Get the best of both worlds with the Silk Utility Shirt from White House Black Market, now on sale for $39.99! Originally priced at $88.00, this pretty blouse merges the utilitarian look with the simplicity of elegance. It features silk/spandex construction, five button placket, point collar, single button cuffs, and contoured tailor fit. At press time, this top was available in fatigue in sizes XXS to XL.

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, iDevice Apps

New iPhone, iPod touch and iPad product announcements for May 6, 2011:

New iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps

• With its most recent update on May 4, Animal Phone - the iPhone App For Kids, is winning over kids with realistic interaction, and parents with an ability to positively engage their children. Before they even learn to walk, children are now swiping and tapping their way across the entire catalogue of kids apps. From virtual tea parties to simulated phone calls with animals, the latest apps are shifting imaginative play from the toy box to the App Store.
• Barchick.com has announced its all new, revolutionary iphone app. Following the phenomenal success of the website, it was only matter of time before they developed the app. Like the website, it’s simple to use and contains only the best bars in London Drinking dens on the go, 24/7. Plus it’s free, what’s not to love?
• MultiSnooze today released MultiSnooze 2.0 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users. MultiSnooze is a patented application, offering the perfect waking solution for serial snoozers. Users can tap or shake to have uninterrupted snoozing (no hitting the snooze button), or use the SoftWake feature to hear a chime sound at each snooze session. A user can also awaken to his or her own iTunes playlist or the app’s stock songs. Thousands of alarm settings can be created, named and saved.
• Ken Tidwell has announced D200 DSLR v2.0 for iOS, another in his series of Min-U Guides to Nikon DSLRs. The app provides quick, easy access to information by allowing the user to “drill down” through a topic, just like using the camera menus, until they find exactly what they need. A convenient alternative to carrying bulky, printed reference material, the app also includes a handy list of D200 Quick Specs, a troubleshooting checklist, error messages, and much more.
• Imre Fazekas has announced Sixth Seal 1.1, a huge update to his popular top-view fantasy action-game for iPhone and iPad devices. Featuring an unmatched gesture-based magic control system, Sixth Seal provides non-stop action and fascinating gameplay with eye-catching graphics. Action, strategy, role-playing, and humor have been seamlessly combined to ensure an unforgettable gaming experience. Version 1.1 incorporates long-waited and requested improvements. The game is Free for 2 days and discounted for another few days.
• AircutDev has announced HydroToss 1.0.6 for iOS. In HydroToss, the goal is to put all the balls in appropriate containers using accurate tilt controls integrated in your iOS device. The balls give you immersive gameplay and a different outcome every time. HydroToss is a constantly updated game; updates include new levels, new type of devices, new worlds, new obstacles and new level design and of course, seasonal updates with themed levels as well as Game Center support.
• The newly launched Addicted to Ibiza Island Guide brings users all the top news, venues and music from the famous sun destination of Ibiza. This app includes hundreds of club nights, bars, beaches and club listings, making it an essential resource for unlocking the secrets of the White Isle. Addicted to Ibiza Island Guide 2011 offers Full length DJ mixes from some of the planet’s most popular DJs, as well as a Shout Outs section where users can leave advice or drop a line to new friends & more.
• Visiting certain countries by car might also mean stocking up on extra equipment, such as visibility vests, spare light bulbs, or as in Turkey, Poland and Greece, a fire extinguisher. The smart navigation software iGO primo app provides you with all this information, both before you start your trip and when you cross the country border. The new TTS Pro feature even reads the country summary out to you when entering a new country.
• SplitApple is a fun archery game, the perfect mix of arcade and simulation. Use your skills and accuracy to hit the bull’s eye. Aim right, adjust your shot power and pay attention to the wind and gravity. Reach the highest score in the tournament and time trial modes. Take risks and aim for apples up in the trees to perform a “SplitApple.” You might lose a shot, but you can win a big reward if you get it right!
• Team Sollmo has announced the release of a major update for its popular free-to-play, single-player RPG Buddy Rush. Today’s Third Wave update includes several new characters, plenty of additional items, a fresh chapter full of missions, and a new Raid mode. Raid is a new mode in which players will be able to bring along all of their created characters to attempt to conquer groups of increasingly difficult monsters. The new characters and over 43 new costumes for existing characters are now available to play throughout the game, in addition to the new chapter, Kanbucay, a beach-themed map that features high-level content appropriate for the new level cap of 72.
• Teyon has announced that for a limited time only, their iOS app Arctic Escape 1.0 will be available for free. Arctic Escape is a hybrid of a simple strategy and puzzle with the mechanics resembling popular Lemmings. Take control of a bunch of penguins getting into all sorts of trouble all the time. They were abducted from Antarctica by a cunning scientist and now need your help to come back home. Teyon will promote the game in association with DailyAppDream.
• Flying Mac has announced that FarFinder, the remote file access application for Mac, iPhone and iPad, has been renamed Presence and has received a major upgrade. Presence 2.0 provides secure access to a Mac’s files, by web browser from any Mac or PC, and by iPhone and iPad using the iOS client. New features include a native iPad client, sharing files with others right from the Mac, bridging between other iOS apps and a remote Mac, round-trip editing for iWork, better connectivity and more.
• Hockey Fight Pro is now available for iPhone, iPod and iPad. Hockey Fight Pro is a 3D Unity based hockey fighting game made in collaboration with hockeyfights.com, the world’s largest hockey fight collection and community.
• Getting Jiggy is a new innovative puzzle game for your iPhone,iPod touch and iPad. There is nothing quite like it, all you need is an eye for detail and the push of a button. How much do you think you know about the animal world? Are you ready to take on the challenge and beat the Puzzle game.
• Adobe Connect Mobile has been significantly updated and is available for free download at the App Store. This is the second major version of the app, which was first introduced in February 2010. The app lets users participate in Adobe Connect web conference meetings using an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch—users can collaborate anytime, anywhere and participate in chat conversations, view slides and presentations, and watch and broadcast video.
• Autodesk has announced some updates to SketchBook Pro for iPad. The design app is taking advantage of the new technologies on the iPad 2 to allow artists to create the highest resolution artwork to date and enable them to produce print-quality images directly on their iPad. The updates to iOS also allow SketchBook users to start a sketch on one device and finish it on another, including their desktop, using Dropbox.

New apps for iPad only

• d-Studio today released a Mother’s Day Edition of Join the Hearts - Jigsaw Puzzle for iPad. Join the Hearts 1.2 adds a nice collection of pictures which were especially chosen for this holiday. Now Join the Hearts Picture Library includes both: Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day collections which makes a pack of 48 beautiful pictures in total. While working on the picture user can zoom and move round the big game table. The interface design of this jigsaw puzzle game has been also updated.
• Dreamix Studio has introduced Album App LITE 1.0, their brand new digital photo album solution for iPad. Easily create extensive photo albums on your iPad. Scale, rotate and move photos with a single touch. Add pages to your album and get creative with the layout, or use one of the 30 predefined layouts. Album App comes with 5 themes that contain a lot of backgrounds, borders and objects to fill your album. Album App Lite is available with a 2 album, 2 pages each, limitation.
• Following the release in January of the iPhone & iPod touch version of Interval Trainer Go Matrix, Appnoose has announced the release of the HD version for iPad and iPad 2 called ITGO Matrix HD. The ITGO series of interval trainers as featured in several major UK publications, offers users the most advanced interval training experience for iOS and are the first to offer user programmable dual fast and slow music playlists, voice, vibration and visual alerts for interval changes in one package. In addition ITGO Matrix offers users the ability to program their specific fast and slow intervals to the exact second with the option to store the customized programs.
• Portegno Apps has introduced KidsMag for iPad, their monthly interactive magazine for kids 3 and older. Issue One features more than 30 pages of interactive content, including: Listen & Learn, Play & Enjoy, Draw & Color, Counting & Writing, and Reading & Listening. Two realistically drawn young children, Teo and Bianca, guide the reader through more than 50 different activities. The writing, illustrations, and activities are comparable to those of the highest quality print books for children.

Full Story » | Written by Kirk Hiner for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »

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A newly designed Nike Dunk High Hyperfuse has been spotted today. This pair combines the the best of both worlds with the always popular Nike Dunk High silhouette set in Hyperfuse material. Blue detailing, seen on the lace eyelets, toe cap, and ankle, help compliment the black base color on the toe box, side panel, [...]

What's missing from my newly single life?'

I don't really know how I thought missing the kids would feel; I think I avoided thinking about it as much as I could. Like sadness, I suppose, like grief. I miss my father and my siblings, who live far away, I remember missing X when we lived in different countries and I miss my mother, who is dead. It's nothing like any of those, it turns out. It feels like anxiety, like a constant unsettling sense that something is wrong. The closest thing I can conjure up is the feeling of twitchy hyper-vigilance that assailed me for several weeks after each of the children was born, when even as they slept I was wide awake, insomniac, starting at the slightest noise and prowling the flat with nervous energy.

It made some evolutionary sense, that state of alertness. It allowed you to protect your helpless offspring from sabre-toothed tigers. This feeling, though, serves no discernible purpose. I haven't even learned to recognise it for what it is yet, and its presentation varies, sometimes a low-level throb of unease, sometimes a lurching panic. It's not that I'm anxious for their wellbeing: first, I am not that kind of parent. I have always been happy to see them spend time away with their grandparents or at school camps, and I can watch them climb trees and ride their bikes, wobbly and oblivious to danger, without the slightest twinge. It makes me happy to see them confident.

Second, and most important, their father is utterly reliable. He's better than reliable; and better than me in many ways. He likes Lego, for a start, and doesn't mind going swimming, and when he does he plays in the water with them, and pretty much all his meals are variants on pasta. He's good on routine and he has a car, so he can take them to the zoo or out for a pizza when they're tetchy and bored. And, of course, he loves them utterly.

Neither am I suggesting that the whole experience of being away from my children some of the time is unrelentingly terrible or that I spend my time weeping in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, staring, tear-stained at photographs of my cherubs. Far from it. If anything, I feel I need to make this time count more, so I go out, I work late, I fill my days and evenings. And there are bits that I really, really enjoy. I have been more sociable than I have for years: I have been to parties, to the cinema and I've met friends at the last minute without having to book a babysitter or worry what time I need to get back. I have had the precious experience of drinking too much and not having to spend the next day drinking terrible coffee in a sweaty, windowless soft-play dungeon, fending off attempts to get me on to a bouncy castle. Most delicious of all, I have spent whole Sundays lying in bed with a book. Bed! Sunday! Even so, it's not the best of both worlds, as some people comment, enviously. It's artificial and it's complicated and it's fraught with layer upon layer of guilt. I feel peculiar if I enjoy myself, perverse if I don't. It'll pass, I suppose.

In the meantime, during my weeks without the boys, I often find myself stopping, in the middle of the street, or on a crowded underground station to rifle through my handbag, convinced I have lost something. I finish my compulsive inventory – wallet, keys, phone, cash, all present and correct – but the feeling remains. I can't shake off the nagging sense that something is off kilter; my atomic weight is slightly altered. I run through other things it might be: did I leave the door open? The iron on? Am I supposed to be somewhere and I've forgotten? But it's none of these: it's the strangeness of being on my own. No one holding on to my arm, no biscuit wrappers or stones thrust into my waiting palm, no barrage of chat about the advantage of one Pokémon over another. Something is actually, physically, missing. It's that simple.

Amos Ipad app. with Modular synthesizer was uploaded by: deadlover73
Duration: 64
Rating:

Filed under: Media, Education: Tweens

Remember those marathon Monopoly games? We stacked up piles of cash and property, and, when it was finally over, we put it all away in a box. Well, there's a new game in town, and it deals with money, too. But it's ongoing and any time your children sits at the computer, it picks right up where they left off. It's an online world that's teaching your kids how to value money and the things it can buy.

What are money lessons in online worlds?

Sites such as Disney's Club Penguin and Toontown, WeeWorld, WebKinz, and BarbieGirls are social networking spots for the preteen set (6- to 12-year-olds). These sites have fictional coins and economic systems that are used as player rewards. Kids both "earn" money and search for it so they can upgrade their characters' wardrobes, abilities and environments.

On Club Penguin, each game awards players with virtual coins -- which paid members can use to purchase virtual clothes to outfit their "igloos" with the latest gear. Kids can also go to an online store to buy real T-shirts, hats and key chains.

The facts

• Companies spend about $17 billion each year marketing to children (McNeal in USA Today, 2006).
• "Viral marketing" is a technique that takes advantage of children's friendships by encouraging them to promote products to their friends (Horovitz in USA Today, 2005).
• Very young children can't distinguish between commercials and program content; even older children sometimes fail to recognize product placement as advertising (Atkin, 1982).
• Kids ages 13 to 17 have 145 conversations about product brands per week (Corcoran, 2007).

Why they matter

Every family has different values about money, and it's important for parents to give their own advice to their kids. Online sites can complicate how kids learn about money because their main purpose is to encourage getting and spending. On something as important as personal finance, the best messages should come from parents, not Web sites that are in the business of making money by keeping kids online and ensuring repeat visitors.

In these games, kids learn to assess their own value by how much money they have.This can get out of hand -- so much so that some kids go online to find "cheats" to get more currency. This is the ideal time for parents to step in and have a conversation about earning, saving, budgeting and spending. An 8-year-old left to figure it out for herself probably won't get it right.

Parenting tips for elementary/middle school kids

• Use the virtual currency to teach the value of money. Point out that money isn't gained without effort. While kids trade tips and tricks for getting more money on the sites, you can explain how a job is also an excellent source of income. Since these kids are too young for real paid employment, consider letting them earn an allowance for doing chores around the house.
• Point out that spending is optional. Even though the sites make it unappealing to play without purchasing, tell your kids that they can still do it.
• Explain how spending is encouraged. Show your kids all the ways the sites encourage them to "buy." Kids quickly figure out that the more time they spend on a site, the more money they eventually get.
• Detach purchase from pleasure. Ask your children whether they feel they have more fun when they're buying and spending. Try to detach the act of purchasing from pleasure. Remember, kids become teens all too quickly, and you don't want spending to be one of their emotional coping skills.
• Point out greed. When someone's more motivated by the desire to get more than play more, there's a word for that. And you might as well teach it to your child. Greedy behavior has been known to occur on these sites and has even resulted in cheating.
• Talk about saving versus spending. Help kids feel good about saving for things. Talk about your own values when it comes to saving and spending.
• Envy is real. Just sit with an 8-year-old who's walked into another girl's igloo on Club Penguin and sees everything she dreams of owning. The urge to keep up with the Joneses starts young. Talk to your kids about times when you've felt envy about someone else's home or possessions, and how you coped with it. This lesson will need repeating in some way every year, but it's never too early to start.

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Get more information for parents on media and technology by checking out Common Sense Media.

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This wedding brings together the best of both worlds: A+ vendors and DIY charm. The couple, Anna and Jeremy, brought their love of the outdoors to their wedding, utilizing lush moss, little birdies, and, of course, the plentiful trees surrounding their venue. Oh, and… they were married in a castle. Cool much? Top it all [...]

Jay Brooks has set the challenge for this month's Session, based around the theme of beer and cheese. There's a rather convoluted and specific set of instructions on his announcement post here, but if enough people do it right the results will make very interesting reading. However, given my location there's no question of me being able to toe the line, so instead you'll have to settle for a solo run by me on some Irish cheese and Scottish beer, chosen more-or-less randomly and thrown together to see if anything clicks. Let's meet the participants...

Williams Gold is a blonde ale, the colour of shining bullion. I get light bubblegum and golden syrup from the aroma and the carbonation is relatively soft: definitely unlagerlike. A mild sweetness is the dominant flavour characteristic, with hints of lychee, though the finish is a little watery. Simple fare.

Joker IPA is almost the same colour, leaning a little more towards amber but not much. It's a sessionable sort of IPA at just 5% ABV and a little parsimonious with the hops. A strange aroma: sugary artificial fruit, like Tizer or Irn Bru. This is subdued in the flavour, coming across more like orange boiled sweets plus some earthy notes as well. I liked it; it's interesting.

Williams Red is last of the three. No aroma at all here, and a gentle flavour of caramel with a light lavender complexity underneath. Again, a solid, well-made but quite quietly-spoken beer. I felt a bit guilty about what I was about to put them through...

My first cheese choice was Wexford Cheddar. Cheddar is a lot like pilsner: a category that tends to get used as a catch-all for all manner of bland and unpleasant crap, but when you meet a good one, properly made and sufficiently matured, you know about it. Wexford is definitely a proper cheddar: slightly sharp at first, then rich and creamy.

Next, some Mature Ardrahan, a semi-soft cheese with more than a hint of gym sock in its pungent aroma. The taste is quite busy, with lots of nuttiness and butter, though that aroma never goes away until you're finished. It's an end-to-end cheese experience.

And then there's Bellingham Blue, a cheese with the texture of wet sand, tasting supremely earthy backed up by lots of mouldy funk. Definitely from a place next to the bass amps in the cheese orchestra. It's one to nibble.

With the line-up beginning to look a bit one-sided I set to, and here's what went with what.

The Gold was no match at all for the cheddar, disappearing under the cheddar cheesiness with barely a murmur. The Red threw out some interesting sweet flavours to contrast with the sourness, but again the cheddar flavours just shouted the beer down. The Red's fizz did a great job of clearing my palate afterwards, however. The big winner was the IPA, doing that sweet-and-sour thing with gusto: a delicious blend of soda-pop sugariness (the sort you might find in a quince jelly) and bitter-yet-creamy cheese notes. Magic.

Oddly the Gold wasn't drowned by the Ardrahan. I found the two flavour profiles kept to their respective corners and I got the best of both simultaneously. I guess that's a win. The same can't be said for the IPA: becoming the first of the beers to triumph over the cheese flavour altogether, and that's not a good thing with something as complex as Ardrahan. The reverse happens with the Red: the cream and butter flavours just wreck the beer. It seems that this cheese is a tough one to get the measure of: I think it merits further beer-related investigations. Sometihng with serious hops would be interesting.

And lastly the Bellingham Blue. We have another non-engagement with the Red: the two elements are totally immiscible. It actually balances quite well with the Gold, however, which takes some of the funky edge off and makes this extreme cheese more readily palatable. The IPA has a very interesting effect, neutralising the gritty earth flavours and leaving behind lots and lots of blue mould. If you want your blue cheese tasting very blue indeed, this is how to take it.

So, not a whole lot by way of amazing discoveries there. I think perhaps the choice of beer had a lot to do with that so, as a bonus round, I decided to throw in something strong and dark to find out what happens, so I grabbed a bottle of Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout from the stash.

With the cheddar this was the first full-on clash of the day: the bitterness of the beer does not sit at all well with the sharpness of the cheese. It's a similar story with the blue: a double dose of acridity and the chocolate subtlety of the beer just disappears. A last-minute goal came from the Ardrahan, as the stout brings out all the creaminess in the cheese and combines it with its roasted and strong alcoholic flavours, producing a gorgeous kind of Irish coffee effect.

And after all that, what are the patterns, lessons, principles and rules to be learned of beer and cheese matching? I have no idea. Everything was a surprise to me: the stuff that worked and the stuff that didn't. The worlds of beer and cheese are both so infinitely varied and nuanced that I'd say it's very hard to put down definitive markers, to the point where I say: don't bother trying. An array of cheeses on one side, and basket of beers on the other, and just let them at each other any which way.

We catch you up on how the God of Thunder made his way to the big screen.
By Eric Ditzian

A scene from "Thor"
Photo: Marvel

Is "Thor" the best Marvel Studios movie ever? Better than "Iron Man," which wowed crowds in 2008 on its way toward $585 million in worldwide box-office receipts? Better than "Iron Man 2" and "The Incredible Hulk"?

That's the word floating around the blogosphere and inside the MTV Newsroom, where everyone is marveling about what director Kenneth Branagh was able to accomplish with his comic book source material.

The movie could have easily become another "Masters of the Universe," a cheese-tastic example of how not to bring fantastical heroes to planet Earth. But Thor, no doubt, has avoided the fate of He-Man before him. To understand how Marvel and Branagh accomplished this impressive cinematic task, we must flash back into the recent past to see how the project came together. Luckily, that's exactly what we're able to do, since MTV News has been all over this project for years and can now present an indispensible cheat sheet: everything you need to know about "Thor":

Searching for the Gods
Marvel had been making plans for "Thor" since the '90s, but things started to come together in fall 2008, when Branagh entered into talks to helm the production. A few months later, he broke his silence and confirmed to us he'd be hopping into the director's chair, citing the appeal of working "on a story about one of the immortals, Gods, extraordinary beings, inter-dimensional creatures."

At that point, though, Branagh said it was too early to speculate about a potential cast. For Thor himself, we soon learned, Marvel was eyeing someone in his 20s who could be "physically powerful, very handsome, occasionally egotistical, petulant, and wild." Names like Daniel Craig and Kevin McKidd had been floated before for the hero from Asgard, but neither seemed to fit the bill, at least age-wise. Other actors like Alexander Skarsgård, Charlie Hunnam and Channing Tatum entered the conversation, but the job eventually went to Chris Hemsworth. Natalie Portman then signed on to play a scientist and Thor love interest, Tom Hiddleston became Thor's brother Loki, Anthony Hopkins became Thor's father Odin, and Stellan Skarsgård, Jaimie Alexander and Colm Feore joined in too.

Bringing Asgard to Earth
Filming kicked off in January of last year, and a week in, Branagh told us all was going well. "We have many miles to go and promises to keep, but so far, so good," he said. "Everybody's doing very good work and just a lot of it is so promising. Fingers crossed for everybody and everything. [Hemsworth] is a great guy."

Our first look at "Thor" came in April: Hemsworth in full Thor costume, his blond locks artfully falling in his face. "It's a pretty impressive costume, and I think anyone who put it on would look pretty cool," Hemsworth told us earlier. "I have a nice long, blond wig which they throw on every day."

