to be so crazy to delay her trip to the hospital for the dumb reason that she uses, over and over again. Two: Dwight’s the best, but doing what he does because he sees a spot of mold? Don’t buy it. Three: It’s not funny.

Whoa, whoa. Wait a second. People on “The Office” not behaving as they might in the real world? Characters wildly acting out of character? Well, that’s not the show I’ve grown to love and then quickly grown indifferent to!

Great to be back in my Upper Montclair Starbucks for a while over the weekend, and to see so many familiar faces.

Mitch Puin! Oil man! That German guy who takes Der Spiegel to the can! They’re all still here! WHAT A MOMENT.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: Martin’s still the mayor of the place.

Martin who? Who cares! It’s the Montclair Starbucks, people. First-name basis with everyone in this place. It is my Cheers. Amanda Bowers! Is that you?!

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time"-- Albert Camus

While at lunch with friends, one of my future broadcast buddies brought up how being too beautiful might be detrimental for a woman. She cited Lara Logan, CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, who laments that her beauty has been somewhat of an obstacle in her career. In a 2005 New York Times article, Logan said, "being really attractive can hurt you." Had she not exhibited tenacity, fearlessness and compassion on her way up the news ladder, she would not be in the position she is today.

So do we feel sorry for poor, beautiful Lara? I don't think so.

In the same article, just a paragraph before, Logan mentions how she used her lady charm to coax the Russian embassy in London to expedite her visa shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

"Let's just say I met the guy from the embassy, after it had closed, in a cafe," she said.

It seems that the beauty that plights her is the same beauty that provides her with special opportunities unavailable to those of us left waiting behind the velvet ropes of normalcy.

A look at the yearbook of female news personalities on television reveals a significant number of former beauty queens (ie: Maria Menounos, Amy Robach, Lu Parker, and even... FOX's latest addition: Sarah Palin). Logan, too, broke hearts as a swimsuit model before she starting breaking the news.

For these women, I think being beautiful has given them extraordinary advantages-- namely careers. It's no secret that attractive faces tend to be plastered on all forms of media. (Please note that I am not at all saying they are talentless, but their looks have definitely been helpful in securing careers.)

Though a few years ago, when I was acting in commercials, my agent said there was finally a surge of "real people" roles that allowed regular-looking folks to represent the mainstream (or themselves) instead of their size two supermodel counterparts.

While commercials may be ready to accept realer looking people, the news, I'm afraid, is not.

Look at Mélissa Theuriau, a French journalist and news anchor who has been hailed as the most beautiful newscaster in the world by Maxim, the Daily Express and countless sexually-charged You-tubers who catapulted her into international fame in 2007 when a compilation of her news clips gained over 800,000 views.

Prior to becoming an Internet sensation, Theuriau worked early morning hours on LCI, a domestic news channel that no one, not even the French, watched.

Thanks to her digital newsroom of admirers,Theuriau was thrust into the celebrity spotlight and found herself a new job as presenter and editor of "Zone Interdite" (Forbidden Zone), a popular investigative news program. She also works for two other French television news shows.

Does she think this sudden job opportunity was mere luck? A product of only hard work, resilience and stamina? Nope.

Theuriau knows being gorgeous has its perks. She has modeled for Vuarnet sunglasses and has been romantically linked with popular French movie stars.

"I welcome compliments, on condition that people also talk about my professional ability. It's great if someone is pleasant to look at, the public is happy and she does the job well," she said.

Gaël Pollãs, an expert on celebrities, calls Theuriau "not an excellent journalist." However, "people find her beautiful, independent-minded and nice, and that is enough."

Clearly, her fan base, many of which don't even understand French, is not aroused by her intellect.

Logan's complex, however, reminds me a lot of a recent episode of Nip/Tuck where a beautiful model walks into the plastic surgery office and tells the doctor she is sick of being "perfect." She wants to undergo surgery to look normal, even ugly-- so that she might experience a day where she wouldn't be hit on, subject to any special attention, nor get the stink eye from jealous hags who were threatened by her halo of beauty.

Ugh. Give me a break.

The doctor refuses to operate on her perfectly-sculpted everything and actually ends up seducing her, no surprise here. By the end of the episode, in a predictable ironic twist, the girl tries to kill herself in a car crash, but only ends up scarring and disfiguring her face. However, 3-minutes of life in the ugly real world proves to be too much for her delicate self-esteem, and she begs the doctor to make her beautiful again.

Unfortunately, her scars are permanent and an old adage comes come to mind: Be careful what you wish for.

For beautiful people, suffering exists on a completely different plane than for regular folks. For example,  Jessica Biel's biggest problem is that people don't take her seriously as an actress, because she's so distractingly pretty. Sure, that sucks for Biel, but a big part of her career is contingent on those very looks. I loved Seventh Heaven as much as the next person, but something tells me that hormonal teenagers weren't tuning in for the show's religious didactics.

The beautiful advantage applies to non-media jobs as well. A 2007 study by Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle published in the Journal of Labor Economics revealed that attractive folks earned 5 percent more in hourly wages than their average-looking counterparts. Attractive people also earned 9 percent more per hour than the plainest people (uglies).

A quick breakdown:

The beautiful ones: $42,000
Average Joes: $40,000
The uglies: $36,400

The research also indicated that the uglies were also less likely to receive promotions at work compared to their more attractive colleagues.

Sad, huh?

It gets better. In schools, better-looking professors get better-looking evaluations from students. Even babies prefer pretty faces to not-so-pretty ones.

Moreover, good-looking folks can get away with almost anything, it seems.

I think back to the teacher-student sex scandals that have peppered the last decade. Debra LaFave was the pretty 23-year-old Florida middle school teacher who had sex with a 14-year-old student in a classroom and at her home in 2004.

During the highly publicized trial, her defense attorney remarked, "to place Debbie into a Florida state women's penitentiary, to place an attractive young woman in that kind of hellhole, is like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions."

She pled guilty and was sentenced to just three years of house arrest.

Her punishment seems quite lax compared to that of the infamous Mary Kay Letourneau, who in 1996, seduced her now-husband when he was only 12 years old. She served 7-1/2 years in prison. Letourneau isn't bad looking, but she certainly ain't no lingerie model, like LaFave.

Makes me wonder if even Lady Justice, in all her infinite blind wisdom, can still smell good-looking people.

Of course, everybody suffers-- you, me, the guy that begs for change every day outside of your local CVS, but I can't help but think that a beautiful person just might suffer a teensy bit less. So when they complain about how their beauty has hindered them--- the very beauty that has gotten them free dessert, a handsome date, or out of a speeding ticket, I have to be just a little skeptical.

Are you one of the beautiful ones?
Check here and find out if you make the cut.

And if you don't, your future can still look pretty good-- just fake it. Gordon Wainright, author of Teach Yourself Body Language, says you can increase your attractiveness by maintaining good eye contact, being happy, dressing well and listening well.

His research predicts that by improving posture and smiling, you will be treated more warmly and start attracting more people.

Vous voulez remporter un oscar de la meilleure photographie? Rien de plus facile. Montez une comédie musicale interdite aux mineurs (1), qui raconte l'histoire d'un personnage militaire historique, et est tirée d'un roman. Et faites en sorte qu'elle dure 2 heures et 10 minutes.

Voilà 82 ans que les oscars existent. C'est autant d'œuvres cinématographiques qui permettent de dégager des tendances sur les films primés lors de cette cérémonie. Voici les critères à respecter:

Source du film

De Autant en emporte le vent à No Country for Old Men, 40 des 82 des films ayant remporté l'oscar de la meilleure photo sont adaptés de romans éponymes. En seconde position –c'est étonnant– on trouve les films orignaux (22 sur les 82 films oscarisés). Puis viennent les pièces de théâtre. C'est de moins en moins le cas, car il n'y a eu que trois films récompensés aux oscars qui étaient inspirés de pièces de théâtre depuis 1968: Amadeus, Miss Daisy et son chauffeur et Chicago. En queue de peloton, nous n'avons que deux vainqueurs inspirés d'autres films: Marty et Les infiltrés.

Genre du film

Les films de guerre arrivent en premier. Ils représentent 21 des films récompensés pour la meilleure photographie. Le plus surprenant, c'est que l'essentiel des films de guerre primés l'ont été dans les années 90, alors que les Etats-Unis ne livraient aucune guerre de grande envergure. Le second genre le plus apprécié est ce qu'on appelle les biopics (ou biographies picturales): 14 films récompensés sont basés sur la vie de personnalités, depuis Shakespeare in Love en remontant jusqu'à The Great Ziegfeld (1936). A la troisième place, 9 films récompensés aux oscars de la meilleure photographie sont des comédies musicales. En outre, 39 films sur les 82 vainqueurs sont des films d'époque.

Box-office

Un examen des recettes (en tenant compte de l'inflation, bien sûr) révèle que, dans un premier temps, nous n'avons pas regardé les films oscarisés. Puis nous les avons beaucoup regardés, avant d'arrêter. En 28 ans, depuis 1927, année qui a vu la célébration de la première cérémonie des oscars, jusqu'en 1955, seuls trois films ont fait partie des 100 films détenant les records d'entrées: Autant en emporte le vent, Les plus belles années de notre vie et Sous le plus grand chapiteau du monde. Et au cours des 31 ans qui se sont écoulés depuis 1978, 3 films seulement ont réussi à figurer parmi les 100 films les plus vus: Forrest Gump, Titanic et Le Seigneur des anneaux: Le Retour du roi. Mais pendant les 22 ans qui ont séparé 1956 de 1978, 11 films sont entrés dans la liste des 100 films les plus vus. Des œuvres comme La Mélodie du bonheur, Ben Hur, Le Parrain, Rocky et L'Arnaque ont aussi obtenu de belles récompenses et fait un carton au box-office.

Classement

Aux Etats-Unis, la MPAA a commencé à «classer» les films (en fonction du public visé) en 1968. Depuis, les films oscarisés dans la catégorie de la meilleure photographie sont très majoritairement interdits aux mineurs. Depuis 1968, 20 films interdits aux mineurs ont raflé la récompense suprême, contre seulement 12 films primés pour lesquels l'accord parental est souhaitable. 7 films interdits au moins de 13 ans ont été récompensés aux oscars. Les deux seuls films aux extrémités du classement à avoir gagné sont Oliver!, classé G (tout public) et Macadam Cowboy, classé X à sa première sortie.

Durée des films

Une chose est certaine, l'Académie des oscars aime les films longs. La durée moyenne des films ayant remporté l'Oscar de la meilleure photo est de deux heures et vingt minutes. C'est le cas de Kramer contre Kramer (1979) à Slumdog Millionaire (2009). Seuls Miss Daisy et son chauffeur et Crash font moins de deux heures. Avant 1979, la durée moyenne était légèrement inférieure, à savoir deux heures et dix minutes.

Studio

S'agissant des oscars, le studio de cinéma a bel et bien son importance. Columbia Studios arrive en tête avec 74 victoires et 110 nominations. Il a remporté des oscars avec les belles images de Tant qu'il y aura des hommes, Ghandi, Le Dernier empereur et Lawrence d'Arabie. (Sa dernière victoire remonte cependant à 1987). Juste derrière Columbia Studios, 20th-Century Fox a été primé 58 fois et nommé 98 fois pour des réalisations un peu plus décousues, comme Eve, Braveheart et French Connection.

Si jusqu'ici vous continuez à me lire avec attention, vous vous demandez sans doute qui sera le grand gagnant de cette année...

Alors, on peut disqualifier plus de la moitié des 10 films nommés de 2010. Pour cela, il faut se rappeler une seule et unique règle: tous les films oscarisés dans la catégorie de la meilleure photographie ont, en moyenne, remporté cinq oscars et ont été nommés pour huit. Ce qui nous permet d'éliminer A Serious Man (deux nominations), Une éducation (trois nominations), District 9 (quatre nominations), L'Éveil d'un champion (deux nominations). De plus, on peut facilement écarter Là-haut: l'intrigue est originale, c'est une comédie (seules neufs comédies ont été primées), elle est tout public et fait 96 minutes (Il n'y avait que Marty et Annie Hall comme films primés plus courts).

Il nous reste donc Avatar, Démineurs, Precious (tiré du roman Push de Sapphire), In the Air et Inglourious Basterds.

Precious et In the Air sont tous deux des comédies dramatiques inspirées de romans. Ces films semblent prometteurs. Néanmoins, ayant été nommés seulement six fois et en tant que drames dont l'action se déroule dans le présent, pour une durée d'environ une heure et cinquante minutes, ce ne sont pas des vainqueurs potentiels. En revanche, Avatar a la bonne durée (162 minutes) et le bon nombre de nominations (9)... Mais il est interdit au moins de 13 ans et c'est de la science-fiction. (Aucun film de science-fiction n'a jamais remporté d'oscar de la meilleure photo. En outre un seul film fantastique, Le Seigneur des anneau: Le Retour du roi, a gagné).

Restent désormais Démineurs et Inglourious Basterds, deux films interdits aux mineurs (classement américain), qui parlent de guerre et ont été nommés respectivement neuf et huit fois. Théoriquement, l'avantage revient à Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), car l'action se situe dans le passé (Seconde Guerre mondiale) et le film a été réalisé par un studio ayant plusieurs oscars à son actif. Contrairement à Démineurs, un film à l'intrigue actuelle et qui est distribué par le studio novice Summit Entertainment.

Un oscar, qu'est-ce que ça rapporte?

A quoi cela sert-il de remporter l'oscar de la meilleure photographie? Comme l'explique Mo'nique: «Cet oscar ne m'a pas donné à manger. Tout le monde a besoin d'argent mon vieux.» Ne vous inquiétez pas Mo'nique, la science a parlé, et si votre agent a réussi à vous faire marquer des points, un oscar vous rapportera un sacré paquet de fric! Dans un article qui date de 1988 intitulé «Ce que vaut un Oscar», John C. Dodds et Morris B. Holbrook nous apprennent qu'une nomination aux oscars dans la catégorie Meilleure photographie rapporte autour de 988.247 dollars [727.650 euros] en recettes complémentaires au box-office. En cas de victoire, on peut ajouter 3.380.154 dollars [2.488.722 euros] au bénéfice du film.

Il y a toutefois une anomalie statistique: une nomination à l'oscar de la meilleure actrice rapporte 872.632 dollars [642.537 euros] au film, tandis que la nomination d'un comédien au titre de meilleur acteur ne lui fera gagner que 809.630 dollars [596.132 euros]. Cependant, un oscar du meilleur acteur rapporte 1.037.634 dollars [764.200 euros], tandis que si une comédienne est primée «meilleure actrice», cela engendre une perte pour le film! La somme en jeu est «statistiquement négligeable», mais cela reste une perte. Mo'nique n'a peut-être pas tort de se plaindre.

Grady Hendrix

Traduit par Micha Cziffra

Image de une: Brad Pitt dans Inglourious Basterds

À LIRE ÉGALEMENT: Tarantino, l'inconséquence du spectateur; A Serious Man est un film sérieusement bon, mais...; Avatar, pas très écolo; Là-haut: on la refait, mais moins pixellisée

Ndt(1) : Pour simplifier, nous emploierons l'expression «interdits aux mineurs» dans cet article. En fait, il s'agit ici de films «classés R» selon la normalisation américaine, c'est-à-dire interdits aux moins de 17 ans non accompagnés d'un parent ou d'un tuteur adulte. Les films sont souvent classés différemment en France.

From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do it all. Germaine Greer's free-thinking female eunuch has been replaced by the desperately self-inventing 'Madonna', argues Charlotte Raven, who looks back in shame at the moment in the 1990s when her generation turned its back on feminism

Thanks to a string of celebrity sex stories, the world according to the tabloids has recently been – even more than usual – a sorry place for feminism. But among the countless snaps – of bikini-clad betrayed wives, distressed mistresses and pneumatic "hostesses" – perhaps the most disturbing was that of Katie Price's two-year-old daughter, Princess, in heavy makeup, complete with false eyelashes. Millions have seen it. The "debate" about it has been staged on all media platforms: on one TV talk show, a woman said she couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Her daughter was a "girly girl", like Princess. She "adored" dressing up and posing in front of cameras. It would be wrong to stop her, wouldn't it?