Then came a pic of Hopkins as Odin. "It's a superhero movie, but with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in," he revealed to us. "It's a big, big, broad thing." More photos followed, until the first footage debuted at San Diego Comic-Con.

The public didn't get a chance to see official footage until December, when the first trailer popped up online, showing the God of Thunder as a skilled but arrogant warrior living in the faraway land of Asgard. But when Thor's reckless actions reawaken an ancient war, he's cast down to Earth and forced to live among mankind. As a threat from Asgard looms over our planet, Thor becomes the only one able to save both worlds from destruction.

Mighty Thor Arrives
A year after filming began, Hemsworth still hadn't seen a final cut. "I can't wait," he told us. "I've seen little bits and pieces through the process and little grabs. It looks amazing. I saw some special-effects stuff the other day that looks mind-blowing."

A Super Bowl commercial gave us a closer look at the action, followed by another full trailer in mid-February. Eventually, Hemsworth got to see the full film. "Being that close to something, it's often pretty hard to watch yourself, but the film in so many ways is so impressive that I was swept along with it like an audience member, and that's a pretty good sign," he told us.

He wasn't the only one impressed. Early reviews lauded the film for its faithful adaptation of the beloved comic books. Everything, it seems, is looking good both for a "Thor" sequel and "The Avengers," the superhero all-star flick that's already in production.

"It would be a lovely challenge and problem to have should we do a second one," Branagh said of directing "Thor 2." "We went through so many possibilities for how the story might go, that of course the prospect of that is very tantalizing and fascinating."

As for "Avengers," which will focus not only on Thor and Loki but characters like Hulk, Captain America and Hawkeye, everyone involved is ecstatic. "We've met sort of separately at various events and things, but yet to all sit down in the same room and do a read through...which I'm very excited about," Hemsworth told us before production began. "All of a sudden there's more people to sort of take some of the weight of it all, but also you want to do your bit and stand out, you know so it's a combination. But the excitement outweighs all of that. I'm a huge fan of these characters and these actors."

Check out everything we've got on "Thor."

For breaking news and previews of the latest comic book movies — updated around the clock — visit SplashPage.MTV.com.

Related Videos

• MTV Rough Cut: 'Thor'

Do opera cinecasts bring us the best of both worlds - live opera plus film - or just the thin ends of two wedges? Can they be more than just radio plus epiglottis? A few questions I'm addressing in today's Independent.... http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/nice-aria-shame-about-the-film-2279518.html

Gonzales balances AP request on bin Laden photos with national security MYfoxLUBBOCK.COM The Associated Press has filed, under the Freedom of Information Act, a request for the pictures of Osama bin Laden's body. Former Attorney General and current Texas Tech professor Alberto Gonzales explains the balance the government walks between ... Could FOIA Suit Force Release of Bin Laden Photos?ABA Journal bin Laden Photo and FOIA - Obama Gets Best of Both Worlds, Says Law ProfPRLog.Org (press release) Want Osama Pictures? Better Ask A Lawyer.Above the Law Glens Falls Post-Star (blog) -Nieman Watchdog (blog) all 7 news articles »

Has anyone had any hands-on experience with the Fujifilm FinePix X100 (http://www.finepix-x100.com/)? Assuming I was willing and able to buy it (which I am not at the moment), it seems to have what is for me a dealbreaker -- a three-second startup time. I really need something close to instant-on for $1000+. Otherwise, it's pretty much my kind of camera. It’s a beautifully-designed rangefinder-styled camera that squeezes an SLR-size APS-C sensor into its compact body, and sports a fixed, fast F2 maximum aperture semi-wideangle lens with a classic 35mm-equivalent field of view. It uses traditional analogue-style control dials for shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation, alongside an electronically coupled (‘focus-by-wire’) manual focus ring. But the biggest story is its innovative hybrid viewfinder, which combines a conventional direct-vision optical viewfinder with a high-resolution electronic viewfinder, offering the best of both worlds plus a few unique tricks of its own. (dpreview First Look (http://www.dpreview.com/previews/fujifilmx100/))

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, iDevice Apps

New iPhone, iPod touch and iPad product announcements for May 5, 2011:

New iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps

• JamKit is a community-driven drumming game and rhythm training tool. Players refine their drumming skills by playing “challenges” made by users across the world as they rank up, unlock VIP features, and compete to be in the JamKit hall of fame. Exposure to the unique drumming techniques of others provides inspiration for users to develop their own distinctive style that they can show off by creating original challenges of their own and contributing to the ever evolving world challenge library that provides fresh, unique content for users everywhere to experience every day.
• In Spelunk, ancient Element Village has five Books of Elements, which record the secrets of integration of things. One day, the Monster Gate in underground city struck village and robbed the Book of Elements to integrate powerful troops to conquer the world. While our brave collin will enter the underground cavern alone and recapture the Book of Elements to save the world.
• PAN Vision and Fabrication Games have announced the launch of Piclings, a new platform game for iOS devices that turns photos into playable worlds. Snap pics of fancy buildings, beautiful natural landscapes or even your weird uncle’s mangy dog, and the game engine takes care of the rest, converting them into levels populated with enemy Huffies and Puffies standing in the way of collectible treasures. Bring your very own Picling named Picazzo to life through photos limited only by your imagination. Piclings is now available for download from the App Store for $0.99.
• Playlithium is pleased to announce that Super Ball Escape HD is available now for free on the App Store. The happy owners of iPad and iPad 2 can now discover, in a version especially dedicated to them, this unique action game playable with the tilt control. Super Ball Escape HD will challenge your skills. Take control of a robot ball and try getting free through numerous mazes. Action, stealth and balance will be part of the game.
• Mooee has updated GolfSites to version 2.0, one of the most advanced Golf GPS App for the iPhone. Designed by golfers for golfers, GolfSites has all the bells and whistles of similar Golf GPS Apps plus it has something others don’t: Ball Path Tracking. By pressing your stroke button every time you hit a ball, GolfSites will remember where you’ve hit, and will show you your ball paths at the end of the game. All your scores will be recorded, statistics and location captured.
• Finncodex has released Neon Geoms 1.1 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users. Neon Geoms is a unique new physics game that requires a mixture of logic, skill and co-ordination to win. Players move a neon ball through various levels, collecting stars for points as they go. Something that sets Neon Geom apart from the rest is its level editor, which allows players to custom create, edit and share their very own levels. Users are also able to play custom levels created by others.
• Thinking Drone, LLC has announced the release of Dash of Color Free for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users. This free photography app lets users apply selective coloring to black and white images, or transform color images to black and white. Dash Of Color Free offers users many of the same tools and effects used by professionals, so they can get dramatic results with a few taps of the screen.
• Urban Anomaly today released Seattle HitList, a tool that identifies the best free sites and informal landmarks within the geographical boundaries of Seattle, Washington. The guide features over 80 MB of high resolution photos, narrative, and geo-mapping of dozens of locations that meet the HitList criteria: suitably hip, local or artistic, free or mostly free, and photogenic. The app is built around an intuitive interface that provides three different types of media browsing.
• Astro Ape Studios has awakened its latest creation, Monsterz’ Revenge, an eerie new social game for iOS that pits a cast of ghouls against evil fast-food restaurants. The graveyard is overrun by fast-food joints crashing the Monsterz’ cookout, and they’re striking back with a spooky skirmish. Players will challenge the junk-food giants by hitting the drive-thru in their customizable battle car, leaving each joint in crumbles.
• Bare Reef has launched its rebranded line of stock market portfolio tracking apps for the iPad, iPhone and Mac. Portfolio Mobile offers the most comprehensive set of features found in any iPad, iPhone or Mac stock portfolio monitoring app. The launch also includes a new web portal that simplifies the process of entering and editing trade history. The new Mac version is available as a 30 day demo exclusively at Portfolio Mobile.
• CGMatic Co., Ltd has announced they are reducing the price of Grove Keeper and Grove Keeper HD for a limited time to celebrate the release of the new versions. Grove Keeper is a casual physics based action puzzle set in a beautiful fantasy world. Taking control of the Grove Keeper, the master of magic, accompanied by likable friends during his journey. Simple and easy to play, outlast the enemies using skillful control and witful strategy.
• That Can Be My Next Tweet generates your future tweets based on the DNA of your existing messages. NEW: combine your future tweets together with someone else to create bizarre mix-ups and profoundly strange combinations!
• Jack woke up with one thing on his mind: food! In Spider Jack, help Jack swing through 75 stages of peril-filled puzzles to reach his dinner. Tap “hook points” to cast Jack’s web through obstacle courses and nimbly avoid dangers. To keep the itsy-bitsy spider climbing, cut previous webs so Jack can cast new lines in his pursuit of delicious bugs.
• TouchGEN has announced their new iPad magazine, devoted to gaming on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices. This pilot edition features 15 reviews from 2008-2010 that earned our editor’s choice seal of approval. A full, first issue of the magazine is in the pipeline for release soon. Issue 1 will feature all the things you’d expect from a news-stand gaming magazine, such as news, reviews, features, commentaries and the like, but in an interactive format.
• Rapid Turtle Games has announced that Charlie In Trouble - Returning Home, the final chapter in the Charlie In Trouble series is now available for the iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store! The game features 8 huge levels divided into 21 stages, with many new puzzles and arcade platform jumping. Help Charlie once more to find his way back to home in the final chapter of this adventure game. He has defied the King’s orders, and traveled through a magical portal only to become trapped on the other side. In order to return home, Charlie must make it through 8 levels in this strange new realm filled with puzzles and enemies.
• INTERSOG Mobile has introduced Cam Capture 1.0, their new imaging utility for iPhone 4. Cam Capture allows users to make quick snapshots for important documents straight from their mobile devices, and additionally can organize and save them. Geared to be both practical and flexible enough to cater to even the most industrious users, Cam Capture simplifies the task of getting personal official photos of oneself made down to an easy seconds-long process.
• Nemo Games has introduced Enduro 1.0, their new driving game for iPhone and iPad. This fantastic game has been faithfully recreated for all retro lovers out there. Enduro consists of maneuvering a race car in the National Enduro, a long-distance endurance race. The object of the race is to pass a certain amount of cars each day. The driver must avoid other racers and pass 180 cars on the first day, and 280 cars with each following day.
• Synqua Games Ltd. has announced the successful release of Chillingham Manor for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This devilishly entertaining matching puzzle game treats players to a delightfully macabre atmosphere and dynamic competitive gameplay against a vibrant variety of diverse villains. The game is complete with a lengthy, endlessly re-playable campaign that throws gamers into the shoes of a rookie cartoon exorcist through Chillingham Manor.
• RB Apps, LLC has announced the global availability of the Doggy Diva app for the iPhone and iPod touch. It is an entertaining game designed especially for little fashionistas as well as for dog owners who adore playing and dressing up their doggies. Doggy Diva offers all the quality from the finely-detailed characters and accessories till the smooth and clean interface that is easy enough to use even for the little users.
• Neon Play has released Pro Football Touchdown 1.0 for iOS. The game has three different game modes, each requiring the player to catch footballs to score touchdowns. The game features live global leaderboards and scores can also be posted to Twitter and Facebook to obtain bragging rights amongst friends. There are also over 20 achievements to complete using Game Center.
• 8coupons has announced its iPhone application is available for free download today at the Apple App Store.  Relative to other deal aggregation apps, 8coupons is the most comprehensive, equipped with over 500K live deals within every zip code in the U.S.
• Appsules LLC has introduced Elapsed 1.0, their first product for iPhone and iPod touch. Elapsed is a free timer application that allows tracking of multiple timers simultaneously. Frequently used timers can be saved for easy reuse. Elapsed uniquely allows modification of running timers, thereby making it ideal for dealing with unexpected changes. Possible uses include metered parking, baking, grilling, doing laundry, exercising and any other tasks busy people need to monitor.
• RedLynx and Chillingo, leading independent games publisher and division of Electronic Arts, are teaming up to redefine touch-based racing on iOS devices with the announcement of DrawRace 2: Racing Evolved for the iPhone and iPad.
• ab2labs has announced that the update of their photography app, Effects 3.0, is now available exclusively for iPhone and iPod touch. Effects is a stylish and creative way to create unique photos. In Effects, the user can manipulate pictures in multiple ways thanks to many innovative features. The features include filters, layers, live preview, sharing with social media and email, upgradeable export resolution and custom frames.
• Readdle has released Printer Pro 1.5, a new version of popular application for printing email attachments, annotated documents, web pages, photos and other types of content from iOS devices. The new version of Printer Pro enhances printing experience for iPhone and iPad owners by delivering an excellent performance and advanced feature set. Also, Printer Pro 1.5 lets iOS owners to print PDF documents with mark-ups, hand drawn notes, signatures and even embedded forms right from Mail or PDF.
• Out of the Park Developments has announced the release of iOOTP Baseball 2011, an exciting new iOS game for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad that puts players in control of a major league baseball team. It’s driven by OOTP’s Out of the Park Baseball engine, which has provided stunningly realistic baseball simulations on PC, Mac, and Linux for over a decade. In addition, it’s the only game of its kind currently available at the App Store.
• Thanks to iPromDress 3.0, well-dressed girls will be heading to the prom in a perfect dress. Designed for easy, intuitive use, with iPromDress you can find the closest prom dress shop, store pictures of your dresses to compare them, and share your dress details and photos through email or Facebook. Your favorites are stored in an easy-to-navigate list, from which you can view the details, pictures, and even get directions back to the boutique. Shop, compare and share with iPromDress for iPhone.
• WhiskIT has announced the release of Spingredients 1.01 for iOS. Challenge yourself to cook whatever it suggests, or use it for inspiration when creating new dishes or menus. The app suggests which ingredients best complement not only your chosen ingredient, but also each other. This gives experienced cooks four key ingredients with which to create that perfect dish. For those in need of a little more inspiration, a built-in Google search helps you to find recipes.
• Thinknao software has announced its latest iOS game, Quoth 1.0 for iOS. Quoth is an exciting new twist to the word puzzles you’ve seen before. Use your knowledge and skills to fill in missing letters of famous quotes, sayings and anecdotes. Earn awards along the way and pass on your favorite sayings to friends and family. Quoth challenges you to fill-in missing letters of famous quotes, sayings and anecdotes within a set time limit. It’s so simple that anyone can play.
• Elite Gudz has announced a major expansion of its Retro-Pop Techno Kitten Adventure game. Previously exclusive to the Xbox Indies marketplace, a platform showcasing games developed by independent boutique studios. Techno Kitten Adventure is a single-button game in which players pilot a jetpack-powered kitten through an obstacle-laden world of rainbows, stars and other sparkly distractions, all set to upbeat techno music.
• It’s late at night. You can’t get hold of your husband. Or maybe your kid hasn’t come home yet. You try and call, but there’s no answer. You start to worry. You could start driving around to places you think they might be. Or, you could use the newly launched application for iPhone and iPad: Footprints. Footprints is a location-sharing app which displays the current whereabouts of your family and friends on a map. Utilizing its optimized Location Tracker, Footprints tracks and shares locations in the background, in real-time, all the time, without draining the battery like some other GPS trackers do.
• Thanks to Openfeint, My Brute is going free for a day. My Brute is a crazy, off-the-wall game of combat that gives you the chance to challenge fighters from all over the world. You simply take on a series of challenges, gain experience, unlock new skills and crush your enemies with ever-greater speed.
• Super Boise Studios is proud to announce the release of Political Fury: Primary 2012 Edition for the iPhone and iPad. Political Fury is about bringing people of various political beliefs together and letting them show off what they know about politics and current events. With this major update they can now share their knowledge in amazing new ways. The developers have added a custom-built forum, an in-game social network, a Primary 2012 Center, a newsfeed that’s updated daily, more community polls, and hundreds of new trivia questions. They’ve also expanded The Knowledge Battle to include the 2012 Presidential candidates so now players can help establish both their party and their candidate as the smartest in the land.
• Villain announced today the release Archetype Cadet and Archetype Cadet HD, free new versions of Archetype, its top-selling and critically acclaimed online first-person shooter game for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Archetype Cadet gives players a free training ground to experience the best, most intense online FPS action from the world of Archetype. Both versions of Archetype Cadet are now available as a free download in the iTunes App Store, and a free new 1.5.1 update of the core Archetype game with memory optimization updates is also available from iTunes.
• iMotion HD is an intuitive and powerful time-lapse and stop-motion app for iOS. Take pictures, edit your movie and export HD 720p videos to your device or directly to Youtube. Time-lapse is a cinematography technique which accelerates movement. It can be used to photograph cloudscapes and celestial motion, plants growing and flowers blooming, evolution of a building project, crowds… Stop motion is an animation technique which make a physically manipulated object look like it’s moving on its own.

New apps for iPad only

• Golden Hammer Software has introduced Scribble Worm 1.0, a revolutionary new puzzle game for the iPad. Use your finger to draw patterns on notebook paper. These patterns come to life as cutesy worms scribbled in crayon, wriggling their way across the paper. The goal is to reach an apple elsewhere on the page by drawing a pattern and anticipating the path of the resulting worm. With a unique game mechanic, Scribble Worm offers lots of challenging puzzles and Game Center support.
• 955 Dreams Inc. has introduced On the Way to Woodstock 1.0.6 for Apple’s iPad. This immersive, interactive timeline explores the phenomenon of how a generation evolved from sock hops to Woodstock. Enjoy over 100 hours of narrative, photography, videos and music from the 1950s, the 1960s and each of the artists that performed at the 1969 Woodstock Art & Music Fair. Over 100 rare color photos of Woodstock from award-winning photographer, Barry Levine.
• iNetwallpaper Limited has announced 3D Wallpaper Pro 1.0, their flagship iPad Wallpaper App. With sleek and stylish design, 3D Wallpaper Pro delivers unique and exclusive iPad Wallpaper, raising the bar in iPad and iPad 2 wallpaper apps. 3D Wallpaper Pro redefines what people should expect from iPad wallpaper apps; this new iPad-only app gives users unique and exclusive HD images with stunning levels of detail and depth.
• ComboApp today announces the recent release of the Pocket MBA Full Course: Part 4 app bundle for the iPad. Created specifically for mobile learning on Apple’s powerful tablet platforms and structured to be a fully self sufficient mobile learning experience, Part 4 of the Pocket MBA Full Course app bundle series represents the latest expansion of the publisher’s well rounded “Full Course” mobile business education solutions franchise.
• APPinspect has announced Hazard Manager 3.1, the map-based workplace inspection app. Upload jpeg floorplans via iTunes for many buildings, using scanned sketches or graphic files. Navigate from Group to Inspection Floorplan Folder to carry out a new Inspection. Choose Inspection Layer to add HazardPoints to map. Edit, push and shove HazardPoints. View all Layers. Flip through all inspections in a folder. Email inspection in .hzp format so another HazMan user can share the inspection.

New accessories

• Urbanears has announced the release of Plattan Plus—a version of the Plattan headphone featuring an Apple certified microphone and remote, with the additional functionality of volume control. The Plattan Plus comes in Dark Grey, Purple, Pool and Cerise and is available for purchase now. The Plattan is designed to be the perfect classic headphone with all the additional features that make it above and beyond what a static headphone would offer. Because you can fold it down to the size of your fist, the Plattan is extremely mobile, allowing for better protection when not in use.

Full Story » | Written by Kirk Hiner for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »

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Priced out of Brookline? Just cross the border to 106 Evans Road at Corey Gardens in Brighton, where Unit 1A awaits your attention and approval for only $219,900. For that price, this 640-square-foot, 1-bed first-floor unit offers a lot of that for which Brookline is renowned without the seven-figure price tag: luxurious living space, lush green surroundings, a residential neighborhood of fine private homes, and convenience to urban amenities unlimited, including public transportation, parks and shops. Add to that fresh paint, pet-friendliness, 50% owner occupation, resident permit parking on a side street and incredible building amenities, and you’ve got yourself a deal. The deal is apparent from the moment you step onto the wall-to-wall carpet that ushers you right from the coat-closeted vestibule into the living-dining room. The steel-framed horizontal window pours in the light, as does the casement window in the kitchen that opens to the dining area via a convenient pass-through wall opening. The casement window and the efficient galley layout give the kitchen an intimate European feel, but the wall opening and the whiteness of the cabinetry, counters and appliances keep the kitchen from getting dark and cramped. Brightness and efficiency are also the words for the bedroom. The large casement window lets the sun shine in, and the oversized closet accommodates two growing wardrobes. In-house laundry, bike storage, heat, water and sewer, master insurance, landscaping and snow removal, and responsive long-term maintenance are all of the building amenities you get for an unbelievably low $178/month condo fee. Located right on the Brighton-Brookline border, Corey Gardens puts you in touch with the best of both worlds. Steps away are the dog-friendly Jean B. Waldstein Playground, Star Market, and Green Line trolley service at three stations. Right down Beacon Street is Cleveland Circle, Brighton’s one-stop center of shopping, dining, recreation and transportation. Photo by George J. Pantazopoulos, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Cleveland Circle is the place to be for upscale restaurants and bars, pizza places, Dunkin’ Donuts, hardware and dry-cleaning stores, CVS, parks, ballfields, fitness trails, swimming, skating, and access to three trolley lines: the C line to Brookline, Washington Square restaurants, and movies at the Coolidge Corner Theatre; the D line to Newton, Brookline Village, and the Longwood medical area; and the B line to Boston College, Allston Village and Boston University. All three lines continue into downtown Boston, and the D line’s Reservoir station has bus lines to Roslindale Square, Forest Hills, Harvard Square, Union Square in Somerville and Sullivan Square in Charlestown. Right across the street from Cleveland Circle are one of Boston’s best concentrations of recreational facilities: sports fields on Cassidy Playground, skating and swimming at the Reilly Memorial Rink and Swimming Pool, and a fitness trail around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. For more information on Unit 1A at 106 Evans Road, or to arrange a private showing, call one of CondoDomain’s Boston agents at 617-314-7704. To meet our agents, visit http://boston.condodomain.com/meetus

Steve Ciatti, a mechanical engineer at Argonne National Labs, is heading a team to explore the possibilities of a gasoline-diesel engine. The result, so far, is cleaner than a diesel engine and almost twice as efficient as a typical gasoline-powered engine. What's the catch? This approach results in better efficiency and cleaner emissions, but sacrifices some of the power density. That is, at peak power—when you push the accelerator pedal to the floor—the engine won't provide quite as much power: about 75 percent at present. "But if you don't drive pedal to the metal, however," Ciatti said, "this won't affect the car's performance. It's excellent in the power range where most people actually drive.

In a typical engine, pistons turn the wheels of the car. Each piston is moved by the explosive force of hot air when fuel is ignited above it in a cylinder.

Both spark-ignited gas engines and diesel engines do this, but they go about it differently. A gasoline engine first mixes air with the fuel, then compresses the mixture, and finally ignites it with a spark plug. In a diesel engine, the air is first compressed and then the fuel is injected; compressing the air makes it hot enough to ignite the fuel without a spark. This is what makes diesel more efficient—and also dirtier.

On one hand, diesel engines are more efficient because they do not control power with a throttle, which restricts air to the chamber. This means the fuel mixes more evenly with air, so more of it burns. Lack of a throttle also eliminates "engine knock" —caused by fuel igniting prematurely in the engine—because fuel is introduced only in the combustion chamber.

On the other hand, the introduction of fuel so late in the cycle creates a problem: emissions. Since fuel burns more easily when the droplets are smaller, the fuel is sprayed into the chamber as a fine mist. But diesel fuel is so easy to auto-ignite that it begins to react almost immediately—long before all of the fuel is in the chamber. Intentionally, the fuel isn't mixed perfectly with the air because diffusion controls the combustion; but diffusion also means some air and fuel are converted into nitrous oxides and soot.

Nitrous oxides are created when the flame jet created by the diesel injection burns so hot that nearby nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air start to break apart and react. Meanwhile, soot is created inside the hot jet because the fuel doesn't have enough oxygen to fully burn, creating soot instead.

"What we want to do is combine the efficiency of diesel with the cleanliness of gas," Ciatti said. "So we lose the throttle and spark plugs, because those create inefficiencies. We start with a diesel engine and inject gasoline instead.

Because gasoline doesn't ignite immediately the way that diesel would, we can actually inject several times before the fuel ignites. That way, we can make sure that the most or all of the fuel is mixed with the air, significantly decreasing NOX and soot."

The engine's performance is close to diesel efficiency, and roughly double that of today's automotive engines at low speeds and loads.

What's the catch? This approach results in better efficiency and cleaner emissions, but sacrifices some of the power density. That is, at peak power—when you push the accelerator pedal to the floor—the engine won't provide quite as much power: about 75 percent at present.

"But if you don't drive pedal to the metal, however," Ciatti said, "this won't affect the car's performance. It's excellent in the power range where most people actually drive.

Ciatti and his colleagues are working to make the system predictable and reliable enough to be successful in a commercial vehicle. Argonne is collaborating with General Motors on this project.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks

Cartoon Network and Activision have teamed together to bring both cartoon fanatics and gamers a little bit of the best of both worlds. It was announced today that a video game for home consoles and handhelds of Generator Rex is in the works and it’s set to release this October.

Osama Bin Laden Death Pictures Now in Freedom of Information Act Limbo Village Voice (blog) But assuming that won't happen, the Associated Press has already taken it upon themselves to file a Freedom of Information Act for a pile of Bin Laden dead body-related media being held by the government, which, if granted by the courts, could require ... Watchdog group is prepared to sue for photos of bin LadenThe Hill (blog) Could FOIA Suit Force Release of Bin Laden Photos?ABA Journal bin Laden Photo and FOIA - Obama Gets Best of Both Worlds, Says Law ProfPRLog.Org (press release) UPI.com -Above the Law -Glens Falls Post-Star (blog) all 8 news articles »

Closet offices are great because they stay out of your way and still provide you with a nice, organized workspace. The main disadvantage, obviously, is that you're restricted to the size of your closet. Today's featured workspace is a great compromise because an office in a walk-in closet is really the best of both worlds. More »

After a competitive opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, which drew "best ever" consideration from several observers, this second round is headed towards the opposite extreme. Last night, not only did the Tampa Bay Lightning complete their sweep of the Washington Capitals, but the San Jose Sharks and Boston Bruins have pushed their opponents to the brink of disaster as well.

Follow after the jump for a look at these series, a host of previews for tonight's Game 4 between Nashville & Vancouver, and a whole lot more!

Before the news, let's check out Matt Halischuk's best hit from Tuesday night:

Nashville Predators News

Vancouver Plays the Part | Pull My (Fang)Finger
AJ wonders if the Preds can get inside the Canucks' heads like Chicago had been for a couple years.

Preds On The Glass: The Vancouver Green Men Are Living It Up in Nashville
Jackson got his picture taken with Vancouver's famous emissaries.

Preds On The Glass: Game Four Preview: Canucks - Predators, "It's Huge" - Trotz
Will the Preds respond now that their backs are against the wall?

Preds On The Glass: POTG Thursday News, Headlines, and Links
Buddy's up & early with his morning links...

Hockey Night in Nashville: WCSF Game 4: Nashville Must Even Series
Robby will have his eye on Alex Burrows tonight.

WCSF – Canucks @ Predators, Game 4 – Could be the deciding factor? | The Predatorial
Could the Preds benefit from a makeup call tonight? That would surely help.

Music City Mindset: The Predator Way Has Never Been Easy
Understatement of the year, here.

WCSF Game 4 Preview: Predators Look To Bounce Back Thursday Night - Predlines
Amanda speculates that Blake Geoffrion might be scratched to allow both J.P. Dumont and Colin Wilson to play tonight.

Ward's NHL road went through CIS - Vancouver Sun
I can't believe they left out his roller hockey background!

Nashville has Little Boom Boom - Toronto Sun
Another intro-style piece, this time on Blake's lineage.

Hockey in Nashville is a smash - Toronto Sun
You have to wonder how far these last two weeks have gone to dispel some of the myths around hockey in Nashville.

Predators show consistent ability to rally during postseason | Nashville City Paper
Playing with the lead? Say, that does sound like a good idea.

Nashville Predators may play Colin Wilson after injury to Steve Sullivan - The Tennessean
Barry Trotz drops Willie's name during media time yesterday, fueling speculation that he'll finally get some playoff action.

Nashville Predators, Vancouver Canucks each used to defensive battles - The Tennessean
When two Vezina Trophy finalists meet in a series, we shouldn't be too surprised at the dearth of goals.

Around the NHL

Sweet Sweet Sweep: Bolts Down Rival Caps In Four - Raw Charge
It's amazing how quickly things have come together for the Tampa Bay Lightning this season.

Video: After tough call, Sharks’ Setoguchi ends Game 3 vs. Wings - Puck Daddy
Now this is the way hockey karma should work - San Jose's Devin Setoguchi gets a garbage call in OT when Todd Bertuzzi pulls off a Ryan Kesler-like move, but the Sharks kill off the penalty and Setoguchi ends up scoring the game winner. Good for them....

ECSF Game 3: Out of gas, the Flyers are pushed to the edge - Broad Street Hockey
Down 3-0 against the Bruins, are the Philadelphia Flyers simply out of answers?

Ryan Kesler’s the total package - The Globe and Mail
He made the difference Tuesday night, after going the first 9 games of the playoffs without a goal.

Canucks starting to look like old selves - The Globe and Mail
Are the Presidents Trophy winners beginning to hit their stride?

World Championship: Day 7 Open Thread - Puck Worlds
Switzerland vs. Norway... it'll be a WAR!!!

Qualification, Relegation Round Schedule - Puck Worlds
Team USA's next game is against Canada tomorrow.

Today in the "A": Schedule Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes - The Cannon
You don't see this every day, a reduction in the number of games a league will play.

Washington Capitals: Why Hiring Craig MacTavish Makes Sense | The Hockey Writers
You can expect to see this article copied several times over the next several weeks, just with a different team in the headline.

On Hockey: After another playoff collapse, the Capitals must make changes - The Washington Post
Cue the jerking of knees.

How Good Is That Goalie? - US News and World Report
It's interesting to see a mainstream news magazine pick up on hockey stats analysis. This article covers a piece of goaltending analysis presented at this year's Sports Analytics conference at MIT.

ViewSonic this week announced details on how ViewPad 10 owners can update their dual OS solution to Android 2.2!

The 10.1-inch ViewPad 10 comes packed with the Intel Atom 1.66GHz processor, 2GB of memory (expandable), built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and 1.3 megapixel built-in front camera. Including both Windows 7 and Google Android within the same device, you can use Flash-based programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat, along with all the fun entertainment apps offered on the Android 2.2 platform.

"The ViewPad 10 allows business users to take their desktops with them, running the same Windows-based apps they are used to on a tablet form factor," said Adam Hanin, vice president of marketing for ViewSonic Americas. "We responded to customer feedback and made available a free and easy-to-install Android 2.2 update. As additional supported code is available, we will share further updates to continue delivering on our promise of offering the best of both worlds."

The dual-OS ViewPad 10 now ships with Android 2.2 and either Windows 7 Home Premium (with a 16GB SSD hard drive) or Windows 7 Professional (with a 32GB SSD hard drive) for respective ESPs of $599 and $679.

Current owners of ViewSonic's ViewPad 10 can get full instructions on updating the device at www.viewsonic.com/assets/113/21936.pdf .

Our client is a world famous restaurant/retail brand that is looking to add another key player to their management team. We are looking to recruit an assistant restaurant/retail manager for their largest location.

APPLY TODAY and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.

Click here to apply, and see a video message from the Account Manager!

What you’ll be doing

• You’ll manage, develop and lead 90-140 employees
  
• You’ll focus on the customer experience, keeping it fun
  
• You’ll split your time between being an assistant restaurant and retail manager
  
• You’ll implement cost control measures to increase profits and reduce waste
  
• You’ll maintain the high standards of Food Safety
  
• You’ll perform basic HR duties: payroll, scheduling, interviewing and training
  
• You’ll maximize profitability without sacrificing customer service
  

About you

• You’re VERY customer oriented and focused
  
• You have 3-5 years of experience managing a fast-paced restaurant
  
• You have been responsible for all front-of-the-house (FOH) functions
  
• You’re a leader; you know how to manage, motivate and develop employees using empowerment and motivational techniques
  
• You have strong communication skills, both verbal and written
  
• You’re analytical; statistics and forecasting
  
• You have an AA or BA
  

What we like about this company

The team works in an exciting and fun environment. You are not restricted to just retail or just restaurant; it’s the best of both worlds. Customers are happy when they walk in the door and are smiling while being your guest.

Other important things

• Compensation 40’k + bonus
  
• 401k, Life Insurance, Medical-Dental-Vision Insurance
  
• Tuition Reimbursement
  
• Free parking
  

About Readyforce

Readyforce is leapfrogging “old school” staffing agencies and making transformational changes to a $300 billion industry that has not seen meaningful business practice and infrastructure change in decades. Our methodology is driven by a technology-enabled, yet human understanding of every candidate, a commitment to true business transparency and by leveraging modern innovations such as expert crowdsourcing, social media, web video and advanced data analytics.

CLICK HERE TO APPLY


Keywords: front of house, retail manager, assistant manager, restaurant, manage, FOH, payroll, scheduling, training, fast paced, fast-paced, customer service, customer oriented, customer focused, national, chain, brand, popular, dessert

• Location: Fisherman's Wharf
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

The Inquisitr

Transform your life with ASUS Eee Pad Transformer AsiaOne Powered by the new Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, it gives you the best of both worlds: the mobility and touch-screen convenience of a tablet, combined with the performance capabilities and longer battery life of a notebook. ... Report: Kal-El version of ASUS Transformer already in the worksHULIQ ASUS Eee Pad Transformer ReviewSlashGear "Bottleneck" blamed for Asus Transformer shortageTG Daily Product Reviews -The Gadgets -GizmoCrunch all 76 news articles »

Environmentalism is stuck – factional and uncertain even of the goals we seek. But we must face facts and engage with reality

In my column this week, I discussed the crisis the environment movement is now confronting. I'm using this essay to expand on the problems I mentioned there, and in particular to consider the most interesting of the responses to the crisis proposed so far, by writer and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth. Let me begin by spelling out, at greater length, the problems we face.

1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions means increasing electricity production. It is hard to see a way around this. Because low-carbon electricity is the best means of replacing the fossil fuels used for heating and transport, electricity generation will rise, even if we manage to engineer a massive reduction in overall energy consumption. The Zero Carbon Britain report published by the Centre for Alternative Technology envisages a 55% cut in overall energy demand by 2030 – and a near-doubling of electricity production.

2. Low carbon electricity means, to most greens, renewable sources of energy. They were never well-loved, but now, in the places in which major deployment is taking place, they are provoking something approaching a full-scale revolt. Here in mid-Wales, for example, and in the highlands of Scotland, public anger towards wind farms and the power lines and hubs required to serve them is coming to dominate local politics. While there are plenty of stupid myths circulating about the inability of wind turbines to produce electricity and about the greenhouse gases released in constructing them, in other respects the opposition to them is not irrational. People love their landscapes, and so they should.

Those of us who support renewables find ourselves in a difficult position: demanding the industrialisation of the countryside, supporting new power stations, new power lines and (for the electricity storage required) new reservoirs. Even offshore power, whose landscape impacts are much smaller, means more grid connections and more storage.

3. The only viable low-carbon alternative we have at the moment is nuclear power. This has the advantage of being confined to compact industrial sites, rather than sprawling over the countryside, and of requiring fewer new grid connections (especially if new plants are built next to the old ones). It has the following disadvantages:

a. The current generation of power stations require uranium mining, which destroys habitats and pollutes land and water. Though its global impacts are much smaller than the global impacts of coal, the damage it causes cannot be overlooked.

b. The waste it produces must be stored for long enough to be rendered safe. It is not technically difficult to do this, with vitrification, encasement and deep burial, but governments keep delaying their decisions as a result of public opposition.

Both these issues (as well as concerns about proliferation and security) could be addressed through the replacement of conventional nuclear power with thorium or integral fast reactors but, partly as a result of public resistance to atomic energy, neither technology has yet been developed. (I'll explore the potential of both approaches in a later column).

c. Nuclear power divides our movements. Some of the most effective environmental organisations – Greenpeace for example – could not drop their opposition without falling apart.

4. Whichever low-carbon technology we embrace, we help to provide the means by which the industrial economy can keep expanding, even if it does so without a major release of greenhouse gases. This threatens to exacerbate all the other issues that concern us. To prevent this from happening, the replacement of fossil fuels should be accompanied by a transition to a steady-state economy. Professor Herman Daly and author Tim Jackson have shown us how this can be done technically. How it can be done politically is, at present, quite another matter.

5. Those who, on the other hand, advocate a return to a land-based economy and the abandonment of industrial society find themselves in conflict with the desires of most of humanity, in both rich and poor nations. They have produced no convincing account of how people could be persuaded to turn their backs on manufactured products, advanced infrastructure and public services.

6. Our reliance on the mineral crunch, which was supposed to have brought the economic engine of destruction to a grinding halt, appears to have been misplaced. The collapse of accessible mineral reserves has not occurred, and shows little sign of occurring within our lifetimes. Capitalism has proved adept at finding new reserves or (in the case of fossil fuels) substitutes for those that are depleting. This takes place at a massive cost to the environment, as exploitation intrudes into an ever wider range of habitats and involves ever more destructive processes. New mineral reserves allow us to continue waging war against biodiversity, habitats, soil, fresh water supplies and the climate.

7. We have no idea what to do next.

8. Partly as a result, we have started tearing each other apart. This is an understandable but unnecessary reaction. Those seeking to protect the landscape are not our enemies; nor are those advocating that renewables should replace fossil fuel; nor are those promoting nuclear power as the answer; nor are those opposing nuclear power. We are all struggling with the same problem, all bumping up against atmospheric chemistry and physical constraints.

The enmity arises when people go into denial. Denial is everywhere. Those opposing windfarms find it convenient to deny that climate change is happening, or that turbines produce much electricity. Those promoting windfarms downplay the landscape impacts. Nuclear enthusiasts ignore the impacts of uranium mining. Opponents of nuclear power dismiss the solid science on the impacts of radiation and embrace wildly-inflated junk numbers instead. Primitivists decry all manufacturing industry, but fail to explain how their medicines and spectacles, scythes and billhooks will be produced. Localists rely on technologies – such as microwind and high-latitude solar power – that cannot deliver. Technocratic greens refuse to see that if economic growth is not addressed, a series of escalating catastrophes is inevitable. Romantic greens insist that the problem can be solved without even engaging in these dilemmas, yet fail to explain how else it can be done.

We're all responding to the same impulses, but we're all being tripped up by denial. Denial, and a failure to see the whole picture, are our enemies. Or perhaps, as doctors say about alcohol, our false friends.

I'm by no means the first to recognise that environmentalism is stuck. Paul Kingsnorth co-founded the Dark Mountain project as a means of exploring this problem. His latest essay The Quants and the Poets is a compelling and beautifully-written account of the way in which "the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers" and is now trying to save the world "one emission at a time". Trying to accommodate a narrative of other people's making, greens "feel obliged to act like speak-your-weight machines just to be heard." This approach, he argues, "has left environmentalism in a position where its advocates now find themselves unable to do anything but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrial economy."

He explains his prescription as follows:

What is missing here is stories, and an understanding of the importance of stories in getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Because at root, this whole squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives. … How to reassert the importance of stories, then, is perhaps a key question now. Green poets might perhaps start by observing that worlds are not 'saved' by the same stories that are killing them. They might want to observe that saving worlds is an impossible business in the first place, and that attempting to do so is likely to lead to some very dark places. Or they might try and explore what it is about how we see ourselves which reduces us to this, time and time again – arguing about machines rather than wondering what those machines give us and what they take away.

In his magnificent book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues in support of a poetic narrative of the kind Kingsnorth promotes.

Of one thing at least I am certain: that not to take myth seriously in the life of an ostensibly "disenchanted" culture like our own is actually to impoverish our understanding of our shared world.

I'm sure that's right, as is Schama's warning that, in embracing narratives, we do not become morally blinded by their poetic power. (He was thinking, in particular, about the old German stories of the redemptive power of the Urwald – the ancient Hercynian forest - and the national myth of the German forest character, arising from Arminius's victory over the Romans in the forbidding Teutoburger Wald. Poetic narratives, even initially harmless ones, have a nasty habit of backfiring spectacularly.)

But here too there is a problem. Green narratives have collapsed precisely because they were unable to withstand the steely quantification demanded by an attempt to get to grips with problems like climate change. Or they have been struck down by circumstance: such as the inconvenient non-appearance of the commodities crunch they predicted. If a new poetic narrative is no better able to answer questions such as how a steady-state economy can be achieved, how low-carbon electricity will be produced, how the common fisheries policy can be reformed or how, in a land-based economy, bricks and glass will be made, it too will collapse. In fact, it will never get off the ground as these questions, once formulated, won't go away.

Perhaps we are less tolerant of myth than we used to be. Perhaps we should be. Is creating new, opposing myths the best way of confronting the founding myths of neoliberal capitalism? I don't think so. Is it not better to fight them with withering analysis, quantification and exposure? But can we do this without becoming insensible to beauty, and to the impulse – a love for the world and its people, its places and its living creatures – which turned us green in the first place? I don't know. I do know that it's a discussion in which we have to engage.

www.monbiot.com

6 Secrets to Startup Success">">6 Secrets to Startup Success'>

Passion alone is typically what drives a founder to get a new business off the ground. Start-ups have little other fuel to make them go; their futures are completely dependent upon the founder's zeal and dedication to the idea.

Unfortunately passion and dedication are typically not enough. In fact, 80 percent of new businesses fail within the first five years, according to a study by Inc. and the National Business Incubator Association.

So what's the cause of this failure? According to consultant, investor, and author John Bradberry, the cause of these failing start-ups is also the same driver for many successful businesses: Passion. Bradberry argues that falling in love with a business can cloud one's judgment when making decisions around the business.

Bradberry is fully aware that his latest book, 6 Secrets to Startup Success, will be a tough reality check for some readers. Starting a business demands an incredible amount of hard work, long hours, and very little compensation. In an interview with Bradberry, he explains why passion alone can't fuel a start-up, and why supplementing excitement with realism and preparation is what's key to successfully sustaining a fledgling business.

What is the passion trap?
The passion trap is a cycle: A pattern of beliefs, choices, and behaviors that are linked to each other. It's a self-reinforcing pattern. Each of us has probably been a true believer in some great idea, some big idea. If I have an idea that I believe in strongly, that's a core belief I have, so I make decisions and choices based on those beliefs. I also interpret data from the environment that tends to support my beliefs, and then I take actions, and those actions create some kind of results that can be evaluated.

There are two sneaky things about the passion trap, it tends to operate at a subconscious or unconscious level, so we're often not aware that these cognitive biases or these filters are at work, and we actually believe that the world or the marketplace is confirming our thesis about the business.

The other thing that's sneaky about the passion trap is that it feels good, and there's a lot of feel-good culture in a lot of the entrepreneurial literature—not only the literature, but the support systems, the communities around entrepreneurs and start-ups, is often all about "follow your passion." I think there's a reinforcing belief that says if you're following your passion, feeling great is a signal that you're on the right path.

Is the passion trap what inspired you to write your book?
I set out to do an immersive study of what I would call "success factors among start-ups," so I brought my own experience and observations, but I also looked at the academic literature and the popular literature, both hard copy and online. At first, I was alarmed at how many businesses really do fail and the high percentage of start-ups that don't make it, and I became more intrigued with what's going on there. Typically, a lot of these ideas are good ones, and the founders are pretty talented people.