Katie Price's currency is as high today as when she published her million-selling autobiography in 2004. She has generated much outrage in the last few years, but it is nothing compared with her influence. Her narcissism no longer seems so aberrant. Women's belief in specialness and a concomitant sense of entitlement has inflated in line with Price's most famous assets.

How has it come to this? Feminists blame the sexists, Martin Amis et al, which is easy but unfair. In reality, we can't blame anyone but ourselves. While Price has been working tirelessly at getting her message across, the thinking women – the writers and journalists – who should have been putting the counter case have been indulging in a variety of "guilty pleasures" – from ogling young men (Germaine Greer in The Boy) to drooling over frocks (Linda Grant in The Thoughtful Dresser). Feminists have become increasingly frivolous, and as such are no match for Price, who is serious about her mission to win over all women to "Team Narcissist".

Two new exposés of the dehumanising effect of the Price worldview feel like too little too late. The fantasy world described in Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, where appearances are everything, has already come to pass. Today's young women are right to think they will be judged on how they seem, rather than who they are. In this context, Kat Banyard's promise to tell "the truth about women and men" in her new book The Equality Illusion is the promise of a horse-drawn plough in the machine age. The truth is no longer enough; she needs a promotional gimmick.

In a recent study of 1,000 British girls (admittedly by a mobile entertainment company), quoted in Walter's book, 60% said glamour modelling was their preferred career. A quarter said they would consider becoming lap dancers. By all measures, the value map has shifted in Price's favour.

I'm sorry to say that we are culpable. Thinking women have turned their backs on feminism. This might not have been a disaster if we had remained neutral. But we, too, have found the governing philosophy of Priceworld compelling. The fact that our daughters join in shouldn't come as any surprise. Their insouciance about the business of striking poses for money has been learned from us. For too long we've been channelling rather than challenging Price.

There was a moment in the 90s – I wince to recall it – when women themselves fell in with the view that feminism was unglamorous and inhibiting. It was cramping our style and even worse, stopping us from shopping! Middle-class commentators encouraged their readers to embrace their "inner bimbos". Their paeans to hair products and sexy knickers read like new lad-mag paeans to tarty women. Comic exaggeration made it clear that the writers were self-aware – women who "should know better".

"Looking back, I don't have many regrets. I was privileged to live through the era of John Frieda restructuring serum, which revolutionised life for women with curly hair": the journalist Ruth Picardie, who chronicled her battle with cancer, suggested a pleasurable frisson as she delivered the lines of the "knowing" fashion bimbo. Irony protected her from criticism – she was simply playing with an alternative value system and couldn't be held accountable for its moral shortcomings.

"Cycled to Bayswater to interview dull Australian feminist then cycled to Guy's for treatment, then to Dickens and Jones for a 'personal beauty consultation' at the fabulous, fabulous beauty studio." Somewhere along Oxford Street, she mislaid the inverted commas. If any feminists had taken against all this, it might not have got so out of hand. Unfortunately, the people you might have expected to question these assumptions were dancing around in bra tops. In my Dolce & Gabbana number, I believed I was free to be what I really really wanted. Like Tony Blair, I felt I was a person of destiny. Or, as Geri Spice would have it: "I don't know what I'm doing but I'm going to damn well do it."

The girlpower we were all getting "into" was in fact a bit of marketing aimed at getting tweens to buy records. Walter, however, thought it was a real phenomenon. Her first book The New Feminism, which came out in 1998, suggested that the sex war had been won. "As women break down every corridor of power in Britain, we can see that we are in the final stretch of a long feminist revolution that is taking women from the outside of society to the inside, from silence to speech, from impotence to strength."

Could we? Or might this belief have been more to do with fashion than politics. Victimhood looked very 80s and outré. There was also an element of laziness. We simply couldn't be bothered to be political. If we could prove there was no need for it, that would leave more time for deciding between fabulous face creams.

If Walter was right, now was the moment to sit back complacently, filing our nails. The last bit of the feminist revolution was simply a matter of signing on the dotted line. "This generation of women is much less likely to experience the feminist's erstwhile ambivalence about taking on power."

In this model, power could be taken on, like a mortgage, after due consideration. Everyone could sign up for it. Those who chose not to may have had some perverse attachment to their "downtrodden", "sorry victim" status. The rest would opt for life as a "laughing, independent, ambitious optimist", in the manner of Cherie Lunghi (worryingly, one of Walter's positive role models) from the Kenco coffee ads.

In her 1994 book Fire With Fire, Naomi Wolf argued that the impediments to my becoming the Kenco CEO were psychological rather than political. An old-fashioned feminine reticence about boasting and bullshitting was holding me back. To combat this, Wolf suggested convening a "power group" in a gorgeous setting with gourmet coffee on tap. Between sips, my Prada-clad sisters and I would affirm our achievements and discuss ways of making feminism "fun, easy and lucrative" instead of angry and bitter.

As a young journalist in the 1990s – when journalism was having its own moment of hubris – following Wolf's advice, I tapped into my own reservoir of "unclaimed power". No longer whinging about constraints, I seized opportunities and relished the feeling of being mistress of my own destiny. Earning proper money for the first time, I gave myself permission to spend it on designer outfits and crates of bottled Coke "Classic". I never had a bottle opener, so developed the knack of pulling off the cap with my teeth. As I did so, an Oprahesque voice in my head intoned "You go girl!"

Wolf said we needed new role models to replace uninspiring "downtrodden" feminists. Walter plumped for Thatcher on the grounds that she "allowed British women to celebrate their ability not just to be nurturing or caring and life affirming, but also to be deeply unpleasant, to be cruel, to be death dealing, to be egoistic. It was cathartic for us to acknowledge these possibilities. Thatcher normalised success."

I opted for Julie Burchill, a narcissist before narcissism was fashionable. Our brief relationship was a six-month-long powergroup (without the gourmet coffee), and I emerged from it unchivalrously convinced that I would be the next Graham Greene, rather than the next Julie Burchill. "You're the proper writer. Not a performing seal like moi!" It was strange to see other women modelling themselves on Susan Street, the heroine of Burchill's 1989 novel Ambition. The book begins at a crime scene. Street has dispatched her rival "to the big boardroom in the sky with a sexual performance of such singular virtuosity that his heart couldn't stand it". Street doesn't do reticence. The only thing standing between her and her ambition to become the first woman editor of the Sunday Best is its owner, Tobias Pope. She agrees to become his sex slave, knowing that she will remain in control and unmoved, even as she's hanging upside down from the ceiling in a lesbian club in New York. In these moments of degradation, she's still experiencing the "ecstasy of success". In spite of appearances, she is leading him on. Her motto is: "When you win, nothing hurts."

We all started to evince "attitude". Like Katie Price doing sexy, we adopted the pose selfconsciously, knowing that it made commercial sense. Women with balls were de rig. The launch of the late-night magazine-format Girlie Show on Channel 4 in 1994 convinced us that being "Amazonian" and "in yer face" would pay social and professional dividends. "Attitude" was sold as a more authentic way of being. The idea was that women had repressed their sex-loving, gobshite side in the name of feminine propriety. According to the producer: "Women have always behaved like this – they've just never done it on the TV before."

The editor of 90s women's magazine Frank cast "attitude" positively as the freedom to be pleasure seeking. The Amazonians were free to do what they wanted. Those of us who didn't fancy hanging upside down in a lesbian club in New York would get the same head rush at the Boots makeup counter. After years of aesthetic constraint, we were finally free to sport the nail colour of our choosing. "Are we perpetuating the beauty myth?" asked Frank's editor, Tina Gaudoin. "Only if you believe Naomi Wolf's half-baked thesis that we are powerless to make our own decisions about the way we look."

I wore Chanel's Night Sky at meetings with editors, aware that much was at stake. Large contracts were being handed to women displaying attitudinal oomph. I hoped my nail colour would convey my capacity for reckless candour and a readiness to say the unsayable.

If it didn't I could always pretend it had. The bars and clubs were full of women lying like men about the size of their promotions. Everyone was "glinting", Peter York's phrase for believing one's own publicity. Sad to report, feminism had reneged on its responsibility to present uncomfortable truths. It had become a mirror of the moment.

Ten years of ego inflation has had a predicable impact. We are hyperconfident, hypersexual and hypercandid about our readiness to do whatever it takes to secure top billing. We're still longing to experience the ecstasy of success. This feels elusive, even to those at the top of the professional ladder. Wolf would be disappointed to see female CEOs fantasising about the moment when they will be elevated to the next level. "What women want" is no longer a mystery. In our age, it isn't a fulfilling job or happy home life, but promotion in the broadest sense.

The heroine of India Knight's novel My Life on a Plate, published in 2000, models herself on Madonna. In times of personal crisis, she asks: "What would Madonna do?", confident that this will give her the right answer. The novel's popularity suggests women identified with the heroine's belief that "all we need is to feel like Queens on Thrones all the time". The queenly aspect of modern woman – the sense that she is meant for better things – could be described as Madonnaesque. The pop star's lifelong commitment to getting to the next level reinforces her fans' belief that it's possible and desirable to "reinvent" your world, as well as yourself, to match your inflated self-image. Her failure to smile once during the whole 40-year process suggests that this form of self-advancement is as enjoyable as suffragism was for Emily Wilding Davison.

Instrumentalism has taken over from romanticism as the governing female philosophy. Madonna-ised woman sees everything, and everyone, as a means to her end. She views her body instrumentally: the "hypersexualisation" of women noted by Walter in Living Dolls has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with self-marketing. Everyone is constantly orgasming, yet they've never seemed less convincing. They aren't fake, but phoney, a form of spin. They are meant to be overheard, conveying empowerment.

A recent interview with sex blogger Zoe Margolis portrayed her as an icon of liberation. But Walter doesn't fall for this: in the 90s she was happy to take women at their own account, believing their assessment of themselves as empowered-women-of-the-90s, but not today. Living Dolls is more sceptical than The New Feminism. Interviewees' claims to be happily promiscuous, porn-loving, sex-texting women-of the-noughties are properly scrutinised this time, and her accounts of the emotional and psychological costs of this way of life are plausible and compelling. But she's less convincing about the causes of the phenomena of "hypersexualisation" and "exaggerated femininity", so named, I imagine, because she couldn't use "hyper" twice.

Walter puts "hypersexualisation" down to a rise in sexism– not the old-fashioned sort but something more sinister that never quite comes into view. The second half of her book explains the return of traditional femininity as a result of a greater belief in determinism. She is right to point out that we no longer believe in conditioning, but surely wrong to say this belief has been supplanted by essentialism – a belief in innate differences between the sexes. The Madonna-ised woman views femininity as a tool for getting what she wants, whatever that may be. In this moment, it is more or less compulsory for intelligent women to reveal a passion for baking cupcakes. The domestic goddess is a pose, not a reversion to old-style femininity. Now that "attitude" is out and old-fashioned feminine virtues are "in", so Madonna-ised woman is ready to reveal that cake-making is her number one "guilty pleasure".

The young girl's penchant for pinky "girliness" reflects not a belief in essential femininity but an early brand awareness. Her belief that the pickers on the next level favour "girliness" is reinforced by everything she sees. Today's girly isn't passive, but sassy and self-defining.

Completely sold on the myth of "self-invention", today's woman believes herself in control of her life, from birth to the present day. There's no governing philosophy, just an urge to assert her will. She doesn't know what she's doing, but she's damn well doing it.

Anyone who challenges or questions her will get short shrift, even our own children. A slew of motherhood memoirs portray the baby as a "rival consciousness". This memorable phrase was coined in Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work. Cusk's nuanced portrayal of maternal ambivalence was read one way by those seeking support for their perception of motherhood as an endless bad hair day.

Mothers are now more able to portray themselves as victims of their children. Brett Paesel says she was prompted to write her memoir Mommies Who Drink by the silence around motherhood and women's unwillingness to bear witness to their subjugation, "which feels like complaining". No one dares convey the rage evoked by the maternal requirement to put someone else's needs above their own? None except Stephanie Calman, author of Confessions of a Bad Mother; Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother's Handbook; Mel Giedroyc, author of Going Ga Ga – Is There Life After Birth? and so on and on. These controlling mothers seem to feel wronged by the autonomy of the people in their orbit. The fact that their children are separate beings with their own beliefs and habits seems like a dreadful affront. Female confessional writers seldom pay much mind to how it feels to be them. Far from being a golden age of female self-expression, this is the opposite. Real self-expression requires dialogue. With the other point of view excluded, candid authors are communicating nothing.

Madonna-ised woman believes she should have everything, like the women from Sex and the City, with everything defined as every possible dress and sexual permutation. The teenagers interviewed in Living Dolls say things like: "We were saying that one week we should go out and try to notch up as many lovers as we can, with the most variety possible – age, gender, jobs." They might be mortified to find these very omnipotent fantasies enacted, page by lurid page, in Madonna's book Sex, 18 years ago. Many of them maintain a Price-like carapace of invulnerability. They are winning, they believe, so nothing hurts. Unable to evaluate risk, they see no reason not to go out to a drinking barn in their underwear, or appear in a college-run porn mag or have sex with everyone they can.

Sex diarist Belle de Jour has claimed that nothing in her background had any bearing on her decision to become a prostitute. On her website her father's recent public admission that he'd slept with dozens of prostitutes during her adolescence was denied any importance. The facts were not disputed. She just doesn't want anyone thinking they impaired her ability to freely choose sexual slavery, à la Susan Street, while still calling the shots. This belief has made women reckless. Belle's assertion in one of her memoirs that she became a prostitute because she "couldn't remember the reasons not to" suggest that she has forgotten, or more likely repressed, the physical and psychological risks. Paradoxically, this generation of women is more vulnerable than any of its forbears. Women's refusal to acknowledge any weakness has made them easy prey.

Happily, Kat Banyard is on hand to remind them of the bad things that do happen. The Equality Illusion is a dose of feminist commonsense. Banyard doesn't think we need new words for things, or a "new feminism". She reminds me of the feminists I knew at university: angry in just the right measure. I've a hunch she didn't serve cupcakes at her book launch.

Refreshingly, she doesn't flinch from portraying as victims the people bad things happen to. The Equality Illusion provides a useful corrective to the Belle-sponsored myth of free will. "Between 50 and 75% of women in prostitution in the UK begin selling sex acts before they are 18 years old." Many prostitutes were abused as children or "fucked up" by other means.

"I was basically too fucked up for work," one woman tells Banyard. "And I knew it, so when I saw an ad in the paper for escorts, there seemed little choice. I figured I was really fucked up about men and had been truly fucked over by them, and didn't trust them an inch so might as well make some money from it. This was not a free 'choice'. It was the opposite. I needed money, but was a mess. Where else do they greet you with such open arms in such a state as the sex industry?"

During the 90s, according to a Home Office report, the number of men paying for sex in the UK doubled; there are now an estimated 80,000 women involved in prostitution and 921 brothels in London. The industry's efforts to make it seem like a normal leisure pursuit, rather than a form of abuse, appear to be paying off. It isn't. Banyard's interviewee had recently been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder – a common psychological "side effect" of prostitution. One symptom of this was disassociation, protective in the first instance, then destructive if you can't stop doing it. The teenage interviewees in Living Dolls are already adepts at this and rather pleased with themselves to have found a way of avoiding the emotional costs of promiscuity.

The Equality Illusion is full of grim statistics illustrating pay differentials and the point that poverty often has a "female face". As Banyard demonstrates, it isn't difficult proving that women are more oppressed than ever; the difficulty now is getting them to admit it.

Natasha Walter can't quite. Living Dolls does an excellent job of exposing the brutal reality behind the sex industry's increasingly sophisticated façade. It reads much more convincingly than The New Feminism; she's describing something real. Yet, when it comes to it, she still can't say that any of these things are wrong: "There is, of course, nothing intrinsically degrading or miserable about women pole dancing, stripping, having sex with large numbers of partners or consuming pornography. All these behaviours are potentially enjoyable, sexy and fun."

Yet even in her own portrayal, there clearly is something intrinsically degrading and miserable about pole dancing. It's not about sex, says one of her interviewees, but the illusion of power. Each man wants to believe the no-touching rule has been breached for his exclusive benefit. If women were liberated, pole dancing wouldn't exist. Why not condemn it outright?