I found the main reasons why businesses fail or succeed are not all that complex. They're fundamental mistakes that founders make, like assume market demand is there when it's not, or they don't raise enough money, or they don't watch their expenses closely enough. I looked for underlying causes. I began to see a pattern: I called it "entrepreneurial traps," because I think there's more than one trap that a new entrepreneur tends to fall into.

One I called the money trap, is when someone ends up with their back against the wall, they're running out of cash, and at that point it's too late to raise money typically, because investors aren't going to be enamored with a desperate entrepreneur. The other I called the capacity trap, which is when an entrepreneur is stretched so thin that they can't or won't come up for air and bring on additional talent or resources in order to grow the business, so they're just like a rat on the wheel.

Then there was another trap. I called it the "idea trap," where someone is so emotionally attached to their idea that it creates a chain of events and misjudgments; over time, I began to call that the passion trap. Frankly, it just played better in the public with publishers. It had a little more stickiness as an idea. So I wrote the book to tell that story. I see so many unnecessary stories of failure, where the idea is a decent one, but not perfect. The founding team is talented, the funding is there, but the level of awareness and the ability to take a real honest look at both strengths and weaknesses is not there.

Could you share an example of someone being a victim of the passion trap?
There are four founders that are profiled beginning on page one, and you follow their stories through the book. One of them, named Lynn Ivey, is the most persistent, resilient founder I've ever known, but she got caught in the passion trap in a big way.

She and her investors built a facility for senior healthcare—an adult daycare center—and were certain that the market was there. The nature of that investment is what I call an "unforgiving strategy," when you invest four to five million dollars in a facility before you can even test the product. You're stuck if there's not market demand for the product. It's not like a software program that you can just pivot and try something else.

The day where I sat with Lynn Ivey, she was [talking about] the movie Field Of Dreams, about "building it and they will come." She had built the facility, but they were not coming. I remember the taste in my mouth and the feeling in my stomach. I was a fan of this start-up and they had a lot of backers, but it was the realization that maybe there's not a market there, and what do you do now?

In the truest sense, the story was in there as a cautionary tale. It's not a failure story because she's been able to convert to non-profit status and is actually slowly gaining her client base, and in reality she may have been five to 10 years ahead of her market. It was an idea that was too early for its time.

The last page of the book has an example of her serving these clients that she does have, and the incredible impact she's having. She's still not turning a profit, but because she's been able to convert to non-profit status, she's still standing. She's been able to flex and reformulate as much as she can, given the nature of the product that she's built.

Another example we use in the book is the story of the Segway. Steve Jobs, Steve Case, and John Doerr, the famous venture capitalist, all predicted it would be the most impactful product since the personal computer, and it was going to change the way cities were designed. They pumped a couple hundred million dollars into the manufacturing facility, and I think they were projecting 50,000 sales per month, but after five or six years, I think it had only sold maybe 50,000 in total.

So, the smartest business people that many of us could even think of got swept up in the belief that this product was too good to fail. Unfortunately, no one sent the memo to the customers. It's an incredible technology and very innovative, it's just that the fundamental laws in business were in play, like the idea is not great until the market says it is.

Must one compromise excitement in order to avoid the passion trap?
I think you can get the best of both worlds. What I'm really trying to combat is this sense that it's an either/or: that passion and reason, or passion and logic, are opposites. Some people would even say passion and planning are opposites, because if you really plan something forward, it entails thinking about elements of reality that are going to bring you down. But if you think of a start-up as an aircraft, passion is the fuel and the engine. It creates velocity. But logic and reason are the engineering and the steering mechanism; you need both, and you're not going anywhere exciting without both. What I explore a lot through the book is how can you get both? How can you make the most of your enthusiasm while not being blinded by it, and putting the right fundamentals in place?

There's a phrase I use in the book called "earned optimism," and that's really the state that I'm after when I'm trying to get a business off the ground, or advising a business. It's that kind of optimism you get after you've really thought through what can go well, what could go wrong, and what our contingencies are, should our plan not unfold as positively as we've hoped. It's staring down the monsters under the bed and knowing that you can withstand that. You've planned for enough financial cushion, and you've built your financial projections in a way which will allow you to go more slowly, if necessary.

One of the most violated rules of the start-up process is that things take a lot longer than founders hope, and they usually cost a lot more. That idea of having earned optimism is feeling like you can sleep better at night, precisely because you've been willing to work at your idea, warts and all, and you're able to embrace the naysayers instead of ignoring them.

Many founders assume the competition is not very strong or that there's no competition. But I've never seen an idea or start-up where there wasn't pretty strong competition. There are a few notable examples where you're absolutely the first in your space, but if I had a nickel for every founding team I've met with where I start raising questions about the competition and they get visibly agitated. It's like global warming: I don't have a necessary political stance on global warming, but if it affects me, I want to know about it. It's treated as data: the more data the better.

Your book talks about this idea of "founder readiness." How can you prepare for being a founder?
There is plenty to do. I was at this conference for two days in Atlanta, and there was a panelist talking about how you can't teach entrepreneurship; people are born, or not, as entrepreneurs. I take issue with that. I have studied people who are successful, and I think there is a certain hardwired set of qualities that prepare people for entrepreneurship, but it's much more than that. It's about what will prepare you for what it takes to get a business off the ground. It includes who you are, why you're doing it, your experience, your expertise and knowledge—there's a whole set of factors. That stuff makes a difference for most businesses.

There's a fairly popular book from [Inc.com blogger] Scott Gerber, called Never Get A Real Job, and the idea is, "don't ever work for somebody else." The minute you get out of school, do a start-up. That will work in some cases, but the data shows that twice as many successful start-ups and tech start-ups are founded by people in their 50s, rather than in their 20s, and there's a reason for that. Going down some career path, learning an industry and learning a discipline, and doing it on somebody else's nickel—working for someone else—can be really valuable in terms of preparing. I think there's certain disciplines or functions that are more useful than others, and an industry focus is helpful. If you've been involved in a particular industry, you recognize the patterns, and that's the industry you found your start-up in. You're going to be better than someone else that's coming from a different market.

Sales and marketing experience is incredibly helpful. The process of having to go out and understand customers and clients is something that not every founder has, and it's an advantage if you do have it. It's hard to learn management from a book, so if you want to build a business someday, it makes sense to go into a job working for somebody else for awhile where you actually manage a team. And you can learn whether or not you're cut out for managing a team—it's okay not to be cut out for it, just make sure you're in a role where you don't have to do that, and somebody else does.

What do you want readers to take away from your book?
Stay flexible. Don't confuse passion and preparation, and understand that how you feel emotionally about your business is not necessarily the best indicator of your odds of success. Do what you need to do to increase your odds of success from a logical standpoint, and I'm not knocking feeling good, just don't use that as the barometer or metric for progress.

Almost every robust, healthy business looks different than the founder first envisioned. Very different. There's some examples of that in the book where someone starts out thinking they're going to start a restaurant—Stacy's Pita Chips is a great example. They started out with the intention of starting a health food restaurant, and had a lunch cart business on Boston's streets because they didn't have enough money to rent space for a restaurant. Along the way, they started serving these leftover pita bread chips to the people waiting in line for sandwiches, because they didn't want people in line to abandon the line. One thing led to another and people went crazy for those pita chips, and the restaurant started selling the pita chips in groceries. Then, one thing led to another thing and they abandoned their restaurant plan, got fully into the consumer food business, and ended up selling to Frito Lay a few years later for $50 or $60 million. That was all because they were willing to pay attention to what the market was telling them.

This is replicated so often in success stories that I've studied. Your first idea is a starting point, so treat it as an experiment. That's what I mean by being flexible. You can be committed and determined, and at the same time, be ready to move on a dime if you get data that tells you the path you're on isn't going to work.

I’m going to miss Mother’s Day with my kids again this May, for the second year in a row. Both times the reason is that I need to be on national tour for my debut novel, Girl in Translation: last year for its publication and this year for the paperback release. My boys are seven and four years old, still young enough to love their mommy without reservation or judgment. When they miss me, they miss me with all their little hearts.

It makes me think about my relationship with my own mother, which was more complicated, even from early on. I immigrated from Hong Kong to New York together with my family when I was five years old. We lost all of our money in the move. My family started working in a clothing factory in Chinatown in order to survive, and although I was still in kindergarten, I worked there, too, every day after school.

We lived in an unheated, roach-infested apartment in Brooklyn that was so bitterly cold in the winter that we kept the oven on day and night. It was our only source of heat.

I couldn’t speak a word of English, either, when we first arrived, but I picked it up far more rapidly than my parents could. When I went shopping with my mother, she made me bargain in her stead -– something I absolutely hated. When a merchant cheated us, it was my job to complain.

It was hard for me as a small child to fill an adult’s shoes, but no matter how difficult my early life may have been, my mother’s life was much more so. She was always in the kitchen until late into the night, working on skirts and sashes we’d brought home from the factory to finish. I remember her flexing her fingers, stiff from the cold, in front of the open oven door in order to keep going. There was not a single night in my childhood when my mother went to bed before I did.

I was moved to write this book because of my mother. I wanted to tell her story, and that of many other first-generation immigrants. My mother never really learned to speak English, although she tried her best, and to Americans she comes across as very simple. I wanted people to hear how eloquent, wise and funny she really was in Chinese.

So I wrote the story of eleven-year-old Kimberly Chang and her mother, who emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor. Kimberly, similar to my own experience, quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life -— the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition -— Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself, back and forth, between the worlds she straddles.

In the novel, I wanted to give English-speaking readers a unique experience: to actually become a Chinese immigrant for the course of my novel, to hear Chinese like a native speaker and to hear English as gibberish. I hoped to allow my readers to experience something thousands of immigrants live with every day: what it's like to be intelligent, thoughtful and articulate in your own language -- but to come across as ignorant and uneducated in English. I also wanted to highlight how much a mother could sacrifice for her children.

However, I wondered if I myself appreciated my mother enough. Like my heroine, Kimberly, I, too, had a talent for school. I was accepted to Harvard, and it was there that I decided to become a writer.

A few years after graduation, I fell in love with a Dutch man. I agonized over leaving my mother in New York, but finally, I moved to Holland to marry him and start a family. My mother lived with my brother and his family -- I told myself -- and she and I often disagreed, anyway. And it was true. Maybe because I’d had to take on the adult role so often as a child, or maybe –- as she believed -– I was just born a headstrong, stubborn daughter, my mother and I often clashed.

The funny thing is that last year, when I was again on national tour and about to miss Mother’s Day with my own children, I was asked to write an article on that holiday for the Daily News in New York. In that piece, called “Our Mothers, Ourselves,” I talked about how my mother had gotten lost on the subway when I was a child, and how later in life I had to lose my mother in order to find her again. I wrote:

“We love our mothers so much, we owe them so much, we want so badly to give back to them some of what they have given to us -- and yet we feel the inevitable pull to carve our own space, to find our own way, to drift.

Perhaps the truth, in the end, is that we need to lose our mothers in order to find ourselves. I suppose for me, the great question is: How do we find them again?”

When I wrote that article in May of last year, I didn’t know that my mother already had cancer. We’d just held the book launch in New York City, and my publishing team had brought my mother and family to the event in style. Although my mother never learned to speak English, she understood enough from her seat in the front row to be very proud. Two months later, she was diagnosed, and a few months after that, in October 2010, she passed away. This will be my first Mother’s Day without my mother.

Now, I look back at all of the Mother’s Days I missed with my mother because I was living in Holland. My own boys will be all right. We’re going to have an extra-special celebration when I get back, and my career as a writer is what allows me to be home for them the rest of the time. But my mother had to leave me time and time again because she needed to work for our survival. Even when she brought me with her to the factory, there was no time for us to be together as mother and cub, as we say in Chinese. I can only find solace in the words that I myself wrote a year ago, not knowing how close I was to losing my mother for good:

“So it is for so many mothers and children: When we are apart, we are together, and when we are together, we are apart.”

My mother and I were quite different as individuals and yet we never stopped loving each other. Despite our complicated relationship, I, too, miss her with all my heart. I have no answers as to why life can be both so tragic and so filled with joy. I can only be grateful that this book -– the reason I’m away from my children this Mother’s Day -– was published in the year my mother would pass away, and that my mother lives on in its pages.

---

Jean Kwok is the author of Girl in Translation, coming soon to BlogHer Book Club. You can read her blog at JeanKwok.com and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Although most know Thor from the pages of Marvel comics, as a superhero distinguished  by his thunderous hammer and his formidable golden mane – imagine a younger, leaner and more politically correct Dog the Bounty Hunter – the character became legend centuries ago, a central figure in Norse mythology.

This Friday, inspired more by comic-book creator Stan Lee's Superman-like interpretation of the character than by any folk saga, the so-called God of Thunder will swing his mighty stick (no pun intended) on the big screen, courtesy of Kenneth Branagh's sparkling 3-D fantasy. Playing the big lug? Chris Hemsworth (TV's Home and Away), who put on 20 pounds of muscle for the role the old-fashioned way, with chicken breasts, eggs and protein shakes.

Starring opposite Hemsworth is an impressive cast including this year's Best Actress winner Natalie Portman – who denies having any childhood comic-book memories – as his Lois Lane; the gaunt, angular Tom Hiddleston (TV's Wallander, in which Branagh co-starred) as Thor's evil adoptive brother Loki; and, perhaps surprisingly, Sir Anthony Hopkins as their omnipotent father, Odin. Was Hopkins keen to work with Branagh, a fellow Englishman, or did he just have some masochistic need to don Odin's burdensome armor-plated suit?

More the former, says Hopkins, who reserves uncommonly high praise for his director, while aiming teasing barbs at his co-stars, all of whom have gathered in Los Angeles to talk of Thor, Shakespeare and Katherine Hepburn.



On working with Branagh:
AH: "The funny thing was, I hadn’t seen Ken for some years. I wasn’t sure how he would respond to me because I was one of the bad boys who ran away from England many years ago. I came out to Cuckoo Land, you know, out here [in Los Angeles], because I never fitted into British theater and all that. So I wasn’t sure how he’d receive me.

"Maybe I’m overstating it. But I’m 20 years older than Ken, and I didn’t know him that well. But we had all the same reference points of the theater. We knew about the actors we’d been working with over the years. And we were both pretty rebellious. I know he was. I was rebellious in the fact that I was a bad boy. I escaped from England and the group theater, and came over to America to Disneyland. I sold out. I’m glad I’ve sold out.

"Ken’s challenged himself over the years. He did some extraordinary things 30 years ago when he was taking on people like Laurence Olivier, doing Hamlet and Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing. And his education is pretty profound. I read a lot, but I hate taxing my mind with analysis. I cannot talk about acting. I hate talking about it. I hate talking about analyzing.

"It turned out that [Thor] was the most enjoyable film I’ve been involved in for a long time, principally because of the cast here, and Ken. I think I’d gone through a patch where I was getting very indifferent to everything, and I could care less. And then to work with Ken, he just pushed the right buttons to get me to give my best. I really value that in him, because I’d gotten lazy. He’s one of the best directors I’ve worked with and so that was the principle reason [for playing Odin]. And hey, I wanted the work. Gotta pay the rent, you know."



On how Branagh, an actor and sometime director best known for his Shakespearean adaptations, handled doing a Marvel movie:
KB: "The scale of the undertaking couldn’t help but make you feel that it was very, very challenging, but that was part of what was attractive. People sometimes ask me, 'How did you do it?' And I say, 'Have you seen the credits at the end -- there’s seven minutes of them. You see all of those names? That’s how I did it.'

"Frankly, when you walk in Day One and there’s a green screen, real mist and rain, the six principals in their new costumes for the first time, and four camera crews and hundreds of people, [you wonder] what to do next. Should I go to visual effects? Should I go to 3-D –  all the places I don’t know? And [then I knew] – find Thor! So we did."



On casting Hemsworth, a relative unknown, to carry a blockbuster:
KB: "Chris came in early on and I think that we [as filmmakers] weren’t fully on the page with what we were developing for him. We became pretty ambitious with what was clearly going to be a character journey, a character who changed from the beginning of the movie to the end, so we realized it wouldn’t only rely on brawn. Iit would need some sort of acting brains and some emotion and some fun.

"At some point we said, 'Well, we should go back and meet that very handsome Australian lad who came in when our story wasn’t really on the page.' And when [Chris] came back, he did workshops and read with the actors. Then one day he nailed it. He told a story about Thor’s deeds like a warrior retelling some story of a great battle, with the kind of arrogance that he needed to have, but with such charm. That was it. And then, you know, when he takes his shirt off, there’s also a wow factor that cannot be denied."



On Hemsworth's connection with the God of Thunder:
"I started with the comic books. I didn’t read all of them – there are thousands, 40 or 50 years’ worth – but I certainly read enough to get a sense of who he was and the world he was from. I read some things on Norse mythology and this sort of fatalistic view they have that everything’s preordained. That leads the Vikings into this fearless attitude in battle and with their lives. 

"That spoke volumes to me about Thor. So you sort of fill your head with whatever information and research you have. But on set, it was just about making it truthful and finding a simpler way that I could relate to him. Instead of thinking, 'How do I play a powerful god?' it became about scenes between fathers and sons and brothers. You personalize that, and that helps ground the story.

"The most uncomfortable thing was the eating. I didn’t mind so much the working out. I’d never really lifted weights to that capacity beforehand, and it was certainly a whole new sort of education, for a good six months. But I just don’t naturally sit at that weight, so I had to force-feed myself with 20 chicken breasts, rice and steak. That was the most exhausting part, I think, out of the whole film, was the eating. It wasn’t the fun stuff, either. It wasn’t hamburgers and pizza."



On timeless stories of fathers and sons:
KB: "Shakespeare was interested in the lives of the medieval royal families, but he also raided the Roman myths and the Greek myths for the same purpose. And I think Stan Lee went to the myths that Shakespeare hadn’t used. The connection, if there is one, is that the stakes are high. So in something like Henry IV or Henry V, [where] a reckless man falls into bad company – could that prince be the king? Is he the right man for the job?

"There it’s Europe and England in power, and [in Thor] it’s the universe. When his family has problems, everybody else is affected, so when Thor throws a fit and is yelling at his father and is banished, suddenly worlds are unstable. If the actors take those stakes seriously, the story is passionate, very intense. And I suppose that kind of an observation of ordinary frailties in people – although they’re gods – is an obsession of great storytellers including Shakespeare and including the Marvel universe."



On working with Hopkins:
TH: "Tony was amazing. I haven’t actually said this on record, but [during] our days working together, he would just regale us with stories of when he was a young actor and starting out in The Lion in Winter with Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn. I’ll never forget that story [he] told about Katherine Hepburn saying, 'Stop acting, Tony. You’ve got a good face. You’ve got a good voice. You’ve got a good body. Stop acting.'

AH: "She said, 'May I talk like your mama?' And I said, 'Yeah.' She says, 'Don’t act, you don’t need to act. Watch Spencer Tracy.' It was good advice."

TH: "And actually, then, then we did a scene where Loki finds the big, dark secret of his personal history. After the first couple of takes, Tony leaned across and said, 'Have you got a good agent?' I said yes. And he said, 'You’re going to need it.'"

Steve Fagin is an artist who uses new logics of organization in his films, videos, and media works. In The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel (1986), he draws from diaries, postcards and novels to produce a film structured as an epic poem -- a "folktale" for a post-literate culture. In The Machine that Killed Bad People (1990), he uses the syntax of CNN as an organizing conceit, to produce a film that complicates the boundaries between event, spectacle, and spectatorship. In Oliver Kahn (2003), which is loosely based on a one-act play by Samuel Beckett, he draws on the conventions of the soccer match to produce a meditation on collecting and memory. In these works and others, he is not interested in staging a "critique" of the dominant media forms that he engages, along with their effects on the popular mind. Rather, he is interested in experimenting with the conditions of the novelistic, as it is accessed through present-day platforms, bringing together domains, procedures, and genres across time and history in order to engender unanticipated larger- or smaller-scale effects. This renegade mode of working requires skillful choreography, informed irreverence, and street-smart timing. For Fagin, nothing is sacred: any actor can be potentially be assembled into a motley crew of consorts, taken on an imaginary voyage, brought to the table at a dinner party, or installed in the arena of a boxing match.

Or in this case, brought into a friendship network on Facebook.

Only For Dummies: Fractured Utopias of the 20th Century (2010) is based on the organizing principles of the social network (namely, Facebook) and the platform of the mobile phone (namely, the iPhone). In using the structural conditions of these domains -- conditions particular to the software, hardware, and the social arenas in which they are used -- Steve Fagin sets the stage for the invention of an entirely new novelistic form. He refers to it as a "miniseries," yet it is a miniseries with an epic nature. Its "star" is the ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy, the wisecracking sidekick from The Chase and Sanborn Hour radio show of the late 1930s and 40s. In this contemporary epic theater, Fagin summons the conditions of the vaudeville act, yet he retools its logics of assembly in accordance with the "friending" and "tagging" principles of Facebook and the navigational principles of the iPhone. The mischievous puppet, an anarchic avatar of sorts, does Fagin's dummy work. As with all of his projects, it is not a matter of parceling out the domains that are perversely integrated and the authority figures that are "overthrown" so much as exploring the conditions of the strange new synthetic multi- spatial and -temporal event that results -- its affects and intimacies; its dramas, dispositions, and rhythms; its intricacies, rules, and treacherous enfolds.

Yet this epic theater, rendered newly mobile through the demands of the cell phone, also refers to the conditions of the encyclopedic museum -- in this case, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the institution that commissioned it. Much of the content of Only For Dummies is drawn from the museum's collection, and the project was made within the frame of a larger series Fagin produced for the museum called Cell Phone Stories, which appeared on a weekly basis over the summer of 2010 (all of the episodes are archived at http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com). Understood in terms of this larger dimension, Only For Dummies opens out into a broader reflection on the conditions of the access of cultural history, and the museum as the privileged site of cultural knowledge -- a site that is now being challenged by digital repositories like Facebook and Google. The exploration that the work conducts, then, is not only that of new artistic, literary, or theatrical forms, but of the conditions of the institutional structures -- however public or private, cultural or corporate, high- or low tech -- through which we engage them.

---

JC: In using the platform of the iPhone and the syntax of Facebook as structuring principles in Only for Dummies, you are thinking about the ways that culture is accessed, scaled, and shared today, and the organizing principles used to format it, in an increasingly mobile and networked world. Could you talk about why you chose, at the level of content, the historical subject of Utopia as the primarily focus? What do these stories of Utopia have to say to us today, in a mobile landscape dominated by instantaneity, multitasking, and historical amnesia? SF: "The past is never dead. It is not even past." This William Faulkner quote is one of the driving forces of the work. It actually comes into to play in the piece -- Faulkner is a friend of my dummy, Charlie McCarthy. The mandate of Only for Dummies was to rethink the encyclopedic museum, how we think our cultural history, as we stand in front of it in the present. Here I was particularly impressed by Harold Szeeman’s curatorial work, his exhibitions that reorganized cultural history, treating a century as a junk pile of debris to be reorganized with a strong disregard for traditional categorization. As you say, standing in front of our patrimony on a mobile phone using a Facebook-like app opens up a very particular "can of worms." I surely was not interested in suggesting -- hence all the surrogates, quotes and sidebars, so called distancing devices -- that historical circumstances are to be taken seriously because "they were just like us," erasing the specifics of history in favor of a hollowed out sameness. I loathe this form of identity through narcissistic mirroring. Rather, I wanted to focus on how the rhetoric and logic of the new, its hopes and dreams, took a very particular turn with the Soviet Revolution, the invention of Hollywood, and the coming to existence of Bauhaus, and how much of our thoughts about revolution -- a more perfect place, the better future pragmatically planned -- are largely ghosted, ventriloquized utterances from things taken to be long dead and buried. You might not remember it, but it remembers you. JC: Let's explore the significance of Charlie McCarthy, since he is a primary dummy in this drama -- one that, through a peculiar bit of ventriloquy, functions as your own sidekick and stand-in (you speak of him as "my dummy"), as well as everyone else's (since this is a miniseries "Only for Dummies"). There is a lot of voice-throwing going on here, vaulting across history and between personages, real or fictitious, as facilitated by the odd new forms of rhetorical and structural coupling that are part-and-parcel of the Facebook landscape. What perverse form of puppetry are you inventing here, Steve? Given your background in film history, one could say that you're pressing these new relational modes of "friending" and "tagging" into service as a form of networked montage, but you're working with a transference that is deeper and more implicated than that. In friending, you bring personages into a qualified relation where one has to consider some bond of intimacy, some higher-level affiliation that would seem to complicate the homogenizing or flattening effects of much digital media play. SF: Sigh, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, who could resist the idea of a ventriloquist act being at the center of one of the most popular American radio shows of all time? Sure Charlie is my dummy, but one should prioritize that he was an everyman “my dummy,” a cult hero. A surrogate for the pettiness, disruptiveness, mischievousness and disrespect for convention and authority in “All.” On the other hand the “true" culprit was someone else: it is thrown speech. Charlie is a “mere puppet.” The Chase and Sanborn Hour radio show that Bergen and McCarthy did was an important motivation for the overall organizational structure of the piece, as was the vaudeville show as a genre. Each of the episodes in my cycle has an episode of the Bergen /McCarthy radio show to listen to. The shows have guests drawn from different contexts talking to each other, jokes, musical interludes, and so on. Yes, one could refer to what I'm doing as “networking montage,” but the use of appropriated text, speech, sound and images both still and moving has many sources and inspirations many of which do not come from the cinema. In fact, I claim infidelity to all of the lineages I so admire. Whether it is fine art, vaudeville, cinema, literature, or television, wherever we go when we talk tradition I’m out the side door. As Groucho says, “Whatever it is I’m against it.” That being made clear, some of the great things that I pilfer and scavenge from ever so devoutly are, to name a few, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, Schwitter’s overall artistic production (sound, image, writing and architecture) and the Brecht/Weil plays, songs and attached critical writings. One can see Brecht and Weil’s suggestions as to proper spectatorship of their “epic theater” as the dummy cycle’s Emily Post/"proper behavior” guide as to how to engage my cycle as viewer/audience. One of my favorite exchanges in the whole cycle is the rift in the Bauhaus chapter where Brecht and Weil discuss distanciation and audience engagement through the youtube clip from the first Schmeling/Louis boxing match. Ideas around counter punching and keeping the correct distance are discussed. Brecht/Weil suggested spectators in their theater should behave like spectators at a boxing match. Also, I wanted to make perfectly clear through the punching example that affect matters in Brecht/Weil. Distance is about the correct distance to counter an attacking opponent of great danger, in this case Joe Louis, and has nothing to do with affectless alienation. Each of the sections foregrounds a different type of juxtaposition. The first section on the Soviet Revolution highlights radical change with direct conflict. This does grow out of the writings of Eisenstein, but even this more classical montage is thrown a curveball. For instance when a Mayokovsky poem goes on about change being a crashing wave against a rock, Nabokov interrupts to say a crashing wave does not alter the sea. Putting Nabokov into the Soviet Revolution debate is meant to add another perspective to the debate. This from left field friend-of-a-friend remark -- Nabokov is a friend with Charlie but not Mayakovsky -- is an indulgence that the Facebook protocol provided me. In the Hollywood section the interruption through looping into fantasy is highlighted. The film sections move from the section in The Pirate on cinema as hypnosis, putting one under a spell. The second topic addressed is the lure of the beautiful image, Marlene Dietrich in Morocco and the third, the ambient banal companion of the TV in All That Heaven Allows. In the Bauhaus section I try to address the capacity of juxtapositions to produce a synthetic advancement of an argument. I guess this type of effort returns to the “failed” experiments of Eisenstein in October in regard to intellectual montage. This seemed proper for Bauhaus, it being a school after all. I feel some of the efforts in this section, especially around Brecht, for instance (the boxing one mentioned above) really do get somewhere on this thorny dilemma. The use of the Facebook structure allows all of these radical juxtapositions to be smoothly bridged. I feel this making things so radically different come together with such ease puts me closer to the collage of say Schwitters or Cornell rather than Bruce Conner or Robert Rauschenberg. I believe there is a quote by Cornell that the problem lies not that things are so far apart, but that they can be brought together with such ease. JC: So, identifying with Weil's call, you're the sports correspondent installed in the place of the art critic! The ringmaster in place of the writer -- as in the clip that Charlie McCarthy posted (in which he tagged W.C. Fields)! If Brecht/Weil suggested spectators in their theater should behave like fans at a boxing match, and this suggests a "proper behavior" guide for us, as audience, to engage your dummy cycle, then how do we resurrect, or engender, that sense of "liveness" crucial to the immersive power of the "match" -- or, for that matter, the performative act? A "liveness" where a certain level of density and affective charge is crucial. You've not exactly chosen a platform that is conducive to this -- the web-enabled mobile device seems rather to produce audiences watching and tapping away in relative isolation, and the level of investment they might otherwise have with social media like Facebook is withheld. You've made a deliberate choice not to make this work interactive -- and understandably so, since that would dilute its precision. It offers the semblance, but not the actuality of participation. As you say through Brecht/Weil, gauging distance matters, and you've carefully judged your distance here. By holding at bay the kind of social investment that social media like Facebook compels, you're rewriting the terms of the game. You're bringing another order of investment into play. Does your mini-epic mobile-theater/prizefight have a "punchers chance" of being understood? SF: Well, I don’t exactly see myself in the “punchers chance” tradition exemplified by the aged bloated George Foreman in his one punch 10th round KO of Michael Moorer to reclaim the Heavyweight crown. This “punchers chance” style has the advantage of evoking the “fear factor,” but it’s just too plodding for me, and the weapon I choose, the mobile cell phone platform, doesn’t really provide the possibility of a one punch KO. I feel my style is more stick and move (tap, tap swipe on your touch screen), keep the jab in their face (tap tap), bob and weave, keep those feet moving (move from new screen to new screen), clockwise, then counterclockwise, keep shifting your point of attack (backwards, then forward) and do not get caught in a corner (do not respond to chat -- for assurance this feature was eliminated). My hope is that eventually the opportunity will present itself to unleash a lethal multi-punch barrage -- a compelling post followed in rapid succession by a series of lively comments to the solar plexis. Yes, I imagine myself Sugar Ray Robinson, but alas, maybe you’re right, I’m just Jake LaMotta always moving forward, trying to remember to avoid the punches, getting hit all too often, clawing at the eyes, rabbit punching their kidneys, wrestling and overall just trying to outlast my imagined adversary. Alas, my version doesn’t bring victory, but at least I get the satisfaction my worthy opponent will be pissing blood for at least a week… and “that’s entertainment.” The prizefight analogy evoked by Brecht/Weil really touches me deeply. Watching boxing matches every Friday night was the only thing I ever did with my dad as a kid and to this day I collect prizefights. By the way I also collect classic cinema DVDs, operas, musica cubana and Soccer matches. The choice of the cell phone as my dancing companion was motivated by several factors. First, the issue of scale. Museums have gotten into this edifice Complex thing and LACMA with the Broad and Resnick structures and CEO Michael Govan’s lineage -- working with Thomas Krens at Mass MOCA, then the Guggenheim, then the Guggenheim Bilbao, and then on his own with DIA Beacon -- are at the core of this contemporary effort to recast the museum as the epic aurific heir of the medieval cathedral. It struck me to engage the museum through this handjob size device, the cell phone, "you have the whole world in your hand,” would produce and interesting dilemma. Second, the juxtaposition of the presence of objects in the museum and their deaurified youtube surrogates, reproductions and ersatz Photoshop reorganization in my piece opens up an interesting discussion of the relation of the aggressively trivial to its more statuesque antecedent. Third, the standard but restricted history traditionally presented by the museum, redeployed via the polymorphous perverse organization of Facebook. Fourth, the touch screen dimension -- the physical tactility of touching and the rhythm of the movement of engagement in contrast to the "do not touch the merchandise” dimension of museum attendance. JC: In a provocative way, you bring together touching and punching, the tiny gesture and the larger-scale boxing match. The intimate act and the public event. Immediacy and history. The problematic of scale -- the relation between the small and the colossal, between the miniature and the "mega," however understood in terms of the museum -- is a problematic of form that has haunted the twentieth century, one that you can see in terms of the development of television, computing, and telecommunications, proceeding in tandem with the ascendance of simulation, where miniaturized representations (as you say, deaurified surrogates) gradually gain precedence over realities, and interface controls substitute for movements. Margaret Morse wrote about how, in our vehicles of communication, shopping, and transportation, small, repetitive acts effect large-scale changes. The flick of a finger can change worlds. In the disciplines of architecture and design, this scalar incommensurability is often taken up as a design problematic. It is something that one endeavors to work with, to "solve." In contrast, you mention that you're producing a "disconnect" -- between the experience of the large-scale museum and its being accessed on the miniature handheld device -- and this would suggest a critical engagement. Several disconnects come to mind. As you've pointed out, physical tactility, touching, is important in your project, and this stands in contrast to the sanctified, "do not touch" spaces of the museum. You're also working with the new culture of appropriation and mixing -- with Web 2.0, all phenomena are fair game, they become personalizable, modifiable, exchangeable -- and this counters the privileging of originality and ownership that the museum necessarily perpetuates. Everything is up for grabs. But you're doing something more than enacting a critique. You're setting forth a terms of engagement -- an interdependency. It's political, in the positive sense (the production of new possibilities). (I know you won't like either take -- your being negative or positive!) One of the areas where scalar disjuncture can be engaged is to find a way out of spatial concepts and container/contained relations. Also, moving away from preconceived hierarchies to more fluid concepts of interorientation. Moving from spatial boundaries to interface protocols. You're doing this in the dummy cycle. You're setting forth protocols of connection that do not respect conventional spatial models. You're doing it with the technology and the interface conventions and syntax (namely, Facebook's) -- but oddly enough, you are also doing it with the figure of Charlie. He is a trickster figure, an unconventional avatar that defies conventional space-time categories. It's like Zizek's take on the Mystery Man in David Lynch's Lost Highway -- he presides over the convolutions and flips in the script, and mediates the disbelief when we learn that one person can, following the rules of phantasmagoria, be in two places at once. He is the fantasmatic figure of a pure, neutral medium-observer, asexualized, childishly neutral Knowledge. As if enacting a symbolic network, Charlie can be everywhere at once. He is in the space of the museum -- he gazes at a Constructivist work, watches a Vertov clip, poses in front of an image of Stalin -- and yet he is elsewhere, accessing a group photograph of Bauhaus luminaries on an iPad, and watching clips from classic Hollywood films on a television in someone's living room. He makes connections -- "friends" and "tags" -- personages who could not logically be brought together. He traverses history and place. He's an avatar into which anyone can step, always enacting a ventriloquy of which he himself is the product. SF: That’s a lot to chew on even for someone that wrote a book called Talkin' with Your Mouth Full! I will pick across the carcass of your queries assuming the indulgence of a buffet, picking and choosing here and there rather than the protocol of “formal dining.” I see Charlie as Charlie, disruptive, precocious; having the flexibility of conversation of the variety show. He is an historical figure that is extended across time and space, but behaves according to the “logic of his character.” The three episodes of the dummy cycle more or less are structured as three days of Facebook postings related to visits to LACMA. In general he behaves according to the protocols of Facebook; he makes comments, post pictures, tags, makes new friends and orchestrates the comments of his page. We have partial access to the activities of his friends Mayakovsky, Stalin, W.C.Fields, Bertolt Brecht, and William Faulkner, etc. This eclectic group is perhaps more interesting than the typical friends of a Facebook user, but it is not any more or less eclectic than most users. I do not feel the cluster of information, discussion and personages defies logic. It might be weird, but it is fastidious in its logic. It simply explores the possibilities of Facebook to produce a ground of discussion. What permissions for debate and evidence does this banality, Facebook, provide? This is the baseline for the project. There is nothing in Facebook protocol that would not permit a discussion across time, different spaces and friends that are famous, but long dead. There is Facebook page for Mayakovsky for instance, and I, Steve Fagin, have already friended him and had exchanges. That Charlie is a ventriloquist dummy is interesting, but more as an organizing banality, an empty center, a site for "received ideas” rather than some mysterious trickster. I’m not for either the mysterious or the trick. Charlie is hollow inside, has no depth. What you see is what you get. Perhaps the issue of scale can be best addressed through the Hollywood chapter of the cycle. I try to produce a scale within another scale effect. Not precisely a mise en abyme, but something I hope to be equally troubling and meta, a place where the shifting nature of aura, you succumb to the wonder of the larger than life cinema and control, the world is in “the palm of my hand” feeling of the cell phone world are performed and reflected upon. As we hold the phone in our hand we see in turn Charlie, sitting in a room, camera circling round him at first we only hear the sound of the movie he is watching, then slowly the film is revealed over his shoulder and then the camera tracks past Charlie into the film. The films used in this section are Minnelli The Pirate, Von Sternberg’s Morocco and Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. Each of the sections viewed address a specific dimension of affect and scale. The section from The Pirate has Gene Kelly discussing hypnosis, Franz Mesmer and putting Judy Garland under “the spell” through a spinning alluring glass globe. The Morocco section has a scantily dressed Marlene Dietrich selling apples via the “knowing” song "What am I bid For My apples” to the seduced audience that includes Adolphe Menjou and Gary Cooper. The men in the movie, knowing the fate of Adam, still eagerly buy the apples from our Marlene/Eve. The lure/siren quality of the cinema is put into play both in the movie and in the use of the movie in my piece. By the by Marlene is also a friend of Charlie. Yes, Charlie understands the risk involved in having “such a friend.” He might be dumb, but he is not stupid. In the section from All That Heaven Allows we have Jane Wyman’s “self centered” son and daughter running off to “their own lives" leaving her with a gift wrapped television, a piece of banal household furniture that will be a surrogate to her for human companionship. The overwhelming feel of loss of affect in this Sirk segment is truly a wonderful depiction. Charlie’s comment to this clip is taken from the previously worked over material in the section related to love and loss via Judy Holliday’s rendition of “the Party’s Over” in Bells are Ringing, now you must wake up, all dreams must end, the party’s over, it’s all over my friend. JC: You've mentioned that your work functions as something closer a case study rather than exclusively as something that is more metaphorical, suggestive, or simply ironic -- the worst example being the fortune cookie wisdom of "one liner" art. It functions on the level of the novelistic rather than the poetic. The questions are put into play within the work itself as fully fleshed out examples, demonstrations, and proofs, rather than exclusively allusions. SF: Although my fondest wish has always been to approximate the novel, I must confess my work stands more as a halfway house between a vaudeville sketch and a clandestine interlude at a cinematic matinee. Unfortunately, in my case, someone forgot to turn the cinema’s house lights down. Jordan Crandall is a media artist and theorist. He is Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. He is currently at work on a new film entitled Exposure, a meditation on identity and ethics in contemporary network-driven cultures, where operational media and personal media combine in unstable, emergent systems and ecologies. He is also continuing to develop his multi-platform work Showing, which looks at erotic cultures of self-exposure and display

MacStories points out there is a small, but perhaps important, difference in the "SSD+HDD" option on the new iMacs. You used to simply get two drives you had to manage separately, as in the screenshot here taken from my MacBook Pro (in which I long ago swapped the optical drive for an SSD). For the new models though, Apple now specifically states: "if you configure your iMac with both the solid-state drive and a Serial ATA hard drive, it will come preformatted with Mac OS X and all your applications on the solid-state drive. Then you can use the hard drive for videos, photos, and other files."

This may suggest a change from the older models, where the SSD came with OS X installed on it but the HDD was blank. As OS X helpfully stores various files under your /Users folder, this (by default) ended up on the SSD. Users had to take special action to put files on the HDD instead of the SSD. There's been some speculation that Apple would do something different in these new devices, perhaps by placing the OS on the SSD and mounting /Users on the HDD to try and give users the best of both worlds.

As someone who has a hybrid setup exactly like this today this today, it strikes me as a rather un-Apple solution because it's fiddly, complex, and it requires the user to stop and think on a regular basis. I use a 64 GB SSD as my boot volume and /Users/rich on the boot volume is a symlink onto the 500 GB HDD unit. My OS X install, my /Applications folder, and my Aperture library are all on the solid state drive; pretty much everything else, like my Aperture masters, iTunes library, and so on are on the magnetic drive.

This isn't a bad compromise, but it's still hard to look after.

Continue reading New iMacs and HDD+SSD configurations; how do they work?

New iMacs and HDD+SSD configurations; how do they work? originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 04 May 2011 13:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jim Goldberg's Open See series and David Goldblatt's Johannesburg tale are modern meditations on documentary photography that reject traditional reportage as too cut and dried

Last week, Jim Goldberg deservedly won the Deutsche Börse photography prize for his ongoing series, Open See, which merges photojournalism with art photography. The following day, David Goldblatt won the Kraszna-Krausz best photography book award for TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948-2010/Double Negative: A Novel.

Or more precisely, David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavic won the award, given that the book is actually two books, one photographic and the other fictional. Both prizes shed some light on the way documentary photographers are responding to a world in which straight reportage sometimes seems too cut and dried, too old-fashioned.

When extracts from Open See were shown at the Photographers' Gallery in London in 2009, Goldberg described himself to me as "a documentary storyteller". His work is intentionally impressionistic, comprising of his photographs, Polaroids and video stills of displaced people – refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants – as well as found images, ephemera and hand-written text, either by Goldberg himself or by his subjects. Sometimes the written words are affecting – the odd, punning title comes from one man's mis-written phrase "in the open see there is no border". Often, they are shocking – one woman, a victim of sex traffickers, writes simply and brutally: "I am a whore."

The text lends the photographs a distinct artiness: an outstretched hand outlined in gold alongside the words "They Always Welcome Me". No irony is intended here, at least not intentionally. Alongside these written-over portraits, Goldberg juxtaposes often-blurred street scenes and intimate interiors, both of which hint at the uncertain, fragile lives of the displaced.

Goldberg is one of the few photographers who straddles the worlds of fine art and photojournalism, which has led some commentators to question his merging of artiness and documentary. His photographs often recall other photographs: Robert Frank's scratched and written-over images from his great book, The Lines of My Hand, or even Duane Michals's more playful juxtapositions of text and image.

While Goldberg deftly sidesteps the issues that dog more straight reportage – the subject as victim or spectacle, say – for a more tentatively collaborative approach, the fragmentary nature of the work has been called into question because its narrative line is not altogether clear. If Goldberg is a storyteller, he is an oblique one, wary of the obvious and overstated. His work is driven not just by a desire to bear witness, but to constantly question how we – the photographer and the viewer – see images of suffering.

David Goldblatt, who is over 20 years older than Goldberg and started photographing in 1948, is most well known for bearing witness to the iniquities of the apartheid system in South Africa. (There is a small but powerful exhibition of his apartheid-era photographs currently on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London). His book, South Africa: The Structure of Things, published in 1998, is an ambitious work that traces the development of apartheid, and the power structures that kept it in place, through photographs.

For TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948-2010/Double Negative: A Novel, Goldblatt collaborated with the South African short story writer and novelist Ivan Vladislavic. The result is a two-volume book in which the writer responds to the photographer's work by creating a fictional narrative about life in Johannesburg, and about a character who is intrigued by photography, its possibilities and its fraught complexities.

It is a novel, then, that is also a meditation on photography in general and on Goldblatt's photographs of Johannesburg in particular, how they reflect the city's energies and the lives of its people. Photography and fiction have come together before – Steve Pyke and Timothy O'Grady's book, I Could Read the Sky springs to mind, but in that instance, the photographs were an evocative accompaniment to the text. Likewise, though more explicitly, the grainy shots that punctuate Michael Ondaatje's novel, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. As far as I know, this is the first novel that responds to a historical body of photographic work, and, as such, the first work of fiction – or meta-fiction – that doubles as a work of photography criticism.