Walter seems frightened of sounding square – as if she's bought into the idea that a taste for porn is a badge of sophistication. She may also be scared of causing offence, possibly justifiably. Women have never been as touchy and as unwilling to accept criticism. Her reluctance to condemn may spring from an anxiety about being judgmental or from a fantasy about having everything. Like her interviewees, she doesn't want to rule anything out.

In the end, she doesn't want to be the person who's limiting women's choices. In the last decade, choice has become an ideology. Walter's solution to the conundrum of how to respond to the sex industry's successful rebranding as a chic lifestyle choice is to make more wholesome "choices" seem equally alluring. To rebrand them, in other words. As things stand, "we can see that certain choices are celebrated while others are marginalised". All that needs to happen is for these "marginal choices" to be "celebrated".

Will her strategy work? We've seen it in operation in repeated attempts to challenge the dominant ideal of beauty. Gok Wan's celebrations of cellulite always precede suggestions about how to conceal it effectively. Beth Ditto's body may look like a good example of a "marginal" choice made mainstream by a process of reclamation, but like every other cover girl she is styled in accordance with the current aesthetic orthodoxy. Her image on the cover of Pop magazine was manipulated, apparently, to make her bigger. Today the pickers on the next level like extreme looks, and Ditto is fortunate to conform to their hyperbolic tastes. The Pop cover is fashion. Like all fashion images, it makes normality seem risible.

It's a good moment to reread Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Its reissue feels timely. In the 50s, as now, the early gains of feminism had been squandered by a generation who thought it unglamorous and inhibiting. Friedan was recording a postwar period of reaction when women sought refuge in a form of conventional femininity. With nostalgia she recalls the period during the early part of the century when women such as Amelia Earhart offered a glorious go-faster modernism in place of feminine passivity and female icons were complex-looking rather than merely beautiful.

I feel the same when looking back to the 1970s. The free-thinking, life-loving, desiring person described in Greer's The Female Eunuch now seems a historical figure. In her place, we have Madonna-ised woman grinding out routines in front of a mirror, with her eyes asking "am I hot?" Her whole being is directed at self-advancement, yet she is as incapable of real fulfilment. Her ambitions have been curtailed, just like Friedan's housewife. How very far this creature is from the feminist ideal. In spite of what is now claimed, feminism has never been about empowerment through choice. You can't simply opt for power – power isn't a fridge or an elliptical training machine. Any strategy in this consumerist register is doomed to fail.

Friedan didn't worry about offending her audience. She described the destruction wrecked by the "happy housewife" on her miserable husband and progeny. With no life of her own, she lives vicariously through them, stunting their emotional growth and preventing them from taking on the responsibilities of adulthood.

It's hard to imagine Madonna-ised woman having an "ah ha" moment reading something that anatomised her flaws. Any representation of the damage she is doing to her loved ones and herself will be angrily rebuffed, along with any accompanying advice about "getting other interests" or "putting baby first". Putting baby's needs ahead of our own, with no quid pro quo, seems as silly to us as Friedan's suggestion that the 50s housewife would benefit from putting herself first.

I remember that T-shirt we used to wear in the 70s which featured Thatcher and the slogan "We are all prostitutes", meaning exploitation was a universal fact. At that time it was thought clever to display some awareness of the social and psychological forces underpinning your actions. Now we think the opposite. Even prostitutes are insulted by the suggestion that they are not free agents, defining the terms of engagement.

If awareness returned – if modern woman were no longer disassociating from her pain and victimhood – all her decisions would be different. The things that hurt us would never seem "potentially enjoyable". We wouldn't wear silly shoes, blog about our sex life, worry that our babies are upstaging us. Most importantly, we'd resist the temptation to caricature ourselves. We'd lose the Nigella-esque pinny, the Price-esque lash extensions; the Belle-esque pose of erotic empowerment would seem inhibiting. We'd recover our desire for the missionary position with the person lying next to us. In every sphere of existence we'd be free to choose normality.

Natasha Walter's Living Dolls is published by Virago (£12.99), Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion by Faber (£12.99) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique by Penguin (£12.99).

In honor of what is very likely their last few hours as Steelers (officially), a YouTube retrospective on Fast Willie Parker, Deshea Townsend and Ryan Clark.

Willie Paker: Below is a six-minute clip highlighting nearly every big run he had with the Steelers. The music is a bit melodramatic, but worth it for the payoff at the end. Despite a number of terrific seasons, Parker was never quite the answer the Steelers (and many fans) sought in the post-Bettis backfield.

That said, Willie Parker is one of my all-time favorite personal stories from the modern Steelers era. A guy that couldn't quite put it together in college and got a break because of the keen eye of Dan Rooney Jr., and went on to peel off the longest run froom scrimmage in Super Bowl history. Willie Parker is the true definition of the maxim that 'luck is the intersection of hard work and timing.'

Re-read a pair of excellent pieces about Parker's unlikely career ascent by Gerry Dulac and Gene Collier.

Deshea Townsend: If you've ever seen him in street clothes, you'd be puzzled as to how Townsend ever cracked a lineup - short, lean, no shoulders to speak of - but it's a testament to his speed, coverage skills, field smarts and versatility. He could play just about any spot in the Steelers backfield and was deadly in their nickel and dime packages, as evidenced below during his pick six against the Cowboys in 2008 -- a play that Ed Bouchette named to his Top 10 plays of the decade.

Here is the FOX broadcast of that play:

And this is an fun vid shot by a fan in the stands that captures Renegade on the scoreboard, and then Deshea's pick six:

Ryan Clark: Another undrafted free-agent who made it with the Redskins, he came in after Chris Hope left the Steelers following Super Bowl 40 and delivered consistently solid play, was rarely out of position and delivered some of the most brutal hits in recent Steelers history.

A devout Christian, he was a also a total ham who loved to interact with fans during training camp. Clark's hit on Willis McGahee in the 2008 AFC Championship game is tied for the most violent hit I've ever personally seen a Steeler lay in a game. Apparently, no less an authority than James Farrior agrees. Check it out:

Clark also laid out Wes Welker in memorable fashion earlier that same season. The play drew a penalty, and the Patriots and their fans whined like babies about, even though the NFL apologized to Clark and said no flag should've been thrown.

Share your thoughts and favorite moments of these three Super Bowl Steelers in the comments.

All throughout February, Arianna's been reading Jeremy Rifkin's "The Empathic Civilization"--the historical argument that empathy has helped us survive and thrive, and that we are evolving from Homo Sapiens to Homo Empathicus. Arianna, Jeremy Rifkin, and a host of other guest bloggers have been talking about the necessary shift to an "age of empathy" that Rifkin believes we are already moving towards. The blogs -- highlighted below -- have shown that we are wired for empathy from birth. We need to activate that wiring in order to save ourselves and the planet.

We're wrapping up our discussion of "The Empathic Civilization" today, March 4, with a live video interview with Jeremy Rifkin, conducted by HuffPost blogger Robbie Vorhaus. JOIN US HERE at 3pm EST to participate in the discussion!

Read an excerpt from "The Empathic Civilization," and check out some highlights from the blogs:

Arianna Huffington, Only Empathy Can Save Us

The Empathic Civilization is a fascinating book that boldly challenges the conventional view of human nature embedded in our educational systems, business practices, and political culture -- a view that sees human nature as detached, rational, and objective, and sees individuals as autonomous agents in pursuit primarily of material self-interest. And it seeks to replace that view with a counter-narrative that allows humanity to see itself as an extended family living in a shared and interconnected world.

Jeremy Rifkin, Economic Recovery Will Fail Without Our Trust

We can no longer afford to limit our notion of extended family to national boundaries, with Americans empathizing with fellow Americans, Chinese with Chinese, and the like. A truly global biosphere economy will require a global empathic embrace. We will need to think as a species − as homo empathicus − and prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilization embedded in a shared biosphere.

Jeremy Rifkin, Why Have We Become So Uncivil?

Reimagining freedom, equality, and democracy from an empathic perspective has far-ranging consequences for the kind of society that we choose to live in. We would need to rethink our parenting styles, educational systems, business practices and, even governance itself to reflect our empathic nature. This would constitute nothing less than a cultural revolution.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, The Young Pioneers of the Empathic Generation

Today's emerging adults see themselves as international citizens to an extent rarely experienced before. Coming of age in the era of the Internet, cheap travel, and surging study abroad programs, they're drawn to global music, sports, fashion, and service.

Jean M. Twenge, Narcissism or Empathy? The Me Generation or the We Generation?

Not that long ago, the goal of raising children was to socialize them -- to replace the natural narcissism of children with restraint and consideration for others. These days, we instead build further narcissism, an inflated sense of self characterized by overconfidence, entitlement, unbridled competitiveness, and lack of empathy.

Robbie Vorhaus, Can Limbaugh and Obama Both Be Right?

The universe is a great wonder to me. I am so grateful to be here, walking this earth among such a diverse group of people with so many fascinating stories and points of views, that I choose not to be right, but simply curious. One of my favorite sayings is, "You might be right."

Richard Restak, Our Brains Were Built for Feeling Each Other's Pain

In our culture we're taught to think of ourselves as independent and self-actualizing. In reality, our brain is uniquely constructed for experiencing other people's thoughts, emotions and actions as if they were our own.

Jeremy Rifkin, Where the Jobs Are

The irony is that President Obama, who was elected, in large part, by a generation who is growing up on Facebook and the vast distributed power of the Internet, appears to not understand the job potential of a distributed Third Industrial Revolution. Today, the information and communications technologies that gave rise to the Internet are being used to reconfigure the world's business models and power grids, enabling millions of people to collect renewable energy and produce their own electricity in their homes, offices, retail stores, factories, and technology parks and share it peer-to-peer across smart grids, just as they now produce and share their own information in cyberspace. This is a Third Industrial Revolution and will create millions of new jobs.

Mary Gordon, Building a New World, One Child At a Time

Our ecosystems are withering on the vine without empathic input from a globalized, interconnected, citizenry. We may be on the verge of the Age of Empathy, but we still have a long journey ahead. In fact, I would argue that we are in still in our infancy, and that we live in an emotionally illiterate North America.

Jeremy Rifkin, Is It Time to Replace the American Dream?

Although American history is peppered with lamentations about the souring of the dream, the criticism never extends to the assumptions that underlie the dream, but only to political, economic and social forces that thwart its realization. To suggest that the dream itself is misguided, outdated, and even damaging to the American psyche, would be considered almost treasonous. Yet, I would like to suggest just that.

Alison Gopnik, Amazing Empathic Babies

Even the youngest babies imitate the facial expressions of other people and take on their emotions -- a kind of empathy. This ability is NOT just the result of the much-hyped "mirror neurons" since, for one thing, mirror neurons have been found in monkeys who rarely imitate others. But it does show that human babies, in particular, are tuned in to other people in an especially close way.

Jeremy Rifkin, When Both Faith and Reason Fail: Stepping Up to the Age of Empathy

The empathic advocates argue that, for the most part, both earlier narratives about human nature fail to plumb the depths of what makes us human and therefore leave us with cosmologies that are incomplete stories--that is, they fail to touch the deepest realities of existence. That's not to dismiss the critical elements that make the stories of faith and reason so compelling. It's only that something essential is missing--and that something is "embodied experience."

More on Arianna's Reading

Oscar hopeful Mo'Nique has her own ideas on how to handle the awards season – and good luck to her

In the months leading up to the Oscars, the awards season can take on a misty predictability. Identikit young women stalk the red carpets, "thrilled just to be nominated", in expensive designer frocks, perfect hair and makeup, the list of agents and lawyers they need to thank whirring around their skulls. The scene is a blur of silk, sequins and supplication: long on frills, short on thrills.

So it's exhilarating when someone approaches this on their own terms. Step forward, Mo'Nique. Widely expected to win the best supporting actress Oscar this Sunday for her role in Precious, she is a woman who clearly knows her own mind. The first clue is her performance itself. As Mary, mother of Claireece "Precious" Jones, she plays a character who is, in many ways, monstrous – flinging small babies from her arms, throwing a television at her child – and manages to make her, if not sympathetic, then recognisably human. The portrait is entirely without vanity, entirely convincing.

Mo'Nique has naturally expected the performance to be judged on its virtues. Therefore, rather than plunging headfirst into what has been described by New York magazine as a "bi-coastal nightmare carnival of awards and lunches, brunches and teas, screenings, Q&As; and tributes" – your average campaign for an Oscar – she has been doing what she can to support the film, while getting on with a busy life in Atlanta that includes a daily talkshow, a 19-year-old son and four-year-old twins. As a result, she has attended far fewer red-carpet events than many of her fellow nominees.

"President Barack Obama had to campaign because he had something to prove: that he could do it," she has said. "Well, the performance is on the screen. So at what point am I still trying to prove something?"

For this, she has been criticised by some bloggers, accused of not bending the knee to the requisite level. It's an ugly reminder that women – and especially black women – are expected to be submissive and supremely grateful for even the most deserved rewards.

At the events Mo'Nique has attended she has looked gorgeous, while occasionally revealing unshaved legs (causing almost as much consternation in some quarters as that flash of Julia Roberts's armpit hair a few years back). In short, she has redrawn the rules of the game, and made this Oscar season a whole lot more compelling. Here's to her raising that statuette on Sunday.

Lyuba, the baby wooly mammoth that goes on display this week at the Field Museum, was preserved almost perfectly intact right down to her baby fat for 42,000 years in frigid Siberian river muck.

Now released from her icy grave, she is being preserved in much the same manner as another famous Russian relic, the body of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. It is a process called desiccation, removing all moisture from the body tissues.

Only Lyuba's hair and toenails were missing when Siberian reindeer herders found her carcass in May, 2007, washed out from the frozen permafrost along Yuribey River in Siberia. Since then, her body, tiny tusks, internal organs and even the content of her stomach have been a wellspring of new scientific insight into mammoths and life in the ice ages.

The museum has designed a vast temporary exhibit called "Mammoths and Mastadons: Titans of the Ice Age," which uses Lyuba as the centerpiece. She was featured last year by the National Geographic Society on television and in its magazine.

A healthy infant that appears to have died in an accident, she is being leased by Russia to the museum for the exhibit, which begins Friday and runs through September 6.

"There is no question at this point it is the best preserved, most complete wooly mammoth specimen ever found," said Daniel Fisher, an internationally renowned mastadon and mammoth expert at the University of Michigan and one of the first scientists to examine Lyuba. He is the curator of the exhibit, which is scheduled to tour ten other cities around the world after leaving Chicago.

From her tiny tusks and teeth, Fisher concluded Lyuba was only one month old when she apparently fell into a quicksand-like riverbank and suffocated as she sucked mud into her mouth and trunk, frantically trying to free herself.

Soon covered completely, she was mummified from the cold, lack of oxygen and a bacteria that colonized her flesh, making it slightly acidic. The bacteria, Fisher said, could have acted as a preservative and given her flesh a foul odor and taste that discouraged wild animals from eating the remains when her carcass popped out of the permafrost and began thawing.

The bones of other animals from the same period show up with some frequency, but Fisher said "we never or almost never get soft tissues" - skin and internal organs. "What we see in Lyuba is barely different in chemistry from tissue in a living animal," he added.

Even her intestinal contents were preserved, helping confirm the diets of ice age mammoths. In Lyuba's case, they also found traces of adult feces, indicating that mammoth babies, like modern elephants, ate their mother's execrement as a source of bacteria they need for proper digestion.

Teams of Russian and international scientists have looked at Lyuba through CT scans and X-rays and have taken portions of her skin, bone, teeth and vital organs for study. Because she quickly captured the hearts of Russians, keeping Lyuba for posterity became a priority for Russian authorities.

Falling back on preservation methods they feel comfortable with, Fisher said, the Russians chose to use a method he believes is "similar" to what has been used to preserve Lenin's body since his death in 1924. His body lies in its own tomb in Moscow's Red Square.

"She was submerged in ethanol and an anti-fungal agent, methylparaben," said Tom Skwerski, a Field exhibit project manager. "Ethanol permeates all tissues and dries faster than water. Then she was submerged in a solution of formalin, a formeldahyde-based product, and ethanol, and dried through evaporation until all moisture content in her tissue is gone and she is mummified.

"She no longer has to be kept frozen, which can also damage her tissue, but is kept in a climate-controlled case kept at 70 degrees and 50 percent relative humidity."

In the exhibit, she is surrounded by displays of fossil skeletons and life-like mockups of mammoths, mastadons and other giant land animals that went extinct with them. The exhibit examines life in the Ice Age and looks at theories behind the extinctions, including the rising numbers of humans and their improving hunting skills and technology 10,000 years ago.

Tickets for the exhibit, which include regular admission to the museum, will be $23 for adults, $20 for seniors and students and $13 for children 3 through 11 years old.

--William Mullen

Was Carly Simon singing “You‘re So Vain” about David Geffen? [LimeLife] Bret Michaels wants Miley Cyrus to “get undressed”. In a song. [Lightly Salted] Sting isn‘t apologizing for performing for a tyrant. [Agent Bedhead] My mom loves Tiffani Thiessen. [Celebrity Baby Scoop] Beyonce still doesn‘t want to have babies. [Bossip] Ewan McGregor interviewed for ‘The Ghost Writer’. [Moviefone] Much like [...]

The agent of John Mensah says the Lyon defender wants a permanent deal at Sunderland.

The Ghana defender's agent, Fabien Piveteau, has revealed that Mensah has his heart set on staying at the Stadium of Light beyond the expiry of his season-long loan from Lyon.

Piveteau told the Sunderland Echo: "John definitely wants to stay. He wants to be at Sunderland very much.

"He likes the club, he loves the atmosphere of the crowd and the supporters and he sees Sunderland as his future if they want him to stay.

"It is a loan deal but he has always wanted to stay.

"There have been no discussions yet between the manager and John but they have to take up an option before May 30 if they want to keep him, so we will see what happens."

I have had a week mostly concerned with pain and panic. The first because I have had both toothache and backache the second because I have just realised - as I do at the end of February every single year - that spring is really very close and I need to do a whole load of stuff before it properly appears on the brow of the hill and rides down upon us like the Assyrians (i). One of those things is the Malvern Spring Show which, I notice from the cunning counter-downer on the Malvern Meet blog is only 70 days away. Here is the Three Men Went To Mow trailer in case you have missed it elsewhere.










But, by way of not dealing with anything on my list of Must Do Stuff, I thought I might wander off onto a slight limb.
An issue that has been troubling me for a while (not losing- sleep-and-tugging-out-my-hair trouble, more driving-along-and-letting-the-mind-wander trouble) concerns the future of newspapers and magazines - in particular Garden magazines. It is not really my problem except in that I like writing for them but I am aware that circulation is dipping and the publishers are getting into a bit of a tizzy about the internet and people getting their information for free rather than shelling out for subscriptions etc.
I suggested at a VISTA debate last year (and may have mentioned at the Garden Media Guild Awards) that in time the internet will kill paper: people don’t really like that idea very much as we have been brought up to have enormous respect for books. I remember being given a hard time for leaving books lying open and face down, turning down the corners of a page instead of using a bookmark or worst of all scribbling in books. It is a throwback from times when books were precious and unique: if you think about it logically the real value is in the words rather than the paper and they will survive in whatever format. This idea is carried through - although obviously to a lesser extent - into glossy magazines: I have piles of Gardens Illustrated, National Geographics and The Garden lying around. I know that I will never read them again and that if I am looking for a particular reference then it is quicker, easier and more up to date to find the information on the internet. But still I am reluctant to tip all that knowledge in the skip.
The inconvenience of magazines is also important: sometimes difficult to find in newsagents, heavy (and therefore not very right-on) to transport and expensive to post. So it seems inevitable that many will fold through lack of interest from subscribers and advertisers. To my generation reading something on a screen rather than a printed page seems unnatural but we will get used to it - think how much technology we have absorbed over the past twenty years - and our children and our children’s children will consider it perfectly normal. To them printed paper will seem as outdated as woolen swimsuits and horse drawn Broughams.
But there is another solution. Electronic readers (like the soon to arrive iPad) can save magazines and make them considerably more profitable but only if the publishers get their acts together. Just think of a magazine delivered automatically as easily as an email to your reader. When it arrives it will have many other features that you cannot find in magazines. Photographs, for example, a photographer will take a hundred pictures of a garden, the magazine can only find room for ten. The other ninety are not necessarily bad pictures just more than required: in an electronic magazine there is space for them all. The sources quoted in an article about, say, Irises can be accessed just by clicking on an active link within the text. If you want to read previous articles written by whichever journalist it is then another link will take you there. It can include videos, podcasts, interviews and, of course, lots of advertising. There is a very illuminating mock-up of an electronic Sports Illustrated that has been knocking around YouTube for a while. The film is here: think about the same format with gardens instead of overpaid American Footballers.and you will see the exciting possibilities.
Then you realise that, in this format, you can get a copy of any magazine from anywhere in the world just as easily. People in Rangoon or Rajasthan will be able to buy copies of The English Garden or New Scientist as easily as people in Reigate or Redcar. Likewise gardeners in Grange-over-Sands and Grimsby will be able to read Horticulture Magazine or Garden and Gun Magazine . The list of potential readers suddenly expands to encompass millions upon millions of gardeners all over the world. And it will be cheaper because it doesn’t need printers or paper or transport or retailers or postage.
The downside of this revolution is that all those people involved in printing, transport etc etc will be without employment. Technology has always had that effect and the process of retraining will be as painful now as it ever has been but once the genie is out of the bottle you cannot stuff it back inside. Ask the
However it happen,s I feel that the period of supremacy enjoyed by Caxton and his descendants since the 15th Century is drawing to an end. There will be no sudden ending - I for one will continue buying and keeping books. I will also try to write another one before they become completely extinct. But in the end the only real advantage of magazines on paper over electronic versions is that you can read them in the bath but, as sure as eggs is eggs, technology as yet unborn will make short work of that objection.
Amongst other news this week is this interestingly irrelevant comment that I discovered on the excellent Encounters With Remarkable Biscuits (Mark Diacono & James A-S, proprietors).
Hey there,I am an active churchgoer and I have several unforgettable worship experiences.These experiences were enriched in some ways by the use of church supplies. Recently, I started a site dedicated to Communion Chalice and other communion supplies.Peace,Isaac
Religion and spam all in one neat package: respect is due.
I am listening to House of the Rising Sun by The Animals. The picture is of Abies Koreana.
Last year I was writing about paint colours as the last of the snow melted.

(i) It is not often that this blog gives its readers a bit of culture so I have decided to copy Byron’s Destruction of Sennacherib in full in order to further your education. It is a poem that has stuck in my mind over the decades: quite why I do not know when so many others have fallen by the wayside. The word ‘strown’ is a bit iffy but the poem made a great impression on me as a ten year old.
I can also recite Albert and The Lion by Marriott Edgar.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Ce sont les services secrets qui sont derrière Al Qaïda, c'est une certitude... Lire l'article de Taïké Eilée Selon Alain Chouet, ancien chef du service de sécurité de la Direction Générale de la Sécurité extérieure, Al Qaïda n’existe plus depuis 2002. Ce qui n’empêche pas le renseignement américain de placer l’organisation de Ben Laden en tête des menaces auxquelles doit faire face l’Amérique, et d’annoncer même avec "certitude" une prochaine attaque sur le sol américain dans les six mois à venir. Le choc de deux points de vue. Alain Chouet, chef du Service de renseignement de sécurité à la DGSE de 2000 à 2002, intervenait le 29 janvier 2010 au Sénat, dans le cadre d’un colloque sur "le Moyen-Orient à l’heure du nucléaire". Il était invité, en compagnie de Jean-Pierre Filiu et François Heisbourg, à répondre à la question "Où en est Al Qaïda ?". Ses propos viennent mettre en pièces bon nombre d’idées reçues : "Comme bon nombre de mes collègues professionnels à travers le monde, j’estime, sur la base d’informations sérieuses, d’informations recoupées, que laQaïda est morte sur le plan opérationnel dans les trous à rats de Tora Bora en 2002. Les services secrets pakistanais ensuite se sont contentés, de 2003 à 2008, à nous en revendre les restes par appartements, contre quelques générosités et quelques indulgences diverses. Sur les quelque 400 membres actifs de l’organisation qui existait en 2001 (...), il en reste moins d’une cinquantaine, essentiellement des seconds couteaux, à l’exception de Ben Laden lui-même et de Ayman al-Zawahiri, mais qui n’ont aucune aptitude sur le plan opérationnel. Donc moins d’une cinquantaine ont pu s’échapper dans des zones reculées, dans des conditions de vie précaires, et avec des moyens de communication rustiques ou incertains. Ce n’est pas avec un tel dispositif qu’on peut animer à l’échelle planétaire un réseau coordonné de violence politique. D’ailleurs il apparaît clairement qu’aucun des terroristes post 11/9, qui ont agi à Londres, Madrid, Casablanca, Djerba, Charm-el-Cheikh, Bali, Bombay, etc., ou ailleurs, n’a eu de contact avec l’organisation. Et quant aux revendications plus ou moins décalées qui sont formulées de temps en temps par Ben Laden ou Ayman al-Zawahiri, à supposer d’ailleurs qu’on puisse réellement les authentifier, elles n’impliquent aucune liaison opérationnelle, organisationnelle, fonctionnelle entre ces terroristes et les vestiges de l’organisation." Plus aucune action terroriste dans le monde ne serait donc imputable à Al Qaïda depuis huit ans ; l’organisation ne compterait plus que quelques dizaines d’individus ; et les revendications de Ben Laden au fil des ans ne seraient même pas sûres. Le journal suisse Le Matin s’est justement ému de ce dernier point, le 25 janvier 2010, dans un article intitulé "Messages de Ben Laden : de l’info très intoxiquée" : "Depuis les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, une soixantaine de messages sont attribués à Oussama ben Laden et sa nébuleuse. Il peut y avoir des années sans aucun signe de vie (2005) et d’autres plus prolixes : sept en 2009, quatre en 2008, cinq en 2007 ou quatre en 2006. Pour la CIA, l’authenticité du premier message audio, justement publié par Al-Jazira le 12 novembre 2002, ne fait aucun doute. Une théorie mise à mal, deux semaines plus tard par les chercheurs de l’Idiap (Institut Dalle Molle d’intelligence artificielle perspective) de Martigny (VS). Avec les conditionnels de rigueur propres aux scientifiques, le message serait celui d’un imposteur. Leurs logiciels démasquent les imitateurs, tout aussi doués soient-ils. « Ils peuvent assez facilement berner l’être humain, mais c’est beaucoup plus difficile de tromper la machine », soulignait, en 2002, le Dr Samy Bengio." Quant à la quasi disparition d’Al Qaïda, Eric Denécé l’avait déjà soutenue sur AgoraVox il y a un an ; interviewé en janvier 2009, l’ancien officier de renseignement, aujourd’hui directeur du Centre Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement, m’avait indiqué : "Al-Qaïda a été quasiment réduite à néant. Il reste quelques centaines d’hommes. Quant à la structure centrale, qui est apparue à partir de 1989, elle a quasiment disparu. Hormis Ben Laden et Al-Zawahiri, tous les grands leaders ont été arrêtés". Menace numéro 1 Aux Etats-Unis, en revanche, Al Qaïda n’a pas disparu. C’est à peine quelques jours après la mise au point d’Alain Chouet que Hillary Clinton déclarait qu’Al Qaïda demeurait la "menace principale" pour les Etats-Unis, devant l’Iran. La secrétaire d’Etat américaine ne faisait que reprendre l’analyse faite le 2 février, devant la Commission du renseignement du Sénat, par l’ensemble des représentants du renseignement américain. Dans la liste des menaces qu’ils ont alors dressée, Al Qaïda devance les programmes nucléaires iranien et nord-coréen, les cartels criminels, et l’éventualité d’une faillite économique dans les pays développés durement touchés par la récession. Le Directeur du Renseignement national, Dennis Blair, interrogé par la présidente de la Commission sur la probabilité d’une tentative d’attaque terroriste aux Etats-Unis dans les six mois à venir, a répondu qu’elle était "certaine". Les quatre autres officiels interrogés de la même manière - Robert Mueller III, directeur du FBI, Leon Panetta, directeur de la CIA, et les officiers supérieurs du renseignement des Départements d’Etat et de la Défense - ont tous produit la même réponse (Washington Post du 3 février 2010, ou vidéo de l’audition). L’attaque pourrait survenir dans un délai de trois à six mois. Un nouveau 11-Septembre improbable Mais de quelle ampleur sera l’attaque ? Sur ce point, les avis divergent. "Al Qaïda maintient son intention d’attaquer le pays - de préférence avec une opération de grande envergure qui causerait de nombreuses victimes, nuirait à l’économie américaine, ou les deux", a déclaré Dennis Blair. De son côté, Leon Panetta a considéré que l’attaque à venir d’Al Qaïda ne s’apparenterait probablement pas à "un nouveau 11-Septembre", mais serait bien plutôt une opération du style "lone wolf" (loup solitaire), nécessitant peu de moyens. A l’image de la tentative d’attentat du jeune Nigérian Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, qui a voulu faire exploser un avion de ligne reliant Amsterdam et Detroit le 25 décembre dernier. Des agents "propres", ayant peu de contact avec le réseau terroriste, et de ce fait difficiles à pister, auraient déjà été envoyés sur le sol américain, selon le patron de la CIA, pour y porter des attaques de faible envergure. Al Qaïda tenterait aussi d’influencer des extrémistes isolés, natifs des Etats-Unis, pour les pousser à l’action. Le vice-président Joe Biden a confirmé, jeudi 11 février, face à Larry King, l’appréciation de Panetta : une attaque majeure lui paraît improbable. Le MI-5 britannique vient de fournir une indication sur le possible mode opératoire des futures attaques d’Al Qaïda ; l’organisation terroriste s’apprêterait à utiliser une arme révolutionnaire : des implants mammaires ! "Après les ceintures, vestes, slips, voire suppositoires piégés, les kamikazes d’Al-Qaida pourraient utiliser des implants mammaires truffés d’explosifs, s’inquiète le contre-espionnage britannique" (vidéo ici). Six mois pour stopper Ben Laden Selon Dennis Blair, Al Qaïda aura l’intention d’attaquer les Etats-Unis tant qu’Oussama Ben Laden et son lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri n’auront pas été "tués ou capturés". Il s’agit là, notons-le, d’un revirement complet dans l’analyse des risques. Souvenons-nous en effet de la déclaration, le 9 janvier 2005, d’AB "Buzzy" Krongard, ancien directeur exécutif et numéro 3 de la CIA (2001-2004) dans le London Times ; selon lui, il était préférable que Ben Laden demeure vivant et libre : "Car si quelque chose arrive à Ben Laden, vous pourriez trouver beaucoup de gens rivalisant pour sa position et voulant démontrer à quel point ils sont virils en déclenchant une vague de terreur." Le London Times notait d’ailleurs : "Plusieurs officiels américains ont reconnu en privé qu’il serait mieux de garder Ben Laden cloué à la frontière de l’Afghanistan et du Pakistan plutôt que d’en faire un martyr ou de le traduire en justice.Mais Krongard est la figure la plus haut placée qui reconnaît publiquement que sa capture pourrait s’avérer contre-productive." Dans ce même article de 2005, Krongard déplorait l’existence de "centaines et centaines de cellules" d’Al Qaïda... à une époque donc où, selon l’ancien chef du service de renseignement de sécurité de la DGSE, Al Qaïda était déjà "morte sur le plan opérationnel". Déconstruction d’un mythe Le Français est peut-être plus rigoureux, qui ne travestit pas le nom d’Al Qaïda, pour lui faire désigner des réalités qu’il ne recouvre pas. Revenons, en effet, à l’analyse d’Alain Chouet(que je retranscris ici largement, pour ceux qui préfèrent la lire, plutôt que l’écouter). Elle nous permet de comprendre les dérives auxquelles mène un mauvais usage du terme Al Qaïda, décliné à toutes les sauces. Les médias sont d’ailleurs pointés par l’ancien de la DGSE pour leur colossale responsabilité : "A force de l’invoquer à tout propos, et souvent hors de propos, dès qu’un acte de violence est commis par un musulman, ou quand un musulman se trouve au mauvais endroit et au mauvais moment, comme dans l’histoire de l’usine AZF à Toulouse, ou même quand il n’y a pas de musulmans du tout, comme les attaques à l’anthrax aux Etats-Unis, à force de l’invoquer en permanence, un certain nombre de médias réducteurs et quelques soi-disant experts de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique ont fini, non pas par la ressuciter, mais par la transformer en une espèce d’Amédée d’Eugène Ionesco, ce mort dont le cadavre ne cesse de grandir et d’occulter la réalité et dont on ne sait pas comment se débarrasser. L’obstination incantatoire des Occidentaux à invoquer l’organisation mythique qu’on a qualifié d’hyper-terroriste, non pas par ce qu’elle a fait, mais parce qu’elle s’est attaquée à l’hyper-puissance, cette obstination incantatoire a eu très rapidement deux effets tout à fait pervers. Le premier effet : tout contestataire violent dans le monde musulman, qu’il soit politique ou de droit commun, quelles que soient ses motivations, a vite compris qu’il devait se réclamer de la Qaïda, s’il voulait être pris au sérieux, s’il voulait entourer son action d’une légitimité reconnue par les autres, et s’il voulait donner à son action un retentissement international. Parallèlement à ça, tous les régimes du monde musulman, et ils ne sont pas tous vertueux, nous le savons, ont bien compris qu’ils avaient tout intérêt à faire passer leurs opposants et leurs contestataires, quels qu’ils soient, pour des membres de l’organisation de Ben Laden, s’ils voulaient pouvoir les réprimer tranquillement, et même, si possible, avec l’assistance des Occidentaux. D’où une prolifération de Qaïda plus ou moins désignées ou auto-proclamées au Pakistan, en Irak, au Yémen, en Somalie, au Maghreb, ailleurs, Al Qaïda dans la péninsule arabique, etc. Principal résultat de cette dialectique imbécile, ça a évidemment été de renforcer le mythe d’une Qaïda omniprésente, tapie derrière chaque musulman, prête à l’instrumentaliser pour frapper l’Occident en général, les Etats-Unis bien sûr en particulier, au nom d’on ne sait pas trop quelle perversité." Bourgeois frustrés Derrière le mythe d’une Qaïda unifiée, qui fait office de "croque-mitaine", il y a la violence réelle, qui répond à des problématiques hétéroclites selon les zones où elle se déroule, et dont les motifs ne sont pas tant religieux que politiques : "Si la Qaïda n’existe pas, la violence politique islamiste existe, elle, bel et bien. Et l’Occident n’en est qu’une victime indirecte et collatérale. Les idéologues de la violence islamique ne sont pas des fous de Dieu, ce sont des gens qui ont des objectifs précis. Et leur objectif n’est pas d’islamiser le monde, c’est de prendre le pouvoir et les richesses qui y sont liées dans le monde musulman, sans que l’Occident intervienne." Pour illustrer son propos, Alain Chouet braque son projecteur sur l’Arabie Saoudite, qu’il considère comme "l’épicentre de cette violence islamiste". Selon lui, elle "se trouve dans une situation un peu comparable à celle de la France du premier semestre 1789", avec sa bourgeoisie entrepreneuriale qui aspire au pouvoir, mais se trouve bloquée par une famille royale se réclamant d’un adoubement divin, et bénéficiant de la protection des Etats-Unis, en échange du monopole sur l’exploitation des hydrocarbures. Dans cette théocratie où le pluralisme est interdit, et où l’islam le plus fondamentaliste est imposé, les contestataires n’ont d’autre recours qu’un mélange de violence révolutionnaire et de surenchère fondamentaliste, exercé à l’encontre du pouvoir et de ses protecteurs extérieurs, sans lesquels celui-ci s’effondre. Ainsi retrouve-t-on parmi les activistes islamistes les plus violents un nombre significatifs d’enfants de cette bourgeoisie, privés de tout droit politique, mais pas de moyens financiers, ni même d’idées. Oussama Ben Laden fut l’un d’eux. Abattre un moustique à la mitrailleuse "On pourra toujours m’objecter, note Chouet, que puisque la violence jihadiste existe bien et qu’elle se développe à peu près partout suivant les mêmes schémas, peu importe qu’on l’appelle ou non Al Qaïda, qui serait alors l’appellation générique d’une certaine forme de violence intégriste mondialisée." Les Américains ne commettraient qu’une imprécision de langage sans conséquence en parlant à tout bout de champ d’Al Qaïda ? "Le problème, poursuit Chouet, c’est qu’une telle confusion sémantique est à l’origine de toutes les mauvaises réponses et exclut de facto toute solution adaptée au problème." Citons longuement l’analyse de l’ancien membre de la DGSE, qui se suffit à elle-même : "Il existe en effet deux façons de passer à la violence terroriste politique : ou bien on constitue un groupe politico-militaire organisé, hiérarchisé, avec un chef, une mission, des moyens, une tactique coordonnée, un agenda précis, des objectifs définis, ça revient à constituer une armée, avec des professionnels de la violence, et à s’engager dans un processus d’affrontement de type militaire. (...) Ou bien on a recours à la technique dite du "lone wolf", du loup solitaire, qui consiste, en gardant un pied dans la légalité, et en en posant un autre dans la transgression, à jouer idéologiquement sur une population sensible, pour inciter les éléments les plus fragiles, les plus motivés, à passer à l’acte de façon individuelle ou groupusculaire, en frappant où ils peuvent, quand ils peuvent, comme ils peuvent, peu importe, pourvu que l’acte porte la signature de la mouvance et s’inscrive dans sa stratégie générale. (...) C’est à l’évidence suivant le second modèle que fonctionne la violence jihadiste exercée en direction de l’Occident et d’un certain nombre de régimes arabes. Et tous les services de sécurité et de renseignement savent pertinemment qu’on ne s’oppose pas à la technique du "lone wolf" par des moyens militaires, des divisions blindées ou par une inflation de mesures sécuritaires indifférenciées. On s’y oppose par des ciblées, appuyées sur des initiatives politiques, sociales, économiques, éducatives et culturelles, qui visent à assécher le vivier des volontaires potentiels, en les coupant de leurs sponsors idéologiques et financiers. Non seulement rien de sérieux n’a été entrepris pour tenter d’enrayer le substrat financier, et encore moins le substrat idéologique de la violence djihadiste, mais en désignant la Qaïda comme l’ennemi permanent, contre lequel il faut mener une croisade par des voies militaires et sécuritaires totalement inadaptées à sa forme réelle, on a pris une mitrailleuse pour tuer un moustique. Alors évidemment on a raté le moustique, mais les dégâts collatéraux sont patents, comme on peut le constater au quotidien en Irak, en Afghanistan, en Somalie, au Yémen. Et le premier effet de cette croisade ratée, ça a été d’alimenter le vivier des volontaires, de légitimer cette forme de violence, d’en faire le seul référentiel d’affirmation possible, dans un monde musulman dont l’imaginaire collectif est traumatisé maintenant par une loi universelle des suspects qui pèse sur lui, par des interventions et des occupations militaires massives, interminables et aveugles. Depuis neuf ans, l’Occident frappe sans grand discernement, en Irak, en Afghanistan, dans les zones tribales du Pakistan, en Somalie... en Palestine bien sûr, on se propose maintenant d’intervenir au Yémen, et pourquoi pas, pendant qu’on y est, en Iran. Mais aux yeux des musulmans, Ben Laden court toujours, au nez et à la barbe de la plus puissante armée du monde, et le régime islamiste d’Arabie Saoudite reste sous la protection absolue de l’Amérique. Alors pour conclure : où en est Al Qaïda ? La Qaïda, elle est morte entre 2002 et 2004. Mais avant de mourir, elle a été engrossée par les erreurs stratégiques de l’Occident et les calculs peu avisés d’un certain nombre de régimes de pays musulmans. Et elle a fait des petits." Reste à savoir, pour Alain Chouet, si nous ferons avec ces rejetons les mêmes erreurs, en alimentant un cycle indéfini de violence, ou si nous saurons enfin, avec nos partenaires arabes et musulmans, l’enrayer. Reste aussi à savoir s’il sera possible de vaincre les intérêts puissants et multiples à voir perdurer le mythe de la Qaïda, exploité avantageusement depuis 2001 tant par l’administration américaine que par nombre de régimes musulmans et d’activistes révolutionnaires. Sources AGORA VOX http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/international/article/al-qaida-n-existe-plus-selon-la-69791