Both Goldberg's Open See, which is published as a bound package of one thick and three thin volumes, and Goldblatt's twin-volume collaboration with Vladislavic, break with the tradition of straight documentary photography, though in radically different ways. They both deserve your attention, not least because they each ask a question that echoes through photography's complex history of representation. That question was best put by Paul Graham, another restlessly inventive photographer, when I interviewed him a few weeks ago: "How is this world? And, what are the new ways to find out?"

Now see this

The new issue of Photoworks magazine is a timely themed issue about photography and protest. It includes work by Immo Klink, whose series Crowd Control features extraordinary night photography of British riot police at work, as well as Stuart Griffiths's intriguing archive of grainy fly-on-the-wall images from his time with the paras in Northern Ireland.

Welcome back to the latest edition of TV Fanatic's Fringe Round Table!

Our Fringe critic, Carissa Pavlica, and fellow panelists Sean McKenna and Nick McHatton discuss this week's episode, "The Last Sam Weiss," in a Q&A below. Drop your own answers in the comments!

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Did the reality of Sam Weiss live up to what you have been expecting?

Carissa: After hearing the producers talk about him, I was surprised he was just a normal guy. I loved the direction he took in this episode and how he made me laugh. That bit with the museum card had me in stitches. So he has vast generational knowledge only...I hope there is enough there to make him a more prevalent character going forward. Best Sam episode yet.

Sean: Sam had always been portrayed as some mystical and all knowing person, something similar to The Observers. The fact that he turned out to be a man with just vast generational knowledge keeps his character and the show grounded. I’m pleased with how his character has turned out.

Nick: Well, the chalkboard told me not to trust him so I trusted the chalkboard! The chalkboard is a liar. Honestly, I was expecting more from him because of it.

What was your favorite scene of "The Last Sam Weiss?"

Carissa: Narrowing this episode down to one favorite is nearly impossible. I love Sean's choices. Great stuff. But, I'll go with Walter sharing with Olivia what he has learned about living with his damaged brain. That was so emotional, and really the first time Walter acknowledged that the damage done may have actually served him well. If it keeps him from becoming Walternate, it was the best thing that ever happened to him!

Sean: Peter walking out onto the balcony as the camera panned back to reveal the rapid lighting strikes. Not only was it visually cool, but it also illustrated just how dangerous and imminent the culminating confrontation with the two universes is headed towards. Oh, and Sam Weiss, patron member since ‘82, was a great moment as well.

Nick: The last few minutes of the episode were my absolute favorite.  Peter entering the machine and the journey he's taken with Olivia to get there. And then the flash forward, I never saw it coming, and I absolutely loved it. I was on the edge of my seat and my heart was racing. I couldn't get enough of it. It's been a very long time since an episode of television has gotten me that engaged.

Do you believe we will actually have replacement WTC buildings by the year 2021?

Carissa: I really don't, and it upsets me. I do love that these two episodes are taking place around the death of Bin Laden. Great timing. More so, I love the constant reminder that Fringe lays in our laps. If you watch, you aren't allowed to forget what a huge sacrifice was made on that day. Other shows (with the exception of Rescue Me) seem to steer clear of the memory.

Sean: That’s an interesting question, especially with the current news about Bin Laden. It’s hard to say but there was something pretty remarkable viewing another one standing in its place, along with the tablet dedicated to the memory of those lost on 9/11 exactly twenty years later. It really is something to never forget.

Nick: I would like to have something there by 2021. It's hard to imagine twenty years after the fact not having anything the replacements up.  Especially with Bin Laden killed this week.

Now that Olivia has "mastered" her telekinesis, do you think it will be used more often in future storylines?

Carissa: While I don't want to see her turn into Samantha Stevens from Bewitched or something, I think it could be used here and there to add a little humor to the more dire moments. Unless it really zaps her energy. I guess when you can pick up a spoon from across the room without your energy being zapped, walking over would be the better choice.

Sean: Perhaps it will pop up here and there in season 4, but I could almost see that a future storyline takes those powers away from her as well.

Nick: Maybe, although I don't feel like it's something the show necessarily needs.

It's one episode away. Your guess at the finale - what will happen, how do we move into season four (squeeee!)?

Carissa: I just don't know at this point. If I'm going to guess, I think Nick's scenario comes pretty close, but in a way to ensure the other universe remains in tact. Perhaps Peter's view of the future enables him to come up with a way to save both, and allow for interaction between the two that will facilitate restoring both worlds to health. I wonder if Peter will come back from the future with knowledge of Henry. There is no way he could destroy the other universe knowing his son is there. Now, there is also a part of me that wouldn't be at all upset if the show lived forever in the future. If Desperate Housewives can go five, why can't Fringe go 10?

Sean: There’s so many directions and possibilities that the show could take. I’m certain Fauxlivia will find a way to help the other universe. Will the entire show time jump to the future? I could almost see Peter attempting to find a way to course correct the events of the past and maintain both universes. Hopefully, Walternate meets his end, as he doesn’t seem to be looking for any sort of redemption or hope. As for season 4, I’m sure the repercussions of the finale will be key for what happens next. I’m just excited to see what actually takes place, especially with all the characters’ new haircuts.

Nick: This question has been sitting blank for a while now as I try to put together something better than "hnghh" for an answer. The best guess I can come up with is as Peter went forward in time he took out the alternate universe. By doing so, he sparked Walternate's need for revenge causing something dire to happen in the future. This will propel us into season four with Peter back in the present working with everyone else to try to make sure the future he saw doesn't happen.

ViewSonic ViewPad 10 gets Android update, By Ubergizmo. Top Stories : Motorola Xoom Review, BlackBerry Torch Review,

Penguin's Book Country is a Brand New Online Community For Genre Fiction Writers And Readers [image]This week Penguin Group (USA) announced the soft launch of Book Country, an online community where readers and writers can come together to read original fiction, post work or comments, and make a name for themselves. The free, multi-faceted site, led by Book Country President Molly Barton, Penguin's Director of Business Development, defines "genre fiction" as all the subgenres of romance, mystery, thriller, science fiction, and fantasy. The site is a creative and supportive space where writers and readers can give and receive constructive criticism, discover new books, discuss and share tips and experiences, and learn about the publishing industry. Book Country also offers agents, publishers and editors a place to discover new voices. Later this year, Book Country will offer self-publishing services for eBooks and print books. Though owned by Penguin Group (USA), Book Country includes books from publishers across  the industry on the Genre Map, and staff members from all publishers are welcome to participate. "We created Book Country because while writing and publishing sites have proliferated in recent years, none were designed by publishing experts to create a more valuable pathway forward for new writers," explained Book Country President Molly Barton. The new site has already gained widespread national attention. An article on the front page of The New York Times Arts section ran on launch day. Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch also covered Tuesday's soft launch of the site, as Book Country's traction in the genre fiction community is growing rapidly. Follow Book Country on Facebook and Twitter. Beloved Betty White's If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't) is the Talk of the Nation [image]The book everyone has been buzzing about has finally arrived. Beloved seven-time Emmy winner Betty White brings her wit and wisdom to fans throughout the country with G. P. Putnam's Sons May 3 publication of If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't), a collection of all new material that includes her thoughtful observations and humorous stories that are funny, sweet, and to the point—just like Betty. The media blitz begins with a wonderful feature by Frank Bruni in The New York Times Arts Section this Sunday, May 1, followed closely by another major feature with photos in USA Today on Monday, May 2. On publication day, Betty will be making the rounds to the top television shows starting with an interview on ABC's Good Morning America, then on to co-host the The View, and over to CBS' Late Show with David Letterman to deliver the "Top 10" list on Wednesday, May 4. Other major media coverage kicks off with a stellar lineup of print features running in Newsweek, Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, USA Weekend, Thomson Reuters, AARP online, and a Books-A-Million BookPage cover story. Additional national television appearances include PBS' Tavis Smiley Show, CNN's Joy Behar, and the "Gayle King Show" on OWN and SIRIUS XM radio. Tune in to hear Betty on NPR's Weekend Edition, The Takeaway, and Leonard Lopate Show, as well as the syndicated Joan Hamburg Show, and Mitch Albom on ABC Radio. She will also reach homes across nationwide via television and radio satellite tours that will hit top markets throughout the country. Look out for reviews and book coverage in Entertainment Weekly, Ladies' Home Journal, TV Guide Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Time Out New York, Chicago Tribune's RedEye, and New York Magazine's popular "Vulture" blog. Fans will have a chance to meet Betty White during a two-week national book signing tour in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that includes two on-stage conversations with Frank Bruni at TimesTalks in New York City and with actor Carl Reiner for Writers Bloc at The Writers Guild Theater in Los Angeles. Additional book signings will take place at Barnes & Noble in Lake Grove, Long Island, the Fifth Avenue store in New York City, and Skokie, IL, as well as Costco in Marina del Ray and Book Soup in Los Angeles. Janny Scott's A Singular Woman Draws Major National Media Coverage [image]Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother, is the subject of a deeply reported and researched biography, A Singular Woman, by award-winning, New York Times reporter Janny Scott.  Little is known about the fiercely independent, spirited woman who raised the current president of the United States. Through her exhaustive research, Scott uncovered the full breadth of Dunham's life.  This acclaimed book has captured national attention in advance of its release by Riverhead on May 3.  A major national media campaign launched with an excerpt from the book in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The piece ran as the cover story in the April 24th print edition of the magazine and was featured online on the Times' homepage last week. The online excerpt generated hundreds of comments and sparked a media frenzy, with blogs and websites across the country and all over the world picking it up, including Salon.com and New York Magazine. Salon called the excerpt "a tantalizing slice of what will likely become one of the most talked about books of the spring, and a compelling portrait of a woman whose unorthodox life would make for a compelling read even if her only son hadn't become the 44th president." On publication day, the author will appear on WHYY's Fresh Air, interviewed by Terry Gross; on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, in a live, in-studio interview; and on PRI's The Takeaway (one million listeners and airs on 50 stations nationwide). She will also be interviewed on PBS' The Charlie Rose Show and on WAMC FM's The Roundtable. In the following week, she will appear on C-SPAN's After Words. We've also scheduled interviews for Scott on Sirius XM's Bob Edwards and The Maggie Linton Show. Scott will also take part in a national tour, including appearances in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. On May 4, Scott is scheduled for an 18-20 city national radio satellite tour, followed by an 18-20 city national television satellite tour on May 5. Look for upcoming review coverage of A Singular Woman in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New York Times daily edition on May 3rd, USA Today, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Five Penguin Group (USA) Books Lead USA Today's Preview of "May Books Not to Miss" [image]USA Today's "May Books Preview," featured prominently in the Life section of Thursday's edition of the paper, was led by five books published by Penguin Group (USA). Betty White's If You Ask Me (And Of Course You Won't), on sale May 3 from Putnam, is the lead title among "books not to miss in May" in a full-page spread on celebrity memoirs and biographies. The Story of How I Became a Man by Chaz Bono, to be published by Dutton on May 10, is also featured on this page.  USA Today reporter Carol Memmott focused on ten fiction and nonfiction books not to miss in May, and ranked #1 is A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother by Janny Scott, which goes on sale from Riverhead on May 3. Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, being published May 3 by Viking, is #2.  The Immortal Story of Cleopatra: Queen of Kings by Maria Dahvana Headley, which goes on sale from Dutton on May 12, is #6.  Putnam and the Robert B. Parker Estate to Continue Publication of Parker's Top Best-Selling Series with New Authors [image]G. P. Putnam's Sons and the Robert B. Parker estate have come together to strike a deal that will allow Parker's top bestselling series, Spenser (39 novels since 1974) and Jesse Stone (9 novels since 1997), to continue in the hands of two new, highly respected and accomplished writers, Michael Brandman and Ace Atkins. Parker, who authored more than 60 novels between 1974 and 2010, most of them national best-sellers, passed away in January of 2010, after which his last few completed novels were published posthumously by Putnam. The final work, Sixkill, the 39th entry in the beloved Spenser series about the now-legendary Boston private detective who goes only by his surname, goes on sale May 3.   Joan Parker, Robert's widow, and his soul-mate since they met as teenagers in Massachusetts in the early 1950s, expressed her enthusiasm for the new arrangement with Putnam and the new authors: "I am delighted that the worlds of Spenser and Jesse Stone will live on in the capable, talented hands of such gifted writers," she stated.   Putnam President Ivan Held noted that "It is exciting to think that we can keep these two iconic characters that Bob invented going with the deft touches of our new authors, Michael Brandman and Ace Atkins under the eye of  Bob's longtime editor Chris Pepe. They have truly captured the voice that gave—and still gives—so many readers great pleasure." Putnam Executive Editor Chris Pepe recalled, "I started working with Bob Parker as a young editor more than twenty-three years ago. Although I was new to the publishing world, I knew Bob: he had long been one of my father's literary idols, and therefore became one of mine. How lucky for me, then, to work with him for all those years, on forty-seven incredible books. He was an absolute joy, and clearly very patient: he's the one who really taught me to be an editor, and so I owe him a tremendous debt. I'm thrilled that we have found two such talented writers to carry on Bob's work; they respect and understand the characters of Spenser and Jesse, and are ideal stewards to bring both series into the future." Michael Brandman is a long-established Hollywood producer and screenwriter who, with actor Tom Selleck, both co-wrote and produced the CBS television movies featuring Selleck as Parker's creation Jesse Stone, a small-town Massachusetts police chief, in such films as Stone Cold, Night Passage, Sea Change, and Death in Paradise. Ace Atkins, who will be continuing as the new author of the bestselling Spenser series, is already well-established with Putnam, having authored a number of well-received novels based on historical crimes and criminals, including White Shadow, Infamous, and Wicked City.  Atkins' next Putnam book, The Ranger, the first entry in a new series about Army Ranger Quinn Colson, goes on sale June 9.   See our full catalog of books by Robert B. Parker. Ace Editor in Chief Ginjer Buchanan, Ace Authors Alastair Reynolds and Allen M. Steele, and Viking/Penguin author Lev Grossman Nominated for Hugo Awards [image]The Hugo Awards, which are among the most prestigious awards in speculative fiction, are presented every year to highlight the most interesting, creative, and culturally significant works and achievements in  science fiction and fantasy writing. The 2011 Hugo Award nominations were announced on Sunday, April 24rd and Berkley's very own Ginjer Buchanan has been nominated for the "Best Editor, Long Form" Hugo Award. She is pictured here, on the left, with author Charlaine Harris. Buchanan has been an influential member of the Ace editorial team for more than 27 years, rising to the rank of Editor in Chief in 2007. She has edited some of the imprint's best -known writers, including Charlaine Harris, Charles Stross, and Robert Sawyer, as well as up and coming authors like Taylor Anderson. Joining Buchanan among this year's nominees are Ace authors Alastair Reynolds and Allen M. Steele, as well as Viking/Penguin's Lev Grossman. Reynolds is nominated for "Best Novella" for Troika, with fellow Ace author Steele nominated for "Best Novelette" for The Emperor of Mars. Grossman, author of The Magicians, is nominated for a John W. Campbell Award for "Best New Writer." The Hugo Award ceremony will take place at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada this August. Click here to see the full list of nominees. Please join us in congratulating our colleagues! The Penguin Press Acquires Pulitzer Prize Winner Ron Chernow's Biography of Ulysses S. Grant and a New Book on Innovation by California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom Ann Godoff, President and Publisher of The Penguin Press, announced this week the acquisition of new books by Pulitzer Prize winning-author Ron Chernow and California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom will show how citizens can use social media, technology and available government data to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and redesign government in their own image. This solution-driven book suggests that we are at the dawn of a revolutionary change in the way government and the people interact. "Gavin Newsom's employing what America does best—innovation—and using it to call for many local revolutions that will overcome the epidemic gridlock in our government bureaucracy," Godoff said. "Just as Apple's app store succeeded by tapping into the ingenuity of ordinary Americans, so can government harness the collective intelligence of citizens to help solve our greatest challenges," said Newsom. Publication is planned for Winter 2013. Ron Chernow, this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his magisterial biography of George Washington, moves from that towering figure of the Revolutionary War to write a sweeping and comprehensive biography of his counterpart in the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant. A publication date has not yet been determined. Read an excerpt from Washington: A Life. Bestselling Author C.J. Box Offers Readers His First eSpecial, The Master Falconer, Featuring Series Leads Joe Pickett and Nate Romanowski [image]This week, bestselling Putnam author C.J. Box released his first Penguin eSpecial, a short story called The Master Falconer. This is the second recent big first for Box, who recently made his first appearance on The New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list with Cold Wind (Putnam). In the words of the Dallas Morning News, "With each new book, the New York Times best-selling author is cementing a national reputation as one of today's most authentic chroniclers of the American West."   The West is not the way it's portrayed in the movies—most of the time. But when a dangerous foreigner in a private jet brings trouble for master falconer Nate Romanowski and his trusted friend, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, it may just be time to Cowboy Up. Box is the author of 11 Joe Pickett novels and three stand-alone thrillers. He has won the Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe and Barry Awards, as well as the French Prix Calibre .38, and has been an Edgar Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, all for the Pickett novels. His first stand-alone novel, Blue Heaven, won the Edgar Award for best novel of 2009. This eSpecial short story is an exciting new addition to the Joe Pickett series hailed by People Magazine as one that "combines harrowing adrenaline rushes with complex morality, humor, and a landscape described so vibrantly it seems to have a life all its own."   Tarcher Author's Ten-City "Hair Tour" Promotes The Internet is a Playground and Raises Funds for National Children's Cancer Society [image]Did you know that a lock of Justin Bieber's hair is currently on tour—with a bodyguard no less? Frenzied fans are lining up across the nation to get their picture taken with Bieber's hair for one dollar, with the proceeds going toward tsunami relief. Though Bieber's hair may not be stopping at bookstores, author David Thorne's hair will. His book, The Internet Is a Playground (Tarcher), is being promoted through a ten-city David Thorne Hair Tour to create buzz for the bitingly funny book, which has already pre-sold more than 2,000 copies. [image]According to Thorne's editor, Michael Solana: "Thorne declared war on Justin Bieber last month with his site HelpMeSellMoreBooksThanJustinBieber.com. A 10-city tour of his hair was kind of inevitable." Solana's enthusiasm is clear in the photo at left. A lock of Thorne's hair will spend three days at each participating store, and for every store on the tour route, Tarcher will donate $200 to the National Children's Cancer Society. The $1 fee customers pay to have their picture taken with the hallowed lock will also be donated to this cause. In addition to this unusual tour, which was mentioned in GalleyCat and will be in Shelf Awareness soon, the book was featured in the May issue of Wired and excerpted for their iPad app. It will be reviewed on BoingBoing, featured on PopMatters.com in a Q&A that will also run in papers via McClatchy, excerpted on nerve.com, and the subject of a Washington Post Live chat. Wired writes: "There is usually a fine line between genius and insanity, but in this case it has become very blurred. Some of the funniest and most clever writing I have read in years." Karen White's On Folly Beach Chosen as Finalist for The Southern Independent Booksellers Association 2011 Book Awards, as She Tours for her New NAL Novel, The Beach Trees [image]NAL author Karen White's bestselling novel On Folly Beach has been chosen as a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association 2011 Book Awards in the fiction category. Winners will be announced the first week of July. White sets off on a twenty-city tour next week for her new novel, The Beach Trees (New American Library Trade Paperback Original), travelling to such cities as Atlanta, Savannah, Charlotte, Charleston, Memphis, Lexington, Dallas, Houston, and Philadelphia for book signings. While on tour White will appear on WLMT-TV's "Eyewitness News this Morning" in Memphis, and on Clear Channel Radio in Savannah, GA, and she will be featured in local newspapers and magazines such as the Atlanta Intown Paper, Southern Seasons, and Southern Lady. The Beach Trees will also be reviewed in numerous local newspapers such as The Pilot and The Herald-Sun, while the author participates in a twenty-website blog tour for even more review coverage. [image]The Beach Trees is Penguin's May pick for the "What the World is Reading" program (penguin.com/whattheworldisreading). Carefully selected to introduce readers to new voices in fiction, "What the World is Reading" will host an online chat with White in May. The book will be featured on a special Facebook page (facebook.com/whattheworldisreading), and it will also be included in a promotional sampler and brochure that goes out to all key accounts. In addition, The Beach Trees will be a July BlogHer book club selection and it will receive reviews and attention on BlogHer.com, in newsletters, and on the BlogHer social networks. Read an excerpt from The Beach Trees. Military Science Fiction Reaches New Heights—Aboard NASA'S Endeavour [image]More specifically, the newest book from bestselling author Jack Campbell will reach a height of approximately 140 miles straight up. Published this week, The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught (Ace Books) is headed to outer space this Friday aboard the space shuttle Endeavour on NASA's STS-134 mission, which launched today. US Air Force Colonel Michael Fincke will bring a copy of The Lost Fleet with him when he embarks on a fourteen-day mission. Col. Fincke, who will be serving as Mission Specialist aboard Endeavour, has already read the six previous books in Campbell's series. In an email to Campbell and Ace Books, Fincke said that he is eager to "read the next installment of Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet while on the space shuttle."    Because of strict weight limits on the shuttle, Fincke requested that the latest installment in Campbell's The Lost Fleet series be sent to him in a digital format. Ace Books emailed a copy to Col. Fincke on the book's pub date, April 26th. The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught is the newest book in Campbell's bestselling military science fiction series—and the first to be published in hardcover. Campbell, who also writes as John Hemry, has a few book signings set up in May, including stops at a few military bases near San Diego and Washington, DC. For more information, visit his website at www.johnghemry.com. Read an excerpt from The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught. Ranger's Apprentice: Book Ten: The Emperor Of Nihon-Ja [image]John Flanagan's international bestselling Ranger's Apprentice series comes to a close this week with the publication of the final book in the series, Ranger's Apprentice: Book Ten: The Emperor Of Nihon-Ja. The popular series, which currently has more than three million copies in print, has attracted fans across the globe with its edge-of-your-seat adventures of Will, an orphan who becomes an apprentice Ranger, and his master, Halt, as they strive to keep their beloved kingdom of Araluen safe from threats and traitors. The series is so popular that it has not only been optioned for film but also adapted as a popular literary summer camp for kids. In its thrilling conclusion which The Wall Street Journal calls "[an] exciting mix of adventure, peril, wit and romance," a kingdom teeters on the edge of chaos, victory lies in the hands of an inexperienced group of fighters, and it's anybody's guess who will make the journey home to Araluen. John Flanagan is currently on a nine-city tour visiting schools and stores in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Phoenix, Houston, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York City. Recent and upcoming media coverage includes Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Scripps Howard News Service, Creator's Syndicate, Savannah Morning News, San Jose Mercury News, Harrisburg Patriot News, Austin American-Statesman, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Wilmington News Journal, Bay Area Magazine, Mediabistro.com, and much more. Listen to an excerpt from The Emperor Of Nihon-Ja on audio! New Next Week A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, And The Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz (The Penguin Press, 5/2) [image]In A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, And The Things That Really Matter, literary critic William Deresiewicz looks back at his youth and eloquently explains how everything he learned in life he learned from reading Jane Austen. Anchoring his recollections in Austen's six great novels—Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abby, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility—Deresiewicz goes novel by novel, lesson by lesson, to marry the things Austen has to teach us with how he learned them in his own life. For the author, these six books challenge some of our most essential beliefs about the way we live: beliefs about growing up, making mistakes, and being happy. Look for upcoming reviews in the Boston Globe, Slate, Seattle Times, and Bloomberg. Features are also coming on Huffington Post, WowWow.com, and MarieClaire.com. An op-ed will also appear in The Wall Street Journal. How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley (Riverhead Trade Paperback, 5/3) [image]The paperback of New York Times-bestselling author Sloane Crosley's How Did You Get This Number drops on May 3, and the media definitely has her number. Crosley will appear as a pop culture panelist on The Joy Behar Show on May 19th. Online interviews include Interview magazine, Vanity Fair, Blackbook, and The Economist. Following an event at New York's McNally Jackson on May 4, Crosley hits the road on a national tour that includes events in Minneapolis, Miami, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. Local broadcast media includes "The Fox Morning News" in Minneapolis, KING-TV's "New Day Northwest" in Seattle and KXAN-TV's "News at Noon" in Austin, with print interviews running in The Miami Herald, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Brooklyn Paper, and The East Bay Express. An oldie but goodie, Sloane Crosley comments on why question marks are dangerous in this episode of The Literary Life. Growing at the Speed of Life: A Year in the Life of My First Kitchen Garden by Graham Kerr (Perigee, 3/1) [image]Former "Galloping Gourmet" Graham Kerr, author of the new Growing at the Speed of Life: A Year in the Life of My First Kitchen Garden, has been busy this spring. While on tour in March, Kerr travelled to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco for book signings and received feature coverage in USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, a cooking segment on Rachael Ray (which you can watch here), a national radio satellite tour to over fifteen markets, and interviews on Portland's KATU "AM Northwest" and San Francisco's KGO "View From the Bay." This week Kerr will head to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books for a cooking demonstration and book signing. He will demonstrate various ways one can use yogurt cheese in their meals and talk about his spring gardening plans. Following the festival, Kerr will return to New York to tape his second appearance on Rachael Ray for an episode focused on "food legends." Growing at the Speed of Life takes readers through the first year in Kerr's kitchen garden, sharing lessons learned from his circle of local knowledge providers. From putting together a greenhouse to planting his first seeds and harvesting and sharing his first crop with others in need, Kerr provides a tour through his gardening adventures and profiles sixty readily available garden vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Read an excerpt from Growing at the Speed of Life.