Home Office study says lads' magazines such as Zoo and Nuts should be made top shelf and have age restrictions on sale

Lads' magazines such as Zoo and Nuts should be made top shelf titles with age restrictions on their sale, a report commissioned by the Home Office is to recommend tomorrow.

The 130-page study argues that such magazines, which offer soft porn at pocket-money prices, are part of a "drip, drip" media landscape that is sexualising boys and girls at an increasingly early age. The report points to computer games, easily accessible pornography and the use of sexual slogans in advertising and branding as making up prevalent sexual images that are influencing the behaviour of children.

Its author, Dr Linda Papadopoulos, a clinical psychologist at London Metropolitan University, said: "It is a drip, drip effect. Look at porn stars, and look how an average girl now looks. It's seeped into every day: fake breasts, fuck-me shoes ... We are hypersexualising girls, telling them that their desirability relies on being desired. They want to please at any cost."

Speaking to an Institute of Education seminar previewing her findings, she added: "And we are masculinising boys – many feel they can't live up to the porn ideal, sleeping with lots of women."

The report was commissioned last year by the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith, as part of a Home Office strategy tackling violence against women and girls.

The Home Office has already launched an advertising campaign to challenge teenagers' attitudes towards violence and emotional abuse in relationships.

The decision to endorse age restrictions on lads' mags is one of 36 recommendations. The report says such magazines are being sold to children at a much younger age than is appropriate.

Papadopoulos wants ministers to look at whether a system of 16 and 18 certificates, similar to DVD classification, should be brought in. Female Labour MPs have long voiced concerns that such magazines are often sold at the eye level of eight- to 15-year-olds and are put next to children's comics in newsagents.

In the past, the editors of Zoo and Nuts have argued that they should be treated as "cheeky seaside postcards" and are no more explicit than the Sun and the Daily Sport, so any restrictions should apply to those papers as well.

The report is also expected to endorse a call from the Royal College of Psychiatrists for advertisements and magazine spreads to carry a warning kitemark when digitally enhanced models appear.

It will also deliver an alarming analysis that the boundaries have been pushed back so far in advertising, marketing and magazines that key elements of pornography are now regarded as mainstream.

Young girls wear "porn star" T-shirts and it is possible to buy babies' bibs with the slogan: "All daddy wanted was a blowjob", according to Papadopoulos.

"Taboos have been pushed back so far. They are taking their script directly from pornography."

David Cameron outlined his own proposals to end the sexualisation of children last week, when he called for a website to be set up to enable parents to complain about offensive marketing tactics.

Some 6,500 writers, from Thomas Pynchon to Jeffrey Archer, have opted out of Google's controversial plan to digitise millions of books

Former children's laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling authors Jeffrey Archer and Louis de Bernières and critical favourites Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson have all opted out of the controversial Google book settlement, court documents have revealed.

Authors who did not wish their books to be part of Google's revised settlement needed to opt out before 28 January, in advance of last week's ruling from Judge Denny Chin over whether to allow Google to go ahead with its divisive plans to digitise millions of books. The judge ended up delaying his ruling, after receiving more than 500 written submissions, but court documents related to the case show that more than 6,500 authors, publishers and literary agents have opted out of the settlement.

As well as the authors named above, these include the estates of Rudyard Kipling, TH White, James Herriot, Nevil Shute and Roald Dahl, Man Booker prizewinners Graham Swift and Keri Hulme, poets Pam Ayres, Christopher Middleton, Gillian Spraggs and Nick Laird, novelists Bret Easton Ellis, James Frey, Monica Ali, Michael Chabon, Philip Hensher and Patrick Gale, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, biographer Victoria Glendinning and bestselling author of the Northern Lights trilogy Philip Pullman.

Ursula K Le Guin, who gained significant author support for her petition calling for "the principle of copyright, which is directly threatened by the settlement, [to] be honoured and upheld in the United States", also opted out.

"My feelings were, in the end, that I doubted I would lose out by opting out, whereas I might do by opting in. Also there was the principle that copyright is important," said novelist Marika Cobbold, author of books including Guppies for Tea and Shooting Butterflies, who opted out. "It would be like handing over my babies to a babysitter I'd never met, [and] I couldn't understand what was in it for me. I love Google, and in principle making information accessible is wonderful, but things are moving so fast, and authors are losing so much control over what we've done, that my fear was who knows, in five to 10 years' time, how this information could be used?"

Gillian Spraggs has also set up a new group that will campaign in support of authors' rights. For "UK authors and agents who are deeply concerned about the Google book settlement, the Digital Economy Bill, and other current threats to the fundamental principles of copyright", its manifesto states that "authors have the right to have their intellectual property protected by the state [and] decide whether and where they are going to publish, and in what format(s)".

"The [Google books settlement] is in some trouble in the States. Following serious criticisms from the US Department of Justice, there are big questions over whether the court will approve it, and if it does, in what form," writes Spraggs. "But if authors in Britain don't make their voices heard now, they may find that a similar scheme (or a worse one) has been imposed over here by government decree." Her group, Action on Authors' Rights, "aims to bring home to the UK government and opposition the well-founded concerns of UK authors about the Google book settlement and the Digital Economy Bill, and to have an input into the debate on digitisation and copyright in Europe", she said.

Pastor Sam, the director of Immanuel Child Development Center in India, shares his feelings of gratefulness to sponsors – gratefulness for the vital role they play in the holistic development of children in poverty.

Here are his thoughts about a sponsor’s involvement in a child’s life.

Parental love is the first love a child receives. However, there are many children who are born orphans and many children whose parents desert them when they are still children.

Also, in many homes, parents end up fighting with each other and this leaves an impact on these little minds. The lives of the children become miserable when they don’t receive or experience love.

You play a major role in the development of children. You are instruments in the hands of God to demonstrate His care to children who don’t know what love is all about. When children receive no love at home, it’s common for them to seek from you the love they miss from their parents.

You help care for the all aspects of the welfare of the children — spiritual, educational, social, physical and financial. You help release children from poverty by giving them education and securing their life by helping bring them into local churches, thus raising them as good and responsible citizens of the society.

Not only that, your unceasing prayers for your sponsored children go a long way in granting the children a bright and prosperous future.

In developing countries like India, the role you play is extremely important. You are a great blessing to churches all over. Through you, churches grow. The church is able to go into places where once we were not able to. The church is able to influence the society.

The majority of churches in India are not in a position to raise funds. Most businesspeople and industrialists are not Christians. We rarely find them with a vision to help children. Hence, we depend on our brethren like you.

Even today, the Lord cries out with the same words that Isaiah heard, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

You are the ones who have responded to this call with the words “Here am I.” You are the ones who have responded to God’s commission.

And sponsored children do have expectations of you because of this. Though the children definitely feel highly obliged to you for the financial help and gifts, they also expect something more.

The children love to read the letters you send. The letters are a source of inspiration, love and encouragement for them. The letters gives them a deep sense of joy to know that somebody, in some corner of the world, remembers them and cares for them.

Through your letters, children understand your emotions and ambitions. You guide and counsel your sponsored children through the letters.

Every child longs to see his or her sponsor, at least once in lifetime, to see the face of the person who resides in some distant part of the world, and who loves, without being seen, and cares, sometimes more than the parents.

You also desire to see your sponsored children, and many times you never get this opportunity. However, even if you are not able to see the child in this world, you should be able to see the child in heaven. This should be the burning desire in your heart.

In order that this becomes a reality, you must regularly pray for your sponsored children and their spiritual growth. In this way, you are able to influence not only the life of the child alone, but also the entire family and society. The sponsored child becomes a powerful agent in days to come, influencing the society and nation. The child begins to be an advocate for other children in the society.

Sponsoring children in need enables one to discover the joy that comes from blessing someone else’s life! We may not be able to transform the entire world, but we can surely make a notable difference in the life of our sponsored children! It would give us a sense of fulfillment, of satisfaction to restore the true joy of childhood to the children.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Originally published in MedPage Today

by Crystal Phend

“I do not want my life to be prolonged if, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, my situation is hopeless.”

“I want my life to be prolonged as long as possible within the limits of generally accepted medical standards, even if this means that I might be kept alive on machines for years.”

Check one. That’s one of the places where I’m stalled on making my advance medical directive.

It’s not that I’m in a hurry to die. All the talk and fear engendered by the so-called “death panels” during debate over healthcare reform last year didn’t scare me.

As someone who travels frequently for work and lives a distance from my relatives, it’s important to me to make sure strangers aren’t making one of the biggest decisions of my life — under what circumstances I would want to live when all hope seems lost. I already carry a simpler copy in my wallet in case of an emergency to make sure my wishes are known.

After being in Orlando for the American Heart Association meeting in November when it was announced that a leading cardiologist had been killed while jogging outside his hotel and remained a John Doe for some time, I always carry a form of identification and my emergency card even when I’m out running.

It’s not morbid thinking to be prepared.

If I become incapacitated, emergency responders will know medication allergies and who I’ve appointed as my agent to make healthcare decisions for me in such a circumstance. No scrambling through my cell phone for emergency contacts or searching for next of kin.

However, making the end-of-life decisions is proving more difficult than anticipated. For me, the challenge is that the line between hopeless and salvageable has been increasingly blurred. Medical certainty just doesn’t seem that sure.

Late last year, news broke of a man who had been judged to be in a vegetative state for 23 years but who was alert and unable to communicate the entire time. After decades of this frustrating existence, a PET scan determined that his brain activity was nearly normal and he was given special computer equipment to reestablish contact with the outside world.

Then earlier this month, researchers reported that an unknown proportion of individuals in a persistent vegetative state may retain some awareness. Functional MRI imaging combined with instructions to visualize one activity as a Yes and another as a No allowed limited communication with five out of 54 patients tested.

What if I was not as hopeless a case as I appeared from the outside, would I want to prolong my life as long as possible in the hopes that someone would realize this? Would I be willing to go decades in that state?

Either way, my family and friends would suffer; pulling life support even if I prespecified that was my wish couldn’t be easy. My healthcare agent is aware of the responsibility she has accepted. We’ve talked about it, but I haven’t yet made the call, checked the box determining whether I would keep hope alive perpetually or throw in the towel.

For now I’ll just have to trust in the (perceived) invincibility of youth to stave off the decision a little longer.

Crystal Phend is a senior staff writer at MedPage Today and blogs at In Other Words, the MedPage Today staff blog.

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The Review at a Glance: ( max score: 5 ) Film: Extras: Audio/Video total rating:

( Max score: 100 )

88

Studio and Year: 20th Century Fox - 2006 MPAA Rating: R Feature running time: 121 minutes Genre: Drama/Thriller Disc Format: BD-50 Encoding: AVC (MPEG-4) Video Aspect: 2.35:1 Resolution: 1080p/24
Audio Format(s): English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, Spanish/Portuguese/German Dolby Digital 5.1, French/Italian/Castellan DTS 5.1 Subtitles: English SDH, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish Starring: Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson Directed by: Kevin Macdonald Music by: Alex Heffes Written by: Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock (screenplay), Giles Foden (novel) Region Code: A Blu-ray Disc release Date: February 2, 2010

"Charming. Magnetic. Murderous."

Film Synopsis:

A powerful thriller that recreates on screen the world of Uganda under the mad dictatorship of Idi Amin. Deftly mixing fact and fiction and startlingly resonant with today's world, the film features a tour de force performance from Forest Whitaker as Amin and carves two unforgettable portraits: one of a charismatic but psychopathic ruler who ravaged his country, and the other of a witness to history who finally finds the courage to make a stand.

My Take:

Boy am I glad I received this one to watch; what a great film! There are few movies of late that really go beyond entertainment and resonate with me after its over; 'The Last King of Scotland' was one of those films. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar in 2006 for his performance of the "Charming, magnetic and murderous", megalomaniac dictator, Idi Amin. If you have yet to see the film, his performance alone is well worth the price of admission...well, purchase. 'The Last King of Scotland' is a thrilling fictional drama that is set in and around Idi Amin's rule of Uganda in the 1970's. I found it quite interesting how the screenplay weaved in fact and fiction. The story is of Scotsman Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) who is fresh out of med-school. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps he literally spins a globe and goes where his finger lands (well it landed on Canada first, so he spun again:)). He ends up going to Uganda to do missionary work in a remote village. The luck of the draw has Nick treating Amin's hand after a car accident near the mission. Nick hits it off immediately with Amin who is an obsessed fan of Scotland (Amin even had his army wear kilt's!). His command of the situation impresses Amin who insists that Nick become his personal physician and eventual "advisor". Nick's story-arc is much like I assume Uganda's was. He was charmed by Amin and the luxury being close to him provided. Amin's charismatic personality created blinders to who he really was and atrocities he was inflicting upon his people; he had over 100,000 Ugandans slaughtered. When Nick (and Uganda) finally realizes what he got himself into, he tries to escape before it's too late. 'The Last King of Scotland' was impeccably paced, never once feeling slow in its over 2 hour runtime. It speaks for itself when a film has a director that understands how to build upon a great screenplay, beautiful cinematography and an Oscar winning lead performance. Whitaker is in command as Idi Amin from his boyish, silly and charming nature to pure evil the next. James McAvoy (Wanted) was perfect as Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, who held his own next to the powerful Whitaker; I am interested in seeing what lies ahead for him. 'The Last King of Scotland' is an example of great film-making and a rare treat. If you have yet to see it, put it on the top of your "must see" list.

Parental Guide:

Rated R for some strong violence and gruesome images, sexual content and language.

AUDIO/VIDEO - By The Numbers: REFERENCE = 92-100 / EXCELLENT = 83-91 / GOOD = 74-82 / AVERAGE = 65-73 / BELOW AVERAGE = under 65 **My audio/video ratings are based upon a comparative made against other high definition media/blu-ray disc.** (Each rating is worth 4 points with a max of 5 per category)

Audio: 88

• Dynamics:
• Low frequency extension:
• Surround Sound presentation:
• Clarity/Detail:
• Dialogue Reproduction:

Video: 88

• Resolution/Clarity:
• Black level/Shadow detail:
• Color reproduction:
• Fleshtones:
• Compression:

The Last King of Scotland comes to Blu-ray Disc from Fox featuring 1080p VC-1 encoded video that has an constant bitrate of 30 mbps and lossless DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio sound that has an average bitrate of 4.3 mbps.

There is no hiding that 'The Last King of Scotland' is a film in the literal sense. Grain purists should love this one. There is a bit of style to the cinematography here, there is an enhanced level of contrast that coupled with the grain added to making it feel like the 1970's. Fox left this one alone, adding no DNR or other terrible processing agents. The result is a dynamic looking cinema-like experience. Colors, though intentionally washed out at times, were true to life, as were the flesh-tones. The Black levels were the only limit here, as they seemed to struggle at times. It’s always nice to see a transfer where fine details such as pores and wrinkles shine through the natural film grain. The DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track was quite fitting. All dialogue was discernible, crisp and up-front in the sound-stage. Though not an action packed film, the effect channels were filled with real life sounds. Babies crying on the right, chatter on the left...always engaged and adding to the films power, sucking you in. When needed, the track dug deep for gunfire or a car's rumble, though not many moments for deep bass. The Last King of Scotland's audio, like its video are faithful to the source and do what they are supposed to- work perfectly for the film.

* CIH users should note that the subtitles appear below the picture area *

Bonus Features:

• Commentary by Director Kevin Macdonald
• Deleted Scenes
• Capturing Idi Amin
• Forest Whittaker - Idi Amin
• Fox Movie Channel Presents: Casting Session

Final Thoughts:

This is what having a home theater as all about. A great movie and a beautiful looking film with top notch sound. Fox Blu-ray did it right with its treatment of 'The Last King of Scotland'. Included are some interesting bonus features. The Directors commentary is quite insightful on the production of the film as well as historical facts. The "Capturing Idi Amin" documentary, at 30 minutes, is also part documentary on the film and part history lesson, defiantly an interesting additional feature. If you have seen 'The Last King of Scotland' and were waiting to see if the Blu-ray release is worth an upgrade OR if you are a film-buff like me, who let this one slip, I can confidently say it’s worth adding to your collection.

Lee Weber AVS Forum Blu-ray Reviews

Reference Review System: Anthem LTX 500 1080p High Definition Front Projector Prismasonic HE1500R Anamorphic Lens Custom 1.3 Gain 128" 2.37:1 CinemaScope Screen Pioneer SC27 Receiver Pioneer Elite BDP-23FD Blu-ray Player (HDMI Audio/Video) Triangle Zerius Speakers (7.1) SVS PC13-Ultra Subwoofer

By Sierra Black

This has not been a banner week for airline travel. The headlines have been peppered with incidents of airline staff and TSA agents being rude, imperious, and sometimes downright abusive to passengers. Many of them involve families with young children.

I'm in Arizona visiting my family this week. On the flight out here, US Airways had assigned me and my kids seats far apart from each other. The idea of letting my two-year-old and five-year-old ride back in row 26 while I chilled out in row 5 with an overpriced cocktail and a good book was kind of charming.

Until the gate agent told me they couldn't do anything to fix it. I'd have to just get on the plane and hope some generous passenger would swap seats with us, he said. Uh...really?

This worked OK on the first flight, but on the second we ran into trouble with a grouchy flight attendant. My kids got panicky when she tried to separate us, which in turn pushed my mama bear buttons. I got mad, and so I did what many 21st century moms would: I blogged about it.

That story got passed around the Twitterverse and eventually picked up by other blogs and media outlets. People started telling me their own horror stories about air travel. But at least my kids and I got our problem solved in the end, without involving the authorities and no one getting hurt. Other families were not so lucky.

On Spirit Air, an entire family was kicked off a plane because a man asked for a glass of water for his pregnant wife. Apparently serving water before takeoff is against regulations. Really? Why?

In Philadelphia, the TSA forced a disabled 4-year-old to remove his leg braces and crawl through the security screen. While the family eventually got an apology, there's no telling how scarred the child and his parents will be by that experience. They have private screening rooms to search passengers. This seems like it would have been an optimal time to use them.

And while it doesn't include any kids — just people acting like kids — there's the whole debacle with Southwest kicking Kevin Smith off a flight because he was deemed too fat to fly.

Clearly, the airline industry has one big, fat customer service problem on its hands, one that probably has a lot of airline execs crying like babies. It's also one they're not likely to fix anytime soon. US Airways told me my problem was standard operating procedure.

What's a traveling family to do? Here's what I've gleaned from the 200 or so comments on my blog.

• Be very prepared. No -- even more prepared than that. Expect something to go wrong and be ready to fix it on the spot. This means being rested, flexible, and cheerful if possible.
   
• Plan ahead. The further in advance you book your travel, the more time you'll have to deal with any problems that arise before you get to the airport (like the kids assigned to sit in the cockpit while Mom is in Row 34).
   
• Fly as little as possible. While some of us have far-flung families, others have more options. Consider vacationing closer to home, taking the train or driving to your destinations.
   
• Be cooperative. Airline staff and TSA personnel have scary levels of power these days. On a plane or in the airport is not the place to register a vocal complaint. If you're asked to do something unsafe for you or your kids, you can always leave, but don't fight about it on the spot.
   
• Be active. When you're not in the clutches of the TSA, you can voice your issues. The federal government has a website devoted to protecting air passengers rights. You can also file a complaint with the Department of Transportation, or take your case to the media. It will take many people agitating for reform to get some respect for air travelers.

In the meantime, try to stay sane and safe while flying. You can lighten up with a little travel humor, and just focus on how much you'll enjoy being at your destination.

 

Permalink | Comments | Sierra Black">Sierra Black's blog | Channel: Culture

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New article on Edward Salcedo with quotes from his agent, including the following: “Ya Edward pasó el proceso de MLB. Atlanta solicitó la investigación y ahora mismo ellos son la primera opción, pero estamos abiertos a las ofertas”, señaló Mercedes, quien en el pasado ha representado a prospectos como el lanzador Michael Inoa y el jardinero [...]

 I recently installed the Backup Exec 9.1 update - and after that the services wouldn't start... 

So - I uninstalled the update then Backup Exec 9.0 and decided to start from scratch... 

Now - when I attemp to install Backup Exec 9.0 I get a message "Cannot install BackupExec Media servers where Backup Exec Remote Agent server is installed." (or something very similar.

????  I don't have Backup Exec Remote Agent installed though!!!!  

Any help would be great.

Thanks
Fabien

LONDRES, 12 (EUROPA PRESS)

Los ministros de Asuntos Exteriores y de Interior de Reino Unido, David Miliband y Alan Johnson, respectivamente, publicaron este viernes una carta abierta en la que elogian la "clase mundial" de la que gozan las agencias de seguridad e Inteligencia británicas y niegan las presuntas torturas cometidas por estas agencias británicas.

"La acusación de que nuestras agencias de seguridad e Inteligencia tienen licencia para tomar parte en torturas es vergonzosa, falsa y la negamos firmemente", escriben, según recoge el diario británico 'The Independent' y en la que afirman que el Gobierno británico desconocía que después del 11-S, la Administración del ex presidente estadounidense George W. Bush hubiera decidido emprender una política de tortura y de entregas extrajudiciales en su "guerra contra el terror".

El director de los servicios secretos británicos (MI5), Jonathan Evans, afirmó también hoy que es "vergonzoso" sugerir que Reino Unido haya colaborado en presuntas torturas, mediante el envío de una carta al diario británico 'The Daily Telegraph' por la que niega que su personal tuviera documentos relacionados con la tortura a un ciudadano etíope residente en Reino Unido, Binyam Mohamed, que ha asegurado que las autoridades británicas sabían que fue torturado a manos de la CIA después de su detención en 2002 en Pakistán.

El pasado miércoles, el tribunal británico de apelación dictaminó que el Gobierno debía publicar un sumario de siete párrafos de lo que la CIA informó a los agentes británicos sobre este ciudadano en 2002. El sumario revelaba que su tratamiento fue "cruel, inhumano y degradante" e incluyó la privación deliberada de sueño.

Pero Miliband --que tiene responsabilidad sobre el MI6 (el servicio de Inteligencia de Reino Unido en el exterior)--, afirma con Johnson (responsable del MI5, el servicio de seguridad interior), que "parece que después del 11-S las autoridades estadounidenses cambiaron las reglas del enfrentamiento para su personal en la lucha contra el terrorismo internacional".

"Cuando esto fue algo claro para nosotros, la guía de la agencia para nuestro propio personal fue cambiada para dejar claras sus responsabilidades, no sólo para evitar la implicación o complicidad en una práctica inaceptable, sino también para informar sobre ellas", señala la carta de los ministros.

Los ministros también rechazan las críticas judiciales del MI5 que caracterizan a este servicio de seguridad como fuera de control. "La política, clara, del Gobierno es no participar, solicitar, animar ni aprobar el uso de tortura o de tratamiento cruel, inhumano o degradante para cualquiera que sea su propósito", añaden.

Miliband, en un comunicado enviado a la Cámara de los Comunes después del dictamen del pasado miércoles, afirmaba que la sentencia era "una causa de gran preocupación" en Estados Unidos. Además, añade que intentó impedir que se publicara esta información para defender el principio "fundamental" de que la Inteligencia compartida con Reino Unido sería protegida. Este "principio de control" es esencial para las relaciones entre Reino Unido y Estados Unidos, añadió. Miliband también ha detallado que ya ha hablado con la secretaria de Estado norteamericana, Hillary Clinton, sobre este tema.

Welcome back to Midweek Madness, where Brad & Angie absolutely positively cannot win.

The tabloids always claim the couple is splitting, separated, or having "the fight to end all fights." So what happens when Brad and Angie kiss at the Super Bowl? The mags claim they're faking it, and putting on a show. The other big news this week? Jennifer Aniston hung out with Gerard Butler in Mexico. In Touch, Star, Us, Life & Style and Ok! all purchased fuzzy shots of Jen and Gerry taken by some guy camped out in the bushes in Cabo San Lucas. But when we were at the newsstand, we saw that People has actual photographs of Jen's birthday party — Jen blowing out the candles and so on. No matter! We've got "news" about Kendra's body, Ashlee's nose and Rihanna's film career!