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One of the great problems of being a freelancer is the solitude. It’s difficult at times to sit in front of your keyboard and do what you’ve got to do without any human interaction. There’s no water cooler to talk around, no office gossip to catch up on and no one else to fill you in on what happened on last night’s episode of The Family Guy. The other issue is that renting a traditional office space is expensive, but without one, some clients may think that your business is unprofessional.

The solution to both problems is a coworking facility. The concept is pretty simple: Put together a group of people who all freelance, rent out a desk for a low price, put in shared facilities such as a conference room and receptionist, and you’re good to go. This keeps the costs down for renters, gives you a professional environment to meet clients and provides human interaction. It’s the best of all worlds, right?

For the most part, yes, there are many benefits to coworking. But just like Luke and the Force, there is also a dark side to coworking, which is something you should be aware of before entering into any agreement. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the good and the bad components of coworking.

The Benefits of Coworking

Human Interaction

Working in your pajamas sounds like a great idea at first, but it gets old after a few weeks. Having people to talk to is pretty nice, and it lets you get out of that comfort zone that beginning freelancers tend to sink into. As an added bonus, maybe you’ll make a new friend, or meet someone to collaborate with.

Better Facilities

Most freelancers start off with a laptop and a discount card at Starbucks for the free Wi-Fi. Coworking facilities often have photocopiers, coffee machines, high-speed Internet, a receptionist and a conference room, making your favorite booth at the coffee shop look outdated. It also saves you money, because outfitting your home office with this equipment gets pricey quick.

Job Leads

Ever been in the right place at the right time? Imagine you’re at a coworking facility, working as a graphic designer. One of the other renters is working on a project and needs something drawn up real quick, but they don’t know how to do it. Just by being in the same location as other professionals, you’ll pull in jobs that wouldn’t have been available otherwise.

Events & Mingling

Some coworking facilities have mixers and events weekly or monthly, making it easy to meet new people and make new contacts. There may also be idea nights where everyone sits in the room, shares a concept they need help with, and then the room responds. This helps not only with productivity, but with your networking as well.

The Drawbacks of Coworking

Working With Jerks

It’s not possible to get along with everybody, and it seems like there’s always going to be a jerk in every office. Spend some time trying out your new spot before you sign an agreement, that way you can feel out the scene first.

Inconvenient Hours

Everyone works on their own schedules, and that doesn’t always jive with what the coworking facility offers. For example, you may be an early riser, ready to go at 8 am every day. But if your preferred spot is only open from 10-6, then you’ll be spending 2 hours at home before you can even start at the new office. This changes from facility to facility — and some give you a key if you sign a lease — so take that in mind before you pick your spot.

Distractions

Some coworking buildings offer private offices with doors that shut out the noise, but more often than not, it’s an open floor plan with desks and cubicles placed throughout the room. This means you’ll be able to hear every conversation that everyone is having, and that can distract you from getting work done. Conversely, you could be the bad guy, always taking phone calls and talking too loud. Find a spot that fits your needs and privacy requirements.

Competition

If you’re working at a coworking facility made for graphic designers and you’re also a graphic designer, then your competition is in the room with you at all times. You might find it inspiring to spur friendly competition between your mates, but when they get an important job over you, that can be crushing.

Tips For Picking Your Perfect Coworking Space

Try Before You Buy

Many coworking facilities offer drop-in rates, where you can just pop in for a few hours and pay a couple of bucks to try it out. Do this for a week or two before you decide on settling in, that way you can see if you mesh well with your coworkers or if the facility is all its cracked up to be.

Find Kindred Spirits — Or Don’t

If you find yourself inspired by watching other great people create, maybe your ideal location is with other people in the field. Find other writers, web designers, etc. that share the same line of work, this way you can collaborate on big projects. Alternatively, if you want to be the only person in your field in the room, go for a coworking space that has people that could need your talents. That way you’re a valued commodity, and you get more business as a result. Step outside of the box to optimize your potential.

Convenience Over Necessity

You don’t need to work at a coworking space per se, so make sure it works with what you do. Verify that the hours and location are to your liking, because driving two hours a day just to work for 30 minutes isn’t convenient or productive. Find something that’s affordable as well, because there’s no point in locking in with a lease if you’re unsure you’ll be able to make the rent.

Go With Your Gut

Pick a spot that makes you feel comfortable. There’s no reason to sign up for the hip new coworking space in town if you’re worried about getting mugged on your way in, and if you have a weird feeling about the space, don’t do it. Trust yourself to make the right decision, and go to another spot if possible.

Final Thoughts on Coworking

The rise of the coworking industry has been a good thing for freelancers, that’s for sure. But before you blindly jump into a long-term contract with a facility because they look pretty, take some time to research your options. This place will become the home for your business, so there’s no reason not to do your due diligence before you sign up.

After all, depending on your location there are plenty of options for coworking facilities, tailored for all sorts of different occupations. And if you can’t find one, start an informal one yourself with a group of friends. Just pick a spot and meet up every day to share and trade ideas. After all, you likely started freelancing so you could be your own boss, but there’s no reason why you can’t have a few coworkers as well.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Ken Hawkins.

  This is one fantastic flyte of wine from my friends at Ribera Vineyards in Oregon. I’ve paired these fine Willamette Valley wines with some ‘on the fire’ family f avorites from Africa – I’m thinking this IS the best of both worlds! ... blog entry by Deborah Gee on BoozeMonkey

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By Adelle Havard

In myth, the fox is better known for its cunning rather than its courage. Becoming a symbol of trickery, deceit and even having its name attributed to false prophets in the bible.

Yet the bad press received is counter to the foxes natural strengths and abilities! Living on a diet of scavenged scraps while always remaining one step ahead of its many predators, are just two examples of this animals ability to adapt, and above all, survive.

A member of the canine family, it is understandable to see how the fox has been able to colonise in so many parts of the world. As a relation of dogs, wolves and coyotes, this animal naturally sits on the boundaries of civilization. However this domestication has meant that while some species have thrived in the urban jungle, others have not.

This species success story is therefore best seen out of the cities, and into the remote habitats where the variations in their biology can really be seen/appreciated. Although you may have to look hard, as these ‘true foxes’ of the deserts, mountains, tundra’s and frozen worlds are kings of being coy.

Of the 37 species referred to as foxes, only 12 actually belong to the Vulpes genus of true foxes; and one that fits into this category but also that of its own genus, is the Arctic fox. Surviving in a subzero temperatures, this compact fox has evolved to have short ears, short legs, and incredibly dense fur. This canine’s unique physical development does not stop there. With its footpads also covered with thick hair, it enables this small creature to hunt all year round, by protecting it from the severe cold and even providing traction on ice.

Moving further along the evolutionary scale, the compact body and dense fur can be seen again but in a very different environment. The Tibetan fox is characterized by its soft, thick red fur and long bushy tail with white tip. Which is essential for battling against the fierce Tibetan winds that come from both the barren grasslands and rocky mountainous areas, that sees temperatures drop to -30C! Not an easy life, even out of the arctic.

 

The story continues on the BBC Earth blog.

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This morning, we noted that Google was getting ready to release an OS X version of the Chrome Canary build. Sure enough, just hours later, here it is. Canary is the pre-Dev build of Chrome meant for users who enjoy testing new things early and often and don't mind some bugs and hiccups along the way. It's meant to be run alongside the more stable builds of Chrome, so you can have the best of both worlds.

Sporty and fashionable, perfect for the girl who likes to sparkle but not too much. This PUMA Girls’ 7-16 White & Turquoise Fashion Tee is the best of both worlds. The raglan sleeves, and comfortable cotton construction keep it sporty, and the rainbow and sparkle PUMA logo and “Flex Your Style” print make it girly. With cap sleeves and a scoop neck, she’ll be stylish and comfortable in this top. Originally $22, this top is now only $7.99 at Carson Pirie Scott. At press time it’s available in sizes S, M and L.

Despite its status as a "classic" action RPG franchise, with roots dating back to 1987, I personally had never had any experience with the series until hearing about Ys Typing Tutor in 2006.  Nearly five years later, the first two games in the series are seeing another rerelease (a DS remake was released in 2009), this time on the PSP.  Going into this, I fostered no fond childhood memories, and I intended to judge it as a game released for the PSP in 2011.

Otherwise, all I can say before the jump is that I wish I had stuck with just Ys Typing Tutor.

Ys I & II Chronicles (PSP)
Publisher: XSEED Games
Developer: Nihon Falcom
Released: February 22, 2011
Price: $29.99 (retail), $24.99 (download)

Before discussing the real bummers of Ys I & II Chronicles, perhaps it would be better to start with the slightly higher points.  One thing about Ys that is unusual among long standing JRPG franchises is that the characters and events from previous games actually carry over in one big overarching plot.  This works in Ys's favor, as the plot itself is pretty unspectacular; the story follows Adol Christin, a mysterious mute redheaded swordsman who washes up on an island looking for adventure, and eventually ends up saving the world from a great evil power.  It's about as standard a JRPG tale can be, but the fact that it carries through between the first and second game is refreshing.

One thing that Ys II does better than Ys I is present charming dialogue.  While the first game takes itself very seriously, the second seems a bit more lighthearted, with a few goofy, fourth wall-breaking lines.  Every demon in Ys II has a string of text, and some are enough to bring out a smirk.

For games that were originally released over twenty years ago, the development team did an adequate job with updating the graphics and sound.  The visuals are crisp and detailed, though the art direction is fairly generic.  Admittedly, it is pretty entertaining to watch defeated enemies explode into a pile of gore and armor pieces.  The music, which is lauded as being some of the best in the genre, sounds fine for what it is.  Most tracks didn't really strike a chord with me, so to speak.  A couple of the songs laden with cheesy electric guitar were a bit jarring and out of place for the fantasy setting, and one in particular (the overworld theme in Ys I) was so obnoxious it had me turning the sound off.  For those interested in the music, it should be noted that the retail version comes packed with a soundtrack CD, while the downloadable version does not.

The last strong point that Ys I & II Chronicles has -- and some may consider this a slight against it -- is that for JRPGs, they are both relatively short.  I finished each game with about ten hours clocked on the timer, although truthfully, it was probably closer to twelve each considering the number of times I died and reloaded from an earlier save.  That said, anybody who enjoys the games enough can find some replay value, as there are multiple difficulty settings and a boss rush time attack mode.

The real negative elements in Ys I & II Chronicles stem from the fact that these are old games with old designs.  Remakes like this can update the cosmetic elements, but little was done to update the way the game plays.

Combat is the first real obvious sticking point.  Rather than having an attack button, Adol will automatically attack demons that he runs into, and depending on his angle of attack, they may or may not retaliate.  It sounds unique, and it saves a lot of time and effort, but it makes for some of the blandest combat I have ever experienced.  It essentially amounts to Adol humping the demons until one of them explodes, except after the first hundred or so it isn't nearly as cool as it sounds.

Ys II does improve on the mechanic by giving Adol the power of magic, so instead of mercilessly running into demons all day, he can shoot a fireball at them instead.  Indeed, since the fireball is the only attack magic, it is used to defeat almost every boss in Ys II.  To the game's credit, the bosses actually change things up enough (some make the game feel more like a bullet hell shmup) to be briefly entertaining, but aside from the boss rush mode, they are few and far between.

The way magic, inventory, and equipment work is also a bit puzzling.  For the most part, Adol can freely change which item to have equipped at any given time.  However, during boss battles, when he needs the ability most, he is locked into whatever setup he had when he entered the room.  Where there could have been some strategy of switching rings mid-battle depending on the circumstances, there is not.  Even more aggravating are the health items.  In Ys I, Adol can't even use a healing herb during a boss battle (the one time he would need to), and in Ys II, he can't switch between the different healing items that have various effects.

Another gameplay element that just doesn't fly today is in the level design.  Although the game worlds aren't technically big, they are infuriatingly confusing.  Most dungeons are frustratingly convoluted mazes, with pointless dead ends and different sections that are visually indistinguishable from one another.  This problem is compounded by the fact that there is no in-game map to reference.  It seems like it would have been a pretty easy thing to implement, but then, that would probably cut gameplay time down by half, since the player wouldn't be wasting so much time unnecessarily revisiting areas simply because navigating the world is so cumbersome.

Short as Ys I & II may be for RPGs, they do still feel padded to make them longer.  Like many older games, the player is given very little instruction at times, and must stumble upon the desired solution by using every possible inventory item and exploring every little nook and cranny.  The developers' need to artificially increase the length is most apparent when climbing the twenty-story final dungeon in Ys I, only to get to the top to find out that the door is locked, and Adol must backtrack down to the tenth floor in order to get the unlocking crystal from an NPC he has already talked to.  Except, of course, the game doesn't explicitly say that's what needs to be done, just that the door is locked and that someone somewhere may be able to help.

Also, since Adol can only carry a handful of healing items at a time, most healing is done with relics that automatically regenerate health while standing still.  Regenerating health isn't a terrible concept on its own, and in fact Ys would be even more frustrating without it, but it happens so slowly and damage can be so severe that it feels like every few minutes in a dungeon, the player has to stop and just stare at nothing for twenty seconds before continuing on.

When it comes down to it, the few infrequent high points where Ys I & II Chronicles does something charming with the dialogue or engaging with the boss fights simply does not make up for the majority of the games being abysmal journeys through uninteresting labyrinths with little direction on what to do or where to go.  The only people I can imagine enjoying this rerelease are either nostalgic fans of the original games, or fans of the newer games who want to learn about Adol's earlier journeys.  And for both of those cases, they probably already checked out the DS remake that came out two years ago.  Most everybody else will want to steer clear of this.

Score: 3.0 -- Poor (3s went wrong somewhere along the line. The original idea might have promise, but in practice the game has failed. Threatens to be interesting sometimes, but rarely.)

Peep-toe shoes with a little kick! These gorgeous Nickels Dacey Heels feature two different textures, giving your outfits some depth. With a reptile printed faux-leather upper accented with a faux-patent leather heel cap and heel these shoes are perfect to wear with your pencil skirt to the office and then with your mini-skirt out at night. The bow detail at the vamp gives these shoes a feminine edge, so you get the best of both worlds, wild and feminine, and for only $19.99! Originally $49.99, you’ll save 60% at Famous Footwear. At press time they were available in Black in sizes 6, 6.5 and 7.5-10.

So, Rachael Flatt found out shortly before the world championships began that she had a stress fracture in her right foot.  It became obvious through her competition (she came in 12th at worlds) that the problem affected her ability to do the jumps that use the right toe pick (for her, since she lands on the right foot), flip and lutz, based on how she was mostly unable to do those jumps cleanly at worlds. 

Since then, Flatt and her coach, Tom Zakrajsek, have been under fire for having her compete when it seems clear she was unable to skate well due to injury.  Phil Hersh has some updates on the situation. 

Among the quotes in the article from Flatt and her coach:

Zakrajsek:  ``Rachael has been treated by Dr. (Bill) Moreau at the OTC (Olympic Training Center) in Colorado Springs this whole season. She skated because she was able to do both clean SP and LP programs and all of her elements necessary in order to compete well and help the US women earn 3 spots. Rachael decided to compete after consulting with her parents, myself and her doctor.''

And this is what Flatt had said about the injury and her conditions after both the short and long programs, as transcribed from audio recordings by U.S. Figure Skating:

Saturday's long program:   ``I was in a lot of pain. I have a stress fracture in my tibia. That was not too much fun. I tried to do the best I could at this point with how I was feeling. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good and certainly wasn’t close to my best. I tried to push through it. I didn’t find out what it was until last Friday so there wasn’t really much time to do much. I came here and tried to do what I could. . .I’ll take a month off to let this thing heal.''

Perhaps they thought she could power through and the adrenaline would take her where she needed to be?  It's pretty unfortunate since several of our other options (even an erratic Mirai Nagasu) would have likely placed low enough for the U.S. to finally get back a third world championships spot. Although, come to think of it, all of our other ladies would have been in off-season mode for at least a couple of months now and maybe they wouldn't have been prepared at all.

There is also the timing of Flatt realizing this only a few days before worlds began.  I guess it was not too late to pull out and allow the USFSA to send Nagasu, but it was probably a whirlwind - I wonder if the decision to drop out was ever considered?

It's hard to say what should have happened since I'm looking at this in the hindsight of seeing Flatt do incredibly poorly at the worlds.  And hey, in her defense, our healthy skaters have often finished far worse than she did.  BUT, she was seemingly physically unable to perform well, although her coach contends otherwise.  If she knew that going in, then she shouldn't have competed.  And we can't know what the real truth is because we weren't there with her as she practiced in the week or two before the event.  Sad turn of events for Flatt and unfortunate ending of the U.S. ladies season.

As you probably know (or have guessed by now) my dream job/career would be to own my own nursery. I've thought about different ways to do this and researched quite a few options. Ideally I would work from home and be able to produce plants for retail nurseries or landscapers. That dream is still a long way off at this point but I tried something of an experiment this past weekend, we had a yard sale, and I tried to sell a few plants.

Saturday, the day of the garage sale, was gorgeous. A cool crisp morning - jacket weather, led to a warm and sunny late morning and afternoon. People came by at a regular pace, looking for bargains and deals. One person asked if I had guns and knives - nope not here. Another person was looking for buttons. Another yardsaler was looking for patio furniture - closer to my goods but still not plants. I met people who claimed they would kill plants - even monarda and mint. You really have to try to kill those two plants! I even met people who were from Alabama visiting a sister who lived in our neighborhood while they were without power from the terrible tornadoes they suffered last week. I hope you'll join me in thinking and praying for those people who lost their loved ones and homes in that disaster.

I met lots of people, but no one who really wanted to buy plants from a yard sale. One person did come and buy a few plants who heard of my sale from the one advertisement I put out (a small message to our local garden club). That was neat since he actually lived in a house with a garden and pond I've admired for a while now. He has over 600 varieties of daylilies! I think his purchase was more to be nice to a fellow gardener than to buy plants for himself.


What was my grand total for the day on plants? $14! I'm sure glad I don't have to feed my family on that income! I'm not disappointed in the least, far from it really. I learned a few things that day and even came up with some ideas for the future that I might explore.