Ok!
"My Body After Baby."
In December, Kendra informed us that she lost 20 pounds in 3 weeks. Now it's 25 pounds in 8 weeks! The weird part is: We still don't care. She looks great, even though we suspect Photoshop shenanigans on the cover, since her thighs are a different shape in the pictures inside (see image 7). Moving on: Jessica Biel told her Valentine's Day costar Jennifer Garner that she was having trouble getting Justin to commit. "Jen advised her to back off and stop being so clingy," a source says. Among Jen's tips: "Play hard to get by being less available." And "Stop quizzing him about other women." Sounds like someone read The Rules! Lastly, this is a quote from Beyoncé: "Some days the only thing I want to do is is stay in my Uggs and watch Big Love and eat brownies!"
Grade: F (grade school play acting)

Us
"Vienna's Double Life."
Since we don't watch The Bachelor, we don't know exactly what this is all about, but it seems that rumor has it Vienna Girardi might be getting the final rose from bachelor Jake Pavelka. The problem? her ex mother-in-law says "She's not looking for a husband. She's just looking to promote herself." Rare, for a reality TV star! Apparently she used to work at Hooters and compete in bikini contests. She married a Marine named Josh Riley in 2005, and while he was deployed in Iraq, she "drained" their joint bank account of $5,000, to get breast implants. She's generous, though: She also got her mom a tummy tuck and lipo with the cash. Anyway, it goes on like this for a while, but we tuned out after seeing the bikini pix (see image 8). Also inside: "Meet My Manzilla!" is a spread of celeb ladies whose boyfriends/husbands are tall. Lastly, in Tiger Woods news, a source says that Elin Nordegren doesn't want to get divorced like her parents did — "She thinks children need both parents." In addition, the source says: "Elin doesn't see [Tiger] as an awful guy, but a damaged bird. She wants to help him." If you love someone set them free?
Grade: F (infomercial acting)

Life & Style
"A Baby To Save Their Love."
Apparently when Angelina Jolie flew from LA to Miami, she ate a salad and an ice cream sundae, then watched Julie & Julia. Later she chatted up a fellow passenger and said: "I'm such a squishy mom. I really am just a squishy mom; I can't wait to just be in bed hanging out with them." This anecdote, along with old quotes about "further additions" to the family, creates a "story" with the headline, "A Baby For Brad And Angelina!" The spread is illustrated with a photo of Angie, with her arms up, cheering! Of course, she is at the Super Bowl. But since Brad recently purchased a house, the mag screams, "THEY'RE MAKING ROOM FOR MORE CHILDREN!" Was it only two weeks ago that this same mag L&S;'s sister mag declared "Yes, It's Over!"? In any case, this article notes that since Angie has to film "steamy thriller" The Tourist, which includes sex scenes with Johnny Depp, she won't be getting pregnant right now. She might adopt, though! Moving on: Lady Gaga is "cracking under pressure" because she has to be "on" all the time. She even went to a bar and played Buck Hunter with no pants on. Kendra cried after her husband's team lost the Super Bowl because the paparazzi wouldn't leave her and the baby alone. Kim Kardashian's boyfriend Reggie Bush didn't propose to her after his team won the Super Bowl, but Kim says, "He never said he would do that." Simon Monjack, Brittany Murphy's widow, tried to organize a "questionable" charity event in his wife's name. Lastly, Fergie lost 17 lbs. and "got the hottest butt."
Grade: D- (music video acting)

In Touch
"Betrayed!"
Basically, Kourtney Kardashian got a text message telling her that her boyfriend and baby daddy Scott Disick was out with Ed Westwick, drinking and flirting with other women. Kourtney was "really upset" and sent Scott a text saying: "Get home now." The story goes on and on with statements like, "Her family never trusted him" and "He loves the fame and fortune." Moving on: A witness named Louise Black — maybe the one from Project Runway? — was sitting "yards" away from the couple at the Super Bowl and says that Angie and Brad were kissing and cheering but "it looked desperate and forced." There's even a subhead here which reads "TOO MUCH SNUGGLING" (see image 9). That's right. When Angie and Brad are not together, it's headlines like "BRAD MOVES OUT" or "THE BREAKUP." But these two kiss in public and it's staged. Also inside: Beyoncé and Jay-Z are "trying to get pregnant." In a shocking exposé, we learn that babies "love their pacifiers" (see image 10). Britney Spears is in a "toxic romance" with her agent, Jason Trawick, who has "almost Svengali-like control" over her personal and professional life and has pushed her to go into the studio even though she just got back from touring 2 months ago. She's in love with him and dreaming about a "big, white" wedding; he is stringing her along. A "source" says: "If he breaks her heart, she could have another mental breakdown." IF and COULD are the operative words here. Breaking: Ashlee Simpson's "old nose is back" (see image 10). Doesn't the 2010 picture look like someone tampered with it? Dr. Steven J. Pearlman was asked to weigh in on the difference between her nose now and her nose in 2006, and he — quite astutely — points out: "The photo of her now is from a straight-on angle, while the one of her in 2006 is a side profile. No nose will look the same from different angles." O RLY? Have you ever wondered to yourself, "Which stars have Lego hair?" Wonder no more (see image 12)! By the way: Madonna is "already filling out paperwork" to adopt an orphan from Haiti. Lastly, Debbie Gibson is turning 40, but says she feels sexier than ever.
Grade: D (student film acting)

Star
"It's On… Again!"
Jennifer Aniston spent her birthday weekend with Gerard Butler… and 50 of her closest friends. During the day, Jen and Gerry kept their distance, but at night… Who knows?!?! An "insider" claims that Jen is really looking forward to her upcoming promotional tour for The Bounty Hunter with Gerard. Moving on: Remember the "Manzilla" spread in Us? There's one here, too, but it's called "Big Love." Miley Cyrus' parents, Billy Ray and Tish, have been spending "more and more time apart." Miley recorded "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" with Bret Michaels, and Tish and Bret "hit it off in a big way." Bret's rep says that "Tish and Bret spend a lot of time in the studio together," though he adds it's "strictly business." Blind item! "Which TV and movie star has been cheating on his wife for years? His makeup artist was his latest conquest, but he owes many other ladies Valentine's Day presents!" Hmm, well, here is a list of the dudes in the VD movie. Kim Kardashian and Reggie Bush had a "Super Bowl blowup" because she kept grabbing him to pose for photos, and saying things like "Don't forget to smile!" A "source" says he snapped at her: "I just won the Super Bowl. This is my night, not yours." Then she cried. Yet another story claims that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's kissing and hugging at the Super Bowl was "all for show." Body-language expert Toni Coleman says: "To me this feels contrived and exaggerated. You can tell these two are actors." There's a two-page piece on John Edwards "temptress" Rielle Hunter: She was also sleeping with Jeff Goldblum while she was with Edwards, and even thought maybe Goldblum, and not Edwards, was the father of her child. Sandra Bullock has not been able to conceive, and it's "heartbreaking" for her. Jamie Lynn Spears' new boyfriend, James Watson, is "equal parts playboy and good 'ol boy," says a source. Friends are telling her it won't last. Lastly: Rihanna has been cast in her first starring role in About Face, a movie about "a fashion designer who has to change her ways to win the heart of the man she loves." Yes, as the mag points out, this plot is similar to the 1975 Diana Ross film Mahogany. Rihanna has "quietly" been taking acting classes and learning to emote. We have one question for her: Do you know where you're going to????
Grade: D+ (soap opera acting)

From Ok!

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REThink Real Estate

Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News

Q: My wife and I live in a great loft that is now about $100,000 upside down. We're going to have a baby, and need a house. But we're thinking we'll either have to short-sale our loft or rent it out for awhile. We can't qualify for two mortgages, and we've been told that if we do a short sale, we won't be able to buy for another two years. Other than just renting, do you have any suggestions for how we can buy another home?

A: I understand your dilemma. As a Mom, I want to assure you that babies stay small and take up little space for about a year. Their accoutrements, however, can dwarf their little bodies. I've seen friends stuff 8-seater SUVs with the "fixings" for their 7-pound babies: it's easy to go overboard, and you'll find yourself using the same few items to the exclusion of all the rest.

Be careful about how much stuff you buy for your baby's first year, and you might be able to delay your move until your place recovers some value, depending on how rapidly the market is recovering where you live.

Need-to-knows

If you do decide to rent your place out, the average lender will give you "credit" for no more than 75 percent of the rent toward your income when it comes to buying another place. But, of course, they will "charge" you with 100 percent of the mortgage, property taxes, homeowners association dues and other expenses associated with that property. You might already have done that math, to arrive at the conclusion that you can't qualify for two mortgages, but it is a fact to be considered when determining whether to rent out your loft.

Now, in terms of how soon after a short sale you can buy again, the current rule is that you cannot obtain a federally insured loan (like FHA or VA, or a conventional loan that is backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac) for two years following a short sale. However, these guidelines do change, and some speculate they will change over time as the numbers of would-be American borrowers with short sales in their recent pasts increases.

Additionally, some lenders will lend to borrowers with recent short sales if they have a good downpayment, income and a willingness to pay a slightly higher interest rate.

There's really nothing wrong with renting for a two-year period, though, if that's your concern. You might even know better where you want to buy, in terms of school districts and the locations of extracurricular activities and family supports (or the need for distance from extended family members, as the case may be!) when your baby is a couple of years old, compared to right now.

If you're expecting right now, it might also be sanity-saving to short-sell your condo (if you decide to go that route) and just rent for two years while you enjoy your baby's many milestones, stockpile some cash and repair your credit.

If you're totally averse to renting, either because you need the tax deductions or you just don't like throwing your money away on rent, there are a couple of old-school real estate strategies I predict will come into vogue over the next few years. The first is called a wraparound trust deed.

In a wraparound, the seller sells you the home, but you make your payments to the seller. The seller keeps her existing mortgage(s) in place, using your payments to her to pay her mortgage payments to her lender(s) -- it's almost like assuming the loan, but your relationship is with the seller, not the lender.

Of course, this strategy assumes that you're willing to pay more than the seller owes on her home, and assumes that the seller is willing to do this (perhaps because she is looking for someone to pay a premium price and doesn't need her cash out of the home immediately).

Investor-owners are good candidates to sell a home in this way, as it helps them avoid capital gains taxes. If the seller's loans were originated anytime in the last few years, though, they likely contain a "due on sale" clause that renders this strategy difficult or impossible to pull off.

The other old-school real estate strategy that might work for you is the lease-to-own or lease-option, where you lease the property and obtain the right to purchase during or at the end of your lease term based on a prenegotiated price.

The pros and cons of a lease-option are too numerous to list here, but almost everything about them is negotiable, so if you are able to strike a deal that is in your best interests on most of the relevant points, they can offer a creative way to rehabilitate your ability to obtain traditional bank-financing while not throwing your monthly rent payments down the drain.

You'll want to verify that the seller is and remains current on her mortgage obligations, in either a wraparound or a lease-option scenario. You'll also want to record the documents evidencing your arrangement with the seller with your county recorder, so that the house cannot be sold or foreclosed out from under you.

Having the advice of both an experienced, local broker or agent and a local real estate attorney and/or title company is imperative, if you decide to go old-school with your real estate financing strategies.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of "The Savvy Woman's Homebuying Handbook" and "Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions." Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

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My wife and I have taken on the daunting task of building a new home. Currently we live in a sprawling two-bedroom 1200 square foot house. Two years ago we decided to have another baby. We thought we could manage in our small home with two children and that we would build a new home sometime in the distant future. A few months after we decided to have the baby we found out that we were going to have two babies. Two babies plus a three year old equals a house full. Our distant future plans had to be put into motion sooner than expected. After a year of searching we have finally found a house to build that we both can agree on.

We met with a prospective builder this past Sunday. I really liked the guy until we started talking about agriculture. He made the comment that "farmers don't do anything in the winter." I had to bite my tongue to keep from letting him have it. Instead of giving him a tongue lashing, I replied that we do enjoy the winter because it cuts hours down to about 40 per week depending on the unexpected. After he left I began to reflect back on our conversation and try to figure out what would make him think that farmers do not work in the winter.

I am from rural West Tennessee where row crop farms are most prevalent. My family and I have a diversified farming operation for the area. We raise corn, soybeans, vegetables, hogs, and cattle. I think that my builder associates warm weather with farm work. He needs to visit my hogs, cattle, and equipment shed for a few days this winter. Here on our farm we spend about three hours a day caring for our livestock. It has been an unusually cold winter this year so that number is very conservative. The barns that house my hogs are older structures and require maintenance daily. We have close to two hundred thousand bushels of grain housed in our grain bins that we are delivering currently. In our spare time we are preparing our equipment for the upcoming season. This preparation includes cleaning equipment (wash and wax all tractors and planters), planter preperation (instalation of specialty attachments for no-till and callibration of seed meters) and general maintenance (oil changes, fluid checks, removal and replacement of worn parts).

I spend a lot of money in the winter. This is the time when our farm purchases inputs such as fertilizer, seed, and crop protection agents. I usually spend a week or two negotiating the best deals for these inputs with different companies. During this time I deliberate on which variety of seed I will place on each farm and how much fertilizer we will use. We farm 3,000 acres and there are close to 100 different varieties of seed to choose from. Usually when I come in for lunch I will get a sandwich and sit in front of the computer screen to see what the grain and fuel markets are doing. I also use this lunch 'break' to catch up on missied calls and text messages.

I do not punch a time clock or keep up with the hours I work. I have often thought about keeping up with them to calculate how much I make per hour but decided that this would be depressing and I have elected not to do so. The work that we do on our farm is ever changing, often difficult, but always enjoyable. I enjoy being a farmer and producing food for a hungry world in the winter, spring, summer, and fall. I often wonder if this enjoyment is translated by non-farmers as 'not working;' if so then I am guilty as charged in that I never work.

In the city where every possible hockey decision represents a potential controversy, it is difficult tell the smoke from the dry ice when it comes to today's decision by Bob Gainey to step down from the position of general manager of the Canadiens.

There will always be speculation attached to what occurred today and a certain "did he jump or was he pushed" stigma will always be tied to the things fans and reporters are not privy to.

Bob Gainey called it a personal decision, saying that he prefrerred to step down a bit sooner rather having to leave once it was too late.

Critics will suggest that time was imminent, others will note that with a trade deadline approaching, that the timing is rather odd and curious.

According to Gainey, he was asked by the organization for a commitment beyond this season, and was not prepared to make one.

There can be no doubt that Gainey leaves the team in better shape than when he took it over in the summer of 2003. There were a good number of high times and some low lights, as there is during any regime.

Of course, the speculation will reign supreme for weeks that Gainey was pressured into an early exit based on current player scenarios and team standing. That is the nature of Montreal to scope such extremities.

Two news bits heard today, from different sources unattached to today's event will linger in my mind.

Earlier this morning on radio station CKAC, commentator and play by play man on the station Martin Maguire was speaking of the Canadiens seemingly never ending goaltending controversy, when he made reference to some inside information concerning the trade market.

Maguire claimed that the Canadiens had and still were shopping goalie Jaroslav Halak, and that offers for him had not risen in return value. However, it appears GM's took Gainey's stance in not moving Halak as a sign that Carey Price could now be had. Offers for Price were pourring in, as per Maguire.

Maguire's colour man on those broadcasts, former QMJHL coach Dany Dube, after Gainey's announcement today, recalled a conversation he had with the GM this past summer, shortly after he had rebuilt the club through free agent signing. Dube quoted Gainey as saying something along the lines of "this is the team you will be left with," hinting that Gainey knew of the possiblity that this was his last season at the helm of the club even then.

Whatever spin the events of the day take on in the future, how many of you actually believe that the Canadiens would fire Gainey in the traditional sense, if ever it came to that?

Gainey, a lifelong Canadien, has endured a great deal during his tenure. A family man with very strong personal convictions, he has lost two precious family members in the past decade. This past summer, Gainey became a grandfather for the first time. This past weekend he surely spent some moments of the phone with Brian Burke, who's family suffered a tragedy of their own.