What did I learn? 

• First, garage sales are not the ideal venue. People are looking for stuff - not plants. That doesn't necessarily mean they won't buy plants but if it's not on their list they are less likely to consider buying it. I think a plant sale out of the yard could work, I've heard several stories about those who have been able to make a god side income with it but a sale in conjunction with a garage sale isn't the best of both worlds. Different types of customers looking for different things. 
• Second, the right venue is important. A craft fair might be better than a garage sale but obviously a real nursery would bring in people specifically looking for plants. One day maybe!
• Third, reaching the right crowd is paramount. I didn't advertise a plant sale at all. I mentioned it to the garden club but only the night before and realistically I couldn't expect anyone to come on such short notice.  The community yard sale advertised in all the local papers but a specific plant sale ad might have done wonders, then again maybe not. Contacting Master Gardener programs and other garden clubs might have been an option but at this point my plant selection was limited and I didn't want to get over my head.
• Lastly, a beautiful day after several really awful rainy days probably keeps gardeners at home in their gardens! When the sun is shining I need to garden, don't you? Make hay while the sun shines! 

It was fun to try and I might do so again in the future - only modified. Good planning, proper advertising, and a nice variety of plants are not only necessary but paramount to success.

A journalist for ages, and a "maman poule" (mother hen) for forever, Erzsi Deàk launched Hen & Ink Literary when a golden egg presented itself in the guise of Siobhan Curham's Dear Dylan in November 2010.

In her earlier incarnations, Erzsi covered fashion and children's features from Alaska to San Francisco to Paris. She has tramped the Alaska Pipeline looking for environmental problems, worked as a camp counselor, managing the craft hut, and always as a writer.

In addition to writing about flowering spaces and urban fowl, Erzsi scouts for great literary works for the French publishers, Editions de La Martinière Jeunesse and Le Seuil Jeunesse, part of the La Martinière Groupe. She also edits the SCBWI Bulletin "Here, There, Everywhere" column that shines a light on children's books around the world.

But her bright and shiny project is Hen & Ink Literary and her favorite food may very well be most things starting with A, or at least artichokes and avocados.

What led you to specialize in youth literature? Could you give us a snapshot of your career?

Whether working in a bookstore and spending all my earned income on children's books (I might possibly have been the store's best client...), studying children's lit at the University of Oregon, or writing my own stories, I have always been attracted and involved in children's books on some level.

Risking the vampire analogies, this was definitely a vein of literature I tapped into early on! And that was before YA officially existed.

Prior to my job at the bookstore, I bought out the Scholastic Book Club's pregnant-girl books -- all of them (think: Mr. & Mrs. Bo Jo Jones by Ann Head (Signet, 1968); Too Bad About the Haines Girl by Zoa Sherburne (William Morrow, 1967); My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel (HarperTrophy, 1969)-- those were the days, eh!?

Now we have doom and gloom/shadows and darkness, and in those days it was the ideally vicarious thrill of someone else's mistakes in broad daylight (and The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (Viking, 1967)) that provided the shiver. But I digress.

My career has been very outside the box. While working at the bookstore, I also worked at the Fairbanks News-Miner as the Youth Page Editor. Then I took advantage of that money-making machine, the Alaska Pipeline.

I worked in television after college (NBC in New York) and was thankful to escape to the Bay Area, where I worked in advertising before moving to France. There, I wrote articles on the fashion world for small rags in the Bay Area (my front page article for the San Jose Mercury-News Travel Section was locked in the post office in the Marais for a couple of weeks due to one of the endless strikes in France; needless to say, the deadline came and went and so, sadly, did my Mercury-News career).

After a stint of price reporting on the petro-chemical industry and some freelance copywriting, I found myself permanently in Paris. In 1996, I launched the SCBWI France chapter, and in 2001 became the international rep for the organization, growing the international presence to some 28 territories and sponsoring projects like the U.K.'s Undiscovered Voices project and eventually organizing and running the SCBWI Bologna conference.

In 2008, I stepped aside to let Kathleen Ahrens and Angela Cerrito run with the international baton, and in 2009, I teamed up with La Martiniere Groupe, building their new DLMJ list of imported titles. Today, I still work with them on two imprints, DLMJ and Le Seuil Jeunesse.

And then came Dear Dylan. I'd been thinking about agenting for 20+ years, but being in Paris and having a resume that wasn't exactly a straight ladder, I'd hesitated.

But no more! Response has been very supportive, and we're clucking happily here at Hen & Ink.

What inspired you to become a literary agent?

I've always been an advocate for others (in high school I actually wanted to be a labor negotiator!), so agenting is an extension of this. Being an agent allows me to shout about projects and people I love but to also work with said projects and people to get them to that "lovable" point.

Working only as a consultant and scout with the French publisher, I missed the pulse of hand-on editorial work. Agenting allows me to fluff my mother hen feathers and sharpen my red pencil.

Why found your own agency instead of joining an existing one?

I'd happily have joined an agency a few years ago, but after working independently and across various oceans, it wasn't likely to happen.

It's like the actress who wants to play Scarlet and dresses like Dorothy for the audition: she won't get the role of Scarlet, she might get the role of Dorothy.

Imaginations can be limited, so if on paper, you look one way, many won't stretch to see you might be that square peg/round hole mix.

How does Hen & Ink stand out from other literary agencies? What makes it special?

I like to say that Hen & Ink is a literary studio with a twist. We aim to work in the traditional publishing arena, but also to encourage and develop work across cultural borders, genres, and media, bringing my 25+ years experience on the international stage, connecting individuals and companies with those around the globe who can make things happen – no matter where you find yourself.

I meet often with publishers in the U.S. and U.K. and aggressively market domestic and foreign rights, attending the Bologna, London and Frankfurt rights fairs. I see Hen & Ink as an opportunity to push the boundaries of our ever-changing transmedia world and connecting people across borders and genres. I'm particularly excited about our growing partnerships, a loose consortium of companies and individuals there to meet the needs of our clients.

(Partners include SheepSpot Creative, which creates book trailers and more, and Raab Associates, which specializes in children's-YA book marketing and publicity.)

How long have you been in publishing? In your view, how has the industry changed?

Depends on what you consider "in publishing." As Richard Nash recently said at the Writer's Digest conference in January, "The business of writing is the business of reading."

I'd say that I've always been in it, either as a reader, bookseller, writer, editor, networker, editorial consultant, scout, and now as an agent.

Would you describe yourself as an editorial agent, one who comments on manuscripts, or one who concentrates more exclusively on publishing issues? Why?

Both. I love the brainstorming and process of working with an author and a project, but I like finding the perfect fit between publisher and author (and working the contract).

Is your approach more manuscript by manuscript or do you see yourself as more of a career builder? Why?

Career builder. I'm not interested in one-off projects -- if I can avoid them. I want to work with creators for a long, long time, building strong foundations and chateaux (castles) in the world of children's literature!

I like the dedicated concentration, and I like the commitment on both sides. I also like seeing great books find their readers.

Will you be providing promotional support to your author/clients?

As much as possible. We are creating a blog for the clients to participate in, providing creative options for promotion via our partnerships and generally, talking up our people!

What do you see as the ingredients for a "breakout" book in terms of commercial success, literary acclaim or both?

Outside of good crystal ball, I think it's the usual: Amazing voice, language and plotting. To find the sweet spot of what makes for a commercial literary gem is the goal.

But I'd add, serious honesty in the prose, an ability to use social media to the best end and not being too shy to talk about oneself.

The world is a loud place these days, and each author/illustrator needs to find her/his own voice and make sure it is heard above the clamor.

It's rare that an author may be allowed to be retiring or shy and assured of any kind of success.

I just hope authors can allow themselves the luxury to actually create amid the noise.

What sorts of manuscripts appeal to you?

Basically, well-written, well-crafted, well-worked books that are not didactic. I respond well to work of any kind that is balanced with a sense of urgency and humor and takes the reader on an adventure -- whether in the literal sense or in the emotional sense.

I want to feel and be touched by the work, laughing, crying, sighing, guffawing, gnawing. I suppose I'm looking for work that makes me feel alive as a reader. Even if I'm sitting in an armchair or lying on a beach towel.

That said, I invite those who might wish to submit to check out my submissions guidelines, as there are a few things, but particularly picture books or poetic mood pieces of over 1000 words can send me round the bend.

More specifically in the positive, I'm open to sparely-written picture books through adult, with a focus on children's and YA/crossover.

I like graphic novels. I don't care where the setting is, nor what color the protagonist is as long as its a compelling story and the setting and race make sense.

Genre? By the time this is read, it's probably time time to find a new genre. The thriller is a big deal now, and not just because of that dragon tattoo.

I'd love to find an exciting thriller-romance (and if you've dared right an unexciting thriller-romance...) that breaks barriers and builds worlds and just generally kicks proverbial you-know-what.

Do you also work with author-illustrators? Illustrators?

I work with author-illustrators.

Are you accepting queries? With or without a referral? If so, what do you require, and what's the best way for a prospective client to get in touch with you?

Please note that queries over 500 words will not be considered. I'm asking that authors query first in a succinct way and only send their work when requested.

Normally, I accept queries from October to May of each year and am closed to queries from May to September. However, in 2011, I'm accepting queries until June 15 (and thus, will be closed from June 15 to September 2011).

Do you have any additional submissions preferences or pet peeves?

Not addressing specifically to me or Hen & Ink (i.e., just writing the email like it's a shopping list).

Not signing with a real name (in other words, leaving me to divine who you are).

Not following the guidelines. By trying to blaze their own path, these people slow it down for everyone else, so I've sadly had to just toss those that don't follow the guidelines, risking missing out on great stuff, but the volume is far to high to do otherwise.

It's a little like "Do not pass go."

How much contact do you plan to have with your clients? What's your preference--emails, phone calls, a listserv? What kind of relationship are you looking to build and why?

I'm all about communication and making sure each client feels heard and tended! Email is the best for now though I communicate by phone if necessary. I'm looking to build a strong professional-relationship-verging-on-friendship. A definite working marriage!

As a reader, which children's-YA books have you enjoyed lately and why?

My current list of favorite reads includes Siobhan's recent books to come out with Egmont and these titles:

• Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber (Houghton Mifflin, 2011)-- loved the voice and speed and insanity of it all.
• The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith (Poppy, 2012) -- This book is every girl's dream.
• My Fair Godmother Janette Ralliston (Walker, 2009)-- funny and ironic.
• Delirium by Lauren Oliver (HarperCollins, 2011) -- I'm still worrying about her characters (particularly the cousin) -- and I read this one over a year ago.
• The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod by Heather Brewer (Speak, 2008) -- felt like this was a small (five-book) present for the 10/11+ boy reader. Good tension balanced by humor.
• The Half-Life of Planets by Emily Franklin and Brendin Halpin (Hyperion, 2010) -- I adored the two voices here.
• The Memory Bank by Carolyn Coman (Arthur A. Levine, 2010) -- what's not to like? It's a sweet-and-sour picture story book -- poignant yet not saccharine.
• The Morgue and Me by John C. Ford -- just a great YA crime read. And the two main characters are fabulous together.
• Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Mayberry (Simon & Schuster, 2010) -- loved the humanity in this zombie-infested book.
• Pastworld by Ian Beck (Bloomsbury, 2009) -- lots of great Victorian atmosphere -- an intro to steampunk with a dark thread throughout and a spot of hopeful light, piercing the bleakness.
• Legend by Marie Lu (Putnam, 2011)-- Lu nails the genre (dystopian) as well as the romance.

Is there anything you would like to add?

The support for Hen & Ink from all arenas has been great. The children's book world is no longer a small pond, and, as the airlines say, you could choose to fly with someone else.

I very much appreciate those who choose to fly with Hen & Ink -- whether they be creators or publishers.

Cynsational Notes

See also A Chat with a Cool Chick Erzsi Deàk on Hen & Ink from Melissa Buron.

Erzsi will be speaking on "Pitching Your Work in the Global Market" at 10:45 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 7 at the SCBWI Summer Conference in Los Angeles. Peek: "Hitting the high notes -- pitches that stop traffic (and create contracts). A mini workshop for writers, illustrators, and anyone who needs to pitch – and sell – a project in under three minutes. What works and what doesn't from New York to Bologna and back again. Bring your pitches and be ready to sell us on your ideas – with or without Colin Firth in the starring role."

Wow.

What a fantastic event.

HRevolution 2011 took place over the past weekend in Atlanta, Georgia and at least for me, was the best of the three HRevolution events we have put on thus far. And certainly as one of the members of the HRevolution organizing committee I could be accused of having a biased opinion. I freely admit it - I am biased. So if you don't want to take my word for it, connect with any of the 130 or so people that attended, keep an eye on the Twitter stream for the tag #HRevolution, and read some of what are sure to be dozens of reflection blog posts that will be posted in the next few weeks.

I am not so biased though as to suggest that somehow HRevolution is better than other events, be they large and traditional major conferences like SHRM, or the many other 'Unconferences' that one can find these days. But I do believe HRevolution is different, and really kind of unique in the space, and really quite special. The level of commitment, passion, engagement, and enthusiasm for this event, at least for me, surpasses what I have seen and experienced for any other event in our extended industry.

Attendance at professional conferences and events can be driven by many reasons - some are attended for specific learning opportunities, some for the chance to meet and network with one's colleagues in a professional community, and some simply are used to re-charge and energize and hopefully re-ignite passion for one's career. I think HRevolution succeeds as an event because it offers attendees all of these things. Intelligent and insightful session leaders, relevant and engaging content, a format that encourages connection and engagement, and finally the chance to spend time with 130 other folks as passionate as you are about the worlds of Human Resources, Recruiting, Talent Management, HR Technology, or whatever precisely matches your interest.

After the event one of the attendees Bonni Titgemeyer tweeted the following:

It is a fantastic and interesting question, and I think gets to some of the core or the essence of why so many people feel so passionate about the HRevolution event.

Particularly for first-time attendees, the event can be seen as a bit of an enigma. It kind of looks like a 'regular' conference - we were in a large, professional conference center, there was an excellent catered lunch and a General Session room and smaller breakout rooms; some of the sessions had elements of more traditional presentation formats. But other sessions had attendees standing in front of the room holding up posters of cartoon characters and rap stars, and as Matt Stollak and Dawn Hrdlica-Burke both observed, the F-Bomb was dropped sort of casually and reasonably often during the day. But contrast that to the big-brained Josh LeTourneau exploring the depths of complex Social Network Analysis, a topic and conversation to challenge your ideas about talent management to their core.

So is HRevolution a phenomenon, movement, or a cult?

I am not sure. Maybe it is all three. For a small event, the HRevolution manages to be a collection of different, complementary, and interesting elements, and to me, that is why it really is unique and special. Maybe the event is anything the attendees want it to be.

Lastly, many, many thanks for all who attended, presented, supported, and come toghether to make this event what it is.

Most importantly, my thanks and undying respect and admiration for Trish McFarlane, Ben Eubanks, and Crystal Peterson. It is an honor and pleasure to work with you.

Where You've Seen Her: Elle MacPherson is one of the worlds best known supermodels.  She's also 48 years old, and still looking damn fine.

MILF Status: Elle has two sons named Arpad and Aurelius, who are both fully expected to try and rule the world one day.

"I've got a chance to go out with some friends on Friday night," MTM said earlier last week.

"OK. What time do you need me home?"

"Well, it's not that simple. I'm also going out with my sister and my mom on Saturday for wedding stuff."

"So? I'll be fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

*    *    *
Later in the week, I found out that we had a couple people coming to our office - arriving Friday evening - from overseas to work for a couple of months. I knew one of them from a previous trip, and had become quite good friends over innumerable Skype "meetings", and so I wanted to make sure they got settled in OK.

So, I talked it over with MTM, and we agreed that I'd pack up the kids on Saturday morning and bring them out with my colleagues for breakfast, and then try to help them with some errands like groceries and getting mobile phones because they didn't have a car.

*    *    *
On Saturday morning, I picked up my colleagues and we all went out for a spectacular breakfast. The kids were amazing, although a little overzealous with eating (by the time I finished cutting half of each kid's waffle, Buddy - the first one to get his cut - was done and asking for more; my eggs were cold by the time I got to them).

We tried to find a phone place, but they were all closed (we were up early thanks to my kids not sleeping and the visitors being jet lagged) so we went to do groceries instead. More than an hour later (I am so not kidding; they were perusing the shelves quite slowly) we left and headed to a phone place only to have Buddy start to melt down in the store as we learned that their computer systems were down and starting new lines would take a long time over the phone.

Ultimately, we left without phones and I coordinated with my boss to have someone help them today with it (I'm working at a site today), and I dropped them at the place they are staying at.

*    *    *
The drive home was horrible. The kids fought and cried and complained. By the time we got home, both kids were beside themselves. They were bickering and fighting; Munchkin was taunting and baiting Buddy, and he wasn't an angel either (although now PTSD prevents me from remembering what he did).

I fed them lunch (shout out to MTM for the smoothies that made the "get them something healthy" job worlds easier) and put both of them (yes even the six year old) down for naps so I could try and recuperate a little.

Munchkin didn't sleep, and Buddy woke up 45 minutes later. I spent the next hour with him draped across my chest and Munchkin in the bed beside me exploring every app on my iPhone.

In an effort to fend off insanity, I put them in the back yard while I made dinner. In the interim, MTM returned home, full of stories about my inlaws that I lacked the will to listen to on the best of days (but still played the dutiful spouse and listened anyways).

(What I did learn, incredibly enough, was that at one point MTM remarked that she didn't have all day to spend with my SIL because the kids were being a handful, and my SIL's response was a variant on the traditonal, "So?" At that point - wait for it - my MIL stepped in and told my SIL that she had no appreciation for what I was doing so MTM could help SIL, how I was bringing my kids to work - sort of true, but not exactly - not to mention how they have been behaving lately - which she saw first hand earlier in the week - and so she said SIL should appreciate what I was doing. I'm as shocked as you are about this.)

*    *    *
Sunday morning was spent flitting between our desktop (it was acting up) our coffee grinder (it was acting up) and the kids (who were acting up). Even a trip to the grocery store (something that usually entertains them) resulted in tears and screaming.

On top of all this, MTM's sister called with some sort of wedding crisis that required MTM's attention.

I spent the afternoon with Buddy draped across me (he wouldn't sleep at all) and was fortunate to have a brief moment to read a little bit of a comic book.

Dinner ended abruptly because Buddy wouldn't stay in his seat and I subsequently had to follow through on my threat to give him a shower to clean him off (which included histrionics and made MTM join me upstairs). Munchkin, feeling left out at the dinner table, decided to exact revenge (or seek out attention) by wetting her pants.

*    *    *
Shortly thereafter, with both kids in pajamas and having just endured a screaming Buddy with tooth brushing, Munchkin looked at me and asked, "What's wrong, Daddy?"

"Nothing. I'm just parented out, sweetheart."

"Oh."

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Each week, we invite a different intuitive to answer a question from a reader. If you'd like to submit a question for Rose please email her directly.

Free Advice from Animal Reiki Shaman, Rose De Dan

My cat, Kit, is a year and a half. He has been sick the past three days and has done nothing but sleep. I refuse to take him to the vet only because I believe there are more natural ways of healing. I know he is strong but it pains me to see him so weak. I want to help but I'm not even sure it is a physical illness. It feels to me as though he is emotionally sick and I was wondering if you had any advice for me. I love him so deeply and I want to help. Thank you. Kathryn

Dear Kathryn, while I appreciate your desire to let nature take its course, that is not necessarily what is meant by natural healing, which uses various methods to support the healing process. My suggested approach for nurturing Kit's healing process would be different.

My long-standing policy for my practice has been to require that the potential client has explored finding answers through a veterinary diagnosis. Until they have done so I will not do a session with their animal companion.

And I follow the same policy with my own animals, I keep a close eye on any changes in eating and other behaviors and if they do not return to normal within two meals I start considering my options, and one of those is definitely a vet visit.

My reasoning is quite simple--I believe in the best of both worlds. Western or allopathic medicine, whether for animals or people, has some very important features, such as trained observation, testing and diagnosis by process of elimination.

It is important to understand what you are dealing with, or what you are not, such as whether a change in behavior indicates a physical or emotional issue (most often it is physical). When you have a diagnosis you can support your companion with the best approaches, which could involve combinations from both worlds.

For example, sometimes the only answer, when there is deep infection, is the administration of an antibiotic. There are few remedies in nature whether energetic or herbal that can equal the infection-fighting benefits of antibiotics when they are truly needed, and none that I know of that can do it as quickly. And speed spares needless suffering.

Continuing with the example of infection as the diagnosis and antibiotics as the chosen western remedy, you can then offer additional support with appropriate complementary modalities such as Reiki or acupuncture to boost the immune system, and supplements such as probiotics to support the digestive system (antibiotics tend to eliminate the good, the bad, and the ugly bacteria).

Many vets are okay with the client asking questions--wanting to learn and to make the best choices possible--and if yours isn't I would suggest a new one. I have found that most non-holistic vets are usually open to the client's use of holistic supportive measures since they truly care about the well-being of their furry (or not so furry) patients, and simply want them to get well. Vets and western medicine are not the enemy, what is causing the illness, is.

By law I cannot diagnose nor offer remedies, but I can say that if Kit were my cat I would not wait any longer to take him in to the vet. Three days is a long time, especially at his young age, to be doing nothing but sleeping. And if he is not eating or drinking, is vomiting or having diarrhea, he may be seriously dehydrated. The longer you wait the more the risk increases that if it is something serious it may be more difficult to turn around.

Best wishes to you both for a positive outcome.

Rose De Dan,
Animal Reiki Shaman

Disclaimer: Rose De Dan shares insights derived from spirit and through animal communication. Any advice she offers is not meant as a substitute for veterinary care.

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• Angel Intuitive, Eileen Smith
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