Perhaps given the choice, his future with a lighter workload, balancing babies on his knee seemed more enlightening than running a hockey team in a city that never forgives.

Over the last few days, the angry Amazon/Macmillan rhetoric has been flying fast and furious from several positions. Most recently, we posted an impassioned piece by Ficbot with the attention-grabbing headline, “Maybe we should be hurting the authors,” which was linked in a post on author Tobias Buckell’s blog and has brought us a great deal of traffic today (not to mention the liveliest comment thread we’ve seen in some time).

There seems to be a perceptual disconnect, or maybe several perceptual disconnects, between the authors/publishers on one side and the e-book readers on the other. There are many voices on both sides, both reasonable and less so—and to each side, the loudest voices on the other side become that other side’s entire argument.

And so we have on one side e-book fans absolutely convinced that publishers and authors unjustly hate them (or worse, don’t care at all). And on the other, there are writers who plaintively wonder, “How did the American public get hoodwinked into believing that the suppliers are the bullies rather than the retailers?”—or else who actively belittle the e-book fans.

It’s the kind of misunderstanding that makes it so, so seductive to write a response, because “someone is wrong on the Internet” and you’re just sure that if you make that one more post, say that one more thing, you’ll get through to them somehow. You know beyond any doubt that you’re right, and you’re sure they’d agree too except they’re just misunderstanding you, and you have to make them understand.

I’m halfway afraid that this post is going to be just another iteration of that. But all the same, but I’m going to try to unpack some of the issues on the readers’ side and explain why this issue is so incendiary for long-time e-book fans.

One of the biggest misunderstandings is that this is all an overreaction to Macmillan taking “perfectly justified” steps to avoid Amazon monopolizing the e-book market and driving everyone else out of business. That’s part of it, but it’s actually just the smallest part of why most readers are so mad—the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“Let Them Eat Cake”

Part of the problem, and perhaps the part that made it blow up fastest, has been some of the rhetoric coming out of the other side.

From Macmillan’s side, with John Sargent’s ads/open letters, it’s a classic case of corp-speak right of the original Cluetrain Manifesto. Sargent addresses his letters to “authors, illustrators, and literary agents.” He says, “Amazon has been a valuable customer for a long time, and it is my great hope that they will continue to be in the very near future.”

E-book fans, dedicated readers, comb through his letters for any reference to themselves—and find none. The letter is not meant for them; it does not mention them. There is no other open letter from Sargent that is meant for them.

Amazon is addressed as Macmillan’s “customer,” rather than a distributor or retailer. Consequently, it becomes a lot easier for e-book fans, the people who feel they should be considered the publisher’s customers, to believe the publisher simply doesn’t give a damn about them.

Then there are some of the authors siding with Macmillan in discussions of the situation. In particular, there is one who is loudest among them: John Scalzi. Now, I greatly admire Scalzi’s writing, and have several of his books. I even like much of his blogging.

But Scalzi has shown a consistent pattern of behavior in his comment threads: when someone brings up concerns from a reader’s perspective that contradict his point of view, he responds with sarcasm rather than any serious attempt at dialogue. Now, granted, some of these people are nothing but rude, but even the polite ones get this treatment.

Neither of these is necessarily something on which to base a rational argument, but emotionally they’re a sure goad. It’s as if they’re smirking, “Let them eat cake.” It’s hard to blame e-book lovers for jumping up on the barricades and yelling, “Viva le revolution!” in response. Nobody likes to be told they don’t matter; it’s infuriating.

But as I said, this is only the straw that broke the camel’s back. In fact, many e-book lovers feel they have been told they don’t matter for more than ten years now.

A Long Time Ago, in an E-Book Store Far, Far Away

E-books have been sold by eReader and Fictionwise—first separately, then as part of the same store, then as part of Barnes & Noble—for over ten years. Over that time, e-book fans have seen a consistent, systematic pattern of missed opportunities and mishandling by publishers who seemed either not to care about or to actively despise e-books.

The books are wrapped up in restrictive DRM. They are often rife with typographical errors—errors which one ex-eReader employee said the e-book companies are not even permitted to correct (or at least weren’t when he worked for eReader), as they are contractually required to publish the book the way it came to them!

Many of the most egregious of these errors never get fixed. Even the Lord of the Rings series had them, and some feel they only bothered to fix those because it was such a popular book. (Trying to get errors fixed but having her requests fall on deaf ears is one of the issues that led to Ficbot’s immense frustration.) “Pirated” e-books are sometimes better-made than “legitimate” ones, because the “pirates” actually care about quality!

Often books in a series are published haphazardly, or not available in particular formats. Their pricing is inconsistent with print editions (more on that in a minute). And in the last year or so, the e-book stores have suddenly started enforcing geographic restrictions on e-book purchases on top of that, leaving many of their former best customers (such as Ficbot, who lives in the UK) fuming.

And this has been going on for as long as these stores have existed.

The Price is Wrong

One of the biggest issues relating to e-books is the issue of price. It’s a thorny issue because it’s actually several issues at once, and even e-book enthusiasts often conflate the issues themselves.

The biggest issue that it is not about, despite some people yelling about it, is the popular slogan, “E-books have zero marginal cost to produce, therefore they should be much cheaper than paper books!”

Many e-book fans do believe this—in fact, it’s one of their great rallying cries against publishers, who they see as The Man who wants to keep them down. It’s probably not as true as most adherents think, but it doesn’t really matter in this argument because most of the people who believe it think even $9.99 is too much to pay for an e-book, so they would have been upset no matter what Macmillan did.

A related matter is the idea that e-books should be cheaper than paper books because you can’t do as much with them. I won’t argue with that idea, but how much cheaper is a matter of debate even among the people who agree in principle.

For some, a $15 e-book might be enough of a discount off of a full-price hardcover to make it worthwhile. Others will point out you can generally get discounted real hardcovers from the same place for the same amount. Again, it doesn’t really matter too much because in the end, those who think it costs too much just won’t buy it. But they sure do like to complain, don’t they?

No, the biggest issue is a matter of trust, and it has to do with Macmillan’s plan to implement variable pricing.

A Matter of Trust

Many people on Macmillan’s side are assuming irate consumers are just mad at suddenly having to pay $15 instead of $10. (It doesn’t help that some of them are mad for that reason, and even those not primarily motivated by it are not exactly pleased about it.)

These Macmillan partisans might point out that hardcovers cost more not because of their inherent hardcoverness—they may seem sturdier, but they don’t cost appreciably more than paperbacks to produce—but because they’re the earliest way to get the book.

“Why, then,” they might ask, “shouldn’t e-books be the same way? Even Baen sells its E-ARCs at $15 for the first three months, after all. Macmillan’s just going to do that, too—and will end up coming down to even less than $9.99 after a while. Is that really such a bad thing?”

On the face of it, the logical answer would be no, indeed that isn’t such a bad thing. $14.99, while not the psychologically tempting $9.99, is still at least five to ten bucks less than a hardcover. If you don’t want it at $14.99, you can just wait until the price drops, just as you’d wait to buy a paperback if shelling out for a hardcover didn’t appeal to you.

But the reason this is likely to send a lot of e-book fans off into incoherent rage is that it doesn’t take into account the history of e-books before Amazon came along.

Publisher Price Control…In Theory

For as long as eReader and Fictionwise have been selling them, even back when eReader called itself Peanut Press, the pricing on e-books has never been consistent at the smaller e-book stores.

The agency model might be new to Amazon, but at least one person holds that Fictionwise has always worked under such a model, where the publishers set the prices of their books. On the other hand, someone who works for Macmillan says they don’t, so I don’t know what to think.

Regardless, I definitely remember hearing in long-gone conversations with store employees that under their arrangement, publishers were supposed to drop the prices on e-books to maintain parity with the least expensive print format. When a hardcover goes to paperback, the price of the e-book should drop accordingly.

But somehow, it quite frequently never ended up happening. I no longer have URLs or exact references to point to—they’re probably still buried in the E-Book Community Mailing List archives if anyone wants to trawl through them for proof—but I seem to remember from the aforementioned conversations a consensus that it was like pulling teeth to get publishers ever to re-adjust their prices.

Invariable Pricing

This hasn’t changed much in ten years. Yesterday, to prove a point, I searched on different price ranges of Macmillan books at Fictionwise. I discovered that only 285 (about 15%) of the 2032 Macmillan titles on Fictionwise are priced at $9.99 or less. 857 (about 40%) are priced at $19.99 and up.

I then surveyed each of the 25 titles on the first page of $19.99+ search results, checking against print editions in on-line bookstores and determined that 7 out of those 25 were available as $7 to $9 mass market paperbacks. (See the link above for specific details.)

If I assume it’s a valid random sample and cross-multiply, 7/25 = 240/857. That would mean 240 of Macmillan’s titles—over 10% of their entire Fictionwise line—would be mispriced—or as I like to put it, “invariably priced”—in relation to their paper versions.

My gut feeling is that’s actually a lowball guess; some of the books on that first search were obviously just-added titles they were trying to push so I suspect there was a higher-than-average number of newer, hardcover books than usual—there’s no way that a publisher is going to keep 30% of its entire back catalog exclusively available in hardcover. And that does not take into account titles priced between $19.99 and paperback range, or ones from other publishers.

There are probably thousands of “invariably" priced books on Fictionwise now. And there always have been.

Conspiracy Theories

Are these mispricings simply a matter of the publishers not caring enough to keep them updated, or because of the bureaucracy required to get each price updated? In at least one case, it has been confirmed that “invariable pricing” is intentional on the part of the publisher: someone from Digital Mac said that $14 is the “correct” price of an e-book of a book that has been out in $7.99 paperback for several years. No explanation available yet.

This “invariable pricing” is perhaps the most bitter pill for e-book fans to swallow. Is it just neglect? Misunderstanding the market? Intentionally sabotaging e-books to protect the print market?  Who knows?

The human mind looks for patterns; that’s why we see shapes in clouds. It’s also why conspiracy theories are so popular. It’s much more satisfying to believe that the publishers are out to get you than it is to believe they’re apathetic or just clueless. But even some published authors believe that publishers want e-books to fail.

And of course, someone not aware of how much of this frustration has built and festered over the last ten years will just assume those people have gone off the deep end.

Flashpoint

So in Fictionwise and eReader, you have e-book stores full of $26 e-books of $7 paperbacks. Now suddenly Amazon comes along, and you can suddenly buy $10 e-books of $26 hardcovers. Is it so hard to see why so many e-book fans so passionately embraced it, even with the DRM and restrictive terms and geographical restrictions and typographical errors?

It was because, finally, someone “got” e-books. They knew e-books were “supposed” to be cheaper than paper books. And, perhaps more importantly, they’re selling them cheaply to them.

It didn’t matter that Amazon was selling them below cost, or trying to build up a monopoly, or anything like that. E-books that were “supposed to be” $26 were instead $10. E-books that were “supposed to be” $7—well, I haven’t had time to research to see if they’re $7 or $10, but I suspect that even if they weren’t $7, $10 would still have been a lot better price than the $26 the publishers made Fictionwise charge.

And this is the world that Apple marched into with its agency pricing scheme, and the ominous declaration that, even though the books were going to be $13 to $15, the prices would be “exactly the same as in Amazon”. And then Macmillan made its ultimatum and Amazon pushed the button.

There’s been a lot of noise since then, about price-fixing, monopolies, loss leaders, and so on. Macmillan partisans complained about Macmillan books being pulled from Amazon (except for used copies which didn’t earn them anything). E-book fans complained about Macmillan blackmailing Amazon. Macmillan partisans called e-book fans entitled crybabies, and e-book fans called Macmillan partisans greedy profiteers.

Some e-book fans (including me) have been upset because the agency model amounts to resale price maintenance, a form of price-fixing that is inherently anti-competition and thus anti-consumer. Some Macmillan partisans have responded that Amazon was misusing its size advantage to monopolize the market. The flamewar continues.

But I suspect that all of these issues would largely go away, or at least become largely unimportant to most e-book fans, if it were not for that matter of trust I’ve been talking about.

Trust Busting

The heart of the matter is that Macmillan now claims it, and other publishers, want to implement variable pricing.

Make no mistake: if they could, it would be a great thing. As Baen has shown, $15 isn’t necessarily too much to pay for an e-book if you must have it right now (though given that Baen’s $15 books won’t be available in libraries or sit-and-read bookstores and Macmillan’s will, I suspect Macmillan won’t sell as many).

Others can wait until the price comes down, just as they do if they’d rather buy a paperback than a hardcover. By and large, we want to give publishers and authors our money—but a fair amount, not paying through the nose.

The problem is that e-book fans look at the ten-year history of invariable pricing at eReader and Fictionwise and doubt Macmillan can be trusted to do it.

Some of these skeptics believe Macmillan is outright lying and planning to destroy e-books by “discovering” nobody wants to buy them at $15 so there must not be a market after all (that “conspiracy theory” idea again), and others doubt Macmillan’s competence rather than its motives—but either way, it amounts to the same thing. If Macmillan couldn’t get its act together in ten years, why does anybody think it can be trusted to do so now?

Over at Making Light, Bruce Baugh thinks that it can because Amazon is a whole different ball game:

Fictionwise says they move about 16,000 volumes a month. Amazon moves…just a few more than that. It’s worth a publisher’s while to make something routine given the extra volume, and I would be slow to take their behavior with regard to a really niche venture as indicative of how they’d like to deal with the single largest sales point in the whole market.

On Tobias Buckell’s blog, Ed Greaves suggests,

It’s a perceptual disconnect. I’ve read several good blog posts about how that’s the silliest idea in the world, that publishers know that ebooks are the future, and they want to get into them, but that the current miasma is causing nothing but chaos. I believe that.

Still, even if Macmillan does come through with variable pricing, I’m a little worried that maybe Macmillan will implement it for Amazon…but it still won’t be worth the time to do it for Fictionwise and eReader, which will keep on selling those $26 paperbacks until they go out of business altogether. I rather hope not, as that’s where I buy most of my books.

Conclusion

So in the end, we have a great deal of anger and frustration on the side of e-book enthusiasts—perhaps as much from not being understood as from the pricing and other quality issues relating to e-books. As a comment from “Thiago” this morning put it:

I’m amazed at how surprised most authors seem to be by the anger of ebook readers, as if it is something that started from the Macmillan/Amazon feud. The fact is ebook readers are mad at Macmillan (and other publishers) for its general mishandling of ebooks (delays in releasing, gaps in series, the general lack of titles, the “variable” pricing and much more) for quite some time now, time during which they have essentially ignored these consumers. The apparent cluelessness of authors on these issues seems to imply authors themselves were just as ignorant.

And in Ficbot’s case, add “geographic restrictions” and “unresponsive customer service” on top of that. It isn’t any wonder that she and others on Mobileread are turning to the one-star “nuclear option”—they feel they’ve already tried just about everything else, and it is the only way they can think of to get attention. (On the bright side, it is at least less destructive than egging cars or painting graffiti.) Maybe authors don’t have a lot of influence over publishers, but if the stores and publishers are powerless to do anything, who else is left?

I’m not sure what the solution is, if there even is one. This whirlwind is made up of ten years of publisher-sown wind (or perhaps more accurately “hot air”). The Macmillan partisans who seem puzzled by the intensity of readers’ reactions, and especially those who berate or belittle them for having what the readers feel are legitimate concerns, only make things worse.

It would be nice to have a little more understanding on both sides, and attempts to engage and communicate, rather than the ridicule and anger we’ve seen so far. It seems particularly needed on the Macmillan side of things—e-book readers (at least the ones who aren’t extremists) have some valid concerns, and it’s annoying getting pigeonholed as entitlement-ridden cheapskates. (Probably almost as annoying as it is for authors to get pigeonholed as greedy, uncaring misers.)

It would also be good if someone could convince the publishers to update their pricing on Fictionwise and eReader, bring it into line and demonstrate the sort of “variable pricing” they would like to bring to Amazon.

But maybe I shouldn’t expect miracles.

Reminder: Please listen, call, or chat into my live podcast panel discussing the Amazon/Macmillan affair, Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific. Go here to find out how to join in!

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